#408 – Innovating E-Commerce Through AI with Max Sinclair
What if artificial intelligence could revolutionize your e-commerce business? That’s exactly what Max Sinclair, a former Amazon insider turned AI entrepreneur, believes and shares with us in this eye-opening episode. With six years of experience in various strategic roles at Amazon, Max’s journey from managing top European accounts to founding an AI company dedicated to Amazon sellers is nothing short of inspiring. His transition from Amazon to launching his AI venture, spurred by an early demonstration of stable diffusion and the release of ChatGPT, provides a fascinating backdrop for understanding the transformative potential of AI in online marketplaces.
Throughout our conversation, Max dives into the challenges and future potential of AI-generated content, particularly in text and image creation. He explains the limitations of current models like GPT-4 and offers insights into how future models will evolve and improve. We also discuss the broader implications of AI technology, touching on concerns about misinformation and the role of trusted sources in mitigating these risks. Max shares compelling arguments on why staying informed and engaged with AI advancements is crucial for anyone involved in e-commerce.
Max’s expertise shines as he introduces an advanced e-commerce tool designed to optimize product listings with remarkable speed and accuracy. This tool, integrating seamlessly with platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, offers a leap in efficiency for sellers by generating comprehensive listings, including text, infographics, and images, with just one click. We also explore the success stories of sellers who have leveraged AI to significantly improve their listing visibility and consumer preference, underscoring the transformative impact of AI in the e-commerce space. Don’t miss this insightful episode where we uncover the future of AI in e-commerce with a true industry expert.
In episode 408 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Max discuss:
- 00:00 – AI in E-Commerce With Max Sinclair
- 03:10 – Strategic Account Management and Product Innovation
- 05:25 – Lessons From Amazon’s Culture
- 07:55 – Opportunities in AI and E-Commerce
- 11:04 – Artificial Intelligence Revolutionizes Image Generation
- 17:16 – Challenges With Photorealistic Image Generation
- 20:11 – Future of Distinguishing Real From Fake
- 24:39 – Impact of AI on Society
- 24:50 – Future of AI Generative Content Models
- 32:05 – AI Product Listing Optimization and Generation
- 36:42 – Insights on AI in E-Commerce
- 39:09 – ChatGPT Prompting for Genuine Responses
- 42:43 – Future of E-Commerce and AI
- 48:58 – AI in E-Commerce Evolution
- 51:46 – Exploring E-Commerce Content and AI
- 53:33 – Kevin’s Market Masters Event Announcement
- 54:05 – Kevin King’s Words Of Wisdom
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 408 of the AM/PM Podcast. This week, my guest is Max Sinclair. Max used to work for Amazon for about six years in the UK and Singapore all over the place and then he went out and started an AI company to help Amazon sellers. As this new AI revolution has taken place, he’s actually a couple months before ChatGPT actually launched, he launched his service and it’s really, really, really cool. So we talk everything AI what you need to be thinking about as an e-com or Amazon seller when it comes to AI, what his tool does, and just the general direction everything is going. Enjoy this episode with Max.
Kevin King:
Welcome to the AM/PM Podcast, Max Sinclair. How are you doing, man?
Max:
I’m good, Kevin. Good to see you. How are you?
Kevin King:
I’m alive and kicking, fighting a little cold here. You can probably tell on my voice, but money never sleeps, so always got to be working, right.
Max:
Yeah, the hustle. Exactly.
Kevin King:
You’re traveling around right now. I think you said that you’re in Vancouver but you’re originally based in the UK, right?
Max:
I’m from London. Yeah, I’m from London, England. That’s where I was born but I’ve been traveling around these last two years.
Kevin King:
Your background is you worked for Amazon for a while, right?
Max:
Yeah, I was there for six years.
Kevin King:
What did you do in the London office, or where?
Max:
Again, it was pretty global. So I started my career as an account manager in 2016. So I was helping to launch sellers on Amazon for the business, kind of walk them through their first FBA shipments, first sponsored products, all of that kind of good stuff. I then kind of transitioned from being a Strategic Account Manager so I was managing the top 10 sellers across Europe. So I had Anker, for example. I had Southern Valley Tech. I had some household names that you may recognize.
Kevin King:
You were their SaaS rep or you were just assigned by Amazon to look after them.
Max:
I was their internal Amazon account manager, so I would I was their POC for all things Amazon. I mean, we were great in that role as a strategic account manager. It was less metrics driven, I’d say, than some of the other roles, like we’re trying to increase revenue, but more just trying to keep the big sellers happy, basically, and help them to grow in a strategic way. To be honest, with people like Anker, I would have been 22, 23 at the time and I was learning a lot from them. To be honest, they really were pushing the boundaries of product innovation and their Amazon strategies were far beyond what I knew.
Max:
I’d been in the company a year, year and a half, so I kind of knew some stuff, but these guys were the experts, but I was helping them manage everything internally. I mean, you know how it is right. There’s lots of different departments that a seller of that side needs to coordinate with and it can be a bit of a challenge. So, yeah, that’s my role and also helping them, you know, product launches and this kind of stuff.
Kevin King:
How did you actually learn Amazon? Did you see a job posting and go and take it and they just kind of train you that this is how Seller Central works. This is how you open an account and here’s the SOP and just regurgitate this to somebody, or what’s that process like.
Max:
Literally, it was my first job out of university, so I had two offers. I had a consulting offer for like a big four consulting firm and I had Amazon and all you know my you know people were pushing me at the time to go to the, the consulting, but Amazon actually paid better. So I was like this sounds cooler and it pays better. So I’m off here and yeah, like so I kind of was a Strategic Account Manager just to finish off. Then I was part of the team that launched Amazon business in the UK, so the B2B side.
Max:
I then went out to Singapore, uh, launched amazon in Singapore, which was just the most amazing experience and there I was in charge of browse and catalog quality. So getting deep into the a9 team setting up the browse. Browse nodes and this kind of stuff for the Singapore marketplace. And then I came back to the EU and was in charge of the 3P grocery business. So I was helping sellers, I was helping supermarkets to sell as 3P sellers. So like maybe you won’t know them in yourself, but like in Europe it would be like Monoprix, Dia Morrison’s in the UK, Iceland, so big supermarkets in the EU helping to launch them on the 3p marketplace, and that’s where I left.
Kevin King:
What are some interesting things you learned working at Amazon about e-commerce? What were some eye-opening things that you learned?
Max:
The most eye-opening thing in my perspective would be the culture. Like we Amazon at least when I started in 2016, had an extremely strong culture of and I could probably recite all of their kind of leadership principles off the bat but I’m not going to but you know, they had like ownership and dive deep and trust, and that kind of culture was really how the company would be organized. And you’d have Jeff Bezos at the time would be doing kind of quarterly all hands, so he would be, you know, very present and at the time he wasn’t the world’s richest man. He wasn’t a household. He became a household name, let’s say, in like 2019 when he became the world’s richest man. But before then he was kind of this nerdy, looking, uh kind of you know, tech, bro, right, and he, but he was an, an extreme visionary and you could see that just from the way he talked about customer obsession and thinking big and he kind of set the tone of the company in in these kind of quarterly all hands and that really filtered down to you know, at this.
Max:
When I joined, Amazon was 350 000 people, so a lot of people. Like when I left it was over two million, so like it grew enormously during my time, but that culture was super strong and that’s something that I think was my biggest takeaway. And I saw the culture kind of change and shift. You know, especially when Jeff left was you know was a major shift but they kind of the culture changed and diluted a bit for the worse, in my opinion, sadly, and the mission that individuals felt in the business kind of subsided a bit with that but that was my main takeaway, I think.
Kevin King:
Do you ever sell on amazon? Did they encourage you to try selling, or did you ever try selling?
Max:
At one stage, I was in a team of two when we were launching Amazon Business in the UK and the other person on my team was someone called Sam Horby who went on to set up Oh Sam and is one of the biggest aggregators around and he, I remember at the time he was kind of sitting there doing his, you know, running a notebook business and in the end I think he even he sold that to someone else who I was at the time with who went on to build Sutrana, the agency in the UK. But personally, I never sold on Amazon. I regret it massively now. I remember like they didn’t encourage it but at the same time they didn’t discourage it. So when Sam was doing this, he was kind of at the beginning, he was kind of sharing these interesting insights with the team, like, oh, I’m becoming a seller and this is a challenge and you know, and like it was helpful, right, because, as you know, working there, you’d see what was happening. You know people facing the pains firsthand and reporting that each, you know, each week in a meeting.
Max:
Yeah, but I never did it myself personally, which was a big regret of mine. I guess one of the things that I did do which did help me is there was tons of educational resources. There’s something called the Amazon Machine Learning University, so I graduated in History, but I did, all of you know, I taught myself how to code at Amazon so I could, you know, I’m not, I don’t codey content, like I’m not a coder, but like I have a very rudimental understanding of it, and I kind of did this, you know, my side project, let’s say, instead of becoming a seller, was actually kind of leveling up on machine learning and kind of just a seller was actually kind of leveling up on machine learning and kind of just going through and understanding all of this which helped me to get roles that I got later down the road in Amazon. So, like you know, being, you know, working with the a9 teams and the browse teams and all this stuff required machine learning, across machine learning. So that, yeah, I mean I did that kind of on the side of you know, whilst at the company.
Kevin King:
So you did this for six years, from 2016 and 2022. And what changed in your mind? You said you wanted to be an entrepreneur. Did you see this opportunity emerging in AI, or is it because of the machine learning that you were studying? You started to see some patterns. Okay, I’m going to go start a company around AI and Amazon. Or was it just, I just want to do something different? I’m not sure what I want to do. Let me figure it out. What was that process like?
Max:
I guess I reached a seniority level at Amazon where I felt that I kind of hit let’s say, five years in, I’d hit where I wanted to get to. When I first joined on the graduate scheme, I’d always wanted to basically be a head of, like a head of department. Have a, you know, have a team that has, you know, has direct reports in indirect reports into the team. So I wanted to kind of have a mini organization and I kind of got to that stage and I was like the next stage up is such a big jump. It could take five years of hard work and there’s no guarantee that I’d achieve that. I’d even get there, right it’s. It’s such a tight pyramid that, like I could slave away for five years and see nothing on the back end. So I had started experimenting with different business ideas. So I mean, I won’t go into them now.
Max:
You asked if I was a seller. I have been an online seller, not on Amazon, but I, you know, I did a bit of kind of Depop and kind of, you know, like soft line stuff, right, you know, buying, rebuying and selling. So I did a bit of that. I explored some different business ideas, but I felt that you know, while you’re managing a full-time job and you know, you’ve got a lot of responsibility. I was dedicating like one or two hours every other evening to these side hustles and it would just like I just couldn’t give my full attention to it and as a result nothing was happening.
Max:
And then, really, this AI wave came and my co-founder, who my now co-founder, showed me the first release of stable diffusion. And this is kind of I’m sure many people listening are now familiar with this. It’s like mid-journey, right, you put in the text, you generate an image. And he showed me this and I said to him could you put a product in that. Could you put a product in that? You know, could you put a product in that image generation, like, rather than generating a random suitcase, could you put in like a specific suitcase and generate that in a lifestyle image? And he built over the weekend a scrappy version of a demo and it had all the problems of, like, the hallucinations and the distortions and like it kind of looked a bit weird, but from basically that weekend, you could see how transformational this was going to be and like, give it, give more time and energy and effort.
Max:
This was going to change, um, like on marketplaces, and it really felt to me like this was a once in a generation opportunity. It required my full intention, like my full attention. So I mean, we hadn’t raised any money at this point but I left, you know, to go full time on this because I just believed that you know, this was basically it and if I didn’t do it now I would regret it for the rest of my life. So, yeah, we went full-time, we did content at that point. So that was in September 2022. And in November 2022, everyone will remember this because ChatGPT launched and it kind of changed. Suddenly what I thought was going to be transformational.
Max:
But have a longer, take longer than it for people to understand what AI was. And I remember with our, you know, our very first customers, we were trying to get them to prompt and they would have never prompted. They literally never prompted. They’d never seen a technology like this. So you’re saying to someone here like now, type in a prompt and create yourself an image and they didn’t know. They, you know they kind of didn’t know really how to handle it.
Max:
Suddenly, everybody knew how to use ChatGPT within a month, two months. Fast-forward to 2023 and everybody knew what was happening and it suddenly was just, you know, an incredibly hot space very quickly, but also a very exciting space because people kind of could see the solution.
Max:
And I guess one of the insights we had then which I think will come to bear now, is we could, you could see, with ChatGPT, not just the image side, but you could see how much better a conversational experience was for discovery, like it was just so much better to talk to if you’re looking to understand something or buy something, to have a conversational based, you know, dialogue, rather than typing a search and then scroll down and try and find what you’re looking for.
Max:
So we, you know, from ChatGPT launching, it really became obvious to us that all of these major marketplaces Amazon, eBay, everyone they’re going to have to go this way, because if they don’t go this way, someone else is going to go this way and everyone’s going to flock to using it because it’s going to be just so much better. So we’ve been working on those two principles. Since we started like let’s help people to create content with AI number one, but also let’s optimize for what we firmly believe is going to be the future of search, which is going to be LLM based search.
Kevin King:
So you do think so with your software, you’ve expanded it quite a bit since the first launch, but one of its features is you can, like you said, take a suitcase, your suitcase. Just take a picture with your phone and stick it in a scene and create the entire scene around it that looks real. Are you tying into an API of one of the big image creation LLMs out there to do that, or how are you doing that?
Max:
Yeah, so we have actually filed a patent on our technology and the answer is we don’t train the base model, so we’re using, you know, there’s various different base models out there, like Stable Diffusion, Dali, Minstrel, OpenAI. There’s a lot of open source models and our bet early on as a company was we believe that open source is going to improve. As a company was we believe that open source is going to improve and therefore we’re just going to build fine-tuning, which is basically, the technology will paint or guess the best pixel around your product. So you put in the suitcase and it’s going to guess the best pixel around that product.
Max:
Now, which model we use to guess that? You know pixel generation. We can swap in and out that it doesn’t matter to us, and our kind of bet was that over time, these models are going to get better and better and better and therefore, like that image quality is going to go fro, you know, being AI, you know, obviously AI generated, let’s say, in 2022, to now looking like hyper realistic and soon probably better than better than better, you know, if it’s possible, better than a photograph. So, yeah, we don’t know. Yeah, that’s how it works on the image side.
Kevin King:
What do you think is the best out there for just playing around with standalone images right now? Is it Dali? Is it Midjourney? What is the best one for creating images outside of? Like your software, if you just want to dabble?
Max:
I think Midjourney, what they have done is amazing because they are about as old as we are in terms of a company and they’re obviously far more successful. So it’s not really comparison. But they first launched, I think, in I want to say mid-2022 was the first Midjourney model and they never raised a single dollar venture capital. And now, like I think they they’re kind of you know one of I don’t know how many millions or they’re turning over, but they’re incredibly, you know, they’re incredibly well known and have the best quality and a super focus in just that element. So I would say, yeah, I think Midjourney kind of the standard balance, but I think we’re going to reach this point very quickly where every model can hit like a very high quality and actually, like it’s relatively indistinguishable. I think the costs are going to come down. You know, like there’s so many people working on this that, yeah, I think very, you know, if people to listen to this, let’s say, mid 2025, basically, everyone’s got a photorealistic model and there’s like 10 options to choose from.
Kevin King:
What’s the big issue seems to be text. Right now, with a lot of these, I mean, I know there’s some specific tools that help in that way, but they have a hard time generating text. I can even tell Midjourney, or I can tell Dolly, create me an image of an Amazon truck and put the Amazon logo on the side of the truck. Instead of putting the Amazon logo, it puts like instead of spelling Amazon A-M-A-Z-O-N, it spells it A-M-O-N, or something like that. What’s the challenge there? Do you think that’ll get sorted out?
Max:
I have no doubt it’ll be sorted out, and I think the challenge is that the models we have at the moment are not, they have no intelligence in any in any real way. So, like the way, the way I would like to like to describe this is the largest LLM that we have on the market right now. A GPT4, a four-year-old, a child, has seen 50 times as much data. So that’s where we are right now, right. Like these things are they’re absolutely-
Kevin King:
Wait, a four-year-old child has experienced 50 times as much data as an LLM?
Max:
Yes, and not just 50 times as much data, but they’ve seen, you know, vision. They’ve obviously had visionary data, they have auditory data, they have touch, they have like interaction from the physical world, whereas the LLM has just seen text. So the four-year-old child has not only seen 50 times as much data, but they’ve seen, I’m not going to say an infinite, but maybe 15 different types of data, whereas LLM has seen text and it’s seen less. But these models, if you look at these graphs, which I’m sure you’ve seen of how much bigger they’re getting, that’s not going to last a lot, right? So where we are at the moment with these models is they are not, they have no intelligence. They’re basically just predicting the most likely next pixel based on your prompt, based on the training data they’ve seen, and they don’t understand the concept really of like it’s an Amazon truck and you want the Amazon on the side of the truck.
Max:
Now, that isn’t going to last for long, right. We’re going to have models which understand these things conceptually, and Sora was a big leap forward towards this, as you may have seen, the video model, because what they’re saying about Sora is that it has some understanding of physics and therefore the videos are better. So these leaps forward that are going to be made, where the models have a deeper understanding of the stuff they’re producing rather than just numerical prediction of probabilities which is where everything is now is going to mean that, yeah, you’re going to be pretty much photorealistic and this is not going to take long. I mean, this will be 2025, right?
Kevin King:
How are we going to determine in the future what’s real and what’s not? I mean, like you said earlier, the earlier models, when you put a suitcase in the scene you could kind of tell, oh, that’s AI generated. Now you can still on a lot of stuff it kind of has that feeling of looking like it’s AI, but it’s getting sophisticated enough in some cases where you can’t actually tell some of these tools where you can change someone’s head on another’s body and have them talk and move off of a still photo. And like you said, Sora you can do 60 second, I think it is, clips right now, that look pretty realistic. How are we going to deal with this five or 10 years from now, knowing what’s real and what’s not real? I mean, obviously Meta and all these guys are saying we’re going to watermark what’s created with our tools, but not everybody does that.
Max:
So I’m a huge technophobe. In the sense, I’m very positive about this stuff, and what I would say back to people is we’ve had LLMs live on the market for a year and a half, right. Can you name one serious, one big issue that’s actually happened from these things? Everyone said in theory oh, it’s going to be terrible because people are going to be able to make bombs from chat teams can tell you how to make bombs and are like people gonna have fake news and I mean like let’s be, you know, it’s been a year and a half like I don’t think you could. I’m sure you could find some, but like, realistically, the doomsday scenarios of this like content hasn’t come, right.
Max:
People know, they trust sources like what you know. I think what will happen is what’s happened now. Like people look at the source. There’s sources where they trust and therefore, if it’s, you know, an established newspaper, they trust the source. If it’s some random person on twitter, they don’t trust the source.
Max:
I mean, we’ve had, like you know, there’s many wars going on at the moment. You, you have these things where people share clips which is actually from you know one war and they’re saying it’s from another war, right? So it’s fake content. You know it’s not AI generated but it’s fake. And yeah, like AI to some extent is gonna increase that. But I think, I don’t think the issue that society faces, to be honest with AI is like oh, is this like what you know? Can people recognize it’s real? Like you know, there’s going to be gatekeepers, as there is now of this content and people can choose to believe. You know people will say if this person is putting their reputation on the line to promote this, then I believe it. Or and if this is just some random bot that’s on the you know the web, then I shouldn’t believe. But I don’t think it’s going to massively exacerbate anything more.
Kevin King:
I mean you could frame people, especially in politics or public figures, very easily. You know, someone gets divorced and they have a crazy ex-wife or something. Yeah, and that wife you know all this Me Too and she says, oh, 10 years ago he, I don’t know, he beat me or something and she could create, have AI create something that looks grainy, it looks like it came from 2009 or something, and it looks like it’s some video footage from the security camera of her husband doing something and say, look, I found the footage. It was lost on my hard drive. Here’s the evidence. And then go after him. That kind of stuff is out there. Or the AI looks so good that when you get the product like in your case, it doesn’t even look anything. It doesn’t look that good. So there’s these sides of-
Max:
I think I agree with the, there’s obviously gonna, it’s gonna be easier for anybody to generate fake content of politicians and whatnot. I can see that. I think it’s not hard to manipulate stuff. Like it’s not really hard to manipulate stuff now. You, we’ve already seen examples like in the UK, there’s this fake recording of the opposition leader bullying someone. So they, you know, they use his voice, they put it through in 11 labs, or something like this, and it went viral on Twitter and, yeah, like is in one sense, is damaging in the in the other sense. Like any sensible person, you know, I think what’s interesting is people will believe what they want to believe, right? So you see this, in these kind of wars nowadays, like on both sides, people will take something and they don’t actually care if it’s true or not. They will share it if it supports their view. So I think, yeah, I accept there will be like increased polarization, but I think, like, a sensible person will be able to quickly say, like this has come from no, you know, bad source.
Max:
I think, on the product side, like I, you know, I hope it’s the case that your content customers, you know, feel like something really exciting and brand new and shiny is coming to them. So yeah, I guess, like I kind of feel like the, you know the genie’s out the bottle in this stuff and like my, I mean, I’m, you know if you, what am I worried about in AI is kind of like mass kind of unemployment quickly, because people get replaced, you know, with you know we build this super intelligence in the next few years and suddenly jobs are, you know they’re only 20 of people need to work. So I think I’m much more worried about kind of the, that kind of societal impact, than the content side.
Kevin King:
I mean that happens in any industry, though I mean at any time there’s a big breakthrough. You look at the Industrial Revolution. You look at airplanes put trains out of business a lot of trains out of business when the airplane started being the way of travel and put cruise ships like the Titanic that were meant for crossing the ocean basically out of business, not tourist cruise ships, so they. I think AI is a really good thing, but the thing that I see these stats, as popular as it is, as much as you and I are involved with it and some other people that are listening most of the population out there has no clue what AI is. They just know it’s something artificial and it’s something that you can do some fancy stuff, some special effects or something with. They haven’t even dabbled with it. I mean, you look at the numbers that have played with it, it’s pretty small.
Max:
I would say the only difference is the timeline to your example, right? So if you think it took thousands of years to go from a wheel to a, you know, a car, and then a 200 years, whatever else to go from a car to a plane, and then 60 years from, like the first Wright brothers plane, to landing on the moon, I think like now we’re going from, it’s going to be like six years from you know, the first LLM to like an intelligent.
Max:
So I have a friend who works in a startup which automates SDR outreach. So they use AI to define your target customer, write them like intelligently hyper-personalized emails and then kind of send that to them. And there’s another AI company I know from the YC batch who do phone calls in human voices so you can follow that up with a phone call. So I think, just the speed at which this is going to move is not like anything we’ve seen before. So I think that’s I agree like technology happens and it’s good, but I do think like how fast is this all going to move compared to how fast can people retrain themselves. I think is the only difference.
Kevin King:
Well, I think that you said earlier that you believe that on the big LLMs, they’re adding more and more tokens and more and more data, but you think there’s a cap to that right and that’s because there’s a point of diminishing returns.
Max:
That’s true. But what I hear from you know listening to kind of the leaders of open AI is that right now they’re pretty amazed that you know there’s a direct relationship between how much bigger they make the model and how much more intelligent they are.
Max:
And I think this kind of makes sense because these models are kind of modeled on like how the human brain works, with kind of like neural networks, right, this is the basis of the technology and at the moment, if you compare the model to the size of a human brain, it’s like a tiny fraction of it, right. Like, as we said, it’s like 50 times smaller than a four-year-old child’s brain. So I think that the element of just adding different training data in terms of images and video and soon these AI are going to be around in the world in figure and in robots, so they’re going to have sensory data as well adding that data to the ability of Moore’s law of just bigger, bigger, more, more compute, I think there’s a long way to go in how much more intelligent these are going to get just by doing what we’re doing, right now.
Kevin King:
Do you think they’re going to specialize, though? Instead, there’s going to be a shakeout and there’ll be a few big ones that are kind of like a know-all be-all, and then there’s going to be ones that they’re going to narrow down. There’s going to be ones that they’re going to narrow down and like there’s going to be an LLM that’s only knows e-commerce and it’s the expert on anything e-commerce, but it doesn’t know anything about how to take care of your baby or something. But then there’s another. You think you’re going to see the specialization of all these AIs and where there’s very targeted, very specific use ones.
Max:
This is very interesting because as I alluded to at the beginning, when we founded e-content, me and my co-founder basically had a choice. We’re like are we going to train the e-commerce model? We’re just going to build like the e-commerce model, e-content is going to be like the e-commerce LLM, or are we going to say, you know what? We don’t have the funding and the ability. Know the team, you know, like of the of the kind of general source ones, and we’re just gonna work on fine tuning and stuff like rag basically meaning rag retrieval went to generation, basically stopping hallucinations and making it more reliable and you know this kind of technical stuff, rather than like actually building models.
Max:
And it’s very clear right now that the general models are winning out, and I think this is because the AI works in unexpected ways. So if you basically give a lot of people these kind of extremely smart people lots of compute and say, hey, here’s more compute, here’s more data, like go trade a new model, like see where you come up. But you’re going to come up with like Sora and it’s going to be and you know, these are totally generalized and it’s moved at the moment like every, all the big series companies who are building these foundational models, like open AI and Minstrel, and you know, Claude’s parent company, I forget their name. All these guys are building just generalized-
Kevin King:
Anthropic.
Max:
Anthropic, yes. They’re building generalised models. Could I see a world where it becomes specialized? Yes, but I do believe that these generalized models just have so much more space to go in terms of the data they’re using, in terms of the data and the size that they can get to, and I really believe we are so at the beginning of this still that give it a few more years of building these large, all-encompassing models and we’re going to have something which is just so incredible. And actually, do you need to build it? Does e-content need to build its own base model?
Max:
I see a world where we enable customers to switch to different models eventually. So, you know, we say to a customer hey, like you want to have something which is, you know, Claude. Claude is three different models at all different prices. They have different qualities, some, some are more human sounding, whatever. Basically say, you go on, you pick your model, we’ll switch different models and you can generate with the model you want and you pay the different price because they all price differently. So that’s how I kind of see us going, which is at the moment, we’re making the decisions for the customer, we’re choosing the model that we think is best. It’s not always going to be best in every situation, but I think easily trading between different ones is our future.
Max:
In the long term, yeah, I can imagine fine, but it’s a different thing between building a base model and fine-tuning, right. I think people already fine-tune. We fine-tuned for e-commerce, we fine-tuned for photorealistic rather than cartoons or anime or any other type of image generation and we fine-tuned for conversion, what works best, the most kind of exciting images you can generate. So I think that’s more of a question of fine-tuning.
Kevin King:
If I go to Midjourney, though, and I go into Discord, open up a chat and I know how to do prompting and say I want a photo, realistic photo, and I want it slightly angled up to give this perspective of a size, and I want, you know I put in some of this in my prompts some of the psychological things of marketing, and I tell it to create an image is. How is that different than what your tool does? Because if your tool is sitting on top of a model and are you basically hand-holding them, so you’re assuming that people don’t know how to prompt it, right, so you’re adding in these safety rails and these safeguards that actually will generate that, or what is the true? Why should I use your software versus just if I’m a good prompter going and using one of the other tools that’s out there, just directly?
Max:
Yeah, I think what we discovered in the last two years is that our real value to customers is speed and scale. So with e-content you can generate the entire listing this is text, infographics and images. You can do it basically all in one click and you can integrate directly into Amazon and you can publish to your Amazon and soon it’s not going to be just Amazon, but you’re going to be able to publish to eBay, Walmart. You know, you’re basically going to have one.
Kevin King:
How does that work? So I have my new product, I have my new suitcase. I just take a picture of it and say go, make me a listing. What do I gotta do?
Max:
You connect your Amazon account. So you connect via our API. So then, we have only Amazon account. We have all your data in your brand analytics, we know your keywords, so we kind of have, we have-
Kevin King:
But I haven’t sold this product before.
Max:
You’ve met to be, you’ve created. At the moment, you’d have to create the new listing on Amazon. So the base listing has to be there on Amazon. We are launching to timestamp this, we will have launched by now a kind of a CSV input so you can start with a CSV.
Kevin King:
So you’ve got to have a basic shell of a listing of some sort.
Max:
Yeah, so you could bring in a CSV from your manufacturer on Amazon. Okay, Exactly. And then you upload that to e-content and then we generate, optimize the whole listing.
Kevin King:
The graphics and everything.
Max:
Everything and you can use e-content to like the first time you may have tried it, you can still use e-content to prompt and generate an image, and the difference between us and Midjourney in that respect is that our models take your input image, let’s say, like the suitcase, and it’s going to predict the next pixel around your specific product. Now, you know interesting story in this, like when we first launched, we were training models for each product. So you would have, you know, we would have like a suitcase model and we would train the model to always replicate that suitcase and then you could type in something and generate the suitcase in any scenario. We found that and this may change in the next one or two years but we found that the hallucinations were still not like. It still had hallucinations in these models when you did that. So therefore, now we are simply predicting their pixels around. We’re painting the image from the starting point of your suitcase, which is not what Midjourney is doing. Midjourney is kind of creating a like. It’s creating from white noise, right, it’s not creating from anything.
Kevin King:
You know what would be cool is and maybe this is something you guys are working on is if I could take, if I want to get in the suitcase business and I’m like, okay, I think I want to do the suitcase business, but I’m not sure how I’m going to differentiate on what I need to do. Here’s a picture of a couple of suitcases I have ideas on AI. Go out there and read all the other suitcases on Amazon, read all the reviews, look at all the pictures and create me 10 prototypes of something that would be unique and different, with a sample listing for each one, and then let me use my human brain to go. That looks cool. I think that work. Do you see it something like that coming when it comes to product research and product development on the you know that’s a very simplistic way of saying it?
Max:
There’s a company called Pietra who you can do text to product, so you can literally type in I want a suitcase, blah, blah, blah, and it will AI generate a product, you know, a sample product for you, and then you can actually manufacture that product. So it’s a really interesting space. I guess in the long, long term, as we look to expand, I think you know it could be cool that we incorporate something like that.
Kevin King:
What about people that lean too heavily on AI? You know, people maybe English is not their first language and so they assume that everything is correct on the listing, Everything is written in a good way versus you and I that are native English speakers can look at it oh, that doesn’t quite sound right or look right. But they might not catch that because they’re not native speakers. How do you deal with those kinds of things? It’s not really a hallucination, it’s just, you just know it’s not right.
Max:
So I think there’s like two steps that we take beyond using a chat GPT to create a listing. And there’s lots of amazing listing like GPTs which if you have like a subscription you can get like all these listing GPTs for free. And some of them are created by people in the community and are great. But we kind of we take two things beyond that, which is we’ve done fine-tuning and we’ve done a rack. So fine-tuning means that we’ve trained the model on high performing Amazon listings. So we like it’s not just, you know, putting in a prompt a few examples of what a good listing looks like, but it’s actually like a machine learning process to fine tune a model to-
Kevin King:
What defines a high performing listing on Amazon? What do you look for?
Max:
So something which has got, you know, well something which is on page one, has good conversion rates, a listing which is performing well in terms of, you know, click through and purchase, and that kind of stuff.
Kevin King:
How do you? And how do you know that?
Max:
Because more times than not, they’re on the page one of Amazon and they’re selling well I mean, you can see data now.
Kevin King:
How do you know what their conversion rate is and what they’re, that they’re not. That’s not just outside traffic that they’re pushing from TikTok and that’s why they’re there.
Max:
It’s a fair question like we kind of took a, you know, you have a number of these tools which you can rely. You know you can get certain estimated metrics from which we used. You take, you know these listings and you fine-tune the model and therefore it kind of, it understands the phrasing and the stylistic notes of what looks good. And then you do something called rag, which is retrieval, mention generation, and basically this is where you query an external database to fetch relevant data. So the relevant data would be keywords right from your brand analytics. The relevant data is Amazon’s prohibited list – stuff that you just can’t say that you know that it’s going to get you blocked. So you have a bunch of, you have fine-tuning and then you also have the rank step and these are kind of two additional steps, which help to help AI to create good listings. Like I would warn people against using. If they’re good at prompting, you could get something good out of ChatGPT. But the problem is, as you say, you need to be good at prompting because it’s very balanced in everything it says.
Max:
Any question that you give to ChatGPT, it’s always going to give you like a kind of watery, two-sided corporate BS answer, right, like that’s just the nature of the model, that that they’ve trained and well that, that so you want to, you want to kind of, in your prompting, be able to peel that away which takes, you know, like it doesn’t take much experience, but you need to know that you need to do that, because if you don’t do that it’s just going to sound kind of quite blur and dull and also might it will say it will do all those weird things AI does, which it goes. That’s when this comes in and it kind of, you know, opens a, has this weird phrasing where it starts in the sentence of a question and then it answers the next one, which no human would, you know, would normally do if they’re writing something.
Kevin King:
How do you feel about the e-commerce sellers that are not really paying attention to AI right now? They’re like, eh, I don’t got time for that. I don’t think this is going to be around. This is just a shiny object and I’ve seen some stuff it does. It looks like crap, so I’m just going to keep doing my thing. I’m making good money, so why change?
Max:
I think it’s so transformational in where it’s going and I know it’s a lot of hyperbole and everyone’s going, oh, this is crazy but like, fundamentally, this technology is unlike anything we’ve developed before. Right and like people. People say, oh, AI is a tool, like it’s not a tool because the tool is, you know, is under the influence of a human, like a hammer. Like a hammer doesn’t do anything that a human doesn’t want it to do. AI is unpredictable. It’s evolving. It’s seen like far more data than you like any one individual has ever seen. Right, like it’s read all of the data on the open internet.
Max:
I posted back in April an interesting TED talk on that the Microsoft AI CEO put out saying that AI is a new species, like and that’s what it is right. That’s his argument. That’s not my words. I don’t know if I agree with that to that extent but I definitely agree that this is not some phase or some like. This is a fundamental shift in human history and to me it’s like you know when humans created language and, like that completely transformed our evolutionary trajectory. I think this is another like AI, in my view, is on that level right so to just ignore it and say, oh, this is, you know, this is just a fad, is really misunderstanding the point. And I completely accept we’re at the infancy stage. You know, I remember showing you e-content, let’s say a year and a half ago whenever we were in person in Silicon, and yeah, it was like it was kind of it was okay, it wasn’t great, it was kind of you could, but like the speed that this is moving is just insane. And you know, you compare I take Midjourney again. What Midjourney V1 looks like versus Midjourney V6.
Max:
These were, you know, these were two years apart, right? So yeah, these are two years apart and literally you kind of see a jumbled mess of colors. For the same prompt, that now gives you like an ultimately photorealistic picture, and then that’s two years, and then you fast forward six months. You’re gonna not be a picture, but you’re gonna be a hyper photo, hyper realistic video here from Sora and you fast forward three months and it like, and then one month. So like, the speed which this is going is wild. So I would say, not even from an e-commerce point of view but just from like a humanity point of view, like you, this is not something to kind of ignore.
Kevin King:
What should e-commerce sellers be doing right now when it comes to AI? Should they be experimenting with tools like yours or with software like yours and trying to improve their listing? Should they, what should they be doing?
Max:
I think the future is for the entrepreneurs and I think it’s really exciting. And we’re already starting to see this with the layoffs in Amazon and all of these Google. Everyone’s doing layoffs and consistent, random layoffs and in my mind, this is going to accelerate because you can get so much more done with a smart AI system. And I think the future of e-commerce is fantastic because you’re going to be, you know, the CEO or leader of your company and you’re going to be able to have an extremely smart assistant to donate your listings across, you know, like e-content. You’re going to have another one which is going to be able to help you to do all your product development and everything else and you know, know, like all that stuff, and you’re going to have and maybe the AI is actually in the factory, so robots, so they’re helping to design, so the product as well. So I think we’re going to be moving to a world where we all have like a chief of staff which is like an AI bot, like an inflection Ai which is kind of helping us to manage our calendar and our time and is helping us to write all of our key emails and you know we’re discussing with this AI, you know, our strategy because it knows us better than anyone else and it’s trained on everything that you’ve seen and it’s, you know, 20 times or 100 times as intelligent as you are. So I think it’s going to be so much more than just, like you know, helping you to create good listings on Amazon. Like you know, we’re at the early stages, right, so, like, I think e-content is a good place to start. There’s plenty of other kind of AI companies doing stuff with you know, I think the challenge that we’ve had over the two years is working out how to apply what we havenow .
Max:
There’s a huge, exciting future which we want to build and be part of building. But, like, also, we want to deliver value to people now and that’s kind of the line that we’ve been working, exploring and now, I think, delivering on but I would say yeah, like, this is, you know, if you’re an e-commerce alien, you’re not going to have this incredible AI assistant and your competition is, and that AI system’s been trained of all of Amazon and it understands how to do seller queries and like you’re gonna be out of business, right? So I think it’s definitely something to be throwing yourself into to just I think understanding, like, how these models work is so important. The basics of it you know, I think that’s that, honestly, to me, is the best place to start. Like what even is this technology which is like it’s going to be defining all of our lifetimes, right. This like what is it right, I think, that’s where I’d start.
Kevin King:
There’s tons of software that comes out every day. I mean, you go to there’s an AI for that so you have a lot of competitors in your space. They’re doing similar things a lot of them a lot worse than what you’re doing. Some of them may have a feature that you don’t have. So how do you stay on the cutting edge and how are you going to stay as a leader when it comes to content AI assistance for e-commerce sellers.
Max:
I think, our competitive advantage. Well, first of all, we have a patent. Second of all, we’ve raised a bit of money now. I think there’s a whole host of people who are creating a stable diffusion or whatever. They’re kind of plugging in a beautiful UX in front of an open source model. And we are, you know, we’re two years deeper than that and we’ve got a team and we’ve built so like I’m almost like from a marketing perspective, like maybe people try this stuff, but fundamentally, like I don’t think we’re going to lose any customers, to like that. I think, when you go to the more established companies and especially where we want to be going, like you know we’re going after the established companies, right, like we’re not, you know, the big boys in the space, I think you know we, like I talk, I try and talk to customer every day, at least one or two. We really want to understand the pains that they face, what value they’re looking from us. Like why do they sign up to us? Like what were they hoping for? How, you know, how can we deliver that with what is available now? And that’s, you know. That’s really what we’ll focus on and I think you know.
Max:
Circling back to the start of the interview with, like Jeff Bezos, like the customer obsession was that’s something that I really learned from working at Amazon like really putting the customer first and understanding it from their perspective and like that is kind of the ethos that we have and we don’t, you know, I get it. I don’t get it. I know it is the wrong word, but I, you know, I’m still on my team when they come up with random ideas for something which isn’t like driven by like a customer interview or customer discussion. Like you know, I don’t want that in the company. I want customers who are using it actively to be like, oh, this is something which would be great and that’s where we focus the resource. So, yeah, that’s our strategy and I hope it plays out.
Kevin King:
How does it work? Do I pay a per-usage fee or is it a monthly subscription?
Max:
It’s an interesting question. I think in the long term, all of these AI tools are going to move to a kind of a service fee for the provider, let’s say, e-content, for basically the UX and the painted technology, whatever they provide, and then on top of that, people are going to be paying for the tokens on OpenAI or you know, Claude, or whatever it is. So I think that’s a future business model that people will get, not just at us, but everyone is going to have to get used to, because these models are expensive and they’re variable in price and I think people are going to have to get used to that pay-for-usage. But right now, as of today, we are a simple subscription. We give people unlimited. Well, yeah, we’re a subscription model. We, for 165 a month package, you get 100 SKUs a month, unlimited generations on that. For 465 a month, you get 2,000 unlimited generations on that, like images, text, infographics, and I like we’ll say we’ll stay at that level as long as possible.
Max:
I don’t want to be innovating in, let’s say, the pricing space. Like, I don’t like that’s not, you know. I want to be innovating in, let’s say, the pricing space. That’s not, you know, I want to be innovating on the e-commerce side, but my prediction is that, in order to make the economics work, that will be how the world looks like in the future. Just because you know, right now we have you know, we’ve got venture money. You can burn money, but, like you can’t, at some point it needs to become a sustainable business.
Kevin King:
Do you have a quick example of someone that was doing pretty good started using your service and changed up their listings, and now they’re crushing?
Max:
We have a seller called Silly Slick. They’re a knife seller and, using e-content, we got them onto page one for the keyword of what is it? Titanium knives, or something like this. We got them on page one. They’ve generated a ton of beautiful lifestyle images and infographics and the rest of it on our tool. So if you go to the case studies on the website, you’ll see the one I’m referring to. But we have six or seven case studies there and I’m always trying to build more in-depth ones out. So we have some testimonials, some other examples that click back life, the listing.
Kevin King:
What did their sales go from? Or their conversion, what’s some hard numbers.
Max:
So the hard numbers is we did some A-B testing on. I mean, the challenge with conversion is it can be driven by lots of factors, including price, price of their competitors, time of year. But the hard numbers are we did A-B testing on product opinion of their previous listing and our listing. AI generated and 88% of their target audience preferred our listing and that was high earners, prime members, all the rest of it. So I think for now, we are working on dashboard. Well, probably by the time this is out, we’ll have dashboards we have them internally of what’s happening with the conversion and that’s how we monitor the AI and we want to publish that to the customers so they can see that as well.
Max:
But having worked at Amazon, I know the challenges of attribution very well and I don’t want to be putting it. We’ve got one case study which says we increase conversion by 30%. So there’s a number, but we know that 30% could be driven by a lot of factors. So I want to be very scientific with these. So, yeah, I guess the split testing is the easiest and fairest way. Some of our own customers, some of our enterprise customers, are doing their own testing and I really hope they let us share it. We’re under NDA so maybe they won’t, but they’re literally. They’ve been using us to generate the content and they’re doing this research as part of the PAC. So I’m hoping we can publish that because that will be the best case study, actually, because it’s come internally from them rather than us.
Kevin King:
Well, Max, if someone wants to actually check out your tool, can you spell that for them and tell them how to go check it out?
Max:
So it’s a very unimaginatively named eComtent from e-commerce content is the idea behind that, so it’s E-C-O-M-T-E-N-T dot AI. But yeah, I’m quite active on LinkedIn and Twitter, Max and Claire, so you can find me there and you can message me, tweet me, whatever, and I’m happy to jump on a demo and I love talking about this stuff. So one of the reasons I love talking to customers is I know you say, Kevin, a lot of people aren’t using AI. All the sellers I talk to love AI. It’s very strange for me that I always hear Joe, my podcast co-host, say, oh, sellers don’t like AI. But from my perspective, I must talk to 10-15 sellers a week and they love it. I’m certainly not seeing that side of it personally, but I believe, you know a lot better than me when you say that.
Kevin King:
The ones that are using it, love it, and the ones that aren’t just haven’t done their head around it yet. It’s been a great talk to you. I can sit here and talk AI for hours as well and go down all kinds of rabbit holes, but I appreciate you coming on on the AM/PM Podcast.
Max:
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, Kevin.
Kevin King:
If you’re paying attention to what’s happening in AI, it’s going to dramatically affect everything we do from the employees we hire to the way we create our products, to the way we create our listings, to the way we sell, to the way we interact with customers and Max’s company is just one aspect of that. But, as you can see from our discussion, AI is world changing in what it’s going to be doing and it’s quickly, quickly evolving. So I hope you’re staying on top of what’s happening in AI. If not, you can get a piece of it from my newsletter Billion Dollar Sellers billiondollarsellers.com. Every Monday and Thursday, a new issue comes up, but I cover some of the latest when it comes to AI and e-commerce in there as well, so check that out if you’re not already subscribed.
Kevin King:
And don’t forget to check out my upcoming Market Masters. It’s limited to like eight people. It’s going to be happening September 12th to the 16th in Austin. You can actually check it out at billiondollardellerdummit.com. Choose the option for Market Masters and you might be able to spend about three hours in front of the Dream 100, where they actually zero in on your specific business and your specific growth pain points for what you’re doing in your e-com business and help you almost one-on-one with some of the most talented people in the world. It’s called Market Masters. It’s happening in September in Austin. We’ll be back again next week with another awesome episode, but in the meantime, remember, whatever you tune into is what you turn into. Whatever you tune into is what you turn into. See you again next week.
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