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

War started, war started.

Like what the f what are you speaking about?

Wow.

Anyway, like I was with the four-year-old and it was really scared moment because for me it was only one thing.

I have to avoid him to be a part of that kind of terror which was happening there.

So we woke up, it was explosions around, it was later on like there was really mess going on.

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And here's the episode.

All right, guys, we got Anatoly here, Two Comic Club Award winner, founder of GSM Growth and co-founder of Ecom Scout.

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 till 2013.

Then I moved to Dubai, to UAE, and after that 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 the US.

So when you heard the war was starting in Ukraine, walk me through what happened from there.

Oh,

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 Kyiv, building my dreaming life, and like we were like buying apartments there, all the stuff.

And suddenly, just like 24th of February 2022, my wife was in Spain that time in Barcelona for some like girls event.

And I woke up because of several calls were there.

And my father, my sister-in-law, several people were trying to reach me out.

And actually, like, I just pick up the phone at 5 a.m.

and they're like, War started, war started.

I'm like, what the?

What are you speaking about?

Wow.

Anyway, like, I was with the four-year-old, and it was really scared moment because for me, it was only one thing.

I have to avoid him to be a part of that kind of terror, which was 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 Kyiv by the end of this same day, and me and our friends, we were trying to cross the border because for me what 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 uh i said f no i won't allow my kid go back that side that way and it was only the road uh through military city which where the explosions were happening and uh i done whatever it takes uh i didn't pay anyone.

Like, it's all was all legal.

I just like crossed the border with my baby after three days staying there.

And

yeah, like my life started completely from scratch.

Like, we have a previous life in Ukraine, and we like to start rebuilding it.

But in the same time, I was like managing my agency, JSM Gross, 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 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 like guys said to me I said guys like take care of your family make sure that you are safe make sure that you like protect them because they are all of them were still in Ukraine and they like said better I will stay in basement with the laptop and focus on work then we'll be seeing what's going on around here I like whoa 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 is help 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 so like I

find out the way how to handle it so guys sport is must I mean when I I like I just say to myself f 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 for a while but that time I didn't think about anything except war and family and all that stuff so after we figure it 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 an advertising agency focusing on shopify store owners where we managing TikTok, Facebook, Google, email SMS marketing.

So basically building advertising ecosystem for the Shopify brands.

And was dropshipping big in Ukraine?

There is quite, but there is a cash on delivery system.

So I never dive into it.

Like it's...

too problematic audience, I would say.

A lot of refunds on the cash on delivery on our market.

And plus, like, it's like 40 million or 360 million only US or worldwide.

It's like a billion of people.

Obviously, like I choose United States market from the beginning and that was definitely the 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 was 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 or stayed 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 are 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 start 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 Kashkais

really quiet and amazing like Paradise Hill I would say a village I would say and we are staying there our kid going to international school there and like having quite fun

do they speak Portuguese or Spanish

they speak in Portuguese but like all the people in the country speak in English so 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 a real estate business now, except digital agency.

Plus, I have 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 the US.

And

a citizenship, baby.

Yeah.

And basically, like during these three months I done much more than like in one year in terms of networking in terms of like connections.

First of all I have already quite a bit of connections but when you meet people again and again again and again for several years and now you're living next to them definitely like 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 like I'm not looking for nightclubs or something like that but it's a fun in terms of like

I would say it's inspiring you.

Like all the, all that's around you 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 U.S.

in like nice ocean area building looking from my gym onto into the beach and all and like having fun with my kid and showing him what's possible.

I'm just like...

have smile on my face like life unpredictable like 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 about business and life click the application link below and here's the episode guys Oh yeah, all the time, like my childhood was, I started working

since 13 years old.

Wow.

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, first job.

And 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 similar jobs.

But I was always hustling and I didn't understand what hustle means.

I was thinking it's just survival mode.

I call that all the time, I'm surviving.

Like 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 ups and down.

And this is where like kind of challenging started.

And I was always on the go to help my mom.

to make sure that uh 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 uh

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,

not physical work can make you well,

who can build you well.

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 uh low-income work and uh 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 like everything just like growing horizontally right did you have a lot of fear and doubt when you were starting entrepreneurship Oh, yeah.

I start like the thing is why I started.

And I tend to God

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 her so we were living in the master room with another Filipino couple in the same apartment and like she came in the room and started crying.

It was in UAE in Dubai.

This is where when in 2013 I left Ukraine and went to UAE as a food runner.

I i was cleaning dirty plates like uh from the tables and went 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 company had great life but because she became in love with me she decided 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 uh extra and always losing money on it.

I was trying to get better job and like uh canceling the contracts before termin uh termination of the contract was executed

was there and every single time I was paying fines.

And those fines always taken out from our pocket ev all everything what we saved.

And basically all the time I was like kind of feel broke but motivated to move forward.

And like again, looking on physical works there, on some kind of of

extra stuff.

But when my wife came in the room and said, babe, I'm pregnant,

I look on her eyes and she started crying.

And she was crying not because she's happy, because she is terrified what's going to happen next.

If she loses the job, we won't be able to pay for the room.

We won't be able to

handle the births and so on.

And that moment I went to pharmacy to buy another test just to double check if it's everything correct.

And yeah, because she was like scared.

I said, let's check just in case.

And I was like, I remember I was walking on the parking spot outside in Dubai plus 35 degrees.

And like I'm 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 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 births in Dubai.

So I brought her back to Ukraine and start

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-making book, nothing special.

But the thing is, I find out what Facebook ads means.

And that was insane,

insane knowledge for me.

It was a gun 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 what I was making.

I was doing five jobs, like waiter,

gas company salesperson.

I got the job there, like when my wife left.

Like

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 like, 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 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 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.

Yeah, it was like

it was quite

tough times because I was working on five jobs, was 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.

And I was just renting the bed space there.

Like, and they were like, hey, crazy, what are you doing?

Like, I was sleeping while driving a couple of times, almost crushed.

Yeah.

Like, my face was yellow, like, eyes black.

My wife saying, like, you're in some kind of sector.

Stop doing whatever you're doing.

She didn't understand what e-commerce means.

I said, I don't care.

Until I figure out, I won't stop.

And like, she said, I will divorce on you if 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 saved on 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 the those countries like if you have some wealth you you they usually put it here and just you 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 American mentality with e-commerce: that people are sharing.

Yeah, you need to pay the price, but people are sharing how they made it.

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'm like,

I have to take a risk.

It's

stupid, but

Mark Hager, it's not a big name, but he is

one of the people who I'm grateful in life to have.

And like

he was having the live 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 the ad account and 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.

Damn.

I like,

this thing is real.

I just take the screenshots, send to my wife, look, look, it's real.

I was telling you.

She said, what is that?

I said, it's 5,700.

I just made a bit 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 to reinvest.

I have to put more, and then it will be blah, blah, blah.

She said, Stop it, stop it.

Like, I will go divorce with you if you won't stop.

I'm like, f it.

Like, I just dropped the phone.

I know that.

I know that from this moment, I definitely won't quit because it's possible.

You got a little taste.

Exactly.

I know that it's possible now.

And in two weeks, I lost everything.

Algorithms updates.

I had a winning product, like a funny t-shirt with the pocket, where like a nice kitty inside.

When you remove the pocket, the kitty showing you middle finger, you know?

So it was like quite funny stuff and like my audience, forty-five plus ladies, teachers in United States were really in love with that stuff.

It was super engaged ad and so on.

Facebook made the updates.

How they love to do that.

Classic.

Classic, yeah.

And now no more middle fingers in the in the ads.

And it was the actually the thing which is was attractive.

Yeah.

And basically

yeah, until summer I was trying to figure out different products, different store.

I was making here and there, losing here and there, nothing specific.

Like by summer, I start making maybe thousand a month in profit.

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 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 account

shut down.

But like full of fun, full of

difficulties in ecosystem, 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 three years old and I was like I was almost crying because it was my dream you know like Jay-Z

for the song about New York and I'm yeah I'm just like in the in the plane

we are we are we are landing to New York, I'm looking in 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 funds and we came not like you know, people who are poor and need like find any job or whatever.

We came helicopter like uh into Manhattan, like all the like a lot of 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 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 I my goal like then then forward we're going he's growing up he likes seeing all those Lamborghinis all those BMWs around France and all that stuff you know that he is 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 my background that everything wasn't as it is yeah 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 like thinking that money are coming that 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, like

my father was an entrepreneur, you know, and he was an unsuccessful entrepreneur.

He lost the leg, he became diabetic.

He has heart attacks three times already.

So he has like a lot of health issues.

When I was looking at him, I was thinking that being an entrepreneur is a curse.

Like nothing could be worse than being an entrepreneur.

So until I figure out what is that in UAE

in 2017, I really before that I was thinking that it's the worst thing ever which could be because my father was example.

He's an amazing dude.

He's an amazing man.

He's a 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 to be better.

Yeah.

You have an all-in mentality.

There was no plan B for you.

Oh, no.

That's the thing.

Like why it's made, it's worked for me because it was only plan A.

I have a newborn and I have to handle it whatever it takes.

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 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 like financial goal is not the strong goal because you can go on the job, you find out the job and make money with no stress.

But if you have like your big why, the better life for your son and the position where you're right now, you know that it can't provide it.

So then you're going to be doing whatever whatever it takes.

Absolutely.

Are you still seeing success with Facebook ads in 2024?

Uh, I would say, like 2023, 2024, it's a success came back to Facebook.

I mean, it was always there, but like 2021 to 2023, it was quite a disaster, it was quite a 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.io, it's our software which we decided to develop exactly to cover the attribution problem.

Because all the similar softwares, which is like our competitors, like the bigger ones, Triple Whale, North Beam, and South

Hieros, yes, they are quite expensive.

And it was always annoying several people who I was talking before.

Plus, we are having agency, our clients always complaining that they are 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 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 for the crowd and made just flat 99 dollars uh monthly thing nothing that's way cheaper than it's 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?

So as an agency one I can say, media buyers are struggling because of the no weekends, no normal routine for them, because if we are scaling like twenty K a day, thirty K a day, you always has to look on the account.

You have to control that like if there is not overspend, because overspent on such kind of levels, there's always painful.

I mean, if you like not cut something on time or not slow down the budget, like something will suck all the profitability.

And we could have problems with the clients after that.

It can get problems to us.

And

media bar always has to be next to the laptop.

And obviously after four years agency exists, we understand that

handling this problem has to be in better, we need to find out the better solution for that.

So now in Ecomscale we're creating the app which is like they won't be needed even

the laptop 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

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 DPI.

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 after AI ad captures, like you just press on one button, and 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

one of those three showing the great potential for the new winning ad.

And like you can scale faster just like by pressing one single button and you come scout.

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 trained it AI both there

by the hundred years of the advertisers' experience.

Like, we took the biggest marketers, the biggest like marketing studies, and

placed it in one spot to

teach the AI the right approach.

That's cool.

And yeah,

my partner in it, he's having the software business, so he knows how to

train the AI.

And basically, when he done it, I was really shocked.

Like when we press a button, we've seen the different ad copies, and we see the powerful angles which shows from nowhere.

I mean, before we spend like a couple of days to do the research in Amazon, to do the research on

YouTube and like internet forums before, now it's like some groups.

And now

AI just doing everything for us.

And like in matter one click, we're just getting the powerful angles for the winning creative.

Just testing

different captures.

And plus

have like separately trained media buyers to get perfect UGC scripts for our UGC creators.

And like all of that combination really give us powerful approach on the advertising.

That's big.

It used to take months to find winning products, winning creatives.

Now you could find it with AI in minutes.

Yeah, like winning products, it's still, I would say, challenging because, like, one of the things in e-commerce, like, you should not marry another product if it doesn't work.

So, before building your own brand, buying thousands of inventory, you have to find out the proof of concept.

Yeah, if this product actually has attraction.

So, like, after the split tests and testing of the different angles, you will understand if it's a product which 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 but with AI you can make this kind of judgment much faster so first of all with charg 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 filling up like five to ten pages of the onboarding form and before we will need to go to several places to finding out and collect the information and get the summary and make the according to that copywriting task and so on.

Now like we have all that

information provided, just going through couple of resources after that combining all under the prompts and boom, a perfect avatar already analyzed, already and goes exist and like it's giving us like

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.

And with the attribution platform, Acom 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 like 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 like i believe like ecom scout i'm not promoting i'm just searching because it's this platform which it will promote by itself just try and you'll see uh and uh from another side like yeah if you are in e-commerce and you're you're looking to scale your brand and looking for building the 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.

Like, person is coming to us in the in the 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 like profitability still going on.

If you have like trouble with TikTok, you have Facebook, you have

email SMS marketing, which is actually a money printing machine.

All the profits in emails and SMS people are 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 we can help you out with.

And yeah, jessamgrowthagency.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.