Links to Episode
Transcript
Mark: Today we have with us Paul Ryazanov, the founder of MageCloud Agency, who helps ecommerce businesses grow from six figures to seven and eight figures through conversion rate optimisation. Through performance enhancements, user journey refinement, site optimisation and stronger internal processes, Paul and his team help online businesses unlock more growth from the traffic and customers they already have.
Paul’s journey from a Soviet background, rebuilding his life in a new country, and learning to lead and speak on stages in the US and the UK demonstrates real resilience, reinvention and determination. And while navigating burnout, economic instability, war, COVID and the rise of AI, he continues to adapt, lead and build a business that creates growth not just for clients but for his team as well. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul: Thank you, Mark, for having me. Appreciate it.
Mark: To kick us off, can you expand on where you are today with your business, and who is it that you love to work with?
Paul: [03:27] The business size, we have about 40 awesome team members as of right now. And we love to work with businesses that have a mission. That’s what I’m always telling. It does not really matter how big you are. It does not matter for me how much you’re willing to pay. If I’m in love with the founder and I enjoy the idea behind it, I will find a way to work.
When I started this business 11 years ago, I decided to focus only on customers whose passion matched mine. And I’m proud to say we have amazing customers who stay with us for years, not because of the contract, but because they believe in what we do, and we believe in what they do.
Mark: Belief goes in both directions. The values, the mission, their passion, their purpose, these are the real fundamentals. So for those clients, when they reach out to you, what do they think they want help with?
Paul: [04:45] Most of my clients who come on board already have an ecommerce website, functional. Everyone has a website at this moment. What they’re looking for is a trustworthy provider. They’ve either been burnt out by the previous agency who put them on a retainer, which is not always the best way to go for the business. Most of my clients say, “We’re only working with you because you’re not billing on a month-by-month basis. It’s not a retainer charge. It’s always when we need it.” They really appreciate this.
And they come for the expertise, because I’m a database engineer myself. I’ve done some coding in my life and I’ve done some marketing as well. So the mix of knowledge, which is always missing. There are a bunch of agencies who just do the tech stack, and some agencies just do the marketing. I’m able to dive into the data, because I’m a database engineer, and give the insight that potentially the business owner would not be able to find. That’s a big value proposition of what we have.
Conversion rate optimisation is just one of the services we deliver. We also take care of website security updates day by day in the background, so the customer doesn’t even know we’re doing this. And obviously they come for the community as well that we’re building. We’re building an ecosystem where a founder can learn from another founder. Especially with conversion rate optimisation: the experiment you run on one business can be tested on ten other businesses in similar segments, and the wins you’ve learned on one account can be proxied to wins for so many other businesses. That’s how my clients feel. They feel secure, they feel that someone cares about them.
Mark: I love simplicity. At its absolute core, what’s the primary thing that your clients want?
Paul: [07:29] Revenue. They want an uplift in their revenue. Point, done.
Mark: So what are the mistakes they’re making, time and time again, before they reach out to you?
Paul: [07:59] There is one single mistake. They spend a phenomenal amount of money driving traffic to the website, but they have no strategy about testing.
What I’ve learned about most ecommerce brands, big and small, is that most of the changes they want to make on the website are driven by one single person, either the ecommerce manager or the marketing manager. So it’s always the opinion of one specific person. What we unlock is telling them, “Guys, if you’re spending 50 grand on Google Ads, at least 10% of that budget needs to be allocated to optimisation of the landing pages and testing different elements of the page to convert more people into actions.” Sometimes that will unlock even bigger income for the company. Increasing revenue by either increasing the conversion rate, or increasing revenue per user, or increasing average order value. Those elements and puzzles that we put together for the brand, that’s the core definition of success in this case.
But to answer your question: people just don’t do the testing. They still believe in what they think is best, and are not relying on the user data.
Mark: What’s that moment like for them when you say, “You’re not testing, you’re not looking at data, you have no strategy”? That can be very confrontational, or it can be very freeing.
Paul: [10:46] I would say there are two groups of people. One truly understands A/B testing and the importance of doing it, and those are probably the best clients to work with because you don’t have to teach them. They just don’t know how to do it, or they might not have the time. But sometimes you’re giving suggestions and the person is so sold on his own idea that he just doesn’t take those suggestions. That’s why I think we all have to be very selective with the clients we want to work with.
And statistically I can tell you, not every single A/B test will be a win. Statistically, 30% of A/B tests are a win and 70% lose. When you’re working with a brand, they have to understand the maths behind it, because otherwise when you’re showing them three or five tests that are failing, they have a switch in their mindset: “Okay, if all is failing, what am I paying you for?”
Mark: That is the mindset shift, because that could be interpreted as, “Thank you, you found me five ways that aren’t working.”
Paul: [12:27] There are tactics that we normally follow. We look into the website. If it’s not completely crap, we usually try to have a completely opposite page to test. If it’s crap, that’s fine, I have to do something from scratch.
The data is the data. It’s hard for me to say if it’s good or bad. I can have a benchmark in the industry, but in furniture you will never have the same conversion rate as in beauty, because they’re different types of products. So I can always see the general average industry benchmark and how this specific client is doing in terms of conversion rate.
Let’s imagine there are pages that fundamentally don’t have a proper setup. They don’t have reviews, there’s no information about shipping. Then you launch a new page and you start testing from zero. But if a brand already has a pretty decent page and they just don’t know what else to explore, what we usually recommend is to completely change the entire page, fundamentally change it, and then run experiments. If the original page works better, then you start with that and optimise with small tweaks. Even small changes can have a huge impact.
We have our own ideas, but our ideas also came from our expertise and from tests we’ve run in the past. There are also a couple of platforms you can subscribe to. That’s something you have to pay for as an agency, but we’ve got access to a database of those A/B tests. So when I’m dealing with a client, I always give them a probability of a specific test being a winner based on tests someone else has done. That’s how I try to convince my clients to keep testing, because I’m showing them real data. I say, “Hey, this is the platform. This specific experiment wins seven out of ten. Let’s test the same on your website.”
Mark: You’ve got columns that you can control, and then things that are outside of your control. This is what makes it an ongoing relationship rather than one and done.
Paul: [16:13] You constantly have to test. Constantly. That’s the reason why I believe that conversions and flows start with every single campaign. It’s not enough just to optimise your product page. If you’re running a campaign tomorrow for Black Friday, the advertisement that you put on Meta, that’s where the conversion flow starts. Then there’s an email campaign that supports it, and then there’s supposed to be a landing page supporting it. The most successful brands I work with have advertisement, email and landing page tied together.
One of the biggest mistakes a lot of brands make, especially in the US when I used to live there, is that they contract one agency for Meta, another agency for email, another agency for design, web dev and so on. And those companies don’t even talk to each other. They’re just sending the bill and sending fancy reports. We try to aggregate this as a full funnel, starting from the Meta ad, then supporting the email campaign, then the landing page. And you have to tweak this based on the specific channel, because the people who found you on Meta are not the same people who found you on Google Shopping, which is more transactional. So running different pages for different audiences or sources of traffic is really crucial as well. Optimisation of your entire website and the flows is something you have to do month by month.
Mark: So tell me, what was it about this line of work that made you say, “Yes, this is what I want to do”?
Paul: [18:18] I’ve got 11 years of doing this with this company, and another 30 years as an IT engineer. What drives me the most is, number one, my internal team’s success.
When my team members buy a new property, buy a new car, that motivates me as well, because I can see their success.
And the same thing happens when I see the success of my clients. We’ve got a couple of cases where the client came six years ago making only 5K a month from the website, and now it’s a five million business. He turned his business from seven people into 35 people, and he’s now aiming for ten million. Clients we started working with six years ago are now getting almost 100 million revenue, brands on US TV channels.
Having the success of my clients is a good foundation for me to feel I’m doing something right. And if they employ people, that’s what I really like. I’m always telling my clients, “If you can employ more people, you make more people happy.” I cannot recover from COVID, but as long as I’m helping 20 people, and then when I’m going to die those 20 people say, “He was a good guy,” that would be pretty much the reason why I’m doing this.
Mark: Tell me about you. Moving countries, relocating, visas. What’s the personal journey been like?
Paul: [20:40] It’s a very challenging life. The balance between work and life. I’m only dreaming about having a proper vacation. I’m only dreaming about having a better relationship with the missus.
Moving from country to country: I used to live in Ukraine, moved to the United States, then moved back to Ukraine, and now I’m in the UK. People who know me in the US, that’s one group of people. But once I came to the UK, the market doesn’t really care who you are. They don’t know. You have to start from scratch.
I think this is the most challenging for me on a personal level, because I had a very stable life in Ukraine and an amazing work-life balance. Nine till five, then all my family. Now, because of the new country and because of the visa, I have to hustle so much more just to put my name on the map. Put my name into the new society that I live in. Getting new clients to know me.
People buy from people. People want to talk. They want to understand, are you the proper partner in the business? Because eventually it’s not just a company, they believe in you first before they sign the deal. And all those relationships, all those podcasts and all those meetings take time. Those meetings cannot be replaced with AI. Maybe I could build my own avatar and put it in the meetings, but I still want to be in those meetings myself. So taking that time away from my family is the most challenging thing on a personal level.
Mark: What are the barriers or restrictions you face that maybe you didn’t see coming, or that other people just don’t have to face?
Paul: [22:51] Don’t get me wrong. If I had a British passport, I would not have all those troubles. Right now I’m on a Homes for Ukraine visa, which is pretty much a temporary protection status here while the war is going on, so I depend so much on other factors.
Historically as a person, I’m always trying to be in control of what I do. I’m moving to the country, I have this all under control. Now it’s something I cannot really manage, and I hate to be relying on someone else. Can I solve my visa situation easily? Yes, I can go and start working for someone. But if I do that, I will rely on this company’s or this person’s decision. I want to control my life on my own. When it comes to visa regulations, that’s what makes it a little bit more challenging. But I love a challenge.
Mark: There are things that are inside your control that you get to do to influence the outcome. Isn’t this back to the work you do with optimisation and looking at the data?
Paul: [25:01] I started this business and I decided that I wanted to be my own boss. I have to control everything myself. Now, while I’m talking with you, I’m thinking: eventually, being a C-level person, nobody else controls it. If something happens in my company, every single mistake is on me. If we send a mistake in an email, it’s on me. I did not control it.
But I’m now thinking, my vision was not to have another boss, and I have 120 bosses. It’s my clients. Business is still working with people. Every single client has my personal WhatsApp. They can call me day and night, 24/7, and they know I will be answering the call.
Unfortunately, when I’m dealing with different suppliers, I find this culture is lost. I think that’s what we all have to bring back. Responsiveness. Responsibility. We need to raise this up. I’m not expecting anyone to work as hard as me, 24/7, but at least be reliable, and if you promise, deliver. That’s something we all need in this society.
Mark: You’re so passionate, so caring, so driven by mission. Do you find sometimes that’s a blessing and a curse?
Paul: [27:28] Yeah, 100%. But at the same time, I start thinking about the mission in general. What’s my mission? And I come to the point that my mission is just helping other people to succeed with their own dreams.
My first salary was 60 bucks a month. That’s why I’m now on a mentorship platform giving advice to people from my heart, from my expertise. A mission in my life will probably be different. If you’d asked me, “What’s your mission?” ten years ago, it would have been different. Now, my mission is just to try to help other people the way I got some help in my life. I don’t know if it’s a good mission or not, but here I are.
Mark: It’s also a super-duper selfish mission, because you get to help other people, and that helps you, your team, your business and your life.
Paul: [28:46] As long as my clients are happy and as long as we’re getting good feedback from them, as long as they need us, I will be proud of what we deliver.
In ten years, during every single onboarding call, when I’m sharing what we do for clients, sharing our reviews on a platform like Upwork over the ten years, that’s one of the key reasons why people believe in the expertise we’ve got.
Mark: Paul, thank you so much for sharing not only the amazing work that you do and your principles behind the scenes, but also your personal journey and what it’s like for you as the leader.
Paul: Thank you, Mark, for having me. It’s great to be here. And for everyone who’s listening, thank you for your time. I highly appreciate it.
Mark: For those people who want to know more about you and the amazing work you do, how can they find out more?
Paul: [29:55] My first name, my last name. If you Google my first name and last name, I’m probably the only Paul Ryazanov who will be at the top of Google. It’s paulryazanov.com, my personal website. You can reach out to me personally. Or if you’re interested in MageCloud or conversion rate optimisation, the magecloud.agency website gives a bit more information about what we do.