Search Interviews:

Jonathan Tilley is the CEO of ZonGuru, a comprehensive software toolset designed to help e-commerce brands and agencies scale their products on Amazon. With a background in digital advertising and firsthand experience as an Amazon seller, Jon spent over 15 years in the industry before stepping into the entrepreneurship world with ZonGuru in 2017. Under his leadership, the company has seen significant growth in product offerings and in serving a global marketplace, including the US, Europe, Australia, and India.

Apple
Spotify
stitcher
tune in
iheart

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [3:44] Jonathan Tilley talks about the range of tools ZonGuru offers for scaling brands on Amazon
  • [7:47] ZonGuru’s first product features and the problem they sought to solve
  • [9:19] The significance of building the right team and company culture for long-term success
  • [11:43] How Jon met his business partner and their journey to establishing ZonGuru
  • [16:02] How grassroots marketing helped ZonGuru reach its first 100 customers
  • [22:17] The transition from bootstrap to a more structured and scalable development team
  • [27:56] Jon shares insights on creating tech specifically tailored for agencies and the key features involved
  • [31:34] The reasons behind saying “no” to certain features and the importance of focusing on core strengths
  • [38:47] How ZonGuru’s growth audit can maximize an Amazon seller’s potential revenue
  • [41:46] The importance of focused conferences in the e-commerce space for sellers

In this episode…

Have you ever wondered what it takes to make a brand flourish on Amazon? With the e-commerce landscape becoming increasingly competitive, finding the right tools and strategies can mean the difference between obscurity and success. But where does one begin the journey of elevating their Amazon presence?

E-commerce expert Jonathan Tilley shares the inside story of overcoming early challenges in the SaaS world to construct a leading toolset for Amazon sellers and agencies. From humble beginnings to strategies for growth, he recounts the milestones ZonGuru achieved, including the critical decision to focus on key features that set the company apart. Jon emphasizes the importance of company culture, stressing ZonGuru’s practice of incentivizing team members to become Amazon sellers themselves, ensuring that the products and features they develop resonate with their target audience’s needs.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Jonathan Tilley, CEO of ZonGuru, about his journey with ZonGuru and the future of e-commerce SaaS solutions. Jon talks about the tools ZonGuru offers for scaling brands on Amazon, the significance of building the right team and company culture, how to create tech specifically tailored for agencies, and how ZonGuru’s growth audit can maximize an Amazon seller’s potential revenue.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related episode(s):

Quotable Moments:

  • “It’s not about turnover; it’s about leftovers and what you can do with that profit.”
  • “If you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’ve waited too long.”
  • “If I could give any insight into building tech, curiosity within your team is gold.”
  • “Being less ‘shiny object’-focused and more focused on the 80/20 is our DNA at ZonGuru.”
  • “You have to have a partnership focus on creating great tech, but there’s an important piece around vision and brand.”

Action Steps:

  1. Embrace a customer-centric approach when developing software: By focusing on the needs and pain points of your target users, you create solutions that truly resonate with them.
  2. Consider the 80/20 rule in product development and marketing: Concentrating on the most impactful features and data can lead to faster and more efficient results, ultimately benefiting your clients.
  3. Build a solid company culture that fosters curiosity and a growth mindset: Jon Tilley’s approach to incentivizing his team to start their Amazon businesses ensures they understand the business’s goals and challenges, leading to the development of effective solutions.
  4. Utilize established business frameworks like EOS and OKR: These systems help create a structured path to achieve your goals.
  5. Develop strategic partnerships and a robust ecosystem: Saying ‘no’ to certain features can open opportunities for collaboration, ultimately leading to a comprehensive service offering for clients.

Sponsor for this episode

At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.

We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.

What do you need to start a podcast?

When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.

The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.

We make distribution easy.

We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.

Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90xAtariEinstein BagelsMattelRx BarsYPOEOLending TreeFreshdesk, and many more.

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.

Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win?

Contact us now at [email protected] or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.

Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…

Never Miss an Episode and get Free Updates

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:15 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Jon Tilley of ZonGuru at zonguru.com. Jon, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast, since we’re kind of like in the SaaS part of the SaaS series and also the e-commerce series from the SaaS side. An interesting one was with one of the founders of Zapier. We had Wade Foster talking about how he grew Zapier. We had one of the founders of Pipedrive talking again, some of the ups and downs. I think when I interviewed them, Jon, they were at 10,000 customers. And now I think they have over 100,000 customers.

The AWeber one was interesting as well. The founder of AWeber on and how he grew that business. From the e-commerce side, I had our mutual friend, Chad Rubin on, when he had Skubana, which he has sold, and now he has Prophecy. I had James Thompson on, who actually started Prosper Show at a successful agency in the e-commerce space. And he was on Amazon, worked at Amazon too, just impressive career. So that many more inspiredinsider.com, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships, and we do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution.

So Jon, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host, so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, and, most importantly, run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share the world with they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you definitely should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us [email protected]. I also have a bunch of free episodes. It’s episodes on Inspired Insider that answers almost every question someone’s asked me, Jon about podcasting. So check that out.

I’m excited to introduce Jon Tilley. He’s the CEO of ZonGuru, and I want to just also thank Nick Pena for introducing us. And he’s a master at partnerships, helps Hello Tax and runs scale. ZonGuru is its software toolset that helps e-comm brands and agencies scale products on Amazon. Prior to actually launching ZonGuru In 2017 he launched and grew multiple brands on Amazon. He also spent 15 years working as a digital advertising executive as well. And so he brings all the value to e-comm, brands and agencies as well. A lot of agencies use the tool to manage their clients. So Jon, thanks for joining me.

Jonathan Tilley  3:35 

What’s up? What’s up Jeremy, yeah, the pain and the joy of e-commerce over many years. I bring that to the table. Yeah, it’s good.

Jeremy Weisz  3:44 

You have the scars to prove it. I’m gonna bring up the site, so if someone’s listening to audio, there is a video piece, and I’m gonna pull up ZonGuru. But if you can just talk about ZonGuru and what you do to start?

Jonathan Tilley  3:59 

Yeah, you mentioned it earlier. I’m the co-founder of ZonGuru. We’re an operational tool set at our core, focused on helping brands scale on Amazon. And over the last couple of years as well, we’ve focused a lot on helping agencies to help their clients scale on Amazon by using our tech. We have over 18 different tools, everything from kind of market research, market validation, niche validation, all the way through to our flagship products around SEO and keyword intelligence. We have a lot of firsts in the keyword space. I coined a phrase called contextual SEO, and really looking at not only the best keywords for listings and how to kind of get customers to find you, but also overlaying competitors and how strong and weak.

So you know, that was a first on our space, and we were the first to integrate with AI back in 2023, January. So over a year now, we were the first movers on the AI space, and we are still a leader in that space, for sure. And then a bunch of other monitoring tools for Amazon, US, Europe, Australia and India are the key markets. So generally, in any kind of big challenge you have on Amazon, depending on where you are in that journey, we have tech that can help you solve that problem in a better way.

Jeremy Weisz  5:31 

I do want to talk about, before we hit record, something stuck out to me that you said, you said, we’re also creating tech specifically in features for agencies. So I want to talk about that. But first, the first version of ZonGuru, and then talk about the evolution. Because, I mean, I’m sure you get a lot of feature requests all the time. In the beginning, you can only do so many things. What did the original software look like?

Jonathan Tilley  6:05 

Oh, man, yeah. So this was 2016 2017 I’d been selling on Amazon for a few years, and myself and my co-founder, Adam Hudson, the phrase that kept coming into my head, and it’s from my advertising days was GAGO, garbage and garbage out right? And I felt that there was so much information available inside of set of central but a lot of the tech out there was just not showcasing the right data in the right way. And so the idea in terms of ZonGuru was, hey, can we create, you know, an all-in-one play on software where you could log in once and have key data at each part of your Amazon journey that would help you to solve information in the most impactful and fastest, most efficient way.

So that was how we went to markets. And what’s the saying? The saying is, if you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’ve waited too long. So, we had a crazy ZonGuru, Guru style, cartoon character logo. And, you know, the first tool was, really had a Chrome extension and some keyword data and a dashboard was really the first iteration that we built out of, out of India, as you do with sometimes with tech startups and bootstrapping and took it to market and started…

Jeremy Weisz  7:36 

What were you looking to solve as a seller at that point, what were some of the specific things that you wanted in the software? Because obviously you were, in a way, scratching your own itch too.

Jonathan Tilley  7:47 

Yeah. And I think one of the main areas specifically for SMB sellers at that time was how to kind of validate a product idea. So we came up with this niche rater system which, which really answers the key was the first really to answer the right kind of key business questions that you need to answer in order to go live with the product. So understanding demand, how much demand was there? How many people were searching for Amazon.

Jeremy Weisz  8:18 

Kind of like the niche finder piece.

Jonathan Tilley  8:20 

Exactly. Yeah, so you came up with this. It’s kind of a mnemonic that people know us by, called the rainbow, which was the niche rating system, which gave you a kind of a rating based on, again, demand of competition, profitability, it’s not about turnover. It’s about leftover, right? And what you can do with that profit, and then capital out there to launch a product. So that was one of our biggest first products was, how do we answer the right business questions in the right way so that you can make smart decisions about your product choice? So that was one of our first areas of product. And then the second one was really around keyword intelligence, and finding the right keywords to put into your listings, to get in front of customers and figuring out the best way to do that.

Jeremy Weisz  9:14 

So is that what keywords on fire, keyword tracker and sales buy, those Kind of…

Jonathan Tilley  9:19 

Yeah, I mean, keywords on fire is our flagship keyword intelligence product. And then, you know, sales bar keyword tracker, these are more monitoring tools that you use to monitor the performance of your products or your competitors, so you can get good insights, so you can optimize and improve your product further.

Jeremy Weisz  9:40 

So the original product, software you had built in India. What happened next?

Jonathan Tilley  9:48 

Well, we started to get some really crazy growth. My business partner, Adam Hudson, started an education business called Reliable Education, actually based in Australia. That’s not where I’m from. I’m from South Africa originally, but there’s always a confusion on the accent. But he was having a lot of success there, really teaching people how to take advantage of the Amazon opportunity. You know, we’re talking, 2015, 16, 17, 18, which is just as there’s still a massive opportunity today, but back then, it was this insane opportunity where you could be from any country with any education background, and you could literally launch a product based business that could compete with the best in the world on Amazon and he created an education program around how to teach people to create, to take advantage of the opportunity by actually teaching legitimate business practices about how to create an E-commerce brand, not just like this, get rich quick type of scheme.

So he was very successful there, and that was a good influx for us in terms of using our software. And the first iteration I would say of ZonGuru, was just keeping up, we had built the tool, it was bootstrapped. It was breaking ahead of a lot. We spent a lot of time just fixing bugs and trying to ensure that we could keep up with the demand and the interest in our software. And that was a pretty rocky road, for sure, but that was kind of the start. And the way you should, to a degree, do it right, is there’s always mistakes and learnings there, but you’ve got to get rolling, get into the market, and then shift and navigate as you go.

Jeremy Weisz  11:38 

How did you meet and then decide to partner up with Adam?

Jonathan Tilley  11:43 

Well, I say Adam, he’s from Australia. He had moved to Los Angeles, and I met him at a networking breakfast event called metal. Ken Rakowski is an awesome connector, I would say, in LA and, yeah, we connected. And yeah, I immediately picked up on Adam’s entrepreneurial spirit. He’s a true, just entrepreneurial genius. He’s always done amazing things in the space. And I was at that stage where I was still in digital advertising, and I had this, entrepreneurial FOMO is what I call it, you know, I just always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and so we connected there. And I was like, yeah, I needed Adam to help me foster the entrepreneurial spirit. And he needed me to connect with fun things to do in LA and people to meet. So it was a pretty good initial connection. And we created a friendship out of that. And just started to see this opportunity around the Amazon wave, and figuring out how do we could get onto the back of that and move with it.

Jeremy Weisz  12:58 

So was he in e-commerce at that time, in the e-commerce world?

Jonathan Tilley  13:02 

He was actually, he had started a startup creating how-to demos and how-to ads and a service around that. So, technically, e-commerce and then actually had a product idea that he was trying to get into, brick and mortar, and was facing all those obstacles, and then decided to kind of start testing on Amazon, and was blown away by the opportunity there, and that’s where we kind of started. And I got involved, started selling products on Amazon. And we had masterminds up in our staying in the Hollywood Hills at the time, and we get our friends together and look at ideas, and blow them up and come up with new ones, and then, and then, just kind of start getting involved in Amazon. So that was, that was the heyday of, kind of the side hustle while, while we were doing a bunch of other stuff.

Jeremy Weisz  13:55 

What type of products did you start with?

Jonathan Tilley  13:56 

Yeah, it was funny. I got to a stage where I had five products ideas, and I just, I was, I kind of hit that wall of like, you know, putting the pressure on which one I should launch first. And at one of those masterminds I had over a bottle of whiskey, we made a decision to move on it. And the first one was this really cool, unique, table setting pieces that I launched with, yeah, super cool, kind of snowflake, organic style designs that we had done that was really kind of craft-focused, and did really well. And then the second product I launched after that, which really took off as well, was  a car seat cover, which, at the time, I had this idea around creating a quick, on, off-car seat cover that was almost like a glorified towel that you could, you know, absorb sweat on, but then take it off and use it again and wash it and almost like off the yoga or whatever was, and that did incredibly well. So those were kind of my first iterations of products on Amazon.

Jeremy Weisz  15:12 

It’s really interesting. So you guys hit it off. You partner up. You have the software. You start bootstrap it. You get it created in India. You get these first features. What was a milestone? Like a first milestone, whether it was a feature set or a client or customer with ZonGuru?

Jonathan Tilley  15:33 

Oh, geez, yeah, there were many, I think the first couple of miles, the first 100 customers was it was an awesome milestone, and that literally came out of me sitting up in the back of bars in Los Angeles and trying to create, like the initial communities around people wanting to sit on Amazon and presenting to them and just —

Jeremy Weisz  15:54 

You’d invite a group and invite them to a bar or some kind of happy hour and present your software.

Jonathan Tilley  16:02 

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So that was kind of like the first initial —

Jeremy Weisz  16:05 

How would you get them there?

Jonathan Tilley  16:09 

I’m trying to remember how we did, you know there was, there was emails —

[Continue to Page 2]