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Jennifer Tsay talks with Jason Barnard about scaling smarter.
Jennifer Tsay, CEO and Co-Founder of Shoott, speaks with Jason Barnard about the shift from a growth-focused to a profitability-driven mindset. She explains how tracking customer acquisition costs and KPIs daily has been crucial for adapting to market shifts and staying in control of her business. This data-driven approach helped her company achieve a remarkable 20-fold profit increase in one year.
Jennifer shares with Jason Barnard how her team focused on maximizing revenue by refining pricing strategies, improving customer value, and optimizing revenue from existing clients. She advises businesses to prioritize growth until they reach a point where focusing on profitability becomes essential, ensuring sustainable success in the long term.
Finally, Jennifer reflects on her leadership style evolution, highlighting a shift from hands-off to more detailed, data-backed management. She now challenges her team to think critically about processes, fostering a collaborative environment where everyone owns their roles.
What you’ll learn from Jennifer Tsay
- 00:00 Jennifer Tsay and Jason Barnard
- 02:14 What Did ChatGPT Find Out About Jennifer Tsay When Jason Barnard Mentioned Her Name?
- 02:45 What Did Bing Show About Jennifer Tsay When Jason Barnard Searched & How Much Was From Her Website?
- 03:28 How Can You Promote Your Personal Brand, Build Credibility & Establish Authority in Your Industry?
- 04:09 What Does Shoott Do?
- 04:20 What is the Reason Shoott Is Able to Offer Free Photoshoots?
- 04:43 What is the Reason Shoott’s Business Model Flips the Traditional Paradigm for Artists?
- 05:55 What Caused the Confusion When Trying to Find Jennifer Tsay Online?
- 06:44 How Did Jennifer Tsay Start Shoott?
- 07:46 What Was the Main Focus When Shoott Was First Launched?
- 08:02 How Can You Test a New Service With Your Network Before Scaling it?
- 09:33 Why Does the First Two Years of Entrepreneurship Feeling Easy Turn Out to Be a Fallacy?
- 09:53 What Factors Led to the Sudden Increase in Customer Acquisition Costs From $20 to Over $200?
- 10:40 Where Should You Focus First When Facing Business Challenges, Reducing Costs or Increasing Income?
- 11:00 What Steps Should You Take to Learn Marketing and Drive Growth While Managing Customer Acquisition?
- 12:06 What Does it Take to Stay Flexible & Adaptable When Facing Challenges That Could Shift at Any Time?
- 12:32 How Have AI Engines Like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot Changed Your Approach to Marketing?
- 13:48 What Was the Mindset Shift When You Switched to a Profitability-Focused Approach?
- 14:05 What Benefits Do You Get From Monitoring Customer Acquisition Costs Daily and Identifying Shifts?
- 15:06 How Do You Determine When to Adapt Your Strategy Based on Marketing KPIs?
- 15:41 What Can Be the Secret Behind the 20-Fold Multiplication of Profits in a Year?
- 16:30 How Does Shifting Focus to Profitability Impact Revenue Maximization After Customer Acquisition?
- 17:11 Why Do You Recommend Growing Fast First and Then Scaling Profit?
- 18:40 What Were the Difficult Decisions in Shifting Focus From Growth to Profitability?
- 19:36 What Are the Challenges of Having a Small Team Take On Hybrid Roles?
- 20:19 What Are the Differences in Leadership Style Between the Growth Phase and Now?
This episode was recorded live on video June 3rd 2025
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Jennifer Tsay
Transcript from Jennifer Tsay with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Scaling Smarter
[00:00:00] Jennifer Tsay: The first two years of entrepreneurship felt easy. It was just a fallacy. We didn’t realize this in retrospect. We were like, oh my God, doing a startup is so easy. And nobody on our team at the time had any background in marketing, so we had to learn it from scratch. And so we had to learn to get really good at testing and really good at dropping things when they weren’t working and moving on to the next thing that was working and continuing to invest in that.
[00:00:26] Jason Barnard: And being honest with yourself when something that did work no longer works.
[00:00:31] Jennifer Tsay: Yes.
[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: And not insisting on something, which is, I think something we’re all guilty of is being comfortable and thinking that has worked. Therefore, it will still, it will work again in the future. It’s just a blip.
[00:00:41] Jennifer Tsay: Yes. If it doesn’t work within two weeks, it’s dead. We’re forgetting it. We will revisit things. It’s the discipline of not being really fixated on things that can only be solved one way or that a reality can’t shift. I think knowing that it can at any time kind of keeps you on your toes.
[00:00:59] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success and the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy?
[00:01:22] Narrator: A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:01:28] Jason Barnard: Hello everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m here with a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Jennifer Tsay.
[00:01:40] Jennifer Tsay: Yes.
[00:01:42] Jason Barnard: That wasn’t a very convincing yes.
[00:01:44] Jennifer Tsay: Yes. Thank you for having me. I’m very happy to be here.
[00:01:50] Jason Barnard: It’s an absolute pleasure. We’re going to be talking about scaling smarter, and the piece of information that jumps out is that you 20 folded profit in a year.
[00:01:59] Jennifer Tsay: Yes, we did.
[00:02:00] Jason Barnard: And that doesn’t mean you have 20 folded revenue. So we’re going to be profit focused and it’s the pivot from normal business to focusing on profitability.
[00:02:11] Jason Barnard: The lessons you learned and why it works now. But before that, really quickly, I asked ChatGPT about you. And when I used just your name, I came up with a model and I had to actually specify that you’re the CEO and founder of Shoottt, which is great publicity for you, and it had to search the web.
[00:02:30] Jason Barnard: It didn’t have anything in its pre-trained memory. So it’s like a child who has to go and look in an encyclopedia to give an answer rather than the child at school who can tell you the answer right off the top of their head. And it went and looked on the web and it pulled up these different results.
[00:02:45] Jason Barnard: And then I went and looked on Bing and you can see that it got the results from here and it’s got some of them from your own website. So you’re allowed to tell some of your own story. But if we look back, some of it doesn’t come from your website. That’s the kind of thing from our perspective at Kalicube. We know that for AI, you need to control your entire digital footprint. But your website, which is actually very good for that purpose, SERPs as a central hub that they use as a source of information about you from you that they then corroborate with the information around the web.
[00:03:18] Jason Barnard: That’s interesting. So you’re doing a good job, and I don’t believe from your expression that you were trying to do a good job, but you are.
[00:03:25] Jennifer Tsay: Thank you. I was not trying, but I’m glad that it’s all working out.
[00:03:28] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well, a lot of it as well is being out there, which as we see from the video results, you are definitely out there promoting your Personal Brand, making yourself visible, explaining what you have to offer to people and why you are credible, and building that credibility and that authority within your industry.
[00:03:43] Jason Barnard: You have to walk the walk for the AI machines to talk the talk for you. That’s quite a nice quote. I just thought that. Brilliant, wonderful. Anyway, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about profitability. Tell me what Shoott does.
[00:03:56] Jason Barnard: And then we’re going to go into why it wasn’t as profitable as it could have been, and to what extent shifting to a profitability focus ruined the front of the business or not.
[00:04:08] Jennifer Tsay: Sure. Shoott, Shoott with two T’s, is a professional photography marketplace and we provide free personal photoshoots for people where they only pay for the photos that they want. Typically, when you book a professional photographer, you have to research different photographers. You may often have to pay upfront for either the sitting fee or pay for sitting fee and then extra for photos afterwards. So it’s this cumbersome, expensive kind of process that we wanted to simplify for the client. And the reason we’re able to make this offer is because of how we work with our photographers. So on the photographer side, from my background as an artist and an actor, I had so many friends that we’re just living paycheck to paycheck. No matter how talented they were, it was very hard for them to cobble a living out of that. And some people had to stop being artists. So we were like, can we create a business model that basically flips the paradigm? And instead of artists finding a gig here, a gig there trying to cobble together work, can we effectively do that for them by aggregating demand?
[00:05:12] Jennifer Tsay: Can we put a photographer in a station about one set location, so if you’re in New York City at Central Park in a particular place, and then say their availability is open from like 12 to 5 and have half an hour sessions. And then basically, instead of the photographer going all over the place, different clients funnel to them instead.
[00:05:29] Jennifer Tsay: Giving them a bunch of volume and a lot of convenience. We figured we could do that. And that’s what created this nice ecosystem. There’s a benefit we passed on to the client. The photographer’s also happy because all they have to do is show up and photograph and do what they love.
[00:05:47] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Which is a great bringing together in a marketplace with an ecosystem. It makes sense both to the supplier and the client. And I realized, just coming back a step, that I made a little bit of a fool of myself because you are Jennifer Tsay, who is an actress. So I did find you, but I didn’t realize that I’d found you because it says actor on Google.
[00:06:10] Jason Barnard: And it shows your photos from your acting career.
[00:06:13] Jennifer Tsay: Yes.
[00:06:14] Jason Barnard: And so the representation I got of you made me think, oh, this can’t be the same person.
[00:06:20] Jennifer Tsay: It’s the same person.
[00:06:21] Jason Barnard: And that’s kind of a problem I had as I was an actor and a musician. And Google presented me as such in the way that you do.
[00:06:29] Jason Barnard: And I had to pivot it. So now presents me as an entrepreneur and digital marketer, which is what we do at Kalicube. It is how I started Kalicube. So how did you start Shoott then? Was it because you saw that gap in the market and you felt it needed to be filled? From your experience as an actress?
[00:06:44] Jennifer Tsay: Yes. Yes, very much so. Like it was rattling around in my head and I had worked previously for a serial entrepreneur. I had worked for him about 15 years prior, and then we kind of fell out of touch because he had moved. And then I was like, I know I love acting, but I also know that I need a better day job that works better for me.
[00:07:04] Jennifer Tsay: And practically I was like, I know that’s the startup environment. I’m more needed there. Are there any startups that you know of that are hiring that you feel like I’d be a good fit for? And he was like, this is so weird. I want to do a new startup, but I’m not exactly sure.
[00:07:19] Jennifer Tsay: So we got together and brainstormed and this kind of came out of it. So it was this very serendipitous thing.
[00:07:25] Jason Barnard: So the question then is if you launched it. And it was a passion project, which is very much like all the projects I’ve done. So I think we’re very similar from that perspective.
[00:07:34] Jason Barnard: And you launched it without enough focus on profitability when you look back at the start. What was your focus at the start? Was it being a nice person and providing a lovely service?
[00:07:46] Jennifer Tsay: It was growth. And it was that too actually. When you first start out, like reputation’s everything because no one’s heard of you.
[00:07:53] Jennifer Tsay: So when you have a crazy offer, like free photoshoot, everyone immediately thinks it’s a scam. And then if there’s no presence of any reviews, it’s crazy. We really built it with our friends and family and network at first to be like, Hey, experience the service. Do you like it? What do we need to do to make it better?
[00:08:10] Jennifer Tsay: We got our footing. We launched in New York. We got enough volume that we’re like, okay, this works. And then we figured out how to scale it to other cities remotely. We were forced to do that because of the pandemic actually. And most of our sessions are outdoor, so it really made it this bizarrely convenient thing because it was outdoor and socially distanced. And one of the few things that your family could safely do together, and people always want photos of their family. So it was, and it was free upfront. So people we grew exponentially and that was really our focus. So we went from one city to ultimately being in 60.
[00:08:44] Jennifer Tsay: When you grow really fast, we’re like, which marketing channels work? I don’t know, let’s test different ones. And there was less of a focus of being really cost conscious of both our fundamentals and also our overhead of staff. Staff is like the big one.
[00:09:03] Jennifer Tsay: Our platforms, all these things like you don’t really look at that with your eye on profitability. But then, there was a change in how effectively we could target our clients on the digital marketing platforms. When it was IOS’s 14.5 change and that changed everything for us.
[00:09:24] Jason Barnard: Technological change that changed your business and it made you then have to sit back and say, what actually are we doing here?
[00:09:30] Jennifer Tsay: Yes, absolutely. Because the first two years of entrepreneurship felt easy, which was just a fallacy.
[00:09:41] Jennifer Tsay: We realized this in retrospect. We were like, oh my God, doing a startup is so easy. And at the time, digital marketing, you could target anyone on Facebook. They could find them super effectively. So with our offer, our targets are millennial moms. If you target those people, like it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
[00:09:56] Jennifer Tsay: And then, when was 14.5 happened, most of our traffic does come in from Apple products, particularly the iPhone. And then people couldn’t find us anymore. They weren’t serving the ads very effectively. So from going from a CPA, customer acquisition cost of around like it could be as low as like $20 and sometimes it would just jump from 50 to 200.
[00:10:20] Jennifer Tsay: And I’m sometimes north of that. So when you are faced with that.
[00:10:22] Jason Barnard: That might be stop and think, wouldn’t it?
[00:10:25] Jennifer Tsay: Yes. And nobody on our team at that time had any background in marketing. So we had to learn it from scratch and that was horrible.
[00:10:34] Jason Barnard: What was your first step?
[00:10:35] Jason Barnard: Was it how do we reduce costs or how do we increase income?
[00:10:40] Jennifer Tsay: The first thing that we do was definitely how do we reduce costs. We pay for nothing extra. Just to get that out of the way because you can do an audit. And on your own audit, you can look at all your line items and be like, slash this, slash this, slash that. You can do that within a day. It’s not hard. But then, I also need to drive top line so that’s a different thing. And that required us to really learn marketing. So we’re like, how do we drop top line? But without having a crazy CPA, how do we control for both?
[00:11:15] Jennifer Tsay: Because the two are interlinked. So that was what was hard for us to try to experiment, ab test, get right, who’s the right marketing agency for us? Do we even need a marketing agency? Can we run it internally? Is that the best use of our time? So there was a lot of back and forth about that.
[00:11:32] Jennifer Tsay: And so we had to learn to get really good at testing and really good at dropping things when they weren’t working and moving on to the next thing that was working and continuing to invest in that.
[00:11:44] Jason Barnard: And being honest with yourself when something that did work no longer works.
[00:11:48] Jennifer Tsay: Yes.
[00:11:49] Jason Barnard: And not insisting on something, which is, I think something we’re all guilty of is being comfortable and thinking that has worked. Therefore, it will still, it will work again in the future. It’s just a blip.
[00:11:58] Jennifer Tsay: Yes. And if it doesn’t work within two weeks, it’s dead. We’re forgetting it.
[00:12:04] Jennifer Tsay: We will revisit things. It’s the discipline of not being really fixated on things can only be solved one way or that a reality can’t shift. I think knowing that it can at any time keeps you on your toes.
[00:12:19] Jason Barnard: And has the advent of engines like AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot changed anything for you in terms of your marketing?
[00:12:29] Jennifer Tsay: Not yet. In terms of our content marketing, it has made it a lot easier for us to come up with ideas for things and do a first draft of things and it’s like easier sometimes to brainstorm like headlines for ads and things like that and some of the copy. But in terms of how we’re advertising otherwise it hasn’t yet that I’m aware of.
[00:12:54] Jason Barnard: Right. It’s helping with the marketing. You’re creating but not with acquisition.
[00:12:59] Jennifer Tsay: Not with acquisition that I’m aware of, but I could be behind the curve on that.
[00:13:03] Jason Barnard: No, no, no. I think it’s something that’s growing and one of the things that the AI is super useful and people find it very convenient, and I recently did a video of going from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel and buying in 15 minutes on ChatGPT just by advice.
[00:13:18] Jason Barnard: And I think that’s going to come and Fabrice Canel from Bing has been telling me that the adoption has been slow. That people are moving away from search towards research using these machines more slowly than perhaps they expected. And that human habits are very much ingrained in the idea of searching for a keyword rather than having a conversation with the machine but it will come. But that wasn’t the topic for today. The topic of today was when you switched to a profitability mindset, what was the mindset shift?
[00:13:48] Jennifer Tsay: It just became very fastidious about all the details of our business. So it was about like, we are not going to spend extra on this, is this really necessary, which platforms do we want to focus on, how do we focus on it, how do we find exactly what’s working? And then we started really looking. We built our own proprietary software and trackers for looking at all of our customer acquisition costs across all of our platforms. So we look at that on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times, so we can start to see when things start to shift.
[00:14:20] Jennifer Tsay: And if they start to shift positively, we’re like, oh, what did we do? We start to shift negatively. I’m like, did we do something or is it just a minor outlier. I don’t. Mostly if it’s election day. We know people aren’t going to be booking these photoshoots as much, so it helps us figure out if there’s any sort of like behaviors that we can account for at least even planning for the next year.
[00:14:43] Jennifer Tsay: And it helps us stay ahead of what’s happening. So we’re never surprised if that makes sense anymore. Because we look at it so, so much. And that helps us stay in control.
[00:14:54] Jason Barnard: So you’re looking at your marketing KPIs daily and making sure that daily, you’re adapting it if it needs to be adapted.
[00:15:01] Jason Barnard: Does it mean you adapt daily or does it just mean that you look daily?
[00:15:05] Jennifer Tsay: We definitely look daily. It doesn’t mean we adapt daily because sometimes, a data point of one isn’t a data point, right? It’s just an outlier. So we wait to see what the trend is and then we start looking at all the other KPIs in context of it.
[00:15:17] Jennifer Tsay: What is our website traffic like? Do we have a crazy bounce rate? It helps. It’s getting a checkup every day and just scanning and scanning and being like, okay, yeah, I just wanted to take chance before it comes,, at all.
[00:15:32] Jason Barnard: Is then the underlying secret to your 20 fold multiplication of profits in a year the tracking that you do of your marketing efforts?
[00:15:41] Jennifer Tsay: That is a huge component to it. I would say the other thing is we then looked at every single inflow of money, like where do we get money from anything, and how do we make strategic tweaks for that? Because for example, if we have 50,000 sessions, are we charging the right amount for people who are late or if they don’t show up. Can we create more packages that make people spend more?
[00:16:06] Jennifer Tsay: Because if you compound that over 50,000 sessions, that scale is just astronomical. So we’re always looking at how do we increase our average order volume? Is there more quality service or product that we can provide? Is there anything like that? Is our pricing correct?
[00:16:25] Jennifer Tsay: All of that stuff works in tandem on top of the customer acquisitions costs.
[00:16:29] Jason Barnard: Right. So as it turns out, focusing on customer acquisition and growing as fast as you possibly can, not worrying about profitability or the large profits initially gets you to the stage of having 50,000 sessions, orders.
[00:16:43] Jason Barnard: 50,000 clients were maybe, let’s say 20,000 clients. Then you can stop and say, how do I maximize my revenue from the people I’ve got currently as clients and the new people now coming in because I’ve built up the acquisition funnel.
[00:16:59] Jennifer Tsay: Yes. That was exactly our journey.
[00:17:01] Jason Barnard: Right. So you made an incredibly smart choice in terms of your journey. Grow fast, get to the point where you can then scale profit. Would you advise that to everybody?
[00:17:11] Jennifer Tsay: If you’re at the point where you are able to even scale it, I think the answer’s yes. Now, I think determining when the proper point is to focus on profitability, that’s where the wisdom and the judgment lies, right?
[00:17:25] Jennifer Tsay: Because you, there are some businesses where you can keep focusing on volume and you can afford to do that. I think like Uber is like that, right? There are some businesses that have much more, just the volume is insane. I don’t know what ChatGPT is like. I think any sort of thing where there’s like very much growth at that crazy rate. Exponential growth.
[00:17:54] Jennifer Tsay: They can keep focusing on that. But as soon as I feel like your tides start to turn a little bit and you’re thinking, “I need to maybe be a little wise, I may have to refocus myself,” then that’s when you want to start focusing on profitability. Because I think overly focusing on profitability in the beginning, unless you just don’t have any gas towards your business, then, I think you might be just cutting off your growth a little too early.
[00:18:16] Jason Barnard: Okay, brilliant. Absolutely perfect. And I’m very convinced by the approach that you’ve explained, but there must have been some really difficult decisions to make in that transitionary period. Number one, which were the difficult decisions, and number two, how did you get your staff to accept the decisions that weren’t necessarily comfortable for them if they’d been focusing on growth and you were switching them to profitability?
[00:18:40] Jennifer Tsay: I think at that point, it became very clear because if your customer acquisition costs are like five to 10 times higher than they were, that you will quickly run out of money. Then nobody has a job. So that makes it very easy to convince people that things have to change. My team is fairly small. I have 11 people full-time and extra 6 that are part-time. And it was very easy to get them on board and be like, once you have, I think the data there. It’s very hard to argue with that.
[00:19:10] Jennifer Tsay: We try to lead in a way where everything we’re asking for is reasonable and backed by data. So usually no arguments there. The toughest part of making that particular pivot was we did have to reduce our head count a little bit.
[00:19:24] Jennifer Tsay: That was a little difficult. We went from 13 to 11, something like that, just because we had to consolidate roles with people. One of the trickiest things is getting a team this small to also absorb other roles and do hybrid roles and then figure out priority, what are they capable of doing? What do we really need done? How is it done? All of that stuff, it’s just a negotiation, but we feel like we’re on a team, so we learn together and we’re all in the same boat. We had to learn marketing. Other people had to learn recruiting. Other people, all of the skills, we all had to learn together.
[00:20:01] Jennifer Tsay: So it felt like a joint effort.
[00:20:03] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay. Which brings me then to the last question which is your leadership style.
[00:20:10] Jason Barnard: If you compare how you lead now to how you were leading in that growth phase, what are the differences in the way you lead?
[00:20:19] Jennifer Tsay: So overall, I’m very much a hands off leader, meaning I don’t like micromanaging anyone.
[00:20:26] Jennifer Tsay: I’m not here for that. I want everyone to do what they do best and I want everyone to feel really comfortable like stepping up into more ownership themselves. When we were in the growth phase, I don’t know if it was much as much leadership at the time, but we were just executing so many things, how do we grow? How do we grow? How do we grow? How do we interview more people? So we’re almost just doing as much stuff from an operational point of view. Whereas now, my mindset shift for leadership is much more like I am fully responsible for really understanding every fundamental of my business from top to bottom.
[00:21:08] Jennifer Tsay: So I get very fastidious about the details. And then my job is to go in and really question if things really can, is when people tell me like, this is how I’m doing it. I look at it and I listen and I’m like, is this the best way to do it? What do we think? And challenging people in that way in a positive way, so that we feel this is the best way.
[00:21:30] Jennifer Tsay: It’s a team effort. So I’m a lot more detail oriented now. And no one minds because I tried to be data backed so that people can get upset.
[00:21:42] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Data backed management, leadership style, marketing and 20 fold growth in a year. Thanks to focusing on the people you already had and the funnels you already had and optimizing, maximizing the revenues from them.
[00:21:59] Jason Barnard: Thank you so very much, Jennifer. That was absolutely delightful. Thank you everybody for watching. This was Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick good bye to end the show. Thank you Jennifer.
[00:22:11] Jennifer Tsay: Thanks for having me.
[00:22:13] Jason Barnard: Brilliant.
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