Paul Sonneveld
Hi, everyone. My name is Paul Sonneveld, and welcome back to today's episode of Marketplace Masters. So today's session falls under a series of what we call agency best practice. And we're going to tackle a question that every growing Amazon agency eventually faces, right? Particularly when it comes to analytics and infrastructure. Do you build or do you buy? Of course, as you scale, clients' expectations increase, reporting gets more complex, data pipelines really get a lot heavier, and suddenly you are making strategic decisions about whether to invest internally or partner with software providers.
Now, to help me unpack this, I am joined by John Aspinall. Many of you will know John. He is the Chief Evangelist and Creative Director at Velocity Sellers. Like John, he spent over twenty years, right, working in the industry across agencies like Canopy, helping scale my Amazon guys, spending years with PickFu and Trellis on the software side, and advising SaaS companies along the way. So he's pretty much seen every decision from every angle, right? So today we're going to break it down. John, so great to have you on the show today. Welcome.
John Aspinall
Thanks for having me, Paul. And it's great to be here. And I love that we're living in two different times right now. It's morning for you. It's about evening for me. And yeah, it's also interesting because after chatting with you through all these years of known MerchantSpring and you guys, I've never said your name, your last name out loud. So it's interesting hearing you say it. So, understand how it's actually pronounced and not the wacky way that I'm not going to try and say it in my head. But no, happy to be here.
Paul Sonneveld
It's interesting you say that. I'm not sure I'm not even pronouncing it right anymore after moving from Holland to Australia about thirty years ago. Yeah, it's thirty years ago this year. That's crazy. So yeah, I definitely, it's sort of more of the anglicised version of pronunciation just to make it easier on it for everyone.
John Aspinall
Well, you're talking to someone, my last name is English. But I don't come off as very British UK. My father is from England. Aspinall is like an aspen tree by the well, and it derives from that. But here in America, everyone thinks it's Spanish for some reason. And they automatically start talking to me in Spanish because I think it sounds like Espanol. And I'm like, it's close. It's a letter different, but it's close. But no, no habla español. I wish I did.
Paul Sonneveld
Oh, that's interesting yeah it's definitely well, yeah. We have a long conversation about that. Because I always get picked people always think I'm some from somewhere else. But let's move on to the topic. I'm sure our audience is not interested in those conversations. If you are, drop me a dm, we'll have an offline chat. But today, we're talking about the this whole conversation around buying versus building right? Let me take, I mean, you've been in this situation so many times.
So I want to sort of start off with you've seen agency scale. As an agency really begins to scale, what are some of the signals or maybe, you know, noises or breakpoints that really indicate, you know what, guys, it's time. We need to have a serious think about this question. You know, do we now build or buy capability, particularly around, you know, analytics?
John Aspinall
Well, I think when it was five, six, seven, eight years ago, the concept of building was a lot more different than it is today. Today, everyone's building. Everyone thinks they're a developer and they're building. But I think when the real core competency comes down to when you're in your daily operations, and something breaks, how much is it going to cost you to fix it, do it yourself for the short term, versus getting a turnkey solution?
And I've worked at many agencies where it would be nice to do the turnkey solution, but they didn't have enough clients. They didn't have enough MRR and revenue coming in. They could afford it, but they knew they couldn't afford to just keep on, you know, chugging along where it's not working. So they kind of do a patch of an in-between. And I've seen way too many times like, yeah, that'll work up until a certain point where you're able to scale.
So when you're hitting, when you're at ten to fifteen clients, sure, you could do the manual Google Sheet and the imports and keep it all in-house. And then when you get to like twenty, twenty-five, thirty clients, well, you got to start to wonder, what's the solution? What are we going to look for long term? And is the goal to take this to fifty, seventy, a hundred, two hundred clients? And if it is, is your solution that you're building out just a Band-Aid and it's going to break again and you're going to have to get a new Band-Aid and a new Band-Aid? Or do you just fully go to the doctor and get it fixed?
So I think as you scale, you begin to feel those pains internally. But there is a turning point where it's like, we can't do this anymore. We have to do something. And then it's now, in 2026, everyone's building. When you have a problem, it's I'll just go use Claude and I'll spin it up, and I'll make my own dashboard. But even at that, a lot of people don't realise you can make whatever you want. Is it going to last? Do you have the infrastructure where it's going to be able to last and stand the test of time for you to get to client one hundred, client two hundred, five hundred clients? If not, then you're just working on another Band-Aid.
Paul Sonneveld
Let's go a little bit deeper in terms of where agencies do go down the route of building themselves. What are the biggest mistakes that agencies tend to make there?
John Aspinall
Yeah, so I see a lot of times when agencies try to bring things in-house themselves, what they'll do is they'll do a lot of shopping around, right? So let's say it's an Ad tech tool. They know long-term they wanna build it in-house, but what they'll do is they'll go try out this Ad tech tool, try out that Ad tech tool, whatever it is, and see what the nuances are and think, aha, well, if we just can make this a little bit better, if we could just do this a little bit more, then they'll try to bring it in-house. But what a lot of times from agencies i've worked at they really don't understand that all that development work, hiring devs to run this, hiring devs to fix this, sometimes outpaces the cost of a turnkey solution.
Now, I'm not saying a turnkey solution for like Ad tech, reporting, even creative at this point, is the way to go, but you have to outweigh the costs, right? Is it that band-aid or is it a long-term solution? I've worked at agencies where they weren't ready for a turnkey solution, but they saw the vision. They saw the path forward. They knew they were going to get to client two hundred, client two fifty. And they were only at client eighty-five. But they invested in it for the long term. I'm not saying that should be everyone, but they didn't have the time. They had the capability, but they didn't want to waste the efforts that they could be using to scale further for client one hundred, client one hundred fifty, manpower, the hours, the cost, the dollars to build the tool themselves.
And I think that's really like an inflection point or reflection point. Maybe it's both of them for like a founder-led business to say, do I see this going to two hundred, five hundred clients, or am I OK with staying at fifty clients? And does it does it make sense for me to build my own, or am I getting a turnkey solution? Because I've worked at boutique agencies, I've worked at industry-leading agencies like my Amazon guy and even velocity sellers, where we're into the hundreds of clients. Right. So it's not so much Can we do it? You know, agencies like Velocity and, you know, my Amazon guy, a hundred percent. We could build it ourselves.
But is that the best use of the efforts for the organisation at the time? Probably not. Right. So, you know, a lot of the visions from founders, it really, they're the crux where it's like, OK, I can see this going long term. So let's invest in this and be able to do this and take all the resources and just keep scaling. But there's other founders that say, well, I don't want to scale. It's shocking that the amount of people I've either worked for or just know in the industry where they're like, don't want to scale.
I'm boutique. I'm staying at fifteen, twenty clients. That's my sweet spot. I could scale, but I have no intention to. But because I think internally, they're afraid of what happens if you're successful because you know more money more problems right you get clients a hundred, two hundred, five hundred clients it's yeah you're getting a lot of money and you're having a lot of mr but you have to put up the the results and you have to show for it otherwise you're gonna have churn city.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. So, let's just take the opposite view as well. Right. Because I'm sure a lot of people are tuning in and, you know, they know that I'm the founder of an analytics business. Right. So, you know, full disclosure, I have a vested interest for this conversation to only go one way. Right. But I want to be kind of true to the argument as well. There are reasons why to go and build it, um, in-house. Right. What, no, that'd be risks or limitations in terms of going, buying a tool. You know, I've also, you know, the argument around, hey, we want to drive increased valuation. We're looking at an exit. You know, if we have some internal tech, you know, that's a driver of a lot of internal things. You know,I'd certainly love to get your thing on that as well.
And then there's the whole thing about, just to throw it in there and to make the answer super complex for you, this concept of analytics as a competitive strategic advantage. We really feel the way we do analytics is going to be, I mean, we used to see this with the aggregators a lot, right? They used to hire whole teams of data scientists because they were convinced that they were going to build these amazing sorts of models and algorithms that were like better than anything else out there. And then we're going to outsmart the rest of us. Right. Obviously, we know what happened there. But yeah. What arguments would you put in favor of building it in-house? Yeah. Like real arguments versus like non-genuine arguments.
John Aspinall
Yeah, you can pull up my screen. Cause I'll show you something really quickly over here. So everyone gets a little bit of a visual, but like right now, this is my IDE, which is basically like a fancy wrapper for accessing code. So I use anti-gravity or anti-gravity, depending on what you want to call it. So in something like this, I have built in here for like creative clients where I have fully internal scripts that run, skills inside cloud code.
So all these are built inside of Claude code where I can go over here and at scale, I can create images for clients, whether it's image stack images or anything like that. So the reason I'm showing this, and then I'll show this window here, and then we could stop screen sharing in a second. This is just directly in the terminal. So the reason I'm showing this is because I connected my Google Workspace CLI into Claude Code. Basically, that's a fancy way of saying everything that Google Workspace can do across Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sheets, Meets, Task, everything. I'd never have to leave the terminal window to do any of those tasks.
So from one command in Claude Code, I can send you a meeting invite, Paul, that's going to be on your calendar, send you a follow-up email letting you know exactly what to do, and summarise that all in a Google Doc, and then, hey, I could share it to a drive. The point of me showing, and you can stop screen sharing, the point of me showing this is because I just wanted to show people, you can do anything. It's 2026. You can build anything.
So, if you find if you're just getting started, should you go and get a turnkey solution when you have client number one? Probably not unless you have a lot of VC backed funding and the PE bros and stuff like that, because you need to learn how your system, how your business and how your organisation operates. I'm a big proponent of if you don't know how to do the task a tool is doing, well, then you're hyperdependent on the tool, right?
So if you don't know PPC from your elbow, and then you start bringing on clients, and you're scaling with a PPC software, cool. What happens when that software stops? What happens if that software gets absorbed by another company and they just phase that out? What happens if that software just increases their pricing, or an API breaks and it no longer works? The client's not going to say... Okay, I understand my ads went out of whack because of your software. They're going to say, no, you're the expert, fix it.
So I would say from clients one through ten at a minimum, the basics and the fundamentals, they're not sexy. It's not sexy opening up a Google sheet and tracking your clients, but you're not ready for a CRM. right. Per se, you're not ready to integrate all these things. And I feel like a lot of people, they, when they're starting an agency or coming out of an agency and wanting to build their own or even just, you know, boutique, they see what other larger folks are doing. And they're like, Oh, I got to do that. But they don't understand like, you're early in the journey, you don't know how any of this works, per se. So, to go and get a solution for it, you're not going to know what happens when it breaks. So that's why with Claude Code, with Codex, with Gemini, you can build anything.
Now, on the flip side of that, that's going to be good up until a certain point. You can take any API, like Velocity, for us here, we're a very happy MerchantSpring client. We have access to the APIs, right? So we're able to bring in all the information into any kind of thing that we wanna bring in internally, right? But our team also understands the fundamentals of reporting. So God forbid, Paul, you get bought out by this huge, Microsoft buys you and decides to phase it out and turn it into something else. Like, we're not going to be left crying, scrambling for another solution. The point is, you have to understand how your business operates in order to scale it, in order to bring on solutions.
Too many times I see where people just, like, for example, I don't know a lick of anything on how to run a TikTok shop personally. I have a fully baked out SOP that's about three thousand pages that I've aggregated using AI on how to do it. Could I go and start a TikTok agency for TikTok shop? One hundred percent. Could I go and lean on software to get started for things I don't know? One hundred percent.
But if those software breaks, if that if that software breaks or there's a problem, the client's going to come to me and say, OK, the software is not working, but you know how to do it because I'm paying you this money. So go ahead and do it while the software is down. I'm going to say, I don't know how to do any of that, sir. Please pay me my monthly invoice. I promise we'll figure it out. We'll get a new software.
Paul Sonneveld
That is so interesting. I think that brings to mind this concept of the data pipelines and the structure. you know, sort of, let me sort of share what's on my mind, and then I'll get you to react to it. From what I'm looking at at the moment is, you know, AI is really good in terms of recreating the visuals, right? And making it look very sexy, very, very quickly. In a way, it's a little bit similar to, hey, agencies, you know, running some data pipelines and then, you know, hooking up Lucas Studio to it, right? You know, we've had many founders that have, you know, before they've been clients, they just spend, when they just started, they spent the whole weekend building out some beautiful dashboards, right?
And they go, look, it's great. It looks just as nice. That's great. So in a way that kind of, I feel like the visualisation and the customisation is even easier with AI. I mean, there's a question around like, you know, how do you make sure it looks consistent every single time so that your client doesn't get completely random report every month? But the challenge is, and I'd say we haven't found a great solution to that either, using AI tech. How do you work through all of the API authorisations, the data pipelines, and the continuous refresh of data? For example, one of the things we do all the time is check for updated data, check whether an order three weeks ago was updated, because it's not static data.
How, I mean, have you found solutions in terms of, you know, solving that in particularly, you know, running the data pipelines, the authorisations, the storage, like, because that's a lot of people don't see that, I guess. But for me, that's like the heavy lift, right? Getting to your point earlier, which is getting one client to work with a couple of API calls, that's easy. But how do you do that across a hundred clients, twenty different API calls, consistently with error handling and all of that? Like, how does that to what extent? I mean, obviously, I'm going to argue it's really hard to do with AI, but I'd love you to tell me, like, how far have you been able to go down that journey?
John Aspinall
Yeah, so I think it's important to understand with AI and access to APIs, you can just drag and drop and put them in there. What a lot of people don't realise is, I say a lot of people, but folks that are just getting into the wave of AI and building, just because you have the API key doesn't mean you've unlocked, ta-da, here it is. A lot of people don't realise with an API key, there's endpoints. And sometimes the documentation that comes with an API, there are twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty pages long of API points.
Good example, I do a lot of things with like SmartScout, the SmartScout API that I'm doing in Claude Code for sales prospecting, for checking with clients, for running audits, for just market data. They have a ton of endpoints where you have to know exactly what endpoint that you want it to pull from in order to populate the data that you want shown. The API is not going to say, oh, I'm reading your mind. I have the sixty five thousand different endpoints, and here's exactly what you're looking at. And then when you pair that with other APIs and workflows together, APIs go down. What's the error? Is that going to stop the other API from kicking off? Is it frozen? Is it timed out? A lot of people don't even realise APIs have timeout limits, right?
So you can't call upon certain things within too frequent of a time because it'll time out. And then what does that look like for your end result? Do you have a brand manager that needs reporting, that needs to run a PPC tool, that needs to run creative? And now they're bottlenecked on a client call with the client because you didn't realise that you're stitching four different APIs together. It's just not working. And now then you're hiring a dev on staff to do all this.
So there's a certain point where it's like you can do anything. Literally in 2026, you can do and build it. I could build the most beautiful CRM system that would do laps visually around HubSpot. But I don't have the bones inside of it to operate like HubSpot does, right? So I think there's a very clear delineation between the two, where it's like, visually, everyone could vibe code everything, but operationally, the boring stuff, the not sexy stuff, the making sure there's errors, there's bugs, there's this, nobody wants to do that. Everyone just wants to say, here's my app, here's my tool, here's my software that I'm running. But when it's not working, then you have a Ferrari with no engine in it sitting in a driveway.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I mean, I definitely resonate. I mean, I can't count on two hands the number of conversations I've had with agency owners that have come to us and said, Paul, really need your help. Our internal solution stopped working three weeks ago, and we can't get it back. It sort of gets beyond that tipping point where it's just too much data.
John Aspinall
Well, not even that, but then also, but also like what happens if Amazon will take Amazon, for example, if Amazon has a new data point or a new piece in the reporting or a new opera, now everything that you've built might break because Amazon just updated one little piece of code. And if you don't know, then you're scrambling to find out that one piece versus a turnkey solution has already known about that, optimised for it, planned for that.
And again, it's not to say you can't do this yourself. You a hundred percent can, but I think it's important. Like, like Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. Like if you're going to take the coding, the vibe coding, you know, a vehicle by the wheel, understand that it's, it's not just it's, a weekend project it's like cool I vibe coded this well, now you got to put your dev hat on and make sure that it works.
Paul Sonneveld
Hundred percent, hundred percent. What about the topic of analytics as a competitive differentiator right from an agency point of view. I mean, because obviously there'll be one of the big arguments against use of MerchantSpring. So, hey, there's two hundred other agencies that use exactly the same reports and dashboards and things like that, which is fine if you're of the view that, hey, analytics is its commodity. We need it. We don't want to spend too much time on it. We just want to get the insight so we can act versus actually my clients, they want something specific, and if I give it to them, I'm gonna add a lot more value to the relationship that other agencies might have. How do you think about that paradox in your mind, John?
John Aspinall
Well, I would probably equate it to like a vehicle, right? So there's the Fords, the Chevys, the tried and true brands, the Hondas, Toyotas, and they're out there, and people buy them, millions of them every single year. But if a new car company comes on board to the market and says, you know, we're cheaper, we're more sleek, we have all these features inside of them. Does that mean that everyone's going to run to them because it's cheaper and it has more features inside of it? Is a new car company going to outperform the sales of a Toyota, or Ford or a Chevrolet?
No. Because there's people that are very fad based that it's like, oh, that's the new thing. Let me go and try that. And then there are shoppers that are like, nope, I got to stay with the tried and true. I want reliability. I don't want to have to think, is this thing not going to work when I'm driving down the road? So I think even when it comes to data solutions, software solutions. There's going to be people that are nope, i can't do that i want to go with something i have too much on the line i have monster mid-market enterprise clients i can't skimp. i can't so it's the the the concept of penny-wise dollar-foolish right.
And again i'm not saying everyone has to go out and buy a Lamborghini because it's the most expensive and it's going to work like you know you don't you have to buy something that's going to suit you and make the most sense for you. But at the end of the day, you can't you can't look at it and say in my opinion data reporting um things like this are are not commoditized right? So, when it comes through the data, if you sold a thousand dollars on Amazon, you sold a thousand dollars on Amazon. Any tool is going to report that.
But when it comes to the reliability of something, when it comes to can they do custom solutions, when it comes to white labelling, when it comes to anything like that, then you're looking into that. And then when you start to look at cheaper options, well, can you do this? And can you move here? And what is your backup like? And what is your tech stack look like? And how many people do you have on your team? And are they dedicated to this? They might turn around and say, we're three people that vibe coded this and we're figuring out. But data reporting is commoditised. Don't worry about it. There's some people that will go for it. And there's some people that just can't afford to, not for a lack of not having the funds, but they can't afford to risk when you have larger clients online.
So if you have someone and you're running an agency in your boutique and you don't, you have more of the, I'm new to Amazon, I'm new on my Shopify site, I'm new on this, they can move in with the ebbs and flows when things change and when things break, if you have to switch tools. But if you land like Procter & Gamble or, you know, someone like that, or a huge client, they're not going to, they're going to dictate to you exactly how I need my data, how I need my reporting, how I need this. And we expect it every single time on the hour, on this day, on this time. And if you divvy from the standard, when you start to work with mid-market or enterprise clients, there is no, whoops, there is no, okay, we tried it different this month because now you're jeopardising your own MRR and ARR.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Wow. So true. So true. I definitely resonate with that. I guess it's a function of maturity, right? As you grow and as you take on those larger clients, you have to start thinking very differently about this.
John Aspinall
Because they dictate – it's funny having worked at agencies and seeing the Amazon seller who's – I have my nine-to-five job and this is a brand that I'm launching on the side. And then seeing like the Procter & Gamble, the Colgate, the Tides, the Game – you don't tell them – here's my report. They tell you this is what we need this is how we need it and it's often a multi-step sales process and multi-call and they almost want to see examples of what it looks like so they can have you vetted. You think you're vetting them as a client they're vetting you even more so to see if you can fit into their internal operations because no one that's mid-market enterprise, large-scale brands. They're not going to change their inner workings because of how you do things. You have to change to them.
Paul Sonneveld
So, just going back to the broader conversation on buy versus build, John, I think a lot of agencies find themselves down a path where they may have made a serious strategic decision to build, and actually, in some cases, spent millions of dollars. I think of a number of our clients who've spent millions of dollars trying to build something internally. It's probably not everyone, but at some point, they decide to walk away from that.
I'm sure you've been in those rooms where those meetings have taken place. How do you make those decisions, right? Like there's vested interests. There is, you know, this whole concept of, you know, it's sunk cost or not, right? All those things. Like how do you build the business case internally to say, oh, let's go for a buy decision here if there's so much runway that's being laid down for the internal build?
John Aspinall
And I think it's a matter of, is it the person that doesn't know about the solution they're building for versus the person that does know about it? So let's take, for example, Ad tech, right? We'll get off of reporting for a second. We won't want to put it too close to home. We'll say ad tech, right? So if you don't know anything about PPC or ads or anything like that, and you build it versus someone who does know about it, well, then you're, for the person that knows about the solution they tried to build and then decided, I think they're making a more educated decision. I think it's a tougher decision, but it's a more educated decision that they're realising that this costs too much money for us to do it.
Too many times where I've seen where that exact same conversation that you were talking about, that situation where it's like, look at all this money we spent to try and make this. It's still not a hundred percent. It's still not even eighty percent. If we were to take that money and put it into marketing, sales, outbound versus the cost of a turnkey solution, we would have made more sales, we would have made more clients, we would have achieved more revenue. So they're looking at it from a calculated decision versus someone that doesn't know about the process or solution that they're building for, and they just built it because they didn't want to spend. They have to switch because of necessity. Right.
So it's not a matter of we spent all this money, and we did it, but we thought we could. But pragmatically, it's not going to work because we could have invested elsewhere. The person who doesn't know about it, they are scrambling because they don't know how they couldn't even absorb to do it internally because they just don't know about the process. Right. So going back to reporting, for example. If you've ever seen, still stay on Amazon, like an Amazon report, there's a million different reports.
So if I didn't know anything about it and I tried to build a tool on it and it broke, I would've spent all this time, all this money, and I wouldn't be able to make a calculated, educated decision to say, I spent all this money, we tried, I could've spent this money elsewhere, I don't know about the process. So it's not a decision of I spent all this money. Here's what we could have done. It's I'm scrambling. I don't even know how to do it myself. I need someone else to do it. And too many times I've been in that room where someone's saying, whether it's for TikTok shop, whether it's for anything else, we just don't know. We tried to make it because Claude code is the coolest thing in the world.
And we thought we could do it. We thought we could save money by doing this, but now we're scrambling and we're just going to go with any solution. And that's good for the, the software companies out there. Cause they're going to be like, cool. That's an easy close on that agency. Cause you know, especially if they talk about the pain points, which I don't think most are forthcoming about it. Like, Hey, Hey Paul, we tried to build a tool to compete with you internally. It didn't really work out. We blew a lot of money on it. We want to sign up with you. Like, yeah, there's no, no discounting there, like there's no there's no talk no negotiations we know that you need this because you don't know how to fundamentally do it.
Paul Sonneveld
It's, yeah oh cool well. I want to go back to one other thing before we, because we're out of time, unfortunately, John, but I know you are super passionate about AI as well, but you're pretty level-headed because, you know, clearly you're not building everything yourselves. So I want to just finish on maybe on one last question, which is what, like, it's almost like throwing everything we've spoken about out the window here, which is, I know you've got kids and you probably don't have spare time on the weekends, but let's imagine that you do, right?
Because I know you're finding the time somehow. What are the things that you are really pushing yourself to try and solve with AI when it comes to Amazon agency things that need to be done? What are the things that you are really trying to push and you feel there is potential there, and other agencies should really look into from an efficiency or delivering value for clients point of view?
John Aspinall
Yeah, so one big thing that I'm working on internally, not to give away any secret sauce, is replicating images in an image stack at scale. So I look at it as what's a pain point that a brand has for a solution that's not already out there? And there's AI image solutions and stuff like that that's good for like the onesie-twosie. But what happens when you're a brand and you have three thousand ASINs and twenty different color variations between them, but you want everything brand consistent?
So I'm working on a tool on the back end in my downtime, in my free time. That's my brain is always on e-comm where pairing the Claude code with the Gemini API to take Image one, say this is, I don't know why it zoomed out. Image one, this is image one. I want you to pull and grab all of my ASINs, all the images, and at scale, run this through Gemini. And do not hallucinate, do not change anything. That is what mid-market enterprise brands need. You can't just give them AI-generated visuals that look cool, but they change from image stack to image stack. They need consistency. They have to go through legal and marketing guidelines and stuff like that.
So that's something I'm building out right now, especially with the Velocity team, to be able to crank that out at scale because that's the biggest pain point. If you notice brands that have large catalogues, thousands of ASINs, they almost always have under-optimised listings because they simply have too many variations and too many ASINs to optimise them all. You'd be there forever. But at scale, so that's what I look for. I look for what's a pain point that someone has that's valuable to them that can take my time, make it more efficient, that can take my designer's time. Because my designer, all they have to do is make what does good look like. Here's what good looks like.
Now take this and scale it across six hundred ASINs without fault, without fail. And we're close to doing that. And that's when the door opens. Because at Velocity, we talk to a ton of mid-market enterprise clients, and we have a ton on board right now, that have a lot of not-so-sexy products. Think of the tools, the components, the engine lubricant. These are kind of things that aren't like the poppy or the goalies of the world that are super, but they still need to be optimised. And you're not going to sit there and charge them all this money per month to have to do it across, you know, sixty months. It's just the ROI is not there for them. So that's what we're working on to bring efficiency and optimisation at scale for large catalogues.
Paul Sonneveld
That's a great example, John. It's I love how you talk about like start, understand where the real pain point is. And, you know, I'd probably add to that, like, you know, what's the process that's like super repetitive and painful. Like I've always been, you know, I've been in the journey of like, I feel like repetitive processes aren't just time sucks. They sort of kill people's mental energy as well. So, you know, they are a great candidate to try and push and invest some time.
John Aspinall
I know we're out of time. I just want to say this because you spark something for me. So Ritu Java, who's an amazing woman in the space when it comes to PPC and ads and even creatives now, she said something at a conference one time that resonated with me. She said, my team, we have a philosophy that if we have to do the same thing more than three times, it's automated, right? So if you're doing something and you've done it the same thing more than three times, that goes in the bucket for an automation. And I think that's a very smart way and a very pragmatic way to look at it.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I, in fact, I used to have a boss, he was in, we're in retail, and he's like, I'm going to do this once. If you ask me again, I'm going to take more time, and I'm just going to, rather than doing it, I'm going to build the solution. Right. Great framework, great framework. Awesome. John, we are out of time. I'm so sorry, or like six minutes over, but I want to be conscious. People, a lot of us have got work to do, or we've got families to go to. But this session has been super practical.
Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for sharing how you're doing, Claude Code, and integrating that with I think it's anti-gravity. I need to check out that tool. I haven't used that one personally. So that's on my list. But yeah, more broadly around, you know, the build versus buy decision, you know, it's not just a technical one. It's really a strategic one, you know, really impacts profitability structure, but also to wonder how you scale, you know, and, and delivering on that long-term view. So really want to thank you for, for your time, John. And this is a rapidly evolving space, right? So yeah, I'd love to put a booking in your diary maybe six months from now to see how has this evolved, what are you working on, and what this industry looks like in six months.
John Aspinall
Imagine six months from now, we come back, we do this, and I'm like, AI sucks. I hate AI. It broke everything. No, it's just... It's only going to get better.
Paul Sonneveld
It will just be our avatars going online, doing the StreamYard thing, talking to each other, having a genuine conversation while you and I just, you know, you can go to bed early, and I can get to sleep in our time zones and, you know, we're all good, right? Awesome. That's been great, John. Thank you so much. Until next time.
John Aspinall
Thanks, Paul.
Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone, that brings us to the end of today's episode of Marketplace Masters. Feel free to head to our website, merchantspring.io. We've got a whole resources section. I think we've got close to two hundred of these episodes sorted by different topics, you know, whether it's agency best practice or Amazon vendor. It's a great resource. It's free. Go and check it out. But we're done for today. Thank you for joining us. And I look forward to seeing you at our next episode. Take care.