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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFbSXQdSWiw

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic: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.