An eCommerce Podcast Hosted by Brett Curry

Andrew Foxwell and I go way back. We recorded our first podcast together over 6 years ago!

Andrew is a seasoned expert in the advertising industry and the driving force behind a remarkable Meta agency that collaborates with renowned brands like Trek.

He also runs an amazing community of brand owners, agency owners and marketing professionals called Foxwell Founders. (Over 400 members strong and collectively spending 250 million plus per month on ads.)

Join us as Andrew shares his invaluable insights on the ever-evolving advertising landscape.

Here's a glimpse of what we cover in this episode:

• What creatives are working best right now on Meta and Google, and are TikTok-style ads worth testing on multiple platforms?
• How answering questions is essential on more platforms than just Google search.
• What strategies are working right now with different Meta campaign types.
• Why having great creatives is only valuable with proper creative testing.
• How to focus on what's really unique about your product in your ads.
• Andrew's approach of "scaling in place" and how it applies to Meta and YouTube.
• Operational AI vs. Platform AI.
• What Andrew's "not, not excited" about AI means (I tend to share his perspective).

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Founders Community
• Foxwell Digital
• GLG Insights
• Northbeam Newsletter
• Andrew Foxwell (LinkedIn)
• Andrew Foxwell (Twitter)
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and I am absolutely thrilled about today's episode and today's guest. I go way, way back with this guest. We used to do podcasts together five years ago, six years ago. Feels like an eternity now. My guest is Andrew Foxwell and he is the co-founder of Foxwell Digital, which is a leading Facebook social agency and more also Foxwell Founders, which is really the reason we reconnected. I could started hearing all this buzz about the Foxwell founders community and everybody's raving about it. I was like, oh dude, I got to reach out to Andrew, see what's going on. And he's doing even more than that. So we'll dive in. We're going to talk about what's working right now in terms of Facebook and Instagram. We're going to talk AI a little bit. We're going to talk about what is Andrew's connections with Wall Street, which I think will be super fun. And so really looking forward to it. Andrew, thanks for taking the time, man, and welcome to the show. How you doing?

Andrew:

Yeah, man, thank you so much. I'm doing well. Glad to be here.

Brett:

When do you think was the last time we were on a podcast together? I think it was five years ago. Six years ago. Easily

Andrew:

Six years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Crazy. It's been a hot man. But you know what? We're here now and we're better. We're back and better than ever, baby.

Brett:

We're here now. We still got lots of energy. We got more wisdom. I got more gray hair. We're just doing it. Oh, absolutely. We're out there

Andrew:

Doing it. Absolutely.

Brett:

So we're going to Bo share our perspectives on kind of what's working on now and what's, we're going to talk about AI a little bit, which is fun. And what's cool, Andrew, you've got this perspective. You run an agency, I run an agency over G Commerce, but you've got a bigger perspective even than that. I mean, your agency is amazing, but you've got this community of 400 people in this community. So if you would, Andrew, talk about what is the community? Cause I think this will set the context for your perspective and some of the things you share on the podcast, but what is the community? Why'd you start it and give us the low down? Yeah,

Andrew:

Definitely. I mean, a couple of years ago, our daughter was born in three years ago and was really coming in pandemic times, feeling lonely and feeling like, am I the only one seeing this? And I felt like Twitter wasn't the best place for my mental health.

Brett:

Not always a positive place to hang. That is for sure.

Andrew:

Yeah, and I'm not saying it's all negative, but it wasn't the greatest place for me and I was feeling really down. And so I decided, Gracie and I talked about it and I decided we, let's figure out a way to get our v I P course customers who've bought more than three courses in one place talking and let's see if we launch a community. And that was just the idea was can we build something that helps people feel less alone and more supported? Yeah. Now it's 445 members from 25 countries spending over 250 million a month just on meta. It's brand owners, agencies, in-house, people at brands. We have, I think five or six agencies. Our whole staff is in the membership. That's how valuable it is. And we talk about everything under the sun, meta adds, creative, creative testing, cro, Google Ads, TikTok, all that. And running an agency, big or small, we have places for both. So my perspective is not just my own, but is here's what we see across the landscape. And primarily these people are in the United States, Canada and in Europe. So we do have members in South America as well, and Eastern Europe and Thailand and places like that. But it's primarily focused in the uk, or excuse me, in the EU and the United States and Canada.

That's really a good barometer of where performance is a lot of times on things and obviously still have the New Zealand and Australia members because they always get new features first. So that's always good to have too.

Brett:

They're living in the future as we'd like.

Andrew:

That's right. Nice. Yeah, so a lot of it, the things that I talk about, it's not just me and here's what I'm seeing across this breadth of people, and these are primarily direct response D to C people. We need to spend money to make money, and that's what we're hired to do.

Brett:

Love that. Well, so this will be fantastic. You obviously want your perspective too, but I know you'll be able to pull some examples and you've got this influence of this amazing community behind you. And so as we dive into what's working now primarily on meta, but we can talk a little bit about Google and YouTube as well, but what are you seeing, and we'll try not to get too nerdy or too technical here, but let's just talk creatives for a minute. What are you seeing that's working now from a creative standpoint?

Andrew:

Yeah, I mean I think from a creative standpoint, a couple different things. One is building creatives that look sort of TikTok centric or answering a question or have a good hook at the beginning from a video ad standpoint is helpful. So the more that you're answering questions and instead of thinking about, here's what I want to tell you about this service. Somebody the other day that was there, remember brought to me an ad and it was for a conference and it was talking about the conference and all the things that were going to be happening at this conference and he's selling tickets to this conference. And I was like, well, what are you ultimately trying to solve with people? Come to this conference? What are the issues that they have? And it's for business owners. So it was, are you missing quarterly sales goals? You're identifying the problems and you're having ads that address those particular problems with the hook at the beginning and an explainer of what it does and making that ad more informative.

So that's the kind of thing that we look at. And you're looking at it generally in a four to five aspect ratio. So it's more of a tall video format and you can also have static images that mirror that kind of idea too. So from a creative standpoint, that's part of it. And having at least somewhere in your mix creators or influencers or people on your own staff creating these ads with you and understanding how quickly the cuts need to be cut up in the video. So two seconds, two seconds, that kind of thing. And keeping an ad moving is as long as those kind of elements are integrated, that's some of the best performing creative that you see across the board right now.

Brett:

I love that so much. And I would echo that and I remember a quote from Google years ago as they were talking about their very first product, Google AdWord, and they said, Hey, what if a good ad was just an answer to a question, right? And I think that's still true, and it doesn't just have to be true for search. It makes sense with search because people are typing in a query and they're asking a direct question and you're giving an answer. But I think it's true in other platforms as well. We've all got these questions and these thoughts and these concerns that are banging around in our head. And so maybe the greatest add or the best ads are just answers to those questions and hitting those point blank. And so a couple things we're seeing, and we do not run traffic on Meta or TikTok or any of those places.

We do a lot on YouTube, one of the top spenders on YouTube, we're finding now YouTube shorts. Those are working fantastically well for remarketing working in other areas as well. And we've been able to successfully pull content from TikTok ads and from Instagram reels and use those almost unchanged on YouTube shorts. And that's a bit of a new first for us because if we look at what YouTube ads typically work for standard pre-roll TrueView YouTube ads, it's usually ads that are minute and a half to three and a half minutes. It's more of a direct response field, is what we run anyway. Almost feels more like an infomercial, but it doesn't have to look like an infomercial. Exactly. And so you've never really been able to take videos directly from Meta and run them on YouTube. But now I think you can with YouTube shorts depending on a few things. And I think one of the things that we'll continue to focus on here is just like how can we continue to write better headlines and better descriptions even in search? Cause I think a lot of times you forget about search or forget about your headline in Google shopping or some of these things, but making little tweaks there, looking to constantly improve there makes a big, big difference. So creatives mean as machine learning and AI improves, I think more of our job is going to be related to creatives, but we'll see. Yeah,

Andrew:

I agree with you. The question the creatives is a really interesting piece. There's actually an incredible YouTube series by one of the agencies two two a couple members of our community, Jess Bachman from Fire team runs a show called Autopsy on YouTube and you can just check it out. Barry Hata a regular contributor as well, and they go through and dissect ads and we have some of this in the membership and it's really amazing how much it can be broken down and how little tweaks can make a major difference. Another thing that's interesting about it is how much Jess is the one that told me this, which is I always think about is what can you say that others uniquely that others cannot, that you can uniquely say? And that is a real, that's an interesting question to start to go after as part of the ad because a lot of people can talk about reviews, you can talk about it's the best window cleaner out there, whatever it is, but what is the uniqueness of it and how is it being pitched?

Because if it's a hundred percent compostable, whatever, even if other people share those, but they're not using that as something that you feel like you can uniquely say because it represents your brand, then that's a big deal. So yeah, the creative thing is such a nuance to gain, but once you start thinking in that framework, your whole thinking changes. And I've had to really learn this over the last two years because one of the big shifts obviously that we've gone through from the med ads standpoint is we are no longer just pulling levers on Facebook ads. You used to be able to launch something with a white t-shirt and a white background and launch it to a PDP and it would convert. I mean not all the time and not create, but it wouldn't do bad. Now we're in this place where we've had to become marketers really we're have to think of the whole funnel and it's made us better, I think ultimately is where it leaves us. And creatives is part of that too. The ads are better and we're better at describing and pitching people on why they even should care in two or three seconds.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so interesting. So I want key on a couple of those points. The first one, looking at what makes your ad unique or your product unique, just do the talk at Ezra Firestones Blur and Mastermind on seven ad tests to evaluate your ads on before you run them. And one of them, the first one was actually called the scratch out write-in test where if you could take your ad and remove your brand, remove your logo, put in a competitor, if the ad still works, it's not a good ad. The ad needs to be unique to you and only, it doesn't mean that every element has to be unique to you, but the story as a whole, what you're saying with the ad needs to only fit for you. So what's unique, what's different is someone going to look at this and say, I don't know that I've seen anything quite like that before.

And that's not always easy to do, but I think it's really, really important. And so that's something to keep in mind. And what's also interesting to me, and we'll talk about AI more in just a minute, but I think as things progress and there's more machine learning and ai and yes, AI can into creating images and headlines and descriptions and write you whole novels and stuff like that, I still think that there's this great need for strategy and someone who can understand marketing and understand product market fit and what does a customer want and if this thing worked, why did it work and what should we test next? And so there there's going to need this to be this strategic component from really smart marketers that partner with the machine so to speak. And so any thoughts on that before? I want to hear your thoughts on overall strategy and what's working right now.

Andrew:

Yeah, I mean I think that you're right in reference strata strategic part of it and where that comes into mind is we have a lot of meetings of agency honors and it's a big, big group in our community and one of the things is trying to help them get more leads. And I really am a big believer right now that if you're an agency or even you're somebody, the DNA of how we were brought up, it was on this foundation of pulling levers. And like I said, yes. And now if you can be someone where you're pitching your services and you're talking about being an outsource CMO for example, or thinking more strategically and being a true growth partner, that is a very different pitch and ultimately will benefit you in the long run more than this other guy over here that's Jimmy who can run Facebook ads.

And I think that we know this, but that's really what we actually need and what the client needs to be successful and why I think a lot of us, sometimes you feel stuck and I certainly back myself into this corner where I feel stuck because I'm only thinking in one dimension and I'm not thinking about, well wait a minute, what's even the bundle that we're trying to sell? And I mean of course, what are the economics behind all of this? And really what is the understanding of it? So I think it's that strategy and how you think about it not only and work with clients on it is helpful and useful, but it's also how you're pitching it to the client to win your agency and yourself more business because it's underutilized in my opinion. And there's very few people that I can turn to know that I'm going to get a true strategic read on it all.

Brett:

And I think in a lot of ways things have gotten as this things have gotten more advanced, it's more complex, it's maybe more difficult to approach some of these platforms than it was before, even though it was more automation and to the subject of pulling levers. That was hard for some of our specialists internally. Like, hey, I've always pulled that lever that that's what I do. I'm really good at pulling that lever. But now you got to kind of raise up a level and think I'm moving bigger pieces now. I'm moving platforms or entire channel types, or now I'm looking at performance match, which is all Google channels rolled into one and I'm still manipulating things, but at a bigger level. And I like the analogy of an offensive coordinator, so to use football analogy, the offensive coordinator not on the field, not carrying the ball, not breaking tackles and throwing out stiff arms. They're elevated, they see the whole field, they're calling plays, they're calling in players, things like that. And that that's more, and I think that also ties into this outsourced CMO type role that's I think where agency of the future really valuable marketing team members more in that role. So still driving things but just moving bigger pieces instead of pulling small levers.

Andrew:

Yeah, I completely agree.

Brett:

Sweet. Love it. So let's talk a little bit about what do you see as recurring themes for, okay, if you're really going to make improvements, my meta ads aren't where they should be or this platform's not working the way it should. What are the things we should focus on? What are some of the recurring themes of this is what we need to focus on to get better results?

Andrew:

Yeah, I mean I think from a, speaking through the lens of meta ads and people that are spending forward on meta ads, I was reading the North Beam newsletter where they put out weekly

Brett:

Love North Beam newsletter, shout out the guys there

Andrew:

Spending is and how many people, it's like, well, 70% of people, it's still the primary channel and meta is for traffic for chop funnel traffic. So I think if you look through that lens, what you end up seeing is number one, a breakdown of those that want to improve. You have to number one, have an idea of what the economics are behind your brand. And that's something that a lot still don't. And that's a hard thing to do because it's really outside of our zone of genius. I mean I got to see in accounting, no, and I can say that publicly, but it's not a math guy. So that took me a while to figure that out. And thanks to members sharing worksheets and things in the membership, they will say, okay, here's what we understand about that. And I think I was doing that a little, but I was not doing it a ton and was leaving it to people internally to do at the company and now we have to become that partner. So that's number one. I think if you look just at meta itself and the things that strategically need to take place, it's making sure that you're customizing and setting up shops is another one because meta shops is going to continue to be a place that people are spending money and that meta's spending your money forcibly or not kind of you're going to be continue to be pushed there for onsite checkout with shops and things like or on shop checkout

Brett:

And influencer has been pretty solid. And most of the chatter I hear about, it's been alls all green.

Andrew:

Yeah, it depends on who you ask, but yeah, the point is that you have to have, we used to have, you know would just set up, I don't know, phenomics or something and it would build your catalog and then you were going to pixel my site pro or whatever. And now you can't just have that. You have to have, having a customized catalog as part of the shop is a really important part of it. So customizing that commerce experience is helpful and I think is something that can improve. I think from an account, obviously creative, we already talked about that. Having an inbound of creative that is consistent and constant based on how much you're spending on different angles and hooks and having a plan of how you're going to test them is a must because a lot of people have that, but they have no plan of how they're going to test it.

And so you end up with all this information that doesn't mean anything. And that same goes for landing pages and having landing pages that and best case scenario match the creative that you are talking about so that the click experience is more clean and people understand what you're trying to sell them. So I think that's another one. And then I think from a technical standpoint, having and testing advantage fall shopping campaigns, if you have not, is something that's going to continue to be a priority, especially in 2023 Met has GI given access to it now to basically every account. And what it does is you know, put in assets and there's no targeting really. You just set an existing customer cap. And so it seems to be a good vehicle for top funnel traffic and for literally all funnel traffic, but it's utilizing a different algorithm it seems thus far and we're still learning about it to get top funnel traffic in or get quality traffic into your site. So I think those are some of the foundational pieces that we need to be aware of in terms of what's working and changing the plan that you have.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. I want to highlight a couple things. One, looking at metrics and what are we measuring and what are we focusing on? And I think there needs to be this hierarch hierarchy of metrics. We're at the top is our financial goals, what are our business financial goals, whether that's contribution margin, ebitda, whatever that top level goal is, and likely the in platform goals that we usually focus on roaz or CPA or cac, they're important, but they're only as important as they help guide those financial metrics. So yeah, understanding that understanding why do we want a 200% row as or a 400% row as why, what is that contributing to or what is that rolling up to for the hierarchy of metrics? And a quick example, we had a client come to us recently for Google Ads management and they said we really want to be at a 400% return on that spend.

And as we started asking questions and digging a little deeper and trying to understand why it became clear that the 400% was just like what other people said. And so as we started actually running ads and experimenting a little bit, they found that a 200% return on ad spend actually contributed to their metrics better, more new customers. Their new customers were sticking it fed to overall profitability and so now they're growing at a much faster rate and hitting those profitability targets. So I love that really understanding the numbers. It's not just I'm following some random benchmark, but I'm understanding my business numbers and then I'm optimizing to hit that. So any tips on how you coach people or help people? And I know you said accounting wasn't your thing. I didn't like accounting class either, although I do like numbers. Any tips or suggestions there

Andrew:

Mean? A lot of it is the get some sort of worksheet or framework that you're able to look at with the business owner and walk them through it and how it can then tie to the ad goals that you're looking at in terms of transactions or conversions or return on ad spend from either the in platform metrics or in platform metrics. Plus it's like a scene of comedy. It's like yes, yeah, and a third party tool and GA four, make sure that not only you have a plan and understanding and walking through it with a client, but then you have an understanding of what are the daily metrics you're looking at and how are what making sure you're looking at the same thing. So that's the big one that I don't think a ton of people do right out of the gates and you have to make sure that you're agreed on that as much as possible.

Brett:

Yeah, I think that this train triangulation of data is really important. So in platform, yes, got to look at it, that third party, whether it's triple whale or North Beam or what have you, and then of course GA four needs to be there as well. And yeah, I think trying to simplify a little bit where you're looking at what's our MER or our media efficiency ratio to our total money in total money out, how are weekly sales changing as spin changes on various platforms. Looking at really simple stuff that you can use to make some general directions or observations and then digging into the details inside of triple oil and North Beamer or GA four, I think that makes a lot of sense for sure. So very cool. Yeah, and then looking at really understanding what kind of testing we're doing or rather how to approach testing. I love that you added that because even if we're getting really creative and really thoughtful with our ads, if we don't have a methodology to test them, then either we're not going to give them enough runway or we're going to give them too much space and waste money. Any tips there? Again, without getting too detailed or too into nitty gritty, any tips on testing methodologies or where someone should start?

Andrew:

I mean testing is number one, establish what you're trying to learn. So actually what do you want to know, number one, and if you want to know, well, I want to know what creatives work and I want to know what landing pages work with them. Okay, totally do that, but let's not do them at the same time and let's make sure that we understand first that probably creative itself in terms of understanding. If you've taken over an account and the person has not really done creative testing, the number one right out of the gates is try four or five different angles in static ads and figure out what on a broad audience they're responding to based on what we call soft metrics, like the ad level metrics. So that's number one is just figuring out what are they responding to and then from there going into testing different variations upon that particular things that they're responding to.

And then from there, going into landing page testing, which can be a big unlock. So it's more about what are you trying to figure out? And also then being patient and knowing that to figure a lot of these pieces out, it's going to take time and money to do so. You're not going to be losing money, but it's not going to be a major money maker right away if this has never been done. A lot of times two people testing to a lot of agencies and I think as an insulation for their own agency is they make it really complicated to make themselves look really smart. And in the reality, the best testing that I can do for you is putting things in a broad ad set. So 25 to 65 men and women or split by gender, whatever, and just launching it and seeing what creative metrics are going to work.

It's not necessarily anything. We used to have a thing where you would graduate, then you would or would say, okay, that ad did really well, now I'm going to pull it into my other ad set and run it. Not something you do anymore, what we call scale in place. If it's working, keep it rocking. You don't need to move it. Love that just to have it be there. So a lot of times, and well, what am I going to do? Launch another broad ad set? Yeah, launch another one and eliminate the one that did well keep that baby rolling. And so I think as humans we want to complicate things and in reality put the complication in your brain power into the different variations on creative and the different hooks and the way that you're talking about them and the different angles you're going for and how they can speak to different segments or problems that your customer has. And that's going to be more beneficial than trying to complicate it at the other side when it comes to testing.

Brett:

Love it. And yes, I can attest agencies are guilty of that and I can pick on agencies, you can pick on agency, you're an agency owners, so I sounds cool when we invent our new way of this is a proprietary way of testing and this is our model and it's a 75 point test and it's like, okay, yeah, you probably don't need all that, but that does sound impressive. So yeah. Yes, simplifying is great and I love the idea of scaling in place. We do the same thing on YouTube. If you're testing a new ad and it blows up in a campaign, don't move it. Let it live there. So got all the oxygen and all the data, just let it roll. So I love that. Hey, let's pivot a little bit. You and I can geek out on ads and strategy and what's working, what's not forever, but I want to talk about AI just a little bit. Sure. What are you hearing in the community? What are you testing? Are you extremely bullish on ai? Are you a little nervous about ai? How is it impacting things right now from your perspective?

Andrew:

I mean I think it's two prong. One is, I think there's the first one is there's operational ai. So what are you doing in terms of operations for your agency or for your brand in terms of coming out with more iterations of things, copy hooks and angles, language, I mean that's one part of it. And then there's sort of like meta AI and what is meta doing with it and what are they trying to go for? I think on the first one, I mean I think across the board I'm bullish on what it can do for us. I think as we all say, with a healthy dose of skepticism, I think for sure on the first one, operational stuff, well, how do I even begin to say this? The issue I see in the landscape many times and a lot of us, you're in the space, just like I talked about, the complication of ad testing.

There is very little that differentiates a lot of creative agent or a lot of agencies now in terms of the skills, a lot of us have the same skills and so people are looking for anything they can do to message about that they're doing that's different. And AI is currently it. I mean remember the days of ManyChat it was we're the ManyChat agency or it's this little thing that doesn't actually do. And a lot of people have put their eggs in the creative basket and are saying, well, we're a creative shop, but we do add buying, which I'm not saying is bad, but a lot of people are saying that and AI is currently being used in this. And so they're saying, okay, well I have a 50 point AI framework for your agency. So I think number one, as you think about this stuff, you have to be really careful of what is that actually doing and is it creating more volume of copy or videos and are they actually productive or is it actually helping?

So that's really where my mind goes on the first part of it. On the operational side, I think that there's a lot that can happen to summarize and to look at data and help you interpret data and things that you would not have seen. So that's an interesting one. I mean watching sessions from Clarity or whatever, hot Jar or whatever where it's giving you a readout from what happened with people mean that stuff's really helpful. I think from the mind journey type creative of video, that's AI and that kind of thing. Images that are ai, I think it's okay, it's in its infancy. Some of it looks a little corny and I don't think feels genuine to it now, but people are pushing the envelope on it, which I think is good. So that's one thing on the meta AI side, what's going on there?

It's clear to me that Meta is investing in this and will continue to take more controls away from us as advertisers. The they're going to put in assets and Meta's going to decide where to put 'em, and it's going to be an Advantage plus shopping campaign and it's going to be kind of a performance Max style. The issue with that I have with this is Meta has a bad track record with allowing freedom in terms of ad placement and display. So we have a client that's running a sale right now and we turned on in Advantage while shopping campaign, the automatic optimization, well, it put the texts in all the wrong places and it cut off one of the texts and it made the ad look terrible. And the client's getting screenshots and sending it to us and saying, this looks terrible. So like I think an AI issue right out of the gates.

But there's other things. They came out and said they're, they're testing this Lattice framework where it's looking at essentially federated learnings, which are learnings across a whole bunch of accounts and they're calling it Lattice and saying, okay, here's what we know and we're matching this color background to this person because we know they respond to things in purple. So the early tests of that stuff haven't been doing anything. They've been performing way worse than anything than we've created. And so I'm not saying it's trash, I'm just saying right now it's not proving to be anything big, but it will be more. I mean, there's going to be endless options and I think you're going to have to be one, pitching your clients to be more comfortable with the changes that are taking place and with the fact that they're dynamically changing your ads often. And number two is you're going to have to be more patient because the AI is going to take some time, I think, to learn and figure that side of it out.

And I think ultimately it will be, there could be instances where it's more profitable, but it's going to, and the initial side of it when it's learning going to be really tough because you're going to be getting screenshots of your clients from the ads that look really like that don't look good. So it depends on how much customization they're doing in this too. So that's like my honest answer about ai. I I think it's a lot of people that are really excited about it. I think that's great and I'm not excited about it. And Meta doesn't have a great track recorder when it comes to this stuff. And ultimately I think about what creates more work for us as agencies. They're saying it saves us time, but if a client's blowing us up with ads that look like crap, that's not going to be good for anybody.

Brett:

That does not save you time for sure. I like the way you frame that. I'm not excited about it. And that's the why I feel about some of the AI related topics. Just got a key in on a couple points related to operational ai. I think it's really the place right now where it's all about augmenting not replacing. It's about helping you do more with less, faster, give you ideas, helping you not start with a blank canvas, that type of thing. I've got some friends who are developers and coders and they're saying, Hey, with the proper use of Chad G p t or whatever their favorite tool is, it makes them 20% faster with coding or maybe 50% faster for certain things. It helps them, if you look at a really good copywriter, maybe you're using AI to kind of get you some thought starters or to tweak things or rewrite some things.

But as I've looked at stuff that AI just creates on its own, I'm not finding subject lines that are better than what great copywriters write. I'm not seeing descriptions that are better than what great copywriters write. I know it's improving. I know it will continue to improve, but I really think it's augmenting not replacing at least so far. We'll see how it progresses. What's really interesting, and I'll be very curious to watch how meta AI unfolds and want to keep up with you on that with Google Performance Max, one of the concerns I had when I first heard this talked about a couple years ago was, man, we're not going to have any control. This is going to all be Black Box. We're just going to serve Google our assets and step away and hope for the best. Actually, you can do that. There's some ways to run Performance Max that are very much automated, but there's also quite a bit you can manipulate and quite a bit, you can move around based on the way you structure your campaigns and then also looking at performance data, changing your creatives, changing a few of the signals and things like that.

And so I think that's probably the future too, where there's, there's going to be this option where you just like, here you go, here are the keys, Google my Money, here are my assets. And same with Meta. But I think there's also going to be this way of, okay, I'm going to leverage some of the automation, but I'm still going to apply my strategies and I'm going to apply my testing framework as best as I can to this tool. And I think that's where we're going to get the best results. So far, we've had great success with Performance Max, almost across the board, but companies that are spending like 50,000 a day on Performance Max, usually it's not just one campaign that they built in an afternoon and don't think about its, it's more of a complex structure. So we'll see. Man, I, I'm bullish, but I think I may have to copy your, I'm not excited. So

Andrew:

I love that. Yeah, I mean, I think to me the practical implications of it, a performance Max. Look at, I did a webinar with North Beam a month ago with John Moran and John's talking about

Brett:

Love That dude, it's super smart,

Andrew:

Was talking about something along the lines of running a Performance Max campaign, but then running something that then suppresses a certain part of this Performance Max campaign that it actually spends in the places you want. And I don't remember exactly what it was, but the point is, I could see that happening with Meta ads. There's going to be like, yes, you're running a manageable shopping campaign and AI as part of it, but you're also then taking and creating a separate catalog or something or product catalog with things that you want to suppress or it's that kind of manipulation that I think is going to have to take place and probably will. It just remains to be seen what that'll be and how much money will be spent figuring that out. Right? I think we're sort of in this place of a lot of people during the pandemic had businesses that were running online and now we're coming through this piece of man operationally things aren't looking as good, or ads aren't performing as well, and there's less levers to pull.

And I think it's, when you think about AI and giving people, like you said, longer timeframe, if it's a $50,000 a day thing, they're going to be fine. But it's these little guys, I think about that spending 25,000 a month, they're going to be the ones that are hurt because they're not going to be able to test this, and they might not be resourced enough to know where to direct, to direct the dollars more appropriately. So that's going to be really challenging, and that's a harder place to be as a business owner, especially when all of your traffic has come from Meta,

Brett:

Totally

Andrew:

From one source.

Brett:

We know so many small businesses that they really built their brand, built their business on Facebook and maybe partially in the glory days of Facebook. And Facebook is still going strong and still working. But yeah, it will be those with smaller budgets that don't have the ability to adapt, that will be hurt the most, which really is a great reason why someone needs to get connected to a community of other smart people and learn and ready, be ready to adapt and improve. And so tell us a little bit more about the founders community. Who's a good fit for that? How do people find out more? Yeah, give us a little down there.

Andrew:

If you do digital advertising, you're an agency owner, you're in house at a brand, you're a brand owner, and you spend anything on Meta or on TikTok or on Google, it's going to be a place for you. We have the Founders community, which is the original, it's been around for two years. That's for people that are primarily spending on Meta. And a month ago we launched the PPC community, the PPC B, both the main founders membership is foxville digital.com/membership. The other one is foxville digital.com/all caps ppc. And they're, they're places that are supportive to you. We have between five and 10 calls a week that members can join, led by different members of the community on of myriad of topics. Everything's recorded, put into a database for you lives as a Slack community. You can ask anything you want. It's a safe place. It's moderated by me. I have an outsourced moderation. It's me, which is a big part of it because it's a big

Brett:

Tax,

Andrew:

It's a big job, stays high, and the quality stays high. I mean, we just asked, we just did a monthly member survey. A couple hundred members filled it out. 99.9% of the people said, yes, I'd recommend it to a friend. So that's a fit. If you're looking, you're, yeah, and big and small spenders. I mean, we have people that are spending, that are brands that are spending half a million a month just on one channel. And we have people in there that are running, their whole book of business is a hundred K spenders. And I've tried to build a community for both of those people and also running an agency and how lonely that can be. So if you feel like you need a little bit more support, then that's a good place for you.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so important because it is kind of lonely, whether you running an agency or you're serving as a marketing director or media buyer because you're going to talk to your family about changes on Meta or Google or talk to your family about, Hey man, my margins are just really down this year. It's really getting me down. It's hard to have those conversations with just anybody. You need a community like this where you can connect. So love that. I'll link to everything in the show notes. And then also Foxwell Digital. So you run an agency, talk about what services you guys offer and who is that a good fit for?

Andrew:

Yeah, I mean, we run an agency. We do meta ads for people and take on a couple clients a year. It's not a huge book for us. And we do a lot of strategic advising to agencies. We do a lot of strategic advising to brands. So if they're looking for a new advertiser, sometime we'll come in and do an audit and say, here's what we'd recommend and help them find a new partner. We've successfully placed, well, let's see, what year is it? 2020. 2023. Yeah. So I just looked at the numbers and I think it was something like 21 leads we've placed in agencies this year.

Brett:

Wow.

Andrew:

So that's a big part of what we do is playing matchmaker. And as far as I know, they're all still there. And that was part of the work, the due diligence that we're doing is checking out on it. So that's a big part of it too, is kind of that matchmaking process. And then we do this consulting with Wall Street as well, which is fascinating to talk to them about the public side of a lot of these companies and what they're doing.

Brett:

So you've got banks, you've got people on Wall Street that are talking to you on a regular basis saying, okay, give me the inside scoop, what's actually happening inside of Meta and inside these communities, because we need to know.

Andrew:

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the best part about being a direct response advertiser always has been, is that we are always the one out there hustling, right? We are the ones that are testing everything. We're trying everything. I mean, Lord knows we'd all love to be a brand advertiser and just be doing freaking a hundred grand in video views. Right.

Brett:

How did you optimize your campaign? I turned it on. Yeah. Yeah,

Andrew:

I did. I used to actually do some of that consulting work four, three or four years ago with a brand or a, I guess a publisher that did a lot of partnerships with those brands. And it was amazing. It was so awesome. You could just turn stuff on. They just had endless budgets. But I mean, the good news about being a Dr. Advertiser is you have the look into here's what's working, here's how it's going, here's exactly why. Here's what sucks. And it turns out Wall Street's willing to pay for that. So if any of you're interested, you can go to GLG or Guidepoint or the two networks and you fill out an application and then they reach out and you can be connected basically to people on their staff. But then they send you calls and you can talk to people and they pay you for your time. Cool.

Brett:

Super cool, man. So interesting. Well love all that you're doing, Andrew, it's been an absolute pleasure to catch you up.

Andrew:

Yeah, man, thank you so much. I'm looking forward

Brett:

To that PPC community, man. I'm looking forward to hanging out a little bit with my PhD kids in there and talk. Wait. And so yeah, I'll link everything in the show notes. Do check out Foxwell Digital. He's got some courses as well if you want to learn through courses, if that's your jam. But Andrew, super fun, man. Thank you so much. Thanks. And we'll have to do it again.

Andrew:

Sounds Absolutely. Thank you.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We would love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? Do you have any suggestions, any guests that you're like, Hey, this guest has got to be on the show. I would like to know about that and hit us up. Look at me on the socials now, man. I'm more active on LinkedIn and on Twitter sort of, and would love to connect with you in the socials are on the socials as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Good ads are just the beginning when it comes to growing your business. The real game-changer lies in your landing pages. They hold the key to turning visitors into loyal customers.

That's why you can't afford to miss our latest podcast episode. We've brought together two absolute legends from OMG Commerce - Matt Slaymaker and Bill Cover - to discuss their favorite landing page tips and share real-life examples.

With over $100 million managed annually in online advertising, we've witnessed firsthand the critical role landing pages play in conversion rates and return on ad spend. They hold the power to either make or break your ad performance, while also impacting your word-of-mouth and organic growth.

Here's a look at what we cover:

• How landing page improvements turned a skincare brand's ad campaign from a dud to a success.
• What good landing pages and amazing in-store experiences have in common.
• The 4 C's of a good lander.
• 5 tips for dedicated landing pages.
• Where to start - homepage, landing, or dedicated lander.
• How landing pages and ads work together to create winning (or disappointing) results.
• Our favorite landing page examples and a FREE swipe file of our favorites!

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Unofficial Shopify Podcast by Kurt Elster
• FIXD
• Boom by Cindy Joseph
• Overtone
• FREE Landing Page Swipe File

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO, OMG Commerce. And today, I'm not the only one from OMG Commerce on the show today, this is the OMG Experts series, and we're talking about landing pages today and product detail pages. And I could not be more excited. This is going to be practical and helpful and strategic and hopefully a lot of fun as well. So I have with me right now on the show, two legends from OMG Commerce. These guys are seasoned veterans in the e-commerce space, marketing space ad agency space. First up is Mr. Bill Covert. Bill and I go way back. He's been at OMG for seven years, which is a long time in internet years, but he's been in e-commerce for I think going on 13 years Bill, and prior to that was in the ad agency world.

So Bill, welcome to the show, I think. Thank you. Is what your third, fourth time on the show you?

Bill:

Yeah, it's at least third. Yeah, we'll go with fourth actually. That sounds better. Fourth?

Brett:

Fourth. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think it's at least fourth and more to come. So excited about that. And then also a return guest on the show, we got Matt, the Playmaker sleigh maker. What's up Matt Slaymaker, how are you doing? What's out [inaudible] Good, good. So Matt is one of our lead Google specialists and strategist, and he's been with us for three years, been doing marketing for seven. He is a pro with all things Google Ads, but he's done more than that too. He is worked on Facebook ads on a number of other things, and he just gets marketing and gets growth for D two C brands and same for Bill.

So Bill's a strategist, we pull him in as we're consulting with new clients and then ongoing clients Bill's always looking for opportunities to grow, to improve, to help clients reach their goals. So today we're talking about something that I think all three of us are quite passionate about, and that is landing pages, good landing pages. So let's kind of set up this way, gentlemen. Why should we focus on landing pages? Why is it so important that we get this right? And I'll let you go first, bill.

Bill:

All right, great. Yeah, thanks for having me. So when it comes to landing pages, the reason why, and I think we're going to unpack this a little bit probably as we get in here, but I would say transition brand experience and customer education. And as I was I thinking about this coming into today's podcast, I was thinking about Steve Krug's book.

It's an old one, an old e bit of goodie called don't Make me Think, which I think is self-explanatory love. And so when you get to a site, the goal for you as a brand in connection to your customer is don't make them think. Don't make them sit there and decide. Tell them where to go, what to do. Orient them who you are, order the best sellers, order the most popular. And so a well-structured landing page does that for you and for your brand.

Brett:

I love that. And my buddy Kurt Elster. So shout out to the unofficial Shopify podcast and the dynamic host, Kurt Elster, he and his partner and their business ethos cycle. They talk about picturing their customer as a drunk guy on the couch late at night, like surfing the web. And it says it's maybe a little bit of an over exaggeration, but if you think about it that way, like, hey, could someone who was intoxicated and a little bit sleepy navigate your website? If so, then that's probably simple enough because yeah, I totally agree. You don't want to make people think or you don't want to make things complex because people will just bail. They'll bounce in no shot of Covering if it's confusing. For sure. So Matt, what about you man? Why? How would you lay that out? The reason why should we focus on Yeah, creating great leaning pages. Well,

Matt:

First of all, I just want to say it's super important, like you said, to tap into that drunken and sleepy audience. They are a big buyer segment, so you got to make sure we're appealing to them. Yeah,

Brett:

Don't forget the drunk segment of your audience sitting on the couch. They're buyers because they, they're ready

Matt:

Buy

Brett:

Ready to buy. They're not thinking about price really, they're, they're ready to pull out that wallet and purchase if they can find their way.

Matt:

Yeah, to me, I think landing pages are so important because I mean, this is where obviously the sale happens and this is where you make your first impression. As it says in the name, a landing page is where somebody lands on your website. So if this is the first time somebody's ever heard of you, you've got to make a really good first impression. So obviously branding is super, super important here. But the other part is this is where we have the opportunity to test things and maximize our conversion rate. So through the landing pages, we have the opportunity to tailor our page and the content on that page to the audience that we're targeting, rather than just sending everybody to the homepage that might look the same product detail pages that are tailored a certain way. Having a landing page where we can customize it to a particular audience is super powerful and important.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And I think we'll share some tips as we go if you be a few product detail page tips and few homepage tips. And of course landing page tips because sometimes we do send traffic directly to a product detail page or directly to the homepage, wherever the case may be. But I love the analogy when we're thinking about a landing page or where someone shows up on your site and thinking about that just like an in-store experience. And Matt, you and I talked about this actually all three of us talked about this before we hit record. That if we think about that in-store experience, when someone first walks into the door of a brick and mortar store, what is that experience? Do they immediately know where to go? Do they have confidence that if they have a question, someone is going to be there to answer it?

Do they feel like, Hey, based on the mood, the lighting, the vibe that I'm getting, the products that I'm seeing, am I in the right place? Is this for me or is this not for me? And I'll use a bit of an example. I used to a lot of local advertising. And so you can imagine you've always got the local car dealer who's like, Hey, we're home with a fair and honest deal. And so then you're like, Hey, maybe if you're naive, you're like, Hey, maybe this is a fair and honest car dealer. So you show up at the car dealership and then you're like, wait a minute, I think this is every other car dealership guy with slicked back hairs walking out the door, khakis, fake smile, sticking his hand out. I stick my left hand and I'm not sure why, but sticking his hand out at Shake your hand, you're like, ah, I got to get out of here.

This is not the right place. Or another example in when I was in college, I worked at Lowe's, the home improvement center, and that we were one of the top rated Lowe's in the nation. We had a lot of pride in that. And there's another big box home improvement store that I actually don't think is bad at all, but the location here is not very good in our hometown. And there's always a difference to me if I go into our local Lowe's, like there's three or four people ready to help me in the different departments, whether it's plumbing or lumber, you've got a pro there handy that'll talk to you in this other box store, you can walk the aisles. I'm like, there's nobody there to help. You never get your question answered. You're not going to find what you want. And so thinking about that experience, I spent a lot of money at Lowe's. I don't ever go to this other store because of that in-store experience. And maybe the ads are just as good, or maybe the ads are even better at that other big box store. But I go to Lowe's because of the experience in the store. And I think there's just, there's so many applications we can tie in there. But what are your thoughts though, guys, when you look at landing page and comparing that to an in-store experience, any other insights or thoughts you'd share there?

Matt:

An example I'd give you is that's how I feel about Chick-fil-A. So anytime I go to that branding experience and the experience that I get from those customer service people, the sales representatives or anytime you say thank you, they're always saying, my pleasure. They've always got a smile on their face and they create this super positive experience that makes you want to come back again and again, it's more than just the chicken. That is the reason I'm going there. It's because of the overall experience that I get when I go there. And you can't say that about every fasting company. Totally.

Brett:

And then the chicken is arguably the best as far as fast food in my opinion. But you're 100% cor, correct. I can't remember a single time, and I've been to a lot of Chick-Fil-A's, spent a lot of money at Chick-fil-A. I've got a family with eight kids. And so we frequent Chick-fil-A. I can't remember going to a Chick-fil-A and experiencing a grumpy employee, I can't remember it. And maybe it's happened, but it hasn't stuck out. It's overwhelmingly positive. It's overwhelmingly fast. If you get anything wrong, they fix it. They're happy. They're saying My pleasure all the time over the top man. And it's fantastic. And that's why you can go to any Chick-fil-A anywhere in the country at 2:00 PM after the lunch rush. And you're still probably going to be a long line. You won't have to wait very long because they're efficient. But there's probably a line.

Bill:

Yeah, and just thinking about that sales rep example, we have a local water sports store where I buy wakeboards and there's lots of different kinds of wakeboards and lots of different kinds of bindings. And I'm a bigger guy, I've got a wider stance and things like that. And there's specific ones for park or there's specific ones for behind the boat sleigh maker's familiar too with these concepts. And just for the uneducated park is the water park, the ramps and stuff, because you don't want fins on that one. Totally. Right. And it's got to stand up to a few more riggers maybe. So you go in and mean even if you've been wakeboarding, if it's your first time buying nothing. And so going in, you're like, okay, these things are running like 500 bucks with the total package bindings in the board and all this stuff, and then you got to buy a life jacket and a helmet.

I mean, you're spending hundreds of dollars. And it's like, how can I get something that's entry level that I'm not going to spend too much on, but it's going to stand up to what I need it to. And you need a sales rep to help you with that. So is your landing page that sales rep or I think of if you're going to a running shoe store or something like that, you might be running on pavement, you might be running on trails, who knows? I mean it might be for something else, distance versus sprints. These all require different products and you don't want to buy the most expensive, I mean, I think we all want to get what's the bottom of the top tier somewhere in there.

Brett:

It's your maximum value. How can I get the best for the amount that I'm comfortable spending?

Bill:

Yeah, maximize value 100%.

Brett:

And one thing that I think, and I want to talk about advertising in a minute, how that ties into landing pages. But one other thing that I think is often overlooked in the space of e-commerce is word of mouth and referrals. And this is something that as we dig in with clients, more sophisticated clients, especially those that are using post-purchase surveys like No Commerce and others, they start to get a lot of feedback saying, Hey, someone referred me, my friend or family or whoever, and that's why I'm here. But you got to think about if that in-store experience or in this case the onsite experience, the landing page, the homepage product detail page, if that's not stellar, people are going to be way less likely to make that referral. And I remember back when I was in a lot of local advertising, I worked with this local printer and they were the cheapest.

They were pretty fast, but they were actually quite grumpy and they were difficult to work with. They're just like some difficulties in working with them, but they were always the lowest price. So I always used them, but I never referred to them because I was like, eh, you probably won't have a good experience. You'll probably be grumpy at the end of your day if you go with this company. But I use 'em cause I'm cheap and I'm feeling cheap right now. So there's one of those things where if you think about the landing page, yes it helps with ads and there's a big benefit there, but your landing pages also can increase or decrease or kill word of mouth. And I think that's really important to underscore here. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Matt:

Cool. So I'm a bit of a marketing nerd obviously. So I share this stuff with people who don't care. But there'll be times where I see a really cool product that has just a beautiful landing page and I'm like, look how cool this is this product. It looks so awesome. And it's not even because of the product itself, it's because of how they demonstrated what the product is and the benefits, how they communicated this. And we'll take a examples there,

Brett:

And we are a little more like that cause we're in the marketing field, we're a little more prone to share those pages, but it does happen more with anybody. They're more likely to share a page, more likely to refer if it's a great experience, if it's beautiful, if the message is clear, if it all works, they're more likely to refer. So love that. Let's talk about the relationship between advertising and landing page because we run a lot of traffic, gentlemen. We spend millions and millions a month on YouTube and Google on Amazon ads and people come to us wanting us to help them generate more customers and develop new customers. And typically the focus is on better ads, better targeting, better campaigns, all those things which are super important. But how would you talk about that relationship? Because something that is often overlooked is how are your landing pages performing?

So how would you talk about the relationship between ads and Lander and how you look at them?

Bill:

Yeah, sure. So the way I look at it is the ads job. And as a digital marketer, my job is to find a relevant audience, relevant keywords and to qualify them so I can find a relevant audience or maybe some percent of that audience that I think is relevant. Maybe there isn't purchase intent, something like that. The ads job is to then qualify that person and to have them go, okay, yeah, that's me, that's what I want. I want that now. And to have them click, whereas the landing page, his job is then to transition them and to up that conversion rate to drive the sale and to orient them from that ad click. Love that.

Brett:

Yeah. Would you add anything to that, Matt? Yeah,

Matt:

No, to put it simply, I think the goal of the ad is to reach the right people at the right time with a message and an image that compels them to want to learn more about your brand or your product. So the goal with the ad really is just to spark that initial interest, reach people who are already interested maybe in looking for this kind of stuff or like Bill said, maybe they're not even looking for this kind of stuff yet and we get in front of 'em at that stage. And then the goal of the landing page is to move them further and to drive that actual consideration and intent. And maybe that's not always somebody actually buying something. A good landing page isn't looking just for the sale. There might be other opportunities, whether it's a lead generation opportunity where people aren't ready to buy just yet that, but you can provide your email address for 20% off later on, or join a wait list for an ultimate purchase later. And then even for those people who aren't willing, they're ready to give that kind of stuff yet leaving such a positive brand impression that they want to come back later on. So I think that's what the landing pages Jo job is ultimately in the end.

Brett:

Love it. Totally agree. I think another way to say it is the job of the ad is to get the right person to click to get attention, to get the right prospect to stop and pay attention and then to get them to say maybe, right, maybe this is the product for me, maybe I want to take it a step further. And so they click and then once they get to the landing page, it's the landing page's job to do everything else to convince, to get that email sign up, to get someone to add the car, to get someone to purchase. That's the job of the landing page. The job of the ad is to get the right person to say maybe, and hopefully they come in predisposed and pretty excited and ready for your message on the landing page. But the art of closing really happens on the landing page.

And so I think that that's super important to underscore and to emphasize in this case. And so I want to give an example, and I'm curious if you guys have examples too of how this can play out. So I was working with a longtime client of ours. They sell a derma roller, so it's one of those microneedling rollers and it's got some product in it and very effective at helping reduce wrinkles and just in improving the overall glow and look of the skin. And we were running some YouTube ads and the YouTube ads were getting great engagements, so people watching the videos, people clicking on the videos way above average on all of those metrics. But the ads weren't performing, we were not hitting their cost per acquisition, target wasn't working. And so we paused for a bit and the client was like, Hey, I want to get to work on this landing page because they actually understood landing pages really well and they were like, Hey, I'm going to rework this page.

So they reworked the page and that totally changed the dynamics of the campaign. So we found a lot of people would look at that and say, well, we got to run better ads, got to run better ads, got to get better targeting, got to get, get better. But in this case, it was the job of the landing page and sometimes you could identify that when view rates are good, click through rates are good, and then conversion rates are bad, that's probably the landing page not doing its job. And so that's where you potentially need to focus. So any other examples gentlemen? Any other thoughts there on when we've identified that it was the landing page and not the ad that was the problem?

Bill:

Yes, and playing off your example real quick, just thinking of a derma roller, I don't know what that is, just because I'm in the industry.

Yes. Would've no concept of it other than I worked on brands who sell these and so are you, he's trying to hide the fact that you D roller. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there you go. You just exposed me there. I'm huge into it. I got a whole derma roller collection. Yeah. So what's your favorite brand of Derma roller? Exactly. See? Gotcha. Okay. Sorted by color. So I think when we're in our own industry, we're so jaded, we're exposed to all the ways this works, we believe in it, we're already sold. What percentage of people got to that landing page and went, do domer rollers really work? And it's like, okay, you might have the best one in the world, but what percentage? People don't even know that this category is a good idea. And are you answering those questions on your landing page or are they going to go to Google and ask?

Because once they go to Google and ask, your competitors are waiting. So totally. You just grew the category for your competitors.

Brett:

Excellent point. Yes, someone, your ad made you a beautiful job of getting attention and getting someone to click and maybe be curious, but if the landing page doesn't do its job, all you're doing is sending that prospect to go shop your competitor and to do another search and to end up somewhere else. So you're growing the category, not growing your own business, which is not the way to succeed in marketing. So what about you, Matt? Any examples or thoughts on how this plays out this role of ad and lander?

Matt:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think you can have all the right targeting set up and beautiful ads, but if you're directing them to a page that doesn't clearly demonstrate what the value of that product is, what the differentiators are, why you should take action right now, then I don't think it's really going to matter. You're not going to see good results from that ad and from that good targeting. So an example is we have a supplements company and previously their landing pages were really core. They were essentially just product pages where the details were very minimal, so the differentiators really weren't there. Essentially all that they had were a couple lines of what the product was, so some features that came along with it and then reviews. So from there it was pretty empty. They updated one of these with the goal of this being something that they could use for a YouTube video where it focuses on one particular supplement and they added a lot of content below the fold, which was essentially talking about all the benefit, what the problem is, so why you really need a probiotic supplement, what the war inside your gut looks like, why you might be suffering from this.

Then they told the story of their brand below that too. We set out to do blank, we're different because of blank. Most prio probiotics fail because they don't have enough blank. And then they littered throughout that their social proof of testimonials, real stories from people, and we a b tested that not just for the YouTube videos but for their shopping ads as well. What if we sent people who were landing on that original probiotic page to this long form probiotic page and we saw double the conversion rates from that long form page? Wow. Because instead of just kind of answering the bare minimum of here's what it does, it then get expanded upon that and said, here's why this is important. Here are the benefits of that and here's why we're better than everybody else.

Brett:

I love that so much. I've got a couple of follow ups there, but I want to ask this question first. Just curious what your take is. Do you guys prefer longform landing pages or short form landing pages? What's say you

Bill:

Yeah, that that's a Turkey question. I am not a fan of very, very long landing pages, ridiculously long landing pages. I think a little bit, it feels disrespectful a little bit. No offense to those people out there. You probably know who you are and what I mean is just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, going to get a lot of hate mail from long, long form landing page. Yeah, I don't think this person that I'm thinking of is offended or even I make, it's going to be a radar email too. Yeah, it's going to be really long. But what I prefer when I'm working with a client or a brand is send me something that's too long and it's way easy to, way easier to whittle it down than it is to make it longer. So I prefer that we start there. So love that, Matt. Thoughts in

Matt:

General, I don't think long is necessarily a problem as long as you're not wasting my time. If the most important information is up near the top and there's a call to action up at the top, I can take action right away and I get my answer or the questions that I have answered, then I don't necessarily mind there being additional content below there. So if that below the fold content is just additional reviews and testimonials and information about the brand that I don't necessarily mind it being long, but obviously it's something that you have to test out and like Bill was saying, it's so much easier to have something that's already long and have too much content and have to trim that down, then have to come up with more content out of thin air.

Brett:

Yeah, totally agree. And I think the right answer here is the page needs to be as long as it needs to convince someone to say yes. And I fully agree with the points you guys were making here, that it needs to be scannable. I think for those that come to your page and they're already convinced or ready, they should have an option to buy quickly. I think Bill, to your point, if someone's got to scroll through an endless landing page or they're forced to watch a 30 minute video sales letter to be able to add to cart, I know there's some strategic reasons to use that, but I always balance on those pages. I will 100% of the time always bail there. So you know, don't want to make someone scroll all the way to the end of what's the equivalent of six pages of text before they have the add to cart option, but you also need enough information to be able to convince someone.

I love an example and we'll get into a lot more here as we go, but room dividers now a former client friend, but they sell room dividers for apartment complexes and workspaces and things like that, but this is often the first time someone has ever bought a room divider when they go to this site and it's kind of confusing and new and what size do I buy and will I be able to install this? Do I need to be a builder? What is this? Their pages are amazing in terms of showing pictures, diagrams, measurements, quick videos that show you how to choose the right one, how to install it, and this would be overboard for something simple like a phone case or something like that. I don't need a lot of diagrams for a phone case, but a room divider never bought one. I'm a little bit intimidated, so give me the details but make it easy to scan because that's how people consume pages and then they look for details and they may deep dive into that interest them. And so page needs to be as long as it needs to be close the sale.

Matt:

In talking about scannable content, I think that's where visuals are so important. Yeah, they always say a picture of paints a thousand words, it says a thousand words, but you can just visually digest information through a picture much more than you can through a paragraph. And I've seen that there's studies that show that people actually remember about 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read and 80% of what they see and do. So that's where you were saying Brett, whether it's doing videos through your landing page or visuals, that kind of stuff is so important in terms of making it easily digestible for people.

Brett:

We think and remember in terms of pictures, if I say quick think of a whale, you don't think w h a l e, right? You think of a whale, right? If I say beach, you don't think of the letters, you think of the beach and an umbrella and surfing or something like that. So we think in pictures, so we need pictures.

Bill:

My friend Todd who works with us, he sent me a Neil Patel article last night and it said that 10% of how's the man shout out to shout out to Todd, right? Smart marketer. It said 10% of people remember write no sound, but remember audio learning 20% remember something in writing and 80% remember from visual and doing. So video is key.

Brett:

I think it really is, and oddly enough, I'm one of the, I love auditory, I love listening to stories and I love podcasts.

That's probably why I'm a podcaster, but that's not the norm. People need to see and experience things that a good landing page does that. I think one last thing and then I want to get into some very specific tips. We've been sprinkling tips as we go, but I want to get into some specifics. So one additional thing to keep in mind is that people are coming to your landing page with questions, with unresolved objections. They're coming to your landing page with a healthy dose of skepticism and doubt and you've got to be ready for all of those things. I like to talk about the fact that we live in the show me state, well, bill and I are Missouri guys, a Matt's Texas guy, lots of love for Texas as well, but we're the show me state, right? And our state animal is the donkey.

So you got to show us before we'll believe anything and apparently we're quite stubborn, but you got to kind of think that way with your landing page. I have to show that these objections are not true. I have to show that this is the right solution for you. I have to overcome all of those hurdles, all that doubt, mistrust, objections that this visitor has so that they go from a maybe to a yes. So keep that in mind that people aren't just coming eager and ready to buy with the wallet out, fully convinced. I know they're coming with doubts and objections and you got to those. So awesome. Let's dive into specific tips. So lay out some of your best of your favorite landing page tips. Who wants to go first?

Matt:

Is that me? Sure. Go for Matt. All right. Yeah, great. So obviously it depends on what the goal is for that landing page. If is this a dedicated landing page, is this a product page, your homepage? Let's talk about a dedicated landing page. So I'm going to give my top five elements that I think you really need to make sure that. Can you explain

Brett:

What a dedicated landing page would be, Matt, and how we would use this? Yeah,

Matt:

A hundred percent. So a dedicated landing page is a landing page that's tailored for a specific campaign for a specific audience. So let's say that you have a top of funnel YouTube campaign where the goal of that is to use your video to reach people who've never heard of your brand before. So instead of sending people to your homepage or your product page, won't send 'em to a page that either relates to that video and that audience in some way, but portrays your brand and is focused on the product that you mentioned in that video. So it's tailored not only to the video but the audience itself.

Brett:

Awesome, thank you. So tips for your dedicated landers.

Matt:

Yeah, so I think the top five elements that you really need to have, and I'll list them all out, then go into a little bit of depth on each of those is your value proposition, your benefits and features, your branding, your differentiators, your social proof, and a strong call to action slash offer. So your value proposition is essentially just what is the point of your product, what is the value that you are going to get out of this? So if you are a company that has sells, let's just say that you are a product that helps women grow their hair back. You could just say that we are a shampoo that grows your hair back. Or you could put this in the form of a value proposition, which is really answering the what, which is the problem and the solution that they're trying to get to.

So essentially regain your confidence with our hair regrowing shampoo. So that's the value that they're really getting out of that. I think every dedicated landing page really needs to have that. The second part is benefits and features. So this really goes into the why. So what is the value that the person is getting out of the features that come with it? So if you sell an iPhone and the iPhone has a certain amount of storage space, what's the benefit of that? So the storage space is the feature, but the benefit is now you have more room for pictures and for memories and things like that, you have more apps that you can use, text messages that you can send. The third element is

Brett:

Just so quickly, Matt, some of the really great examples there, if you think back to old Apple ad campaigns, right? With the original, did we look at the iPod, right? One of the original examples, they didn't talk about the number of megabytes of storage or whatnot, but there were like 3000 songs in your pocket and I was like, this is amazing. 3000 songs in my pocket or I love the old campaign. It really I think helped launch the iPhone into kind of the stratosphere. There's an app for that. So you've got this problem, this thing, there's an app for that solved and here we'll just show you in the ad. And so yeah, really making that value prop come to life. Love, love that,

Matt:

Right? Yeah. Because in the end, features are really just what leads to the benefit and the benefit is truly what people are really after. From there you've got strong branding differentiators. So this answers the who, so who are you and what makes you different from everybody else. If you're in a crowded space, especially things like supplements for example, where there are hundreds of brands that sell probiotics or brain supplements, things like that. What is the reason that people should trust you amongst everybody else? And then the fourth element, how you can really show that is through your social proof. This elaborates on the credibility aspect of it, why should people choose? You provide things like testimonials, reviews, third party publications. So if you've been mentioned in Forbes, cnn, some of these publications out there, that kind of stuff really helps move the needle in terms of people trusting you. And then the last part of it, once they've digested who you are, what you're selling and why this is important, having a strong call to action or an offer that actually inspires them not only to take action but to take action right now. So does your call to action create that sense of urgency? If it doesn't, then people are going to leave and not maybe come back later on. So I think that's the other element you're really got to make sure you have.

Brett:

That's awesome. And Bill, I want to hear your tips in just a second, but Matt, what are some examples? Because I think we always learn better when we're looking at those who are doing this well. What are examples that we should pay attention to

Matt:

In terms of a dedicated landing page that I think does well? Yeah, so there is a company called Fixed out there. So if you go to fixed.com, you'll find this F I

Brett:

X D,

Matt:

Yeah, f i xd.com. So these guys, if you pull them up on your mobile phone or computer right now, I think they do all these elements really, really well. They do. So at the very top of the page, they have their value proposition that is super clear says meet the car Sens, meet the car repair sensor. That is saving people thousands of dollars. So instead of just saying it's a car diagnostic tool, which is just what it is, it paints that out in a very clear way. You're saving thousands of dollars. That's the value that you're getting out of this. Then in a

Brett:

Quick frame on that, just so people get the idea, like check engine light comes on, you take the fixed device, plug it into the computer port on your car, and then on your phone you get a readout of exactly why that check engine light is on, plus how much it should cost to repair it. So really answers questions for you and helps you not get screwed over later at the mechanic. So yeah, keep going man, right?

Matt:

Yeah. And from there the next thing they jump into is over 2 million fixed sensors sold 10,000 plus five star reviews. So there's your social proof, there's the credibility that they've already created. Then they get into why every driver should own a fixed sensor. So what it does, so car diagnostics like Brett just mentioned, maintenance alerts, issue severity. So it kind of shows that benefit that you're getting out of this. From there they go on to explain why they're different from other people, why you should trust them over others. But then what they do really well is they have an offer that is happening pretty much all the time. It says Shop six, shop fix today before this offer times out and they have this timer that's constantly ticking, but it's 67% off, and so they're always kind of promoting, make sure that you're getting this at the best possible deal. So you get to that page and you have that sense of urgency to go ahead and buy right then and there, which I think they do really, really well.

Brett:

Love it. Great example. We'll need to have the show notes, but go check it out for yourself@fixed.com. Bill, what about you? Top landing page tips.

Bill:

All right, sweet. You bet. So I would love to turn all of these into Cs at some point, but I have connect, so how does it change their life? Connect with the customer and where they're at and psychologically understand their pain point and address that and say, look, I get it. This is what you're going through. Here is how we help. I mean, it could be a very simple product. They have a pain point content. So I think dream big. Imagine what your brand can be, what your landing page could look like. I think some of the most awesome landing pages are just very visual and give me a great brand impression and a great brand impression. Gives me a great product impression and I want to identify with that product brands like that.

I think Peloton has amazing landing pages and they do the connect thing as well. If you are living in an apartment in a high rise, it's a big deal to have to get up, go down the elevator and go to the gym in the morning. Whereas you could have a Peloton just in the corner, you could wake up and you can do your whole workout routine with an instructor right there. You don't have to go to the gym. They make that very obvious, here's your pain point, we're the solution, and then call to action. So not just certainly tell them what to do, you may think it's obvious, it may not be obvious, but also what are the steps? What are the next steps? One thing, example would be the Goldie Locks Purple Mattress YouTube ads, love it. Next time you see the eggshell test ad, click and look at that landing page and look how it matches the ad and also watch they show you what this is.

When it arrives at your door, this thing is going to arrive in a box that looks like this. If you don't like it, here's what you do. So it answers all these questions. It walks you through yourself having bought this product vicariously.

Brett:

Yeah, it kind of leads you through the process, right? I heard this great marketing analogy one time that people will not go physically where they haven't gone in their mind burst or where they haven't imagined themselves going. And I think that's what that page does. It shows, hey, this is what it's going to be like when it shows up in your doorstep and when you open the box, it's going to look like this because there's some unknowns. There's still some people out there that are a mattress shipped to me. Is this going to be like a giant box? Can I get it through my door?

Is it going to be, it's going to be messed up, damaged. That is a hurdle that will keep people from buying. But once they see that, okay, actually the box is not huge, it's all air compressed and then it puffs out. Once you open it, then they feel confident and say, okay, yeah, this makes sense.

Bill:

Yeah, they also took the risk away from the buyer by saying, if you're not happy, put it back on the porch. You don't have to put it in the box. We'll do that, put it back on the porch and call us.

Brett:

Which I love that too, because that's the other thing. And then sometimes why I don't buy things or what gives me hesitation from buying things on Amazon. I know Amazon will take it back. I know I can return it. I don't want to. I've got stuff in my house that I knew I wasn't going to use, but I'm like, ah, it's too much words to return.

This who sits in my closet, or I give it away to somebody, which is fun, but that creates a hesitation. If I don't want this mattress, you mean I got to box what I got to compress it and box it up? No, just put it on the porch. We'll take care of it. Love that.

Bill:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The next tip would be trip wires. I think anyone who's doing a quiz is doing this. So something short of a purchase that I can do to segment those who were very interested. And now with GA four, maybe that's just in GA four, okay, they looked at this, they looked at five products that were all the color of red or something, and you can just track that as an event. But if you're doing a trip wire, like a quiz, then they're serious, they're curious, they, they're bounce, but they just didn't purchase yet.

So now we've isolated that group. We can go after that group with better messaging and okay, why didn't you buy? Maybe you need a sale. Maybe you had an objection or an FAQ or something like that. And then avoid paralysis by analysis. So don't give me one product unless you sell just one product, unless there's one obvious hero product. Give me three products or maybe some product categories guide me. Remember that sales rep like, Hey, what's the most popular? That's where I want to go. Don't make me think, don't give me 30 products. Give me a reasonable amount for what you sell and what your brand is and your category. And okay, I'll figure it out from there.

Matt:

And speaking about guiding me, I think that's another benefit that comes from the quizzes that you just talked about. So the obvious benefit of the quizzes, ultimate obviously when they go through all the options, they fill out all the questions at the end, it'll ask for their email address and that's where you send them the result. So the brand gets the email address and the user gets the result. But the other benefit of that is you're guiding the user to a product that is best for them based on the results that they gave. So I know there's this skincare brand called Curology that's a huge part of their system. They really just make custom skincare routines. So based on the inputs that you put in, do you have greasy, oily skin? Are you prone to acne? Things like that, what are you looking for? They're going to send you a bundle that is tailored just to you. I've seen this work for supplements companies, hair care companies as well. What are you looking for? What color is your hair? Things like that. And it tailors and guides the user to what is going to be best for them, which obviously helps the brand in terms of getting the user to the product that they're most likely to buy, but also helps the user because it's getting them a product that's most likely to best work for them. So

Brett:

Yeah, I love that example of quizzes and guiding someone to the right choice. And I think one of the tips that I would have, and actually I've got four and they all actually do start with the letter C bill, how crazy is that? But one of them is confidence. We've got to instill confidence in the shopper before they're going to make a purchase. And I love the example of Madison Reed and for former client, but we help them grow on Google and YouTube, but they are at home hair color. And so they've got this quiz, it's like a personal hair care consultant. And this is a very important thing. I've a lot of ladies in my family that color their hair and this is not something to take lightly. It's not like, yeah, I'll just try this if turns my hair. Weird color, no big deal.

Some people do want a crazy color and that's awesome, but they want the color they want and they don't want to get this wrong. And that's why a lot of people go to the salon and pay hundreds of dollars for the coloring. But at Madison Reed you can get it refresher the price and you do it at home, but they've got this color consultant, you take the quiz and it's very thorough, but it's still easy to fill out. And at the end, not only are they increasing satisfaction by delivering the right product, but they're giving you confidence in the process to say, ah, I was just asked the right questions and now I'm confident that what is going to be delivered to me is going to be right. And so then people actually make the purchase. So I love that.

Bill:

Now's how you've got visibility into that customer group.

And this could be a whole nother podcast on segmenting your cohorts, but yes, now it's like, okay, so you're male and you have dark hair, now I know how to talk to you.

Brett:

And so exactly, all kinds of segmentation there. If they don't purchase now, you know how to remarket to them. Or if they have their email now you know how to email them. You so many benefits there. Another thing, and you really alluded to this bill, but I'm going to kind of clarify maybe just a little bit, but congruent. I think the experience need to be congruent where if you made a promise or an offer on the video or on the display ad, in the display ad that you created, that needs to be front and center on the landing page. If you're talking about a holiday promotion or a Mother's Day promotion, that needs to be clearly visible.

If you had a look and a style and a tone in the video, that look and style and tone needs to be on the landing page because the first thing someone's going to say just like when they walk in the door of a retail store is, am I in the right place? And so you got to have that congruent experience between ad and landing page. And then I think that the two other Cs that I'll just throw out really quickly is it needs to be convincing. It needs to overcome those objections and really handle anything that's lingering or any objections to buy. And it needs to be compelling. It needs to promise that benefit, bring all those things to life enough to make someone say, yes, I'm going to purchase. Awesome stuff. Guys, this has been amazing. Just a couple of quick things here as we get close to wrapping it up.

Where do you usually suggest people start, right? So we run a lot of YouTube traffic, a lot of search traffic. Google shopping are now more performance max. But where should someone start? Should they start by building dedicated landing pages? Should they start by optimizing their product detail pages? Should they work on their homepage? What advice or what thoughts do you guys have there?

Bill:

That's a great question. So yeah, it's kind of recommending a supplement to someone who doesn't exercise and doesn't sleep supplement. Should I pay? Well, tell me what you were trying to do, but you got to do the basics. So if your homepage needs work, I mean, go after that. Go after the product page, do the lowest hanging. It's always going to be the most ed page, right? It's always going to be, yeah, page, get yourself a video going. A dedicated landing page is third, fourth, somewhere even further down the list.

Do the basics. But then by that time, you've got enough content and enough to kind of pull from these assets and it's like, okay, the U G C, the FAQs, the video, the banner header. And I would say also I come from e-commerce development and we talk about minimal minimum viable product and working iteratively. I've met, I have friends who worked for two years on their store and didn't launch it, and I'm like, why? Oh, there's a misspell over here. I'm like, are you kidding me? Get that thing out there and start generating revenue and iterate as you go. Just write. I don't just go to chat G p T and have that thing. Write your landing page and prop it up and then start to, I'm not I, that was an exaggeration. Do a little more than that, sorry. But just start to get something out there and then start to plug in your assets and get traffic to it and test and things like that. So work iteratively, but just start with copy, then get some images in there and get a video in there and go from there. I like it. What about you, Matt?

Matt:

Yeah, no, I totally agree with what Bill said. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect when you launch it. The important thing is that you're just in the initial stage is starting to collect some data and like Bill said, you can iterate from there and you can ab test from there. Maybe you have the version, but then you spin up a secondary version where you split traffic 50 50 and you see what version does better. Maybe that original version that you thought wasn't as good as this next page is actually performs better than that new page does. So it's always something that you can be testing. But in terms of where to start as it comes to homepage, product pages, dedicated landers, I agree with what Bill said, and you alluded to Brett, your homepage is always going to be your most visited page, not just on the ad side most often, but all your organic traffic is tending to go to your homepage, your direct traffic, when people type in brand name.com, that's usually going to your homepage.

So I'd really think you got to start there. From there, I'd make sure your product pages look good, because shopping ads, performance max ads, a lot of this is going to be driving to your product pages and that's where the bottom of the funnel and middle of funnel traffic really lives. And I'd like to start from there. Establish a firm foundation and then at that point develop your dedicated landers where your YouTube top of funnel traffic can send potentially your remarketing traffic. Search traffic can go to those pages as well. But start with the low-hanging fruit, like you guys said.

Brett:

That's awesome. And so I'll give just a couple examples here of pages that I think you should check out. And then we're going to talk about a free resource that is in development right now, but by the time you listen to this, it'll be available. So Matt talked about dedicated landing pages later. That's the pages you use for top of funnel Facebook or YouTube traffic love Boom by Cindy Joseph and their five makeup tips for older women. We've sent literally tens of millions of dollars worth of ad traffic to that page and it's Covered. And so it's very simple. Starts with five makeup tips for older women and then has some celebrity social proof and some other social proof and then great offers. And it's a brilliant page, so we'll link to it. You should definitely check that out. Actually, I think the celebrity has been removed.

Yeah. Oh, you're right. The celebrity has been removed, but they did have a celebrity, and I don't can't say it, but there may be a celebrity there or there was a celebrity there who was very well known. And yeah, she was on friends. She was on Lisa Cdre or Courtney Cox, if that helps. And I may or may not have had a monster crush on her as a teenager when I was watching that show Totally places. I know you're my age. It does. But I also, Monica, I thought all three friends were amazing. So yeah, great. Dedicated later should definitely check it out. And when it comes to homepage, I'll shout out another one that that's owned by Ezra Firestone, overtone coloring conditioner. So if you want your hair pink or blue or green, this is color depositing conditioner that's temporary. Their landing or their homepage is beautiful.

It answers all the questions. It shows the product. It's got social proof, it's got all the elements we really just talked about, which is a great one. And then we're going to link to a bunch more because I know one, you're potentially driving or working out, and so you can't capture all of these. But let's talk this free resource. Fellas, all three of us have been collaborating on this. It's going to be Dino Mite, but what is our free resource Bill? You want to kind of plug this real quick?

Bill:

Yeah, you bet. So we are offering with this podcast a swipe file of our favorite landing pages. So these aren't necessarily ones that we work on, brands that we work on, but just showcasing anything we've seen over the years on the internet, students of landing pages, great branding and getting people from, I've never heard of you two, I want to buy right now. Yeah. And a number of these are clients. I think we have worked with them and help them grow their, they're marketing, but a of just people we shop and love and admire and respect. And so anything else you would want to say about this? Matt? Plug this resource. I mean, Matt, the Playmaker s slave maker had a hand in this guide, in this swipe file. So I think people should get it for that reason alone. Absolutely.

Matt:

No, I think just to go along with what Bill said, it covers every industry and it covers every need. So whether you're looking for product pages, how can you improve your product pages, dedicated landing pages, your homepage, it covers all those. And then depending on your different goals, so if your goal for your campaign is to drive sales, there's landing pages that cover that. If your goal is to drive lead submissions, like the boom example that Brett was talking about, there's really good examples for that as well. So regardless of what industry you're in, business size, things like that, there's an example for you.

Brett:

Yeah, so check it out, request that you can go to the show notes of this show or also look on the guidesPage@ogcommerce.com and you can find the landing page, swipe file and guide. And just a closing thought here as we wrap up. I think there's very little that can change the math and change the results of your advertising, of your campaigns, like a landing page, if your conversion rates are not great, and e-commerce standards are in that one to 3% range. Typically, brands that are really scaling have landing pages that Cover a little bit higher than that. But it does depend on a number of factors. If conversion rates are not great, focus on those landing pages. It will pay off in spades. And when you get it all working together, awesome ads, great targeting, great campaigns, end landing pages, then that's when the magic happens.

So Any closing thoughts, gentlemen?

Bill:

Sure. Yeah. So one closing thought. Make sure to understand. I said at the beginning, your client, or sorry, your client, your customer's pain point and understand their skepticism. I think FAQs are kind of a commodity. We think, oh, faq, that's just the throwaway thing at the bottom with the accordion interactivity there. But think about that. People have a reason they almost aren't going to buy from you. I've even seen on a jeans website after purchase the question, the post-purchase questionnaire, why did you almost not buy? And it's like, whoa. That's a great question. Yeah, love that. That's a bold question. But you're getting these questions through your chat on your onsite chat, and that's stuff, if you're getting these questions, collect them and figure out the common questions and then figure out the answers because your customers have these questions. And that can be just right there on the landing page.

Matt:

Yeah, I'd say when thinking about the value of landing pages, think of what is the value of improving your conversion rate from 3% to 5%. That could be the difference of 3 million of revenue to $5 million in revenue. So the best brands that we work with in terms of success are the ones that are constantly iterating and constantly moving the needle and trying new things in terms of landing pages. So whether it's AB testing, their homepage, their product pages, they're always testing some element, whether it's new images, videos, copy length, things like that. So don't be afraid to dive in and don't put it on the back burner. Don't think that this isn't really all that important or that you really just need to be focusing on the ads. All that is really important. But like we talked about earlier, you can be reaching all the right people with all the right ads, but if you're not sending 'em to a page that is likely to Cover them, it's not going to matter that much in the end. So

Brett:

True, true. Thank you, gentlemen. Awesome stuff. Much appreciated. And hey, we would like to hear from you. If you got a couple minutes, we'd love that review on iTunes or wherever you consume podcasts and or shoot us a note, man. It would make our day to see a note from our amazing listeners. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Khierstyn Ross has made a name for herself by successfully launching products and brands on Kickstarter. However, the crowdfunding landscape has significantly changed in recent years, particularly on Kickstarter. It is NOT the same world it was in 2019.

While the barrier to entry for launching a successful project has become higher, it's still a good fit for many clients.

In addition to helping brands on Kickstarter, Khierstyn is also a pro at helping companies grow on Amazon. She's mastered the art of launching new products and pre-sells on Amazon.

Here's a look at what we cover:

• What products do well on Kickstarter, and what products usually flop?
• What kind of $ do you need to invest for a successful Kickstarter launch?
• When to launch a new product on Shopify vs. Kickstarter.
• How to build a brand on Amazon.
• What kind of results should you expect when launching on Kickstarter?

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Launch and Scale
• Khierstyn Ross (LinkedIn)
• Khierstyn Ross (Twitter)
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

‍

Transcript:

Brett:

Hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we have a return guest on the show and we're talking about what's new, what's working with Kickstarter launches, and also deciding to even want to do a Kickstarter launch because they're not just for people who are brand new or brands that are brand new. They can also be effective for brands that are mostly built on Amazon and want to build off of Amazon. And so can talk about lots of strategies and ideas and fun stuff. My guest today is Khierstyn Ross and she is the chief brand builder at Launch and Scale Launch and scale.co. And she's been on the show before. It was so much fun. I had to have her back. It's been like, it's been three years though, right? Khierstyn has been three years since we chatted last on the podcast.

Khierstyn:

I think so. It feels like yesterday. Yes. But I know you're one of my favorite podcasters, so I'm very excited for her

Brett:

Today. Awesome. We appreciate that. And we actually got to, so yeah, and the interview was maybe three years ago, but last year we got to hang out I r l as they say, as the kids like to say, in real life at Cap Con five, shout out to Ryan Daniel Moran. So that was cool getting to see each other in person. I know. But man, a lot has changed. A lot has changed since that first interview and what works and what doesn't. On, on Kickstarter, would you want to give a quick update? What, what's shifted, what's changed? What's working or not working on Kickstarter today compared to in the past?

Khierstyn:

Man? I mean everything and nothing is the same. Yes. I remember if you're watching this and you have heard me talk about Kickstarter in the past, you'll know I was like, everyone should do Kickstarter. And that I think was like 20 19, 20 20. And now that we're recording this in 2023, I've actually gone public to say that most people shouldn't be using Kickstarter. And I think that's a good follow up, a comment.

Brett:

It's a bold to say when you built your, I know you guys do a lot more than Kickstarter now, but you got to build your agency on Kickstarters. That's a pretty bold thing for you to state.

Khierstyn:

Yeah. But I guess the reason I did that was because I got to a point, I think it was November, 2022 or 21 that I went public on my birthday to say, I'm leaving Kickstarter. And that doesn't mean I don't do Kickstarter campaigns, but it was a bold statement because I felt that for the last few months we kept launching products based on the Kickstarter success formula products that should have worked. And late in 20 20, 20 21, we weren't seeing the kind of success with our students that we should have been seeing. We would be building the audience the way that you're supposed to. We would be doing engagement campaigns, we would be making sure they were great products. And Kickstarter campaigns for new brands started to not do as well as they used to. And that started me asking the question of, is it me? Is it us or it has something changed in the market?

So I ended up going public because I discovered that as Kickstarter has evolved over time, it's gone through some astronomical changes in how it's originally supposed to be used. And Kickstarter, for those that aren't familiar with it, it's the world's largest crowdfunding platform. And crowdfunding on Kickstarter means that you have brands like new sellers or existing brands that want to use Kickstarter as a platform to launch new products and get pre-order sales from backers or Kickstarter audience. Kickstarters become one of the prime methods of funding new products because it gives you a chance to get your inventory paid for without having to fund it yourself, which is like that right there. Sign me up.

Brett:

But yeah, it's this weird dynamic too, and I know I've got lots of friends that have done this where successful brand you, but they're launching a new product, takes quite a bit of capital to launch certain new products. And so they launch on Kickstarter, they get this, all these preys and I can fund the development and whatnot. And for whatever reason, people love the idea of funding a Kickstarter or some people do way more than doing a pre-buy on other websites or, I know it depends, we'll talk about the nuances there, but yeah, in some respects, people are more willing to do that pre-buy on Kickstarter than elsewhere depending on a few factors.

Khierstyn:

Well, what's interesting is that Kickstarter campaigns have new products that aren't available anywhere else. So the difference with the Kickstarter traffic that you're getting is you have all these early adopters that are perusing the website for really cool innovative things that are not available anywhere else. And they're willing to take that chance even though there's a risk, they may not get their product for a couple of years. The, there's just something about being a Kickstarter backer and helping fund someone's dream. And

Brett:

You feel like you're an investor, right? You're committing buying something because you believe in it and you almost feel like you're an investor and yeah, you don't want it tomorrow or anything. You are, yeah, you're part of something bigger and something cool,

Khierstyn:

But there, there's just something special about that. And so Kickstarter's a really fun platform. You get high off the success of Kickstarter campaigns and doing it, but what has happened with Kickstarter, because it's such an attractive model for small businesses for financing without trading equity, is that it became this really, really oversaturated platform. And so you get to the point where with Kickstarter, there's so much attention for new products, for eyes, for launches that your product starts to get buried on their platform. And when you look at the strategy behind how to win on Kickstarter, you need to have the algorithm kind of pick up your project as a popular project and start to show you to more people. So if you're a Reddit user, it's kind of getting upvoted so that your post doesn't get buried in hundreds of other ones that'll never get seen by be one of the top ones.

It's the same sort of thing with Kickstarter. So when you look at the strategy that goes into setting yourself up for success, you need to have a pre-launch, which means you need to go in with an email list full of people ready to buy your product so that when you go live on Kickstarter, you have a really strong day one, and then Kickstarter's algorithm is going to be like, Ooh, that's a popular project. We should show this to more people. And then that's when you start to get traction and go viral. But the problem is when you have a platform that has become oversaturated, become so competitive, it means that what you as a creator have to put into your launch goes a lot higher. It means that the Firestone

Brett:

Fair to entry is much higher. You're competing in the big leagues, it's professional stuff now.

Khierstyn:

So layman's terms more competition, way more expensive to get started, way more expensive to get started. Suddenly you are risking capital for inventory and it means the price to play may not actually be worth it because a lot of campaigns end up leaving Kickstarter not able to buy their own inventory, which is a self-fulfilling problem because what if you do all this work, you're literally putting your startup at risk. So it's like it's a problem where we've seen campaigns just not hit the levels they want because that barrier has just been so high. So

Brett:

When you say someone's leaving Kickstarter, then are they going to a place like Indiegogo if that, I don't even know. I'm not paying attention to the space. What else are they doing if they're not launching on Kickstarter?

Khierstyn:

So if you're not launching on Kickstarter, Indiegogo is their little brother. So that's definitely a good possibility if it's a product fit. But typically what we do is we help people decide whether the crowdfunding model is right for them or if they just want to take a less risky approach and go to their own website. So we end up having a conversation with people who are like, look, if you're not Kickstarter, let's launch you on Shopify or even go straight to Amazon. But typically for us, we do brand building on Shopify if not,

Brett:

And I think that's the way to go. And what you and I were talking about for a lot of brands, a lot of companies, you and I were talking before we hit record, you're working with a number of brands where they've built their business on Amazon, they're 80 to 90% Amazon now they're wanting to build off of Amazon. And so in that case, you could look at something kickstart related, but likely Shopify. So I want to spend a little bit of time there because there was a period of time in OMGs growth where our agency, we were getting a ton of leads of people who said, Hey, we're 2 million, 3 million, 5 million, whatever brand on Amazon, but we need to diversify. We're nervous of having all our eggs in the Amazon baskets. We want to launch on Shopify. That's not always that easy though, right? There's like a different mindset, different pricing approach, different marketing model, different everything on Amazon versus your own store. So how do you help an Amazon brand or someone who's largely on Amazon, how do you help them achieve success off Amazon? And how do you navigate that Shopify versus Kickstarter discussion? Oh

Khierstyn:

My God, you've opened a can of worms here. Yeah.

Brett:

Yes. Sorry. That makes for good radio, good podcasting there.

Khierstyn:

Amazon sellers are, and this is just a blanket statement, but the way to be successful in Amazon is have a good product that has high enough search volume that you can use PPC to target certain keywords to get people who are what we call high intent, who, for example, I go to Amazon because I'm looking for magnesium supplements. So I am looking,

Brett:

These are really popular now, by the way. Yes. A couple years ago, I never heard anybody talk about magnesium, and I'm a supplement guy. I take all kinds of crazy weird stuff that I experiment with where it's at. But the magnesium train that's that bandwagon I should say, has really been picking up steam lately. So what are the benefits? Why are you taking magnesium? Quick side note here.

Khierstyn:

So I take magnesium because I train for triathlons and I Oh, wow, find that my muscles really tense up without magnesium. And so mag, there's something about the magnesium that helps my body, my muscles relax. And it's like, for example, I have this chronic pain on my shoulder here when I'm biking for longer than 60 minutes, and for some reason when I take magnesium, my muscles relax and I don't have that level of tension again. So

Brett:

Crazy. So there you've heard it here, folks. If you're training for a triathlon, get magnesium. So there you go.

Khierstyn:

Yeah, it's great. That was awesome memory, great four sleep mean, but there's also different kinds of magnesium depending on the purpose you want.

Brett:

Yeah, that's what I've seen. We've got a couple of big things of it. My wife bought some for our daughters, which has a special purpose. I don't know what it is, but yeah, I've taken a little bit of it and it also seems like I have a bit of a calming effect as well, potentially.

Khierstyn:

Yeah. Yeah.

Brett:

Awesome. Well, people didn't tune in to hear us talk about magnesium, but fun little. I've loved that little wrap rabbit trail there, so that that's good. But yeah, so you were talking about someone who sells on Amazon, they're dependent on search volume. Is that still how people discover products on Amazon by search? And so people go to Amazon searching for something. So you mentioned going there for magnesium, so I'll let you pick up the story there.

Khierstyn:

I go to Amazon, I search magnesium supplements for athletes or whatever, and it takes me to 10 pages. I scroll through the first five listings, I look at reviews, et cetera. I look at ingredients and I decide that's someone who's called a, it's high intention because I'm going there for something very specific, typing in keywords, finding a product based on ads and purchasing it because of social proof. That's it. The seller on Amazon generally, unless if you have a backup strategy, you're not collecting the customer information, you have no relationship with the customer, potentially this magnesium supplement is something that's not even a custom formula that you've created. It can potentially be white label that you've just slapped your own label on, and it's a commoditized product. There's no differentiation outside of that. Not all Amazon products are like that, of course, but that's typically what I see the Shopify seller. Typically where they thrive is, and this is why I kind of have beef with a lot of drop shipping products because drop shipping products are just one of a thousand that everyone else is selling and there's no differentiation. Totally.

So the first thing we need to look at in terms of getting success on Amazon is how have you differentiated yourself? Shopify products are very different because it's direct to consumer, meaning you need to sell based on a relationship. So you're starting to build your email list, you're starting to differentiate yourself through focusing on a specific customer through helping feel people emote. What does that mean? Getting people to feel something when they're using your product? There's just a whole different kind of psychology that goes into it because it's really the difference between you ordering on Uber Eats your dinner versus you going into a restaurant and getting served by having the relationship with the waiter and hearing about the story of how the restaurant got started and the experience of it. It's like, am I making sense?

Brett:

Totally. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And what's really interesting, and then we consult with a lot of Amazon brands as well, or people that are building brands on Amazon, off Amazon. And I think really the path to success now to, regardless of where you're selling is you've got to build a brand, you have to, that's it, differentiate. There has to be some personality to your brand, and there's still money to be made just by succeeding off of all the search appointments on Amazon and people trusting Amazon and not knowing your brand. But really I think that's short lived, and then I think it's really hard to then go off Amazon in that case. And yeah, one thing, I actually posted this on Twitter earlier this year. I said, Hey, if you had to build a brand right now, would you start on Shopify or would you start on Amazon?

And why? And it was heated, man. There was people, it was like 50 50 split people you knowing and debating and hurling insults at each other and mashing of teeth and all kinds of stuff, like deciding which is better. But it really depends, I think, on what your skillset is. I think if you can build a brand on Shopify first and you can attract those customers and build a following and then go on Amazon, that's even better. But not everybody has that skillset. But really I think what you're also saying is, but if you do launch on Amazon first, you still got to build that brand building skillset to have any success off of Amazon.

Khierstyn:

Yeah, because I think there's really, you can go both ways, but if it were me, I would do exactly what you said, launch on Shopify and then go to Amazon. Because if you're a new seller, new product, I want to understand if I have three star reviews on my product, I want to understand how much my customers love and do a controlled experiment, get that feedback, and then go to Amazon for round two, because I have to make sure that I have

Brett:

When you're there, reviews. Yeah.

Khierstyn:

And if you go to Amazon with a subpar product ev for a new product, and that's listing goodbye three stars, you're not selling anything.

Brett:

Totally. Totally. So that's awesome. So then as you're kind of having that discussion with somebody, when does it make sense for someone who's selling on Amazon to then use Kickstarter as one of their first things off Amazon? Well, when does that make sense?

Khierstyn:

Yeah. So there's different levels. The timer we've taken Amazon sellers to Kickstarter are twofold. One is when they already have a thriving Amazon business in one space and they decide to launch a new brand on Shopify. So they're starting for a new brand and they want to launch it on Kickstarter. We did this with Kelly Waits where they were multiple seven figure seller in one spa in strength training and stuff like that. And then they launched Fitness Bengals for women. They wanted to create a brand around that. So they went to Shopify to launch that. We did that with another Amazon seller who saw a new product market for, and I thought he was crazy when I first talked to him because he was launching a beard straightener for men. And I was like, he's a

Brett:

Straightener. Interesting.

Khierstyn:

And being an Amazon seller, he was so an he's so analytical, and he was like, look, we've done the research. Thousands of men buy women's hair straighteners to straighten their beer because there's nothing available. And so he sold me. I was like, okay, well, clearly I'm not your demographic, but he took, well, he again had a thriving Amazon business and decided to go to Kickstarter to launch ABER Light Pro, the new beard brand. And so that's like case one Amazon seller knows the ropes, wants to build a brand. We also have the other side where you have an Amazon seller that gets on Amazon and is ready and is profitable, has a kind of figured out and wants to then become available on Shopify, and they start to do a brand extension to start going multi-channel by building out their email list, their customer relations, getting super clear on their avatar, et cetera.

Brett:

Nice. And so let's talk about that a little bit. You know, talked about the barrier to getting launched on Kickstarter has gotten harder. Yeah. Well, let's say I'm, I've got a brand and I'm launching a new product and I want to use Kickstarter. What kind of email list am I needing to build? What kind of sales volume or interest volume am I going to need to get in that first one to two days or whatever, whatever that timeframe is? What does that look like now?

Khierstyn:

So if you're a new brand and you want to invest the money, we are working with a factory right now out of China that is building a North American brand, super cool case study. And I did the hard sell, not to do Kickstarter for them, but they're like, look, we want to raise $250,000. We have the capital, we want to do Kickstarter. I was like, cool. All right, you've passed all the tests, let's go. So getting them to do quarter million dollars, we are building their list up to about 10 to 15,000 people from zero.

Brett:

From zero, largely through Facebook ads, Instagram ads, things like that.

Khierstyn:

We're doing TikTok to Google, Facebook, but our top of funnel activities are going to be your Facebook, Instagram with remarketing. But anyway, so say 10 to 15,000 people on the list, building a social media following with that. And if we assume that our cost per lead is about $2 50 cents pre-launch for a qualified lead, then that is going to yield us about, on the first 36 hours, we want to be hitting about 20% of our overall goal. So I don't know what the math looks like,

Brett:

So Well, 20% of two 50 is 50. Yeah.

Khierstyn:

Yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Math is not my strong suit.

Brett:

Calculators are four and computers and all this,

Khierstyn:

And I'm charging my phone. But yeah, that's like we work backwards and we have a full cash flow forecast that we essentially after doing a, we'll do a market test before we onboard someone for a full launch. And based on that, we establish what the cost per lead is and then use that to build out a full launch projection in a marketing budget. So you can say, all right, if you want to go for 250,000 for a raise, this is what your list has to be. These are the average conversions we're expecting and this is what that expected investment's going to be. So

Brett:

Nice. Nice. Got it. Okay. But man, that's pretty good though. So you're getting leads, you're getting email captures for $2 and 50 cents. Yeah. So you're spending 40 K or whatever the case may be to get 15,000 email addresses, and that's enough then to get you started on Kickstarter. Yes. And then really the Kickstarter machine, the algorithm getting listed and stuff, that's what takes care of the rest basically.

Khierstyn:

And if you look at the breakdown of a hundred percent of funds at that volume, you're expecting Kickstarter's audience and give you about 20 to 30% of your total pledges. And then the rest come in from pre-launch if you're using an amplification service like gel op to advertise your campaign to their backer audience, it's pr, it's word of mouth, et

Brett:

Cetera. What was that? Wait, what was that tool you just used? I'm not familiar with that

Khierstyn:

One. I also gel OP is

Brett:

Gel op. How do you spell that? Yeah,

Khierstyn:

J E L L O P.

Brett:

Got it. So you can market your launch on that, and then you got influencers and people that may grab ahold of that and start promoting it and talking about it and stuff. So

Khierstyn:

I love Jello because the results just speak for themselves, but they are a marketing agency that specializes in Kickstarter launches. But the difference is that where we are a marketing agency that helps people build up for a successful Kickstarter campaign by doing the pre-launch, the marketing, we start the fire, and then J Op is a great, what I call an amplification service because in exchange for say 15% of the pledges that they bring in, they're going to take over as your Facebook advertisers and market your project to their database in exchange for a commission.

Got it. With that. Got it. So we tend to, because if you really look at how Kickstarter marketing companies are built, a lot of them take, and it's completely varies, but they'll take 10 to 20% of your raise total because they're marketing your project to this huge backer community. And a lot of the big agencies have that. And I decided early on that I didn't want to be doing that. So we would rather just come in and help people start the fire and partner up with a company like Jup during the launch if a company wants to take it to that next level.

Brett:

Nice. Nice. Very cool. Yeah. Okay, great. And then do you ever do a combo where you're doing some stuff on Kickstarter, some stuff on Shopify? If so, what does that look like?

Khierstyn:

Yeah, so not at the same time. Kickstarter is very clear that they can be the only place that you're selling the product. Got it,

Brett:

Got it.

Khierstyn:

But what that will look like is if you do a Kickstarter launch, you can then after your 30 or 60 day campaign finishes, you can continue pre-orders on Shopify.

Brett:

Nice.

Khierstyn:

Okay. You want to do that.

Brett:

Are there times in when you just recommend, Hey, let's just do a big pre-launch on Shopify, and I know you don't get the boost of all the eyeballs that are on Kickstarter. Maybe you can't use gel up in that case and stuff, but when do you advise someone just to do your next product launch on Shopify, even if you're trying to get a lot of pre-orders and maybe even trying to fund the product development and stuff?

Khierstyn:

Yeah, great question. The questions I ask to make sure if Kickstarter is the right fit for someone versus Shopify is the first step I look at is the product. So more and more now you have to look and see if you're essentially launching products around for the Kickstarter audience. So because you're in large part needing to make sure that you're getting a huge 20% of your pledges come from Kickstarter, so you should make sure it's a product fit for them. So I look at that and if I'm like, okay, design projects, tech, gaming, those tend to be the big categories. So if it's a product fit and has a great track record on Kickstarter, Kickstarter can be an option. Cool. Question number two, what are you wanting to invest in doing a launch? Okay, so that's where when we looked at the numbers of say the factory that is spending $60,000, $70,000 in pre-launch between the video ad spend, marketing fees, et cetera, to yield 250,000, they're willing to pay that price because they want the big social proof, they want the big list. But I tell that to eight out of 10 entrepreneurs and they can't stomach that,

Brett:

Right? So that's a big investment because there's no guarantee you'll build the right size list. So no gear, there's no guarantee it'll get funded. So it's a pretty big chunk of capital to put out there.

Khierstyn:

Yeah. So that's question number two is like, look, this is what it costs to go to Kickstarter. What kind of a launch do you want? And if they're like, that's my marketing, and

Brett:

Is that kind of the normal, is it like 60 K to launch on Kickstarter? I'm assuming you probably do it for a little bit less, but what is the threshold there to get launched on Kickstarter?

Khierstyn:

If we say the average that you want to go for is six figures, assume you're going to put in about 40 if you're starting from zero. Okay.

Brett:

Yeah. Got it, got it. Okay.

Khierstyn:

And some people are like, cool, I have investors ready to go. But if you're that Shopify brand that you're serious, but you would rather have a smaller launch than what I would advise you do is instead of spending 40 k building up an email list that you can't convert for three months as you're building up, and if you want to go straight to Shopify and spend your money to get orders right away, then we recommend that you do a smaller controlled launch and do a pre-order campaign on your own website.

Brett:

Got it. At that point. And then how any tips or suggestions or Shopify plugins or something to make that pre-order successful because they're some people that don't like to do, but are you positioning like this, you would a Kickstarter launch and try to build a ton of excitement around it, but you're doing it all through Shopify instead of Kickstarter?

Khierstyn:

So couple ways you can do that. It's less about the apps you use unless if you want to stage a crowdfunding campaign on your own website, there's an app called crowdfunder on Shopify that you can use. So that is a good one. We typically haven't replicated crowdfunding on Shopify sites. Just, I don't know why we just haven't, but the typical, I think that there's more flexibility with your Shopify launch. So we just finished one where we had a $20,000 first month for a baby product. Now we decided after doing market testing with MoVI that we didn't want to go to Kickstarter because it's a baby product for newborns that can only be used in the first 12 months of life. And when we look at the Kickstarter demographic, it's just too narrow of a niche to get the volume that we would hope on Kickstarter. And if MoVI had gone to Kickstarter, they would've ended up driving 95% of the sales. So at that point they're like, we would rather just launch on our own website.

Brett:

That's great. So yeah, so talk about that for a minute. Who is the Kickstarter demo? Does it skew slightly mailed? I know you said tech and electronics and stuff like that are big there. What does that demographic look like?

Khierstyn:

Expect it's like 25 to 45 ish. They're early adopters, which can literally be anyone at this point, but 25 to 45. So you're looking at that millennial crowd, you are looking at people who like gadgets household, it is like a split more 60 40 these days of male female. But when you look at is my project, is my product even like a fit? I would just go to Kickstarter and in their search bar type in, okay, watches. Oh, watches are a great category, coffee maker. Oh, awesome. Diapers

Brett:

Less. Nope,

Khierstyn:

Nope.

Brett:

Who wants to fund the diaper? You want to wait till the last possible minute to buy diapers typically, unless it's watching your baby for you or something. Yeah. So that totally makes sense.

Khierstyn:

So something that they're products that servee a wide market. There's an insole that we worked with that helps with knee pain. They wanted to go to Kickstarter, but we're like, ah, I don't know if that's the demographic. So we did a market test and turned out that we were right with their demographic. It was like 55 and up people who suffer from knee osteoarthritis. And that's just too specific. And the demographics are just too old for us, too old. I say old, but it's just too old for the, it's totally

Brett:

Good. It's audience, it's not a match, it's just not a fit. The millennials on Kickstarter. Yeah, yeah.

Khierstyn:

Got it. Exactly. Got

Brett:

It. Okay, cool. So what are you doing to overcome any, so let's talk about, again, launching pre-orders on Shopify. What are you doing to overcome that resistance that some people will have to pre-ordering stuff?

Khierstyn:

Great question. So full transparency number one. Yeah, it, it's really interesting because we had two launches last month that were really good. And then one of the products keeps selling and the other stopped. And when I looked at the websites, the big difference was transparency in shipping. So for some reason, one of the launches decided to not put a pending shipping date on their website while the other one did. And so when I was like, oh, I think know what happened, you need to be be very clear with people ships in July. So number one, you need to be upfront and make sure that people know what to expect. Number two, don't start taking pre-orders until you are confident in your manufacturing timeline. I mean, you started manufacturing or it's on a boat, you need to be confidently eight maximum 10 weeks away from being able to fulfill.

Brett:

Got it. So that's the threshold any more than eight to 10 weeks and not going to happen.

Khierstyn:

We have one product right now that we keep pushing off the launch date because the, it's just like to get to that point where they're finally starting production, they're just like, the sample has to be finalized or there's one little step before we can start production. And we're like, no, we need production to be locked in because last thing you want is to have to tell people five times, really sorry, customers were delayed again. So if you could be as close to the process, better off to keep, just get to market faster and stuff,

Brett:

It really makes sense. There was this coffee maker that was really successful, I think it was on Kickstarter, and it was kind of unique, used centrifugal force to brew the coffee in, you know, could program it and then connect it with Alexa and all these other things. And I was so excited about it and it, it'll do a full shots of espresso or do a single cup of coffee or do a full pot of coffee, super versatile. But they kept having a push back the shift date four or five times something. I mean, I'm just making up a number, but it was a lot and people were losing their minds. It was so unique, so interesting that some people were sticking around, but a lot of people weren't. So yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. For most products. People are not going to want to get the date pushed back any, that's certainly not a few times. So yeah, do this when you're confident that you know what the ship date's going to be.

Khierstyn:

Yeah. But surprisingly you don't get a lot of refunds and this nice plus depend on you being good at communicating delays and how you deliver it. Yeah, of course. But those are really, what are

Brett:

You doing to, are you discounting so that someone wants to buy now? And if so, how much to get someone to say, Hey, you are, you're doing a pre-order shipping in July or whenever, but you get these perks, these benefits, these bonuses, these discounts, what does that usually look like?

Khierstyn:

So people need a reason to buy now. And so I think the pre-order offer is really important because why would I buy now when it's higher risk wait and supposed to wait? Exactly. So there's a couple things you could do. We typically do a larger discount than we would typically expect. You can get super fancy with this, but one that we did for MoVI was 20% off and we kept it simple. You could do things like offer a free accessory with all pre-orders, do something more of value to entice people to buy during a pre-order stage. It's slightly different from a Kickstarter sales strategy because on Kickstarter you have the ly bird rewards where you have 50% off door Crashers special if you buy in the first day. And then day two is a different offer. And then it's it, it's just different. But I like having pre-orders say the first week you get a certain discount, et cetera.

Brett:

But so even if it's on Shopify, you making the offer, the pre-launch offer a little bit different from week to week to again, build some urgency there

Khierstyn:

If you can do that. Otherwise you will see your sales are going to be big in the first week and then nothing for two or three weeks until Mother's Day comes up. And then you do another sale and then your sales spike. People do need a reason to buy and your sales cycle will ebb and flow, but you can help people by giving a good pre-launch offer.

Brett:

Very cool. Very cool. That's awesome. Any other guidance or tips on, do I really focus on building with Shopify or building with Kickstarter? We covered a lot of ground, but any kind of final thoughts there or final tips?

Khierstyn:

If I were launching our next product, I would start on Shopify. I would build an audience. I would keep our costs down. I would do some paid ads. I would scale that way. And then after I have a bit of an audience, I would go to Kickstarter for product two, product three. Got it. That's what I would do. I wouldn't start with Kickstarter unless if I were a funded startup, had something truly unique and stuff. But I prefer just to go direct and ask for the sale because when you close and you ask people to buy your product, that's when you're going to get the most objections. That's when the most learning happens. And that's I think how you're quickly able to figure out how to make something work as opposed to a slow build of a Kickstarter in the beginning.

Brett:

Yeah, I really like that. And we're seen it successful. And again, don't, we're not involved in Kickstarter campaigns, but have had a few clients who very established multiple seven figure eight figure brands, but they launch a new product and they've got a huge audience and a huge following and they want to do the Kickstarter thing. It creates a buzz, it creates excitement. Great. They get some funding and that works, but they've got a hundred thousand person email list or whatever and so they can make it happen. Do that. Yeah, pretty easily. Yeah, totally makes sense. Awesome. So Khierstyn, if people are listening to this and they say, man, I want to know what launch and scale can do for me. I want to know what Khierstyn and team can do. Talk a little bit about your agency, what you guys offer, and then how people can get in touch with you.

Khierstyn:

So we are full service agency. What I mean by that is we hyper focus on early stage brand building. So if you are a seven figure Amazon seller and you want to get stuff to work on your Shopify site, we specialize in helping you figure out how to get the fire going. So we do it through paid ads, conversion rate optimization, and email marketing to essentially handle all sides of the funnel so that we can start to build your audience and go from there. So that's number one. And if you're looking for more like mentorship, et cetera, we do have online programs to help

Brett:

With Nice two. And is all of that available to learn more discover@launchandscale.co?

Khierstyn:

Yes, it is what groups

Brett:

As well? Okay.

Khierstyn:

Yep, you got it.

Brett:

Sweet. Is that the product Launchpad? Is that the training?

Khierstyn:

Yeah, product Launchpad is our, and we actually have a $1 trial on that. Look at

Brett:

That $1

Khierstyn:

Trial can try before you buy. It's a no-brainer deal. But yeah, we find our sweet spot is agency. When we work with founders who are serious about building brands, I absolutely love it. So we work with all kinds of products. It's super awesome.

Brett:

That is a ton of fun. And you got a podcast as well, right? Are you still Podcasty or did you switch to the YouTubes?

Khierstyn:

So the podcast is more where we, YouTube is number one and we end up publishing most of the audio to the

Brett:

Got it, got it, got it. So you're you, youre for YouTube first and then the

Khierstyn:

YouTube's not baby. Yeah.

Brett:

Got it. It. Excellent. Any YouTube tips for the people at home? Cause I know there's some brands, I do hear this more now where people are wanting to, I just opened your YouTube channel, so I just heard you come through the computer here. But any tips on YouTube? Someone brands wanting to build their presence on YouTube organic, any tips or suggestions there?

Khierstyn:

YouTube shorts.

Brett:

YouTube shorts.

Khierstyn:

But on video, actually, this is a question for almost a question for you, but yeah, terrific. We get most of our traffic from YouTube because we go heavy into search volume or and seo. So if you are a brand, some of the easiest and best content you can do is being where people are searching for. So probably my best YouTube tip is if you are, we're launching a product to help women with bladder incontinence. So if she can create videos on what is bladder incontinence, best tips for bladder incontinence, pelvic floor exercises four. So what I'm doing is I'm looking at the problem my product solves and getting into the mind of my customer to think what are some things that content they're searching for to solve that problem. And by you building a content strategy and videos that answer that question on YouTube, you are able to get in front of them.

That's probably, I love YouTube so much because you can essentially plug yourself into where people are by being smart with search as opposed to TikTok, which is more trends and lifestyle things. I think that there's like, if you want predictable traffic, getting onto the YouTube bandwagon is probably the best thing. But I actually don't know if you can answer this, but our long form videos, we have the keyword research and titles, we've kind of figuring that out and that that's good for us. But short form videos, do those play heavily into SEO these days with that search intent? Yeah,

Brett:

So that's a great question. The short answer is I'm not sure. So I'm a YouTube ads guy, I understand organic to a certain degree, but I lean on friends like Liz Jermain who's been on the podcast a couple of times. I know for us we, I've been posting YouTube shorts mostly just clips from the podcast or clips from me speaking at events. And they've done pretty well. They've done pretty well on YouTube shorts. I do love the fact that YouTube organic grows over time and one video can be better a year from now than it is today even, and still generate leads and stuff where there are very few things probably that have the rapid scale potential that's available, the viral factor that that's there with TikTok, but it's usually kind of a flash in the pan, right? You got to keep cranking out content all the time.

Yeah. So what I've heard though is you kind of need to do both the long form content and something that's going to be keyword optimized where it's showing up in search, other content where you're just, you're falling kind of a series of ideas. And so then it's showing up in the recommendations engine and then you pull from all of that to create shorts and then the shorts can kind of feed everything. So that's kind of my understanding. Yeah. But again, I'm just kind of saying what other people have taught me. I'm not an expert on YouTube organic.

Khierstyn:

Yeah, I think this is definitely do your research, but I saw Neil Patel, he's the SEO guy. He

Brett:

Is the SEO guy. No doubt.

Khierstyn:

I did see a short about how when you start to type in things in Google, short form videos are starting to show up as answers to that. So actually

Brett:

Interesting. Yeah. Shorts are showing up in the search. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, especially if you're answering your question. If I get that question answered in under 60 seconds, that's better than watching a full format minute video or something. Even though Google's getting pretty good, I like just saying, Hey, your answer is starting at this point of the video, and they'll just show you that, which is great. But I love the idea that that shorts can be answers to questions as well. So it

Khierstyn:

Means from that smart, I would assume that having SEO in your short strategy is probably the best way to get qualified traffic. Because our best customers come when they're searching for something. So we have a client who is doing so well, but on YouTube shorts, et cetera, but she sells a mindfulness journal, and that is she can easily tap into what is mindfulness, breathing tips for meditation. She can whatever it is that her target audience is search searching for, she can build content around that show up in their feed, they find out she has a journal, they buy the journal, and it's just, those are probably the best leads because you end up nurturing and qualifying through your content as opposed to dancing on video on TikTok. And they're like, oh wait, you sell journals?

Brett:

Yeah, okay. It's like, yeah. Or they don't even notice. They don't even notice your name or anything. They just see you dancing and they're entertained. But that's it. Yeah,

Khierstyn:

I love TikTok, but in terms of search intent and getting organic traffic through a good content strategy, that's probably where we really shine with that.

Brett:

Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Cool. So you can find it all out and more@launchandscale.co. Khierstyn has been a ton of fun, really enjoyed it. Thanks for taking the time. And until we do this again,

Khierstyn:

I know. Well, thank you for your time. This was awesome.

Brett:

Absolutely. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear from you. So give us feedback on this episode. Give us feedback on the show in general. We'd love to get that five star review on iTunes if you feel like we've earned it. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Liz Germain is a YouTube PRO and a repeat guest on the show! We first met when I was speaking at an eCommerce event held at the YouTube LA Offices. 

Liz is responsible for well over 200 million organic views on YouTube and has worked and consulted with some of the top influencers online today. 

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• The three types of content you should create on YouTube and how to approach each.
• How search-driven views only account for less than 10% of total watch time on the platform.
• The 4 phases of creating a massive following on YouTube.
• The metrics YouTube cares about and you should obsess over.
• How YouTube ads and YouTube organic do NOT mix, but how you can still leverage both for growth.

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• YouTubeGrowthHacks.com
• ChannelAmplifier.com
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

‍

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we have a return guest. I've been looking forward to this podcast episode for three plus years, and it's finally here, and I'm excited, and you should be excited as well. So we have one of the foremost experts on YouTube organic growth. If you listened, if you've been a longtime lister, you'll remember her first episode. I've got Liz Jermaine on the show today. She's the CEO and founder of Vidfluence and the creator of the Channel Amplifier Program. She is a superstar. She's helped a ton of names that you would know that we can't necessarily mention on this podcast, grow their YouTube following, and we're going to talk about how you can do that by following these tips and these pieces of advice, the sage wisdom that Liz is going to lay out here for us. So with that intro, Liz, welcome to the show. How's it going? And thanks for taking the time.

Liz:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me back. I always love to come and talk to especially e-commerce brands because I feel like YouTube is often an untapped market, so I really appreciate you bringing me back on.

Brett:

It is untapped. Yeah, so we, as you well know, and as most listeners know, we focus a lot on YouTube ads, and I love the YouTube ad space. It's continued to grow. I think it's an opportunity like no other in the ad space, but most e-commerce companies aren't doing that either, and they're certainly not investing in the organic side. But there have been a few occasions, a few occasions we had one and still have a barbecue client, and they invest in organic content, and then we also run ads. We keep them separate, which we'll talk about later, but the combination of the two is very, very powerful. And so we're going to get into that a little bit today. So Liz, give us your background for those that don't know, how did you become a YouTube master?

Liz:

Yeah, great question. So I am a YouTuber, first and foremost, and happened been for a very long time. My very first channel was in the health and fitness space for women. So we sold a bunch of digital products, membership sites, meal plans, guides, things of that nature for workouts and lifestyle for females all over the world. Really at one point we had over a hundred thousand women in those programs from 32 different countries around the world.

Brett:

Cool. Is that channel still active? Are you still actively posting there?

Liz:

I have not posted in over two years, but it still brings in leads. It still brings in absence revenue, and that's one of my favorite things about YouTube organic is that when you put the videos up that are the right types of videos, they have the potential to continue to produce results for you even after you stop posting. So I have direct firsthand experience with that, and that's really how I got kind of my initial YouTube entry point. But that's certainly not the only channel that I've worked on at this point. We've helped, oh gosh, I don't even know, probably several hundred other coaches, experts, influencers, authors, speakers, all kinds of people, even e-commerce brands, real estate agents, lawyers, I mean, you name it, there's probably a vertical for you on YouTube. And at this point I feel like almost like an encyclopedia of strategy based on industry because the patterns themselves will reveal themselves over time on what works and what doesn't work.

And so it's been a really cool evolution journey from going from health and fitness space just for women to expanding out. The second channel we worked on was in the van life space, and that channel grew significantly faster, not making all the beginner mistakes that we made on the first one. And then from there, we've helped all kinds of different people in pretty much every industry you could think of. So yeah, YouTube is the place to be, and part of that is due to what I've seen and firsthand experience is that evergreen nature of high quality content.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. Good quality YouTube content just gets better with age, it grows and it can continue to get views and drive action For years and years, and we were talking a little bit before you record, I I'm posting more often on social, so if you want to follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram and YouTube shorts and stuff. But I have a lot of friends that post on TikTok or run TikTok ads. And what I always hear is, Hey, you just need to commit to 37 pieces of content per day on TikTok. It's going to explode for a half an hour and then it's going to die. And of course I'm exaggerating, but that's sort of the way it works on TikTok and Instagram in some cases where they are just content hungry. And yes, some content may really take off and reach a lot of people and it drives impact. No doubt, the lifespan, the of that content is quite short. So talk about that a little bit on YouTube and then how would you compare YouTube to other social platforms? Not that you have to pick one, but why should we be motivated to invest time in YouTube versus maybe some other social platforms?

Liz:

Yeah, that's a great question. And this comes up a lot with potential people we're looking at helping is that question of do I go on TikTok, do I go on reels, do I go on YouTube? So just know if you're struggling with that question. You're definitely not alone. I may be biased in sharing my experience, but just based on all the data that we look at and also the several dozen high level clients that we get, it's one of the first things that they'll tell us is we don't know anything about YouTube or how to do it. However, we have noticed on our sales calls, on our conversion landing pages, on basically all of the sales transactions that we have, whenever we get someone that says they found us through YouTube, it's the easiest close of all time. And I think that really speaks to the power of people's time investments that they spend watching long form video.

And this has become really interesting, especially over the last year with YouTube launching shorts, right? So YouTube now also has its own version of the vertical short form one minute or last videos. However, I think there's a lot of buzz around shorts out there in the YouTube space, and there's not a lot of practical strategy that comes with it. And so before we jump into choosing specific platforms, first and foremost know that if you do YouTube long form videos first, you will also be able to segment that out and repurpose it for at least half a dozen different platforms. So you can pull the audio and have it be a podcast. You can pull out many clips from that episode and have those turn into TikTok or reels or shorts. You can take the transcript of it and create a blog post on the websites.

There's all kinds of stuff that you can do. So one of my favorite things about YouTube specifically is if you can figure out how to overcome the barrier to entry of having to learn long form video, it can have a trickle down effect on all the other platforms. Because if you do that the hardest thing first, we can then segment that out and repurpose that content pretty much everywhere. Now with shorts specifically, it's important to also know that even though there's all this buzz, like, oh, just do shorts, just do shorts on the back end when we're looking at the actual data, and also when we consider what YouTube as a business actually wants, YouTube makes most, I think it's like 97% or more of their revenue through selling ad space, correct? So what

Brett:

YouTube, yes, descriptions are just a tiny, tiny fraction of their revenue. Tiny, it's all ads, basically.

Liz:

All ads for the most part. And so what YouTube wants out of short form video creators is essentially to be able to double dip on the ad revenue that they're able to earn and that the creator's able to earn by supporting the viewers on the platform in an even deeper way. So now we have the concept, and this is something that even if you've heard about YouTube shorts, a lot of people haven't also heard that you can actually remix segments of your long form videos and post those later pulled out directly from a long form video. And a remix is slightly different than a standalone short in the sense that it is better aligned to what YouTube as a business wants to increase the ad revenue that they make as a company. So when you pull a remix short out of a long form video and you repost that later, that will have now a little button if someone discovers that video on the short shelf that will have a button that will link them directly back to the long form video that it was pulled out of.

And this is really ideally what YouTube wants out of its creators is that if you are doing short form video, if you can figure out a way to embed high quality shorts into the long form content with this specific intention to pull those shorts out later as remixes, you'll have a what's now considered a new traffic source essentially for long form content. Because the reality is, and you can think about your own user experience on any of the platforms. And when you are in that endless hamster wheel scroll, how engaged and how much are you actually paying attention to the creators that pop on your feed with short form video, you're not really spending a significant amount of your time to get to know them. A lot of times too, I talk to some of the best TikTok organic growth strategists in the world as well, and they say it's great for size and for speed, but it's not great for loyalty and connection and people even knowing what your name is, they might remember what you did, but they're not going to remember who you are.

And so with shorts now on YouTube, we have this incredibly cool opportunity where people can go directly if they liked, especially when it's set up as a remix. If they like that short form content, they can now instantly move into the longer form version of that video and spend even more time with you. And the benefit to YouTube as a business is they can monetize now that short view. And if someone progresses through to continue watching longform, they can also double dip and monetize that longform view as well. And the creator benefits from both of those two. So the other thing with YouTube specifically is that there's all kinds of different ways that you can monetize your content, right? It's not just ad sensee revenue. We're talking developing deeper relationships with people, having those videos due the sales process and overcoming objection process for you even while you sleep. So by the time somebody lands on a sales call, for example, or they land on your product checkout page, they're already pre-sold because they've spent significant amount of time with you prior to actually getting there. So there's all kinds of different benefits for YouTube specifically, but for me personally as a human being, I don't want to have to make 37 pieces of content a day, and I will never do that. I just refused. For me personally,

Brett:

It's a awful, awful, awful way to approach life and business. Just yes, some people love it. Gary V eight to 15 piece of a day, he loves it. It sounds horrible to me. Yeah,

Liz:

For me personally, I just don't like even having my phone when I'm out in the world. So it just never made sense for me. I didn't want to keep up with the rat race of the constant timeline scroll, and I'm all about trying to figure out ways to work smarter and not harder. And in my first business in fitness, when my partner left, my partner was my real life sister, and she got married and decided to start a new business with her now husband. And when that,

Brett:

We'll push up her, I'll just point that out. How could she do that to you? But that's the wake house. Yeah,

Liz:

It was definitely a interesting year, but we're all good now. And it's actually for the way that all happened. It was perfect. However, when she left in that first original business, I had to get really smart because she was half of the leadership team, half of the content team. She basically was my second half in that business. And so when she left, obviously there's this huge gaping hole. And so the first thing I did obviously was go back to audit. Where are the highest number of sales coming in with the least amount of effort on my part? And at the time, we were running all kinds of advertising campaigns. We did Instagram every day. We had Snapchat, we had Pinterest, we had the blog, we had email, we had YouTube, we had literally everything. And it was just not like it losing half that leadership team.

I wasn't able to keep up with the pace of that. So I wanted to look at, okay, we're the highest conversions coming in with the least amount of effort and YouTube and Pinterest were actually the top two for us. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting. I wonder why that is. And that's when I kind of accidentally stumbled upon the power of Evergreen video content. And I've just basically gone all in ever since. Plus, YouTube is the coolest place to be. There's the weirdest, coolest, strangest, most interesting types of people that become creators on the YouTube platform, and I've always really enjoyed that as well.

Brett:

Yeah, it's super, I mean, really anything you're interested in, you know, can go deep on that topic and find lots of experts and find one that resonates with you. And the other thing, and I've talked about this on several podcasts, but YouTube is still growing. I've got a lot of kids, my young kids want to spend time on YouTube. My 12 year old daughter, Maggie, that's what she wants to do in the evening is watch YouTube. She watches on the tv, cause we didn't given her phone yet. She's only 12, but although she protests and says a lot of her friends have phones, but we're standing firm and she's not getting one for a while, but she watches YouTube all the time. I'm on YouTube. My dad, who's 73, uses YouTube to research things and find things. So it's growing. So your audience is on YouTube, and then when you look at all the benefits of that content, having a long shelf life, it really makes a lot of sense.

Now I want to talk about the remix really quickly. So I was telling you before we record, I haven't put as much energy into our YouTube channel as I probably should have. I have started to post shorts. So taking clips from this show, from e-commerce evolution, posting that as a short, some of those have done pretty well. But yeah, I've totally noticed what you said where I've seen this on TikTok or Instagram reels or shorts where you watch something and you're like, oh, that was really cool, but then you go to the next thing and you're like, I don't remember that person's name or what they did or how could I ever find them again? I don't know. So how does that work? How do you make a a remix from a full podcast episode recording or a longer form piece of content? How do you technically go about making that a remix?

Liz:

So to make remixes, you have to do it in the YouTube app. So if you pull up any of the long form videos that you have on your channel and you pull that up on your app screen, you'll see at the very bottom there's a little button that says create. If you click create, you'll be able to select anywhere from 15 to 62nd clips that can be pulled out as vertical video. And so there's an important conversation here and have about timing, right? Okay. You basically would want to have your long form episodes go out first, allow those to do its thing for at least a couple days, usually around three to five days to see is the algorithm going to pick this up and start pushing it out to wider audiences. Now if it does get picked up by the algorithm and it starts being shown in the homepage and suggests a video and all that, we basically don't want to touch it.

We want to let YouTube do its thing and see how high that spike is going to go. Now if it doesn't get picked up, then that's not as important with the timing aspect of it, but essentially once the initial traffic on that long form video starts to level out or even decline, that's the perfect time to blast out a couple of remixes because someone can then discover the content through the shorts feed and then be led back into it. And sometimes that can give it an additional, it's almost like taking out the paddles if you're a doctor and you just give a little heart shock to the patient on the table if it starts to level out. Okay, great, let's roll out some remixes, see if we can get some of that shorts traffic in there to give it a second wind. So all of the remixes right now, and by the way, this is all very new and it's rapidly changing.

YouTube is working on the interfaces for being able to edit more engaging shorts, clips and all of that. So I only anticipate this getting better and better over the years because as of right now, reels and TikTok absolutely win as far as editing features in app. However, YouTube won't be far behind and it is something they're investing a lot of time and money into. But where it stands right now, it's super easy. You just have to go into the YouTube mobile app and pull out any long form video and you can grab those 15 to 62nd clips and re-share them as a remix to help give new life to an old video.

Brett:

Super cool. Love that So much. Excited to try it on this end. And I really also love that the way you frame that, Hey, if you can learn to make that long form content and learn to make that well, then with each time you do, you'll have six to 12 pieces of content, maybe more that you can share in a variety of other places and really get maximum leverage out of that. But can you describe what is longform content on YouTube? We talking eight minutes, we're talking 20 minutes, we're talking an hour. What is long form content?

Liz:

Yeah, so I would classify, it really depends on first and foremost who the audience is, right? If you have a podcast channel, your standard is going to usually be for full length episodes of long form videos. It's usually going to be anywhere from like 45 minutes up to even two hours or more depending on the structure of how your normal episodes go. But I would consider long form video to be anything that's typically between four to 20 minutes long unless you're in an interview type capacity and you're creating that specific type of video format. Short form, of course, we all know it as vertical video, usually it's no more than a minute or two long. For YouTube specifically, there is a 62nd max on that. So it could be argued that anything long form would be basically anything over one minute. However, the reason I don't say that and I start at four minutes is because of what YouTube cares about most, which is total watch time spent on the platform.

So when it comes to your job as a creator, the more that you can align yourself with YouTube's business goals, the better you'll be rewarded. And one of their main things is to essentially increase the amount of time. This is what built all the different algorithms, all the AI on the backend. It's all built to keep people on YouTube and to get them to come back tomorrow for as long as possible. So with long form content, I would say we really are looking at the starting frame of reference point is like four minutes all the way up to unlimited, several hours at a time. There are also, depending on the audience, if you have an audience that is into meditation and spirituality, I've seen creators put out eight to 10 hour videos that are just audio recordings or meditation, high frequency sound healing type of things. So there really is no upper limit on the length of long form videos, but I do personally believe that the four minute mark is really when we start to move into long form because of the thing that matters the most on YouTube, which is how do I keep people on YouTube for longer

Brett:

Total watch time, align your goals with YouTube's goals and good things are going to happen. I love it. So let's dive into what are some of your top tips? So if I want to grow my organic presence on YouTube, where do I start? What are some of the top tips that you recommend?

Liz:

Yeah, so I think it's really important as we were discussing before hopping on here to understand the difference in traffic sources. So when we're looking at YouTube specifically, and this is a concept that YouTube introduced to me after they studied several of the fastest growing, highest engaged channels on the platform, they essentially came up with a framework of the patterns that they found in the content those creators were putting out. And it really comes down to most of the fastest growing heist engaged channels have three main types of content or videos on their channel. The first is help content. So that's like the how-tos, the tutorials, the listical videos, the frequently asked questions that the target customer or the viewer has about a specific problem or challenge they're facing in their life. Then we have hub content and hub content is really the meat and potatoes of fast and very profitable YouTube growth Hub content is the repeatable series or formats that you put out on the channel.

So this is if you think about your channel as a TV show and you're the host of that TV show, these are the episodes that you're known for. So if we look at that in the context of even late Night talk show host for example, they have an interview format. They have a live performance format, and they typically will also have some kind of like a standup comedy format. That's what we mean when we're talking about hub content. It's these repeatable formats or repeatable series on related topics that you can essentially turn a never ending series of related videos that keeps the viewer watching and it's kind of what you're known for. It's your bread and butter. And then the last type of video that they discovered were is something we call hero videos. So these are much more designed for eliciting emotional connection with a viewer taking a stand on controversial or polarizing topics, really the why behind the brand, the soul behind the brand, why are you doing what you're doing?

Why does this matter in the world and how can we take somebody on a hero's journey where the first half we're kind of highlighting the problem and pouring salt in the wound. Midway through the video, we have some kind of a turning point realization and call to action to join in the movement to change it. And then the last half of the video is giving them action steps and more of the inspirational hopeful, okay, now let's go out in the world and make a difference. So when we're looking at the frequency and timelines for when and how and why to post these different styles of videos, health content is really great in the beginning because it's again, how-tos, tutorials, frequently asked questions. It's also really great for e-commerce brands specifically, but health content usually is going to rely on YouTube search traffic for the most part, right? Right. It's like the specific keywords that your customers are searching for around things that they're struggling with and they want to solve in their life. Now, the challenge and the limitation of just focusing on search strategy on YouTube organic is that search views as a whole on all of YouTube every single day account for about seven to 8%, definitely no more than 10% of total views that happen on the platform daily. Whoa. So then the question is where I thought it

Brett:

Was, I had in my head that it was something, I thought it was more like 50%. Has it just been on the decline in recent years or I said another longer move had? No, it's just,

Liz:

Yeah, it's a good question. I'm not sure that it's necessarily declining. It's pretty much always been that way. It feels a lot louder and a lot more significant. I think this is at least my personal take on it because that's what everybody talks about. You think about YouTube and you're like, oh, it's a search engine, it's owned by Google, blah, blah, blah. So there's a lot of content out there that really is pushing SEO and keyword research and all of that. However, it does have these limitations, and I don't think that's necessarily a decline with search traffic specifically. It's just kind of always been that way. It's just that the people doing SEO strategy tend to also be putting out a lot of the SEO content. So it's what you kind of first are exposed to when you get into the YouTube world, and same thing happened to me, I didn't even know that there were other available options.

It could help grow the channel significantly faster and with much more loyalty and higher engagement using some of these other traffic sources that really focus on optimizing for that hub content. What are those repeatable series that will bring people back to YouTube and keep them watching longer? So with search as a whole, all the total available views on YouTube, only less than 10% come from search traffic, which begs the question, where's the rest of the traffic coming from? So the other thing to pay attention to is the recommendation traffic sources. And this is really what YouTube's algorithms are built to do, is to support high quality content being pushed out to the right audiences. So if you think about YouTube channels as a whole, channels are designed to serve a specific value proposition to a specific audience. So when you start mixing all different kinds of formats and there's not really a core parent topic, we start to see obviously engagement and reach decline in that type of a scenario.

But when we're talking about YouTube recommendation traffic, this is really the sweet spot for people. If you want to grow fast and you want to pull in the right types of people, you have to learn how to optimize for YouTube recommendations. So what does that entail? First and foremost, we have the YouTube homepage, who doesn't want to hit the YouTube homepage, but the homepage also includes a subscription feed too. This is in your analytics. This would be called browse features. That's kind of how they classify it. If you're in your YouTube studio, looking at your data browse features includes YouTube's homepage as well as the subscription feed, which is essentially a secondary homepage just for the channels that you're already subscribed to. So that's the first and really biggest and probably easiest recommendation traffic source to crack into is the homepage traffic. But then we also have suggestive video, and you've probably seen this even when you're watching TV with your girls or YouTube TV with your girls, at the end of every video, yeah, you'll see the creator's end screen where they might have a couple related target videos linked up there for you, but at the end of that, YouTube will also tell you, Hey, this is the next best video to watch, and then it will just start auto-playing it.

This is very similar to how even Netflix works. If you finish a movie on Netflix, what does it do? It puts, there's three other recommended movies right below there. So suggestive video traffic also includes the sidebar if you are on desktop, the videos that YouTube's recommending for you based on what you're currently watching. And then if you're on mobile, those suggestive videos will be right below the video that you're watching. So homepage traffic as well as suggestive video traffic are really the secret keys to the YouTube kingdom, especially if you want to grow fast and you want to grow a really big brand, that is what you really need to figure out how to crack into. And it really comes down to a couple main things we have to consider the viewer's journey. So step one for the viewer is do they even see your video in one of those three traffic sources? That's called an impression. I probably don't have to explain impressions because you have a very smart audience that's called an impress. Yeah,

Brett:

You talk a lot about ads. So impressions will make sense for sure. Yeah, and I'm really glad to bring this out cause I'm assuming there's quite a difference between optimizing to be discovered in search on YouTube, the organic search results and optimizing for YouTube recommendations. So yeah, I'd love to hear this. So we're thinking about the viewer's journey continue. Yeah,

Liz:

So phase one is getting the impression in one of those three spots, and you're absolutely right. Optimizing for search is very different than optimizing for recommendation traffic. However, there is also this third crossover spot where you can optimize for all three, and that's really my favorite spot to be because that's where we see insane exponential results. But from the viewer's perspective, first and foremost, do they even see your videos pop up in those recommendations or in the search engine results page, if they're searching for a specific keyword, you don't have direct control over whether or not YouTube gives you those impressions. But what you do have direct control over is step two, three, and four for the viewer from the viewer's perspective. So let's say they do see your video in those impression spots. The next phase, and this is arguably the most important and biggest opportunity that you have, is the click through rate.

Do they click to watch your video and click through rate is going to come down to three primary things. First and foremost is the topic, is it relevant to the target viewer that's seeing it? And then from there, it's just the title and thumbnail because that's all they see in those impression spots. So getting really, really good at writing insanely clickable titles and creating complimentary imagery or packaging in the thumbnail designs is an absolutely essential skill for anybody that wants to grow their YouTube channel because it's directly correlated to your click through eight. Nice. Now, usually with click through eight, we're aiming for anywhere from seven to 10% is kind of a baseline. The only time I'd be okay with it not being within that baseline would be if the impressions just shot through the roof and all of a sudden we have 10 million impressions, it's expected that that would go down because that means YouTube's actually doing exactly what we wanted to do. It's showing it to wider and wider audiences.

Brett:

YouTube's loving your video and they're showing it to a lot of different places. We see the same thing on the ad side of things as well with you YouTube or with Google Shopping as an example, sometimes you're really insanely high clickthrough rates, but then as Google says, Hey, this is a great ad, and they start showing you more places and more often clickthrough rate comes down, but your overall impact goes up for short. Now I get the title and thumbnail piece. You talked about the topic of the video. Do you just mean what you're making the video about or is there something on the video where you signify this is the topic of the video?

Liz:

Yeah, well, everything you do on YouTube is going to come down to who you're making the videos for. So we have a specific process that will typically take people through where we get really clear on who the avatar is. And it's not that you necessarily have to just choose one avatar and stick with it, although that does help. You can have up to two to three varying avatars, but what they do need to share is core underlying values or psychographic behaviors. So why do they do what they do? What are their fears? What are their triggers? What are their values? What are their goals? Things of that nature are super, super important to break down psychologically for the viewer, and it's probably the same way with ads too, but that's the first step is figure out who you're making the videos for, because then from there, we can essentially pretend to be that viewer on YouTube and create a whole separate account, then start to behave as they would behave, and then study the patterns and top performing content that YouTube does put in those impression spots.

So that's kind of essentially how we reverse engineers starts with who is the person we're creating this content for in the first place, and then how can we become them so we can basically see what they see and then match and mirror our content to follow the patterns in top performing videos or top performing creators on YouTube as a whole. So yeah, click through rate is super important, and we have to have that relevancy factor first because even if you have a great title on thumbnail, if it's not relevant to the viewer you made it for, they're not going to click it anyway. So that's kind of that's, and then YouTube

Brett:

Is going to stop showing it, and then it's just going to die a

Liz:

Switch. Then a it gets buried painful death. Yeah, so that's phase two. Then let's say they do click on it because it's relevant to them and they like the packaging, the title and thumbnail. Then from there, we're on phase three for the viewer is once they're on the video, how long do they stay on the video? Do they leave after 30 seconds? Do they watch 80% of it do what is going on the backend once they land on the video? So really looking at the audience retention reports, and we want to bare minimum baseline 40% retention, if we can get it, can get up over 60, 70, 80% retention, basically doing exactly what YouTube wants creators to do, which is keep people on YouTube. So got it. That's super important to look at as well, is your audience retention reports. And see, just because you a video has a hundred thousand views, that doesn't really mean much if they all left after 15 seconds versus if you had a video that had 3000 views, but the viewers stayed for 85% of it.

That's what we're trying to do and what we're trying to optimize for there. So that's kind of phase three from the viewer perspective of what the creator needs to understand, click through rate and audience retention are two of the most important things that you need to optimize for. But then there's this fourth phase, which is once they're done watching your video, then what do they do? Do they go on to watch more of your videos or do they leave YouTube altogether, or do they just go over to a video that was recommended to them in the suggested up next spot that YouTube put in front of 'em, right? Where does that viewer go from there? And this is a part of YouTube organic strategy that I don't see a whole lot of people talking about really at all. But it brings it back to that importance of hub content and having repeatable formats or series, because you look at the biggest YouTubers in the world, like the Mr Beast of the world, they have essentially four or five main formats that they just repeat over and over with different people or different prizes or different environments.

And that's pretty much it because they have this proven formula of a video that gets really high clickthrough rate, really great audience retention. So if you find that you have a breakout video in those two regards that your audience really resonated with, then the next challenge from there is how do we turn this into a never ending series of related videos? So if you can though you don't have direct control over impressions that YouTube gives you, you do definitely have direct control over the click through eight, the audience retention and the ability to feed those viewers into these bingeable behaviors or rabbit holes of related videos for them. And that's really what we help support all types of creators in doing so that when you optimize those three things, the impressions are guaranteed to go up.

Brett:

Nice. So we're we're launching more with the help content, FAQs, listicles tips, ideas, five reasons why, five things to do, blah, blah, blah. So we're starting with that more often than Knocks, that's going to drive some search impressions and get a little bit of volume and traction for our channel. Then we're going to pivot and eventually do mostly hub content and hero content, or what does that kind of frequency or makeup look like over the long haul?

Liz:

Yeah, great question. So ideally, what we want to have happen from search videos or even from shorts videos is that they find those videos, but then they go on to watch more content on the channel. So we want to see both of those styles of content as a gateway into the repeatable series. So when it comes to, let's say you have your first, it's brand new first day on YouTube ever, you're going to put out 10 videos. Of those 10 videos, I'd probably make sure that at least four or five of them had some kind of keyword, especially if you have products or services or something that you sell on the back end of the channel. It is really important to have that help. Library of Evergreen FAQ's, tutorials, how-tos. So out of 10 videos, if you started with, I'd probably make sure at least four of them are search related, and then the large majority of the rest of them, like five, six of them, would be more focused on recommendation traffic sources.

So right out of the gate, we're doing both, because the cool thing about help content is you can make it at any time. You don't have to just do that in the beginning. And if you only focus on search based videos in the beginning, you may end up pigeonholing yourself into becoming a resource channel where essentially people will get those answers. They might find you through search, they watch that one video, but they got their answers. So there's really no incentive for them to go on to watch more content because they just came to YouTube to figure out how to change attire or how to file their taxes or whatever it is, and they got the answer from that video, and then they're gone. They're going to go apply the answer. So when you only focus on search stuff, you can run into what we call a resource channel, where it's like you may have one video that has a million views because it was really relevant and it's something a lot of people struggle with, but then the rest of your videos are getting two, 300 views, so there's not any crossover between your content because there's no real relationship between you and the viewer themselves.

So yeah, if you were starting with 10 videos, I'd say at least four of 'em should be some kind of search topics to get people in the door, because search is amazing for discovery, but we want to make sure that the bulk of the strategy is focused more on that hub content that has a higher likelihood of being recommended by YouTube. And then Hero videos is really only once or twice a year. This is like if you have a big launch coming up, if you are wanting to do press, you want to deepen the relationship with the viewers that you already have attracted to the channel hub, or sorry, hero content really isn't something that is like you're doing on a consistent basis every single month, because they usually have much more storyboarding that goes into them a lot more time, money, and energy that goes into the production them if you want them to really take off. And they're usually focused more on the emotional aspects of the human experience. How does this practical information or entertaining information also apply to who you are and what you're here to do on the planet? So

Brett:

Love it. Love it. Well have several more things I want to ask you, but we're running out of time. So we got about five minutes left. Let's go a little bit rapid fire for this next section, but mistakes that you see. So you coach a lot of people, you work with a lot of people, you've grown a lot of channels, hands on. What are some of the top mistakes you see YouTube creators make?

Liz:

Yeah, I would say not understanding traffic sources and how important recommendations are for YouTube growth and trying to cheat the system with especially paid advertising. Like, oh, let me just run some ads to these videos. Ooh, that's like, Ooh, it just makes, it grinds my gears when I see that. Okay, yeah, you might get a lot of

Brett:

Views on it, open number of views quickly though, but

Liz:

Yours, so it helps your ego quite a lot to get lots of views. But on the back end, we'll look at the data around it, and it's like we're getting people from the wrong countries. We're getting people in the wrong age groups. There's all kinds of stuff that can go wrong with that. And not only that, the watch

Brett:

Time is not good. The P people are not engaging with the video

Liz:

Usually. I mean, think of it, it's the difference between invitation and interruption marketing. If you're watching a YouTube video and then an ad pops on, you might go through and watch the remainder of that video, but in most cases you don't because it was interrupting your experience, right? You're not leaving comments, you're not watching the increased audience retention, you're not watching significant portions of the video. You might pop on because you were curious, but it can hurt audience retention, it can hurt click through rate, it can hurt engagement, and all those things YouTube's AI will be looking at and basically be like, oh, this video must not be that great, then let's just bury it. Right? So I would say that's one of the biggest things, especially for entrepreneurs and business owners, is trying to run ads to content to build an organic audience. And I just never think it's worth it ever, ever.

Brett:

Yeah. And so do you recommend that, obviously YouTube ads have their place, we spend millions a month on YouTube ads, but you shouldn't really mix your ads strategy and your organic strategy. They can compliment each other. You can take viewed video audiences of people that engage with your organic content, you can target them in ads, but are you typically recommending two separate YouTube channels, one to house your organic content and one to house your ad content?

Liz:

Yeah, definitely. The other reason for that too is to preserve the integrity of your organic data when you're doing analytics reviews, if you have all this paid traffic coming in YouTube on the backend, there are filtering tools and all that, but it's a little, it's kind of complicated to get there, and it's a much more advanced skill to be able to filter out paid versus organic traffic sources and all that. So YouTube's going to clump that all together on the back end of the channel. And especially for the more beginner type of analytics reports, you can filter it out in advanced analytics, however, it just creates an extra roadblock, an extra step to really be able to understand what's working organically for you. So typically we'll recommend that you keep those two channels separate. You have a separate, almost like a dummy account just for your paid advertising, and then you don't really SEO or put that out there at all. It's kind of just like this shadow account, because on the backend with Google Ads, like you were saying, you can still retarget totally the viewers that you get organically even on a separate account. So totally, I just think, you know, couldn't pay me enough to put ads on an organic channel.

Brett:

So we'll keep 'em separate. I am sold on that idea. I really appreciate that. So as we wrap up, Liz, I know people are going to be watching this and thinking, okay, I got to spend more time with Liz. I got to learn from her. I want to know all that she has to offer. So I think you get some free tools, some free downloads, and then also I want to hear about the Channel Amplifier program as well. So where should people go now if they want to learn more?

Liz:

So you can head over for free stuff, you can go over to YouTube growth hacks.com. We have a free little starter guide over there for you. And then as far as getting deeper level support and really learning how to take action on what we talked about today, you can head over to channel amplifier.com. It's a 90 day training program where the first eight weeks, you're essentially going to be going through a whole library of over a decade of YouTube experience and really breaking down what actually matters on the platform for successful organic growth. And then the last half of the program, we do hot seat coaching. So if you need a second pair of eyes on your data, you can't figure out what's going on with the channel, where your bottlenecks are and things like that. It's a really supportive community of other creators, and also you'll be able to get direct access to me in a much more affordable way than working.

Brett:

That is awesome. I'll, I'll lead you. So URLs, one more time to check both those out.

Liz:

Yep. YouTube growth hacks.com to get the starter guide for setting up your channel correctly. And then channel amplifier.com is where you can learn about the YouTube training program.

Brett:

Awesome. We will link to all of that in the show notes, but go check it out. Hang out with Liz, learn from Liz. List your name, ladies and gentlemen, you killed it. Super fun. The hour, or not quite an hour by way too fast. So now we're going to have to think about part three at some point. So Liz, really appreciate it. This was awesome. Thank

Liz:

You so much for having me.

Brett:

Absolutely. And thank you for tuning in. And as always, we'd love your feedback. We'd love to know what you'd like to hear more of on the show, topic suggestions, guest suggestions. We are open to it. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Steve is a legend in the eComm space. He is not only the store owner of Bumblebee Linens, but also the host of the highly successful marketing podcast, "My Wife Quit Her Job,” which ranks among the top 25 in its category. He has been successfully running an eComm event for 7 years, and it is one of my favorite events to attend and speak at.

He’s also the author of a brand new book - The Family First Entrepreneur.

His impressive combination of experiences gives him a unique perspective on eCommerce and entrepreneurship.

Here is a look at what we cover:

• How to grow using lifecycle marketing when only 12% of your customers buy more than once.
• How Steve thinks about customer buckets to grow cross-sells, upsells, and repeat orders.
• How Steve and his team use Chat GPT4 to 10x their organic traffic.
• What’s the future of AI and white-collar jobs?
• How Steve thinks about pricing and why they no longer offer deep discounts.

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Family First Entrepreneur
• MyWifeQuitHerPodcast (YouTube)
• Steve Chou (Twitter)
• Sellers Summit
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I have an e-commerce veteran. He's a legend in the space. He's a podcaster, he's an author, he's a store owner. He runs his own events. If you don't know him, you are going to love getting to know him on this podcast, but I've got Steve Chou joining me. Steve is the host of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, a Top 25 podcast in the marketing space. He's also the author of a brand new book called The Family First Entrepreneur, which we'll talk about a little bit on the show. He's the co-founder of Seller Summit, one of my favorite events to attend and speak out. I think I've spoken there three or four times coming up at the time of this recording, which is great. And then also co-founder of Bumblebee Linens. And so we're going to be talking lifecycle marketing, ai, and probably other fun stuff because he's a podcaster. He's comfortable with all this. But with that intro, Steve Chou, my man, how you doing? Welcome to the show and thanks for coming on,

Steve:

Dude. What up Brett? Always happy to talk to you and very thankful that you were able to speak at Seller Summit. I want to say for the past five years, I want to say, I think that's

Brett:

Right. I think it's been five years. Seller Summit has become one of my favorite events to attend and speak out. I think I've spoken there for the last four or five years, and it's also been really fun to watch the attendees grow. Now you keep it small and intimate on purpose, but the size of the sellers you, you're seeing their businesses grow over the last several years, which has been fun to watch. And so I don't know what your perspective is on that as the event organizer,

Steve:

It's been great. Actually, the average revenue per attendee is in the mid seven figures now, and it wasn't like that in the very beginning. Seven years ago, everyone was making six figures, and it's been amazing to see them grow over the years. And your talks always get high marks, which is why I always invite you back.

Brett:

Thanks, dude. Thanks. Good to hang out. I always in just enjoy the speaker networking and the speaker mastermind. You do, but always a good time, great audience and super fun event. So talk to us about, I dive into a few things. I want to talk about lifecycle marketing, and you've had a really unique perspective because you run a podcast, you run an event, you talk to merchants all the time, but you are a merchant, you run a store. And so we're going to talk about lifecycle marketing and love your perspective there. Also going to get into AI just a little bit because I think you're using it in a very unique way, very powerful way. So we're going to dive into that, but talk to us about what was the process like to write this book? So Family First entrepreneur, what's the motivation behind that and what was that process like? Just curious.

Steve:

Yeah, I, I'll just tell you, the motivation was I've been blogging for 10, 11 years now over a decade. My mom has never read a single thing, but as soon as I told her that I was doing a traditionally published book, she got all excited and wanted to read her right away. That made me very happy.

Brett:

See, you're doing this so that hopefully your mom puts something on the fridge. Look at what Steve did. He wrote, he wrote a book. He finally did something interesting.

Steve:

There's a lot of childhood trauma there. Let's not get into that. But yeah, the other reason was it's always been on my bucket list and I just want to walk my kids to the bookstore. Hopefully this bookstore, that's the only bookstore that's left in my area, stays in business in time for the book to be released. So I can actually walk them through there. So

Brett:

Dude, that would be amazing. Yeah. Hey, dad wrote that book also for you to do a book signing at that bookstore. That would be super cool as well. I'm not sure if they'll, you know how I'm

Steve:

Going to do a tour? I'm going to do a tour.

Brett:

Are you really?

Steve:

I am, yeah. Afterwards, yeah, just like a relaxing tour where I'm just going to go around and just do a little book signing here and there. I don't know if I'm going to make it out to your neck of the woods. Brett, you're No

Brett:

Springfield, Missouri. Come on. Actually, for mid-size market, we were very entrepreneurial in nature and entrepreneur friendly. Actually, I saw it was Inc. Anchor four, somebody several years ago ranked us it one of the top mid-size markets for entrepreneurs, which is kind of cool,

Steve:

But maybe I'll have it at omg. Who knows? What's that? You led me to your offices. Maybe I'll have one there.

Brett:

Yeah. Okay, let's do it. Let's do a book signing at OMG headquarters. I love it. So more about the book later, but let's do this. So you're the co-founder and you also said you called yourself the Grunt at Bumblebee Linens. So explain what you guys saw, what you guys do, and then we're going to get into lifecycle marketing in just a second.

Steve:

So we mainly sell handkerchiefs and linens for special occasions. And I would say our primary customer base are people who are getting married, people who have baptisms. And unfortunately we also do a lot of funerals, but we personalize these hankies. So we actually have these industrial sewing machines in our warehouse, and we do a lot of sewing, which means generally there's not a lot of repeat business, but we're talking about lifecycle marketing, which implies that you sell to your customers a lot. We do have a really strong set of repeat customers, and believe it or not, I kind of discovered this by accident, but there are a lot of people who collect handkerchiefs also. Really something we discovered over the years. They

Brett:

Collect handkerchiefs BA based on special events or something. They're buying a handkerchief to commemorate something or they want to buy 'em different

Steve:

Styles. It's kind of like there's people who have a hundred pairs of shoes in their closet. These people have thousands of handkerchiefs. It's

Brett:

Crazy. You got the sneaker heads, you got the shoe dogs out there, you got the

Steve:

We hanky heads.

Brett:

The hanky heads, hanky heads. That is hilarious. So yeah, it's a good point. So I mean, obviously people do get married more than once on occasion, certainly, and you have those other events, but yeah, this is not, I'm not going to join the hanky of the month club unless you're in that crowd or I'm not going to buy one a year or something. So yeah, I was a little surprised when you said, Hey, one of the things I'm passionate about is lifecycle marketing. Let's talk about it. So how do you think about lifecycle marketing knowing that the vast majority of your clients are only going to buy once?

Steve:

So just throwing some numbers out there. So only 12% of our customers are repeat, but it actually represents over 36% of our revenue. And I kind of stumbled upon this one day by just looking through our, does

Brett:

That mean that the AOVs are really high for your repeat customers,

Steve:

Or they are? I'm going to tell you why I'm getting into that. Yeah, good,

Brett:

Good, good. Yeah, sorry, jumping ahead. Yeah.

Steve:

Yeah. So I was just looking through the stats and I just noticed some customers in there that were purchasing a lot of linens. If some person's purchasing 40 dozen napkins or a hundred hanks, it's kind of unusual. So one day, just on a whim, I called the person up and I was like, Hey, we noticed you ordered a large quantity and you've ordered more than once. Can I ask what you do? And then they told me, Hey, yeah, we're an event planner. We do this all the time. And so I was like, okay, great. Here's a custom coupon code and here's a dedicated rep, so when you need anything for the event, we'll make sure it gets there. We'll put a person on it. And so now what we do is we go through our customer list almost every single month, find those outliers, and we just call them up and on the phone. People are surprised.

Brett:

You literally call them on the phone. On

Steve:

The phone, yes. Not email.

Brett:

Are they like shocked? They're like, wait a minute. The e-commerce store that I just bought from is calling me on the phone right now.

Steve:

Exactly. But they're good. I mean, they bought from you, they know who you are. So they're more receptive, and we're always really polite. We lead in with coupon, dedicated rep care of the order, and it works really well. And so these people who we get that way end up being customers for life, and they buy a lot and they buy often.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. I think, I know we're mutual friends with Drew Sonke, nerd Marketing, but also involved in a number of companies, just kind of a legend in the e-commerce space. But he talks about identifying your whales, identifying, looking at things like recency frequency, monetary value, so how soon did someone purchase, how often did they purchase, and then the monetary value of what they purchased. And so you identified those people and now you're totally giving them the white club treatment phone call, thank you, coupon code, dedicated rep. And yeah, after you do that customer for life, why are they going to go anywhere else? Why do they choose Amazon or something for their next linens? They want to buy from you. So

Steve:

Yeah. The other thing we also noticed, and I recommend that everyone do this, is we looked through all of our traffic sources and we found out which traffic sources had the highest revenue per visitor. And because before I did this analysis, I was just looking at everything in aggregate. If everything's good, usually, you know, don't look at it. But I started looking at it and I noticed that the people I was getting from Facebook were our lowest revenue per visitor of all the traffic sources.

Brett:

Interesting.

Steve:

The people who were coming in organic through Google were our highest value people, which tends to be true for, I would say for most stores. But that's what caused me to actually focus more on the organic SEO side.

Brett:

Interesting. And as a Google paid guy, and I also have a background in seo, I love SEO too, but how did Google, so Google Organic is the highest, was it still comparable to Google paid search as an example, or was it noticeably different?

Steve:

No, paid search is up there too. I mean, they're one and the same, right? I mean, yeah,

Brett:

You are actively searching at that high buyer intent, so that that's different than someone that you're demand gen type advertising with Facebook

Steve:

Super. Maybe you can comment on this, Brett, but I moved over to Performance Max and Performance Max is a black box.

Brett:

It

Steve:

Is. So it's actually kind of hard to tell where everything's coming from once I did that.

Brett:

So a couple things. I can send this to you after we're done recording. There's a script that my buddy Mike Rhodes, he runs Web Savvy and Agency Savvy, is based in Australia. Brilliant, brilliant Google marketer. He and his team built this script and we added a little bit to it, but basically you run the script, it'll pull all the data outside, pull all the data out of Performance Max and show you where the spend is going. So it gives you quite a bit of insights to know what you might need to adjust or what you might not need to adjust. And we have heard, because everyone is telling Google the same thing, we want more visibility, we want more data inside of Performance Max that some data's going to be coming into the account. So we'll see. We have seen though, kind of anyway, we slice it. Performance Max is doing pretty well for most of our clients. We spend now between four or 5 million on just Performance Max here in the last year or so, and a little better than smart shopping at new customer acquisition. We can scale it a little bit better, but they're definitely some kind of best practices to follow in terms of the way the assets you've given and the way you structure your asset groups and the way you bid. I'll be talking about that at that seller summit, which will be fun. But yeah.

Steve:

Yeah, I mean, what I like about Performance Max is that you can actually maintain it with it's relatively low maintenance.

Brett:

Yeah, totally. If you want to be hands off a performance max and you've got all the right assets there, you can totally be hands off. And this is also why I kind of hated it in the beginning because I thought it would only be hands off. You could be hands off if you want, but if you want to tinker and you want to add new things, you want to try segmentations, you could do that too. And we've been able to push the envelope with a couple clients by creating multiple campaigns or by the way we structure the asset group. So it's kind of interesting. But yeah, if you just got it kind of simple and it's dialed in, it'll just keep working, which is great. Did you see, and we're getting a little bit deep

Steve:

In the field off topic. Yeah, yeah. Curious,

Brett:

Did you, your performance improve from smart shopping to Performance Max, or is it about the same as it was with Smart Shopping?

Steve:

So I was actually never using Smart Shopping. I was only on shopping. Okay. And it's just regular. And I found that unfortunately, performance Max kind of eats into the,

Brett:

It does

Steve:

The other campaigns. So I just like the hands off nature of it. And overall it gives me greater reach. The isn't as good, but it gives me higher reach. I make more money overall, so that's why I like it.

Brett:

And the issue with just standard Google Shopping is your placements are limited to just the search results, but you'll notice if you pay attention, if you're shopping for something and then you go to YouTube or you go to a site that's part of the Google Display Network, which is like 90% of the internet, you'll start to see product listing ads or Google Shopping ads for related products. Not even the products you clicked on, but if you've been searching for cookware or a vacuum or whatever, you'll start to see ads for those things in other places. And that's largely driven by Performance Max, which is interesting.

Steve:

I see minutes everywhere I go now, actually.

Brett:

That is awesome. Cool. Okay. So you identified your best customers. You call them, you give them an offer, you identify your top traffic sources. What else do you do that's unique related to lifecycle marketing?

Steve:

So we just have different buckets for customers, and I don't know if this is unique, I'm sure other people are doing it, but we have a portion of our list that has never bought before. So for those people, we'll discount a little bit more heavily just to get them to make that first purchase, just to get them to open up their wallet. We also have a bucket of customers that have purchased once but didn't purchase again. And I just can tell from our data that if we can get someone to buy again, just twice anything, chances are they're going to be a longer term customer. So we do whatever we can for them to get that second purchase. We'll cro, so we have these flows automatically set up in Clavio so that, I'll give you an example. We sell three different types of napkins in our store, cocktail lunch and dinner napkins. And we usually sell 'em in matching sets. So if someone buys like a cocktail napkin but does not buy a dinner napkin or a lunch napkin, we automatically send an email that tells 'em, Hey, did you know that we sell matching lunch applicants and dinner applicants? And so we're kind of automatically getting them to buy again, and it's all fully automated in the auto-responder sequence. So for those people who bought once and haven't bought again, we just cross-sell them other products that are just automatically related based on what they bought. What's

Brett:

The take rate on that typically? Do you know off the top of your head, if you send that, Hey, you bought the cocktail napkins but not lunch or dinner when we saw matching, are you getting a pretty good take rate on that?

Steve:

The take rate is probably in the low double digits, high single digits. But we actually cross sell a bunch of, so another example also is, Hey, did you know that we sell personalized cocktail napkins, though the take rate for that is higher, so if they want their initials on it and whatnot, that tends to work better. So we'll leave with that

Brett:

So that that's more of an upsell. Right. So you got cross sell bought cocktail napkins. Now here's the lunch and dinner that are matching, but there may have been a reason why they only bought cocktail, so now you're saying, Hey, you've already got those, but now get customized cocktail napkins. Correct. Got it. And then there's a higher take rate for that. Correct.

Steve:

Correct.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. Interesting. What are some of the mistake, because again, I know you got a unique perspective, you talk to people at Seller Summit and you run a podcast. What are some other mistakes, either tactically or with the approach or mindset? What are mistakes you see people make when it comes to life cycle marketing?

Steve:

I would say the biggest mistake I see people make is spending all their money on customer acquisition and just kind of neglecting the repeat business side. And I can get it. I get it. It's much sexier to get a new customer. You're running ads and you get these new customers, but then our business wouldn't be the same if we didn't have our repeat customer base. Right? Totally,

Brett:

Totally.

Steve:

Because it's a solid foundation to build upon, and in fact, that's the way we grow. We constantly build upon these repeat customers,

Brett:

30 per 36% of your revenue. That's huge.

Steve:

And not only that, getting new customers is just getting more and more expensive every single year. So you almost have to focus on your existing customers in order to survive, in my opinion.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And I heard this from J Abraham first, but there's really only three ways to grow a business. It's more new customers. So customer acquisition, it's getting people to buy more each time they purchase. So increasing your A O V, and then it's getting them to buy more often increasing the ltv. So new customers, A O V ltv, those are really, that's it. Like millions of tactics you can kind of layer in there. But those are, that's it. And it's often easier, more profitable to either in increase your A O V or extend increase the LTV over time. And so

Steve:

Can we just talk about pricing a little bit too?

Brett:

We would love to, yes. Would love your perspective on pricing. Absolutely.

Steve:

We pretty much don't do big discounts anymore. And it was only after I did the math, did I kind of discover how detrimental a discount is. So during Black Friday, a lot of people do heavy discounts. Let's just take some numbers here. Let's say you have a product that sells for a hundred bucks and your margins are 50%, which means it costs you 50 bucks. Yep. Right? Let's say you typically sell a hundred units a day of that item. So you're making 5,000 unit $5,000 a day. Let's say during Black Friday you decide to do a 25% sale. I like it. I like it. Not a big deal. A lot of people do that. So all of a sudden

Brett:

It's just 20%, it's just 20 Steve,

Steve:

But it's not, yeah, 25%. That's it. That's it. So the new math is you're selling it for 75 bucks, your cost of goods is still 50, and so you're only making 25 bucks per sale, and all of a sudden you need to sell 200 units a day just to break even. Right? Right. So yeah, you

Brett:

Cut your margin in half. Another way to say is you've got to double your sales to make the same amount of money. Yeah.

Steve:

Yes. Most people don't realize it. Most people only think that they need to make up 25% more sales to make up for that 25% coupon. And I'm being generous here, right? 50% margins is, I

Brett:

Mean, those are healthy. A lot of people would love to have 50% margins.

Steve:

Exactly. Now, what's cool is the opposite is true when you raise prices, right? Let's say a store's net margin is 10%. I think I looked at statistic up at one point. The average net margin after everything for an e-commerce store is 10%, right? Let's use that same example. So a hundred bucks, you're making 10 bucks per sale. Let's say you decide to raise your price as just 1%, right? Just a dollar. You can probably raise your price 1% and not see that effect on your sales. So all of a sudden now you're making $11 in profit, that's 10% more, 10%

Brett:

Increase by raising increas profits, right? Yeah. And it's also one of those things where, and people are kind of used to price increases now because of inflation and just everybody knows the cost of goods are growing up and whatnot. In that scenario, you raise your prices 10%, which may not be that big of a deal. So you go from 50 to 55 or something like that, that could double your profits, right? Because you're at a 10% market, which is pretty crazy. So yeah, love that. That cool. So eyeopening like we got to think more than just customer at new customer acquisition. We got to think about lifecycle marketing and putting people into different buckets, focusing on those whales or those VIPs or those most profitable customers and really treating them differently. And then love this pricing discussion too, just because I want to make sure we give it adequate time. I want to talk about AI because I think you're doing some pretty cool stuff there. You're getting some tangible, measurable results from ai. But first of all, what's your general take on ai? Should we be scared? Is AI coming for our jobs? Are you excited about AI and nervous about ai? A little bit of both. What's your general take?

Steve:

I see. I think on the content side, I'm a little worried because a lot of my business is based on seo. I don't know if you've tried the new Bing search, have you?

Brett:

Not much. I've tried more chat G P Ts. Some team members have tried Bing, and I'm hearing mostly good things about it. I do hear the Google's goo, so Google's got barred, right? But I heard there's a new thing coming called Project Magi, I think. Yep. Yeah, that'll, that'll be interesting. So yeah, we'll see how that all shakes out. But yeah, continue.

Steve:

I was going to say, it's just if you use the new Bing, it's just kind of a glimpse to how things are going to look like in the future. So let's say you type in, what are the best hankies? Well, in Bing search, which is based on Chachi B T four, I believe only the top four results come up and it's not search. It says, Hey, the top hankies are from this place, this place, this place, and this place. Then there's citations, which basically means you really need to be in that top four just to get any clicks. Wow. Yeah. Going forward. And if you run an affiliate site or a content site, you're just going to get the answer and no one's going to click on the citations. Right.

Brett:

Yeah. Super interesting. So now you know where it's always been super important to be page one. It's always been important to be at the top of page one. Now you got to be top four your toast, basically.

Steve:

Yeah. So I think content sites are in trouble. I think e-commerce is okay, but you're going to have to really take those top coveted spots in order to get

Brett:

Traffic that way, bid to be in those top spots, treat customers in a way that you're going to get good reviews, offer a great product. So that's going to kind of fuel everything else. Cool. So talk about how are you guys using AI to grow your business?

Steve:

Yeah, what's cool about ai and a lot of people are using for content, a lot of people are using it for bullet points for Amazon. Some of the cool ways that we've been using it for is just even for product ideas. So let's say you're a dad of a ton of children, eights

Brett:

Kids, man, I got the old show

Steve:

Eight children. I didn't think I'd ever meet someone with more kids than Tony, but yeah,

Brett:

You got to be by one, right? She's got seven. Yeah. We instantly connected us weirdos with lots of kids, different cut from a different cloth.

Steve:

You can actually ask Chad g b t to give you products. Someone with a father of eight kids would be interested in. Maybe that's a little broad actually, but you can actually get really good product ideas based on just demographic information that you give it.

Brett:

Interesting. So give me product ideas for this type of person, this avatar.

Steve:

Yeah, the same works for cross sells also. So like, hey, give me stuff that people would buy hanky with and or napkins or linens or whatever. And sometimes it comes up with some obscure products that you actually might want to look into carry.

Brett:

Interesting. So have you used AI to fuel your next product idea, or is it more like it gives you some ideas and that spurs other thoughts? Or have you taken an idea directly from Chad G P T and executed

Steve:

On it? I mean, that's kind of how we stumbled upon some of our next products because we haven't been brainstorming new product lines in a while. We, we've been getting variations of the same because you can get a whole bunch of variations of hankies and napkins, but we haven't really thought too much about completely different product lines. And this is something that we just recently did and we used chat G P T four for that.

Brett:

Interesting. Have you launched those product lines yet? We

Steve:

Have not yet. We have not yet. So the original plan was actually go to China because we used to go to the Canton Fair every other year, but then Covid hit and then we kind of made the last minute decision not to go this year just in case. So we'll probably end up going next year, but we do have some source agents that are looking for these products for us right now.

Brett:

Very interesting. Yeah, we'll keep you posted on that. Super interested in that as well. So of course, the content idea of writing bullet points, descriptions, things like that. We're still much very much in this exploration stage as an agency. How do we use ai? One interesting thing that we're running into, some of our larger clients are telling all their agencies, Hey, you cannot do anything related to our brand on Chat G P T. And the reason they're giving us is because once you enter that information to chat G P T, then it becomes, now Open Eye can use that in other ways. So there's some clients that are resistant to that, which is totally fine. One way we're using it though, just for the podcast as an example, so I'll write show notes and a title for a show. My sister will then got to plug it into chat g, PT and Disaster Variations. And it's probably more than half the time we'll either use a suggestion directly from chat G P T, or we'll take that and tweak it and then use that. And so we're using it that way. We're getting into fuel copy ideas for some of things we're working on, but we're mostly just playing around with it at this point. I've got some lofty ideas for AI related to data analysis and stuff, but we're still playing around with it. But you guys are using it for content even out outside of Amazon? Correct?

Steve:

We've actually, I have a couple posts that rank on the front page that was, I would say 80% ai. Wow. Google made a statement in 20, their stance in on that in 2022 was, Hey, no way. Don't use it. You're going to get

Brett:

No AI generated content. You will not work well for you. We don't want it on the internet basically.

Steve:

But in 2023, they soften their stance. They're like, it's okay, as long as it's not used in a spammy way. They don't want sites that are just purely ai. So the way we're using it is we're using it to avoid the blank page syndrome, generating outlines, and then within the outlines, maybe generating content for each bullet point and then having a human go through it, fact check it, and then kind of tailor it more for seo. What's unfortunate about ranking on seo, and I mentioned before we started recording that we actually increased our SEO rankings four x in the last six months, R

Brett:

Four X in the last six months, and you identified that's your most profitable source of traffic.

Steve:

Correct. And I, I'll just tell you this, just a way to rank Google today, and maybe you used to do this, and I, I've been doing it for the last decade, it's taken all the fun out of writing because Google just wants the answer in a succinct way. And so now that's the way we write all of our blog posts,

Brett:

Right? Yeah. It's not like creative pros, whimsical ps, things like that. Not so helpful and

Steve:

It's actually hurtful.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. Because you, you're clouding the real answer or the substance that Google wants to find. Because if you look at what is Google's goal been from the beginning to organize the world's information and make it easily accessible and useful to everybody, and part of what they're doing is just trying to surface answers. And so the quicker you can answer a question that users are asking for, the better. And that's really what Google's all about, answering questions. So you need to help them by answering questions very clearly and succinctly. So,

Steve:

Hey, we're on the topic of ai. One thing we're using it for also is to write some of our email marketing autoresponder campaigns. Probably let, I hate writing that stuff just because it's just not my thing. And so usually I put my wife in charge and she hates writing, but we've actually trained the AI to sound like us, and you can actually have it write personal emails and just kind of tweak it a little bit as it goes to sound like. So how do

Brett:

You do that? You have to feed it some of your other content? Yeah, 10 of my emails. Write another one that sounds like me.

Steve:

So I shoot, I can't remember the terminology now right off the top of my head, but you feed in something that you've already written and you have it generate a voice paragraph, I think that's the term for it. And then you say, Hey, using this voice paragraph, write an email about this, and then it pumps something out.

Brett:

Interesting. So really you're maybe only giving it one piece to then base that voice paragraph right off of Very interesting. You can

Steve:

Actually, if you have access to the api, you can actually, so this is one thing I'm working on the side. Once this whole book launch is over with, I'm going to f I have a class that I've been running for over a decade, I'm going to transcribe all the videos and feed it in and create Steve Bot so that whenever someone has a question, they can ask this bot first and it's all my stuff and it should answer them with my answers as a first line with your

Brett:

Tone with your, with your answers you've already given. Exactly. Yeah. Not to do that. To build Steve Bot, do you have to use a paid version of Chad pt? I would assume, or you have to do use an upgraded version or

Steve:

Something? Yeah, you should get the paid version and just have access to the api. Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah, because I know if you use just the open free version or whatever, you're limited on the amount of content you can have it crawl or look at or assess or whatnot.

Steve:

Plus you want to be using chat G P T four, which is only available to paid customers got. It's actually significantly better for content. Okay. Okay. Yeah,

Brett:

Good to know. And then they break a record on subscriptions going from zero to millions of subscribers in record. It's nuts. Time for chat. GBT four.

Steve:

Yeah, it's been nuts. It's been nuts. Let me just tell you this chat, GB four is probably comparable to an average US writer, whereas chat GBT 3.5 was more along the lines of in international writer. Got it. That you would hire. So I mean, it's sad to say this, but I, I'm downsizing my writers because Chad GBT four, is that good? I'm keeping my editor who's just going to massage it. But I mean, what's scary about AI is I think a lot of jobs are going to be lost.

Brett:

Yeah. I mean, one thing on the more optimistic side of ai, I hear people saying things like, Hey, it's not going to replace anything. It's going to augment things. And I think to a certain degree that's true, where you'll always need people with good business ideas, you'll always need a creator. I've seen, you know, have mid journey that will create photos based on prompts and stuff. You always kind of need someone who's creative in giving those prompts. But I think there is an element where it's like, well yeah, but we don't need as many people. So maybe it's not replacing all the rider, but it's replacing some or you know what I've heard, I'm not a coder. I know you've got an engineering background, Steve, so you'd have a unique perspective here. But some people thinking, Hey, does this do away with really large develop large development teams? Do you just need one developer or two maybe? And then you use AI to generate everything else. And now you've got these smart developers that are just kind of checking and pulling things together and now it's 10 Xing, a hundred xing their output. So yeah, I think there is a scenario where you don't need as many people, which is encouraging from a profit standpoint, but kind scary from another standpoint as well.

Steve:

I mean, I keep in touch with my buddies in the hardware space and they're using it now to design hardware, so it's going to replace white collar jobs.

Brett:

Isn't that interesting? And I heard someone say this not too long ago that the fear was, hey, machines are just going to take away all the manual labor jobs. And that's true for some things like checkout. So someone working at point of sale at a retail store, you have the automated checkout stuff, but it's actually coming for white collar jobs in a much more aggressive fashion than blue collar jobs, which is super interesting.

Steve:

So start your own business folks. If you're

Brett:

Start listening to My Wife Quitter job podcast, start an e-commerce store, not selling linens, but something else, and then use AI to write your content. So talk about that. So four x four x your your SEO rankings in the last six months, is that strictly from just increasing the amount of content you're creating? What do you attribute that

Steve:

To? It actually was not, I would say a large portion of it was rewriting existing content in such a way that Google wants the answer. This is why I was alluding to earlier when it sucked all the life out. So I literally pulled out all the anecdotes, all the stories win for the featured snippet, which means you try to answer a question in a sentence and try to hit that featured snippet spot, did a bunch of link building, which still works, just talk about something the

Brett:

More. So it's totally works. And that's something we did from the very beginning all the way up to the end when we shut down our SEO practice just because it wasn't a passion anymore and nobody on our team wanted to do it. But link building was always the most effective. You get good back links and it's still true today, which is pretty crazy.

Steve:

It's still true, but it's a pain in the butt. And I'll, lemme just talk about some creative ways that we built some links. It's the simple thing that any one of you guys out there listening can do is to issue special discounts for military teachers and students and nurses and first responders. So we got links from military.com, all you got to do is say, Hey, I got a discount for the military, and then you reach out to all the military sites and they'll link to you and post it. Another way that we did it was I now have a Bumblebee Linen scholarship and my wife Quitter job scholarship. So I've got backings from a lot of top universities all over the US and we just give away a $500 scholarship every year for both companies.

Brett:

That's so crazy that I remember that idea from a long time ago. I don't know, thousand 12 or 13 or something insane like

Steve:

That. Oh, has it been around that long? I didn't. Okay, didn't. It's been a long, long

Brett:

Time. Maybe not quite that long, but a long time because those EDU links are super powerful, even if it's a no follow link. And so super smart. So you're doing the scholarship thing and for the cost of 500 bucks, one, you're doing something cool, you're giving a scholarship, but two, you're getting those high quality back links. That's super interesting. I hadn't heard anybody doing that for a while, but I love that.

Steve:

And another, a large part of it, and the problem with SEO is you do all these things, you don't know which one most had the most effect. The other thing we did was we carefully link sculpted everything to our money pages. And I basically found out the primary products that make the most money on Bumble B linens. And I put those in the menu and all the other categories, I put all on a separate page with one link, so they're not usually accessible anymore. And then all the scholarship page, the first responders page and all those coupon pages, we just linked to those money pages. So we're just sculpting everything towards,

Brett:

So you're getting that page ring coming to those scholarship pages and then you're sending those to the money pages. Yeah. Yeah. Love that, man. That's super, super short.

Steve:

So I don't know which one had the most effect, but

Brett:

Yeah, and that is the thing about seo, it's a little hard to, harder to pinpoint. You can't turn it on or off. You just got to do the work and keep doing the right things and then eventually you'll be rewarded with great rankings. But yeah, you do enough of the right things and you can do stuff like four extra traffic, which is amazing. So a lot of them, so you use chat G P T for then to look at existing content and rewrite it and pull things out and make

Steve:

It simple? No, actually for the existing content part, that was all kind of manual. Those was all, okay. Yeah, all new content is helped with Jet Chat g, PT four. Got it. Mainly because rewriting stuff and knowing what to take out requires a little bit of human intervention.

Brett:

Yeah, it does. It does. Yeah. That's pretty tricky.

Steve:

Yeah.

Brett:

Cool. Any other thoughts or predictions or insights on ai? I'm just curious other parts of your perspective there?

Steve:

I mean, the only thing I fear is I think this is going to be the year of spam. Think of how many people are just pumping out eBooks on Amazon right now. And as a result, I don't know if you've heard, but Amazon's been canceling a lot of people's Amazon KDP accounts really, if there's suspected of putting out low content books or regurgitated books, but just the sheer number of websites, blog posts, eBooks, it's just been astronomical.

Brett:

And then how do you feel like you are, so now you're browsing the web, do you want to read something that bot created or do you want to read something that a human crafted and they thought through and you're reading an author's life rather than something that's just cranked out by the machine? And yeah, it's

Steve:

Interesting. I think the Google search results have been crafted for many years now personally because everyone's gamified

Brett:

Because of that, because of kind of the spammy content that's out there.

Steve:

It has nothing to do with Chachi. BT really, it's been around for the last five years. I mean, if you Google something, it's all the same regurgitated stuff that's on the front page. And it's been a problem for a while. This is why I think Google's ripe for disruption. I mean, they're going to take a hit. So whatever this Project Magi thing they're working on, I'm pretty sure it's going to hurt their ad business.

Brett:

It it'll have to, and that's really what I heard about the reason Bard was delayed so much, which is their answer to Microsoft's version of chat, is because Google is 80%, 80 plus percent of their revenue is ad driven. Microsoft is a 2% of their revenue is ad driven. So they're like, who cares? We'll just let, let's go scorched earth on our AI offering through search and let's see what it does where Google's like, they've got to be productive if they can't kill the golden goose there. So yeah, we'll see. So Project Magi, we'll see what that looks like. If it's successful, it's awesome, but it's going to have to hurt their ad business. So yeah, man, I'm very curious to watch that unfold.

Steve:

And I'm curious how it's going to affect my ads too, right, that we run.

Brett:

Yeah, no

Steve:

Doubt. Here's the other way I think about it though. In the event, let's say they Nerf all the content sites by just giving the answer, well, guess what? I'm going to creating content and that's going to lead to less that they can feed in to their tools. So I'm just curious how that's going to play out.

Brett:

And then we also are like, well, okay, what if you disincentivize people from writing content, so then you're not feeding the AI good content. So then what does that do to future content? All kinds of interesting questions there, philosophical questions that it opens up. But hey man, this has been super fun. I know we're kind of coming to the end of our time. I want to do a couple things. Let's talk a little bit about the book. So Family First Entrepreneur, I know you, you've got a family, beautiful kids, very intentional about spending time with your family and then pouring into what's the most important part of your life, your family, not your business, but what is the book all about and who did you write it for?

Steve:

So the reason why I wrote the book, Brett, is because I feel like 99% of the entrepreneurship advice out there is either wrong or just given by a bunch of single dudes who have the time to work 80 hours a week. You's got

Brett:

To crush it, man, sacrifice all about the business,

Steve:

But that's not true. So I run two seven figure businesses. I work 20 hours a week pretty much, and I have one VA for the blog that handles almost everything. I believe that if you structure your business correctly and all you want to do is make a couple million dollars a year, then you can do it in such a way that you can spend time with your family and spend time with your loved ones. Now, of course, if you want to start something that's like a hundred million dollar business or whatnot, or a billion dollar business, you're going to need to hire a team and all that stuff. But most of us, honestly, and I don't know you're the reason why you started your business, Brett, but for me it was just all about freedom.

Brett:

I like paint, I like

Steve:

Paint, and hey, you paint

Brett:

Trouble.

Steve:

It's all about freedom. Most people don't go into this wanting to star a billion dollar company. And what happened to me was I just kind of lost track of that. So once Bumble VN started getting some traction, I started trying to grow that thing, scaling like crazy, and I ended up driving my wife crazy because we'd set these goals and we'd hit 'em, and then I'd move the bar more the next year. And I'm cheap. I'm a frugal Asian dude. I don't spend that much money. We make way more than we spend all. So what's the point of trying to grow the revenue, right?

Brett:

Every single year, just growing for the sake of growing is all you're doing at that point. Yeah,

Steve:

Exactly. So the book really is about how you can build a business that suits your lifestyle while still making a good lot amount of money and how you balance the two.

Brett:

I love it, man. I'm excited to read it. I bought a bunch of copies so I can give 'em to friends and stuff. I don't want to support you and your journey, so proud of you. I dunno if I'll put it on my fridge, I'll leave that to your mom, but I'm excited to get some copies and share them with people that are close to me. So for those that are listening who are like, okay, hey, yeah, that sounds awesome. I want to check out the book. How can they find it? I'm assuming it's Amazon and all over the place.

Steve:

So you can go to the Family first entrepreneur.com, and I'm giving away a lot of pre-order bonuses. So you'll get a three day workshop on e-commerce, get a two day workshop on how to make money with content because I podcast, YouTube and blog. And then I'm doing this Family First Challenge where I'm actually going to go in there and work with people for six weeks on how to help them figure out their sign hustle or just kind of talk about imbalances and how it can help them out with their businesses. So those are all just free pre or bonuses that you can get The Family First Entrepreneur, you can order it anywhere. Amazon probably the most common place.

Brett:

Cool. So I'll link to all that in the show notes or check it out there as well. If somebody's like, Hey, got to check out the podcast. Got to learn more about what Steve Chou is up to. Where can they connect with you? Because you're active on the socials as well, or is it mainly YouTube?

Steve:

Probably YouTube. Do you consider YouTube social?

Brett:

It is ish. Yeah. I think it's still lumped into the social platforms, but it is quite different. Yeah,

Steve:

I would say YouTube and Twitter.

Brett:

YouTube and Twitter. Got it.

Steve:

It primary places. Yeah.

Brett:

Awesome. YouTube and Twitter. And then Seller Summit and annual event. I think it's a must attend event for sellers that are trying to grow their Amazon business and D two C and want to hang out with a tight-knit community that's really growing and smart. Probably based on when this is going to be released at maybe after Seller Summit, but where working if people will find out more about Seller Summit, if not this year, next year.

Steve:

Yeah, let's just go to seller summit.com. And really the main reason to go is to hang out with Brett. He usually has this entourage around him, which prevents the riff raft from getting to him. But we have a no riff raf. We have a No Entourage policy at some no

Brett:

Entourage policy. So yeah, I will, I'll take the picture, I'll sign the, I'll sign whatever you give me. But no, I would love to hang out and it's an awesome event. So Steve Chou, ladies and gentlemen, Steve, this has been a blast. Your're, super smart guy, love hanging out with you. Also love that you typically poke fun at our mutual friend, Andrew, you Darien and E-Commerce Fuel, which yes, I love that in your almost every talk that you give you sneak in a couple of jabs at UD Darien, which really just warms my soul. I love that guy, but it's also fun to make fun of him.

Steve:

So it's so easy to make fun of him when he runs probably one of the most successful e-commerce forums and he doesn't sell anything himself.

Brett:

So there's an example right there. Another chap, you Darien. But no, that dude, dude's super smart. We're both investors in some of his projects and he runs an awesome forum and it does a good job of taking the flack that's given him. So that's awesome. So all right, man. Hey, really appreciate it. We'll have to do it again sometime. Looking forward to hanging out with you in Florida here in just a few weeks.

Steve:

Sounds good.

Brett:

Thank you. And as always, thanks for tuning in. We would love to hear from you. So what would you like to hear more of on the podcast? Any suggestions, ideas, guest ideas? We are open to that. And if you've not done it, hey, leave us a review. Or if you think someone else will find this show helpful, please share it. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

Aaron Sheehan and I go way back. We first met when Aaron used to work for an agency that OMG supported.

Now, Aaron is the Director of Competitive Strategy at BigCommerce. He brings a fresh perspective on the eCommerce industry, and a unique point of view on eComm platforms and the future of eComm technology.

Coincidentally, his office is only a quarter of a mile from mine. In hindsight, we probably should have recorded this show in person.

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• What is Headless, and how does it compare to Composable? Are these just buzzwords or trends that are here to stay?
• Aaron’s and my take on the state of eCommerce and why we see a prevailing “cautious optimism.” 
• The eCommerce trends Aaron is most excited about and what omnichannel means today (vs. what it meant 10 years ago).
• When should you consider upgrading your tech stack, and where does the BigCommerce offering fit in the marketplace?

‍

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Aaron Sheehan (LinkedIn)
• Aaron Sheehan (Twitter)
• Big Commerce
• Feedonomics
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

‍

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I'm talking to a guy that I go way back with. We've known each other, worked with each other since like 2014 or something insane like that. And so we're going to be talking about the commerce and tech stack and where e-commerce is headed and all kinds of other fun stuff. But I'm delighted to welcome to the show Mr. Aaron Sheehan. He's the director of competitive strategy at Big Commerce. Aaron, welcome to the show. And how's it going, man?

Derek:

That's going well. Thanks Brett. It's nice to see you again.

Brett:

Absolutely. What's hilarious it to me anyway and to us probably maybe others will find it funny. So we are both in Springfield, Missouri. Most of the guests on this show are la, New York, somewhere global. Who knows? But we are literally, I think if you looked out the window of your building, you would see my building. We are that close to each other. We probably could have just done this podcast in the same room, but here we are in our respective offices quarter of a mile away or something. So it's awesome.

Derek:

Your guests might have the belief that Springfield is really tiny now that because of we've grown know that we can see each other's office. It's a little bit bigger than that. It's passive. It's a little bit than there not see Brett's house if he, yeah, closes the lines. I can't see what he's having for dinner.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, it's not that small of a town. Missouri State University is here. It's the home of Bass Pro, it's a home of O'Reilly Automotive. There's stuff happening in Springfield, Missouri, a greater metro's, a half a million or something like that. And the total, I used to be in tv, so I think in TV demographic or designated market areas. So we're like number 70 in the us so beds size market maybe a little bit bigger. But yes, we are in Springfield together, which is super awesome. And so I want to know this, I'm sure others are wondering this, Aaron, but what is the director of competitive strategy? What do you do? What does that look like?

Derek:

That's a great question. I have not yet quite figured it out myself. So I just hit one year last week at Big Commerce and I keep doing things here and eventually somebody will tell me what my actual job is. What do I have you do

Brett:

Here? Well, I do things,

Derek:

Yeah, so it's actually, it's a sort of series of duties and concerns, but the primary role of the director of competitive strategy is to advise the business, the big commerce business on what our competitors are doing, what the larger market is asking for, and how we can best be competitive with big commerce and phenomics in speaking to the merchants and brands whom we serve. So that takes a lot of different flavors. So there's a sort of research hat that you wear when you're going through and trying to figure out listening to podcasts like this one, what are the trends? What is happening in e-commerce? What direction is the economy taking the business? There's also a piece of that that is sales enablement. So competitive intelligence is the sexy part of the job, and that usually manifests as enabling our sellers, our partner managers, our account executives to have accurate up-to-date information on how to position big commerce properly in deals and understanding then and advising back to our product and engineering team and merger acquisition team, where do we need to be going? Not where is the puck, but where is the puck going to be? And that's a really, really overused analogy.

Brett:

Yeah, it is, but it's still good. Get tip that Green Gretzky. Love that guy's. Classic.

Derek:

It's classic. Yeah, it's classic. So that's a lot of what it is. And then there's a certain amount of publicly representing big commerce evidence on podcasts and find shows like this one.

Brett:

Yes, I love it. I love it. And that's why I'm excited about this show really because I want to talk about where you view e-commerce is headed. And I'll share my perspective as well. Even if listeners of the show are perfectly happy with their tech stack right now, there's always this thought of what's coming, what's next? What do I need to be thinking about? Do I go headless, do I add to my tech stack? Do I add apps? Do I, do I re-platform? What do I do? So understanding how to where things are because yeah, we have to consider where the industry is headed, where the puck is going so to speak, and we got to skate to it. I also love how you answered that where you're like, I don't know, we're still figuring it out because I don't know if you are this way Aaron, and you're a really smart guy. When I'm hanging out with family or other people, they're like, so what is it that you do? I looked at your website or I did this, but I have no idea what you do. Do you struggle with explaining what you do at family reunions and things like that?

Derek:

Very much so. Very much so. It helps. E-commerce is something that's pretty accessible to most people. Almost everyone has some engagement with the industry. It's all the plumbing and stuff that's sort of behind the experience that is a little opaque to a lot of folks, but it definitely can be challenging, but it's been worse in the past, so this is actually not too bad.

Brett:

It's getting better. Yeah, it's funny, my niece sister's daughter was telling all her friends at school, she lives in Kansas City that her uncle Brett was one of the owners of Google. And so I was super famous there for a little while. It was unbeknownst to me, I don't know where I'm hiding all the cash and all the stock options. So there you go. You heard it here. First misconceptions as to what we do in digital marketing, but the way I like to explain it say we help e-commerce companies get more customers and scale, and I know you help navigate and help e-commerce companies make good business decisions and then you help big commerce make good business decisions. And so we're going to be diving into that just a little bit. First of all, and we talked about this a little bit before we hit record, I was really keen on big commerce and paid a lot of attention to big commerce kind of my very early days in E-com.

And then the whole world shifted to Shopify, at least the area of e-commerce that OMG primarily plays in. But I got invited to the spoke at event in Miami, met Juan Jato and Dan on the big commerce team. They invited me to the partner summit in Austin last year. That's where you and I reconnected. Even though we live, our offices are quarter of mile way and we had to meet up in Austin, but I was so impressed by what Big Commerce is doing and the roadmap and the ideal client profile that the big commerce is building for. And so I was pretty excited about it. And I think not a lot of people know what Big Commerce is doing, but why are you excited about commerce and where it's headed?

Derek:

Yeah, great question. So I've wanted to work at Big Commerce for some years because I was on the other side of the table for many years as an agency partner doing implementations. And I know right at the time in 20 14, 20 15, that was primarily Magento, right?

Brett:

Yeah, Magento. But that's still the glory days of Magenta. It

Derek:

Really was. And so it was the best option for an awful lot of people. The platform became very enterprise grade and frankly a little on the overcomplicated side for a lot of merchants. And I know you felt that as well on the piece when you're just trying to get a product fee to work and you've got to employ a team of five developers to figure out how to make it it reliable and map attributes stuff. And for most merchants, all that's overhead that's coming out of your margins directly. The more time that a brand spent as an IT company, the less they are spending on and growing their funnel, optimizing conversions and adding channels and broadening reach. It

Brett:

Be great to spend that redeploy that cash into product development or product enhancement or improving the customer experience or marketing, getting more customers rep. Oh wow,

Derek:

What have an idea. Yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, A little self-serving but also true.

Derek:

Very much so. This podcast paid for by OMG v, the what oppressed me about Big Commerce at the time that I started becoming I choose sort of became aware of Big Commerce and started working with them back many years ago. The platform was very mature for what it enabled and the way it was built was very much allowed for an easy transition from a Magento environment to big commerce. There's a lot of feature parody, a lot of the concepts were the same. And it was stuff that you know, mentioned Shopify earlier. Shopify didn't have and still doesn't in many cases. Some things I consider sort of basic e-com and the people were very warm and very knowledgeable here. It was definitely a company of entrepreneurial hustlers but who are also kind. And I think you know, say that and you're like, what does that mean in the business context?

Why do I care? When you're on the partnership side of it and you're working, you're going into delivery to solve problems for your merchants, your joint merchants, you actually want people you trust on the other side of that table kind of doing business together. And that's not necessarily the norm in tech even. And that really sort of stuck with me as I liked working with these folks. I hope I can do it again. And so I took another agency, I went to another agency, went to the big commerce partnership program a second time, and then post Covid or during covid had the opportunity to come over here finally and work from Springfield, Missouri, worked for Big Commerce, crazy Good for you, and jumped to the chance to do it because I've always liked working with Big Commerce as folks and the product and I saw an opportunity and it jumped on it real quick because I wanted to be here.

Brett:

Love it, love it. And I really like that perspective too. And this is something we try to do at OMG and I think the best agencies, the best brands also embrace this where you can be really business savvy and have smart strategy and be sophisticated there, but also be kind and be a good partner and be a good human. And I think that actually works really, really well in today's environment. And so this idea of collaboration and multiple people winning, it's a real thing. And I know it's the same thing, hanging out with the big partner or big partner, big commerce partner Summit and other things. Really dig the team and the vibe going on there, which will look great. So let's pivot a little bit. Let's talk about e-commerce globally. And you mentioned to me before we record, you're on the road a lot, you're going to shows you're at Shop Talk.

We were just at, I was not, but we were just at Prosper and Etel West and a bunch of other things. So we get to rub shoulders and talk to merchants. We are in an interesting environment, Aaron, right where you got inflation, which is maybe improving, maybe not. You got people talking about a credit crisis, you still have a conflict in Ukraine. You got all these things that there really have created some uncertainty. You got bank failures. And so there there's a lot of negative news and I see people that I really trust on LinkedIn. My buddy Jeremy Horowitz, I think you're connected with him as well. Like gorgeous talking about, hey, there's some real things to be concerned about as a business owner and as a brand right now. But also as I go to events, and I haven't been to one in a few months, but as I talk to brand owners, people are still growing. They still got their foot on the accelerator and yes, cautious about what's going on, but I think the best brands understand, hey, there's always opportunity to grow. There's always opportunity to improve. But how would you describe the current state of, what's your global outlook on e-commerce right now?

Derek:

Bullish still, we're long past the point at which e-commerce is sort of a novelty channel.

Brett:

Yeah. Will it stick? Will it not

Derek:

Stick, right? Is this internet thing for real? I don't know. We're so far on that curve through it. Covid provided. I think Covid was a moment of maybe wild fiduciary optimism over sampling on a white vent in that the growth projection E-commerce grew incredibly fast in a very short period of time. And if you jumped on the bubble expecting the bubble to continue at that pace, you probably feel like we're in the middle of a giant depression right now. But realistically, if you took Covid out and looked at the projections, e-commerce is still ahead of where it was in 2019 by a healthy amount and projected to be higher in 20 this year, 2024. And going forward, these aren't going away. We're transacting on phones, we're still transacting on computers. I think

Brett:

A quick side note there too, Aaron, because we did the pseu at omg, we invested in our team and hired pretty dramatically during the pandemic to tr. We just saw e-commerce taking off. Then e-commerce slowed down a little bit. But if that was you and then you, you're seeing a bit of that retraction, Hey, you're in the same company as Shopify, you're in the same boat as Google, you're in the same boat as Amazon. Really All the big tech companies have had to pull back a little bit and even engage in layoffs and things like that. So it can sort of feel like, oh wow, it's doom and gloom. But if you look at Google added something like a hundred thousand employees during the pandemic or whatever. So yes, they've let go of some people, but still headcount is way up over 2019. And I think that that kind of tracks with e-commerce growth is still up over 2019. It's just slowed since the height and fury of the pandemic growth.

Derek:

Yeah, and I think where that's become most acute is in sort of a certain amount of privately held VC bat companies just because valuations went kind of nutty there for a lot of folks for a period of time. So now you mentioned going to shows. I was at NRF in New York, which was great because last year's NRF was omicron, so it's sort of, Sloan didn't happen. There was no very little at attendant. So this was record breaking year at N RF in New York, the Javits Center, tens of thousands of attendees went to Shop Talk in Vegas. Just got back from that a couple of weeks ago, about 8,000 people there for that. So the mood is definitely, I say guarded optimism from, yeah, it's guarded optimism. People are guarded in the sense that the easy money, I'm just going to slap my business plan down and go shop it out to a VC firm and they're going to get an offer sheet, they're going to be fighting over me trying to, that's gone or at least slowed down quite a bit.

And valuations are down to, even for publicly traded companies, it's down to sort of a healthy amount. But very few companies are like, I'm going out of business now because they're, nobody wants selling. Generally speaking, if you're in tech, people want what you're selling. And if you're a merchant, as long as you have, you've diversified your channel offerings well enough so that all your eggs are not in one D to C basket. And we can talk maybe about that a little bit more. I think you'll be fine. The challenges are more operational now for a lot of folks as they adapt. It's a, it's change management. That's always the hard part for companies. There happens to be a lot of change happening in successive waves and so people are just dizzy from trying to pivot, but that doesn't mean they've fallen over. So it's just more work.

Brett:

And I love that guarded optimism and that that's exactly what we're seeing. We still have a healthy flow of merchants reaching out to MG Commerce asking for growth strategies on Google and on Amazon and elsewhere. But there's also this trend of people more focused on business fundamentals. We want profitable growth. We want to be a healthy business, not just throwing money everywhere because we can't keep up with growth. And I think brands are functioning and needing to function more like healthy businesses, which is the way it should be anyway. And so that's definitely a trend as well. I want to talk a little bit about platforms and technology because, and I used to hang out at I R C E back when that was a hot show and we were getting to know each other win when Magenta was rocking and rolling. What are some of the shifts you've seen in terms of tech stack and platforms? What has kind of changed in that regard? Since when, and I first started hanging out back in the earlier days of e-commerce,

Derek:

Right? The good old days.

Brett:

The good old days.

Derek:

Yeah. I feel like the obvious answer to that is software as a service. The move from on-premise, sort of open sourced or even closed source platforms like Oracle, atg, magenta, WooCommerce, moving towards software as a service, as a delivery model. So the public cloud became a thing and then multi-tenant SaaS became a thing. And the value proposition of being able to, I almost apply insurance math to businesses, which is law of large numbers, which says if I get enough people together in one data center, I'm mitigating each individual merchant has their risk mitigated in terms of security, uptime and stability. And your brands and your businesses no longer have to be many IT companies or higher many IT companies and full service agencies to host, run, operate a complicated piece of tech stack. Definitely. I think it's certainly had the most impact in the platform in MarTech spaces.

So if you look at how email campaigns are managed, if you look at attribution software, if you look at platforms, customer loyalty ified, now it is, and it's even beginning to affect your legacy platforms like ERPs and OMSs, right? You're starting to see the back office is now catching up to the last 10 years of innovation and tech, which is fantastic. And long past time it's hard to find cobalt developers these days. So I would say the ation is the biggest sort of tech change. We may talk about it later quite a bit. We can say about composability and headless as well. I think the jury's still a little bit out on pieces of that and who that's for and why and why it matters. So I wouldn't say that that's necessarily, it generates 80% of the hashtag thought leadership on LinkedIn. Yeah, it does, but it generates maybe 5% of the actual implementations in the world, right? Here's definitely something to sort of explore there, but definitely SAS is unquestioned. I don't, yeah, yeah. On-premise software sort of ruling the roost it did back when we were walking around an I R CGE in 20 14, 20 15.

Brett:

So a couple things I'll kind of key in on that, totally agree with you SaaS, it taken over and one of the things that I believe I heard at the last big commerce partner summit was the belief and the position that kind of an open framework or an open model one back in the on-prem days when really it was probably a better experience for you as a merchant and for the user if you secured your own hosting and had an on-prem option on-premises option like magenta or whatever. Now it really is SaaS and there's so many benefits there. You talked about insurance, talk about there's speed, all these things. And I think the commerce belief is that more open is going to win on the SaaS side of things as well. Is that kind of a line or any perspective or insight on that?

Derek:

Yeah, very much so. One of the reasons I'm here, coming out of many eight years of being in the W ecosystem is I believe in open and flexible and giving choices to merchants and brands to shape their digital future the way they want. If you talk, a lot of times you'll talk to folks who are in on another platform that, where they're at the mercy of that platform team's roadmap. It's hard to innovate, it's hard to find developers who can work on it or it's limited in what it can do, or it's got pretty strong guardrails around key pieces of it. Like our friends in Canada with a green bag, they [inaudible] Yeah, don't think about it too deeply. I

Brett:

Don't have no idea

Derek:

What their approach to payments and FinTech and look at those, those eight Ks and you kind of realize where the money's actually coming from. And so there are definitely plenty of brands and merchants for whom I've had this conversation many times, flexibility is actually a negative. And I saw this on Magento as well. Too much choice, too much optionality, and it bred analysis paralysis or a lack of maturity maybe to be able to assess where something, what should be, where I should depart from the norm and where I should just stick with the, the templated approach. The platform gave me

Brett:

It limited speed and maybe cause people to go down the path of spending too much money and when really just needed something simple, just get the products up online and sell 'em. Be, yeah, go simple.

Derek:

But some you can overcorrect on that you can overcorrect and go to a very safe platform where innovation is, maybe it meets your needs today, but innovation is challenging and you're kind of like you have vendor lock in. And I think if there's anything that that's probably at the heart of that headless and composable movement, it's people being wary of vendor lock in because we've all been through, I think the phase of, I fall in love with this product and then it gets bought and it gets acquired and rolled into a larger stack and then silently dies, right?

Brett:

Or just maybe doesn't innovate, right? We've been seeing this, I, I've got some friends and I'm more on the marketing side, not the tech side, but even WordPress. WordPress used to be the platform. It was, I don't even remember the percentage was 30% of the internet was, excuse me on, and it's kind of fading. I hear most people advising don't do it when it comes to WordPress. So almost every platform or channel can have its day or there's the risk of the downfall of that platform, and then you potentially are stuck depending on how you built on it.

Derek:

Oh, totally agree. Although in full transparency, my 11 year old daughter has a WordPress, so I mean

Brett:

Full put, WordPress is not dead yet, it's just not. Maybe it was on a meteoric rise and it's maybe on the plateau or decline at this point. Yep. Let's do this here because you mentioned headless a couple of times, and if you're about our age, we're not talking about the sleep of hollow dead headless horsemen type of thing. I want to get your perspective on what headless is because I still think there's a lot of people that are confused about it. And so want to hear your kind of explanation and then what is the trend there? And I think you kind of nailed it where you said, Hey, everybody's talking about it. It's 80% of the headlines, but maybe about 5% of implementations are actually headless. But what is it and what's your perspective on it?

Derek:

Yeah, no, great question. And what I've had to grapple with quite a bit in the last year, I, I'll draw, I'll start maybe by illustrating what I consider two terms that get used kind of interchangeably in that the sort of LinkedIn content world that we live in, headless and composability or headless and composable. So the way I describe it to people is headless is an adjective that you would apply to a piece of software, and it's all it means is that that software, usually it's applied to an e-commerce platform or a web website, a CMS or something like that, but it's a backend without a front end. So it would be an e-commerce platform where I have a management utility or APIs and I can put my products into it and describe my products and access my customers and fill orders and things like that. But the interface, the screens, the elements, the buttons, the forms, that's not part of the platform. Instead, the headless platform is meant to have a different system on the front. So back in the day, way back in the day, for instance, we used to do an agency you and I worked with, we used to do a lot of Magento in the back and WordPress on the front. Gary would be,

Brett:

Yeah, and quick shout out, we don't mind to mention it at all, but Classy Lama was the agency, that's where we met. So shout out to Kurt and the crew and the glory days of e-commerce. Man, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Clai Lama. I know you did as well. But yeah, there was a lot of magenta on the back end, WordPress on the front end, which we kind of dogged both of those platforms on this podcast. But anyway, yeah, continue that thought.

Derek:

Well, and that headless framework means that I'm picking a system that is maybe better for representing front end content but doesn't have the maturity to handle complex data on the back. So I take the system that's better for handling complex data like category taxonomy and product attributes, product media and images and long form content and stuff like that. And I'm saying I'm authoring all of that in this complicated system back here. But the thing that I'm going to use to build pages, maybe I want to drag and drop editor, maybe I want better sort of media management tools. Maybe I want something that's more user friendly and less sort of dev heavy in how it operates. I can basically hack glue those two systems together, and I go to a website and it's at my domain.com and I click the store button, and now I am@store.my domain.com.

So I was on WordPress, then I hit the store, do my domain.com, and now I'm on a big commerce or a Magento page. So headless simply means a backend with no front end, that's it. Either labels a piece of software, composability or composable is the adjective you would use for an entire tech stack for a company being made up of pieces that are purpose built to do one thing specifically. So in a composable landscape, I probably have a headless system, maybe multiple headless systems, and I also have a separate front end and maybe I have a separate product information management system, a separate dam or digital asset management system. I have lots of maybe have loyalty or promotions running r running, I've search and merch. I'm using Clav or Algolia or something. I'm taking lots of services and I'm knitting them invested

Brett:

In class in these individual areas.

Derek:

Yes. And I'm knitting Symp

Brett:

Symphony of e-commerce.

Derek:

That's perfect. Yeah, great analogy. And so I would use multiple headless systems to make a composable stack. And where you get the confusion is that there's two words get used interchangeably and it feels a little bit like one is meant to replace the other. And I think vendors, we're probably as guilty of this as anybody else, don't necessarily do our buyers any favors because you've got to shovel your way through all the marketing speak to get to the reality. I think we've gotten a lot better about this, but definitely I see plenty of it still plenty of confusion and FUD on the topic.

Brett:

Yeah, dude, the great explanation, love that headless is really a backend without a front end. And then composable is really joining all kind of the best in class or the things that work for different business use cases and combining them, composing them. So really, really good explanation there. So yeah, do see, are the headlines just going to fade away or is this move, I'm guessing the composability that that's probably really a real direction that the industry is headed or what's your perspective on that?

Derek:

Yeah, I think about this a lot and depending on how I wake up in the morning, I might have a different view, but at come moment I act totally fair. You're right. I don't think it's going anywhere, which sounds maybe a little counter to my sort of crack, about 80% of the thought leadership with the 5% of the, I don't think it's going anywhere. And the reason I don't think it's going anywhere is that platforms J, all the innovation now to speaking specifically about e-commerce here at this point, the innovation, the new platforms being created or the platforms being improved, they all fit the composable model. We knew we're part of the maline because

Brett:

They know that's how you get product adoption is by being composable. If I'm creating this new novel thing that has value in the marketplace, it's got to be composable and no one's going to buy it.

Derek:

Yeah, exactly. So think when I survey the landscape, I spent a lot of time by virtue of this job looking at other e-commerce platforms and how they're built and who therefore I don't think composability, headless is going away simply because there's too many people, there's too many platforms self-identifying that way. And what will likely happen at some point is there will be some kind of VC or private equity rollup of multiple best in breed, and you'll create a brand new sort of monolith of maybe multiple solutions and different new different things kind of doing business as one that's not new to business. Brett, there's two ways to make money in business bundling and unbundling. So we are in the middle of a big unbundling, which is the coal composability thing. At some point there's going to be a rebundling, but architecturally, I don't think it's going to go back to being the way that a magenta or a woo or something got started where it's completely different

Brett:

Environments that don't communicate with each other, stuff that that's likely dead.

Derek:

Exactly. Monoliths. I don't see anybody trying to build the next monolith, which makes me question whether or not we'll see another one. And so look at the product direction of where Adobe is taking the sort of leftover bits of Magento. They're not trying investing in making it a monolith, they're investing in making it a microservices based platform that connects to the rest of Adobe's services. So there's not a lot of people sort of advocating for it. So I think what will happen is I think platforms like us Big Commerce are going to keep leading the way on making headless composable more accessible. Because that's the biggest barrier right now is it can be complicated and it can be inaccessible and it absolutely is not the right choice for a lot of people. But I do think that over time what will happen is headless composability will get more commoditized and it will become more accessible to a wider variety of merchants who are going to want the benefits that approach provides without all of the overhead that goes with it. That's my guess. Right. Makes

Brett:

Sense. Totally makes sense. So I want to, in just a minute, I want to talk about some of the trends you're excited about and I have think some good perspectives I want to share there. Before we do though, I just want to, because I think a lot of people don't know this, what position is big commerce carving out in the marketplace? Who's big commerce trying to serve and really where is big commerce headed? And I know you've got a unique perspective because you view the competitive landscape as what you do on a daily basis, but talk to people about that who maybe just haven't heard from Big Commerce in a while.

Derek:

Yeah, no, that thanks for the opportunity to pitch. Yeah, so big commerce big, I think you've mentioned this a couple of times, both off air and on air. We kind of fly under the radar for a lot of people. There are other platforms that get a lot more with bigger marketing spends I think that get more attention. We've been around for quite a while, started off as an s and b platform and have grown into an enterprise level platform. I would say that we squarely serve, if you ask Gardner and Forrester and stuff that we serve, the mid-market, if you were to ask them, they would say we serve the mid-market, which that am ambiguous term, that means whatever anybody needs it to mean in any given. But I would describe it as largely speaking that 5 million to a billion dollars in on online G gmv, right?

That's who we're not trying to be sap really no desire to become sort of a conglomerate, publicly traded. We're publicly traded, but we serve b2b, B2C merchants equally well. About 35, 40% of our customer base I believe is doing b2b. So we do quite a lot, lot of direct brands, but we are really built more for more, I would say semi complicated channel makeups we're built around the premise that merchants should be able to, to, we should be encouraging them to sell on every channel, every marketplace, every digital property that they possibly can to diversify, to reduce that risk of an economic slowdown in one channel, sort of tanking the whole business, which we're kind of seeing in some of those venture backed like D two C brands that got kicked off in 20 18, 20 19, 20 20. If you didn't have an in-store strategy, if you didn't have a marketplace strategy, you're kind of feeling it right now. We're there to serve those merchants as well as we can by taking what is a complicated series of I need to manage multiple web properties from one backend. I need to manage multiple marketplaces and add networks from one backend. We figured out how to make that actually pretty straightforward and simple. And so we're best serving mid-market merchants who are growing into multiple channels or established brands that are already there and they're usually looking to get off of some kind of antiquated piece of highly expensive legacy software and move to something more modern.

Brett:

And that was one of the things that really spoke to me as I was at that partner summit was this focus on that. And I think another point of clarification, one thing I heard someone mentioned was that in Ian, even more like in the 10 million to a couple hundred million range, that's a real sweet spot for big commerce. I know you can work with people that are a little bit smaller and of course that are bigger, but I think that that's where a lot of growth in e-commerce is going to come from. That's the type of business that OMG commerce wants to work with. I think there's a lot of exciting things with that size merchant that you can do either as an agency or as a platform. Yeah. So then when should someone, if someone's out there, they're maybe not exactly loving the platform they're on, when should they start thinking, maybe I should check out Big Commerce, maybe I should look at what it has to offer. What are some pain points that often pop up the big commerce has an interesting solution for?

Derek:

Yeah, great question. Adding channels a or and optimizing existing channels has a been one. So we acquired a company called Phenomics about a year and a half ago. Phenomics does optimization and management of product data across ad networks and marketplaces and makes it really, really easy to spin up and turn on, Hey, do you want to get into Target? Plus, do you want get into Amazon or one of the many Amazons, do you want to go to Google, Walmart? Do you want to advertise on TikTok meta? Like there's about 500 I think supported sort of channels between marketplaces and ad networks. Making that simple MA and making that optimized so that it performs really well, kind of using AI to optimize that mix of product data works better for, I would say more high SKU count merchants. Usually if you've only selling 50 SKUs, you probably don't need AI to optimize your feed.

You should be able to do that yourself in an hour or two. But if you're maybe a little bit larger, you need that help. I would also say on the platform side, we get a lot of people who start calling us when they start hearing no from their existing vendors because maybe that vendor happens to have very tight opinions about how the checkout should look and doesn't allow custom customizing the checkout. We also get a lot of folks, we have a very large office in London, so we do, I don't know if Europe is your target audience, but we have a lot of expansion in Europe because we're very friendly to regional fulfillment and payment models worldwide. So because we're so global, we get a lot of folks who are doing cross border and don't, they're not necessarily looking to just outsource that to one of the many sort of providers that sort of handles cross-border outsourcing.

They want to do it themselves. And we also get a lot of people looking to explore headless for the first time. To be honest, definitely, I'm going back to the earlier statement. We have more headless implementations than any other partner in the mock clients. Yep. Because we're so gosh darn and easy to use, Brett and so accessible. And because we have a front end, actually, you don't have to, I mean most of our customers aren't using as headless. You don't ever need to think about it with us. But if you do or you want to, you're curious about exploring it with us, you can simply deploy us one whole big commerce get started and then slowly pull stuff back over time as your business demands. There's really no other platform that allows you to mix and match in a composer, like slowly transition to composable. So I like to tell people we're the last e-commerce platform you should ever need because we enable pretty much every method of selling on any channel that anybody wants with big Commerce. So if that sounds appealing to a merchant, then they should probably give us a call.

Brett:

Dude, that's a good line. The last e-commerce platform you'll ever need. And a close second is we're just so gosh darn easy I think. I don't know what marketing is going to go with, but I think you should pitch both those taglines and as long as you get credit for them, I think one of those will work. So perfect. Awesome. We're coming up against time a little bit, but I want to spend a little bit of time here. What are some trends you're excited about? And you kind of alluded to one big one that I know we both want to chime in on a little bit, but what are you excited about in the world of e-commerce and trends that we're seeing?

Derek:

I'm really excited about how omnichannel is being a redefined right now among merchants and vendors in the space. So back when you and I were met in 20 14, 20 15, you'd go to I R C E and everybody was omnichannel, right? It's not everybody's composable now. Everybody was omnichannel. Omnichannel, totally. It didn't matter what you were selling. It was omnichannel. Omnichannel,

Brett:

All of which were all the channels. All the channels,

Derek:

All the channels. And what it meant though, a lot back then was my point of sale, talked to my inventory management system, which talked to my e-commerce platform, endless aisle. What if I use my stores as fulfillment centers? What if I shared customer data between a digital customer and a web? Because it was very siloed, still is for a lot of brands. The web store is very siloed operationally from the physical store. And so omnichannel meant things like Bluetooth beacons in your store that would connect to shopper's phones as they were walking through and show them 360 views of things or let them earth stuff that wasn't on the shelf like beaconing. And then it's changed a little bit and now it feels like it's more about advertising and transacting on other platforms, digital platforms assigned besides just owned web properties. And so now you see omnichannel deployed to not only mean what I just described previously, but also is now inclusive of selling on social media networks, of which there's a new one every couple of weeks it seems like, and transacting on new marketplaces, of which there's a new one every couple of weeks.

Cause everybody's building their own marketplace now. And so there's a lot of that. Unified commerce is the buzzword I saw at N R F and Shop Talk this year earlier, meaning it's just commerce. It's just

Brett:

Commerce. That's the beauty. Just commerce. Yeah.

Derek:

Yeah. It's just commerce and the brand needs to be anywhere where its potential customers are. And so you have a lot to manage and optimize, but the opportunity to grow is actually huge, even given the economic conditions that we're in because people are everywhere and they're fragmented, and so you've got to go find 'em, go optimize your message for that channel. But the channels are robust enough, the reporting is robust enough and the audiences are large enough and you can actually make money. You have to work pretty hard not to make money. So I'm excited.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that perspective because you're never going to hear a shopper say, I just want an omnichannel merchant. If there could just be some omnichannel offerings, they don't think about that. But they want products to be easily purchased. If they're on Facebook and they just want to shop and they want to buy right there, they want to buy right there. If they prefer to shop on Amazon, they want your product to be there. If there's some products that they want to buy in store, they want to buy it in store. And what we are seeing, and I know you're seeing this too, is that the pure play D two C brand where all they do is sell on their.com, that's probably not the path to get where you ultimately want to go, whether that's long-term profitability or to sell your brand or whatever. Usually you're going to need to go multichannel or omnichannel or this unified commerce of right.

My.com is crushing utilizing Google and YouTube and all that the Google ecosystem has to offer. I'm maximizing my opportunities on Facebook and Meta and Instagram and other social platforms, and I'm maybe selling on shop on Facebook and I'm maximizing marketplaces. And yes, they're growing, obviously Amazon is by far the biggest, but you got to think about Walmart and Target and you guys are really closely integrated with Target and there's lots of exciting things right there. Don't sleep on the target, the marketplace, it's not huge. It's not for everybody, but we've seen merchants on the target marketplace really do well, really move some volume of products there, which is pretty exciting. And to be in store, there's some products people like to buy in store. But yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Aaron. I

Derek:

Was just, Hey, target plus is invite only to my understanding, unless that's changed and we are able to,

Brett:

Yes, I have that back door, a little bit of that int

Derek:

Rope. We can get you under the velvet rope to the v I P lounge. Here's what I'm saying. Yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, just talk to Aaron and actually OG through, we're connected to the Heat omics crew, and so we can help you get in there as well. And yeah, shout out to Brian Rosen, one of the founders of Theos. He was on this show back in 2018, if you can believe that here in Shein. He's, he's an OG that Brian Rosen

Derek:

Spent the thought later, Brett.

Brett:

Yeah, before it was even Trip, before everyone was even talking omnichannel. We were going right here on this show. So, man, there's more things I want to ask. Aaron. I'm kind of bummed we're up against time here just a little bit, but how can people connect with you? Because you seem to me in any way, and to be pretty active on LinkedIn and other places. So where can people find you and those who want to just learn, explore, stay up on how tech stacks are developing and things like that? How should they find you?

Derek:

Well, if you're in Springfield, look out your window. You could probably

Brett:

Small place you, you'll see 'em small. Stick his hand.

Derek:

Yeah, I'd live on top of the water tower real easy in the spot. No, I'm, I'm probably too online. So I'm on Twitter and I'm on LinkedIn primarily, so I'm pretty easy to find Aaron Sheehan on either of those. I've had that handle for a while. I'm also, it's Aaron dot sheehan big commerce.com. If you want to drop me an email. I do eventually read all my emails, but probably a LinkedIn or Twitter DM is the fastest way

Brett:

To get ahold of me. Totally, totally. That's just cooler. You want to just drop into somebody's inbox, uninvited necessarily

Derek:

Price. Why isn't the DM

Brett:

Dms slot into the dms that's totally acceptable these days. And then those that are interested in phenomics or big commerce, how should they go further there?

Derek:

Big commerce.com, phenomics.com, there are prominent calls to action on both of those sites. You can certainly also, you can talk to Brett at OMG if you're interested in learning more about Phenomics as well through his fine agency and team. And you can of course, reach out to me directly if you want to get ahold of anybody at Big Commerce, I can connect you pretty quickly, whether you're an agency looking for a partnership or you're a merchant who's interested in getting a demo or maybe just learning more about the platform.

Brett:

Aaron Sheehan, ladies and gentlemen, Aaron, this has been a blast. I wish we had more time. There's more things you want to talk about. But all that means is we just need to schedule round two here before too

Derek:

Long. In person.

Brett:

In person, in person. Yes. That is our quasi promise to you, listener. And I'm sure that carries a lot of weight with Next time we do this show, actually, we've got two of these microphones, so we could set up a little studio here. I can slide over. We could be here in the same studio and only add about a minute and a half to your commute. And let's do it. Let's do it. So, all right, man. Really appreciate it. Yep. Take care. Awesome. And thank you for tuning in. We could not do this show without you. And hey, we'd love your feedback. So would you like to hear more of on this show? And if you have not done it yet, we'd love to see that review on iTunes. It helps other people find the show. It makes my day. And hey, I think I'm going to start reading some of those reviews on this show, just for fun, just to call people out. So with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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What got you here won’t get you there. 

What will it take to reach your next big breakthrough?

Whether or not we want to admit it, we all have limiting thought patterns that create a sort of blindness, preventing us from seeing breakthroughs. 

I first met Will when he was the Head of Growth for Organifi. He helped grow the brand from an $18 million per year run rate to a $100 million per year run rate in short order. 

In today’s episode, Will Hughes wants to help you think differently. And not just a philosophical kind of thinking, but big, business-altering, breakthrough kind of thinking. 

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• The remarkable story of the Hollywood Blacklist and how we can find treasure in what others are rejecting.
• Using creative thinking as a competitive advantage.
• How to avoid being a copycat (while still paying attention to competitors).
• What Google vs. Yahoo can teach us as entrepreneurs. 
• The power of reticular activators.

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Liquid Mind Masterclass
• Will Hughes (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

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Transcript:
Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO OMG Commerce, and today we have a very unique episode. I think this will blow your mind. I think it will unlock some things for you that will be extremely beneficial. This'll be a ton of fun to listen to. I've gone through this material, I've seen one of these courses. It's fantastic. And so my guest today is Will Hughes. What's up Will? How you doing, man? Welcome to the show.

Will:

Yeah, man, great to be here. Great to see you again.

Brett:

Absolutely. And so just a quick intro so folks know who you are and how we met, but we worked together when you were the head of growth at Organify. Yes. When you were there for years, you kind of saw that really the explosion of that brand and it went from just a kind of cool little brand to something really massive. And so I know that'll come out a little bit. I've seen this presentation or some of your content they're going to go through today. I know Ezra Firestone saw you speak and he immediately invited you to come to his Blue Ribbon Mastermind and present as well. And so we're talking about how to think differently to really unlock scale in your business. And so your, your approach to process called Liquid Mind. Yes. But tell us just a little bit about that, and then I want to get into your background, but Liquid Mind, what is this? Let, let's kind of tease this topic a little bit and then we'll talk about your

Will:

Background. Yeah, for sure. So actually I come with gifts. I'm going to actually do sort of a case example. I'm going to do some straight hardcore learning for everybody listening today. So we'll get into that when you're ready. But just to paint a picture, so what I like to teach is creative thinking as a competitive advantage. So what I rail against is the copy culture. I hate that everything in the e-commerce industry with D to C brands, everybody's just ripping everybody else off, right? There's very few originals, there's very few innovators out there. And if someone's going to launch some new strategy or program in their business, a new subscription program, 99 out of a hundred times, they're going to find a brand that they appreciate and they're going to just go rip off their stuff. And that might be the efficient thing to do, but it's such a lack of originality and innovation in doing things that way.

It drives me crazy. And more importantly, it leads to this oversaturation of the same type of marketing that everyone's doing the same thing. So if there's a new hot kind of video format, well all of a sudden everyone's doing the same thing. And that dilutes the impact of what that strategy might have when everyone's just copying everybody else. And so what I teach is these frameworks for business, creativity and innovation, how to think differently, how to think creatively, how to have frameworks to get these big creative ideas on a much more regular basis. So we all have these big aha moments once or twice a year. I want to give people a form, a formula, a format for a formal thought process for getting it once or twice a month. And the reason that matters is creativity equals innovation. And innovation equals revenue. So I want to teach people to be innovators. That's what I'm after.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And there's something to be said about, you have to pay attention to your competitors and you do need to look at benchmarking. And they're sure if they're ahead of you in certain areas, you may have to make some shifts, but that's not how you achieve breakthroughs. You don't achieve breakthroughs by copying the competition. You achieve breakthroughs by thinking differently and by making unique connections and combining things that nobody else's combined before, going with the fresh novel idea and then executing on that idea. So I love this phrase. I love your approach here. Love the content. We're going to dig into it. But you and I got to hang out when you were at Organi and yes, I quickly did see the, you are a guy that thinks differently and you were able to push the envelope. And can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like? Because I know a lot of people know organi, but sure, you were there for years. What changed as you were there?

Will:

Yeah, so I got to identify, mean it's been years when I first got there. Now, I moved out to San Diego maybe five plus years ago to work at Identify. When I got there, about 18 million in revenue. And some of the genesis of all this is on the, my first week on the job, this EO came to me and said that my goal was to grow the business to a hundred million in revenue in 18 months. And we had to do that at either breakeven or profit,

Brett:

Right? No big deal. Hey, it's not. So just put a pen in this or come back to it later. But yeah, a hundred million. So basically that's more than five x growth in 18 months. And yeah. Yeah. Can't lose money. You got to

Will:

Do, yeah, got to do pretty no profit,

Brett:

Right? No, no, no problem. No problem. So

Will:

Real, really aggressive goal. And when he first said it to me, I mean, it kind of was really disheartened. I'm like, I just moved across the country to take this job. That's not realistic. That's not the way these things work. You know, want both profit and massive growth at the same time. So I had some concerns about this opportunity, but I sat back and I thought about it for a couple days, and where I landed was I could do this, I could figure this out. And the way I was going to figure it out was thinking differently than everybody else. I was going to make it my mission to be more creative and find frameworks for unlocking creativity. And it set me off on this journey. And in fact, I did get the company to a hundred million run rate in about 18 months. It was just more than a little more than 18 months. But I did actually get them there. And I've been using these frameworks ever since and kind of replicating that success. So it was definitely a fun ride. I've got amazing friends still working at Identify left there about two years ago. But just it great company, great friends all the way around. Really good experience.

Brett:

And really, it's a great product. We enjoy New mg. Got to work with you on some YouTube projects. I remember sitting in your office and you were whiteboarding and talking about stuff, and it was one of the most fun conversations I had sketching out YouTube ideas for campaigns and stuff. Sure, yeah. What a cool company. Glad our paths collided. And that was super fun. So you grew from 18 million a year to a hundred million run rate, which is phenomenal. A lot of that was done by thinking differently. Because you're right, you either, you got two options. You can either scale or you can be efficient, but you can't do both

Will:

Really hard to do.

Brett:

Wow. Maybe you can, there's creative ways to figure things out. So, sure. Let's talk about this a little bit. You talk about thought patterns and thought patterns that we have as entrepreneurs, as humans that are limiting. Yep. So talk about that a little bit. What have you observed?

Will:

Yeah, so this is interesting. So thought patterns. This is a really big blind spot that no one's paying attention to. So over time, we learn how to think efficiently. Our brains learn how to take shortcuts to get to the answers that we're seeking faster. And that's great. That helps us to multitask. It helps us to move a thousand miles an hour. As entrepreneurs, it served us well. But at the same time, this is a really interesting area, which is it. It's a blind spot that no one's paying attention to. So over time, we all learn how to think efficiently. The brain learns how to take shortcuts to get to answers faster. But we'll give you an example. So if you counter a problem in your life and then you encounter a similar problem down the road, you've experienced something like that before, you're going to get to the solution to that problem much quicker.

And so your ability to short circuit getting into answers gets faster and faster and faster. But it also locks you into one way of thinking, one single approach in how you solve problems. So this is really good for efficient thinking, it's really good for multitasking and moving a thousand miles an hour, but it's the antithesis of creative thinking. And I can give you an example that's kind of interesting. So I have this, it's in one of my presentations, but it's a visual. And I know we're on a podcast, so no one's looking at the visual, but it's a heat map. And it's a heat map of how the eyes move on an article website. So think the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or whatever, we all know and understand the concept of banner blindness, right? And so what's happening when you look at this heat map is everyone is immediately going to the content.

And the content as we know, is on the left through the center of the page. And no one's looking at the top or right of the page because you've learned in the past, there's no content, there's no value there. Let's go right to where the value is. Your brain being efficient, let's not waste time looking to the right and to the top. But when you're doing this in your business, when you're trying to solve problems, that might actually be where the creative solution is. So if you go to some new article website, and the actual great answer you're looking for is on the right rail, you're never going to see it, right? You're blind to it's,

Brett:

Yeah, we're trained to not

Will:

Look for that. Yeah, you're trained to not look for it, and you're not look going out of your way not to look for it. You're going out of your way to be efficient and find the answers that you want and what's blinding you to what other opportunities might exist. And so what it's really doing is it's locking you into one way of thinking, having one single perspective, and not having the ability to think differently. And that that's the case study I actually brought today. And if it's a good time, we can jump into that now or yeah, let's do,

Brett:

Let's go right to the case study and there'll be lots of follow ups and stuff. So yeah, let's lay it out there.

Will:

So for those that are going to watch this, I am going to do a screen share, but you got sweet, this is going to be fine for just listeners as well. So lemme just pull that up. There we go. Okay. So what I like to teach are these case studies of people that have done something extraordinary, something different, that had extraordinary results. And sometimes I'm profiling famous business leaders like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, and sometimes the people you've never heard of. In this case, we're going to profile a gentleman by the name of Franklin Franklin Leonard. And Franklin Leonard was the founder of a company called the Hollywood Blacklist. And the Hollywood Blacklist is a collection of some of the most successful movies that were ever produced out of the rejections of all the major studios. This is a guy who is really thinking

Brett:

To love that concept, love that concept.

Will:

So what his job was in Hollywood is he was a script reader. Now, I don't know what that job title actually is, but he would read scripts all day long, eight hours a day, and I don't know how many scripts they can get through in a day, but very monotonous job. And he's looking for that needle in a haystack. He wants that one movie he can pass on to his boss, and hopefully they'll buy this script and fund the movie and make the film. And his goal was, how can I find more high quality scripts in a more efficient manner? And the genius in what this guy did is he found a creative solution that was in the trash bin of all the major studios.

Brett:

Nice.

Will:

And so what we need to know, or the problem that works we really want to overcome here is studios have been making decisions on what scripts to greenlight, which movies to fund and produce. They were making these decisions on the wrong criteria or very limited criteria I should say. And so for some of the reasons they would,

Brett:

Their version of banner Blindness, right? Yeah. They were viewing movies through this certain lens and only doing what was successful before. Yes. So it was that translation there. You

Will:

Fully nailed it, right? There's one way to do it, there's only one way to do it, and now we're blind to other approaches. So that's exactly right. So the criteria they were using to decide which movies to green light were things like, if a script comes in with a star actor attached, like if Brad Pitts attached to a script, the odds be getting made, obviously are much higher. The genre of the film is going to matter because some genres make more comedies versus drama, whatever. Some make more than others. They would evaluate the script if it's going to do well in foreign markets, is this going to translate overseas and in another language? And of course, what they really want is, is this movie going to have a sequel? Can we follow it up with another movie if it's successful? So is the criteria that they were using.

And so what Franklin wanted to know is what are the favorite scripts that didn't meet these criteria from these other movie studios that were being rejected? But yet they were really high quality scripts. And so back in the early two thousands, I think the number was 12, I think there was 12 major studios back at that point in time, universal MGM and so forth. And so what he did is he went around and he took an anonymous survey of his friends that were also script writers at the other studios and other executives at these movie studios. And he asked them to give him a list of the 10 favorite movies that they had rejected or passed on in the last year. And he simply tallied up the list. Super smart, which of these movies got the most votes? Went to the top of the list regardless of how everyone ranked them individually and

Brett:

Here. So the same movie was on multiple lists, so multiple rejection lists, but it was still the favorite of those rejected. Those went to the top of his list.

Will:

Exactly. Right. And it didn't matter if everyone listed a movie, one versus two, that was irrelevant. It's just a total cumulative score. Yep, exactly right. And so the blacklist is a summary of these 10 we're the movies that were most voted on by the executives. Now remember, these movies have been rejected by every single major studio. So here's the results. Fast forward to today, over 400 of these movies that were absolutely dead, 400 have been made into movies. Wow. Now let's look at the quality.

Brett:

Sorry, what type, I know you just said what type period is this again?

Will:

Well to today? So started in 2005 and now 2005

Brett:

To today, still 400 movies, over 400

Will:

Movies. None of these ever were been made into movies. 300 of them were nominated for an Academy award. So this is showing you, they were high quality scripts. They were missing on high quality scripts. 54 of these movies actually won an Academy Award, and four of the last 10 pictures came from the Hollywood blacklist. They never would've been made. So those four movies are Slumdog Millionaire King's Speech Spotlight.

Brett:

What's funny, that was the movie that came to mind first when you said it was Slumdog Millionaire, because it's such a beautiful story, but it does not fit any, it doesn't fit any mold. So that that's, there you go. So cool. That was one of 'em. Yeah,

Will:

That's exactly right. So those four movies, Argo was the last one. They never would've seen the light of day. In fact, they were rejected. These were turned down by all 12 major studios. What revived them was the blacklist. So in Q 440 scripts have been produced into movies making over 30 billion in revenue. Wow. Now, here's the hero slide. Harvard Business School actually did a research study around the blacklist, and they said movies from the Hollywood blacklist generated 90% more revenue than non-listed films with a similar budget. So not only are these higher quality as far as getting accolades and academy awards or high quality scripts they were passing on, right, 75% of 'em get nominated for Academy awards. So high quality stuff, but yet they're earning 90% more at the box office. They've been, what tells you is Hollywood's been evaluating films incorrectly for the last 100 years.

They got locked in that thought pattern. There's only one way to do it. And you kind of nailed it just a moment ago, Brett, is, it's almost a two layer effect here. Number one, we get locked into a single way of thinking, one perspective, there's only one way to view things. That's our thought pattern. But then when you work at a big company, they give you the way that they do business and they then force on you, this is the way it's been successful in the past, and there's no other way to view it. So it's a layering effect there where you really, it's, it becomes impossible to think creatively. So to be different, to think creatively, you have to learn how to break these thought patterns. And that's something that I really like to teach. And we'll go through one example here that basically Franklin Leonard is teaching us, which is I like to teach people how to approach achieving how to overcome the problems in your business or how to achieve these aggressive growth goals from different angles, altitudes, and directions.

In his case, Ray Leonard's case, he was taking the opposite approach, the inverse approach or the reverse approach to what everyone else was doing. By doing the opposite, he's getting these big outsized returns. So that's the opportunity. How do we think differently from everybody else? Let's think in different directions. I want to teach people how they can see what they don't and your competitors can't, right? We're blind to this stuff. And it's shocking at how blind we are. When people go through my masterclass, we do a bunch of puzzles and it is ridiculous how adults can't solve these puzzles, but yet kids can solve 'em like that. Kids are far more creative and imaginative than adults because they're not stuck in the thought patterns that we are. It's just, it's crazy. So I like to teach people how to think differently to scale businesses up to nine figures and beyond.

So let's do a couple, we'll do two more quick examples of this. So who else took the inverse approach and did really well with it? Right. Well, how about the Yahoo Google fight, which now fast forward today is going to be the Google Chat, G B T fight or AI fight. But back in the nineties, Yahoo was the most trafficked website on the planet, right? 125 billion in market value. And we all know what the Yahoo homepage looks like. There's a million things going on there. There's probably 40 different links that you can click before you even scroll below the fold. And here comes Google with their very clean interface and only one single thing to do type in a search bar. And Google just cleans their clock. They take the opposite approach and just bury Yahoo. Google's current market share is 85% for search versus Yahoo's 3%.

And remember that valuation? Yahoo. Yahoo was valued at 125 billion. They sold to Verizon for just 5 billion a couple years ago where Google's valued at a trillion. Wow. So they're taking the opposite approach in getting extraordinary results. And that's all that's also playing out right now in front of us with AI and chat G P T and all the competitors rolling out compared. When you look at Google compared to chat G P T I typed into a search, which is on the screen for those watching, is what are the best things to do in New York City into Google? And we get what we always get. We get a bunch of ads, we get a bunch of blogs, we get a bunch of articles that we got to navigate our way through the junk, the good, the bad sift through research versus I throw that same question into Chad G P T and it gives me 10 recommendations of what to do in New York City. And they're all great. They're exactly what you would expect. Not only is it telling me to go to the nine 11 Memorial and Statue Liberty, but it tells me to see a show and gives me restaurant recommendations. Go eat here.

So this is yet to be fully played out, but it's certainly a different approach of the way things been happening

Brett:

On. It's going to be really interesting to watch that play out. I do think, and I'm a little bit of biased cause I'm a Google guy and our business is somewhat built on

Will:

Google as a month.

Brett:

Eventually someone's going to take some of their market share, no question about it. But there's still times where if I'm searching for a product or searching for something, I want to use Google and not chat gps. I don't want just text, I want visuals and other things. But for sure the AI revolution and the progress that's being made and the speed at which it's improving, it's crazy stuff. And Google's still on the heat for sure. Well, the

Will:

Speed is incredible. Cause when I was playing around with chat G P T around the holidays, December-ish, you, the results I was getting out weren't very good. And where it is today, obviously we are all getting better at training the ai and the AI itself is getting better. Oh my gosh. The results are spectacular and it's just a couple of months later.

Brett:

It's insane. It's insane. And one kind of highly, one thing too sure that I think we will add to the comparison between Yahoo and Google. Yahoo is very traditional. Let's sell banners, but let's make the banners better and let's make them more interrupting. And then let's just, it's native ads and stuff, which all worked. That's fine. Sure. But Google's thing back in the day was, Hey, what if a good ad is just an answer to a question? There you go. And that's what they built the business on really, right? Well, it was organizing the world's information, but making an ad, just the answer to the question and making it the right answer and different way of thinking, unlocked immense value areas and great user experience. And really to a large degree, they just earned that 85% mark market share. I know they're people made disagree and stuff like that, but people want to use Google and why it's happened

Will:

For sure. Okay, so we'll do one more example of someone, Colin, of following this inverse reverse logic or orthotic flaw pattern or thinking that Franklin Leonard did. And so this is an example, is Blank Street Coffee, a coffee chain in New York? So probably only people living in New York will have heard of it, but they're taking the opposite approach to the big boys who obviously is Starbucks. So what they're taking is a very small efficient approach. They are starting with their square footage. So the typical Starbucks is going to be 1500 to 2000 square feet, where these are little micro stores. These are like 350 square feet for blank Street coffee. Or they're even these food trucks like the taco trucks, we all know it's a mini taco truck. It's almost like a VW kind of old school seventies VW bug on a truck,

Brett:

Which is very small.

Will:

Yeah. Yeah. They're tiny. And what they're doing is just giving you a great product that costs less and it, it's a different experience. Starbucks is saying, come in and sit down in our living room and spend the day. And these guys are saying, Nope, no, move on with your day. We're just going to give you a great cup of coffee. So they're automating the process of making a coffee, which is cheaper for them. So they then can pay their employees even more. They're paying 28 bucks an hour, which is way above them of wage.

Brett:

$28 an hour for just the coffee shop. It's crazy. Yeah,

Will:

Crazy.

Brett:

But you need that if you're living in New York City for

Will:

Sure. Of course. And then their coffees on average, it's about 30, 25% less expensive than Starbucks. So it's a value. Those companies growing really fast, they've raised $80 million, they've opened 40 different stores. But here's the key for Blank Street, these stores turn profitable within 30 days of launch.

Brett:

No

Will:

Way. What retail store have you ever heard of turning profitable 30 days of launch way, right? 30 days. So they're taking the opposite approach and crushing the big guy. I mean, they're not crushing Starbucks's back obviously, but they're doing a great job. And no Starbucks is turning a profit in 30 days. So Scott Galloway says, when something is successful, everyone else piles in, right? Yeah. The copy culture stuff in our rail against. But this creates the opportunity for someone else to come in and take the opposite approach. So instead of always thinking, how do we copy the next guy? I want people innovating. I want people thinking creatively, how do we actually think different? And this is one way to do it. How do we think in different directions? Come up with the inverse approach. And I actually just had a big win for myself on this.

So just in teaching you this masterclass, liquid Mind masterclass, and I was thinking about how do I market and grow this program? And I came up with a very cool idea. I'm actually building a case study around it right now. So I won't reveal the answer on this one, but people can get on my email list and it, it's a case study that's going to come up, but it's the opposite of what everyone else is doing. And what it's landing me is the opportunity to speak in front of my exact target audience, which is CEOs and founders of digital brands, e-commerce companies, rape anywhere between a million and a hundred million plus. And I'm getting in front of these opportunities to speak to these founders anywhere from about a hundred in the room all the way up to a thousand in the room. And this is not through any traditional way you can think of. This is not me going to a conference. This is not me going to a mastermind. This is not me on a podcast. This is something new. So I'm having this really good win on it now I'm documenting it as I go do.

Brett:

Now I'm totally curious. Now you got to tell me this half of the podcast.

Will:

I'll share it with you now for sure. But then for everyone else, they can join my email list. It's free to get on. So this case study we're going through now, I produce two or three of these a month and just get on the email list and I'll put them on the distribution for it. So they can just go to liquid mind masterclass.com/join, J O Y N, just join. And that's just free opt into the email list, and then you'll get these case studies and even this one will come out as a, you'll see the video recording of this case study. So sweet. Anyway, really interesting. And just a good, it's just one practical way that I can teach people. How do you think creatively? How do you think differently? Okay, well here's a practical way to do it.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And it's all linked to that in the show notes, but it's liquid mind masterclass.com/join. So check that out. Yeah. So I love this because we want to, there's this old saying, and I agree with it, that success leaves clues. And so when you see someone is successful, a company is successful, you say, well, what are the clues? Well, the most obvious thing is, well, we just do what they did. Let's offer more products at lower prices or whatever. But maybe that's not the answer. And one of the things where I live in southwest Missouri where an hour and 45 for the Walmart headquarters. So northwest Arkansas is not too far. And one of the innovations that Walmart had was, instead of, so this great service at the time, whatever, low prices and stuff, but rather than going to all the major cities where everybody else was, their approach was, let's go to small towns. Sure, underserved small towns that everyone else is overlooking. And that's really where Arkansas, or that's really where Arkansas is, where they're from. But that's where Walmart really gained a competitive edge. So I do like this idea of, what if I did the opposite? So here's what every else is doing. Success leaves clues, but what if I did the opposite? Is there something in that

Will:

It's got with the speed of technology and the speed at which we all move today to be successful, to compete on these platforms? I feel like you almost everyone just seems like you have to steal from everybody else. How are they doing it? Let's borrow theirs. What's their upsell flow? What's their how bundling and pricing, let's just borrow a borrow bar. Whereas if you can just slow down and be creative, you'll put such distance between you and your competitors. It's ridiculous. So the way I think about it is the leverage points of a business, and I have a slide on this in one of my presentations, but I probably throw 20 of these leverage points on the slide. I just said subscription programs, bundling pricing, copywriting, video ads, whatever. There's probably 50 to 75 of these leverage points in any D two C business. But if you can stop in 80 20 those and then get creative around the ones with the highest impact, you'll put such distance between you and everybody else because everyone else is being lazy and just copying. So being creative is actually the competitive advantage. So that's what I'm really after.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And it is true. Most of your competitors, all they're doing is copying everybody else. And those are the conversations that are taking place in marketing meetings and CEO level meetings of the C-Suite. And other companies are just copying what everybody else is doing. And so there's

Will:

A weird thing with that. You do want some, it always validates a bit to go, oh, someone really impressive. Everyone wants to copy some of the models from, like Dr. Squash has done so phenomenally well and Manscape has the amazing ads, and so everyone just wants to copy, copy, copy. But you know, it's copy everything and be successful. Just because it speaks to their audience doesn't mean it's going to speak to yours. And I feel like it's the movie example I was just giving in Hollywood where it gives you cloud cover to say, well, that's what they're doing, so we should do it. But it doesn't

Brett:

Mean it's the safe thing where you say, well, this formula's worked before. I mean, tell all the other Tom Cruise movies sell. So if we get him on this movie, it'll do great. Sure. But what's also, what's so great, and I'm so glad you shared that example, I did not know about the Hollywood blacklist, so I definitely learned that that's a new perspective for me. But he didn't just say, give me all your garbage, give me all the trash movies. But what he identified was that he believed the model was wrong. He believed the way Hollywood was looking at was wrong, but he knew there was some gold buried in the scrap pile, right? So he is like, Hey, what are your favorites? Tell me the ones you rejected because you had your model's broken, even though he probably didn't say that, but what were your favorites? And he started there. And so really a smart approach because it's looking for things that everybody else is missing. Yeah,

Will:

Exactly. Right. If you actually put just a little bit of creative thinking time in each week, why can't you come up with a two degree shift on a subscription program? And that's better than anyone else in your industry. You know, don't have to, we're about inventing the iPhone, but how can you make a two degree shift that is better than everybody else? And if you can just get into this process of thinking, the results are spectacular. So I actually do some work with a company called Size Advisory, and they've got a venture capital arm out of Silicon Valley, and they'll bring me into consult and do growth marketing for some of their portfolio companies. And what I am doing behind the scenes is I'm bringing this framework, I'm looking at the leverage points of their business, and then I'm looking for the creative opportunities to accelerate them past their competitors. Because invariably, when I go to meetings at other companies, if they're looking at a website redesign, if they're looking at their funnel, if they're looking at their ad copy, the meeting always starts the same way. Well, this is our biggest competitors doing, how do we copy that? But it's the way every meeting goes in these companies.

Brett:

And these are really smart people,

Will:

And there are very smart people, really talented people. And any of the companies that size is advising, these are incredibly well funded, talented, smart brands. But I'm telling you, the meetings almost always start with, we need a new X, y, Z funnel strategy, and this is how the competitor's doing it. Let's build off from there. And it always ends up being full and emulating what everyone else is doing. So I'm okay to look for inspiration in those places, but then innovate on top of it. And a good first step for that is let's think about thinking in different directions.

Brett:

And I remember hearing this quote, I think it was maybe from Jim Collins or Jim Collins references this, but it says, one thing that's worse than failing is succeeding and not knowing why you succeeded. Really. Right? So there's like the success, it was created, but you're like, well, I don't know. I dunno what I did. It just happened. And I think sometimes when we look at other companies, we see, oh, they're really successful at attracting new customers, or their margins are greater, whatever. And so we copy something. But that wasn't really what made them successful. Don't, we don't understand. I think what's key there is understanding why is this company so successful and what are the elements in that I should maybe learn from or implement? And what are the elements that I should do the opposite? Cause there's more opportunity in the opposite. I think sometimes we make assumptions as to why people are successful and we're going down the wrong path.

Will:

So yeah, you're really interesting because I've definitely worked with some companies who have some spectacular marketing that people love, and whether I'm in a mastermind with them, or maybe I was advising them as a consultant, but you go in and I'm now working with maybe their head of growth or head of creative, and they're shockingly little there. And what that shows is what you just said is their secret sauce was actually something else. Maybe they just had the perfect product market fit or the absolute perfect tagline, or the absolute perfect name, liquid iv, the most genius name ever in that one word. If it's considered one word, I'm not sure Liquid iv. But what I get from that is it's hospital grade, which means it's premium and it's a

Brett:

Hydration problem. Instant, instant hydration, get all everything you need, just get an IV what you're drinking. That is a brilliant name,

Will:

Genius. It's absolute genius. And so there could be other reasons for the success you're pointing out. So yeah, I've actually got into these companies and I looked under the hood and I'm like, wow, that's not where the competitive advantage is. So it's just really interesting. And sometimes maybe they're just outsourcing all of it to an agency. They definitely have, there's some magic somewhere for these companies to be scaling Point

Brett:

But point. There's some unfair advantage somewhere in the business. There is. It's allowed it to happen.

Will:

But to your point is if you're just emulating everything that may not be where you might be copying the wrong things,

Brett:

Right? Yeah. So you're here. Totally. And I love the examples you gave of Qua and Manscaped and shout out to Raindrop, a Jacque Spitzer in the gang that they helped create those ads or did create those ads. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. They're fantastic. But then you look at something, is it what? What's Ryan Reynold's mobile company that just sold the T-Mobile for like,

Will:

Oh, mint, mince

Brett:

Mint. Yeah. So his ads are the opposite. And yes, obviously they lean, he leans into Ryan Reynolds as a celebrity and instant trust and stuff, but they're the most simple ads ever. And he kind of tongue in cheek talks about how simple these ads are, right? Sure. So that you can't just look at it and say, well, we got to be funny like Dr. Qua, or No, we have to be really simple like Mint Mobile. Well, but why are you doing that with Mint? It totally lines up with we're no frills, we're super cheap, it's all, and then we're leaning into the credibility of Ryan Reynolds. So yeah, so why are you doing it? Yep. What's the strategy here? What is this unlocking? What is your competitive advantage? Because otherwise you're just copying and who knows what kind of results you're going to get. So

Will:

Creative unlocks looking for the creative unlocks. That's what we want.

Brett:

So any tips? And we're about out of time, and I want, hopefully people are like, dude, I got to know more about liquid mine. And so we'll talk about sure that in just a second. But in any tips or tools, how do I know that I maybe am locked into a thought pattern? Or how do I know that I'm not thinking creatively enough any, or maybe we should just all assume you're not thinking creatively enough. Right? I am locked in patterns, but any tips or suggestions there?

Will:

Yeah, I can cut to the end of the book or movie on this one. You are thinking in thought patterns. We all are. Yeah. And it's human nature, right? Yeah. It's human nature. And look, it's served us very well. Why we're successful to begin with is we figured out we have pattern recognition, we figure out the patterns and we shortcut our learning. It serves us really well. In general, it's just the antithesis of creative thinking. So we are thinking in thought patterns. What I'm trying to uncover, and I do in a lot of the presentations I'll give from stage is I try to give people some unlocks to really show them just how blind we are. The visual that's not in front of us of the banner blindness, right? It's, it is just a representation that we just get locked in one way of viewing things like, this is what you need to understand.

We get locked into viewing things from one single perspective, whereas a second per, it's why it's really helpful if a third party expert gets dropped into your company. And it's why if an outside consultant gets dropped in, I get dropped in sometimes they immediately see something just so obvious and so that everyone else couldn't see it. And you're just like, holy, how do we miss that one? Right? Yeah. And it's just because you get so stuck in your way of thinking, you just can't see the right, can't opp other opportunities. And all it takes are these unlocks to say, oh my gosh, well then once I break free of the thought pattern, you're no longer blind. And so that's why builder, these just kind of step by step frameworks. So yeah, I do that through my masterclass, which is a formal training. I teach it live to founders of TC brands and e-commerce companies.

And I teach on stage a fairmount going to Blue Ribbon, as you mentioned, in a month or two here down in Puerto Rico. And then I produce these case studies. So those are free. So if you like the material we cover here today, I'll produce two or three of these case studies a month. Not all of them go public. Some are from my innovation group, but the public ones, I will send out one to two every month over email to those on my list. So that's awesome. So you want to learn more, just get it, go to the join section of the website. So just W Liquid, my masterclass slash join.

Brett:

Awesome. So I want to talk about the, these life cohorts, the training and stuff that you do. So we'll talk about that in a second. But how do you find these case studies? Are you trained now where you see a good idea like that and just immediately resonates? Or how are you finding these great examples?

Will:

So actually I go, I'm going very deep into content. And so I'm always trying to think differently than everybody else. And one potter that I do see happening now today is people not going nearly as deep. They TikTok. Everyone's moving towards TikTok. I know some brands that are turning out 100 plus TikTok videos a month, which is just blows my like, well, you and I work together with identify or other similar brands. We were working, we were talking actually just about a month ago about a brand, but at the peak of any of these I've ever worked for 10 to 20 videos a month, max. Totally. And that was a lot. That's just going to have all openings, all closings and hooks and chop it up in different ways. But you're talking 10 20. So now people are cheering out a hundred videos a month, and of course you can hire talent and U G C and all that, but my point is they're not going deep on the content.

It's all surface level. And so I'm going the other way. I want all my content to be very deep, very well thought out, very tried and tested. In this particular example, I have used this thought process to great success so much Cibo, our entire case study on it. So I don't have any answers to how I come across them other than I devour content the way everyone else does. I listened to a ton of books, ton of podcasts. I go to a lot of masterminds and all the like. But because my brain now is in this space of trying to think differently, of thinking creatively, I do very quickly find out who, who's doing something different, whether it's people or you don't know. So I actually have two case studies coming up with people you've almost certainly have never heard of before. One, she's a bestselling author, but it's a book on sugar-free living. And her book was number one on the top of the charts. I don't know if it was actually number one in South Africa and in England. So she's very smart and she's very accomplished, but she's not a household name, but she's done something different and extraordinary that we all can learn from. So I'm just finding people that I can profile and somewhere where I take inspiration, oh, I'm going to incorporate that in my way of doing business, and then I build a case study around it.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. And I love the comparison, and I think this will tie in nicely. You get the TikTok machine, which who knows if it'll be banned or not or whatnot, but it's huge. It's hot, but it is a content, it's an insatiable beast. You got to keep feeding a content. Or you can look at something like YouTube where I've got some friends who are pretty large on YouTube, and it's more about viewer pieces of content between them really well, high quality, and they're just going to get better over time. They're going to get more views, more traction that they're going to explode over time potentially. So very different model. No right or wrong, but it's like, nah, I don't want to be this content factory. I want to do fewer piece of content and succeed. And one concept I want to throw out, I'm just curious if you're familiar with this or not, but it's the idea of a what's called a reticular activator.

And I wonder if you've like got this triggered working for you. So the idea behind it, have you heard this term before? Sure, yep. Yeah. So it's like your name is probably the most powerful reticular activator, and that's where if you're in a room and there's tons of noise you could hear when someone's like, will you hear it? Or you go to buy a vehicle, and I just bought my wife a 4runner not long ago. And so red car, no, I see every 4runner on the road, right? And it wasn't that they weren't there before and now suddenly they are there. It's just that my subconscious is looking for this. It's looking for this pattern. Exactly. And so I think you've probably trained your brain to start looking for these breakthroughs. That's

Will:

Exactly right. And now can we take some of those lessons and put them to use for us? That is actually one of the case studies. I have not actually built that one yet, but that is actually on my outline to do so. That's sweet. That's really interesting. The example is you're in a really loud crowded restaurant and you know can't hear anything. Then the person sitting directly across from you, but all of a sudden someone a hundred feet away in the corner says your name at a very low tone. You're still going to pick it up. You

Brett:

Hear it? Yeah. It's just so fascinating the way the subconscious mind works.

Will:

Yeah, for sure. Mind will pick that stuff up. So yeah, it's literally breaking through the noise. And so those are the concepts. When I come across those, I'm like, there you go. That's something I want to explore deeply and use to my benefits. This is exactly the kind of material I love to teach. Yep.

Brett:

Love it, love it. Well, I am super excited about hanging out in Puerto Rico and hearing the full talk and maybe sit poolside or something. That'd be super fun. So tell everybody, if you were listening like, Hey, I want to go through one of the live trainings, the life cohort, that's all@liquidmindmasterclass.com

Will:

As well. Oh yeah, I didn't mention this. So I do offer the, it's a six week, six hour, one hour week, six week masterclass that I give the first section. I'll actually give train for free, so it's not recorded. Again, thinking differently. I don't do anything recorded. Everything I do. Well, that's not true. My case studies are recorded, but that's more because they're going to end up on YouTube and that's just the content engine. But when I'm teaching, I teach live, and when I'm teaching the masterclass, I teach the masterclass live. And now why would I do that? Well, what's the completion rate give? Give me a guess because you'll get close if not nail it. What's the online completion rate for an online course?

Brett:

Oh, it's got to be like what, 10% or something

Will:

Like that? Like five to seven? Yeah. Yeah, it's five 7%. The online completion rate of the Liquid run masterclass, it's 97% and no one drops out maybe. But I'm teaching it live. It's same thing. There's a concept there that's related to a personal trainer at a gym. If the personal trainer's waiting for you, you are good. That's, you show up. The reason you hire a

Brett:

Trainer, you're paying for it. They're waiting on you, you're going, you're

Will:

Going. Yep. And that's part of it. So I do teach it all live. I teach it in small groups. It's almost all founders, a million to a hundred million. So I teach section one for free that you can get on the homepage. There's just a little button on the homepage if you want to go through section one for free, or if you just want to get on the email list and get those case studies. Again, they come out one to two a month, but that's just forward slash join to get to those case studies. But yeah, other than that, you'll see me floating around at various masterminds, they're on stage and yeah, Puerto Rico's going to be great down there for Blue Ribbon.

Brett:

Yeah, dude, you're hitting the circuit and doing it in a unique way, which I can't wait to learn about and learn your ways on that. But yeah, you're hearing your name pop up all over the place, which is awesome. So we'll link to everything in the show notes. Do check that out at a minimum of ethos case studies, but also consider the masterclass as well. But Will Hughes, ladies and gentlemen, will, thanks for joining us. Tons of fun. And we'll have to do it again sometime.

Will:

Yeah, it's great to see you. Absolutely. Look forward to hanging out soon.

Brett:

All right, man, really appreciate it. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? Give us some feedback. If you've not done it already, leave us that review on iTunes. It helps other people find the show and hey, it makes my day. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Online marketers can learn a LOT from direct response TV (DRTV) ads. 

• The power of an irresistible offer.
• The art and science of a problem-solution ad.
• The appeal of a “magic product demonstration.”

To name a few!

This episode features Jordan Pine, a seasoned DRTV veteran who has also had success in the online marketing space. I wanted to pick his brain on how to be successful with DRTV. I’m convinced that some of the lessons he knows and that other DRTV pros know can be leveraged by online marketers. Recording this episode was an absolute BLAST! We went a full hour, and I could have easily continued for another couple. It was fun and insightful! Here’s a look at what we cover:

• The “Divine 7” for choosing the right product to advertise.
• The 10 TNT (Tried-and-True) elements of DRTV.
• Why the Ginsu Knife commercial belongs in the DRTV Hall of Fame.
• The “problem scale” and how to use it to analyze a product and the strength of a problem/solution opening. 
• Gluing people to ceilings, running over flashlights with tanks, and other “torture test” product demos.
• Lessons from the Godfathers of marketing like Claud Hopkins, Rosser Reeves, Joe Sugarman, and more.

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Jordan Pine (LinkedIn)
• SciMark(Website)
• The SciMark Report
• Paragon Products (Website)
• 10 Tried & True Techniques For Commercials
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And I'm not exaggerating when I say I really couldn't be more excited about today's show because if you've listened for a while, I'm a self-proclaimed marketing junkie. I've always liked ads, I've always liked TV ads, and specifically I've always liked infomercials. Yes, that's correct. I've always loved infomercials and DRTV ads. And so today I have a legend in the space. Joining me on the show, Jordan Pine Jordan Pie. Jordan Pine is SciMark's founder and president, also the co-founder of Paragon Products, and he's a blogger. He's a student of DRTV. He's been running campaigns forever. He's one of the masterminds behind the wildly successful tack light tack glasses. I think there's a tack lantern tack, all kinds of stuff. And also some microwave cookers, which have done phenomenally well. He's a trusted name. Everyone wants to talk to him if they're looking at DRTV. And I think there's a lot we can learn from DRTV. One thing that I've said over and over again is YouTube is actually very similar to DRTV, so we're going to get into that as we we dive into the podcast. So with that, Jordan, welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time and how you doing?

Jordan:

Well, thank you for that amazing introduction. I'm going to have you do all my introductions in future.

Brett:

Thanks for having.

It's a fun gig and yeah, man, what an amazing career. What an amazing background it was. I knew we were going to be friends when you'd reached out to talk about YouTube with me. And I just mentioned the Ginsu Knife commercial, right? Because it's one of the earliest commercials. I remember watching the Ginsu Knife commercial as a kid and thinking one, this is awesome. I got to talk my parents into buying it, which they did. And then two, who makes these? It's fun. Who makes these ads? But as we talked about it, you immediately fired me a YouTube link to the original, original, because I think I probably, I must have seen the ads in the late eighties or nineties, but this was from 1978, which was awesome. Yeah,

Jordan:

Great campaign. Great. And a very iconic, memorable opening with the hand can be used a knife, but it doesn't work so well in a tomato. That opening is probably the, if there's going to be a DRTV Hall of Fame, it'll definitely be, it's

Brett:

Got to be one of the just so engaged. You have to basically have to watch that when it says in Japan, the hand can be used like a knife. It's got this great voice and he chops through the wood, but then does not work on a tomato. So it's fantastic. So give us your background a little bit. So I've talked about some of your successes, but how did you get into the DRTV world?

Jordan:

Yeah, it's great. Sideways, I guess I would say I've had three careers, four, if you count a brief stint as a private eye, yes. But first I was a soldier. I joined the Army at high school and I served four years active duty and four years reserve. All in peace time as it turned out. Thank you for service, there weren't any major. Oh yeah. Yes, I will accept that. But there's a lot of guys that have done multiple tours now that have done way more than me. I was lucky enough, from my mother's perspective at least, to not be sent to any major wars or spent any time in war zones, down peace, years of the nineties. But after that, I was a journalist. I went to college on the GI Bill and I got a degree in journalism from Rutgers University. And I was a working journalist for several years, a business journalist.

And then I got into digital marketing and I had a friend that I had met in the National Guard that was the reserves that I served in, that was recruited right out of college into one of the top as seen on TV companies. And later on, he said, a few years later, he said, the brother of the CEO of my company, former company, and he's looking for a marketing director, would you be interested? He'd always told me how crazy the industry was. And I was like, yeah, sure, I'll meet with him. And pretty much the rest is history. I got recruited by him as a director of marketing and then eventually spent five years there, became VP of marketing. But I really love the industry from day one. My current business partner and best friend, the one that brought me into the industry, bill Corliss. He used to always tell me these stories and they were larger than life stories. And then I joined and it was every bit as crazy and fun and full of characters as he had said it would be. And sharks, of course. Yes. His epic advice to me when I first started was always remember, these are the kind of people that will stab you in the back and then ask for their knife back.

Brett:

So descriptive and somewhat terrifying as well. Yeah. Did you, let's just talk about this for a minute cause I've got a perspective here too. What do you like about, so yes, there's some larger than life characters and the products are fun, but what is it about this combination that makes you love DRTV? Just for a side note, we started talking about this. For those who don't know, Dr. RTV stands for direct response. So instead of ads that are aimed at branding and positioning and driving response, at some point, direct response ads are designed to get someone to, in the early days, pick up the phone or mail order or something or visit a site and make a purchase. And so Dr. Direct response, but yeah, or what is it about the combination of things that you like so well?

Jordan:

Yeah, so direct data you're talking about there is really what appealed to me. Just you can get immediate feedback on whether something is working or not and that that's mean besides all the crazy characters. And this industry comes out of Boardwalk, so there's a lot of interesting selling techniques going on. But what I really liked about it from a marketer standpoint is you can immediately see if, and it's really fast too, in our industry, within a couple weeks, you can know whether this creative idea, whether this product idea that you had actually resonates with consumers or not using cable television testing. So I always like that. I always making the phones ring these days, making the servers light up, however you want to phrase that, you know, can actually immediately see the impact of your decisions, of your marketing strategy, of your creative. And you really can't beat it.

And it was also in the beginning, when I started in the industry, it was the only type of advertising that actually made money. Now that isn't the case, but when we started, we would make money in direct sales off of TV and forget about paying for your advertising. You're making a profit for the first six months, and then you go to retail and you've got all this advertising behind you and suddenly it blows out at retail. So it was a beautiful, beautiful model. It still is in many ways, but especially in the early days that I started, it was a very beautiful model because like I said, all your advertising is making you money. And in addition to fueling your eventual retail sales,

Brett:

Yeah, would you just wild. So making money on the front end and then, yeah, I know you really can explode when you hit the retail store shelves and then you have all those ads kind of fueling the growth. I know for me, I, I've just always loved the art of a good ad and especially the psychology of selling. And you talk about some of the greatest pitch people on Dr TV spots or infomercials, like Boardwalk Pitch people. And there's just something about this, the psychology, the art and science of that as well, that that's super interesting to me. What are the phrases that's causes someone to lean in? What are the phrases that cause someone to almost feel like they have to purchase? And so I love the psychology of it, love the art of it. And then there's nothing like the rush of when people start responding.

When I was in college, I worked for a radio station and I was involved with this live broadcast one time, and this was early on, I'll never forget this. This was early on when I realized I may maybe kind of hooked on marketing. So we did a live broadcast for a jewelry store and I was kind of involved. I got to get on air a couple times and whatnot. But people started flocking to this jewelry store and they were selling stuff and the owner was happy. And I was like, this is pretty fun. This is pretty exciting. There's some real juice going on here. So yeah, when you see a campaign that's working, it's still super exciting to me. So

Jordan:

Yeah, it's like that excitement. That's why I love the industry. So you go into the CEO's office and you have the report and you have all these phone orders and all these web orders and you're like, we got to hit use a metric, a metric, a KPI called Cost per Order. It's like CPA, but yep, cpo. And the CPO is so low and we just have a party, pop the champagne. It's so exciting to see your work immediately. Yeah. Give you those results.

Brett:

That's amazing. It's amazing. Cool. So we talked about Ginsu Knives is one of the all time greats, the Hall of Fame. It's definitely in Canton for sure. And then mentioned Tack light and the spinoffs then of that and some of the microwave cookers that you've been involved with. But what are a few of your all-time favorite DRTV campaigns and why?

Jordan:

Yeah, it's a good question. I'm really a big fan of anything by again, the pitchman that started the business. So Ron Pope Billy Mays. My two favorite commercials of all time are both Billy May's commercials. The first one would be Oxyclean, the original Oxyclean commercial that he did. And really it's because the technique, of course, is as flawless and it had had one of the best magic demos of all time. A magic demo in our trade magic demonstration is sort of what it sounds like. It's a demonstration that's so good. It's almost like a magic trick, although it's not. And he had this giant tank of dye and he drops the scoop of Oxy cleanin and the red dye tank turns clear. So if you Google that or go on YouTube and find that commercial and just watch it, it's really a clinic and great Dr selling.

And so that's probably my favorite commercial of all time with Billy MAs, the late great Billy MAs. And the second one would be a commercial called Mighty Putty. Mighty Putty was like a putty that dried cured so that it would bond things together. And again, another Billy MA's commercial and that probably had those commercials, had some of the best torture test demos as we called it, where they pull a tractor trailer or they lift a bus, they pull a plane later on. Those kind of, again, magic demonstrations, which I love because at the end of the day, it's a little bit of a PT Barnum style business. It's a Barnum technique. And if you can really get what we call wow factor or wow going in a commercial, it can really cover, really cover over a multitude of sins. But it can also really just kick you into the next level in terms of getting buzz and driving sales.

So I love the old pitchman, I love all of Billy Mays's work. I mentioned Ron Pope. Ron Pope was one of the guys who started the industry. So any of his infomercials, Showtime Rotisserie said it and forget it. And in the modern era, the guys that really worked with Billy and did a lot of the great classic commercials like John Miller and Peter Hutton from Hutton Miller, those are the guys behind the scenes, the creative geniuses that do a lot of the commercials. You even see today all the mighty putty stuff and stuff like that. So those are the guys that are my, no, their work is at the top of my list for sure.

Brett:

Yeah, Billy Mayman, like the Michael Jordan of T rtv, he's just one of the greatest. And Ron Pope, I've heard his name forever so I know he's a legend as well. And there's something about that magic demo or the torture test. I love that. I never heard that phrase. And we, I've called it over the top demo as well, where you've got, it's good to show the product in actual use. This is specifically what I'm going to use it for because people need to be told and there needs to be that suggestion of, hey, you can fix your pots with it and you fix this and that and whatnot. But then, yeah, then you see the magic demo and now you're like, man, I got to get this nothing. This, it creates that real emotional draw. I still remember, you probably remember this ad too, this wasn't exactly DRTV cause it was short form TV commercial, but it was more direct response. It was for super glue where two guys walk into a room carrying a dude and they glue him to the ceiling and it's like this ad was not cut and they put glue on his shoes and stick him to the ceiling. And I'm like, man, that's amazing. He got it. My super glue.

Jordan:

So I think the original version was a beam. He was dangling the hard hat from a beam. From a beam, I don't know off a building, but if you go, yeah, that was the original super glue demo. They glue the helmet to an I-beam or whatever and he was hanging off of a beam. Yeah.

Brett:

And I assume that's legit. Were those real demos or do you know?

Jordan:

Yeah, I don't know about that one. I'm sure they were with many different safety. As someone who's done 150 plus of these commercials, there are things that you do. We have safety things in place that might be off camera. I don't know if he was hanging off the Empire State Building. That would

Brett:

Probably be,

Jordan:

Yeah, you would never get permission or insurance for something like that. Sure, sure. Hang your actor off of a, but yes, there, they're always real demos, maybe off camera. Like I said, there's some safety features. There might be, hopefully there's a cord connected to the guy's ankle and Casey Falls or something.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's awesome.

Jordan:

But wait, what you were saying, sorry to cut you up, what you were saying in the balance between demonstrating the product in real life, all the everyday uses like Mighty Pie is a great example. You know, can stick a mailbox on, you can you know can do this, you can do that, you can plug a leak, but then they have that, what I call it is the knot that you would, but you could pull a tractor trailer with it. Yeah, yeah. So it is a balance. You have to make sure you get enough of those everyday demos as well as that magic demo that kind of really proves the point.

Brett:

Not that you would, but you could. I love that. I love that you could. Yeah. Let's break down what are some of the successful elements? Cause I think that there are lots of lessons here and we're going to talk about how to tie this into digital marketing kind of as we go here. But what are some of the elements of a successful Dr. RTV campaign?

Jordan:

Okay, great. So when I started, I studied all the old masters and in the current greats as well. And I read their books, I interviewed them if possible. And of course I worked with them. You heard

Brett:

Some of your, just quickly, who are some of your favorites of kind of the old time greats?

Jordan:

Yeah, sure. So the old time greats, you got las got Albert Lasker and Kennedy, which was a cohort of his Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins wrote book a hundred years ago. Scientific Advertising. Yes, scientific Advertising, which was the inspiration for the name of my consulting company. Mark, you got John Caps. Yep. Tested advertising methods. Yep.

Brett:

So good. Yeah,

Jordan:

Of course you got the madman guys, you got David Ogilvie, Ross Reeves, personal favorite Mad Man. They might have even based Don Draper on him.

Brett:

Oh, on Ross Reeves.

Jordan:

On Ross Reeves, yeah. And he was a great kind of cranky guy. He had some great quotes that I could share with you from that era. And then you have Al ik, he's one of the early assing on TV guys. I mentioned Rom Pope, Joe Sugarman. Joe Sugarman was a print guy, d r print guy. But he wrote so many books that are super valuable.

Brett:

Yeah, I love his book Triggers. So it's triggers, it's a really fast read. It's like every chapter's two or three pages. Super fun. It's one I highly recommend you grab it on Amazon. So it's a great

Jordan:

Read. Actually behind me you can't see it. But behind me I, I'm a book collector so I have a library of, I mean it's only like, what was it, 30 or 40 books. But it's all the key books that have been done by all the Dr. Masters. So

Brett:

Nice. Yeah,

Jordan:

I have his books in there, Sugarman for sure.

Brett:

I bought Triggers, my son is doing sales just, he's only 20, but he definitely stole my Triggers books. I got to buy a new one. But I was glad. A lot of wisdom use that education for sure. So cool. So I catch you off, we kind of went on a rabbit trail there talking about some of breaks. Yeah. But you're talking about elements of success. You want to interview some of these guys. So who all did you interview? Just curious about that.

Jordan:

And I didn't finish my whole list, but the, and the more modern era, the Kani brothers, aj, Andy and his brother Chuck. I worked for Andy and I've worked, I've partnered with AJ since then. But in those days he was the, they're brothers and they all have three different companies and they're big force and on tv. So just working for the one brother and studying under the other brother got a chance to interview them. I interviewed Billy Mays, I interviewed Ropo P Met Ropo P interviewed him. So anybody that I had access to or that was still living, a lot of the guys I mentioned earlier are not living anymore. But the guys that were still living at that time, I worked with them. I interviewed them and I compiled these lists. That was kind of how I started as a journalist. I'm a journalist coming into, I had some marketing experience, but on the digital side, early digital too, we're talking about, so you're a Google guy, remember when I was just a colored banner across the top of the Totally course I was a bear ball and search engine, but their first ads were cu Yeah.

So we actually were one, a small company that I worked for in New Jersey. We were one of the first people to advertise in the tri-state area on that banner. And we used to have the Google team come in and talk to us about advertising at that time. So that's my digital marketing experience was way before the.com bubble burst basically. And my company survived because it was self-funded and it wasn't venture backed, but it was one of the few at that time. And I went through that period. But anyway, so I come in as a journalist and I don't really know much about as on TV at all infomercials. So this is what I did. I interviewed people, I took notes, I made lists, and I eventually condensed these lists down. There's a saying in DR that it's a success and probably applies or comes from other industries as well. Success is 80% product and 20% creative. So I set out to understand what the product criteria were that these guys were looking for and what the selling techniques were in their creative approach. And I ended up with, in the end I had the Divine seven and t n t,

Brett:

The Divine seven and t n T. Okay. Did you explain? Yes.

Jordan:

So the Divine seven is seven key product criteria, particularly for as seen on TV products. And t and t stands for tried and true. It's 10 tried and true tech selling techniques for Asen on TV commercials. And I'd, I'd be happy to go through those. Do you want You want to go through 'em?

Brett:

Do it man. Let's do it. Yeah. And we probably won't be able to key in on all of them in much detail, but let's go through it for sure.

Jordan:

Okay, so the Divine seven number one is unique and that's really about perception. So it has to be perceived to be new and different, right? Number two is mass market. Our ideal would be one per person, which obviously you can sometimes get there with sunglasses. You could say my market size is one per person. You could have multiple people in house that wear my sunglasses, but usually it's about one per household. That's how we look at it. Yeah. At least one household. One can be in every household in America. Problem solving.

Brett:

If you feel like that's true of the total addressable market, that's when you've got a mass market. Enough offer. Got

Jordan:

It. Yes. Well also, and this is something that's important to understand, what we do is we test cable television networks, big ones, Fox News and big news channels, stuff like that, as well as it's a moving list based on rates. But when we air a commercial, it's airing, airing everywhere. It's not local, not a regional air, it's a national air. So if you don't have an item that appeals to the entire nation or every household in the nation, then you're really just wasting money. So you're

Brett:

Wasting exposure. It's not very targeted spend.

Jordan:

Right. Got it. And then number three is problem solving. I always describe this as a the problem scale. I call it one to 10. One is an itch, 10 is a heart attack. Seven, you want to be a seven or higher on the problem scale in order to really grab people and sell to them. That's very important. I'll have a lot of people say, and actually you can critique bed as say on TV commercials this way, when they have that opening hate when this happens to you and you're like, no,

Brett:

Not really. That's really not

Jordan:

Very painful. It's probably not strong. Yeah, yeah.

Brett:

Got it. So it's got to be,

Jordan:

Do a minor inconvenience.

Brett:

So it's not a heart attack, but it's certainly not just a little itch, it's a like a

Jordan:

Seven, it's a like a seven or better. That was my, that's a sweet spot. Obviously not an exact science priced, right? That's just common sense. And in our business we operate on impulse purchase. So it varies by item, but typically with the consumer products that we do, that's why we're 19 99, 14 99. And we used to be $10, buy one, get one, because those are impulse purchases. We used to say, you're easy to take a $10 bill out of your pocket. It's harder to take a 50 out. And obviously these numbers have moved around a little bit. Now it's 29 99 is a common price point. But when I started it was 10 14 99, 19 99. And the idea was, you know, don't have to think too much about spending that amount of money. Once you get into more money now

Brett:

It's like you need to think about it, you feel like you need to talk to your spouse or somebody about it, then you just don't do it. Right. But if it's, yeah, 15 bucks, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, you just do it in the spur of the moment.

Jordan:

And if you're seen an on TV section in a Walmart or whatever it, it's always in an impulse area of the store. So a checkout or does it end cap. So you're on your way and you're like, oh, okay, grab that. Don't got to think too much about it. Throw it in my bag, throw it in my cart and move on. So that's what price right means it's just an impulse price, not a considered purchase. And that's really about price to value. You can have a TV that's impulse price. The loss leaders, you see sometimes they used to do $99 flat screens or whatever. Hey, this is about price to value, but ultimately the idea is take it out of considered purchase. I got to think about it and move it into a, I'm excited, I'll just drop the money and buy it.

Brett:

Got it. Love it. So number five.

Jordan:

Number five is easily explained. We have longer than most because as on TV is what we call short form is a two minute commercial. Obviously most commercials are 30 seconds, but that doesn't change or less, that doesn't change. The consumer's been trained, viewer's been trained to have about a 32nd attention span. So if your product isn't easily easy to explain, you're not going to get it done in that time. You're not going to sell them. People come to me with what I call Swiss Army products that does seven things. I'm just like, this is not for us. No way. I can explain those seven things in 30 seconds or less. And I really have to communicate what it is, what does, why it's different in that short period of time. And this'll be more common sense now to people who are dealing with TikTok and right. YouTube and things like that because we know the tension spans are short. But again, when I started and I first compiled this list and refined, it was insightful. People had longer attention spans back then.

Brett:

Kind of sad but true. Yes. So yeah, usually the DR tv, the short form Dr. TV commercials are two minutes or whatever. Yes. But are you using a rule of thumb? I want to be able to explain everything though. Problem, solution, feature, benefit, demonstration, 30 seconds. Because then you're reiterating it just for the rest of the time. Yes. Type of thing.

Jordan:

Yeah, you're reiterating it. We spend the rest of the, well last 30 seconds of the commercial is going to be building an offer. We'll get to that when we talk about the t and t, but building an offer and all those things that will sound familiar to people. So the last 30 is gone, the first 30, you really have to establish the problem, make yourself the solution and convince, tell people what it is, what it does, why it's different. And that first 30 and then the middle of the commercial is usually reserved for credibility boosters. Again, we'll talk about this in the t and t list, but Got it. Yeah. Credibility boosters, establishing value. That crazy magic demo. That's one of the biggest challenges. Okay, I want to do, I want to emulate Billy Maze, I want to emulate Hutton Miller. They have the first ones to do these kind of things in a big way.

So how do I do that now? How am I going to explain, I'm going to lift a bus with Mighty put, obviously I'm not doing that one, but a version of something like that in 60 seconds. Okay, there's a bus, there's Mighty. So that middle part of the commercial, if you're doing something big and grand, a Barnum move, then you're going to need the middle of the commercial for that. And then of course it becomes even more challenging because we do run sixties, a double 30. So now you have to cut that down. So really you got to be thinking, and again, this is going to sound less cutting edge than it might have sounded a few years ago, but you really got to be thinking about condensing your message into the shortest time possible so that at least you get the sale down and then you can do all these layering on top things to make it more exciting and convincing.

Brett:

Totally, totally makes sense. So what it is, what does what it solves, problem, solution, demonstration, all that in the first 30 or or potentially less. Awesome. So then number six,

Jordan:

Number six is age appropriate. So what that means is it's just a play on words and DR tends to skew older, middle-aged and above. So I established that because people would try to do tween products, or especially these days, young kids aren't even watching younger people even watching tv. Correct. So you know, got to make sure that the demographics of cable television or broadcast television are right for your product.

Brett:

So generally you're thinking forties and over or Boomer and older. What it's,

Jordan:

It's moved down. It used to be, I used to say 65 plus because that again, that's a sweet spot because our 50 plus boomers and above, because that was really the sweet spot. The bulk of buyers off of TV were that age group. But then things have evolved and I, when I started, I remember this clearly, I think web sales were 5% of total. It was like 95% phone sales and no, I'm sorry, 90% phone sales, maybe 5% web and 5% or more, a little bit more was mail. Mail-in send your checker money order to this address now. And we did that for years. It diminished in a diminished, but it was still a significant percentage of our sales. And the websites were mall websites. I dunno if remember those. It was like you go there and it's tons of products. We didn't even have our own webpa domains. It was kind of like a proto Amazon that we just drove them straight to our product

Brett:

Page. I think I'll just mail it in. I could call get online, I just want to mail it. That's so funny. Or even the mall websites are awesome too. So skews older, but it has shifted down a little bit, you would say?

Jordan:

Yeah. Now I'd say it's 35 plus or even 30 plus. I wouldn't do teens, I wouldn't do teens. I probably wouldn't do 20 somethings. I wouldn't do anything. Maybe it depends on what your goals are, but to get direct response, yeah, you're not going to get that. Yes.

Brett:

Yep. Makes sense.

Jordan:

Cool. And then the last one is of the divine seven was credible or believable, although that can be a pretty low bar if you have enough. Wow. And other factors going for you. But sometimes we look at quite a few products that people just aren't going to believe it. So if you look at it, and I know what you're saying, I remember an example would be someone brought a cardboard square, it was reflective somehow and their whole pitch was like you put a potato on it and it just grows. So if you put this in your vegetable drawer somehow it'll just, things will grow and stay fresh. And I looked at it and that science, I don't

Brett:

Think science works that way. I'm not a botanist, but I don't think it works.

Jordan:

And I just had to say, even if they had research and I'm like, well even if the, I'm not a scientist and I'm not going to critique your study, but it's just people aren't going to believe it. Take this cardboard square, put it in your refrigerator and magically all your produces is going to stay fresh. I didn't believe it. But then again, there's a famous product called Green Bags, infamous, famous, I mean it still sells today. That actually does work. And when you look at it the first time you'd say, ah, I don't know, putting my vegetables in a bag keeps them fresh. It actually works. There's some science behind why it works. So like I said, credibility is a good criteria to keep in mind, but you'd be surprised sometimes how low the bar could be as long as you do the other things. And obviously customer satisfaction, et cetera.

Brett:

Got it. And that's where I think some of the magic demos you talked about, you see it and maybe you wonder a little bit, but you also kind of believe your eyes. You believe what you're seeing, something like a magic piece of cardboard that grows produce or something. It's like I don't too much, I'm sort of seeing it. But so yeah, that totally makes sense. So the Divine Seven, that was worth the money to tune into the podcast right there. Divine Seven, divine. Love it. But we're not done folks. But wait, yes, there's more. But wait, there's more. There's so much. Alright, so let's talk about T. The, you said 10 T and T, 10 of the tried and true. Yeah,

Jordan:

Well the Divine Seven, just one last thing on that. Yeah, so later on I, I've refined that and rejiggered it a little bit on my website. I think I have eight criteria now. One that I added later that I think is important I mentioned earlier is wow. So sometimes if you have a really amazing demonstration, a really magic demonstration you can get by with not having some of the other Divine Seven and also Divine Seven are not like required. They're not hard and fast. They're basically, if you want to have the best odds of success, you'll hit all seven of those plus Wow. And then you have a pretty strong idea that you're going to have something successful. Of course you don't know until you actually put it in front of consumers and find out. So we use these criteria to this day and I, I've been consulting with Major the big Gas on TV companies for years as well. And they use these criteria just as a gut check, a way to sort of separate items. Then of course is a whole process of validating and finding out if you're actually correct. But it, they're good heuristic for separating the wheat from the chaff to start.

Brett:

Love it. And I love the Divine Seven is actually eight. That's fantastic.

Jordan:

The Divine Eight, right? The grade eight, I don't know, I got to grade

Brett:

Eight. Yeah, it just works. I don't know. Yeah, divine Seven's pretty special. So I will link to your blog posts also that be in the show notes so folks can check that out. Cool. So T and t, let's talk about that.

Jordan:

Okay, so t and t, you're basically breaking down the elements of a successful on TV commercial number one is start with the problem solution opening. It ties right into problem solving as a criteria for products. So you start by articulating a problem. This is the classic black and white or desaturated scene. You've seen an infomercials, oh no, are you tired of blah blah, blah. That's the classic scene. But starting with the problem solution is opening is hard and fast. I

Brett:

Love the Flex Seal commercials that are relatively, I mean that's not too old, but the opening scene there is a leaky roof and this guy with a pretty thick New Jersey accent's like this will cost thousands, these repairs will cost thousands of dollars or whatever. And then he gets into his pitch. That's a pretty good one. Yeah,

Jordan:

Phil's done an amazing job with the Flex Seal line. He blew it up into a whole business and that that's classic VR as well. So yes, you, they're actually super cuts on YouTube that you can find of it's, I have a favorite, maybe I can give it to you to put in the show notes, but it's like a super cut of all these problem scenes. Nice. And it's just hilarious when you put 'em all together. It's like this person has the worst, they ever fall down the stairs and they're gar garbage bag breaks and their roof is leaking and it just goes on and on. And so start with the problem solution opening. I, I've actually done a lot of, again, it's a very measurable type of marketing. So I've done a lot of AB testing with more aspirational openings or not having a problem solution opening. And every time hands down the problem opening is what wins.

Brett:

And a lot of that ties back to it. It's more motivational. We're more motivated to avoid pain then to seek pleasure. And so it makes sense. Yeah, if we got a problem, we want to solve it. So yeah, it makes sense that that's going to be usually the strongest opening.

Jordan:

So that's one. Number two, showcase unique features and benefits. So any good webpage or Amazon page has a list of features and benefits. So we just showcase those particular things. Again, this part of the commercial, these kind of go in order by the way. So this part of the commercial is about establishing what it is, what does, why it's different. So you showcase that and then tied into that as number three, which is demonstrate or demo the product repeatedly, which includes that magic demo in tech light we had the magic demo of this is supposed to be a super tough military durable flashlight. So of course we'd run it over with a Humvee, we freeze it in a block of ice and it still works. We do all these crazy military tough demos,

Brett:

Which both of those are really memorable. Seeing it in the block of ice and someone chips weigh the ice so you can, until it's actually ice and then the Humvee, that was better than just a van or something, right? It's going to be

Jordan:

Military how had to be a Humvee,

Brett:

Right? It's perfect

Jordan:

How to be a Humvee and then explain how the product works. It's a little mundane, but here's how it works. Here's part of a commercial's important, who does a really good job outside of Dr is Dyson. So Dyson's really selling you on there. Yes. Their sophisticated vortex technology inside of there, which is why you're going to spend three times as much. Exactly. You normally spend that in a vacuum. So they use that to great effect. Number five, prove value by comparing and contrasting. So when you think about this, I always think of the most iconic side. It's usually a side by side demonstration. You can also do before and afters of course. Number one in terms of comparing contrasting before your roof was leaking after your roof is no longer leaking or weight loss, you see the guy with the gut and then the guy doesn't have the gut anymore. So that's before. And afters is a classic example of that. But this a second one in terms of contrasting bounty, the quicker picker upper to this day, they do that split screen scene where they both go over a regular paper towel and the bounty goes over the same spill and there's a smear and left behind liquid on the negative side and on the product X side and on their side it gets the whole thing. So that is that drill

Brett:

I think brilliant immediately communicates the difference and it just lands, it works.

Jordan:

And then we have number six is established credibility with testimonials. So we don't always use testimonials. Sometimes we use celebrity endorsements. Basically this boils down to, you mentioned psychology earlier, I'm a student of social psychology, particularly Robert Cini. Yeah, I love it. And he has a concept called social proof. So we, especially in longer form, which is the half hour infomercials, they use a lot of social proof, a lot of people telling you how great the product is an incredible way. So that builds that sale for them.

Brett:

And the other interesting thing about social proof, we use this a lot for YouTube or any kind of digital ads. Video ads is especially user-generated content, but testimonials are pretty engaging as well if they're done the right way and I know how to craft the right testimonial or edit the right testimonial, but they tell a story and stories are very engaging. So it provides that social proof gives you confidence that it's going to work and it's also pretty engaging and helps draw somebody in. It's interesting, I remember going through a period of time when I had some clients tell me like, ah, testimonials, it's old school try. But I think everybody's over that. They know, no, this works, it's going to work forever. That's like saying good offers. So like old school. Okay, so anyway,

Jordan:

Yeah, I've heard that so many times in so many different ways. There's so many things that everything that I'm saying and everything that I will tell people is tested, tried and true means it's been tested and before me, I mean billions of dollars have been proven these things out. So I always kind of have to laugh when people are say, oh I'm not, I'm going to do that. Yeah,

Brett:

I don't want to do that. That's not my brand, it's not my style. I'm like, oh, okay,

Jordan:

It's great, but we know it works. Do you want sales or

Brett:

Yeah,

Jordan:

Exactly. Anyway, so yeah, where were we? Chaldini social proof. Yes, very important. Raise an answer. Obvious questions and objections. So we mentioned Sugarman earlier, this is basically Sugarman one of, I mean Sugarman has many things, but one of the things that jumped out of me enough to put it into my, he's

Brett:

Also Sugarman's the guy, but I don't know if we mentioned before. So Ruth book triggers, which you recommend, but he is also the guy behind glue blockers. That was one of his big successes. Love the blue

Jordan:

Blockers. He was the first guy to do the blue blocking sunglasses. He had those great, that had a lot of social proof in it. There's a character that he found on a beach that did some dance moves and stuff. Very iconic. And that of course led to many variations. And to this day you can buy blue blocking sunglasses. They still sell. But yeah, so his thing was to, and this is selling 1 0 1, he just applied it to Dr Print, you know, sit down and you think about what I mean, any Amazon seller knows these things because there is a section on every page where you try to anticipate questions and give answers or people submit questions and you give answers. So his idea was to include that if you have, he said it in a funny way, he said, raise an answer, obvious questions and objections, but make sure you have a good answer. Yes,

Brett:

Yes, yes,

Jordan:

Totally. So don't raise it if you don't have a good answer, but to anticipate what people are going to say, like that's not real or whatever. So then you show them that it's real or that this can't possibly do X and then you think of a way to show that. So if you have a good answer, anticipate, again, that's just selling 1 0 1, but he applied it to Dr. Number eight, present a powerful offer at an incredible price. I mean that is what was it Sounds like it. It's become a bit mundane crossing out the higher price and putting the lower price. But Dr. Infomercial marketers kind of pioneered all this stuff.

Brett:

It still works and it still works online. And we've tested this quite a bit. And we have clients that will test this during holiday sales or whatever. Having that was priced, that's marked out. And then the current price, it's powerful. It's got that psychological effect of, hey, I want to buy this anyway and now you're giving me a little extra justification and a little extra logic that I can use to say, yeah, okay, I'm doing the right thing here. I'm making a smart choice to buy this. I'm saving money to buy this product. So that's fine. Yeah, still

Jordan:

Works. Save saving more money than I'm spending.

And of course along with that goes all the techniques. Some people don't use them anymore, they've fallen out of favor. They're a little bit manipulative. But sometimes if you can do supplies are limited and things like that, all the infomercial guys pioneered every technique you can think of. Supplies are limited. Act now. Act now. And you get a special discount reasons to, there's so many ways you can use this. One of the modern innovations that I've seen that I thought was pretty clever is obviously when you're at a commercial, some percentage of people, a growing percentage every day are going to go to Amazon and find your, they're going to skip your website, they're not going to call your number, they're not going to go to your website, they're going to go to Amazon, they're going to search. So they're going to find competitors. And you don't really want that ideally.

So we used to have this offer not available in stores, which was true cause you can get a bonus item or something only on TV that was incentive to call us and order direct. But now it's seen one of the top players saying, this offer only is not available on Amazon. The product on Amazon of course, because you'd be stupid not to have it there, but they have a special offer, a TV offer that you can only get by going to their website. So that's incentivizing come into my sales funnel and stay away from all those competitors and knockoffs and stuff that you're going to find when you go to.

Brett:

And I guess that that's even powerful even if you are selling your own product on Amazon. And we've seen this a lot by the way, quick side note, we help brands launch on Amazon, we do it all the time. And yeah, we found successful companies that are really good at running their own ads and driving traffic through Facebook or YouTube and they're generating this little business, little ecosystem on Amazon of people that are feeding off of their brand or off of their ads. And so then once we launch their brand on Amazon, then they can get those sales. But I'm guessing even if it's your listing, even if you're controlling Amazon, you still probably want to drive some traffic to your own funnel once you get the customer data and all that. But also you probably need to get some of that data pretty quickly to know that the campaign is working, right? Cause you need that feedback to know is the Dr TV campaign working and you need that more in real time than probably can get from Amazon.

Jordan:

Yeah, yeah. It's solving Amazon is I'm sure is a big challenge for everyone. It is. It's been a challenge for us as well as that's evolved to the numbers are crazy and of course I'm part of the problem because I love my Amazon Prime too. Totally. So I think everyone's trying to solve that. It's become a big part. Like I said when I started 5% web, still having mail-in orders. Now of course web is so dominant and Amazon's just eating all that. So phone is talk about phone, people are like what people call in and order. It seems so antiquated, but it still happens significantly enough that we would put phone numbers obviously still. But yeah, become everything became web and now everything's becoming Amazon.

Brett:

So what are those breakdowns now between phone, website and Amazon? Do you know? It probably varies but

Jordan:

Averaging the averages, I would say up to half of your direct sales we're going to come from Amazon or people are going to go to Amazon, maybe 40% I've heard. I don't have a good numbers, but I'm just, I mean this is take it with a grain of salt back of the envelope. And then I think phones probably got to be down to like 20%, but it's still significant. So it's still

Brett:

Significant.

Jordan:

And again, it would depend too on what you're selling. Obviously a lot of people are using hybrid model of DR where they're doing branding and they're driving to web and they're doing other things. E-commerce, the.com people are doing DR. Now performance driven marketing. So that wouldn't apply to them. But when we're talking about classic as on tv, I'd say maybe 20% phone, 30% your microsite, the rest Amazon, something like that. Yeah, I mean Amazon. Yeah, that makes sense. Amazon just eaten everything.

Brett:

Makes sense. Awesome. Yeah. So back to t and t. Were we ready for number nine?

Jordan:

T n t? Yes. Use it. It's dynamite. Yes. So you present a power powerful offer, an incredible price, and then you increase your perceived value with a value comparison. So you could pay a hundred dollars for this, but today you'll get this better product for only 1999. So we do a lot of comparisons. Sometimes it's just a matter of no, if we go back a few years, we used to zero in on a, this is going to sound really dated too, like catalog page. Yeah. We use webpages at some point where you zoom in on the price and you circle in red and it's like look how much this is. Well

Brett:

Even saw that you guys know tack light, right? I think you use Zoom into an Amazon listing and show it these are $59 but not tack light.

Jordan:

Yes. Seven or eight years ago when we shot that, yeah, that was still a, I mean I would use it today, but I don't know exactly how I would use it because I mean it's moving so fast, but back then it was still a good selling technique. And there's all these techniques by the way they evolve, but there's still the fundamentals. So fundamentals just a question of figuring out how to apply value comparing today, but especially if there's the first one to break price, and again I got to put the asterisks of Amazon is because now it's becoming much more common to find all different price points. But the fundamental technique is to find someone who's selling something for an expensive price and then be the first one to, to break the price. So we used to do that all the time. We would, whether it was on live shopping or even an infomercial going into to short form, we would break the price. It would be 60 and we'd bring it down to 1999, fortune point 99. So if you can break a price, you definitely want to call that out in your advertising, the first one to be at this crazy price.

Brett:

Love it, love it. So number 10, the grand finale of t and t

Jordan:

Number 10 is actually the title of one of the books that we mentioned. A guy named Aloff wrote a book called or Money Back. He's the guy who coined that phrase. And conceptually it's minimizing risk with a satisfaction guarantee. Again, something that might seem mundane, people don't give it as much thought as they should. And somebody who's a really conscientious marketer should think about ways to innovate in this space. How good can you make that guarantee? We used to, it was in the beginning it was as simple in the ally cuff days, simple as if you're not completely satisfied, we'll give you your money back, no questions asked. That was innovative at that time. And then it became we'll pay, I'm sure you've seen in some of the early web days, we'll pay you to return shipping. Yeah, we'll triple, we'll give you triple the money back.

I think it was Pope who'll used to do certain crazy. You'll lose money on that when people use your abuse you for your guarantee. And I looked at the numbers and it's like a small fraction, we'll actually fill it out and send it in. You had a couple hurdles to jump through and he was like, it's worth it for the ones that get through the process and go through all that trouble, it's just worth it to pay them double or whatever it is to have the power of that marketing. And Sugarman's, Sugarman was a fan of that as well. He would give these, I think he called it satisfaction, not satisfaction, total satisfaction guarantees or something like that. I don't remember the exact terminology, but his idea was like, this guarantee is so good that people will actually think you are getting ripped off. And that gives them the confidence to take that final step and close the sale.

Brett:

Which makes a lot of sense. And yeah, you mentioned free shipping both ways. I think Zappos was one of the early ones to do that online. Yes. And they realize that that's the biggest hurdle for someone to buy shoes online, is that it's not going to be the right size and returning, it's going to be a nightmare. It's going to cost a lot of money. So they invested actually marketing dollars into those returns. So free shipping both ways, no questions asked. We'll exchange it. Yeah.

Jordan:

Well what is Prime doing? Prime doing the same thing. You can just don't even put it in a box, just literally throw it through the window of your local ups and we'll take it back and give you a refund. They're making it as frictionless as possible. Totally. And that's the concept. Yeah,

Brett:

That's the concept. And that increases consumption and demand and sales enough to make it worth any of the hoops you have to jump through as a business or the added cost as a business. It if far outweighs that, so love that. Well man, that was gold. So you got the Divine seven actually with the grade eight and then 10 tried and true. So that's fantastic. So we're up against time a little bit, but I don't want to get this short cause it's been awesome. So just a couple more things that I want to chat about as we wrap up. You know said you could know it in as early as a couple weeks that this is working when, what do have to see to know that your DRTV campaign is working and talk just a little bit about the math behind DRTV. 

Jordan:

Yes. So usually in two weekends that's usually how we run weekend to weekend testing. We've erred on enough cable networks, major cable networks to get the so each, and again this is changing a little bit. Attribution as in everything is becoming a bit tricky, but I'll just talk about the general model when it was phone and web and things that you can key would've a different phone number in every commercial that ran every station. This is called keyed marketing, it comes to print as well. And then we would match up the server logs for the times that the, based on when the commercial aired, matched it up with the server logs to know what orders are coming from where. So we get pretty granular in that regard of we added on these 10 stations over the course of a week or two weekends. And most of the media is on the weekends that airs.

And then you know immediately get, you get daily reports, you get a weekly report and a few days after that you get a final report. We include some sales that trickle in, we call it drag. But looking at those numbers again, the key metric in as on TV is the cost per order cpo. So it's basically your ad spend divided by the orders that you got. It's similar to a cost per acquisition. And based on that number and based on experience, I have a little spreadsheet business model that factors in all the costs. We already know what number we're aiming for. Every campaign has a pre-calculated breakeven and obviously if you get below that breakeven, you're lower, the CPO the better and you're golden. So yeah, it's very fast. And we can also what's called buy manage. So that's what a direct response agency will do based on which stations are performing, which rotations, which is a certain time of day is performing. You can get pretty granular with that as well. Even down to the hour, they will buy the ones out that are not driving sales based on the data they have and they'll heavy up on the ones that are driving sales. Totally makes sense. So that's basically how it works in a nutshell. Do you have any more?

Brett:

No, it's perfect. Yeah, so it's your media buying at that point. You're optimizing just like we would do online. But then I know one of the questions that I have and that I'm sure others do as well, how does a product like Tack Light sell for 1495 and how do you make money? Because you're spending a lot on the CPOs, what are they, like a dollar. But for products like that, are you really relying on upsells and cross-sells things on the backend or talk about that a little bit.

Jordan:

And there's a science to that as well and some techniques that I've collected and applied over the years, of course it is upsells, your average sale is not Fortune 99. It could be back in the day. It could be as high as $60 off of a $10 initial offer. So there's a lot of things happening on the backend, things that that you really can't do as efficiently on Amazon. You can do on a web microsite and on the phone of course as well. And the biggest things are just this word deluxe that's worth listening to this podcast. People like Deluxe, if you apply this word deluxe to something for some psychological weird reason that nobody knows, but it's been proven over and over again, over a hundred years of direct selling people, people will order it. So we used to see strange things. I don't know 40% of customers will order a deluxe. Why? Wow. Because you called it deluxe?

Brett:

No, the deluxe. We all want the deluxe. Deluxe. We can tell our friends deluxe show, well when this is the deluxe, no big deal.

Jordan:

What does that mean? It can be a color even. Well this is in the copper gold color. Oh, okay. And people will go for it. So it's a very powerful word. We obviously try to deliver some extra value and make the product a deluxe product. So that was key. And we did that upfront. We'd always order ordered these things, by the way, in the order of most converting to the least converting based on all the history and knowledge that we had. So deluxe is first obviously multiples of the same thing that you ordered. For some reason people like to order two and three, especially if you give 'em an incentive. We used to see crazier things there. I had a producer friend called the Mooch Factor, and that even applies to the commercial by the way. So we used to offer a lot of bonus, little bonus items, throw away things that you get for free if you order now.

And then we started doing a lot of buy one get ones because for some reason it didn't matter what it was. You might say to yourself, why would anybody need two of these? But for some reason if you give them two, it stimulates the sale. So you can apply that on the back end as well. People who obviously bought one, they're more likely to buy two or three. You can make arguments. We have classic arguments like buy one for you and one for your family and one for your friends and one for your mom. So one for the house and one for the car is a classic as seen on TV arguments. So those two things alone drove most of the backend revenue or drive most of the backend revenue. And then little things like you can do a longer guarantee, like a war, longer warranties, which is familiar to people who have ever bought a vacuum cleaner at a department store back in the day or any electronic item at a Best Buy.

They're always, or even now on Amazon, they're trying to sell you guarantees and insurance all the time. Totally. So we would do a little bit of that accessories. It sort of trickled down to smaller and smaller percentages. A lot of times we load it up and then pair it back as we saw what people were responding to. Because you get all that data too. The phone center gives you all the data, the website obviously. And you can study that and say, okay, this is converting and this is not converting, swap things out. It's a very scientific endeavor in that regard. And that we keep iterating, we keep trying different offers on tv. We keep trying different things on the backend to maximize that average sale.

Brett:

And is there usually a certain magic number you're going for where maybe you're offering it for 1499 or 1999, but you're trying to get 50, 60 as the average order value?

Jordan:

So we have a thing that's similar to I guess ROAS we call it. And it may be if people have heard of it. Media efficiency ratio. Yeah, totally. Some call it ratio. So two to one was the gold standard and everyone was shooting for a two to one in terms of revenue to advertising spend. That was, as a general rule of thumb, that's what we were shooting for. And then of course got better than that three, four to one. If you got a four to one, you're popping champagne and

Brett:

Yeah, nuts. You're buying all the airtime you can possibly buy at that

Jordan:

Point by the world supply. My first boss in this industry, Andy Kuban, used to, when he got really excited and we had William Low CPOs, he would call up the agency and he would say, buy the World Supply of Media.

Brett:

So that's

Jordan:

That. Say, what do you

Brett:

Do it company wants to get, they're like, you got it. I will buy everything right now. So that's awesome. Jordan, this has been an absolute blast. This totally lived up to expectations. Super fun. I'm actually quite bummed that we need to wrap up here, but we are for sure running out time. So couple of quick things. Well first of all, just mention this as we Rapid fire, favorite projects you've worked on. And then I want to talk about how people can connect with you. Maybe they want to tip their toes in the DRTV or may just want to learn more. So we'll talk about that in a second. But Rapid Fire, favorite campaigns you've been involved with and why?

Jordan:

Yeah. So the first one is Nearest and dearest to my heart would be the finishing touch line of personal hair removals. It became Micro-Touch and a bunch of other products that eventually became flawless and is now with church and Dwight. It was a big sale in our business, but that was the first one I worked on. So those are the first campaigns that I worked on. So those are near and dear I, I've done a bunch of fun stuff with I, I've worked with Billy Mays, so anything I did with him was always fun. The, there's a, it's on YouTube now as well. There was a short-lived discovery show called Pitchman, which started Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan. And I'm actually in one of those episodes. Nice. And I had done a deal my five of my 15 minutes of fame, I guess. So I worked on a few pods with him that we did the Magic Mesh years ago. Magic Mesh, which is a curtain, a mesh curtain. It's like a screen you can walk through and it closes is automatically behind you. That one's near and dear, because it was the first one I did with Fred Paddock and Paddock Productions out of Kansas City. Shout out to them the home of the Super Bowl Champs.

Brett:

Absolutely. Go Cheese man. I'm from KC originally. Huge cheese man.

Jordan:

Yeah. So that was the first project we did together. Became a big success and aired for many years. And then like all the attack light stuff that we've done, Nick Bolton, it's been great to work with. He's, he's a spokesman. It was all the fun stuff that we did. Fun pseudo military type stuff that we did over the years. It's been eight or nine years I think now that we've been shooting commercials for that and introducing new items. So all those have been great. Nick's great. The Paddock team, which did that as well is great. So I've had so much fun on all those commercials, thinking of new ways, new things to run it over with. We went to a tank park and you can actually drive a tank at somewhere in Missouri. And we went there and ran over a bunch of products with a giant tank and crushed a car. I think that's a picture on my website if you go over

Brett:

Where Missouri. Cause I'm in Missouri, I'm in Springfield, so I'm about two and a half hours

Jordan:

Southeast. No, it's not Missouri. Sorry, I misspoke. It's in either, it's in Minnesota. Minnesota, it's called a tank.com. You can probably just Google it and you'll find it, but you can actually go there and drive a tank. And we went there for the day and shot a bunch of really fun stuff. So thinking of, just imagine you're on your 26th or 27th tack commercial and you're like, okay, what could we possibly run this thing over with Now we've done everything. I've done a monster truck, I've done. So it, it's so much fun just trying to come up with these ideas.

Brett:

One, upping yourself on production, which is awesome. Yeah. Fantastic. So for those that say, Hey, I want to keep learning from Jordan, I want to check out some of his articles, some of his materials, where can they do that? And then what if they want to work with you, how can they get in touch with you that way?

Jordan:

Yeah, so I have the companies you mentioned, my consulting company's called SciMark, S C I M A R K. So if you just go to SciMark.com, you can find Humble

Brett:

About science and marketing. Easy to

Jordan:

Remember. Yeah. Yes, that that's Hopkins. Hopkins Scientific Advertising, which you mentioned, which you knew, which I was impressed by. Yeah, I've

Brett:

Got on the shelf in the office.

Jordan:

Yes. That was a very inspirational book for me. So when I named my consulting company, I named it after that. So scientific marketing, so cymar.com, it's got a bunch of stuff on everything you want to know to find out more about me and contact me. And then I write a weekly sub. Used to be a blog. I've been doing it since 2007. It's sort of inside baseball about this industry. It's called the SciMark Report, which you can find on CK and LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn so you can find all my contact stuff and websites and projects and everything. On LinkedIn. I have a YouTube channel, SciMark channel, which has all my commercials on it. If you care to peruse my collection. I think

Brett:

You got to. They're fantastic. And so if you enjoyed this podcast, you need to go to the YouTube channel and watch it and also get the CK as well. So Awesome. Great. Good stuff. And then did you mention Paragon?

Jordan:

Yeah, Paragon. So Paragon is, Paragon is my product company. We do our own products. We design, manufacturing and supply. I do the commercials. My partner Bill Corvis does all the China side development and logistics and managing the supply chain. So we partnered up later on after he brought me into the industry and I got some experience and he did his thing. We later on partnered up in this company called Paragon, where we like the tech, tech projects are actually our products. We've developed them, we do all of our own products now, but Nice. For many years. I just did consulting for other people and then I started doing my own commercials and my own projects. So most of the ones we talked about on my own products as well as commercials or our own, I should say. Sure. From Paragon. Yeah.

Brett:

Awesome. Well, Jordan, this has been an absolute blast. Looking forward to doing part two at some point, or maybe we can talk about how these things work on YouTube at some point. But just fabulous job. Super, super fun. And yeah, thanks for coming on.

Jordan:

Great. Thanks for having me. It was great talking to

Brett:

You. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you love this episode, which I bet you did, share it with someone that you think might benefit from it. And hey, if you haven't done it already, we'd love that review on iTunes, helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Chris Brewer is an agency veteran, marketing expert, and former golf pro. Not to mention my business partner and OMG Commerce’s co-founder.

Each year, Chris has the privilege of talking with hundreds of DTC brands, both big and small. He hears about their goals, struggles, plans, and more. As a strategist, I also consult with large-scaling eComm brands. Through our perspectives, we’d like to highlight ways in which great brands get in their own way and offer some candid advice when it comes to working with agencies. 

We love the brands we talk to and the clients we serve. But, like anyone else, brands can sometimes overlook how they inadvertently hinder their own growth. Here are a few topics we cover that we hope you’ll find helpful:

• Having goals that aren’t battle-tested.
• Still thinking like it’s 2020 in some areas of your business.
• Prioritizing automation and tools over strategy.
• Shooting for perfect data and ignoring actionable data.
• Stopping short of getting results.

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Chris Brewer (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

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Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG commerce. And today we have the man himself, the co-founder of OMG Commerce, a repeat guest on the podcast, although it has been too long, some might say since he's been on the podcast. But today I have my business partner, Chris Brewer, on the show. Chris, how's it going? And thanks for taking the time.

Chris:

Thank you, Brett. I was beginning to think that I was in the penalty box. I really was. I wasn't saying I wasn't pushing, and then the invitation came.

Brett:

Yeah, well, what have I done? Why am I getting the invite back to the podcast? We previous shows were so good, and actually you still may hold the record for one of, I think Ezra has the record record, but that's that. That's understandable. It's Ezra Firestone, but you've got one of the top downloaded shows in the history of this show.

Chris:

It's a good thing I spent $12 on that fiber guy.

Brett:

Exactly, exactly. So hey, today, I'm really excited about this episode one because I do enjoy chatting with you and fun stuff always happens when we're on a call together or chatting. And so I know this will be no different, but we're going to get into some straight talk here. We're going to hopefully be transparent, maybe a little bit blunt, but in a loving way, and talk about from our perspective how D2C brands sabotage their own success. So how might you, dear listener and friend and beloved D2C brand owner, how might you be sabotaging your own success? And we only share this out of love, compassion, because we want you to succeed because we have to look at these things from our own perspective. When we talk to other agencies and we talk to clients and we ask, Hey, how do agencies sabotage their success? How do we as an agency, how are we tripping over ourselves and making mistakes potentially? And so hopefully this will be helpful. Now, Chris has a unique perspective because he talks to DDC DDC brands day in and day out. So Chris, I want to get into your background too, for those that don't know you, but what do you do on a day in and day out basis at OMG Commerce

Chris:

Day in day, day out, it starts early here at the home office. Got to get some solid coffee in me could do a plug because I just finished up my big box of just went blank on the name.

Brett:

Sounds like you need another cup, I

Chris:

Need need another cup. But it's just like all natural pod coffee that we have from, so you're

Brett:

Rocking the keur

Chris:

Egg, I'm rocking the Keur egg and starting off there and then my day starting out with looking at meetings coming up. So because I think we recently totaled this up and we knew it was a low estimate, but I'm talking with at least 25 brands a month-ish over, well over 200 conversations a year with not just D toc, but occasionally CPG brands, occasionally B2B com brands, but obviously a prevalence in the, and

Brett:

That's just tracked calls through One Source. You're also going to trade shows and you're getting on impromptu calls which don't end up in the CRM and several other things. So yeah, that's a really low estimate. But yeah. Yeah, you're talking to a lot of people.

Chris:

Oh yeah. I'm talking to a lot of people and I'm also active in some forums, e-commerce Fuel and Blue Ribbon Mastermind. And so I'm always trying to keep my finger on the pulse of what brands are talking about, just staying on top of trends. So between keeping my hand on the finger of, or the pulse of those kind of things. And then the calls I get really, it's kind of a cool place because I hear about stuff that's coming before it really gets out there in articles and blogs and posts and things like that. And I also, for the topic of this pod podcast also have been experienced to how D2C brands can sabotage their own success. And sometimes that's how they arrive because that's happened and we try to repair and sometimes counsel.

Brett:

Yeah, yep, exactly. And so yeah, you've got a unique perspective. One of the best ways to learn is to have your ear to the ground to talk to actual customers and clients because things just come out the fears, concerns, hopes, dreams, all that comes out when you're on these calls. And so we're going to dive in and hopefully provide some insight into what are ways you can better set yourself up for success, whether you're working with an agency or an in-house team or whatever the case may be. But how can you D2C brand really succeed and accelerate growth this year and beyond? So before we dive into that topic though, Chris, give folks like the 6 30, 60, 90 second background. Who is Chris Brewer? What did you do pre OMG and lay that on us.

Chris:

Wow, I got to go back 14 years to go pre omg. It's been a long time. But before that I was a multi-time entrepreneur. I had a direct mail company doing postcards and mass mailings in a localized area. Prior to that I was actually in digital me or in the digital printing field for billboards and an agency for outdoor advertising placement. So I've been on the traditional side of media with direct mail and out outdoor. And then I've also had jobs, I've had real jobs with companies of VP of marketing for a franchise group for a short and somewhat painful period. And then also was in national sales, helped lots of trade publication in the golf maintenance industry of all places. So a real interesting background, but obviously for the last 14 years I've been eating, drinking, sleeping, bleeding, and digital media.

Brett:

I think it's 13, but it's close. It probably feels like 14. How would you Yeah, because it's 2010. Anyway, it doesn't matter. 13, 14,

Chris:

That's when we officially started when we went to the event I thought was 2009.

Brett:

Oh, that could have been, you could be right. I'm thinking of incorporation. Anyway,

Chris:

When we actually started the, Hey, let's try Google Maps for local businesses

Brett:

Conversation. I think that may have been 2009. That is a good, really good point. Now you threw this out there really quickly, but I want to key in on it just for a second. You mentioned golf. What's your background of golf? Because I know we had some golfers listen to the show, they'd be fascinated to know your background with the sport of golf.

Chris:

I played high school golf, I played college golf and I went after my senior year of college. My parents were thrilled to hear that I was not going to go get a job. Instead, I was going to go try playing the mini tours. I played the mini tours in Texas and Florida for a couple of years where my favorite joke, I was the leading money spender. So even though I was quite good, I was not good enough and also just really didn't like the life on the road. So after that, I played amateur golf for obviously been playing amateur golf since then. And now I'm just a hack, just like anybody else can go out some days and shoot a nice little 74 and other days it could be an 85. And I'm burying my head in my sorrows and my wife hates those days. But I still love it. And I still rate golf courses for Golf Week magazine. So I travel, I'm headed to California and I'm taking my clubs next week and I'm going to try to find in between a couple of shows, some nice golf courses I can go rate for the magazine. So that's what I do to stay connected.

Brett:

It's amazing. It's just a reminder. There are different levels of good because if you were to go out and golf with any normal person, they'd be like, whoa, this guy's amazing. And you are, you're good. But then there's certain levels even of world class. So kudos to you for being on the tour for keeping the passion up. Yeah. So let's dive in man. So let's talk about D2C brands. How do they sabotage success? I've got several tactical things I'm going to share and I'm going to kind of chime in as you share some thoughts, but we'll just go in no particular order here. We'll just share based on your perspective, several hundred conversations a year. Where do D2C brand owners trip over themselves or sabotage their own success?

Chris:

Yeah, I think one of the ones, I'll kind of skip around on my list cause I kind of went just random thinking. But one of the things that I think is a good place to start is what I wrote down. They don't battle test their goals. And what I mean by that is one of the questions we ask, because I say this 10 times a week, it seems we're a low volume agency. We're very picky about who we bring on board. So we need to understand if our goals are in alignment. So I'll ask, what does success look for you in the next six months? Be as clear as you can in terms of your metrics. And so I'll give you an example from 25 minutes ago, I had a Shark Tank brand, I won't mention who it was, but they said we want to double sales in 2023 with a five to one marketing efficiency ratio.

So now what I don't know from that and what we actually didn't explore in the call, cause I ran out of time, but is like how did you come up with that number? How is that battle tested? How is that viable? And actually in our team's field, I tell people that we're going to take what you give me and we're going to look in your account. And that's always fun is sometimes you get, hey, we got to have a five to one return on ad spin and we want to grow three x in the next two years. We look in their account that may have some history. They have never hit that number, never, not even close. So they haven't battle tested their goals, but they have an idea or a wish or a pipe dream that if they got on with, I could just say any, A lot of other agencies, they're just going to say, sure, we'd love your business. Yeah, we'll

Brett:

Give it a shot. We'll give it a shot, we'll give it a it a

Chris:

Go. And then that's why, that's where then we see later in forums that I'm attending, agencies suck. They're terrible. And a lot of times it's just like they started out completely misaligned whether they knew it or not.

Brett:

Yeah, I do like that thought a lot. If you're got a goal and we all need to have goals, you need to know what direction are you headed. And this something we talk about a lot as an agency is that goals help set direction, but it's like the habits and the daily practices and your daily routines and what you do consistently, that's what actually brings results, not goals, but if you're shooting for something that is unattainable or unreasonable, you are setting yourself up for failure. Yeah. And the five to one merges for those listening to unpack that a little bit, that's where you're looking at spending 25% of your total revenue on marketing basically, or 20%, sorry, where you want to get a five to one return on your marketing dollars. And that's looking at total revenue, total ad spend, that type of thing. When you're looking at RO ads, that's when you're looking at return on ad spend in platform.

So what is Facebook or Google or TikTok or what are they reporting in terms of sales generated from your ad spend? And yeah, it's a really valid point, Chris, that if your goal is something that you've never hit before and never even gotten close, then it begs the question, what makes you think you can get there? And agents, some agencies are good, our team is really good. We know some other agencies that are rock solid, but we're not miracle workers. You need to know, hey, who is your market and what are your landing pages and things like that. And so yeah, battle testing your goals. I like that.

Chris:

And piggybacking on that a bit, which leads into another topic is sometimes what's happened is just in the last, let's call it three, four years of the D2C C boom including the covid boom, is that some brands are still wearing their masks figuratively because they're living in, well hey, we did this in 2020, how can we get back to that? And a lot of times I'm finding which I is regrettable in some ways, it's great when I can talk to a brand that's been around since 2010 or 2012 or 2014, we can go back and see the progression and where things were. Whereas a lot of brands launched 28, late 20 18, 20 19, they don't have reality. And also before a lot of the data changed and things that allowed really rapid scale on meta and other platforms. So I think that's why it's so important to have really great advisors, whether it's a consultant or an agency or another brand that you trust that can help break through some of those things to find what is the real truth here.

Brett:

I like it. And just kind of piggyback on that, what are some of the things that maybe brand owners don't understand or just aren't admitting about the current environment that are potentially tripping them up?

Chris:

Well, the current environment right now is just on a call with 12 individuals late last night, 9, 9, 10 o'clock. One of them works with large VC funded brands, people with 5,000, 150 million in the bank. He said they're not spending the money completely pulled back

Brett:

In terms of new investments, new acquisitions, things like that,

Chris:

Right? And so with that, what I see is just they stop taking risks in the current environment. And so there's this pullback, there's this foxhole that hey, we're going to wait this out, we're going to reduce spend. And I dunno if that's in answering your question, but it's related to the same topic in terms of not paying attention to the macro environment and just having blinders to that,

Brett:

Right? Yeah. It's easy to still take that 2020 mindset of e-commerce is on fire and growing like crazy. And certainly we've had a few reality checks since then or some big shifts since then in terms of supply chain issues and then inflation and slow down and e-com, stuff like that. But it's easy still to get in that previous mindset. But yeah, there's a shift happening now. I think most people have felt it, and I think we're all concerned about where things are headed, but I think we have to sometimes double check. But is my thinking related to this channel or this goal or this platform, is that still rooted in 2020 or is that based on what I'm seeing today? Cool. Well

Chris:

That's I, I'll give you a compliment. I think you've done a really great job from a CEO and leader perspective, leader perspective in the e-commerce space is really champion championing third party data and tools and where is your source of truth? That's a one question you told me to ask and it's been a great question, which is, and I think that's a good sabotage that I didn't write down. I don't know that you did either, was just what is your source of truth? It may be good to spend a little bit of time because there may be really folks also on the podcast going third party attribution. What do you mean?

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good one. I did write down something related to attribution and getting the right data, but yeah, understanding what is your source of truth going to be? And we talk to very sophisticated d TOC brands that have all kinds of custom tracking and they've marked up different Google analytics reports and they've got backend tracking and they've got their CR CRM connected to Shopify and they're doing complex stuff where other people, the people that just mainly manage what they're seeing inside of Facebook and inside of Google. And there's not really a right or wrong, but the key is what is your source of truth going to be? So what do you believe the most, and really the most important thing there is what metrics are you measuring that lead to the right business and financial outcome? This is something that I talked about with Robert Ray Hill from Triple Whale and talked about this with others and we talk about it internally is that you can't just obsess over return on ad spend, right?

Return on ad spend is important, but it's only important if it's impacting your business metrics. It's only important if it's helping actually grow sales and grow profits and make you a more valuable company. You can't take row ads to the bank. And so it is understanding, okay, what is our source of truth? What do we believe the most? What is the most accurate, knowing that nothing is 100% accurate when it comes to attribution and performance tracking, and then what lines up with our business goals. And so one of the things that I wrote down is I think there's some brands that are obsessing over perfect or they're obsessing over getting it right instead of obsessing over actionable, let's get data that's actionable, at least directionally accurate so we can make good decisions, know where to spend more money, where to spend less money rather than obsessing over being perfect.

Chris:

Boy, that is a big one, and I actually, I had took one of my takeaways from the Harvard Business Review and actually that was one of the other elements in the Harvard Business Review about just why businesses and general sabotage their success. And that is a focus on perfection rather than allowing some of the things that, especially in e-commerce sales are going to be coming into play. And I hear that some of the potential partners that we gently decline are those individuals where I'm picking up vibes on the call that there's not going to be much room on either side of the line and that's going to lead to a bad outcome usually.

Brett:

For sure, for sure. Cool. What are some of the other things that you've noticed where brands get in their own way?

Chris:

One is kind of keeping your eye off the ball on your inventory. I could pivot just real quick to the Amazon space because this was another one that came up today. Brand was having an incredible traction and they had a big lift in sales that was caused by some external factors. They hadn't thought that through and they hadn't ordered enough stock and they went out of stock and going out of stock on Amazon, it's like it's the last thing, want to, it's one of the last things you want to have happen. And so they were talking about how long is it going to take us to recover this and what are we going to need to do? But out allowing things, keeping your eye off the ball, whether it's your inventory or your basics or if you're a brand leader that you've got other people on your team making sure there's a reporting cadence where they can come to you with these executive summary types of things in the business like that maybe you don't, aren't able to keep your eye on this, but make sure somebody is and that you're looking at those things.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really good. While we're on the topic of Amazon, I've got one to share here that I think has come up a lot. We've noticed this trend happened starting several years ago. We do a lot with Amazon advertising and the trend has definitely been for both agencies and brands to adopt automation, to use tools that automate bids, take some of the manual labor out of managing your ads, and it's not all bad. I think in the early days of those tools, we would've argued and we had the data to back it up that you could do better doing manual adjustments, but nobody really wants to do manual adjustments. But here, here's the mistake that I see people making. I think there's some brands out there that value automation over strategy. They believe that if we can just automate some of these little things, that's all we need.

And so let's pay less money for that. Let's go affordable, we'll just automate and we'll move on when really strategy is what moves the needle, not the automation piece or not the little bidding up and bidding down. And so that's what we have been preaching on the Amazon side, but also in the DDC space for Shopify stores. And with Google is that the overall strategy you take, whether it's with your Shopify store, big commerce or whatever, or on Amazon, that's what matters. And really some of the other things are just to support your strategy. But that's where I think agencies and smart marketing directors and people with just a good marketing mind will always be valuable regardless of what happens with AI and automation and things like that. You need the strategy piece. And so you've got to prioritize that, I believe over automation. So utilize ai, utilize automation, but prioritize strategy and utilizing platforms to reach your goals.

Chris:

Yeah, that's great.

Brett:

Awesome. What are some other things that you notice that pop up, whether it's related to actual tactical marketing stuff or just the way people show up or the way they think or communicate? What are you saying?

Chris:

One quick one that I just think is a great reminder because things come in waves and things, even in e-commerce, they get repopulated and they fade. One thing that to me has faded and I think it's possible that it faded because there was so much attention on it for so many years and we harped on it and we tested every single brand that came through and said, you got to fix this. But it's starting now to see some feedback from our strategists when we're reviewing brands like, Hey, your page speed sucks. Yeah, so there was this focus because just on the Google side, for instance, having good quality score on your ads, for instance, page plays into that. If you've got a slow rendering mobile site or a slow rendering desktop site, that that's also slow rendering on the ads and it's just going to provide a bad experience overall. And so also the page tools that just Google has have been, it used to be junk, but it's improved a lot over the last several years. So one of the things I would do, and just because you're a Shopify store, you may think, oh, I got no control because Shopify, there's a lot that you can optimize with page speed on Shopify. Sometimes it's as simple as the kind of font that you're using and what's loading. So that's just a one little quick take is page speed.

Brett:

Yeah, and what's interesting about that is I think because that was a hot topic years ago, we talked about page speed a lot it seems like four or five years ago, I think now a lot of people just assume that their website is fast. To your point, I'm on Shopify, it's fine, I got it taken care of. You need to look. You still need to check because, and Google's got some tools that they use for page speed and it's basically the same tool they use when they're analyzing your landing page and determining will this be a good user experience or not. And that will impact your ad performance. So page speed still valuable, you still got to pay attention to it. So another thing that I want to kind of highlight, and this will kind of tie into some tactical stuff, is mistake that we see people making.

Cause we audit dozens and dozens of Google ads accounts and Amazon ad accounts and seller central accounts on a yearly basis, some months, dozens in a single month is a lot of people are stopping short of getting a conversion. And I'll throw a couple words out there. We're all running remarketing ads, we're all trying to get people to buy. Again, we're all running email and stuff like that, but as we dig a little deeper and pull back the curtains or look under the hood or whatever metaphor you want to use, we found that most people just aren't doing this very well. I get to speak at D2CX retain an event that gorgeous put together in LA last year, and one of the points that I made was like remarketing is one of those things that everybody is doing and almost everybody sucks at.

And that's not to be mean the way it is. We look at it, we're like, oh yeah, I've got a remarketing campaign, I'm all good. But really what we need is if we're running any kind of top of funnel traffic, Facebook, YouTube, whatever, how are we engaging with people that just viewed that they were interested enough to just watch the ad, but that's all they did. How are we building audiences there and trying to market those people again, how are we finding people that all they did was click on one lander, they did nothing else? How are we continuing to share a message with them and move them further down the purchased funnel and maybe share with them a unique offer or unique perspective or give them more of what they need to make a decision? What about people that add to cart or what about someone that's purchased one time, but that's it, right?

I think one of the mistakes that people make, and I hear people talk about this or they want to shift their strategies that makes me think this. We assume that because somebody bought one time they'll buy again, or we assume that because they purchased that we don't have to market to them again, which is absolutely not true. People are not thinking about your brand nearly as much as you think they are. You're an afterthought. We're an afterthought to a lot of people. So you've got to be reminding, recommending cross-selling, upselling, but you've got to do it in a strategic way because the other thing we see is that there's a ton of waste when it comes to remarketing people remarketing to huge windows of audiences. People that have been around for 360 days and stuff like that are treating those people the same as someone who was just on your site a day or two ago. And so I see a lot of people either stopping short of getting a conversion or just not executing that playbook effectively where they're not getting those conversions they need to be getting.

Chris:

Yeah, we see that. It's always amazing to me that we get, I've seen it occasionally, even with 10 figure brands, it seems like it's more with seven figure brands that I see this. And so if you're a seven figure brand, go check this. And that is just not utilizing all of those audiences that Brett just talked about it. It's low hanging fruit in a lot of instances. The other one, Brett, that we see a lot, and this is fairly recent, but I still find a lot of brand owners are surprised when I say, did you know you can hook Clavio up to Google ads? Did you know that you can keep that fresh list of customer data for similar audiences? Retargeting all synced up. There used to be a time where we would just have to remind brands every 90 days or 60 days or so, depending on their velocity to upload a fresh customer list to Google ads. And again, we find no connection or a list. This was a guy had a hundred thousand clavio list a couple weeks ago and the last time it was updated was September of last year. So that's another thing that, I wouldn't say that that's sabotage necessarily, but it's definitely one of those eyes off the ball type of things.

Brett:

Totally. And there are different levels here. You could be sabotaging or you could just be not leveraging your success. And it's one of those things where you're running ads, you're investing dollars in your efforts, but there's just a few things that are off that are really making some of that money wasted or just allowing, not allowing you to get the full impact of those ad dollars. Cool. What else did you write down in your notes on ways D to C brands sabotage their success?

Chris:

Well, I think this is the part in the podcast, Brett, where I've got to, oh, I've got to back the chair out. Oh, and I've got to stand on my soapbox, which is right

Brett:

Behind me.

Chris:

So forgive me in advance. I know that there are those of you who are wounded and may need therapy from what I'm about to say. And so here's the area

Brett:

I'm curious myself where this is going quite, this is quite

Chris:

Set up. Every I here you get worried and rightfully, but that is brands will lump all agencies in the same box. That's the first segment of this. And the second segment is they don't treat their agency. I'll include freelance. They don't treat their agency or freelance partners like true partners or an in-house team. Where I see in my 14 years of experience here,

Brett:

You've got way more than that.

Chris:

And I've seen it, I've been in marketing 25 years. What I see this over and over again is they've got an individual running things. That individual is doing a good job, but one day that individual comes into work late, they have a talk with that individual, they start coming in on time. Then later that individual messes up with some campaign structure, fails to upload an audience something again, has a conversation. But then everything's great for a long time and they continue working. They stopped, had a conversation, identified the problem, found a solution, and they rectified it. What I see happen so many times with brands that hire agencies is the first time a human being drops the ball or makes a minor mistake, all trust is lost or major trust is lost. How could you guys do that? And yet the brands that we work with that have the conversation, Hey, I noticed this or I noticed that.

And sometimes noticing something or even having another agency call out something, there's actually a reason the agency did not implement that. And so I've seen brands leave agencies over things that were part of the strategy and they never gave the agency a chance to talk it out or discuss why. What are the reasons we do that? I've seen agents, I've seen brands leave agencies over copy that was written for an Amazon storefront that was taken off the Shopify site with, and they were all upset because they thought for sure it wasn't English first content. They're

Brett:

Like, we hate this content, we

Chris:

Hate this content. This is terrible. Some foreign person wrote this overseas person actually that's on your Shopify site. But those are the kinds of things that I would just encourage brands out there, and I even tell people this on discovery calls before we work together at the first hint of mistrust, misalignment, if you're having water cooler conversations with your co-founder at your brand about who you're working with, you are sabotaging your own success by not calling it out and determining an improvement plan to correct the course of action. Because it is just like it's costly when you hire an in-house person, you have to let them go and go and recruit and find someone else and train them up. It is, I could argue it is equally expensive. It is to replace an agency. And what happens sometimes is we're seeing this now in, I've seen this in every recession before every recession that comes, people pull back, I'm going to bring this in house because my brother-in-law's sister's husband used to run Google ads back when he worked for the plumbing company. That's extreme. But they know somebody that's going to run their ads for them and they pull away without asking what else is going on here? Well actually we had four people involved in the account and these kind of things. So I would just say there is malpractice. There are reasons when agencies should,

Brett:

There are bad agencies out there or lazy agencies. There are for

Chris:

Sure there are. But you really do yourself a disservice when you lump everybody together. Because I posted today in an e-commerce forum that I'm in, there is a $1 million brand that was saying, I can never recommend agencies for these reasons. I had this bad experience. And what I tried to gently point out was there are multiple service providers involved in this forum that could point to multi-year multi amounts of clients that have been with them for years. But what we forget sometimes is just the old, I don't know, the adage or proverb or it's not a proverb, it's an adage, probably is an upset client that it's not resolved, will tell so many more people than a happy one. And so many times it's kind of funny too cause I had an Amazon brand tell me one time, there's this big Facebook group with multimillion dollar sellers that I don't have access to. It's a private group. And I was talking about, man, so I hear that everybody's trashing this kind of ad type. It's is actually DSP advertising. Everybody's trashing it. And I just wish the brands had success would support it. And he's like, I'm not going to support it. Yeah. He's like, why would I support, I've got competitors in that group.

Brett:

Totally.

Chris:

Why would I chime in and talk about how awesome this is working for me? And I was like, oh, I get it. But that's what I would caution so many things as people get their KPIs from forums, people get what their goals should be from forums. People get what agent they do your own work. Yeah, figure it out. Okay, yeah, I'm

Brett:

Going to step, get influence, get inspiration, get feedback. You want to know what other people are doing, but don't take that as absolute truth. And a couple interesting things that I'll point out there. I'm

Chris:

Stepping off the soapbox now. I'm back.

Brett:

Oh, you're stepping. Okay. Soapbox right now. Got it. We'll meditate later. And I think, Hey, I love the agency business. I had an agency prior to omg. I really enjoy this type of work. So I'm pro agency, but I believe there's some brands out there that you'll be happier, you'll do better. You'll love life more if you don't work with an agency. Yep, yep. You will do better hiring an in-house team. And in fact, I'll, I'll point out Peter Goodwin, our good friend who started a Groove life silicone wedding ring company. We worked with them for quite a while. We helped them launch on YouTube and on Google. But Peter told me from the beginning, he's like, Hey man, I want to build an in-house team, but I do want to work with you guys that right now cause I know you're the best. And all this became good friends.

We had an awesome client relationship, but he was going to be happier and he wanted to build that in-house team. And he did. We know other brands like p and g as an example, there are other really large groups that they're just built to work with agencies. That's how they function. And we've had a multi-year successful relationship with a large p and g brand. And so you know, get this expertise with an agency that you often can't hire or can't find. But the one thing I'll mention, and then we'll get off your soapbox, you started this is sometimes where people are like, and you've probably heard this comment too, where I just can't find good help, I just can't find it. Good employees, employees are the worst. I remember hearing that a lot at for whatever reason, the old Dan Kennedy super conferences, which I love Dan Kennedy. But everybody at those events, just my perspective back in the day were like, oh, employ you don't want employees. Employees are the worst. So that that's about as intelligent as saying all agencies are bad, not true. Where would we be? Our most valuable resource is our team is our employees and agencies can be valuable too. So awesome. Now that we've moved past that, now that people are sufficiently convinced that agencies are okay, what would you share next? Chris?

Chris:

Really, I mean the last thought I had, this is one I'll source the Harvard Business Review so I can give credit where credit is due. I thought this was really great, that teamwork can be frustrating for very smart people

And that's where they find it sometimes difficult to truly delegate because they got a sense that I can do it better. Regardless of whether or not that's true, especially likely for those, like we were saying earlier, those have a perfectionist streak. So one of the things that we look for when we're evaluating a brand relationship is if we've got an owner, and sometimes these can be multi-million dollar brands, but the owner still got his hands on Google ads because they learned it and that's what they do. And now they realize they got to gather up the baby and they got to pass it over to this other. And what happens, and we've seen this, we saw this a lot during smart shopping years of Google Smart Shopping where we knew that that campaign needed those, I don't know, Brett, four or five days to let the algorithm determine what was going on.

Brett:

Yeah. After you make a change, need to let it do its thing, experiment a little bit before you make the next round of changes.

Chris:

And so this extremely smart, extremely well educated individual who hired us because of what he heard about our expertise on smart shopping, sees the early data on the campaign and before saying anything goes in and pauses it. And we had that happen multiple times. Even though we have in our agreements only we are going to be in the account, all of those things they just can't help themselves. And those are things that then we had to start those things all over and it just causes a lot. Now it's not just keeping your hands off your campaigns and things like that, but it's also just being kind of self-compassionate about your own internal reactions and understand where those come from and generally appreciate what diverse minds bring to a team. That's a quote from the Harvard Business Review. And I think that is a real key.

And sometimes if you find that you're having trouble scaling outside of macroeconomic factors and maybe you look in your rear view mirror and you've had a lot of team members come and go, you've worked with a lot of good agencies that you thought were good agencies but didn't work out, maybe the next stop is the mirror to a self-identify. Like where have I prevented our own success here? And get some expertise, some outside help. Like, Hey, tell me what I should know here. Where am I? Where are my blinders? Be open. That's one of the things I love about our team at OMG is anybody can come to me, the co-founder and say, Hey, I've noticed this about you. I think this is something maybe you could work on. Or, I get frustrated when you do this and there's no power trip over that. Totally. And so l look, sometimes stop and think about, hey, what other factors could be in place here that is preventing my brand from reaching the levels that I believe and others have told me that it could reach.

Brett:

Yeah, really good. I heard another agency owner talk about, I think he called it talented founder syndrome, where as founders we're pretty smart and we're pretty confident and we're willing to push through obstacles and we're generally right about a lot of things. Certainly not everything but right about a lot of things. That's how we've become successful. And so then it becomes difficult to delegate and let loose of some things, but ultimately you have to or you're going to get, get stuck. And so really good insights. Chris, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing. I know we could keep going, but we are up against the clock. So for those that are interested and they're like, man, I'd like to talk to Chris Brewer, I'd like to talk to Chris about my business, how can they get in touch with you?

Chris:

The easiest way is to go to our website, omg commerce.com. We've got a strategy session button there. Click that, fill out some brief information. My coworker, Caitlin will review that, will ask me maybe some additional questions. We'll send out a follow up, can fill out some additional foot stuff. It saves us about an hour of that if we feel there's a fit, if we don't feel there's a fit, I know Brett and I both know amazing other freelancers, agencies that we can refer to. So I'd say, Hey, don't hesitate to reach out if you think you're too small or what have you. I'm happy to spend even 15 minutes. I do a lot of little 15 minute calls just like, Hey, what's your challenge? Let's figure it out and let me point you in this direction or this course you could buy or this person you could hire. But that's how you can reach is just that free strategy session on our site. And I'd be happy to set up either a short call or if it's more appropriate, a more in depth kind of exploratory conversation.

Brett:

And I've been on a lot of those calls with you, Chris, over the years and very helpful, very insightful. People leave those calls feeling good about themselves and good about their business and they feel like they've gotten some good direction

Chris:

Pitch. We have no pitch on the

Brett:

First call. And so if you're looking at Google ads, help you get performance max questions, YouTube questions, you want to grow your email and SMS marketing or anything related to Amazon, reach out. We'd love to chat with you. And just out of a quote a minute ago that we'll kind of, we'll end this on getting outside perspectives, getting outside help, not a sign of weakness, sign of wisdom. And I really like that. So Chris, any final words or recommendations or things you want to point out before we sign off?

Chris:

No, I would just say do your research, do your homework. Put as much effort into hiring those that work from an outside perspective in your business as you do in hiring your own team members. That would be my final thing is I don't know if omg, I think we got six rounds. I think it's like five or six rounds before someone can actually start working for us.

Brett:

Yeah, several. It's at least at least four.

Chris:

And so don't hire your first freelancer because of recommendation or an agency. Really do your homework and it things will turn out a lot better for you.

Brett:

Love it. Chris, thank you so much. It's been another good one. And we will make round whatever the next one is. Hey, much shorter. That's

Chris:

Fine than fine. I'll, I'll hear from you in a couple years. Thank you for so much

Brett:

For the opportu opportunity. Okay, thanks Chris. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We could not do this show or Lisa wouldn't be fun to do this show without you, so we'd love your feedback. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you have any guest recommendations or burning questions, fire them our way. I am active on Twitter at Brett Curry, active on LinkedIn, the Brett Curry, and hey, I'm just starting on TikTok, so check it out, see what you think there. Would love to connect with you on the socials until, and with that, until next time. Thank you for listening.

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Jeremy Horowitz is one of my favorite follows on LinkedIn. 

He recently dropped some brilliant (and terrifying) posts about the economy, the impending debt crisis, and what DTC brands should focus on now.

Jeremy and I go way back. In fact, this is our 4th podcast together over the years (he used to host a show too). Jeremy has been in the DTC SaaS space for years, having previously managed marketing for a large DTC brand. Jeremy is now the Sr. Partner Manager at Gorgias, and he and his team run the DTCX events, which have become some of my favorites to speak at and attend. 

Here's a look at what we cover. Some of it's heavy, but it also speaks to the amount of opportunity on the horizon: 

• What keeps Jeremy up at night? A potential consumer debt crisis? More at this link.
• 64% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Those making over $100k per year are in the same boat.
• What you can learn from Liquid Death. 
• Understanding how and where your customers want to buy.
• Avoiding the discount doom loop.
• Getting your inventory as close to "just-in-time" as possible.
• A different way to look at your marketing budget and performance. 

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• U.S. Personal Savings Rate Chart
• Jeremy Horowitz (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

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Transcript:

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Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are going to talk big picture. We're going to provide some information that I think will be helpful, maybe a little bit scary as well, but I think overall positive. So we're going to be talking about state of the economy, state of the eCommerce, and what you should be doing right now and for the rest of the year to ensure success and growth for your D2C brand. I've got the man, the myth, the legend Jeremy Horowitz on the podcast today. And Jeremy is a guy that I've known for a long time now. He used to run a podcast. I was on that podcast and he was on this podcast ages ago as well, but now he's a senior partner marketing manager at Gorgias. Gorgias is a much beloved partner of OMG Commerce. And we'll talk more about Gorgias as we go. But Jeremy, I've, I've recently discovered is an amazing follow on LinkedIn. He's writing some really thought provoking items and so as I was reading his stuff I was like, Jeremy, you got to get on the podcast and talk about this stuff. And so here he is. So Jeremy, welcome to the show man. How you doing? And thanks for taking the time.

Jeremy:

Thank you. Thank you. I am doing awesome. I think it's our fourth podcast we've done over the years, so we're excited to dive that in. I have no idea, I'm going to live up to that intro, so I hope I can really deliver on all the key points. But yeah, I'm really excited to dive in. It really just came out of at Gorgias, we were analyzing data across 11,000 merchants past couple years. I've just been scratching my head of like everybody's saying all these crazy things and shouldn't be happening looking at a bunch of brands that I work with, both through Gorgias and personally, it was like, is this actually happening? And most of the time it's almost never matching up. So I just started studying a lot of the data across all of our merchants and then I started studying the public filings of your and Meadows just to see what's going on.

Cause essentially when you aggregate all e-commerce up into hundreds of thousands, millions of brands we're essentially the digital economy we that's reflected in those earnings. And so I've just been trying to try to just read the TVs and figure out are we in a recession? Are we not in a recession? How bad is inflation? How good is inflation? How has that impacted, where is e-commerce on its growth trend? And I'm sure we'll dive into all of those things. But yeah, I'm basically just like everybody else, just trying to just combine as many and try and get as many points as possible to figure out what is actually going and what can we tactically do to just keep moving through all these just unprecedented times that candidly have been enough ready for some from normal times and some non unprecedented times for a couple years.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. And I love the way you unpack that. And then that's exactly what we're going to dive into on this show, making sense of some of the broader macroeconomic issues that are taking place. And just a quick caveat, I'm not an economist. Jeremy's not an economist, but Jeremy's a really smart dude. And so we're going to be diving into this because we want to get a pretty good picture of what's actually happening, where are things headed so that we know what to do and we know how to grow our business, we know how to keep pushing forward and take care of our teams and our clients and our customers and all of those things. So yeah, because I pay attention to the news a lot as well, and we're talking about this before we record. Sometimes I hear things like, Hey, something worse than a depression is on the way.

And I'm like, oh no, that sounds terrible. And then I listen, I read something else and they're like, it's going to be a soft landing. Nothing to see here, nothing to worry about. Economy is up until the right, everything is great. Inflation is not bad, don't worry about it. We're in a recession, we're not in a recession. Just all this stuff. And to your point as well, we've had unprecedented year after unprecedented year, right? Pandemic, totally unprecedented. Then we had supply chain issues caused by the pandemic and now inflation, it's just one year after another. It's stuff we haven't dealt with before. So yeah, I would take some normalcy if you would dial that up, Jeremy. I would totally take that.

Jeremy:

What does that even mean anymore? That's a good point.

Brett:

That's a good point. We wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if things were normal, but here we are and no sense in wishing for something other than what is right, let's just get after it and try to make things work as best as we can. But you had a recent post, and this was the post that really triggered me to say, okay, Jeremy, I got to get on the podcast. It was what is keeping me awake at night right now? And I'm a really positive person, by the way. I can always see the positive things, but I'm also a realist and I want to look at the hard stuff too. So unpack that a little bit. Jeremy, what is keeping you up at night right now?

Jeremy:

So this was a chart that was done. It was a research firm and a private equity company paired together to look at from basically late 2019 to release this in q4. So it was basically through q3, Q4 of 2022, how much consumer credit card debt was the average US consumer taking out and what was their savings rate as a percentage of their income. And I'll share this in, and I can send this so we can throw this in the show notes, but yeah, I'll

Brett:

Link your to your, it's basically a post or whatever. I'll link to that in the show notes. But yeah, there there's this graph that shows savings rate versus credit card debt. Yeah, but you're good.

Jeremy:

And so as you soon go, we go into the lockdowns and early part of 2020, saving rates go through the roof. So the normal average float somewhere around five to 7% during the covid lockdowns, they go spike around 30, 33% in 2020. And that kind of, depending on where you see stimulus, it also goes into a little bit of 2021. And that makes crazy high rate probably, well, I don't know, you can ever have too high of a savings rate, but it just in way past the average. And then you see the amount in hundreds of millions of dollars of credit card debt just plummet from about 850 to 750. And so right from a traditional finance, personal finance, that's great things to see. People are paying down their credit card debt really actively managing their finances and then saving a lot of money. So they have good cash reserves.

So that for us in the consumer economy, they're in a good place to spend. They've got savings that they can tap into, they've got credit card debt that they can tap into. Then the really thing that what keeps me up at night is as you see in 2021, and then what really flexes into 2022 is essentially just a hard reversal of those two graphs and just, you see it's skyrocket in either direction. So by the end of 2022, you see that the personal savings rate had basically it fell back down to somewhat normal levels and that five to 10% and then plummeted down to 3%. And then you just see the credit card rate, the amount of the credit card volume skyrocket from that seven 50 area to north of 950 million, no, nine 50 billion, 909, a big number, a really way too big number that you can't wrap your mind around.

I think it's 9 billion, but that sounds insane to me. So I'm going to say nine 50 million and then we can fact check me afterwards, but it just essentially goes skyrockets. And it was pre pandemic, it was about 850, so a meaningful step up north of 10, 15%. And so what really keeps me up at night is it billion, right? It's 50. So nine 50 billion, really, really bigger than the GDP of probably a lot of other economies in the world. And so right, credit card debt isn't bad, savings should be good, but there's everybody's decision on what they should be doing. But really what more concerns me is knowing that I don't know about everybody else, but every credit card on their mother has offered me a credit card in the past three years. And if I had actually taken all of them out, I think my credit limit would've been something like three x my actual income, which is just bubbly. That's just scary. Those are not good. And just knowing that not all consumers are that disciplined, my guess is reading the middle ground of that data that people are overextended. And so some other data point has really come out that 64% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

When you just think about that means over half of every consumer that you could possibly touch is literally on paycheck to paycheck to pay for everything that they're working on. And then the second piece of that that really is like, oh boy is a group, there's a sliver segment of that that makes six figures a year. They're making over a hundred thousand dollars in gross income on an annual basis and still live paycheck to paycheck. And so what really concerns me is when we take a step back, lockdowns tons of stimulus and inflation, and I don't want to spend too much time on monetary theory, but when the government pumps even more money than what people are already making and the only place that they can pump

Brett:

Amounts of money that have never been pumped into the system before.

Jeremy:

So

Brett:

Yeah, it never happened before to that level.

Jeremy:

Sure, right. Unprecedented scale, unprecedented frequency. Cause it happened multiple times and at those points in time, all consumers could really push at a meaningful volume into maybe their homes was consumer goods. So we had this artificial one-time massive growth that's just really, really jacked up. Then on this back of that, consumers are like, well, I don't really want to change my spending habits now, and I actually, and now I want to go and travel and do all these other things that are going to require me to spend money. And unless something else happens and maybe there's plenty more brilliant people out there than me, maybe there's some simple solve to this that we just haven't figured out yet. But at a certain point this has to stop. People have to either go back to savings or default on their credit card or stop spending money.

I mean, maybe I'm blatantly missing something, but to me it's like it has to be one of those three camps. And so just knowing that having your financial capital tied up in inventory is the kiss of death for any e-commerce or retail business. To me, this is, I think I'm really focusing on this year and every brand that I taught you and advise, it's like how are you really, really optimizing your inventory? How are you being really, really thoughtful about your timelines to inventory when you're placing pos, how much inventory you're carrying? Because at a previous company, and this is a super extreme just to prove a point, but when I was audacity, be calculated to weeks of term, which is essentially how many weeks will it take you based on your current sales velocity to completely sell out? Some brands we were seeing had hundreds of weeks, thousands of weeks of inventory.

And that faces a reaction I need of knowing that all of these factors are at play. You just have to be so nimble in these times. And I know that that's for every operator out there. I'm sure you all just turn off the podcast and hate me because it's the past two years from the supply chain have been a nightmare and everybody's been telling me to load up on inventory and get ahead of this. Exactly. But to me, this is where we're in a little bit of a pickle on our side of the just economy and sphere of yes, the proper thing to do was to load up on inventory, but now you might get stuck with too much if your consumer demand falls off. And so I think the one piece of helpful advice, and I hope what everybody takes away from this is really start studying your customer's purchasing behavior.

And I'm going to misuse in an economic term, but I like the way it sounds of really start to understand your consumer demand curve. So if I'm to study economics, I know it's the price and quantity, but really understand what's, how often do people buy, how much do they spend when they buy? And are my customers the type of customers that literally wait for a paycheck to afford my product or do they need to put it on buy now and pay later? All of those components. And I know you can probably buy some third party data to understand more of the financial habits of your customers, but I think that's going to be really, really important because the key has always been to tie your inventory buying to that as much as possible. And I don't think it's a skill a lot of people developed as you could just blow out sales recently, but it's kind of a little bit more of, I don't kind of the old days when we used to really have to manage merchandising and the e-com manager side of the store, but I feel like that's really going to be the key for everybody this year.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm so glad you pointed that out. And I want to just k kind of key in on a couple of things. One, I think this all does go back to really understanding the consumer, understanding what they're experiencing right now and how that might predicting or thinking how that might impact behavior going forward. But knowing that 64% of consumers live paycheck to paycheck and it's not the lower income folks only, it's people that are making over six figures. So even if you feel like you're reaching a higher income earner, probably most of them are living paycheck to paycheck as well. So just knowing any little blip, if we start to see unemployment rates really go up, that could cause demand to shift dramatically. Right now we've got all these weird things happening, but unemployment is really low. Everybody's working, a lot of people are working.

So cash is still flowing, but a lot of it is credit based and saving rates are going down to your point and that you can look at the graph for yourself to see how scary it is. But yeah, and now this is a complete, those things inverted, the savings rate and the credit card spending those inverted recently. So did your approach to inventory that got flipped upside down too, right? Because a couple years ago was all about just get in whatever we can get in because we'll sell it. And now you got to think about it. And so one of the things we did, and I actually wrote this article at the beginning of the pandemic, it was about understanding consumer behavior in a downturn because if you remember, this is actually hard to turn back the clock and remember, but March and April of 2020 looked like things were going to be a disaster.

Those were the first losing months that OMG commerce ever had where we didn't plan on it. There was other CapEx times and whatnot. We'd spent a lot of money what we meant to. And so we lost money for that month. It was the first two months we ever lost money. But then we're like, oh wait a minute. Yeah, everybody's stuck at home. They can't spend money on anything else other than stuff online. And then things exploded. But I wrote this article on how are consumers going to respond to a recession? And it's interesting, you kind of got these different buckets and we got this pulled up. So we kind of talk about it. There's some people that just slam on the brakes, bad stuff happens, they slam on the brakes. There are other people that are like, they're pained, but they're patient so they're feeling the pain, but they don't want to really give up what they're doing.

You get the comfortably well off folks and then you've got the people that are kind of live for today that are like, Hey, caution the wind, whatever, we'll just keep spending money. I think to your point, there's a lot of people that are live, live for today or where they're feeling comfortably well off where they start those spending habits and they don't want to adjust them. They start those spending habits and just because inflation's there, they're not spending less, they're going on trips, they're doing some of those things. So I think just understanding that it doesn't take a lot to shift things off a cliff, so to speak, in terms of demand and being ready for that. So time is back to inventory. I think that's a really important piece. What are you recommending to merchants now? How should they be thinking about inventory? How many weeks worth of sell through? What are some practical tips you you'd give there?

Jeremy:

Yeah, so I would say that just in time inventory should be taken to probably as close as you can take it to the extreme. And I know it's very different for every business because you have your PO timelines, you have your sell through and wholesale retail,

Brett:

Running out of inventory is bad too. Really. We manage brands on Amazon and you know, run out inventory on Amazon and you got to start some of your flywheel over again. So running out is bad too. But yeah, close to just in time is probably a really good idea.

Jeremy:

And I think, right, cause you really have to thread the needle. You can't go too far in either direction, but I think you really have to lean more towards is this sellout existentially bad for our business and start more on that side. But I think it's really more of just speed. If I was running a brand, I would probably be checking myself through on my best products every day. And then I'd probably be checking myself through my products once a week, if not multiple times a week. Just because assuming that you have the right terms with your manufacturers, I probably would be placing pos more frequently. I know that's not as cost effective and everybody's going to like, well, you'd be more profitable and you're telling me to do something less profitable. But I think this is actually where you need to push your margins on every other part of your business so you can afford to spend a little bit more here just to give yourself the runway.

Because what we never talk about, and I know people are probably on two thousands to say cash conversion cycle, but really how long does it take me to put dollars out of my business? How long does it take me to bring dollars back in And inventory, especially if you're shipping from overseas, you're automatically on probably a month to two month timeframe as just the fastest baseline. And so really being intelligent about that. I think the other piece is just if you like more of a tactical thing. One of the best things we did when I was at a brand back at my time at Lumi is every week I'd standing e with my ops team and our head of supply chain and logistics. And I would literally go through our inventory and it would mostly be prioritized by our best sellers, but I would let them know, hey, these are the changes we're making to our paid media budget.

These are the things that are going on promo, these are the things that we're going to feature on the site and email blah blah, blah blah blah. And then they would start adjusting. And if you don't have that already add, it's the calendar this week. If it's something you're already doing maybe once a month, I'd probably pull that into biweekly weekly. Really have that down. It's really a muscle that you have to learn. There's no perfect science. There's tons of tools that will tell you that they have this perfect algorithm and they help but consumer, consumer demands consumer demand. And so you really just have to get really dialed in there so that when you do have the shakes and when do things do change, you can really adjust as quickly as possible. And I mean, Lululemon is already running away. We made too much sale.

And I think it's actually a brilliant tactic of they're just ripping the bandaid off. It's going to be painful. People are talking about it a lot. What concerns me about what they're doing is they're running it at such a scale that they might actually get into a discount death spiral where they might pull in so much consumer demand cause they're making such a big deal out of it that then they're not going to hit their sales targets in Q2 34. So that actually there's ways that you have to be very careful about it, but I think we're just going to see a lot more people less aggressively discount top of funnel and less disagree acquisition and more strategically discount. How do we move stuff? How do we clean stuff out? And I actually drew Sn one of our close friends really had a meaningful posts about this on Twitter or about the past week of we really shouldn't be discounting the super loyal people that are with you and are going to buy. And there's very strategic points at when to introduce those promos, how to introduce those promos. And you can do it fairly automated now. And I think we're just going to see way more adoption of that with the couple of how oil companies have their burnoff or we're pump, we're pumping too much oil so we burn oil off so we don't ruin everything. I think we're going to see more of those clearance sale type of just move out of the system when need be. That's

Brett:

A good analogy. A little oil burnoff. You got to get rid of some of that inventory and you got to rip the bandaid off and the Lululemon, the example. And I do want to talk about some other DDC brands that are doing really well right now. Cause I think we've learned great from examples. But let's talk about Lemon really quickly. Obviously phenomenal brand, they crushed it during the pandemic. Everybody's wearing yoga pants, staying at home and whatnot. But talk a little bit about that. So now they're discounting everything. What are your thoughts on that discount death loop and any more thoughts about Lululemon, but then also specifically how do we avoid that discount death loop?

Jeremy:

Yeah, so plenty of thoughts on Lululemon, but the good sound bite is actually Ezra Firestone has, I think one of the most intelligent promotion cadences where he's just like, I really don't discount much on the top of funnel and every six, eight weeks I'm running a shallow discount to just get people over the line and clear out some inventory. And so without knowing anybody's business or the intimate inner workings, I would just generally, I would say that that's a pretty good philosophy to have. Obviously tons of nuances and cadences to everybody's business as far as Lululemon, the, it's kind of like a contagion outbreak I think is what I'm concerned by is if this is small scale and it's a small percentage of their inventory specifics products, that classic fashion model where stuff goes out of season and we cut

Brett:

Last year's stuff, buying a sweater and it's June and it, it's fine. That doesn't hurt the brand. You're just, you're getting rid of stuff.

Jeremy:

Right? Exactly. Versus hey, we just launched a bunch of new stuff, we're putting a bunch out, end of stuff's only six months old and we still think we have too much. The problem is that although I know that everybody loves to think that you're going to promote a sale and a ton of new customers are going to come in and buy, at least in my experience, it's your loyal customers and the people who are going to come back and buy anyway who just run through it and take as much inventory as possible, which is great for that short term cash injection. The problem is that if you promote it too heavily to them, you're removing your buyers in three to six to 12 months. And so yes, it solves your short term problem and survival. You can only play in the game if you survive.

It's like, I want to be very practical here, but then when you're like, oh, we produce all this inventory and we're trying to hit our sales numbers for q2, Q3 leading up into holiday, yeah, you're probably not, you're probably going to have a lot softer sales then. And you're back to the same problem where we've produced too much, we don't have enough new customers to offload all of this inventory and we've got to go back to the same customers and it just compounds over and over and over again versus, I know nobody really likes to do this, but the strategy we've run at a couple brands is you move it in a retailer that's one of those offloading retailers, and I know that sounds bad and we need better branding for it. We should call 'em something better than liquidation partners, but move it in a channel where it is maybe a net new introduction. I personally, when I was in college and had that machining, I shot to TJ Max and we're introduced to products, it's super cheap prices and five, 10 years later I ended up buying them. But it was a way to raise it's cash out, get the cash back in your business.

Brett:

And that's only cheapen the brand. We all expect to go to Marshalls or T or TJ Max or Ross, whatever, and there's just a little one off things here and there and it doesn't hurt the brand. We're knowing we're getting it at a discount for a particular reason. And yet maybe you do attract a net new customer, which is kind of interesting. And they kind of key in on the point you're just making. It doesn't take very many of those cycles of discounting deeply and hitting your existing customers for them to be fully trained to just wait for the discount like couple cycles. And I, why would I ever pay full price for your goods at that point? And so then it's really hard to back to back away from that drug of discounting

Jeremy:

Because that tough piece, what we were talking about earlier, cash in cash out, now you're having last cash in for the same cash out from your inventory, you're a advised and it just becomes a gnarly cycle where it's very hard to get out of once you're in that kind of vicious cycle downward.

Brett:

Cool. Makes sense. Totally makes sense. Well, who else are you following? Who are some of the brands that you feel like are just crushing? And I know you may not have insights into their cash conversion cycle or how they're managing inventory, but from what you can see, what D two C brands are just crushing it right now?

Jeremy:

So from the brands that they've publicly disclosed or there's some information there, I think the first one always comes to mind is Liquid Death. We had a great time with them at Retain last Q4 last year, and it's just such an interesting brand, but they really have taken off, wait a minute, were they at Retain? Oh yeah, they spoke the day that you weren't there. They spoke the next day.

Brett:

Oh my gosh. Gosh. Yeah. So I spoke so LA Event last year. I had a blast. I loved it. I had no idea they were there. I mean, I couldn't have shifted my schedule, I couldn't have made it, but I'm so, so bummed now that I missed those guys.

Jeremy:

Yeah, I'll send you the recording of who meets speech, their SAP at retail. But I think what they've done really, really well is, and I, the reason I like them is I think it's a good representation of the opportunity here of if you think we're in no session, if you think that tough times are coming, it makes business so much more difficult. But the winners not only win then they dominate the next decade. Yes, multi-decade of their category industry, the market in general. And I think that they're already in that mode and they're just doubling, tripling down and it doesn't seem like they're slowing down at all. So if anyone doesn't know what Liquid Death is, I don't just don't know if you're under a rocker or something, but they basically sell

Brett:

Jeremy really quickly cause I don't want to lose this thought. And I think it's important right here because we started a little doomsday with a couple things. But here, here's the beauty of this conversation of what we're doing. If you make the right decisions now and get your inventory in a good spot and you get your marketing dialed in which Liquid Death does and we're going to talk about in a second, then you could be successful now. And then if things do go south, you are primed to win. And I've read a more millionaires are created during a recession than any other time. And even during the Great Depression, tons of millionaires were created. So there's opportunity there, you just got to be ready for it. So I love that mindset. We're making the right decisions now to give us the best chance of success now and for whatever may be ahead back to Liquid Death for those that are living under a rock, what is it?

Jeremy:

Yeah, and just to pile onto that point, cause I think it's really important of it also, if you just survive to be the number two, three player in your space, that's also a great business to run. You don't have to be number one if you're in the right market, it could be millions, tens, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars even in the number 2, 3, 4 slot. There will be 17 providers in a space anymore. But survival also is a big win here. But yes, yes. Liquid death, the super tltr is super fresh water in a metal can and everything is branded as super punk metal, hardcore, I don't call it aggressive advertising, but it's insane where one of their stunts was like you could sign your soul away to the company or they infused Tony Hawk's blood into skateboards and all their ads are just these really crazy far out there.

But fun. Cool. Well I guess it's very subjective. People either hate them, they're playing polarizing very well, hate it, but they're just absolutely blown up. They launched on D two C very quickly moved into Amazon now they have a massive hotel wholesale expansion, they're in Whole Foods, they're in a ton of different providers all over the country. And I think while everybody else that I know who's been expanding has been having this channel debate and it's really tough time of do I spend here, do I spend there? How do I just budget my marketing spend? And this is their speech from the conference last year is we just invest in stuff that we like and if it makes us laugh and we think it's going to be a good time, we just put a bunch of money behind it. And obviously they have all the data in the back end on society, know what to invest in.

But they're thinking about it of just how do we grow the overall sales? How do we grow the overall brand? And it's just very funny of Omnichannel was the huge thing a decade ago, then it became all of you to see the past five years. Now everybody's back to omnichannel. And it's like we get so wrapped up in all of our and so guilty of this, all the specifics, your job is just to get your customers to buy your product in any channel possible from anywhere possible and not from your competitor. And I think they're one of the best examples of they hit most of those typical growth paths of Scaled Up, got into Amazon, really, really scaled up. And then their CPG brand so aggressively went into Burry in wholesale. So I think they're a big one. I think Dr. Qua is another big one. You

Brett:

Actually came on Liquid Death really, really quickly. Newer to Liquid Death. I did not know their story until, I don't know less than a year ago for sure. But one of the things, I can't remember if you wrote about this or if I read about it somewhere else, but they did a taste test, but it was a

Jeremy:

A

Brett:

Taser taste test. And I love this angle. They took some really negative reviews online. So some people were saying it was literally the worst water they'd ever tasted. Way overpriced. People were saying it was literally the worst. And so if I remember right, liquid Death challenged these folks to a taser taste test where they gave liquid death plus other brands and if they could pick out Liquid Death as the worst in that bunch, then they would win something. But if they didn't

Jeremy:

A thousand dollars,

Brett:

Yeah, a thousand bucks, they would get tasered, right or tased and they got tad, which was pretty awesome and little risky, I think most marketing departments and most legal departments with Brown on a taser taste test but fits their brand. And I love that they did that,

Jeremy:

A ski mountain in a ski resort in Utah did that also. And it was a incredibly successful iPhone, but they took a one star review, put it on top of their mountain, all the things, if you have a great product, it's actually playing into the negative can work on a very tactical level.

Brett:

Yes, because it shows that you're confident, it shows that you're really confident in your brand and you can't do that if you've got a mediocre brand obviously. But yeah, that's a super fun, super fun tactic. So liquid death, sorry, let's talk squash. And I love Dr. Squash. I'm connected through their creative agency, a little bit raindrop, but yeah, love those guys.

Jeremy:

Yeah, another brand doing a lot of creative work. So for anybody who isn't familiar, it's all natural men's products of soaps, deodorants, bunch of other personal care products like that same model launch on ddc, got into marketplaces and now they're really, really ramping and scaling through Walmart and all those other channels. And I think what they've done really brilliantly is they just really leverage tech well and they're not leveraging tech just to have everything in their tech stack. And I've been guilty of that, of playing with all the new tools but really dialing in their data so that I was talking with their head of E-com there we're like they are testing and constantly know when to send people to their e-com store versus a partner or versus another website. And really dialing in that customer buying behavior because I think that that's, especially if you come out of that DDC mindset or just the Amazon mindset when Amazon's a little bit different cause people will buy from Amazon no matter what.

But definitely a mistake I made when I was managing Amazon and DTC that were both seven eight figure channels was certain people are only going to buy from those other retailers or those other places no matter what. It's such a waste of time to get Amazon buyers to buy from your site or Amazon buyers to buy from wherever new store you're launching it in. And then the same respect they're going to just go back and buy. And I think really just knowing the consumer behavior by channel and then doubling down and using their marketing, using their site to amplify those things that isn't to say aren't driving a ton of revenue through their site and it's not a meaningful sales channel for them. But really leveraging all of those points and that is a little bit of an eight nine figure play that is, it's more expensive.

You need to have a team to facilitate all of that. But I think you can do it at the earlier stages also of your one channel. It just really goes back to so intimately knowing how your customers buy from you that when to pick which way to go. To me, I mean their numbers have just exploded. Disclaimer, they are a Gorgias customer, but the way they're just publicly seeing that company take off, I think that they're another one where they're going to go after the p and g Unilever in their space. They're really going to meaningfully scale up. And they've also running theme here have navigated the one channel. Yeah, add in retail wholesale. And you really need to balance that because caps are going to get too expensive once you hit those 30, 40, 50 million a year thresholds where you just need to balance these things out and you're probably starting to tap into audiences that are so big that you're selling to name your retailer here. Product like buyers and customers.

Brett:

A couple things that kind of key in on there. Love the Dr Swatch brand. A little bit connected there. Spoke at a YouTube ballet event in early 2020, so pre pandemic and some of the Doctor Squa guys attended that. Do you know the guys at Raindrop Creative? Jacque Spitzer?

Jeremy:

Yeah. So

Brett:

They created the original Doctor Qua add that went viral and it was YouTube out of the year and stuff. Funny now Jacque is a friend, we're connected but they, they'd taken a YouTube course I'd taught back in 2017

Jeremy:

18. That's so cool. That's so cool. Everything is so connected

Brett:

Connection, but love what Squa is doing and yeah, it is interesting how omnichannel is all the rage again when it wasn't for a while. But I think it ultimately just comes down to what you said, we're trying to remove friction and we just want customers to buy the way they want to buy. And we typically buy in patterns. Those that buy only on Amazon usually only buy on Amazon those. And it seems like with our family, we've got stuff we buy on Amazon and stuff we buy in store and then you rarely break out of that. And so yeah, I think just understanding how do our customers want to buy this and we've got to give them that option and it's becoming more and more clear to me. And I'm sure it is to you, pure D TOC is likely not the playbook that that's not the playbook typically for the success that most people want. You need to think about marketplace, you need to think about in-store distribution really. I don't think that we have any of our largest clients, those that are doing 50, a couple hundred million that are just pure d TOC at this point.

Jeremy:

And even all the companies that we idolized back in the day that this whole model was built off of all have retail almost totally abers, Warby, Casper, Yeti, Casper, well Casper's just over its own fucking now. But that is

Brett:

A good a point. That is a good point.

Jeremy:

Well all of them, they went to DC then they went retail. Most of 'em are selling on Amazon. Most of them are trying to either are in or are working on wholesale, they're all in the model where it's just like, okay, we just need to go back to selling a product and focusing on that. And DDC is a avenue and a channel. And so I do think kind of tying it back to what we started with, wholesale adds a level of complication. Cause you do remove that piece, you got to buy longer inventory times, you got to ship it to them and they've got us all through then they pay you back and all those components. But then just I think to me just double triple down on the same principles if you know have longer times really get as much data as quickly as possible, really dive in, really start to go a little bit looser.

I know especially those retailers, the fees and things of stockouts and not fulfilling their inventory is a little bit tougher to handle. So you always have to keep that in mind when you make those decisions. But you also just have to be mindful of maybe we shouldn't be selling in 25 retail partners, maybe we should be selling in 10 or 20 or those other numbers. And I think now it's just a great time to shake things up, what actually rattles and falls off the trees versus what stays strong and you can really meaningfully streamline your business. I know that probably feels painful after two years to streamline your business, but just I really keep moving and keep doubling down because the players that survive this are going to be able to pick up a lot of amazing opportunities between talent and share, potentially acquire other brands, launch new products, so many different components once all of this passes that yeah, it's probably going to be a rough 1224, who knows how long runs. But once you're on the other side of that, as soon as the fed drops rates, debt will become cheaper again. And then we're just back to growth mode. And so it's really just about making it through this period so that we can get back to the side where we can just really aggressively get after it.

Brett:

Love it man. Love it. So aside from really getting control of your inventory and doubling and tripling down on things that are working, and I do love the idea of yeah, you want to go but just focus on what the things that are moving the needle and that are really working and kind of drop some of the other things. So focus, even though you're diversifying, you're still focusing, what other practical advice should you give? What should DDC brands be doing going forward?

Jeremy:

Yeah, so someone who on the marketing side will love this one is stop worrying about your aimer acquisition costs. Stop ring's not the right word. Stop having that be your North Star. Look at MER and just what is from a financial, you are a cfo, how much do we spend on marketing advertising costs, how much do we sell period. And then just have an understanding of what your margins are for wherever you sell. So you can have your numbers match up, your marketing spend as a percentage of sales needs to make sense from a p and l perspective, but everybody's doing these super complicated things of DTC and channel modeling and Amazon. And then how do we impact that against this, that and the other. From every time I've dug into this and from every time we've analyzed the data, the more you can just blow out one marketing channel, the more every other marketing channel does well and sells more.

And it's nothing new. It's called the halo effect. It's been around probably for a hundred years, but really go back to that and I know it's really nice to have those immediate feedback loops and that kind of dopamine hit when you know that a channel crushes and it's like that immediate feel, but you are sacrificing something by not looking at the bigger picture. So that's definitely one thing. And I think the part two of that of why it's so important is because of all of this big economic picture and if it plays out the way that I think it advertisers will have to pull out their budget either voluntarily or involuntarily. And while that's a tough thing to realize and you never want to be that advertiser for everybody else who's there, CPMs go down, it becomes less competitive. Customers buy Yes, yes. And it's easier.

It's easier from a cost perspective and from an advert number of touches advertising perspective to get people to buy. And that's, to me, that's that magic unlock where you dominate because then you can spend more money. And it goes back to the kind of three or four years ago when we weren't going crazy trying to figure out how to get cack into a reasonable place. I'm not saying we'll ever go back to that specifically, that was a very magical moment in time, but I think it will get better and things will loosen up and then you can really more aggressively put your foot on the gas even if everything else isn't really great, just because that will be less competitive. And so I think that's why having that just ready to go moment, ready to go prep is so important because if you're looking at everything holistically and you see that crack and that opening, take it and it's going to be great and it's a tough thing and there's no way anybody's going to be right all of the time. But if you can and you're in that top one 10% of brands, you're just going to set yourself up for a special moment in the company's history.

Brett:

And actually I did a podcast with from Triple Whale and we talked about how you know, should stop dispensing over your ROAS and you are not your roaz. I think it was one of the lines that you use, which was pretty great. But obviously got to pay attention to RO as we do. We look at ACO on the Amazon side, we're we're looking at those numbers regularly, but those aren't the real numbers. The real numbers are your financial numbers that that's your real businesses, the financial metrics that are there. And if you can dig into some of the minutia, some of the complexities of your numbers to unlock decisions and understand a little bit more where you lean into and what you lean out of, that's great. But you can overdo it for sure. And I think this is one of those things too that a lot of people do, and I was just thought this analogy the other day.

My son, my oldest is 21 and he's selling solar systems door to door. So he, that's cool. He got a bit of my entrepreneurial bug and he doesn't want to have a normal job and he wants to make unlimited money and stuff, which is totally cool. And he's out there knocking on doors, which is awesome because it's really, really difficult. And I'm like, hey, if you can sell that, you can sell anything. Which is true, but they've got stutters and they've got closers and he actually has a little bit of both. But you can imagine someone that didn't know the business looking at it and saying, we're paying Sutters an awful lot of money, but the closers, closers are the ones bringing all the money in, so let's just pay the closers. And I think that's what we're tempted to do. People be like, let's just run bottom of funnel search and that's it, right?

And obviously you would never look at a direct sales organization and say, stop the Sutters. That's where the leads come from. But it's the same concept with marketing. It's just sometimes a little bit harder to see. You can see who's setting the appointments in a direct sales organization. You can't always see it in a D two C brand, but it's the same concept. You unplug that business dries up and your toast. So understanding how do we make the most of what we have? And maybe that's really strict marketing budgets and we're trying to get the most out of that budget as we can, but knowing that you can't just shift bottom of funnel or things will dry up before long and then wait for those CPMs to go down. Because that was one of the beautiful things about the early part of the pandemic. Viewership went up so people on YouTube skyrocketed on Facebook skyrocket and people pulled out of the auction. So it was like a heyday man for, we had had several brands scaling then with unprecedented CPMs for the time.

Jeremy:

Yeah, exactly. And I think the coolest thing, well honestly the coolest thing pandemic was awful. But I think the interesting lesson from that time period is that was a flash episode of what happened is all those brands that were ready just hit the gas while everybody kind of just like, what's going to happen? What's waiting? We're not sure where our finances are. And I'm sure today and over the past couple years they've been in a significantly better positioned because they were able to really take advantage of that moment.

Brett:

Yeah, totally. Awesome man. Well this has been super fun. I could talk for hours with you about these topics. We are running up against time a little bit though before we sign off though, tell us a little bit about Gorgias, for those that don't know, I mean Gorgias is such an awesome success story. You guys have exploded in recent years, but what is Gorgias and then what do you specifically do at Gorgias?

Jeremy:

Yeah, thank you. Always happy to talk about Gorgias. So Gorgias is the number one help desk in the e-commerce ecosystem really. And we're the number one most solid help desk on Shopify. And so basically any customer support interaction, any customer experience interaction with your customer, we're the technology that connects you. So commenting on social emails, SMS voice, all those different platforms, WhatsApp will have just launched that platform that your CS team uses to not only really drive efficient great moments, but now innovative brands like Dr. Squad, princess Poly, are actually driving revenue through us. So using us to essentially be kind of the closers for an e-commerce company to our analogy earlier where live chat people email in with questions and all those components, how do we answer them? How do we get them the right answer? And then how do we actually turn that potential problem question into a sales opportunity? Yeah, because

Brett:

Really every touchpoint with a customer, every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to grow that relationship and an opportunity to close another sale.

Jeremy:

Yeah, exactly. And maybe it's down the road, maybe you're investing for that retention play. But yeah, and so really having a great time there. I run partner marketing, so all things with all of our partners, like amazing partners like you and omg, we're doing events, we're doing, we're working with a lot of ambassadors and affiliates in this space as well as as all the other technology and agency providers where we're just looking for fun things to do to just help people figure out how to grow their store and navigate all the craziness that has gone on. And I'm sure we'll continue to go on over the next couple of years,

Brett:

No doubt. But you guys do an amazing job. One you put on great events, we've done some events together and just a lot of smart people at Gorgias Man, a lot of brilliant, brilliant people at Gorgias, most of our biggest, fastest growing clients are using Gorgias. And so we give it the full OMG stamp of approval for what that's worth. So yeah, man. Hey, I strongly recommend people follow you on the socials. Where are you most active? I see you on LinkedIn, but where are people or where should people follow you if they want more Jeremy Horowitz in their life?

Jeremy:

Yeah, so on LinkedIn I try to post one helpful thing every day. So Jeremy Horowitz, H o r o W I t Z, and then I've got everything else that I'm working on linked, like linked from there. So yeah, that would be the easiest place to find me.

Brett:

Sweet. That's awesome, man. All right, good stuff. Well, hey, hopefully people are prepared. They're, they're going to be mindful of what can happen, but they're also not fearful but inspired, right? Because that would be the messenger. Don't be afraid. Yes, be aware and be prepared and then you can crush it no matter what. No matter what happens. So any other asks, any other call outs, any other resources, anything else you want to mention before we sign off?

Jeremy:

Everybody have an amazing 2023. If there's anything can help with, let me know.

Brett:

Awesome. Thanks buddy. Appreciate the time.

Jeremy:

Thanks. Have a good,

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. I would love to hear from you, what would you like to hear more of on the show, guest ideas if you have them. I'm open to that as well. And if you haven't done it, I would love that review on iTunes, helps other people find a show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

At one time, Charles Tichenor was a top 100 advertiser on Facebook.

On the platform, he frequently manages 7 figure budgets per DAY! 

In the early days, he managed FB ads for Apple, New Balance, major automotive brands, and more. Facebook gave him test budgets ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 per day to test new features and Betas.

In this episode, Charles and I dig into what’s working now, what mistakes he’s seeing, and a bit of his framework for success.

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• How Facebook Advantage Plus ads give you an unfair advantage - and what you should do about it right now.
• If you want to win more customers, you have to BE your customer.
• How chasing “what’s working now” with Facebook creatives is likely to make you a second-rate advertiser - and what to do instead.
• The AI Charles was using before Chat GPT and how you should use it.
• Creative ways to use Chat GPT to speed up your marketing process.
• How TikTok is different from all the other platforms.
• How to win with TikTok organic and paid ads.
• How to land on the right creatives for your brand.
• Plus MORE!

‍

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Charles Tichenor (LinkedIn) ‍
• Charles Tichenor (Twitter)‍
• Charles Tichenor (Instagram)  ‍
• Disrupter School (Website) ‍
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)
  ‍

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are talking with Charles Tichenor from disruptor school.com and we're talking about Facebook ads and social and AI and all kinds of crazy fun stuff to help you grow your business. And quick background, I met Charles first at Geek out c Diego. I was speaking there, shout out to Nick Shackleford, met Charles there. I was like, whoa, who is this crazy, crazy smart guy. And so we met there and then Blue Ribbon, also San Diego, separate events over time. We met there because you were speaking with my buddy Jeremiah Allen, and so we really connected and hung out there, I think over the cigar party potentially. But anyway, Charles and I were chatting. We're like, dang, this is a podcast episode. Let's do it. So here you are. So Charles, what's up man? And I want you to shed light on a couple things and I got a couple of intro questions for you, but all right, let's listed as Top 100 Advertiser on Facebook. Yes. You've generated a billion dollars in revenue from Facebook ads. These are some crazy, crazy statistics. What do you attribute that to? How have you become this monster maybe that some people don't know about on Face with Facebook ads?

Charles:

I think it really comes down to three things. First off is luck and timing in that I basically was spending seven figures a day before there was a Facebook pixel. So the fact that I was supervisor at Omnicom for the Resolution Media, the performance marketing division overseeing Nissan and CBS and Henkel working with Act Division and Levi's and Apple back in like 20 13, 20 14, just right place, right time. So that's always a key place of things. There's nothing you can totally beat that. Totally. I think a second thing was that I did get a very strong background in data science and analysis. So I have an MBA from a Harvard Business Review, and what that really helped me do was when I was spending that money, I was always doing case studies. I was always doing very aggressive testing. And what that meant was, back at the time there was one rep at Facebook for everybody west of the Mississippi River, and nobody wanted to talk to me because Facebook was this ugly redhead stepchild of a thing that everybody in the room was all about Yahoo,

Brett:

Nobody understood it.

Charles:

So me and this guy became best friends and anytime there was a new tool or they were building up a new team or new ad type I had a seven figure budget to test it. One of the first big wins we had was I launched the first lead gen ads on Facebook. So not only did I have huge budgets, but I also had master's degree education on conducting case studies and data analysis for marketing. So I kind of became that Chuck Yeager of Facebook ads, one of, not the only one, but a few of them just kind of test piloting a million things. So by the time other people got to see stuff, Facebook was funding me at 10,000, $50,000 a day sometimes on new tools. And that still happens to this day which has given me tremendous insight in how the platform was developed, the tools, how they're being designed, the product teams behind marketing and messenger and measurement, how they all were actually working together.

And I've seen those teams evolve over years. And I think the last thing is that I had the luxury of not learning how to run Facebook ads from somebody that was good at email or search or programmatic. I kind of came in fresh, which meant that I have a huge advantage over most people or I did. And I try to teach that advantage because I look at Facebook not as a version of Google display or of email, and I don't value the same metrics in the same way that most other people do. And I've always looked at it through the lens of business results and that has made me a really bad agency employee. But ultimately when I got to the side of vendor and made me one of the best, I'm on my fourth eight figure business to a nine figure exit in the last five years that started as a low end seven figure business. Dude,

Brett:

That's not bad.

Charles:

It's not luck eventually it's a process.

Brett:

Do that once and that's cool. Yeah, yeah, for almost on your fourth, that's fantastic. But it's such an interesting point though. We all and just realizing we all come to whatever we're working on with a paradigm. So you came to Facebook ads, but really not with the paradigm of Google or TV ads or something like that. If I were to approach and try to dig into Facebook, I would totally look at it from the lens of Google ads on YouTube because that's what I know. That fresh perspective is useful. And I think, like you said, you can kind of unlearn that a little bit and force yourself to have a fresh perspective, which is pretty cool. So amazing ways to learn seven figure a day budgets and Facebook linear via an alpha tester beta test or things like that. That's awesome. So fast forward to today. Quick shout out to Triple Whale and RAA Mutual friend of ours, you were just nominated for a Whaley, which is brand new, that's Triple Whales award they give out in the d c industry. Sadly, you did not win, but it's still a happy story. So talk, what were you nominated for and how did you finish in the final rankings there?

Charles:

So they had a lot of awards best, most innovative brands and communities and all of that. I was nominated for the last award which was Best Operator which was tremendous. I mean, it was an amazing award to be recognized like that. And sadly I didn't win, but Renee from Marine Laer did win and top. If I'm going to lose to somebody, I'll lose to that woman that is doing 200 million plus retail locations. Hey, look, it's Triple Whale. She's the bigger whale than me. I'll come for her next

Brett:

Year.

Charles:

And

Brett:

Phenomenal brand 12

Charles:

Months, just a closer. So it was an honor, and if you have to lose losing to the best feels really good. Yeah,

Brett:

I hear you man. We'll, kudos to you to become runner up for the inaugural whales as best operator. It's like their best picture if we're going to compare this to the Oscars. So well done. And tip the hat to Marine layer for sure. Awesome, man. Well let's dive in. So we're going to talk Facebook and TikTok and social and AI and a lot of fun stuff, but what are some of the changes that have happened with Facebook ads over the last six, eight months that maybe some people aren't aware of yet?

Charles:

I think the biggest change that we're seeing is the unfair advantage that Facebook is giving to Advantage Plus campaigns right now, which is a certain style of running an ad, it's a certain campaign type that that's an option. I was doing some of the tests about a year ago where they were giving us about 10,000 a day to test it, and it's a slight change in the way that Facebook is using their data to target the right people to get results. Historically, once Facebook introduced the conversion pixel, which again I remember when that was, was a greater, that was more traumatic to the industry than iOS 14 ever was which was just wild. Like iOS 14 was a roadblock, a speed bump, what I mean in comparison to the end of

Brett:

Days. But the conversion, well that was traumatic and mostly in a good way for Facebook advertisers. It was traumatic, maybe the rest of the industry.

Charles:

And no I saw so many agencies refuse to adopt the conversion objectives. They really dove into P P C and Facebook, to be fair, was designed to compete with Google Display. And when they refused to adopt machine learning, there were folks that bought into it that were really successful. All the brands that got really big in 20 16, 20 17, 20 18, because Facebook ads are really easy adopted it. There are other agencies that fought it that lost floors in their Manhattan office. It was a massive either you were on one side of that divide or the other. And to bring it back to Advantage plus, we're seeing a very interesting piece come in where Facebook is underpricing the attention specifically to invest in a change in consumer behavior. They've done this previously with dynamic product ads, carousel ads. Before that there was no carousel, and those are the ads where you swiped through left and you just see all the products.

There was nothing like that beforehand. And what Facebook did was they gave a discount on how much it cost to reach people, specifically making the investment to change consumer behavior. To be fair, they also did with Canvas ads, which failed miserably. And Hey, look, I made a lot of mistakes with Canvas ads. I completely bet on it, and failed miserably and Call of Duty was still the number one game that year. So kind of shows you how that works. And we're also seeing them make the investment in shops, but a lot of people running Facebook ads have noticed that there's like a 20% off on the shop side, and that's Facebook making an investment to take some of their profit to change consumer

Brett:

Percent off on your CPMs. So you're running an ad to

Charles:

No 20% off like the purchase, it was 20% off the purchase price, people getting massive discounts up to like $20 off buying something. But Facebook was just refunding the user. It wasn't actually coming out of the advertiser's bottom line.

Brett:

Oh,

Charles:

Interesting. And that was to get people used to using shops and the really invested in changing consumer behavior. So with Advertiser with Advantage Plus, they're investing heavily in getting the advertisers to change the way that they're using the platform in a slightly different style. And best practice for years now has been broad targeting, dynamic creative, define your best ads and letting that run at lowest cost Auto placement, which is now maximized conversions or whatnot or I remember it was they keep changing the name for the same stuff but what we're getting with Advantage Plus is they are giving advertisers better results merely because they're using that tool because Advantage Plus does three things really well and different than other platforms. Number one, normally the way

Brett:

A phrase explain what Advantage Plus is to those that don't know. And maybe you'll wrap up into these three things, but yeah,

Charles:

Yeah, absolutely. So Advantage Plus is a type, it's an option when you're running a conversion campaign to tap into the Advantage Plus style way of running the algorithm. And what it does differently than a normal conversion campaign is three things. Typically Facebook spends money on ads because the end user has a good experience with that ad. And then our job is to make sure that the ads that get spend also drive good business results. An advantage plus, it's not only saying the end user, but also that person is directly in market to make a purchasing decision, which is a slight nuanced change, but it's more or less even at prospecting, we're still kind of retargeting people that might very well be in another company's funnel where at Broad, for instance, I used to run New Balance and we did initial testing around advanced matching, and we found that up to two thirds of our budget was spent on people that had clicked on our competitor's ads and been to their site in the last week.

Advantage Plus is basically cranking that up. It's a way more aggressive version of that. Second thing is that it's not allowing for dynamic creative, so you have to put in your best ads and third, only good ads are getting spent. So you can put in really bad ads and push the budget to the moon and you might not get any delivery at all, which is very similar to big caps and cost cap. So Advantage Plus is basically forcing advertisers to only put out the best ads and to prioritize or isolate those best ads and spend the most amount of money on them so that they get the best results. And really what Facebook is doing is they're putting their thumb on the scale of the market economy so that advertisers are encouraged to make the best form of content so that Facebook users have the best experience. And that is a tremendous change, and we don't know how long that'll go on for. Eventually those costs will come up, but the folks that are taking advantage of it are seeing astronomically just tremendous performance above the baseline. And to give it a small example, I was testing it at 10,000 a day, maybe six months ago, a year ago. I'm now at 35, 40,000 a day on an ad account where I'm spending 80 to a hundred thousand a day. And that's a huge piece, and be fair,

Brett:

It's 30 to 40% of your pool spend is going to,

Charles:

And we have to understand that part of the way it's doing that is predicting what people are going to do. So it can't be the majority of your traffic because if all of your people are taking predictions, eventually you run out of data to make good decisions with, and that's a whole other thing for another day, but it's

Brett:

Doing very interesting. So let's dive into creatives just for a minute. I do. I want to kind of underscore something because this is interesting, something I didn't know about Advantage Plus, but so Facebook is rewarding you for just running the best creatives, and in fact, they'll only show the best creatives or good creatives in some ways. That's kind of what Google did early on with their quality score. They were incentivizing you to create a good ad. So they look at click through rate, they look at keyword relevance, look at your landing page, and they'll actually lower the cost for you. They'll make it more attractive for you as an advertiser if you create a great ad. So cost will always go up, right? That's going to happen, but probably going to be some elements of that stick around for Facebook, which is interesting. Yeah, and

Charles:

Cool.

Brett:

So let's talk creative. Yeah, go ahead.

Charles:

Oh, I was going to say, and that's how Facebook's always work. This is just a far more aggressive nature than what we've used to seeing sort of how TikTok is the most aggressive content suggestion engine ever. It's sort of like the YouTube suggested video, but on steroids with a nuclear bomb attached to it, sort of the same thing.

Brett:

Got it. Nice. That's awesome. So let's talk creatives. So what creatives are working right now and or what are some of the creative mistakes that you see brands making right now?

Charles:

Yeah, I mean I think probably the biggest mistake, let's start there. Let's tear it down and then build it up. I think the biggest mistake people are making and brands are making is they think that there's a best kind of creative, and so they're constantly chasing whatever that screenshot they saw. What I can tell you this, I'm working with a brand in the clothing business, apparel and accessories. They'll do over 150 million this year and they run only square static images. I also personally am partner in a clothing business and we spend 75 80% of our money on videos that were kind of designed for reels. Some of it is U G C, some of it's highly produced, some of it isn't. The point there is what does work is what you do well and how people are used to hearing from you. Almost every brand that has an identity, I'm been sipping on this liquid death. So Liquid Death is great around branding,

Brett:

Unbelievable.

Charles:

If Liquid

Brett:

Death, you dunno the Liquid Death story, you got to pay attention. Yeah.

Charles:

Now if Liquid Death, what they've done is they basically took the Warp Tour, Oz Fest, all of that type of vibe, and they turned it into a water business, which is great. Now, if they came out with an ad that felt like a Gap commercial because everybody else was winning with it, that ad wouldn't do well. Now it might work for everybody else, maybe that works for Dasani and it works for all the other brands on the shelf next to them, but it wouldn't work for them. And what's most important is figuring out how you can communicate with Inspire trust in a relationship with your target customer base, and then ultimately continue to hammer that home and think of all the different types of ads that you've seen on television, all the different commercials over the world. And we still have the Geico, we still have flow totally from Progressive. We still have the m and ms, we still have the polar bears at Christmas for Coca-Cola. Know what you do well and leverage that as much as possible. That's the greatest hat to create it. The worst thing you can do is try to respond to other people are

Brett:

Doing. Okay. One second, Charles, I think I lost video and I just want to make sure. Are you seeing your video?

Charles:

Yeah.

Brett:

Oh, there you are. You saw your video that whole time? Yep.

Charles:

Okay, I see uploading It's like 97. 99. 99.

Brett:

Okay. Okay, cool. For whatever reason, your screen, your portion went black for a minute, but it should be recording on your end and uploading, so we'll probably be fine. Okay. So you just finished with, I think when I interrupted, you just talked about Coca-Cola at around the holidays and stuff like that, so that's the greatest advantage. Yeah, but I love this what you do well and how people are used to seeing you, what generates trust, and then go all in on that. But yeah, what are your other thought?

Charles:

Yeah,

The most important thing to do in creative is figure out what is your unique positioning in the marketplace? How do you define your own little piece of the pie? And then how do you make that pie bigger? That's really the trick. I will tell you this. If your strategy is to chase what's working, you are only going to ever be a lesser version of 80% of the market. If you want to be elite, figure out your identity and stick with it. If you change your clothes and the way you talked every single day and went out into the world, you have no friend <laugh>. Like it's the same thing.

What you're looking to do more than anything in any business is ultimately have relationships with people and direct, especially in direct consumer and e-commerce, what we're trying to do is acquire profitable customer journeys with multiple sales in a long-term relationship for great L T V. That happens because of identity and because of trust. So figure out what you do and then continue to do it. What you do well matters. And so figure out what you do well and continue to do that versus chasing all the other things from everybody else because you're only going to ever do a worse than the person you're trying to copy.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. You'll only be, if you're just chasing what works, you'll always be a second run type of deal. And I make a lot of sports analogies, but to compare this to sports, I coach basketball and so if someone said, Hey, what's the best basketball move? Well, I don't know. What are you good at? What fits you? Are you a post player? You guard, you got speed, you got size, you got jumping ability, you great outside shooter. That's what matters. And then do what you're really good at. And that totally makes sense when it comes to career. Well, okay. Steph

Charles:

Curry versus Michael. Yeah, if you did Steph Curry versus Michael Jordan. Well, the completely different player, LeBron James just scored the most points, but he's also shooting 50% more free three pointers than Kareem Abdul. I think Kariba Abdul-Jabbar has three attempts behind the three point line.

Brett:

Well most have to check the dates most of all of his career that the three point line didn't exist, so he could couldn't even do it. So yeah, different eras, different everything, but super interesting. So get understand what you're good at and then key on that. Any advice? So if someone's kind of stuck in that rut of I'm just chasing what's working, I'm hearing this new ad type or this type of U G C or this, and I'm just lurching how does someone understand what are they good at, and then so they can double down on that?

Charles:

Yeah, I think it's always good to test stuff. It's always good to be uncomfortable and to lose. And you should always have part of your efficiency as a business baked into loss. If I'm breaking even, I'm probably losing money because it means that I can't test, I can't get better. So I try to bake in the idea of a five or 10% loss as normal operating procedure. And hey, look, if you have a retail location that would be returns and theft and all of that stuff, that's just baked into business. What I think people need to do starting off with, is everybody has an identity on how they communicate. Some people are great copywriter, lean on it, some people look great on camera, lean on it. Some people are great graphic designers. How do you get attention? I think there is far too much focus on figuring out how to build the best ad for your business and not nearly enough attention and time and effort put into how does this business already make money? Why don't we just do more of that? And sometimes the easiest ways to turn a struggling seven figure business into something on a nine figure run rate is to get rid of every effort that isn't honest and true to who the business is. If you have a beautiful product, just show me a picture of the product I brought TX to market, and if you just took a picture of it, the most beautiful pictures in the world will never sell it. We had to do a video.

Brett:

Is this, sir, what is tx?

Charles:

The workout equipment from the gym, the yellow bands. So I brought that to market. A picture wouldn't do it. We had to show a

Brett:

Picture of a paint rubber band. What do you do with that? Yeah, yeah.

Charles:

There was no concept. So the best way to get somebody's attention, and this even when you're trying as a business owner trying to sell the product and get people interested, what are you doing in person? How are you communicating? You can't just say, Hey, look, here's some military grade rope. Great. Am I supposed to buy that? What am I supposed to do? Instead, you can show somebody what's going on and all of a sudden it clicks. Being able to figure out how you can earn somebody's attention and then monetize. It has very little to do with the kind of ad that you run. The ads that you run are an appropriation of that knowledge, but if your business isn't successful enough to have cash flow before you run ads, the ads are never going to make you successful. And I think that's one of the biggest pain points people have is they think the only thing missing is good ads.

They think, I've got a great business, all I need to do is get on Shark Tank and have somebody give me money. That's not the way that it works. You have to have something that works so you can pour fuel on that fire. Facebook ads is just fuel on the fire. It amplifies your existing business model. So the easiest thing for a business to do if you want to learn how to make the best ads, is look to how you already make money. What do you do well, and then appropriate that for some paid version of attention. Otherwise, you're going to waste weeks, months, or years of your life just being dishonest with yourself and with your customers and failing.

Brett:

And people feel that right when you're not totally honest or you're not true to who the brand is or who your product is. People feel that it comes out in some way in the A. Yeah, and it just kills the believability and the effectiveness. And I love how you broke that down. It's very simple, but very powerful is how do you best get attention? How do you best get attention for your product? And then how do you best demonstrate it and allow that story to come to life? And if I'm selling artwork, maybe just a picture of that is all I need, or it's a really unique piece of clothing, maybe just the picture of it is all I need. But if it's workout bands a picture of, that's not interesting, compelling at all. So showing the workout and showing the results and showing all of that super interesting.

And so really comes down to identity and who are you and how do you get their, and who are you are your customers? How do you get their attention? And how do you show why your product is awesome? Anybody? And I know this is a bit of a dangerous follow up because you just said, Hey, don't just chase the best because then you're going to be a second rate version of that. But I do think there's, so there's value in getting inspiration. There's not value in copycatting but anybody you would recommend that we pay attention to that just does this exceedingly well where we should try to be remarketed by them or check out their Facebook ad library or something like that. Anybody that's done doing this really, really well.

Charles:

Yeah, I am. And I get this question all the time. And what I would say is this, find the people in your business that your competitors that are better than you everybody has 'em. Go be a customer. See how they treat you. Go to their website, add things to cart, shop around, take an idea of what their store feels like. If you were to start a grocery store today from scratch, you're going to build off of every time you walked into a grocery store, the Publix or the bonds or the Piggly Wiggly that you're used to going to, right? There's a format, there's a style. So there's an old saying that I love, you're only as good as who you steal from. And the idea of that is you have an identity, but you need an in order to really evolve that. All of the identities that we have is appropriations of inspirations that we've had. So my best advice, and I'm actually not a huge fan of Ad Library, I think it's a wildly overvalued resource because it doesn't give you context. If

Brett:

This was a good ad, a bad ad, or somewhere in between, you just see that it's an ad. That's all you can tell, right?

Charles:

Yeah. If you want context, go be a customer of your competitor. If you were to spend, I was doing this when I was building three 10 nutrition years ago. I literally went to all of our competitors and I bought their products, I joined their communities, and I got to understand the words that people use, the messaging that came across the content types. My Facebook feed was full of ads, my emails were full of ads. I had gone through the experience of the person that I'm trying to reach and understood what they're doing so that I could then go be with them in that stream and just give them an alternative. Coming in, just assuming that you deserve any attention from anyone is well, it's a losing battle. And so my best advice is go out there, experience the world like your consumers, and if something inspires you, you're like, wow, they're just doing better. Go try it. And what I found is when you're inspired by somebody, you'll appropriate what they're doing in a way that feels more like you than hiring whoever they hired to do that job for you. The Harmon Brothers got a million people wanting to work for 'em because of the pooping unicorn at, right?

Brett:

Right. Yeah. They've only worked for Squatty Potty

Charles:

For Squatty Body, right? Yes, they're great, but you can't use that ad format for jeans. Just doesn't work,

Brett:

Right?

Charles:

So that's my number one piece of advice is if you want go out, be your customer, be your own customer in the world, and see what inspires you, and then just appropriate everything possible and have an allowance for failure. And that's where I get some of the best things ever is somebody built a better mouse trap, I'm going to build it my way. And some of those ads will last forever. I've got ads that were like that where, and in my women's clothing business, I literally just got ads from Victoria's Secret that I was like, this is amazing. I built a version of that ad and it spent nearly 2 million in the last year.

Brett:

Wow. Wow.

Charles:

Great. I'm not reinventing the wheel, wasting all the money. Make one more analogy and we can move on. Cause I know you love analogies, and this is one of my favorite, McDonald's is the only fast food restaurant that researches locations, burger King and and everybody else puts them selves across the street from McDonald.

Brett:

Ha

Charles:

Just be Burger King. Ridiculously successful,

Brett:

Right? And Walmart, or, I mean, McDonald's has got the cash and they've got the method and they're more of a real estate business than anything else. A lot of people don't know that if you watch the movie The Founder, that their McDonald's is more about real estate than anything else. So makes sense that Burger King and the others just, yeah, go where McDonald's is. Yeah, I love it. Awesome. So yeah, let's such good stuff. We could drill into any of that and have a blast, but let's transition a little bit. So let's talk Facebook or let's talk TikTok. So what are some of your thoughts on the short term near term for TikTok, both organic and on the ad side?

Charles:

I love that. I think it's a really interesting place. What I can say with TikTok and with Facebook, YouTube, any optimized CPM platform, I want to set this table here real quick. And remember that ads are nothing other than organic content that you pay for people to see and they run on the same algorithm. So if something does well organically at earning attention, it will almost assuredly do well as paid media, it earning attention. Now, whether or not that attention that you earn is monetizable is something completely different. But with that being said, TikTok is the most aggressive content suggestion engine we've ever seen. And if

Brett:

You use TikTok and what does that mean? It's the most aggressive content suggestion engine.

Charles:

Yeah. So if you were to use TikTok for an hour or two and just swipe on things that you don't like and the things that you do, you're going to only have a feed full of things that you enjoy and you can program tos. I've done it once where I was working with a business and what we did was we made a dummy TikTok account and we only went through all of their competitor and liked and watched all the videos, all their competitors. Now whenever they open up TikTok, it's merely just an inspiration machine. And so the point of that is it's extraordinarily personalized. It knows what you're watching and wants to show you more content like that with a million different data points that they're looking at. And I think that that is something that no other platform can do because it's not really in the nature of that platform to do it.

YouTube rabbit holes we all know about that works on a slightly different thing. YouTube Rabbit Holes is more about the topic of the conversation than maybe the style of the delivery, the keywords and all of that stuff, which is great. And then in Facebook they show you content based on what you like to see based on all the websites you've been to and all the places that you've been and where you spent money that time of year or what you're in the market for. Chat, TikTok is very much about, this is what gets somebody to spend five seconds of their eyeball here. We're going to give you that as much as possible. And with that in mind, I don't think any other platform will be fundamentally able to make TikTok obsolete because it would be out of their core user experience to do so. I think that probably the closest we will get is Instagram reels or maybe even Facebook reels that are inside the app because those don't have an identity as much yet other than trying to be TikTok. When it comes to TikTok ads I think that if you hit on creative that does well, you can do exceptionally well with it. There is a huge issue with TikTok or a difference between TikTok and Facebook. There are two huge differences. Number one, a good Facebook ad can run for years. Anybody that says insists that ad fatigue is real misinformation. I've had ads that have run for 2, 3 40 years that I've ads that I've built four, five years ago that every now and again I still see in my feet

That stuff happened. The longevity of a Facebook ad is basically forever. And same with YouTube,

Brett:

TikTok, same with YouTube, same, we've got YouTube ads we've run for years and spent millions of dollars on the same ad and just keeps cranking.

Charles:

My buddy Sean Cannell from Think Media, he's got an affiliate video of Father's Day gifts. And every year, every year in June he makes, he gets an extra couple million views and a big check. It just happens. Like Clark, he made that thing in like 2013 or something like that. It just happens. It's Evergreen,

Brett:

<laugh>,

Charles:

TikTok though, maybe two weeks. That's all the ever long, that's all however long it'll work because TikTok is also part of that suggestion engine is also new. The aspect of new as a value point is extremely high. Now, you could maybe run something again in a couple months and it'll work rate, but it means that the churn rate of content is massive and that churn rate has far more to do with time than with money could. That ad might last for two weeks. If you're spending 50 bucks a day, it might allow us for two weeks if you're spending 20,000 a day. So there's a big issue there. And being able to consistently deliver that quality of content that's monetizable. And the other side of TikTok ads is it'll never be as smart as Facebook, Google or Facebook or Google. And it has far more to do with the fact that Facebook and Google have a leg up of over a decade of communication and location and transactional data. So I think there are places where businesses can leverage TikTok is their unfair advantage in the marketplace to scale. I think ultimately though there are few scenarios where TikTok is an evergreen isolated growth and acquisition channel at scale, it just won't work because yeah,

Brett:

Totally makes sense.

Charles:

Other places are better at acquiring cash flow in a more stable fashion. So it's just too hyperbolic and honestly just not smart enough and it can never catch up because as fast as it gets better, everything else is getting better faster.

Brett:

Right. Totally makes sense. Love it. We could drill into that too, but we were, we're running out of time, so I want to transition and talk AI for just a minute. So how are you using chat, G P T or other AI to help give you superpowers or give you an edge or help make your marketing better?

Charles:

Yeah, I love it. I mean, chat, G P t's the latest version of the ai. And to be fair, I've been using Facebook's version of that for years. It's called Dynamic Creative. And I don't actually don't spend a single penny on Facebook without having ads tested and proven and created through Dynamic Creative, which is Facebook's version of chat G P T. And so that's a superpower in that I literally will only ever test in that environment. I never having a single account with a single penny spent on anything that's not developed that way. And for Facebook, I use something called the 3 22 Method, which is three creatives, two headlines, two sets of copy, and we can dive into that forever. But the point of is that's giving the AI the best opportunity to create the best user experience so that ultimately I'm buying the lowest priced attention for the highest quality user in targeting the individuals in the most sustainable way to attract the most consistent type of attention.

And from then, it's my business model that monetizes it. Using tools like Chachi PT to handle the copy side of things, I think is something a lot of people are using. As a very light end, I, I'm using Chachi PT to develop YouTube titles and email headlines to see what gets good open rates and checking against IQ keyword scores. And to be fair, those are also really, really great for my Facebook ad. If this a gets lot of clicks on YouTube and a great email open rate, well you better believe when I've dropped that on a Facebook ad, it's going to crush. Absolutely. I think it's also really important to use chat G P t though as a way of understanding how consumers behave. So you can put in there like give 50 reasons why somebody has this pain point and use that to understand concepts in market research.

My friend Sarah Levenger has a great way that she's using chat GP to effectively extract psychological data points on users and using that as a tool, something like that. Yeah. So what she's doing is she's taking in, for instance, say all the comments from Facebook, from an Instagram, say an Instagram post went viral and it's got 30,000 comments. We can grab all of those comments and all of those words that are being used and throw it into chat G P T. One of the things that I love to do is say, Hey, tell me the 10 most important things in this 5,000 word article or something like that 5,000 character piece. And it'll break it down for you. And if you want to do that in even a more really actionable way is say you've got a 30 minute YouTube video, get yourself a transcription of it, drop into chat G P T and tell me what are the 10 most important things mentioned here.

And then you can literally tell it to tell me more about line item three, four, and five, and then boom, you got a 5,000 word description and mini ebook done like that. And it takes no time at all. The point is you can use all of these things to understand what's going on. What I will say is, what it does that I'm very bullish on and I'm a huge fan of is that it can do the collation of data and the sorting of data at scale in a way that tremendously saves you time. Ultimately, you're still going to have to qualify and use insight to appropriately take what it's giving you and take action on it. Yeah, people know when they're reading something written by ai, I wouldn't use it as a co, I don't think it's going to the best for seo on like I'm just building up, blasting out blog pages.

But it can give you a great insight to be a way to inspire your thought process and to also take huge sums of data and make it very simple to read. And I think that's, at least in the way that I'm using it right now, some of the most powerful things. And Sarah Wenger if you don't know her, you should absolutely check her out. She's, she's a stud. She's the best at consumer psychology, and that's one of the things that she's doing a lot of, and I was really inspired by her with that. But just the idea of using AI to take insight from the written word is tremendous and also inspire different ways of thinking and a way that gets you out of your own head. I think those are some of the most important things. Yeah, I love it so much. You can use it, Laura.

Brett:

And I think it really comes down to a lot of what you described comes down to two things, asking the AI better questions. You only get good results if you ask good questions and if you give it good data, like, Hey, look at all these comments. Tell me the top 10 takeaways. But then being able to quantify and qualify and say, yeah, but it's really these things, right? Or This doesn't really make sense, but this does. Yeah. So yeah, I love it, man. I'm super excited. We're using it as a team and really just playing around with it. I think that's a key too. Just play around with it and see what you'll learn and new ideas will be sparked as you go. So let's do this. Charles, I know we got a hard stop in just a couple minutes. I know you're very active on TikTok. You're a great follow on TikTok. Good follow on Twitter, LinkedIn. Where can people connect with you and then out on the socials, and then talk about how they connect with you at Disruptor School?

Charles:

Yeah, so I'm at ct, the disruptor on all socials and at disruptor school on all socials. And you can go to the disruptor school.com to check it out. If you are on a social media account, well, you're not seeing me, let me know and I'll make sure to add it into the flywheel. But I'm literally everywhere, all day, all the time which is sort of my unfair advantage. I love making content and talking to people. I think my wife would wish that I put my phone away a little bit more, but hey, look, that's my life. These are the problems that I have. And

Brett:

Then, dude, you're very good content.

Charles:

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, keep going.

Brett:

Well, I was going to say, yeah, I think there's a bit of a delay as we're recording this. We'll get that cleaned up in the edit, but I've, TikTok being aggressive, you're grateful on TikTok. I'm not an avid TikTok user, so I'll just put that disclaimer out there. But I have been trying to use a little bit more lately. And for whatever reason, TikTok thinks that I love, Tiser because I see you all of the time on TikTok, which is actually great.

Charles:

Well, thank you so much, man. It's nice to know where those 200 views are coming from. It's just breadth all day

Brett:

Long. Tell me it's You're welcome, huh?

Charles:

I love it. I'll take <laugh>.

Brett:

That's awesome, man. So I'll link to everything. I'll link to your socials, we'll link to the Disruptor school, so definitely check it out. And Charles Tichenor, ladies and gentlemen, man, you crushed it. Thank you so much. I can't wait to schedule another one because there was so many things that we didn't dive into. Oh, yeah. Need to. So round two is coming, buddy.

Charles:

I would love it. And anybody watching this and listening an, anybody listening to this, if you have questions on any of this stuff, right back to Brett. And maybe we can just do another, maybe a mail bag, show something, dive in deep. We went an inch deep, a mile wide today. Let's go a mile deep and just make it really fun.

Brett:

Do a little, ask me anything. Yeah, fire those questions away. Send them my way. And then we can get Charles back in for round two. Charles. Thanks, buddy. I know you got a split, but really appreciate the time. It's a ton of fun, man.

Charles:

All right. Thank you very much, man. I appreciate it.

Brett:

And as always, thank you for tuning in. Let us know what you like to hear more of or less of on the show. And yes, if you got questions for Charles firing my way or connect with him on the socials. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

This episode of the eCommerce Evolution podcast is truly unique.

It's not uncommon for us to talk about branding, storytelling, and entrepreneurship. But in this episode, we also discuss faith, family tragedy, chasing your dreams, and nerd out a bit on basketball legends like Michael Jordan and Steph Curry.

Ashton Owens is living many kids’ dreams…but more importantly, he’s living his own. He works directly with Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and other pro athletes. He runs Triple Threat - a creative agency specializing in branding and storytelling for pro athletes.

Ashton and I have a lot in common. We go to church together (how we met), share an affinity for professional basketball, lost a parent when we were teens, and experienced some fun and wild entrepreneurial journeys.

Here’s what we cover:

• How growing up in an entrepreneurial family and losing his father as a teenager shaped Ashton’s faith and professional accomplishments.
• How inviting Michael Jordan to his birthday party as a child influenced Ashton’s belief that the world is full of possibilities.
• The crazy story of Ashton’s first meeting with Steph Curry and Under Armor.
• The meaning behind the Steph Curry logo and how it relates to storytelling.
• Ashton's belief that most people count themselves out before they start and how to shift their thinking.
• Plus more!

‍

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Ashton Owens (LinkedIn) 
• Triple Threat (Website) 
• Empire Printing (Website) ‍
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

‍

Transcript:

‍
Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG commerce. And today I am, I've been so looking forward to this episode. I hope you geek out and nerd out and get as excited as I am as you listen to this. But we're going to dive into branding and storytelling, but from a unique perspective we're talking with a buddy of mine, Ashton Owens. He's the founder of Triple Threat and they are a creative agency. They help with storytelling and branding and they work directly with professional athletes, the likes of Steph Curry and Clay Thompson and others. And so lots of good things, fun things to dive into both from a brand and storytelling perspective, but also just from an entrepreneurial perspective and a going after big things perspective and it chasing your dreams.

If we can go there on this podcast, we're going to get into that just a little bit. And I want to, before we kind dive in, Ashton, I want to kind of talk about how we met. So Ash, Ashley, I go to church together. Did not know that, right? I probably saw you in passing. Yeah, your sharp dresser always got the black hat on as you have in this if you're watching this video, you can see it. And so our pastor was like, he said, Hey, you got to meet this guy that I know that goes here, Ashton. I'm like, okay, I'll meet Ashton. And I don't know, we live in Springfield, Missouri, which is southwest Missouri, smaller community. It is the home of Missouri State University, home of Bass Pro there. There's some claims to fame in Springfield, but it's not a big place.

So I meet with Ashton and I find out this guy's like he's working with Steph Curry, he's designing logos, he's working with Under Armor, he, he's working with Clay Thompson, like iconic. My last name is Curry. I don't know for sure, but I think if you saw my jump shot, you might be like, I think he's related to Steph. Actually. I can't make it through to save of my life. But anyways, this awesome connection immediately hit it off. So with that brief intro, Ashton, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on and how's it going?

Ashton:

Yeah, man, well, I appreciate you having me on. It's an honor and excited to dive in. And yeah, I mean, love meeting other creatives. Been a pleasure to see other incredibly gifted, really, really dominant in their field, be here in southwest Missouri, which is amazing. There's really no limit to where you know live if you know how to network, how to build, how to scale. And so seeing you in a place like Springfield when most people don't even know it's a flyover city. So <laugh>,

Brett:

Totally a flyover. Yeah, that's awesome, man. It is funny, we, a lot of clients have a lot of clients in LA and on the east coast as well. And there, I just went through this string of several meetings where I'd be talking to someone and they're like, Hey, where? Where's OMG based? Because OMGs pretty well known. We work some pretty big clients and we do a lot of cool stuff and just had this string of people being like, Hey, where are you guys based again, I'll stay in Missouri. And they're like, Missouri, never been there. In fact, I don't know anyone from Missouri, but it does go to show, again, especially in a post covid world, does not matter where you are if you do really great work just doesn't matter. So

Ashton:

Most of my clients refer to it as Ozark with the Netflix show. And so they're like, oh, is that where that one show? And my goodness, of all the things to represent us, I don't know if that's the one I want to lean on, but

Brett:

I don't think that's, that's probably not the claim to fame. We want Lake Ozarks is a real place. Yeah, it's a real place. That show was not filmed here, it was filmed actually in Georgia, which a lot of people don't know, and I don't think they got the accent right. There's a unique Ozark, Missouri accent, they didn't nail it, but the show very popular. So kudos to Jason Bateman and the crew there. So we're going to dive in. We're talking about a lot of things, branding, storytelling, chasing your dreams, really cool stuff. There's going to be a fair warrant. There's going to be a fair amount of basketball talk in this podcast. I've mentioned on this show before, I coach basketball, I love basketball. So we will definitely tie it to business, but just you've been warned. We're going to talk hoops just a little bit. So first of all what is triple threat? So talk about your creative agency and how in the world did you start working with Steph Curry, clay Thompson, and other famous athletes?

Ashton:

Yeah, so Triple Threat is a creative agency really with a focus on working directly with athletes. So there's a lot of great agencies out there that they have their niche markets or their opportunity to scale in different industries. And for me and my interest in my background, I really loved sports and grew up obviously with Michael Jordan and the Bulls, as you can see behind me if you're watching. And so my childhood was just riddled with that type of interest in sneakers and that type of life. And so for me, I wanted to work with those people. But being in Springfield, Missouri, as we were just talking about it's kind of tough to break into that. There's no local team, Chicago, Memphis, the Thunder, there's

Brett:

No pro sports team in Spring. There's no

Ashton:

Pro sports. No, no, not at all. And then you have football and baseball obviously with the Cardinals and the Chiefs and so on and so forth. So for me to really break out, my wife and I, we got married young and we moved to Oklahoma City. And so we were there for about 10 years and really just started networking and being able to take this vision and this opportunity and obviously taking a lot of, in the beginning, free work doing stuff just to prove yourself at a young age just to get in the door something that's in your head and how do you break in when you don't have a resume? You didn't go to college for it, but you have this vision and something that you want to pursue. And so with teams coming through in a n b city, like Oklahoma Oklahoma City, we just had the opportunity to network and find a couple of the coaches on the Thunder that went to our church actually at Life Church.

And then they allowed us to meet and we had opportunity to rub shoulders with the one player. And then once you're kind of verified in the group of basketball players or in any industry get, if you have the right idea and the right ambition, you can really take it from there and start knocking on the right doors. So that's the journey of a vision from a childhood dream that's just kind of continued. And even though you have to do some of those not so fun projects or things that you're not as passionate about you if you focus and hey, why are you doing this? Start what's your passion? And just know that you'll get there one day. I think that that really is, that's the story for me and my journey.

Brett:

It's phenomenal and it is so true, and I think this is true. We OMG commerce, we play in the D toc, the direct to consumer e-commerce space. And even though it's a global space and coast to coast and in the US and stuff, it's a little small knit community. And once you do really good work for a couple of people or even just one you can be in in and then things can really snowball from there. And I love that you did that. So you met some guys at church that coached for the Thunder. You got in, you did some work, people loved it, and now you're kind of off to the races. So talk about what do you specifically do for Steph Curry? Because he, he's my favorite athlete right now for a lot of reasons. He's got the personality, he's got the last name obviously but he's just good.

I think if you look at who's changed, and actually we're recording this podcast just after LeBron James broke the scoring record broke the 38 year record, Kareem Abdul Jabbar's all time scoring record. So tip the hat to LeBron for sure. But I think if you look at who's changed the game the most over the history of the nba, Jordan is right up there. He's the one that made the sport go international and he just changed the game in a lot of ways. But Steph Curry changed the game in a major way too. They're now kids, Mike, 10 year old that plays bat they, they're jacking up threes. Why are they jacking up threes? Because Steph Curry changed the game. You got to shoot threes to be competitive anymore. So iconic athlete just one of the best of all time. But what's it like working with Steph and what do you, for Steph specifically? Yeah,

Ashton:

I mean funny enough, that statement of your kid and high schoolers thrown up these ridiculous three pointers. He had a tagline that they ran with for many years called Ruin the Game. And so a lot of people reference that in a negative way. Okay, you've ruined,

Yeah, they're one for 16 and they're shooting from half court. And it's like, come on man. No, for Steph it's been a privilege because like I said, part of that journey of knowing that I wanted to work in this industry and work with these type of players you know, just do the work and you get introduced to the right people. And so when I showed up on the scene to meet and start working with Under Armour and Steph at the time, it was close to four years ago and it started with an individual that I was working with who had the opportunity to become the president of this brand that they were building that is now referenced as Curry brand. At the time it was just an Under Armour. Under Armour had the deal with SC 30 as he called it. And it was just a typical shoe deal that he had his logo on it, he had signature shoes, but it was nothing more than that.

And so Steph wanted to, knowing the trajectory that he was on and the confidence that he had to change the game, he wanted to do what Jordan did, which is basically, Hey, I want to be my own guy. I want to be the Michael Jordan of my generation. And so I want to build a brand that far exceeds who I am and my time on the court. And so it really started with the vision for him. And so I got called in to walk alongside the brand and help figure out what's the name, what's the logo what does this look like, what's the story? And it really does come down to, I always tell people that Michael Jordan taught us to fly Michael Jordan, how he hung in the air, how he went after championships, his determination, he was ruthless. And so we loved him for his competitiveness.

Brett:

A killer man. He was the ultimate competitor.

Ashton:

Ultimate competitor. But what Steph has done is he has transcended through changing what does the game look like in today's generation and how do we push the limits? And even if you show up, he's changed the game where people are showing up 45 minutes before a game just to watch him warm up because his warmups are so iconic and ridiculous. And so how does he take that joy when you watch him? I find myself chuckling. He'll do something, I'm just like this ridiculous. How did you do that? But he decided to take that and he wanted to create a brand around it and tell that story of joy. And so the title that we came up with for that was Changed the Game for Good and that meant a lot of different things for him. Obviously his faith and his background in just his family his upbringing, but also changed the game for good, constantly pushing the limits and breaking records and finding his way in history as a positive influence to the game.

And so that really is what kind of began that journey and that story for him. And so I got introduced to them and started helping craft that in late 2018, early 2019. And then you move into this brand as it's evolved. And since then, now I work closely with his camp. Steph is involved, he's an entrepreneur just much like Michael Jordan. And so he has the opportunity to build and invest and create opportunities. And it's absolutely fascinating once you kind of peek behind the curtain. But he's involved, he has his foundation, eat, learn, play. He has his underrated tour, which is really based around the next generation of players where he's finding and helping develop high school students. And then at the end of it, he helps them get scholarships to go play and get recognized. He has under golf doing the same thing in golf, which is a sport that he loves unanimous media. There's a lot of different facets to Steph and what he's investing in, but it really takes that type of mentality and understanding of what it takes to build a brand and how to tell that story, not just with a pair of sneakers or clothing, but outside of that, how do you connect all of these dots and work together. And so he's absolutely fascinating from a business standpoint just as much as he is to watch on TV and see him do what he does every night.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so cool. A couple things I want to double click on and then take a look at one, this idea of building a brand. And I love the reference Jordan one because I'm a massive, huge Jordan fan. I know you've got a couple cool Jordan stories that we'll talk about in a minute. But if you look at this idea of brand and being an entrepreneur or an owner of something versus just being really, really good at something, if you look at Jordan's playing career, I think he was making something like 3 million a year as a player, which sounds like not much compared to today's money. Top athletes are making 30 to 50 a year, but at the time he was making 3 million a year or whatever and it was more as he got towards the very end of his career. But now as the Jordan brand is something like a 2 billion a year, 1 billion, whatever it is, it's massive.

And I think he makes something like a hundred million a year just on royalties on that and Will forever. So pretty crazy. The power of building a brand. I love what, I love how you guys tied that in and that tagline is perfect. Change the game for good. He did change the game, we talked about that. And for good, he brings joy to it and he's just trying to do good things like that fits him really, really well. How did you guys come about that tagline and the logo and some of those things? How did you bring that to life to really tell his story?

Ashton:

Yeah, I mean it takes a village. So I mean obviously you have a massive group within Under Armor who has worked with him and has built a team around him. They knew that they needed to obviously treat it as if it's its own organization. And so building a team and having presidents and creative directors within that team and then bring in outside help like myself, I've never worked directly as an Under Armour employee, but I was brought in, has stayed close to them throughout this process to continue to see that, how does that live on social media? How does that live on merchandise and stuff as it continues to grow. And so it takes a process of bringing the right people around and I don't know how many the hundreds of logos that was, we went through that process and being able to just be at that table.

There's a lot of times that you show up and you go, what am I doing here? This is an absolute insane opportunity, but it's also just a really cool opportunity because you have a seat at the table and if you're going to take your shot, take your shot. And seeing a lot of these great industry-wide people from their backgrounds, they've come from Nike or they've come from car companies, it it's really, it's amazing. And so the three thing that about the logos, it's called the Splash and the Splashes obviously representation of the Splash Brothers, which is him and Clay Thompson if you look at it looks like when you make a three pointer it has that element to it. It's S and C, so Steph Curry obviously. And then another piece is the halo on top, which is separated on purpose, obviously to give to the s and c, but also just to represent his background and faith and point to that.

So it, it's packed of a lot of meaning. There's a lot of stuff. It obviously was not just based around one person, it was a lot of iterations and a lot of fine tuning. But even the Curry logo, the name, if you look at how it's spelled the type, they created a custom type and the C is actually the arc of a three pointer. And so if you turn the C upside to the side, it's a three pointer. And so then the whole font was built custom based on that one letter which I thought was really, really did

Brett:

Not know that. That is amazing. And that totally makes sense. And now I see it. Now you said it, now

Ashton:

You see now you

Brett:

Can't unsee it.

Ashton:

Yeah, can't unsee. So even when we did the animation for the logo, when you look at it, it comes out of it, there's a lot of storytelling obviously within it, but you come out of the basketball goal and then you see the three pointer and the curry then spells out based on the court eye level.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so cool. So I want to hear a quick story. I want to have you tell a quick story about the basketball and the initial Under Armor meeting you were in. So I just asked you about this basketball earlier cause I saw it in a picture, the John Deere website, but it's a basketball, I dunno if you have it close, if not, we'll just describe it. But basically it's basketball that says never give up on it. Right on phone. I was like, where'd you get that basketball? That's awesome. So tell the story of that and then how that came up in your first meeting with Under Armor.

Ashton:

Yeah, so my background, like I mentioned I didn't go to college for this. I have no background other than I loved art, I loved basketball and let's figure out how to do it from there. And so it was a time when I was learning to be an entrepreneur and have a team and make budgets and all of those really hard things that no one teaches you and you're just kind of failing and learning and failing. And so it was a really rough time for my wife and I as we were learning this route of entrepreneurship. And so we were out at a thrift store. I found a basketball I thought was cool, it's kind of roughed up a little bit. So I took it home. I think I spent 75 cents on it and I took a marker to it and it was late at night, probably 3:00 AM to be honest.

I mean it was the middle of the night and I just sketched out, never give up. And I put it on my desk and I left it there and I just looked at it constantly and I've carried with it as I've had different offices as I've moved now back home to Springfield, it's been with me and I think it's actually up in my son's room so that's why it's not close by. But it's really iconic because not just for me and my personal story and how it's been an inspiration for me, but here I am. Like I said, I've flown into Baltimore, I'm at the headquarters with Under Armour and I'm getting ready to present for the first time and it's overwhelming. And I could paint you a scene of the world's biggest conference room, the world's biggest table with a hundred chairs. I mean it was overwhelming to say the least.

And so I'm walking in as I'm not an employee, no one really knows who I am. I don't even know why I'm there, honestly, I don't know what I'm presenting. But it was just a really cool moment where I'm sitting there waiting for my time, we're all sitting around, Steph is looking at sketches and stuff and the creative director for Armour pulls up this mood board and he had printed out all these different things and on that board was a picture of my basketball. And that night I had taken a picture of it with my cell phone and I posted on Instagram years prior and just had said note to self, never give up or something like that. And so I was sitting there and I go that's my basketball. How did you guys get a picture of it? And they of course were completely shocked because they didn't put it up there because of me. It was something that they had looked to as inspiration that they were looking at

Brett:

When they first, did they first question you were they come on, you're

Ashton:

Basketball real. No, yeah, I mean they did brilliant. I'm pretty sure I even pulled it up on my Instagram. I like, no, this is my from years ago. And apparently someone had taken that and saved that photo and put it on Instagram or on Pinterest and it's been shared thousands of times. And so here I am just a crazy moment in time where honestly as I tell it, it kind of gave me that confidence in that moment where I just felt no doubt, I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. This is who I'm supposed to be in that had a little spiritual moment if you will. And so just kind of dove in. But it was just a cool moment that I reflect on and love sharing and obviously still have it and my boys have it now and something to look at.

Brett:

I love it man. And sometimes we all have imposter syndrome at times you become an entrepreneur and then you're around other successful entrepreneurs and you're like, do I really belong here? Am I really an entrepreneur? Or you start to build a company and now we're close to 75 team members at OMG and I'm like, I'm the ceo. Like am I really cut out for this? And we begin to have, and sometimes all we need is that little moment and is yours is a crazy wild story, but it's like, no, no, I'm supposed to be here. This is where I'm called to be. This is where I'm supposed to be. This is it. Let's go. And what a cool story and what a great line too. Never give up. I'm a big Winston Churchill fan and I know he was a fan of that line as well. Super cool. So then I'm assuming the pitch went pretty well after that moment. That was certainly a great way to start it.

Ashton:

Did I actually have photos of it. I, some of the guys that I knew they were snapping photos so it was captured in time and something that I do look at every once in a while as I can't believe I was there and that moment and that's where it all began. Yeah, definitely. So

Brett:

Cool. Special. So let's talk, just curious, what has it been like so early years you're at the boardroom with Steph at Under Armour, what was it like working with Steph kind of in the early days to the way it is now?

Ashton:

Yeah, absolutely. So what's crazy is we ran right into Covid at that time. And what's really unique about the story is I had an agency at that time in Oklahoma City and we were in downtown Oklahoma and we had offices and team and we were growing and this was just an exciting opportunity. I had a family situation pop up with one of my brothers and needed felt just we needed to move home. It was kind of a situation. And so we sold everything and we moved back to Springfield in the middle of the pandemic. And the reason that's important is because while I was going remote and sold everything and was going more so was the world they were all going remote. They were all taking Zoom calls from their kitchen tables and living room and kids running everywhere. So I think it was really just a perfect time because I was able to integrate into the team while also in a really special way.

Cause I have three boys not having to travel a lot. And so for the first two years, honestly, I mean Zoom call once, twice a week working hand in hand with their team and that's just continued. And so it's actually eliminated having to travel. They will mail us if we're doing shoe release, they'll mail us the shoes, we do the filming, we edit it, we send it back, everything is digital, there's no need to be in person. And so it has changed, but it was kind of the situation that happened and now it's just worked to our benefit as we continue to work together and find ways to collaborate and do stuff. So really special. I do have some trips coming up there, I'll be seeing them, but outside of that, it's just like this. It's a zoom call, which is crazy.

Brett:

Love it, love it. So you were telling me, we were talking and prepping for the show, you mentioned you think people count themselves out before they get started and this kind of ties into chasing your dreams a little bit or just going for something big and maybe relates a little bit to imposter syndrome too. We limit ourselves and what we think we can do, we don't take the shot we the big swing. So how does that play out you think? And how have you been able to overcome that thought of self limitation?

Ashton:

Yeah, I think it's just been, it starts with my childhood and my family. My dad and mom were they preached it. My dad was a poor pig farmer who grew up with nothing. My mom was the cheerleading captain and was wealthy and my dad somehow convinced her to go on a date with them. They fell in love. And then from there, from that day forward when they graduated high school, my dad left, went up to Alaska and then hitchhiked home once he made enough mind to marry her. And so that story of my family and how my family was started was just kind of where it was. I'm the second to youngest out of six kids and so I had siblings and so there's the first kids, they're sleeping in one room, in a studio apartment type of life. By the time I get on the scene they, they've kind of figured things out.

So I got into the scene and I'm walking into a little bit more confident entrepreneurial family but that was in my DNA from a young age was if you want something, just go do it. There's no, what's the worst that's going to happen? Fail. Now that sounds really great when you're on the other side. On the side of it though, when you're in the middle of that, it's really terrifying. But the secret to it was just having mentors. I had people who showed up in my life that I allowed in that I allowed insecurities or questions or fears. I mean even to this day I still have things that I'm like, I don't know how to pull this off and I'll make a phone call part of my process if there's anything that I'm questioning or wanting to do, there's so much that I still have no idea at thir age 32, I have years and years to learn. I'm just getting started. And that will still continue to come down to finding people who are super wise, who are open and willing to share their story or their process and just grabbing coffee with them or a phone call. That's just part of it. And so that was the secret to my success is there's been individuals who have come in into my life who have helped me time and time again.

Brett:

That's so great. And I remember hearing this one time, and it's true where you can become a lot more confident when you realize that everybody is just making it up as they go. And that really ties into you're a parent if you're a business owner. I mean it's a bit of an exaggeration, but not really. We're all facing stuff every day that we've not faced before to a certain degree. And so yeah, you just got to have the confidence to do it and you got to lean on mentors and that's something that you know, got to have great parents to start with is awesome. But having those other mentors around you is really great too. You grew up in an entrepreneur family, so I love that story about, I didn't know that your dad moving to Alaska, making enough money to go marry the wealthy cheerleader that that's awesome. But you grew up, your family owned a printing business, is that right?

Ashton:

Yeah, I mean because it was the only thing that he didn't have to go get a college degree for. He could go in and start learning, get his hands dirty and start working and then build from there. And then Amway was also a huge part of his business as well. They were the ones who taught him how to tie a tie and shave, which was important. Business books, how to go and get a loan, how to open a business, L l C, all that stuff. It came from going out and seeking that information.

Brett:

Yeah, that's so cool. And so do you think growing up around the printing business, is that part of what gave you this passion for art and design and stuff? Do you think that's where that came from? Partially.

Ashton:

Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. It's from a young age. My dad at age 13 would, you would get kicked off of the fine family finances a little bit and given a budget and he'd help you budget and learn. And so from a young age you had to go and start working and it wasn't as dramatic as that sounds, but I mean it was the principle that mattered. And so from a young age we were at the print shop learning to print, pulling shirts off. We did anything from paper printing to clothing and hats and t-shirts and everything. And so my love for fashion and how does that play out, how does a brand look good on a t-shirt and part of your marketing strategy. All of that was from age eight, nine years old. That's what I was doing. And then when I started working in the front office, we had a Windows 95 computer with Crall draw on it, and that's how I learned to design. I actually didn't even pick up Photoshop or Illustrator until I was in my twenties because that's all I knew and I just made it work. So yeah, absolutely.

Brett:

That is a crazy story. There's probably lots of graphic designers out there if they're listening, they just had a gasp moment. You didn't start on Photoshop or InDesign.

Ashton:

Yeah, what was that? Wasn't around.

Brett:

That is amazing. Yeah, love that. That idea of teaching kids at a young age and kids growing up around a business. My dad was not entrepreneurial, always a hard worker but I always had this entrepreneurial desire inside of me, which is super interesting. But we share a lot in commons. We go to church together you and your family, your siblings are homeschooled, we homeschool our kids, there's all these connections, which is super cool. We love basketball. I'm the second most famous curry that maybe the third or the fourth, I don't know, but <laugh> absolutely also family tragedy. So walk through that just a little bit, as much as you're comfortable with, but you guys face some tragedy as a family. What was that and how has that shaped kind of your journey?

Ashton:

Yeah, for sure. Like I mentioned, I grew up with a really predominant mom and dad in the household. And so we had a really a healthy upbringing not just in faith but in family and in our education in business. And so when my dad got to a certain age, he loved to travel. That was his dream. One of the businesses that he actually started was a travel agency, which back in the eighties and nineties was, that was the thing. And so he did it so that he could get free trips or he could get deals. And so we would travel all the time. Part of the reason we were homeschooled as well as we could pick up and leave anytime in 2007, he had reached a point where he was wanting to explore the United States a little bit more. And so we bought a brand new RV and we started doing some trips here and there.

And on a trip in July of 2007, we went up into Canada went down through Seattle, and we were just on the other side of Seattle on the Olympic Mountains and we were coming down the mountains when the breaks actually failed to our rv and we were out of control and we went off the mountain and luckily everyone survived except for my dad who obviously passed away at that time. And it was a really scarring memory. It was a hard time. It was my world turned upside down at 17, I think you needed add more than ever. I was the homeschool kid with the metal band and loved art and basketball and I was confused at what I wanted to do, but I loved it all and rebellious as all get out. So it was a challenging time, but it was one of the coolest moments in my faith.

I met my wife during that time of, I call her my angel, she showed up and kept me centered and through that we started dating and we got married at 19. We had our first kid at 20 young kids figuring it out. But that all plays into when my dad passed away, we had a bunch of small businesses that had to be taken care of. And so all of a sudden you're kind of thrown into that of who's doing what. And although I was 17 and so I didn't carry the burden that a lot of my older siblings did, that was right there in the trenches with them and figuring it out and what is does life look like now? And we had 300 acres, which was some farmland that we all grew up on that's has to be taken care of and who's taken care of mom now.

So it was a really challenging time, but it really, there's two ways to look at it. You can be defeated by it or you can be empowered by it. And so it was a moment for me to really just grow up and you don't really have a choice, honestly. There's no one there to offer anything else except for you just got to keep going. And so fell in love, got married young, had kids young actually, our first house that we bought right after we got married in 2011 we got hit by the 2011 tornado in Joplin. We lost our first home. And so it's like you start looking at your life and you go, oh man, look at that. That was horrible. Oh man, tragedy set back. And really all I see as a believer in my faith, I just see God continue to show up and continue to pave away and give opportunity. And so that also as an entrepreneur and as a businessman, you constantly are met with maybe not as tragic, but you're constantly hit with roadblocks and failures and missteps and opportunity to either fail and go under or be empowered and figure it out. And so I would say as much as it is willpower and courage to keep going, it was also just grace and the people around me, like I said, mentors my wife that God put in my life to help me keep going.

Brett:

The people that come alongside you, the grace of God during that moment. And what's super interesting and and I have talked about this a little bit, I don't think I've talked about it too much on this podcast, actually I have on one other that I was a guest on, but I lost a parent as well. And my mom died when I was 15, had lung cancer, battled it for 16 months, passed away. And it's one of those things where you would certainly undo it, you would certainly change it if you could, but there's also something about it where it forces you to grow up. It forces you to change. In your case, you start running in or helping run the family business and the family farm and now you're like, dude, I got to be an adult right now.

Facebook becomes real at that moment. It's not just something you're reading or trying to make your parents happy and stuff, it becomes real or it doesn't. But in our cases it became real. And one of the things I think for me, I always had this confidence and I think my dad gave it to me, always told me that I could do anything that I put my mind to and when I didn't believe it. But I think one thing that happened, losing my mom and wrestling with that, I was not afraid of business failure at that point. It's like, right, I know what it's like to lose somebody, so I'm going to lose some money. It's not a big deal. I'm not worried about that. I'm just going to going to go forward and work hard and chase these things and life is short. It gives this perspective of talk about taking your shot take man, because you don't know. You don't know what's going to happen. And so don't waste time being afraid. Take your shot. And so pretty crazy. And so has your family, your siblings and stuff, they've continued to run the business. Is every all six kids entrepreneurs or just you and a few others?

Ashton:

Yeah, I know mean each of us are entrepreneurs in our own way. My oldest brother Austin ended up taking over with my brother-in-law Cliff. They partnered up and took on. It was a larger endeavor combining, there was different sections of the printing industry that my dad was a part of. And so they have now actually taken up until this year the time to obviously build it in the way that is sustainable and is up to date, but then is also combining and doing all of it. And so really cool to see them continue to expand and grow. They're super successful in what they do. I look up to Austin as one of my mentors and someone that I love and he was one of the reasons that I moved back and I don't regret for a minute. So yeah, it's been awesome. It's been really cool to see them continue to thrive.

Brett:

Yeah, it's mostly digital podcasts. We're mostly doing stuff online and whatnot. But would it make sense to give a shout out to your brothers printing business or to the family printing business? Maybe there's somebody out there that needs something printed and they should check it out. Absolutely. Be open for business. They can new clients.

Ashton:

So it's Empire Printing and it was called Empire Printing back in the seventies with my dad but then it's now there was Express Press and all these different things and until this year, 2023, they actually rebranded it and brought it back to Empire Printing and put everything underneath it. And they do with massive accounts nationwide, they do an incredible job printing embroidery, massive embroidery area, and then all of teen challenge and all of the printed books and collating and all of that stuff. So yeah, shout out to Empire Printing. Cool. The place to go,

Brett:

You need, if you need some printing call Empire Printing. Shout out to Austin. Tell him Ashton sent you. Yeah, Ashton. Super fun. So this idea, and we talked about it quite a bit, but just asking it point blank here, this idea of chasing your dreams, what do you tell people? So you're talk, talking to kids, talking to other entrepreneurs, talking to whoever. What do you tell 'em how and why you chase your dreams? What's your message there?

Ashton:

Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, you know, put the blockades in front of you. And so if you can remove the doubt, the insecurity, you can kind of point blank, look at what is holding you back from whatever that is that you're pursuing move it. A lot of times people put college as their thing. Now obviously I didn't go to college, so I am on the other side of the group that says, Hey, I was raised on youtube.com, so if I had a question, that's where I learned my stuff. So if you want to figure it out, I guarantee you it's on YouTube. But there's other things, right? Being a doctor and a lawyer and other qualifications that you need to go to college for. And I would say if that's your dream and want to do it, go by all means go do it.

But outside of that there is nothing that you cannot accomplish if you don't put your mind and heart and energy into it. And so the way that I've always say is send the email. A lot of times people ask me, how do I get in contact with these players or whatever it was relationships, there's a lot of times it was an email sent, it was a Facebook message, it was doing some creepy research and trying to find someone who works somewhere and tagging and figuring out the right person on Instagram and then just sending them a DM or finding a way to find 'em on LinkedIn. And so I have my own method of even to this day that if I want to find someone, there is no way that I can't. I mean the internet is filled with opportunity to go and research whatever you want to get the right contact for the job that you want or the industry you want to be in. So I always just say, send the email, man, just go and do it and don't hold back any of your fears and it will work out in the end. So

Brett:

Send the email. Just send the email, go out and find it, do the research. Don't be afraid, take the shot. This ties into this point, you and I were talking to this, you and I were talking about this before we hit record, but behind you, for those that are watching Michael Jordan, bull Jersey you're big, you're big Michael Jordan fan, you may be even bigger Michael Jordan fan than me. But tell your story as a kid, what was your interaction with Michael Jordan as a kid? And I think this illustrates this fearlessness that your dad and mom instilled in you and that you have to this day, but tell your Jordan story.

Ashton:

Absolutely, yeah. When I was six years old, my dream was to invite Michael Jordan to my birthday party. And of course my parents meeting who they were, they like, great rhyme a letter and we will send it. And so I, I crafted it for a week. I sat down, I spelled everything wrong and I was homeschooled. So shout out there, but I put it all together, 'em a picture. I think I even told them that I have a letter somewhere if you can stay at our house and you'll have to stay in my mom and dad's bed, but they're fine. They'll sleep somewhere else because you're huge and they have so

Brett:

Everything.

Ashton:

Absolutely. I had thought through everything. So I sent the letter and in that moment my parents were like, whatever. They looked up his corporate office and they mailed it. Well, surprisingly enough, my dad got a call at his office and it was Michael's secretary or assistant and said, Hey, Michael is actually in Paris right now so he won't be able to make your son's birthday party, but he was really moved by your letter. And so we want to send him a box of gifts. And Michael's written a letter for him. So if you wouldn't mind, we we'd love to give that to him. And so obviously as I was turning seven, there is just already this unbridled expectation of life. What can we not do? Dream it, achieve it? And so it just took on this whole manifest of just being fearless. And so a few years later there was a card contest in your basketball cards if kids know what those are anymore ripped it open. And actually right here is the pack that I had opened and it says on it win a sign Michael Jordan Jersey. And I thought, why not I could win that. And so I convinced my sister to sign me up

Brett:

Basically pen pals. I know Michael at this point, so I got to win the jersey.

Ashton:

Absolutely. Just, I put a good word, it's great. I know him. So yeah, so I ended up winning the jersey and it continued to just obviously feed my love and passion for Michael and the culture that I was thrown into in a farm in Springfield, Missouri, engrossed in East Bay magazines and sneakers and baggy clothes East Bay,

Absolutely. It was a lifetime journey of that kind of fearlessness that started at a young age, but was encouraged. And so if you're a parent, I always tell people, if you're a parent and your kid has some crazy idea, encourage that and help them. And if help them outline it. Like my parents didn't say no and they didn't throw away my letter when I wrote it. They said, well if you write it, here's the next step. We'll go to the mailbox, we'll send it, we'll look up his address and we'll send it and we'll see it. What happens. And so just walking that through, even for my kids now, there's been opportunities to encourage them in their love and their interest. And it comes from my upbringing as a child.

Brett:

I love it, man. So amazing. So we're really just have time for a couple more things, but I'm just curious, what are some of the books, the podcasts, what are some of the things you are consuming that are helping propel you on this entrepreneurial journey?

Ashton:

I obviously there is leadership podcast by Craig Rochelle. That is by far one of my favorite guaranteed to, it's probably been mentioned on here a dozen times, but that is one that just encourages my marriage. Enco encourages me as a father, but encourages me as a leader as I'm stepping out in faith and pursuing life. So I think that that podcast has transformed me how I built this sky. Ross started listening to it when it first came out and I think listened to every single one of them, if not a couple of times. So I love those podcasts. And then for book, I always say failing forward, one of the most impactful books that I've ever written or I've ever, I did not write it Johnson Maxwell wrote that one. But that I've ever listened to and read, it fed my soul during that learning period of life. And I referenced that one a lot. But I think that there is so many different materials out there that, not just podcasts, but there is books and that's another piece of it. If you want something or you're struggling with, there is so much content out there to just go and get it. It's obtainable. It's a lot of times it's free or it's pretty small. So yeah, those are a couple of the ones that's impacted me.

Brett:

Love it, man. Love it. What's next for you? What's next for you and team? I know you're working on some highly secretive things. You and I met and talked about these a few weeks ago, so some of you probably can't talk about, but what can you talk about? What's next for you?

Ashton:

Yeah, I mean there's opportunity within the space of the digital age. And so I, as we've gone through this kind of winter, as we call it in the metaverse, there is a lot of things that are happening while everyone is down and out about it that I think will continue to see opportunity with memberships and stuff. And so staying involved in that industry and then continue to help Steph and Clay and a couple of these other guys with their projects or their brand and so that we'll continue to grow and chase after that. And then of course pickleball, which we could have a whole other podcast about pickleball. So that is where I'm investing a lot of time and energy. So we'll come back two excited

Brett:

About that. Well yeah, exactly that. That'll be a great excuse for part two. We'll come in, we'll talk about pickleball. We'll nerd out for all those who were like basketball, come on guys, but you may like pickleball. So come back for episode two. It'll be more your speed, more your style there. So that's awesome. So check it out, go to triple I'm, I'm going to get your website wrong if I don't look at it here real quick. So triple-threat.co. So check that out and also just keep an eye on stuff Steph doing essentially anything Steph does in the public IRS foundation, potentially you've had a hand in that to some degree. Pay attention to Steph and Hi or I mean a clay, his shoe stuff, which is really cool. And in any other ways people should follow you. Are you active on the socials? Are you active on Instagram or LinkedIn or anywhere else that you want to mention?

Ashton:

I'm pretty well hiding behind a lot of the other people and allowing them to do their things. It's not

Brett:

A bad choice. Not a bad choice at all. Yeah,

Ashton:

I let them do it, but I do it. My personal AMO ins 23, I'm on Instagram. It's pretty well all I do if I am on it. So yeah, you can follow me there.

Brett:

Awesome. Fantastic. Well, Ashton, this has been an absolute joy, been a ton of fun and inspiring. I'm ready to go out there and just do whatever and hopefully pass some of these lessons onto my kids and other good stuff like that. So appreciate it brother. Thanks for taking the time and then we'll definitely have to schedule part two.

Ashton:

I appreciate the time as well. It was, it's been a joy. Thank you so much.

Brett:

Awesome. And hey, special shout out, Brian Franco, pastor Life Church, Springfield, Missouri, for making this connection. Appreciate you as well. And as always, thank you for tuning in. Let us know what you'd like to hear more of or less of on the podcast. And if your answer is, I'd like to hear less basketball, don't worry, this is going to be, this was the Basketball Heavy <laugh> podcast. We probably won't have another one quite like this, but this has been a ton of fun, so hopefully you enjoyed it. Hey, if you've not done so, leave that review on iTunes. Makes my day, helps other people find the podcast. And unlike Ashton, I am trying to get more active on the social. So follow me on Twitter for some good marketing tips and ideas, and also LinkedIn. I'm trying to get more active there as well. So with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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According to Chad Rubin, there's a lot of reckless advice from "gurus" when it comes to pricing on Amazon.

Just raising your price because of inflation, might not be your optimal move. In some cases lowering your price, improving sell through, improving BSR can raise your total profits. But lowering your price could have devastating impact to your profits. So should you raise or lower your price? The short answer is - it depends. The key is to test, watch the data, and optimize.

Chad Rubin recently exited Skubana, Prosper Show and his own agency. He’s now the founder of Profasee a dynamic AI repricing tool for Amazon sellers to help you maximize profits without hurting your ranking on Amazon.

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• Prepping your business to sell and how Chad successfully exited Skubana.
• The fallacy of managing your Amazon ad spend to an ACoS goal.
• The art & science of Amazon pricing.
• How to price on other marketplaces so you maximize sales on amazon and preserve margin.
• Product assortment strategies on and off Amazon and where Chad would launch a new eComm brand if he started today.
  ‍

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Chad Rubin (LinkedIn)
• Chad Rubin (Twitter)
• Profasee (Website)
• Profasee (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

‍

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we have a seasoned pro man with multiple exits, multiple multi-time successful entrepreneur, Mr. Chad Rubin. you may know him from the days at Skubana, which he exited, and we'll talk a little bit about that on the show today. Hopefully that successful exit. He was also a partner in Prosper Show, which to this day is one of the best Amazon shows on the planet. The team here at omg, we still attend. We're prepping to attend this year, which is awesome. And then Chad also had his own agency, which he exited, and now he's the founder of Profasee, and that's a unique spelling on link to the show notes, have Chad explain it in a second. But basically their mission is to maximize your profits.

It's an AI dynamic pricing tool to maximize profits without hurting your ranking at your BSR on Amazon. And so we're going to be dropping some Amazon Truth bombs today. We're going to be talking about the keys to pricing and profitability on Amazon because it doesn't, it's not worthy just to sell on Amazon and erode all your profits, which a lot of people unwittingly do. And so we're going to show you how to be profitable on how to build a brand on Amazon. So with that, Chad Ruben, how you doing, man? Thanks for Hey, taking the time. Good to see you, dude.

Chad:

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Brett:

Yeah, man. So tell us a little bit about Profasee and explain how to spell it for those that are going to hear this and then Google it later. And then we're going to get into some juicy Amazon topics here. Maybe get into some healthy debates as we go, which is always fun. But yeah, talk about Profasee.

Chad:

Yeah, so Profasee, we are a dynamic AI driven repricer for Amazon brands. We change pricing to maximize for profitability without sacrificing your BSR and Amazon, your competitive positioning on Amazon. I've been doing this for about a year AI first. So before chat, G P T and AI was really a thing. I started focusing on AI because I thought that was the future. And certainly I feel really certain in my assumption that AI is the future. And so how do you spell Profasee? It's P R O F A S E E, Profasee Profits. You could see it's a planned words. After I sold Skubana, I stared at a tree for a bit and that name came to me and I was like, okay, it's predicting the future with a level of certainty. And what are we doing? We're predicting pricing with a level of certainty of how we're going to make you more money

Brett:

Profits, you see. And it is a Profasee because you can predict it. I love it. That's awesome. So let's, actually let's lead with this because I know this is something that I'm interested in. We're looking at acquiring some agencies and we've invested in some e-commerce brands and things, but a lot of my friends are in tip dipping their toe in the m and a waters, or they've had partial exits or fully sold. So let's just talk about this a little bit that we'll get into some juicy Amazon takes the Skubana exit. What was that like? Any learnings, any takeaways? Because we hear horror stories like M and as terrible, you're going to hate your life for a period of months, or it could be totally liberating or somewhere in between takeaways from that experience.

Chad:

I mean, so many takeaways. Where to begin first of all, there's hair on every deal that's out there. There's always going to be hair. And for me, I'm like a skeptical individual, so I always skeptical the entire time of the process. And luckily we sold, I think at the height of everything, which is April of 21, I couldn't have asked for a better time to sell totally. And so I think I did a lot of things to make sure that the deal went correctly with my business partner. We exited in the most beautiful and healthy way possible collectively. What else can I share with you about the deal? Yeah it was definitely painful. I would say, let's just say you're going through the process right now. I think it's an art around bringing the right inner circle of your company into the process. When is the right time to tell a few people in your inner circle of the company? And I think we did that and it's

Brett:

Up too soon. You'll be like, Hey, we're thinking about selling people panic. People worry about their jobs, they're freshening up their resumes, they fired out the door because they think I'm, I'm going to be on the chopping blocks, but you don't want to surprise them. So what are your nuggets about that?

Chad:

Well, I mean, I think there's an art around it and bring people in the right time. So I made a list of the people who are absolutely necessary to be in the know about this acquisition. I got them excited about it because, well, I was excited about it. They would also benefit from the process. So there's a certain level of self-interest there and

Brett:

Be everybody pulling on the rope in the same direction or rowing in the same direction type thing.

Chad:

Totally. I think setting up calls around marketing and sales and development I would make sure to get those questions in advance, 48 hours in advance of those phone calls so that we can prep and pre-process before those phone calls happen. So I want to make sure that we're nailing every question and come prepared. And so I think after the first time we had a call, we didn't get the questions in advance and I was like, okay, this is going to have the change going forward and making sure that me and my team are meeting on those and actively working on those, and we're managing the business and operating it and making sure you're operating extremely well while you're going through the process.

Brett:

And I know it's quite distracting those due diligence calls and the requests are numerous and you know, got to keep the business running for obvious reasons. You want to take care of customers and you got to keep revenues up, but it's also imperative to the deal, you can't be so distracted on the m and a portion of the deal that your profit slip or your revenue slip because then your business is less valuable and now you're getting less out of it as the deal goes on. So any tips there? Or was that just kind of disciplined being do and determined and keeping focused? How did you press ahead with m and a while still running the business day to day?

Chad:

Well, I think the beautiful thing was April of 20 leading up to April of 21, we had the shift of well bricks, the clicks with the pandemic. And we were directly in the epicenter of enabling people to sell online. And so we were capitalizing on the shift. On top of that, you had some acquisitions in our space like Stitch Labs and Trade Gecko, and we were consuming the clients off those platforms. And so again, it's just knowing when to hold 'em and knowing when to fold him. And I think we just timed extremely well in the grand SEMA things and totally, I

Brett:

Don't, was don't think it could've been any

Chad:

Better. Yeah, I was recently listening to a, I think it was definitely a podcast with Harry Stabbings and Jason Lempkin, and Jason was like, we will never see valuations ever again in the software space similar to 2021. And I was like, bam. Nailed it, right? <laugh>

Brett:

That. Yeah, it's amazing. Well, kudos to you guys. You put it, I mean obviously you couldn't have predicted that. You couldn't predict that when you started Cubana, but you did the right things. You had a valuable, successful company. You saw the trend, you picked the timing when you, the wave when saw it. And so kudos to you guys. Awesome.

Chad:

A lot of hard work, a lot of hair loss seven years of high highs and

Brett:

Low lows that every deal has hair on it. I almost made a bald joke. I was like, well, maybe you want those deals anyway. Yeah, but that's awesome. So kudos to you guys. And what do you think and again, I know we've got some Amazon topics, so if you, dear listener are not into m and a one, I think you should be thinking about it at least we'll get to Amazon in a minute, but where do you see m and a going here over the next year or two? Or are you removed from it and not thinking about it a whole lot?

Chad:

I mean, I think if you're building a product that people love and helps and enables people to flourish and you're creating value, inevitably someone will want to buy you over time. So I'm necessarily not at the stage where I'm already thinking about the sale, I'm always thinking about the sale, but simultaneously not thinking about the sale. I'm just thinking about how do I provide tremendous amount of value and create something that people absolutely love and over time will find, we'll, we'll get love from somebody else that wants to buy us.

Brett:

And I love the Jeff Bezos quote that in the long term, customer and shareholder interests are aligned. So I love the idea of thinking about a sale from the very beginning, whether that's your goal or not, because to get your business in a healthy financial state, growing in a healthy way that's good for the longevity of your business if you decide to keep it forever and pass it down to generations or whether you decide to sell it. So yeah, I love the process of thinking about selling right away and you're doing right by customers in the long run, help helps shareholders as well.

Chad:

So just two things on that. One is in our first seed deck, we did compile a list of potential acquirers and the company that bought us was not on that list. So it's never, I'm not saying never, but it's not usually who you think it is going to be. And I think that's an interesting takeaway that I wanted to share. And another takeaway I think is interesting is the acquirer or the suitor of Skubana that was manufactured luck. So I was looking into partnerships and trying to figure out new ways to scale quicker and faster and making it more impactful. And I had reached out to the CEO and we had this conversation and one thing led to another, and that's sort of what started this whole process.

Brett:

Nice. I love that. And I think there's something to be said though about, you know, prepared the deck. You thought about who would buy it. I think there's something healthy about that thought process to again, make the business attractive for that group or thinking through why would this be interesting or attractive? Well, the product has to be good for any of that to be true. But then yeah, manufactured luck. And another way I've heard this said Jim Collins talks about, he calls it return on luck. So the most successful people, the most successful companies aren't more lucky or less lucky, they just make the absolute most of the luck they've given. And that's what you did. You were out there, you built a great team and a great product, and you're talking to CEOs and you're thinking about strategically, how do we grow, expand, create mutual benefit, and then it open the door for an awesome acquisition. So that's fantastic. Really, really cool. Great. Any other parting where I know we can make the whole podcast about m and a, some people wouldn't like that, so we'll move on. But any final tips on m and a in terms of whether advisors or podcasts to listen to or any takeaways if

Chad:

Someone maximize shots on goal find people, surround yourself with people like a council, a Jedi council, people who are going to empower you and help lead you through and Sherpa you through the process of an m, m and a. I did that a great book to read's,

Brett:

Not something to go alone unless you're like seasoned M and a pro, probably not. You need the Sherpa, you need a team around you.

Chad:

I had a great C F O that I hired that led the way he's been through many edits and also making sure your financials are in order. I know it sounds like, hey, everyone has that, but we certainly didn't have it. I think many other companies don't have it even in sass, right? There's deferred revenues and bookings that happen, and getting that squared away is very important in the process.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally makes sense. Well, awesome. All right, let's talk about Amazon. And you know, guys help maximize profits without slowing down BSR and without losing your rankings. And it, it's a dance. We all know that we want to improve our rankings and capitalize on that organic growth and the behemoth that Amazon is in terms of generating traffic and buyers. But if all we're doing is giving money to Amazon, and I've seen a lot of PNLs from Amazon brands I know you have too, where you're like, well, the only person making money here is Amazon. And so we've got to have this structure in a way where you're building a brand and building it profitably. And so let's talk about that. What's kind of the art and science of pricing on Amazon?

Chad:

So I think firstly, the reason why I started Profasee was after years of spending time building Skubana and the Prosper Show and all these other things, I disregarded my e-comm company. We manufacture vacuum filters and coffee filters. So I wanted to revive that business. I mean, it was getting bad. We were getting copied. I wasn't putting a lot of time into it. I probably had the wrong team in place on top of it. So I got back into the game and I was trying to figure out how do I turn this business around? And there's a lot of, first of all, there's a lot of just reckless commentary around pricing from gurus in the Amazon world. And B, I don't think any seller or brand spends a lot of time thinking about pricing. And so they're making sub-optimal decisions around pricing and they're under monetizing their products. And I felt that with my own brand on Amazon and started dog fooding building Profasee for myself, and then started opening up for other people the same way I did. So I found an itch to itch, to stretch and started building it for other people. So, sorry, go ahead,

Brett:

Brett. Well, I was just going to say two things. One, I love a dog food reference. For those that don't know I think this is a Google term where they talked about well, they borrowed from Purina or something. But the idea is say, if you want to make your product better, you got to eat your own dog food. And I guess there are stories of a may, maybe it's Purina eating it, people eating the dog food in the boardroom, which would be really funny to observe. But yeah, it's the idea of we get the product doesn't fit us. If we don't like it, nobody else is going to like it either. So I like that. And then I do want to maybe key on this, and if you think this is better to talk about in a minute, that's totally fine, but what's some of the reckless advice? I love that you said that, and I totally agree with you. What's some of the reckless advice about pricing that you hear on Amazon?

Chad:

So pricing's easy to talk about, right? Everyone, but Oh, just raise your pricing. First one's

Brett:

Not your product. <laugh>, right? I just want to sound smart. You change your own price. Yeah, whatever.

Chad:

Yeah, so pricing isn't one size fits all. So you can say, okay, just raise your price, right? Inflation's here, raise your price. Just do it. Just go do it. And that's what I was hearing especially when I took over my e-com company in October. I was like, that's absurd. That's crazy. Doesn't price need to be calibrated to what the buyer wants? And don't people have different conversion rates and sessions at different times of the day? Why is pricing static? And so the reckless advice is like, Hey, just go ahead and raise it. But raising isn't necessarily the most optimal decision. It could be actually lowering the price, which increases your velocity, which means you have more unit sell through, which means you're generating more absolute profit dollars on the bottom line. So everyone's maintain these knee-jerk reactions, and most Amazon brands are just focusing on adjusting spent. And so if you're managing $10,000 of spend on Amazon today, you would never not optimize it. So why is nobody optimizing price? So that's really where I started to really question and ask why and build a discipline around this.

Brett:

Awesome. And so then I know your tool does this algorithmically and automatically, but what are some of the ways that you could be and should be optimizing price? And I really like the way that you point that out, that yes, sometimes raising the price is absolutely the right answer, but sometimes lowering it and increasing your yourself or in your BSR and improving your ranking and all those metrics change that's better for you. So how are you analyzing that? How's someone that doesn't have AI behind them analyze those things?

Chad:

So I think we all have to understand, and I think everyone that's deep in Amazon gets this, there's a knock on effect. So if you change pricing today, it affects your orders tomorrow. And so knowing that you have to actually really be super hyper focused on your Bryce. And so if you're doing this by yourself, if you're doing it manually, you would trade a spreadsheet for, and you'd have a tab for each asin and you would be looking at your current price, your impressions, your conversion rate your unit session percentage. You'd have your competitor, the top 10 maybe competitors in there with their price. And you'd essentially have your profit for every day on those prices. And you'd actually start making small tweets and start seeing what these small tweets have on your bottom line of profitability and also inputting in your bsr. So you're making these changes and when you make changes to pricing on Amazon, it's not in a vacuum. And so you make these changes, you're making decisions around changes, managing to a specific net margin and have a continuous process around those changes implemented internally at the company.

Brett:

Nice. And how often are you changing prices so as not to mess things up? Is it a multiple times a day?

Chad:

We're talking about Profasee in general or just

Brett:

In general and talk about Profasee too. But in general, if someone's doing this manually and tweaking and observing, what does that look like? And then what does Profasee do?

Chad:

So if you're doing this manually, I mean I think the depends on how many props you have, but if you're doing it on 10 products, you can probably do it manually maybe but I think you should be doing it once a day. And this is a fundamental step because it's the smallest lever that swings the biggest store of profitability. But then you should be having weekly meetings with your finance team and with management and speaking about, Hey, what are our target margins? What's happening based on these price changes? And really connect pricing as a discipline across your roadmap for product across your finance team, across marketing, across your ads team or your ad agency, whoever you're hiring to make sure that you're managing to expectations.

Brett:

Yeah, I like it. You talked about spend a minute ago and well, first of all what else do we need to think about with price? Any tips or mistakes people make when it comes to price on Amazon?

Chad:

Well, I think that first mistake that I shared, which is people don't know what the optimal price is, and the only way to know truly is to look at the data. So it's not just to raise price. And I think, and this is going to the next segue of the conversation is there's so much data to capture your price, your bsr, your conversion rate, your session rate. We do a reverse ace and lookup on all your competitors, and we ingest it all into a model. And the beautiful thing about a model is that a model is self-learning and continuously learns and improves 24 7. And the reason why I started building prop was I couldn't do that manually. And I also have a lot of stews. So before we did a stew rationalization at the company, I had about 500 something stu, private label skews, which is a lot to manage.

Brett:

Yeah, you pair that down then through analysis or have you

Chad:

Oh yeah, it's been paired down quite a bit 80 to 20 Pareto principle. We established criteria around what we want to keep and then liquidated the rest. So it's like, Hey, what's the age of this inventory? What are the turns like on the existing inventory? What are our net margins? And based on specific benchmarks that we made, we said anything over a specific timeframe or under a specific margin, we got rid of.

Brett:

Love it. I love it. So then as we kind of transition, because it's something we're talking about before we hit record, a lot of people that run Amazon businesses, they're either doing this or their agency is doing this, or marketing team managing to hit a cost goal, advertising cost of sales, and you have to consider a cost. It's an important metric. You have to look at it. I also like what you said though too about you're not going to have $10,000 in ad spend and not optimize it, but you don't optimize price. And when we're running Amazon ad campaigns, we're tweaking bids constantly. We do some manual and bulk work and software work and stuff too. But I love where you're going here actually. And so I'll chime in a minute, but why is optimizing for a cost goal a mistake or shortsighted?

Chad:

So a couple of things. It's a target and it doesn't actually account for profitability. And so in the past decade on Amazon, it's been this gold rush. We've all been able to capitalize it, and now we're moving into growing revenue profitably. And so as an agency, and I would love to know, you're an agency, you're a master at this, and I'm wondering if you guys collect this information, but most agencies that I talk to don't actually collect inventory on hand or no, what that looks like or know what your Len cost structure is. They're managing to a specific ACOs. And that ACOs, by the way, the ACOs equation is what you spend to what make, and they're only adjusting one part of the equation. It's almost like having a peanut butter sandwich with no jelly. It's like it's okay, it'll get you by, but it's much more delicious when you combine it together.

Brett:

Yeah, and we do. So look at, I think you've got to have a line of sight, whether it's an agency, your in-house team, a freelancer, whatever you're hiring clear line of sight to total sales and what is our total a cost? But that's still the same thing. It's still just a metric or a goal. We, we've had this discussion in our agency and our leadership team, we want to hit X percentage of profitability. Well that's cool, but we also want to think about total profits. We want to hit a number, we want to hit a profit number. So you got to think about that as well as the percentage. So yeah, these are one of those is one scenarios where you need to think about total profits and how does a shift in ACO impact your total profits? Because you're not taking ACO to the bank and you're not selling ACO to a potential buyer down the road. Its based on profit and

Chad:

Profitability. So ACOs doesn't tell the whole story, right? To me it's a metric, and I'm trying not to be mean about it, but it's almost a gospel metric. But the real God metric is your prophet.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. It's so true. I actually just record a podcast, this is more on the D to C world, but with Rob Rayhill from Triple Whale, and I love what the guys at Triple Whale are doing but they were talking about, Hey, don't obsess over roaz. You got to know, obviously it's an important metric, you got to know it, but that's not the ultimate business metric and that's not your ultimate financial metric. It serves a purpose, but if you become too focused on it or if your agency or marketing person's like, well, ACO is good, so I don't know why you're upset, ACO is great. Well, that's not the God metric. Yeah, exactly. I like that. I like that. Cool. So how you, did you look at this in your business or how do you look at it or how do you coach people? And I know we've talked about it a little bit already, but how should we look at it? A cost versus profitability and EBITDA and all those things?

Chad:

Well, I know specifically for my business on Amazon, our God metric, if you know your God metric, you got to use it everywhere. And so for us, we're using contribution profit, absolute profit dollars. We're man, we're like, every time we meet in our L 10 meeting, we're looking at what our net margin, how it's trending over time. And we have a specific goal in mind of net margin to accomplish that we're trying to achieve. And I think a lot of just the agencies that I talked to don't, man, they're interested in capitalizing on your spent either a percentage of revenue, PPC revenue, sometimes it's the total revenue, sometimes it's your spend. And I had to really shift away from the agency that I was working with specifically because it's almost like we were worshiping a false, false shot

Brett:

And mean some of those models work and there's not a perfect pricing model, but as an agency we do the percentage of ad spend thing and in some cases percentage of sales. But the key though is you've got to have line of sight into the most important metrics and then you're really optimizing on those key metrics. So a cost keeps us within certain guardrails, and that's what we see most closely in the platform where the ads are. But it's that contribution margin and overall profit that that's really, we're our North star, that's where we're headed. And that's amazing. Yeah, I think that's a super important discussion to make. And when you are talking I would love to get your take on it because you said the business was a little bit back burner for a while as you're building and selling skubana and whatnot. But once you started talking about contribution margin and focusing on profitability at the highest level of leadership, what did that do for the rest of your team?

Chad:

So a few things though. I took over this business, it was a mess. It was really, and I didn't want to take it over. So

Brett:

Was this the family business, long time business or something? Or business you started a long time ago.

Chad:

My family business, my family had a vacuum retail store. I started private label in two really officially in 2009. And this is my own standalone business, private label on Amazon. Nice. And again, it hasn't gotten a lot of love. It didn't light me up. I really want to maximize my outcome. And for me, it was focusing on software that really lit me up that really got me excited. I know a lot of people love building products and launching on Amazon and doing that, and that just wasn't something that I wanted to focus on. So I had other people focusing on it not, and it's all about having the right butts in the right seat and I just lost sight of the business. So I tried hiring two other individuals and without going into too much detail, it didn't work out. And then I started implementing L 10 meetings, which is an EOS practice

Brett:

Just on traction, the book Traction,

Chad:

Yeah, yeah, I'm in EO as well with Gene. And just started focusing on where are the problems and how to assess those problems out. So one of the problems with price, another problem was the fact that we had too much inventory. We had a lot of stale inventory we were getting hit, and the other piece was like our listings were unoptimized, they were dusty. Like a listing of 2000 from 2012 is different from a listing of 2022 or 2023. So I started implementing that and we actually just had our first net profit, positive net profit, net margin of profitability in the month of December. And I think that's the first time. Congratulations. 18 months. Awesome.

Brett:

Yeah,

Chad:

So super

Brett:

Cool. That's a big deal. So pretty quick turnaround really when you think about it. And so that one, that traction system, which great book us is it Gene Wickman or Eugene Wickman. Anyway gene, yeah, yeah, gene, yeah, it's a great book. So check that out. But from that L 10 top level leadership meeting, identifying what needs to change, and you did that and now you are in the money, which is awesome. Very cool. So you dropped we teased out some truth bombs and we might be dropping on Amazon. And you said something, Chad we've been using some religious terms. You dropped something that was a bit like heresy, a bit like blasphemy. Earlier when we were on the talking, you said if you were starting a new brand today, you might not even launch on Amazon to begin with. So talk me through that. What has led you to that spot and unpack that for us a little bit.

Chad:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's having a criteria of what you're going to be. I mean, if you are going to launch a product on Amazon, and I do believe in the power of Amazon, by the way. Absolutely. I just think it's a, and I think you used the proper word early on and I, there's just so much saturation on Amazon. I dunno if you used that word, but essentially there's a lot of saturation. So I would be, shelves

Brett:

Are full, the shelves are full at Amazon.

Chad:

Yeah, shelves are full. I love that. I would establish criteria for how you're going to approach Amazon going forward. So I like to use, I EO and I experience shares. And so one of the reasons why I love AI is that it improves over time. Essentially becomes a highly differentiated product and has self-improvement. So if you can do that with software, you can likely do that with your product on Amazon. An example would be, I know this is a high level product, but essentially it's the Nest thermostat. It gets better over time. It takes years to copy that product because it gets better now. My Nest knows when I'm home and when I'm not home and adjusts my temperature accordingly. So I think this is amazing. There's establishing a new set of criteria to win on Amazon going forward because what got you to 2022 isn't going to take you to 2025 or 2026 and this, you've been in this team for a long time on Amazon Spires every three months.

Brett:

Totally.

Chad:

But if you build a foundation, right, if you build a product from the ground up, you build a highly differentiated product, there's some scarcity of supply, you have a product that improves over time, whatever that is, I, you come up with it yourself and you find sleepy verticals. And where if someone buys your product, for example, a nest, they're not going to buy the anchor nest for good reason. You become a lot more strategic in your process, in the way that you're building your product on Amazon.

Brett:

And it was interesting, I mentioned this to you before we hit record. I posted a poll on Twitter and on LinkedIn. And then quick plug, I would love to follow you guys on Twitter and on LinkedIn. I'm committing to at least the first half of this year going hard on social media, making connections, having fun. And I may continue, hopefully it'll continue. But for now you'll find me there. You'll find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. But I posed a question. If you were launching an e-commerce brand today, what would you do? Would you launch that on Shopify or other platform? Go d toc, drive traffic, build a brand, build demand, build like a following and then launch on Amazon, or would you launch on Amazon first and then look to go D two C later? And it was interesting, it was a heated debate. You can find it on LinkedIn, on Twitter, if you look at my profiles at Brett Curry, Twitter the Brett Curry on LinkedIn, but it was slightly in favor of Shopify, about 55%.

Something like that said go D toc first. I think the real answer is you probably got to understand your product. Is it more of a demand capture type thing where people are searching for it and you need that search traffic as Amazon is driven by search. It also depends on your skillset. What do you good at and what can you do? But I much prefer if we're talking about pricing optimization and profit maximization. I love driving traffic, building a brand off Amazon first because then when you launch on Amazon, you can likely better protect those profits. So yeah, what would be your take on that topic?

Chad:

So funny, you're just getting into social media and I'm also getting into it. So I just posted

Brett:

Dude check and you've got a good, I actually saw you got a good following on LinkedIn, man, I don't know what you're doing, but I'm

Chad:

Happy to share offline by the way. Want to. I can help.

Brett:

Let's do it.

Chad:

Okay, thanks. It's something I'm passionate about. So I just posted something about the Hoka exclusive monetization strategy on LinkedIn yesterday. And Amazon is a gateway drug to find high value customers for your brand.

And it's like 50 people start on Amazon and sometimes they never leave, but always a lot of people start on Amazon, it's not Google. And so it's never been easier to just create a seller account on Amazon. You build a product, you drive some traffic to it, you'll have far better return on ad spend and thus enhancing your profit on Amazon specifically. And so for me, I would start on Amazon and then once I have a good core heroes to you on Amazon, I would start building Amazon like exclusive, which is what Hoka does. They locked their exclusive products on their own website, but they have their generic ham nilly Vanilli product on amazon.com for social proof, for exploration, for discovery. If people just want the black ones and they get them on the second time purchase off of Amazon,

Brett:

I think that's smart too. And I think really regardless of where you begin or where you are now in your journey, cause I know most likely talk, as I interact with listeners at events and stuff, a lot of the people listening already have a business. So whether you start on Amazon or started off Amazon, I love that strategy of core products, hero products on Amazon, but exclusives, new releases, other things off Amazon. And I do think it comes down to your skillset, Amazon, how to crush it on Amazon. If there's somebody that understands Shopify and understands Facebook ads and YouTube ads and Google ads do that, but there's not a real right or wrong answer there. But one cool thing that's happened, we did this with Boom by Cindy Joseph Firestones company launched 'em on Amazon, they had not been on Amazon for years. Company had been around for maybe a decade or so.

We added 15% to the top line almost immediately. Profitable growth didn't diminish growth on other channels. There's also this group of of buyers and potentially our parents or grandparents or whoever they only want to buy on if they're going to buy online, they're buying on Amazon only. And if you are running traffic off Amazon, you're driving people to Amazon right now, whether you mean to or not. Cause that's just where people like to go to shop. And so yeah, no right or wrong answer there, but I think regardless of where you start or where you launch pricing strategy, product strategy. And so actually let's double click on that a little bit. And what else do you recommend there in terms of product strategy on Amazon versus off Amazon, and how does that tie in to pricing? Any of the thoughts there?

Chad:

Yeah, so I mean the thing is you want to have as lease channeled conflict as possible because Amazon, Amazon wants best pricing or price parity across the channels. Yes. So look, we've built suppression monitoring into our systems, but I'll give you an example. There's a cosmetic company that we are working with at Profasee, and they had a bigger issue. They were, the holy drill for them was like, let's get our product into Target. So Targets started buying their products and it became like 5% of their revenue. So Amazon's 95% target's now 5%. Well, the target collection at Amazon the target collection started to not do well. So Target wanted some concessions. So what does that mean? Target wants some concession that you have to lower your price on Amazon and it becomes, it's sort of target hijack the 5% of their revenue and now it's messing with the 95% of the revenue. So it's very important to calibrate and to really think about this before you get in. I know it's so awesome to be in Target or to be in Sephora and to see it on the shelf in the physical world, but at the same time it can have some devastating consequences and unintended that can really hurt your business.

Brett:

Yeah, yes. I'm thinking about that, minimizing that channel conflict. Any tips for that? How do we minimize channel conflict? And I know you did quite a bit of that with Skubana back in the day, but thought there.

Chad:

So a couple things you can have. Now, Amazon's not a little smart about this in the diaper category specifically, but if you can actually zoom out and do this in other categories, and it's not so significant, which is having different skews having a different collection. So for example, the Gap has their outlet and they make product specifically for the outlet than they do for gap.com, then in-store. And this J True does the same thing. So having a different collection and different bundle kit variation and even different ounces size specifically on different channels could prevent that from happening. That's just like one idea.

Brett:

Nice. And that's where, and a lot of manufacturers do that. They have the TV exclusives for Best Buy, right? You can only buy this particular version in Best Buy, and this is the version for Walmart. And we know the guts are probably pretty similar, but there's just enough changes to make it where it's exclusive to that retailer, whichever retailer wants.

Chad:

So another example would be like I think it's, is it Kia or Hyundai? I think it's, maybe Kia has the Genesis, right? Or Toyota has Lexus having two different types of, it doesn't have to be a different name. That's a little bit extreme. That means two different marketing budgets. But that's one thing if you do have channel conflict and you want to want to keep pricing a specific way, the price on Amazon becomes your floor. You give us your floor price, so you give us your floor price and your ceiling price, and those are the boundaries that we operate within to maximize profits for you. And Amazon

Brett:

Needs to be the floor. That's what they want, that's what they require. And if you don't do that, you're going to have trouble on it on

Chad:

Amazon. Exactly.

Brett:

Yeah. Makes sense. Chad, this has been amazing. So I want to talk about Profasee now because I know you built something really, really cool. Kind of sprinkled some nuggets here throughout talking about what it does. It's AI driven as dynamic pricing adjustments. But talk to us more about that. What's the quick explanation of here's who it's for, here's how it works, here's why you should consider it. Yeah,

Chad:

So we are four private label brands. There's tons of people that live and die by the buy box. We live and die by the ERP on Amazon. We believe that you can dynamically adjust price to maximize profit at different times of the day to maximize your profit without sacrificing your BSR on Amazon. So we predict the perfect price at the perfect moment for the perfect customer to make sure we're making you more money. We do that with ai. Why? Because there is a gold mine of information, both from amazon.com specifically from Seller Central and the API of ads along with a surplus of data that you mine from third parties and pull it into the model. So the model can actually be self-learning and learn from your data to figure out really what the Amazon algorithm wants, how your competitors react, and to constantly learn from those signals to maximize the outcome for your business.

Brett:

Yeah, very, very cool. And then we talked about, hey, you can do some stuff manually. You can build a spreadsheet, you can start calculating things, do stuff on a daily basis, but ain't got time for that, right? <laugh> like, and you're pulling data from lots of different places and then putting that into models and coming up with those prices. And so what are some of the things there that the algorithm's considering? Is it looking at competitive price and then it's looking at what conversion rates are and ads and things like that? And it's trying to find that optimal?

Chad:

I mean there's so many signals. So your own price, your reviews, the quality of your review reviews, the quantity of the reviews, your bsr what else your inventory position, if your FBA or not fba, we do a reverse ace and lookup on your competitors, suck in their price, suck in their reviews, pull in all the imaginable signals on those competitor PDPs, those pro detail pages. And we're doing that every single day doing that 24 7. So it's really all about boosting profits and going away from like, Hey, we're going to statically Uber surge. Uber has control surge pricing, which dynamically changes pricing. Most sellers are just guessing or slapping a margin on their product and statically leaving it there. It doesn't make any sense. And so in this fast place marketplace of Amazon, how do you be fast paced? You do it with ai.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. And so any case studies or examples that you can talk about, I know there's probably a lot I know in the Amazon world for those that are not in it, very secretive, very secretive, these Amazon sellers, they don't want their name out there in any way, shape or form, but in any case studies that you can share.

Chad:

Yeah, so there's one company that's on our website, one that was willing to speak, and there's going to be more coming up as we move into our next, we're still early, right? We're, we've been building in this model for the past year but one company called Wall Charmers, they do decor, they're in the decor category on Amazon and they were leaving some serious money on the table. We made them an extra 30% more in profits and which has an amazing effect, not just on their EBITDA but on, they want to sell at some point in the future. And so think about applying not just the increase of ebitda, but the EBITDA multiple, you get on that increase, that's huge.

Brett:

And you said, yeah, 30% increase in you multiply whatever that dollar amount is by three, four, up to seven or more depending on how healthy your business is and who the buyer is. So yeah, that's very significant. Chad, if people want to follow you on social, you're a great follow on LinkedIn. I know that for sure. How can they find you?

Chad:

You can follow me on LinkedIn Chad Rubin you can follow me on Twitter. I'm also, sorry, I'm new to Twitter. I'm definitely been involved in LinkedIn for quite a time, so I'm doing both now, similar to you you can follow Twitter, Chad Rubin, you email me and my personal email is Chad Profasee.com. Feel free to reach out if you're interested in talking price, if you're interested in talking to ppc, if you're interested in just talking about Amazon or need someone to bounce ideas off, I want to make sure I'm available to the community.

Brett:

Awesome. Really appreciate it, man. And it should be blatantly clear Now. Chad knows his stuff. He knows the game. He's been in a long time, very, very successful. So otherwise people can check out Profasee on the webs, on the interwebs. What's your address?

Chad:

It's just Profasee.com, P R O F A S E e.com.

Brett:

Awesome. And we will link to everything in the show notes, including your social, so people can check that out. If you forget, you can find that on omg commerce.com under the podcast will link to it. But Chad, there's been awesome, man. Thank you so much for taking the time enjoying Matt with you and talking dropping some Amazon truth bombs, talking m and a. Super, super fun. So thank you,

Chad:

Thank you.

Brett:

Awesome. And thank you for tuning in, really appreciate it. We'd love to hear from you. So if you've not done so, hey, we'd love that review on iTunes helps other people find the show makes my day. I may give you a shout out on the show if you leave a review on iTunes. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this episode, you’ll hear Rick Watson’s unfiltered hot takes on the latest changes coming from the “Big 2” in eCommerce: Shopify and Amazon.

Rick Watson is an eCommerce influencer, former software CEO, and the host of The Watson Weekly podcast. Frequently speaking at large retail events like ShopTalk, NRF, and IRCE, he knows his stuff!  

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• How Rick grew from 0 to 45,000 followers on LinkedIn in a few years (fun side notes for anyone wanting to grow their social following).
• The recent Shopify rate increases - people are complaining, but no one is leaving.
• Headless Commerce and Shopify Components - it’s new(ish), it’s sexy, and everyone is talking about it. Is it right for you?
• Amazon FBA changes related to IPI - this shows that Amazon is smarter than the rest of us.
• Buy with Prime - what is it, when does it make sense vs. when does it not? 
• Walmart, Target+, and the other marketplaces - should you care?

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Rick Watson (LinkedIn)
• Rick Watson (Twitter)
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO mg commerce, and today I've got a treat for you. I have an e-commerce influencer, a consultant, a guy who's just crushing it on LinkedIn and beyond. He knows the ins and outs of Shopify, Amazon, all the marketplaces, everything, anything and everything happening that's big, and this guy knows it. So I've got Rick Watson on the podcast today. He's the CEO and founder of RMW Commerce Consulting. And so Rick, welcome to the show, man. How you doing? And thanks for coming on.

Rick:

I'm doing great, Brett. Thanks for reaching out to me and happy to be on the pod.

Brett:

Yeah, it's one of those things where I've been and I've mentioned this on a few podcasts, I'm trying to dial in my social media game. So I'm posting on Twitter, which I'm partially liking and just honestly partially not. But I'm enjoying LinkedIn a lot, so I'm posting on LinkedIn. I see this cat named Rick Watson <laugh>, and he's dropping knowledge bombs, and I'm like, I got to check this guy out. So I look at your profile, you're like 45,000 followers on LinkedIn. So I'm like, all right, I got to get to know this guy. So reached out and here we are. So just as a quick aside, and we'll get into e-commerce news and things going on with Amazon and Shopify, and we'll dive into some juicy nuggets there, but talk about social media. You well get started on LinkedIn, and do you think is that worthwhile for someone to consider investing in their LinkedIn game?

Rick:

Yeah, I mean, look, it all depends on what your goal is. For me, LinkedIn is marketing. I started my own consulting firm about four years ago, and I know this is not going to be an interesting business if I can't find my own deals. And so it just started with

How can I help people? And so naturally, I've always enjoyed writing and speaking. And so I think there is a few different sides of it. One is how do I talk about the companies that people care about, which is the big two ecosystems in e-commerce by far, or Shopify and Amazon. So that's why you'll see me talk about Shopify and Amazon a lot. And then if I can sprinkle in there information while I'm talking about those topics, other things to help people, that gives people an idea the type of work that I do, but not in a salesy way. I was never good at really selling myself per se. And what I've figured out over the years, especially on social media, no one wants you to sell to them on social media, not so don't do it. So right. I think you have to remember why you're there and everyone has a goal. If your goal is to find new partners, it could be to find new customers, it could be Ed, but a lot of that social media, the way I think about it, it's the top of your funnel. It's how you meet new people. And if those people trust you, then maybe one day they'll do business with you, but not before. Love it, but not before. Right?

Brett:

100% no. And trust you build that on social media for sure. So how long did it take Rick Watson to go from whatever you had in the beginning to <laugh> now almost 45,000

Rick:

Follow? Yeah, so I've been on LinkedIn since the beginning, 2004, five. I think everyone started on LinkedIn as their online resume, but I didn't totally until I used, until I started my business, I never got serious about it. So when I founded my business in 2019, I had about 2,500 con contacts. And so in the last, that's awesome. Four, the last four years I've maxed out, I've learned two things. Number one is the maximum number of connections you can have on LinkedIn is 30,000. I did not know that when I started.

Brett:

Interesting. You cannot

Rick:

Connect followers. So I had to go to the whole follower model, which luckily Introdu, LinkedIn introduced this whole creator mode. So your profile becomes something that someone can follow rather than connect. Actually had to delete connections to meet to <laugh>. So it took me a while to figure out that after a couple months after I started my business, I basically post on LinkedIn every weekday morning. That's kind of my routine. I do it before I start. And that's really the foundation of all my content marketing, period. All my content basically starts on LinkedIn.

Brett:

Nice. And then you're taking pieces of that content and sharing elsewhere potentially.

Rick:

Yeah. So I might be like, if I post about a Shopify over a month period, maybe three of four of those posts might turn into a bigger blog post that will be then used for seo, or each of those stories might be used in my podcast in a little bit different way. And so I'm actually starting to get into looking to starting to get into video. So some of these more popular posts might turn into, so it's all these things are starting to reinforce each other as I kind of like, okay, I got LinkedIn, I have, okay. And the podcast is going, what else can I use this content for? Is what I think is interesting,

Brett:

Leveraging that content. Love it. Love it. Yeah. Well, let's dive into some news. I appreciate that. Side note. And for anybody wanting to build their social media following some free tips for you. So let's talk Shopify now fairly recently, depending on when someone listens, I think it was actually this morning or whatever as we're recording, but Shopify just announced a price increase. They bumped the price on basic and advance and sounds like it was a pretty decent hike, right? 30% or something. So talk that. Why did Shopify do it? It's probably obvious to most people, but why did they do it? And is this good, bad, or it just is?

Rick:

Yeah, I think it is. Look across the board, everyone's raising their prices totally. The cost of employees is higher, the cost of services is higher. And so that even applies to Shopify. Shopify hasn't done a price increase, and to be honest, since I've been following Shopify in the past five or six years at least, wow, I can't think of when they've done a price increase. And I think the COO mentioned that something like 10 or 10 or 12 years. So it's almost like a mistake. I think that they haven't raised prices till now. And so it was kind of inevitable when I saw their Q3 earnings and they kind of went from profitable to slightly, not terribly unprofitable, but negative 10% net margin. And I'm like, these guys are going to increase their price real soon here, <laugh>, no doubt. Because otherwise what do you have to do?

You have to lay, they're a software company who are all their expenses people, so they don't want to lay off people. So they're going to increase their prices and then they might do some layoffs and they ended up doing both. But yeah, I, I'm frankly kind of indifferent for it because I thought it was overdue before I posted my article this morning. I did some searching on Twitter just to get a sense for what people were thinking. There's a lot of complaints no one likes, no one likes to hear about a, no one likes to hear about a price increase, but in a week you will not hear one Pete, I guarantee

Brett:

It'll be dead. It'll dead

Rick:

Like

Brett:

Dead. This really sucks. But they're reaching for their wallet to

Rick:

Where else are they going to spend six months to pay a new agency to re-platform? No, nice to spend, no, they're going to spend the extra $10 a month <laugh>, right? Yes. Thank you.

Brett:

Yep. So likely long overdue. So interesting news there. Yeah, hopefully Shopify can get profitable because hey, we all need Shopify, even the ecosystem at large, a hundred percent Shopify's good for it. So let's move on to another topic. And this one's super interesting to me and it's one that admittedly I understand at a surface level but not deeper. And so I'm excited to chat with you about it. Let's explain what headless is for people and then Shopifys kind of play on that is Shopify components. We'll talk about that in a minute, but what is headless?

Rick:

Headless is an unfortunate term that has made its way into popular terminology in the e-commerce world. And I kind of came up as a developer, so I understand a lot of the technology. And I was a software engineer for many years as and an architect. So headless essentially means that there's a separation between how you display content to a user, the journey a user will go through on the path to purchase from back office and operations functionality. And traditionally in a software, Shopify, a Magento, a Magenta, a Salesforce, historically, all those things were kind of bundled in one software platform. So if the prototypical example is, if you don't your Shopify template, it's not like you could design a custom one. Let's is early on you couldn't design a custom one from scratch. You were kind of choose one of the a hundred templates and that's what you got, right?

And headless I first heard about headless back in the magenta days, something like 2013. And part of it, it was performance of the site. Once you put over a thousand products in Magenta, it would start to collapse. And so people would build completely custom front ends, but use the Magento cart on the backend. And so people talk, what I heard was people would talk about taking the head off of Magento, and by the head they mean the ux. Mm-hmm. Things like the homepage, the category pages, the search engine, the pdp, basically everything up until that add to cart button is the head. And so that's what people meet by headless. And I think the real look, at the end of the day, the goal for headless is flexibility and as flexibility

Brett:

And is speed a component too? Speed of the, and user experience

Rick:

Speed's a component. If the platform is slow by default, right? <laugh> not a component. If the site is pretty fast, Shopify isn't natively slow unless you load it down with a bunch of stuff. It's not the fastest platform on the planet either, but and so some people have run Shopify in the headless mode. Usually that started out with some kind of CMS on the front end or a custom front end, and you can create a user experience. And so I think as Shopify I think Shopify has seen this and then we'll probably talk a little bit about this, but there are a lot of vendors, particularly in the enterprise space, you may have heard term composable commerce or mock microservices, all these kind of terms are in the headless universe per se. And they're just different flavors of this idea.

Brett:

So you can take all these little microservices and kind of stack them together to build your own flexible custom UX and e-commerce experience. And maybe it's to use the example you used before, and probably this wouldn't be today because this is old, but magenta's the checkout or Shopify's the checkout, we've got these other things that are on the front end. They're the

Rick:

Head and exactly. And look, flexibility is great, but similar to a Lego set, most people don't want to build an e-commerce platform by be being given a set of Legos. The reason that Shopify is such an amazing company is that it works pretty well for most things people need. Totally. And so I think as a result, I think what most people who hear about headless who are like, oh, it must always be better because it's new. And I think that's not true at all actually. I think there's a segment of scenarios where out of the box cloud platforms are not flexible enough. Like multinational companies, people with multiple E r P systems with many different fulfillment centers, many different brands. I had a customer ask me like, oh, could Shopify support a million skews? And I even had the Shopify sales rep. Nope, <laugh>, right? <laugh>

Brett:

Not a

Rick:

Chance. So you probably need a little bit more a different platform

Brett:

Than sense something that's top of the box then, but it totally makes sense. Shopify out of the box works for most people. But we got this, the headless component, headless commerce, which is all sexy and it's all the rage and stuff that most people don't need. So then what is Shopify components and how viable is it? Where do you think it fits into this

Rick:

Industry? Yeah, so what I think is Shopify components, if you think about where Shopify started from like's, to use the contrast, Shopify is really for smaller brands that kind of grew up. And that's really the whole Shopify business. Now, of course there are many multi hundred million brands that have been in e-commerce for years and years. And technical architectures are usually a disaster and very complicated. They have 15 e r p systems, they have four brands, they're all on different platforms. They have a pim, like a product, a put a catalog over here. They have an order management system, maybe multiple of them, different warehouse systems all over the place. There's no way you could plug Shopify in as a hub to all those things. And so the idea of composable commerce per se, or what Shopify is calling component components is how can we break apart what's good about Shopify?

Let's say the checkout maybe some of the hosting infrastructure that was designed for commerce and fit them into this complex enterprise world. Can we provide value to this type of brand? And look, the jury is out because it's a new idea and this is a new direction for Shopify. But I think that's the vision is how can we take the best of what build Shopify into this great all-in-one solution, break it apart, and now we have this componentized solution that runs on great infrastructure. I mean, no one, Shopify's not perfect, but no one really worries about Shopify going down day to day, right? Right. So they know how to host software and they have a great checkout. And so I think to me, those two things like the great hosting and great checkout to me, especially early on, what Shopify components is going to be most about. And then they're saying other things are components. I'm not really buying it right now. They threw fulfillment in the fulfillment's, not a component. I mean, come on, everyone needs a three pl. It's a service. Don't call it a component. I mean you're just confusing what it is. But anyway, that's kind of the,

Brett:

Yeah, it's interesting. Do you, you know anybody using Shopify components and is it getting some traction or still

Rick:

Too new? Well then announced said a month ago, so the answer is no. I read the original press release carefully and Shopify is very slick with its marketing. And so they have these components that they have components that they've built over the past few years before they came up with this new name components. So hydrogen, oxygen, the integrations with these new CMS systems. And when they release components, they said, Hey guys, those things we did in the last three years, those are components. And so as a result, everyone's using comp. So it almost depends on how you define a,

Brett:

That's a good way to get adoption for your new product. Just rename your old product for new one and now it's like instant adoption. Yeah.

Rick:

Shopify's something master at this

Brett:

That is smooth. That is smooth for sure. Okay, cool. So good stuff there. Let's get some Shopify news. That's fun. Let's pivot it a little bit and let's talk Amazon. Cause I know you are deep in the Amazon world and so let's unpack this a little bit, but Amazon has made some recent changes to fba. So talk about that. What are some of those significant changes and why do they matter?

Rick:

Yeah, so I mean FBA is obviously a huge part of the third party seller universe on Amazon. It's essentially Amazon's full system that they introduced 15 plus years ago. Now it's had some growth challenges in the past few years where they've struggled with capacity constraints mostly brought about by the pandemic. There's more sellers than space. And so they doubled their fulfillment capacity in the past two years. And one of the things that I think what they're trying to do now is they're basically trying to prevent the next storage crisis in advance. So Amazon is smart people, they try to think ahead of what's going to come going on. And so they introduced this new feature in the last month called I don't think they've rolled it out technically yet. It's called FBA Capacity Management. And basically what it means is every seller, even if they're using FBA ta, they get a certain amount of storage allocated.

Like, okay, you're a seller, you can get this much storage and if you want to get more tough, this is how much that each brand gets. And so what they found is, okay, we have this storage problem and we have sellers that want more space and we have sellers that aren't using their space properly. So what they came up with is a way to solve all these problems at once, which is brands that are doing well, you can bid for more storage. And Amazon we have, oh, we can grant you that request. So you're like, okay, we think that you want to double your storage. Great, tell me about the inventory you're going to put in this. It's like, okay, this inventory's not selling no request denied. Oh, if this inventory has really good sell through by and it's measured by a metric called I I or inventory performance index. Essentially if your sell through is good in 30, 60 days say, then you have a much higher likelihood of not only getting access to new storage if you ask for it. And second is you actually aren't going to pay extra for that storage if you sell through that inventory. So it's almost like a carrot of putting good inventory in FBA and taking out bad inventory and penalizing people who by giving them less space if their inventory doesn't sell well,

Brett:

Which is really smart on Amazon's part, how do they maximize even though they doubled their warehouse space and there are I think some 1200 fulfillment centers in the US or whatever. You probably need better

Rick:

Idea.

Brett:

It's crazy. Yeah. But yeah, still you got to maximize that space. So what do you, you incentivize the product they're selling and you make it really hard for people to send more products in there are not selling. Yeah, very, very smart. Why Amazon is a leader. Sure. So if your i p is good, you may get that extra space and not have to pay any extra fees If it's maybe somewhere in the middle, maybe they'll give you extra space but charge you a premium for hundred

Rick:

Kind of what's happening percent. Exactly. So if almost your I P I is good for the extra storage, then you get back what would've been your fees as not cash, but credits. Amazon is way smarter than the rest of us. So they're not giving you dollars back. They're giving you like, oh, if you want to get more, it won't give you future credits. So they're paying back you gift certificates basically to future FBA storage, which is again, which is really

Brett:

Hilarious.

Rick:

Another evil genius idea that they came up with this at the same time.

Brett:

Totally <laugh> incentivizing merchants to do what's in the best interest of Amazon and in the best interest of Amazon's customers. So that that's good. And then the reward is gift certificates, basically

Rick:

<laugh>, right?

Brett:

Future credits on stuff.

Rick:

We're going to try that. You can only buy from them, right?

Brett:

<laugh>, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is super interesting. Okay. But we deal with this a lot to our agency. Obviously we've got a big Amazon department and we help with the organic side and the paid side, but we do run into this sometimes with clients where they're limited on inventory and then you can't really hit the gas pedal too hard on some of your growth strategies because then your sell through is too high. So then it's like this game of let's consistently build that I I. So that increases your capacity. So it's a bit of a process for sure.

Rick:

And so I think long term, look, I has always been pretty important to Amazon, but I think you can see how it becomes more important with as space becomes an issue.

Brett:

Yeah. So space becomes premium. Cool. So we got that as a new rollouts fbi. F b what else is new on the f b side?

Rick:

I, it depends if you want to go for buy with Prime, that's probably the next big

Brett:

Tools. And first of all, explain this because Amazon and really all the tech companies are notorious for this Google name something then renames it three times. And I know Shopify may be similar, but Amazon, so there's a few things that are named similarly, but what is Buy with Prime?

Rick:

Buy with Prime is essentially a way for, let's describe it from the consumer point of view first, A prime shopper can go to a non-Amazon website and get a prime-like experience, meaning they can be guaranteed that they can use their Amazon account, they're stored information and get their item in with a prime promise within two days. And it be part of the A to Z guarantee, which means you'd get free, no questions asked, returns and everything, the whole prime promise essentially. So that's the consumer promise from a merchant side, it means that if you're a merchant with a direct consumer website, basically like fba, Amazon's fulfillment plus Amazon Pay had a baby and that's what Buy with Prime is. And so a lot of people, a fair number of merchants already had Amazon Pay on their website. And this AM Prime becomes basically a new button on the product detail page labeled Simply Buy with Prime.

And when you click it if you have that inventory in an Amazon facility either mcf, which is kind of the white box, Amazon or fba, which is all your stuff for your three P business, which is in a Amazon box you can actually do either you then click off to the normal Amazon pay flow, which looks like PayPal or any other third party payment flow. You go off to a page, you select your shipping method, and then you go back to the website and then Amazon will share your contact information back with the brand. And so the brand gets something from it, they get to mark themselves to Prime shoppers and they get to co-own this shopper's data. And then Amazon gets something to put them because obviously they're interacting with Amazon. And for Amazon everything is about Prime. So why does Amazon do Lord of the Rings? Like the answer is they want more Prime members, right? Totally. So yeah, everything about anywhere the Prime brand can ensure that prime members get more value wherever they go.

Brett:

Prime is the ultimate accelerator for that growth flywheel. Once someone becomes a prime member, your consumption on Amazon goes up dramatically. And so Amazon knows that and they want to incentivize that. And this is really interesting because one of the arguments we hear some of the things that, of the things I hear a lot is, hey for those that don't want or think you shouldn't sell on Amazon, hey, if you grow your business on Amazon, it's no longer your customer customer. And that's partially true from a data standpoint. Amazon owns the data. You do get to see some of that. But ultimately, in my mind, that's not a reason to not be on Amazon. That's kind of like saying, Hey, if you sell a product, don't get on the shelves of Walmart because that's a Walmart customer. Now you like this way, retail's always worked, right?

It's distribution and if you're a great brand, you want people to discover you on Amazon just like you would on the Walmart store shelves. But anyway, this is a little bit better in that, hey, what is one of the hangups if someone's checking out on your D two C store? Well, do they trust it? Do they trust the delivery? Do they trust the checkout? This gives you that Amazon checkout and you still get the data, which is interesting. Now, I would love your take on this. I know when this first happened, Shopify said, Nope, not on Shopify against t o s can't do buy with PRI on Shopify. Yep. Have they they backtracked on that? Are people just doing it anyway? What's your take on that?

Rick:

Yeah, I look they technically, I think Shopify warns against it. Okay. They're not preventing it. And it's almost like I think they're taking a little bit of a wait and see attitude. And I think it's smart to be honest with you, because I think the average D two C brand who is really focused on their brand probably doesn't want Amazon on their website in the short term. Maybe in the long term they might change their mind, but in the short term, for sure not. If I think about the average D D C brand, that's just not how they think about the world at all. It's just a different reference. However, there's millions of Amazon sellers that have a very small d TOC presence and they have no hope of building their own traffic on their own and attracting customers. And so if Amazon can be an accelerant to help them move some of these Amazon shoppers to their website, which it's, look, it's proven to happen. There are multi-billion dollar businesses. Anchor is one of the started on it as an Amazon brand.

Brett:

And one of my favorite brands, by the way, in terms of Chargers for your phone, for your MacBook, whatever percent, that is always the brand that I buy. I trusted.

Rick:

Yeah, yeah. No, it's great.

Brett:

But it's another example of a good brand that was built on Amazon, but now it's a brand. I'm not just buying an Amazon charger, I'm buying Anchor even though I buy on

Rick:

Amazon Charger a hundred a percent. But you gained that trust on Amazon because you trusted what the reviews. Yep, yep. Right?

Brett:

Yeah, exactly. And you bring up a really good point. I think if someone is highly skilled, and we talk about this a lot. In fact, I posted on that on Twitter a couple weeks ago in the tweet and gain a lot of traction. I was like, Hey, if you were to start a brand today, start an e-commerce brand, would you start on Shopify and then launch on Amazon? So start on Shopify, build a following, build a community d toc, and then once you've got a brand following, then launch on Amazon. Or would you start on Amazon first and then try to go D to C after? And it was really interesting. People were very passionate both ways. It was almost 50 50, a little bit more leaning towards building on Shopify. And I would kind of agree, if you've got the skill to build D two C and you can build up that brand and build up that demand and build up that interest, then when you go to launch on Amazon, you'll take off there and you won't be as priced.

It won't be like a pricing game as much and stuff like that, but I could totally, so if you can build that D two C customer, I see there's no reason why you just don't do a Shopify checkout, just keep it all within Shopify. But if you need to maximize your inventory that's inside Amazon, or if you live on Amazon mostly and now you're trying to go D toc, maybe it is a good gateway. Maybe it is a good little transition little bridge to go from strictly Amazon to D to C. So definitely it is super interesting. Yeah,

Rick:

No

Brett:

Percent. Any case studies or takeaways or anything you, you've heard from people that are using it? I know it's pretty new.

Rick:

Yeah, it's pretty new. I have been doing some secret chopping recently, so I will be hopefully releasing some content about what's it really working. And Amazon has a number of case studies and if you saw, they announced it in September something last year, and then January they're launching it. It's been invite only, it's actually going to be invite only until February 1st this year. But apparently they did some studies and they, they'd be testing that the Buy with Prime button increase conversion over a similar PDP 25%. And so

Brett:

Interesting. We'll

Rick:

See. And I'll say in some cases it's more, some cases it's less like your mileage may vary. And so I think that I, that's why they're did the beta period is so they can prove and gather this data so that they can launch it to the wider world. I think to me, the hardest part of adopting power with Prime is FBA period. The average DDC brand doesn't have their stuff in fba, they have their own d P,

Brett:

Right? Right, exactly. So

Rick:

It's not really an option. And look, if they have an Amazon business, that's one thing, but then do you, now you're confusing the ba, so

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, it's like don't straight, your inventory is not there.

Rick:

Yeah, it's not straightforward, I would say.

Brett:

Yeah, that really makes sense. So Rick Watson out there doing some mystery shopping, so hey, another reason to follow Rick on LinkedIn, because you'll get access to those case studies and those examples when they come out. So sounds fun. Alright, kind of as we wrap up curious your take on Walmart. So when you look at the two biggest players online in terms of marketplaces and just online retailers, it's Amazon and then Walmart, but it's not really that close. If you look at market share and shoot from the hip a little bit here, but different numbers, but Amazon's like 40 to 49% of all purchases are on Amazon. Somewhere in that neighborhood. Walmart is like six, right? You know, look at fulfillment centers like we talked about Amazon's like 1200, Walmart's like 200 and Walmart's got all the stores and stuff. But what is your view on Walmart as a marketplace and as a viable online competitor at Amazon? And how are you consulting your clients to

Rick:

Use? Yeah, what I would say is for the average brand look you, Walmart, you have to pay attention to, but I mean the big three, Amazon, Walmart at Target, everyone needs to pay attention to. Beyond that, it kind of drops off and it becomes much more a niche. If you're at home improvement, you have to worry about Home Depot, and if you're in beauty, you might need to worry about Ulta and Sephora. So it gets very niche after that. But the big three, everyone needs to care about. And so most of the brands that I consult with, Amazon, Walmart, and Target are there customers on retail wholesale side period. And so as you think about marketplaces, those are really, Walmart is the only really market marketplace that you can recommend without question, as long as someone has already started to scale their Amazon business, you're like, should I care about when you go, there's like, I don't know, 50 marketplaces in the us which one should I care about? Well, probably not 50 of them. You should probably just make sure your Amazon and Walmart business are optimized first and then you can start caring. But for most people, they're never going to get there because there's always, if you have $10 to spend, you should probably invest eight in Amazon, one in Walmart, and one across every one else. You know what I mean?

Brett:

Exactly. Or maybe in the beginning you just invest all $10 in Amazon

Rick:

A hundred

Brett:

Percent and really grow that. And then you start looking at other things. And for a lot of our clients, we recommend something similar where let's really focus on the immediate opportunities on Amazon and then we'll begin to look at Walmart. And sometimes Walmart is a couple percentage points in Lyft. Yeah, maybe it's 5%, maybe it's a little more, but it's not going going to be a game changer, but it is certainly something considered. Yeah. Curious also your take on, you mentioned Target. So we've got kind of an end with Target plus for at least some verticals through a couple connections we have and have a few clients that are on Target Plus that's pretty interesting. We actually got some people that are moving some products on Target plus what's your take there? And it sounds like probably a lot of your merchants are on Target plus as well.

Rick:

Yeah, I think it's interesting, particularly a O V seem to be higher on Target relative to other places, which I think moves in needle for some people. I think Target is just such a quality retailer that relate, that relationship is important.

Brett:

Oh, quality customer buyer, pretty loyal, the target fans or still loyal to Target

Rick:

A hundred percent. Again, marketplaces smaller than Walmart, so it's like diminishing returns as you go down. So Walmart and Target are never going to make or break someone's year if they're the head of marketplace period. It just won't cause it's always going to be, it's certain it's on the wrong side of the 80 20. Yeah, yeah. Even maybe 90 10, right? And yeah, I'm sure you

Brett:

See, yeah, I would say so. I would say probably more like 90

Rick:

10. Yeah, exactly. With your clients as well. So one of them can of these businesses can be a 200 million business and one cannot, right? So yeah, it's a very powerful idea, and this is something I coach my clients on, where should you spend that next incremental dollar? And almost more important than your dollar is your time. Most people have a fixed team, they have three people on their team, and I've walked into clients that were on 10 marketplaces and a 10 million Amazon business. I'm like, this makes, no, doesn't make any sense. Yes, you're diversified for

Brett:

All three people on Amazon, forget about the rest for a while.

Rick:

<laugh>, right, for forever, yes, you're diversified, but you are destroying your own opportunity. So

Brett:

Really good point. Really, really good point. Awesome. So you talked about clients and I mentioned your business as we kind of launched here, but RM W Commerce consulting. So talk about what you do, how do you help people and what are the types of brands and companies you're working with?

Rick:

Yeah, so I've worked with a number of different, mostly private equity back brands over the years, which means basically the ultimate owner is an investor that has a portfolio of brands and companies that work for them. Some of them I've worked with are like W H P Global, which bought the brand Ann Klein. They own toys of Russ. They own Joseph Aboud. And so helping them with digital strategy. And a lot of these brands that private equity buys are in the e-commerce world, you might call them opportunity buys and because there's something that people love about this brand, but maybe it's been mismanaged and people under, there's name recognition there, but something about the execution is not right. The profitability is upside down or their digital strategy is bad or they're not in the right, there's something about the business that needs to be improved. And so that's when private equity comes in.

And so I'm usually very much aligned with the new investors and the CEO to help transform these businesses. Basically kind of assess where we are, recommend like a punch list of items. These are the top 15 things that I would be doing right now, and here's what your returns are going to be over the next two years, whether it's people, process technology across digital marketing platforms supply chain, merchandising, but you name it, insourcing out outsourcing. And it's different for every brand depending on how much money they're working with, what their timeframe is et cetera, how many staff they have.

Brett:

Yeah, totally makes sense. So yeah, it's a lot of fun. People, processes, technology, mapping that out. So you're looking, working on the strategic level, you're maybe helping build out the team or find the right agency or find the right partners. And so you are guiding these companies, which is awesome. And so you are primarily working with private equity back companies or exclusively working with private

Rick:

Equity back companies? I would say primarily that's about two thirds of the business. I also worked with software and service providers in the e-commerce industry. I, I've been in the software most of my career and I've been a software company ceo. So a lot of e-commerce service providers, a lot of times in supply chain marketing payments have come to me for advice on Broadway, go to market strategy i e-commerce is a competitive market. And so if you are a supply chain provider or technology provider or a three PL or a payments company, you may be like, how do I stand out? What should my strategy be? What is the right message for me? And it's usually companies that are between series A and series C and they're trying to make some kind of change in the business, right? Well, we've grown to this point, but we're kind of hitting diminishing returns and they're bigger players above us, so how do we break through to that next level is really how I help them from a go-to-market messaging and approach point of view.

Brett:

That's awesome. That's awesome. So if someone's interested or like, Hey, I need to find out more about this, or this sounds like it might be a fit for me, how can they get in touch with you?

Rick:

Yeah, the simplest way that has all the information there is my website, rmw commerce.com or it's also easy, just hit me on LinkedIn search for Rick Watson and you'll find me and should be a message and I'll respond. So

Brett:

That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, Rick, this has been a ton of fun but do follow Rick Online. He's a great follow on LinkedIn. You'll learn a lot, you'll learn a lot daily but also catch you at events, right? You're speaking at nrf, you're speaking at other Yeah,

Rick:

Events. I'll be at Shop talk events, happy at I R C, I'll be at leads, so that'll be fun. Yeah, looking forward to meet anybody who comes around.

Brett:

Awesome. And also, I think I mentioned at the top of the show, but the Rick Watson Weekly, is that the name of the

Rick:

Podcast? Yeah, the Watson Weekly is a podcast Watson, we started about a year and a half ago, and it's kind of a different than the normal podcast, 15 minutes every week. It's a digest of e-commerce news and hit subscribe in your Apple podcasts and would love to have you, Liz

Brett:

Watson, weekly, get that weekly e-commerce news. I like it. Rick, thank you so much. This is a ton of fun and we'll have to do it again.

Rick:

All right, thanks a lot, Rick.

Brett:

Alright, thanks man. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love your feedback. So if you've not already done it leave us that review on iTunes or wherever you consume podcasts. And as I've mentioned, hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter. We'd love to connect with you and keep the conversation going on the socials. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Bear Handlon is a former Yale football player, Naval Officer, and the Co-Founder and CEO of Born Primitive, one of the hottest brands in the fitness, athleisure, and outdoor apparel space. Bear’s story is truly unique and full of valuable insights. 

Bear had a simple idea, $4,000 in the bank, and was about to ship off to officer candidate school, but he decided to launch a company anyway. He parlayed the success of his initial product, custom-made compression shorts, to build a large and diverse brand with a wide array of products.

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• When to focus vs. when to expand your product offering. 
• Born Primitive’s 3 keys to building a growth flywheel.
• How to turn mistakes into extreme customer loyalty.
• How getting the product right fuels everything else. 
• Why being face-to-face with customers is the key to product innovation and marketing. 
• While products can be replicated, a strong and unique “brand identity” cannot.

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Born Primitive
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of omg commerce, and today is another episode in the continuing series of How I Built It series. We're talking to the CEO and co-founder of Born Primitive. If you are active, if you're into exercises, if you're just into looking good, you've probably heard of Born Primitive, but if not, you'll hear about it today. And so I've got like I said, the CEO and co-founder, bear Handlin with me today. Bear, how you doing man? And welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Bear:

Appreciate you having me, Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. So you and I connected at Ezra Firestones Blue Ribbon Mastermind was, I would say one of the best events I've been to in terms of, well, the content was great, that people were great, but the setting, holy cow, it was Cardiff by the Sea just north of San Diego. We could see this place right on a cliff. And so it was good to connect with you and good to hang out there. It was just a pretty epic time.

Bear:

Yeah, I used to live out in San Diego, so anytime I have a chance to get back, I'm like, I'm all about it. So that was like, yeah, they killed it with the venue and obviously the content was awesome. Tons of squared away people that are all you kind of solving the same problems in e-commerce. So super cool to be a part of it

Brett:

And just a plug like, hey, now that the world is opened back up, I believe you got to get to in-person events. And it seems like to me, it seems like the trend is to smaller events rather than the giant events that we used to have, but I believe got to be at those events. It's where you make connections, where you make breakthroughs. It's worth the time. So good stuff, man. Well, I'm super excited to dive in your story. I got to hear some of it on stage as you and Ezra were chatting at Blue Ribbon, but I want to unpack it a little bit and of course share it with the wider audience. So what's your background? Cause you were a naval officer, so you had a military career right now for those watching the video, you're crushing a Red Bull. You worked for Red Bull, right? So talk about you went to Yale, is it right that you went to Yale? That's super awesome, if that's true.

Bear:

Yes. Yeah, so graduated from Yale University played football there. I was a big sports guy growing up so I had the opportunity to pursue that. Graduated, went and worked for Red Bull for four years, did marketing for them. It was awesome. Still, I'm still loyal even though I'm not employed with them anymore, as you can see. And

Brett:

They're like the OG Energy drink, right? The original, yeah. Yeah,

Bear:

They invented it eight in 1987 came over to the States in 97. The energy drink category didn't exist until Red Bull. So everyone else is just the poer copy

Brett:

Just to,

Bear:

Other brands are doing great, but they'll never be able to. They invented the category totally. So that's their claim to fame with Bread Bull. So that was really cool. I learned a ton about kind of brand and marketing through them, and obviously the way they do it is kind of second to none. So great exposure ended up making the decision to join the military when I was 26 and just before joining the military actually launched more primitive. So horrible timing from a logistics standpoint. I don't know, you'll

Brett:

Start a military career and become an entrepreneur at the same time. Great. Yeah,

Bear:

I think we started it maybe two and a half months before I shipped off to Officer Candidate School. So that's how it all got started. And then I was kind of dual hating being active duty naval officer for about eight years in running born primitive. I just got out one year ago, so this is my first full year as of a few days ago where I've been able to be full-time c o and not sending out emails at three o'clock in the morning from my laptop somewhere overseas or something like that. So that

Brett:

Is amazing. How does that feel? Is the renewed focus really special? Is the free head space really amazing? What's it like now not being military officer and entrepreneur simultaneously?

Bear:

It's great. It's like I've heard people use the analogy though, it's kind of a gas that fills any space it's given. So yes, I have all this free time in quotes, but it immediately got filled with more primitive. So it's not like I'm any less busy. I think I'm actually more busy because I'm able to be more involved. But there was this ironic experience that I had in the military ex, there's a ton of red tape, ton of bureaucracy to make any decision that takes forever. So part of my day I would be in that environment and then I would go to born primitive where I'm the CEO in particularly early on where there's only a few of us you make decisions so fast, you can up the budget immediately. You can just say, oh yeah, let's do it. So I saw both ends of the spectrum of efficiencies and I think that it was good to see both because even with the business now we have 75 employees, I'm still trying to keep the lean, agile, efficient components and never turn into this big bureaucratic organization that just has a bunch of layers of unnecessary tasks.

So I think seeing both has been a huge benefit for me as we develop this thing.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And it makes a ton of sense seeing the insane bureaucracy and red tape and the hurry up and weight mentality that I know exists in the military but as you scale and as you grow, you do need systems and processes. That's something we experienced as an agency. And I was looking back at this presentation I did in 2019 and we're at 25, 26 people, something like that, and now we're at close to 60. And so as you grow you do need processes. So there is something very valuable about checking twice and having systems and procedures in place, but min when things just slow down to lurch and or grind to a halt and all the red tape that that's no good either. So they're like, there's got to be this balance in between of entrepreneurial speed and energy and enough systems and processes burn the whole thing down. So I'm guessing you probably found a happy medium playing in both those worlds.

Bear:

Exactly. Yeah. I think you take the good of the systems and processes and then lean it down a little bit. But 100% we're absolutely to the point now almost to a fault, where I realize, all right, we're a little too loose here. I we need to have KPIs and monthly reports and things like that. So I think we're trying to find that middle ground now.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome, man, that's awesome. So then for those that don't know, and I kind of alluded to it, I said, Hey, if you're into working out and you into looking good and stuff, you probably heard of Born Primitive, but what is born primitive and why did you start it back in the day when you were just about to ship off to the military? So yeah, what is it? Why'd you start it?

Bear:

Yeah, so we're an apparel company mainly D TOC right now but expanding into mass retail as we speak and just launch on Amazon. A couple months ago, congrat, as we were talking, congrat about Congrat. That's awesome. Year or two ago, I probably would've said we're a workout apparel company. We're a whole lot more now. Workout apparel was what we started with but now athleisure apparel's huge for us. And then we recently just launched our outdoor apparel which is a whole new category, whole new kind of sister brand for us. It's called Born Primitive Outdoor and then launch our campfire collection, which is now jeans and flannels and sheline denim jackets and anything you know, would wear maybe wear around the camp fire. So we have a pretty good, and even some active professional stuff. So men's stretchy dress shirts and active pants, things like that that you travel in.

So nice. We're covering a pretty wide variety now. But at the core of it, it started as a workout apparel company and just the cliff notes of how it started, I developed a pair of custom compression shorts that was specific to a very niche market in Olympic weightlifting. I was doing a lot of training for CrossFit, and that was one of the lifts we were doing. So I took an old football girdle from the Yale days and cut out the quad pad and took it over to my neighbor who was a seamstress, and she stitched in the padding in another area of the shorts. And that was the first prototype.

Brett:

And this was for a specific CrossFit move or CrossFit workout, is

Bear:

That right? Yeah, so the Olympic lift is called snatch and there's a portion of lift where the bar can make contact and you're like your pubic bone to the point where some guys in competition were fracturing that bone. Dang. So I just basically stitched that pad in that area and the intent was literally just to make one, and I was going to be the only one that would wear it because I would just plan on wearing it on the days I had that lift and then just wash it a couple times a week. And then long story short, guys were saying, Hey, you should market that. And I said, yeah, no way. And I did a little bit of market research and realized I wasn't the only guy experiencing that problem. I said, Hey, maybe there's something to this. Read some books on overseas sourcing, kind of schooled myself up, got an Alibaba, put out tons of feelers, whittled it down to a couple suppliers. And after quite a process, we ordered, I remember our first order was 200 units, and at the time that was pretty scary, that m oq of 200 units. And then then I shipped off to Officer Can School and Born Primitive was rocking and rolling. So that's how it all

Brett:

Started. That's crazy. And I did not know you sold the stretchy dress shirts. I'm going to have to check those out. I'm a big fan of those actually. So excited to look at that. And so yeah, you started with this one product for a specific need for a specific group of people namely yourself. And then when you got that order of 200, did you sell through it immediately or were you so busy going through ocs and stuff that you didn't have time? What was that like?

Bear:

Yeah, honestly, it marketed itself and we got really lucky. There was a silver medalist in Russia who got wind of it, and him and his guys ordered it and they were posting about it which was huge. I mean, we didn't pay them, we didn't ask for it. So that kind of put us on the map to have a world champion and a silver medalist as well, plugging. It was pretty cool. And yeah, I remember I had the little PayPal notification and turned on my phone and you'd get the little cha-ching, you know what I mean? And it was so exciting. And that

Brett:

Was right. Money we're in the money

Bear:

Of course, eventually we had to turn that feature off because it is a bit more frequent now. But I remember that was just exciting in the early days to see that initial traction. And then we realized, I quickly realized, okay, this is cool, but we can't pigeon our whole ourself to one product. We need to build a brand. So we honestly just started screen printing t-shirts and hoodies and going to any CrossFit event we could within reach every weekend and selling clothes from a card table in a little crappy little tent. And that's pretty much hot.

Brett:

Much clothes and compression shorts were like,

Bear:

We'd have screen printed t-shirts and hoodies and then the compression shorts, and that was pretty much the product lineup. Got it. And we would just set up at any CrossFit event, we could pack up the Jeep. We were just super scrappy. There was no marketing plan, there was just two of us. And we'd work all weekend, get back inventory, everything. I remember we had a yellow legal pad, was how we took orders, which is just hilarious. Just thinking of the logistics and systems we had in place, we didn't know any better and that's how we did it. So the first three or four years we just pounded the pavement and got out there and slowly little by little we started establishing the following and we expanded into, I think the light bulb moment for us was we launched our first sports bra, and that was basically our first kind of custom cut. And so product that with more of a performance mindset of like, Hey, anyone can do screen printed stuff. Let's actually try to make some performance apparel with a purpose. And that, I think that was the moment where we said, okay, this is the lane we want to run it because anyone can screen print on a t-shirt. And I think that was at the three and a half or four year mark and Nice. We really haven't looked back ever since.

Brett:

Awesome. So I'm curious, were you born primitive from the beginning? Was that the name from the beginning or did that evolve and change over time?

Bear:

So the first original name was technically Snatch Shorts. That was the name of the product. And I remember it was actually one of the founders of Early, and I'm forgetting his name right now, I'm embarrassed, but I remember I had a call with him in regards to an athlete he was representing that we were going to sign. And on the call he actually gave me some great advice and he was the one that actually recommended, Hey, I like what you're doing, but if this is long term, I think you should consider changing your name to a brand name. Yes. And then I remember I thought about it. So I think two months in we quickly changed to Born Primitive from snack shorts, but yeah, that's awesome. Technically the OG name was Snatch Shorts llc, yeah, incorporated in Indiana. And then I got some good advice from a dude who's done it before and totally thank God because I don't think Snatch Shorts LLC would have quite the ring that born. I

Brett:

Don't think so. I want to buy my snatch shorts hoodie you want.

Bear:

Exactly. Exactly. And that's exactly what he said. Really

Brett:

Pigeon pigeonholes you into this one

Bear:

For sure. Yeah, and I see other companies do that. I'm like, man, I wish they would think about that because you might crush with that product, but then what's after that? Nothing. You know what

Brett:

I'm saying? Yeah. We just, we've been consulting and working and investing in a brand called Keto Brownie originally, and they're like, Hey, we can't just be a Brownie. So they rebranded as Sinless Snacks. And so now the Keto Brownie is a product and it still has the name Keto Brownie, but it's part of the umbrella of similar snacks. So yeah, you got to think long term about the brand for sure. So you guys did something that I think is really interesting, and I think this is something that every entrepreneur, brand owners should do if they can. So you were face-to-face with your customers selling stuff, getting feedback, trying to hawk stuff at shows and stuff. What do you think you learned or what did you pick up? What'd you learn about customer preference? Customer taste, marketing, any lessons come from those hundreds of CrossFit shows that you guys went to?

Bear:

Yeah, I think for one, you learn about what the customer actually wants, right? Because you're in the trenches with them and there's no better data point than that. Yeah, I think the second major thing would just be learning the importance of one-on-one interactions, especially in the early days. That's the marketing plan. You're building your business brick by brick, and every interaction is critical. And it's cool to still talk with people because I still honestly run checkout at some of our events because to me, that's a great way to just check in with customers. As I'm checking 'em out, I'm saying, Hey, how have you heard of us? And you'll either get, oh, I've never seen you guys, or I've been with you guys for eight years. I remember when you were back in this event eight years ago and you were running checkout. You know what I mean? It's cool to give them a positive brand experience in person. And then over time that foundation gets bigger and bigger. And I think some people might overlook that one-on-one interaction and how important that is. But if you're playing the long game that's how you build a loyal following.

Brett:

Yeah, I love the in-person events, and we do it too as an agency. We have a booth and people come by. And so I always thinking or always observing what headlines do people read and when they stop and say something, what are they asking for and what do they comment on or not comment on it? And when you're at the table, what are the T-shirts they pick up versus those that they leave? And what are the questions they ask that you might not ever get back to you if you didn't do the in-person event? And so I remember one of my favorite quotes was from I think Chesky of Airbnb where he said to do build a company that scales, you need to do things that don't, right? So you can't just spend your every day going to shows, right? That's not a way you scale a brand, but to effectively scale a brand, you need to do some of those things because you learn stuff you won't learn anywhere else.

Bear:

Absolutely. And that's why we still do it. I don't go early in construct the booth anymore. I used to even, I just recently stopped doing that. I was finally told, Hey, you can't fly in two days early and be running a power drill. You need to be doing other things.

Brett:

Maybe you should be running the company. I don't know. Yeah,

Bear:

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I roll in and run checkout and get to interact with customers and see what their tastes are. So it's a great way to get real realtime data. And then obviously that applies to our website. It's as far as merchandising and what people are wanting. So it's a good use of my time.

Brett:

I love it. So I want to talk about two things that I think are super important, but sometimes tricky to find the right mix or the right timing of. So there, there's huge power in focus doing one thing really well, the snatch shorts, making those really, really well or the initial performance sports bra, making that really, really well. But then you got to expand if you're going to build a lifestyle brand, if you're going to reach a larger audience, you got to expand into other products. One of the early mistakes we made as an agency is we tried to do everything. We did web design and we did TV and we did direct mail. Cause we had some background in that and it was exhausting and we weren't great. Then we realized, hey, we're really, really good at search marketing, so we're going to go deep on that. Went deep on that, started crushing it, growing, getting some recognition nationally, and then we started expanding from there, which I think that can work. You focus on something, you nail it, and then you begin to expand. How did you guys approach that? When did you realize, okay, hey let's try the sports bra, because you obviously weren't thinking about sports bras when you made the shorts originally. So when did you get the idea for that and then when did it become clear, okay, we got to expand beyond this too?

Bear:

Yeah, so the co-founder, Mallory she was the one who kind of thought of she was having frustrations with the active apparel she was wearing at the gym. And as I said, we weren't really doing any of that performance stuff. So she said, well, hey, why don't I take a swing at this and I'm going to design a sports bra that I enjoy and nice. And she nailed the features on it. And I remember we launched it at the CrossFit games, I think in 2015. We sold out of it and girls were wear wearing 'em at the event and coming back the next day and getting the other three colors. So that was a really good initial sign. Nice. Did you have

Brett:

An athlete wear it at that, the CrossFit games?

Bear:

Not that year I don't think. But the word kind of spread because girls were telling their girlfriends, they were coming back to the booth and being like, I heard about the, do you have any of the vitality brass left? And that was just almost like an unexpected, holy crap, this is, there is a good development. So we kind of doubled down on, okay, we need do cut. And so performance apparel and mainly on the fitness stuff to start. And I think you bring up a good point of you have to be specific at least initially, and then you have to be very calculated. And when you expand what that's going to be and have a real plan that sports bra thing was a bit of a fluke I'd say, just because it was mal just trying to solve a personal need. But then we were like, okay, we're doing this kind of performance workout apparels that we're going to do and then the next transition would've into it. Athleisure stuff's like joggers and comfortable stuff that you could probably wear to the gym, but also lounge around the house just, I mean, how hot that market is as well. Massive. And we crushed

Brett:

At, and it's fueled by the pandemic that just helped at all explore. Oh

Bear:

Yeah. Crazy. I mean, our rest day joggers we sell a gazillion of them. We, they're our best product. It's so huge opportunity in and then yeah, I would say we rode in that lane for a good amount of time and I finally was like, okay, I think we're ready to go into another vertical. And that's what brought up out Born Primitive Outdoor which we just launched in September. And that's kind of backcountry mainly for us. We're kind of targeting the hunting audience but it's for anyone in the outdoors, it's a layering system all the way out to your layer pop jackets and stuff and rain gear. So that was something I always wanted to do is I, I'm passionate about the outdoors and I was like, okay, we're finally ready. Those other two components are super healthy and are thriving, but if you want to keep building the business and raising the ceiling on what you can accomplish, you have to carve out new lanes. So we did that and then our campfire collection was kind of a sequel to that, which is more flannels and jeans and Sherpa line denim jackets and just fun stuff you'd wear around that vibe. And then we're getting into tactical apparels, well in April. So we have, and then also the biggest one probably on this list right now, we're launching a performance shoe in July. So

Brett:

Dang man, that's

Bear:

When I'm looking at the roadmap for Born Primitive to get to certain top line milestones, I realized, okay, fitness is killing, but we have to some other revenue streams in different categories that will allow us to reach out to to other customers and bring in new people into the fold. So we're excited about it. There's a lot going on but I think you bring up a great point about it. It is a balance. You can't spread yourself too thin, too quick, or then you're doing everything at 80%.

Brett:

Totally. And yeah, you had built this machine and it was momentum was there, the athleisure, the performance wear, it was just going. And so when you get to a point where you're like, Hey, I can healthily invest in these other things without pulling away from the core, great, now it's time. And I liked it. Did you get feedback on the, Hey man, would love if you launched some outdoor wear, or was it more of a this is my passion, this is what I'm good at, I want better products in this category because it does fit people that are into CrossFit and exercise. A lot of them are out into outdoors as well, so it definitely fits. But was that driven more by personal interest or more and more by feedback from customers?

Bear:

Initially personal interest, and it was ironically validated pretty significantly. We retained an investment bank to help us go through a process to reach out to some private equity groups. And they did a survey on 2000 of our customers and basically posed the question, what would you like to see born primitive do? And the top two were footwear and outdoor apparel. And those were two things that interest were already working. And it was a very high number. It was over 70%. Wow. So that worked great with the deck. We were pitching these private equity groups like, oh, hey, we have hundreds of thousands of active customers. This was the number one and number two answer for what they want. And oh, by the way, this is already getting worked and it'll be launching on these dates.

Brett:

It's amazing. And so you guys primarily say, I got a couple questions there, but you primarily partnered with private equity to help fuel expansion and invest in new products and things like that.

Bear:

So actually no. We raised zero capital. We strapped it from the beginning and still have not we're nine years in last summer, or it was actually last spring, I finally made the decision, Hey, why don't we reach, why don't at least get in the game and see what the market will fetch? And we're actually currently under an L LOI with some really cool guys that bring some, it's amazing, unique experience, but we're only selling a very small portion of the business, so we're still going to run the show. I think these guys are great strategic partners. But yeah, it's one thing I'm really proud of is I see a lot of these other DDC brands that they raise 30 million, they raised 20 million. And I kind of chuckle because I'm not to sound arrogant, but if you were to give me 20 million bucks, I could stand up a D two C brand and have it very relevant very fast because you got 20 million bucks.

And we started this thing in a garage with nothing I think, at the life that at the time my life savings was like 4,500 bucks, and I was about to join the military. Our co-founder, Mallory, was a dental hygienist so I'd like to think a lot of these brands we compete with had quite a headstart on us, and we gained some serious ground on 'em, and now we're in the hunt with them. So it's something I'm proud of. And I think the way we had to conduct ourselves was so much different. And when we went through the investment process, one of the things that really made us stood out is we've always been profitable. So for these guys that are used to seeing at all these TDC brands that have these projections of profitability five years from now, they're like, oh, you guys have never lost money. And I was kind of a chuckle. Of course, yeah, yeah. There's another way to do it. And that's just because that's the way we had to do it because we didn't get a bunch of money up front, but it'll be nice to be with some partners now. They bring some unique experience. They're former executives at a very big apparel company, they publicly traded. So we're excited about what the new chapter's going to bring on that front.

Brett:

I love it, man. And now I've got several friends like Joe Twilight Brokerage and I've got some investment banker friends and private equity friends now, and we're looking to buy an agents here too, and potentially more, but just going through that process, I think that this is what's super interesting to me is as you talk to investors and as you look at, Hey, let's value our company, or let's maybe put it on the market and see what people say or let, let's look to go buy another business. Just the way you look at businesses in that lens or in that environment is different. And I think whether you do a deal or not, that will shape the way you think about the health of your business and the margins and how you're growing. And yeah, I love it. I love that you went through the process and awesome for you that you got an loi hope that goes through because yeah, it's nice to have partners when you're looking to expand and do different and bigger things. So that's cool. Yeah,

Bear:

You hit the nail on the head as far as learning to reverse engineer it once you see what they look at and what they ask if the process were to fall through, or if it does go through and we do it again in five years, I'll be so much more dialed in on what, what's important, at least on that front. And I'm actually one of the guys from It's quiet light, right? Yeah yeah. I'm reading his

Brett:

Joe Walker exit. Yeah,

Bear:

Yeah, I'm reading the book. I actually just started it last night. The exit Exit. Oh no,

Brett:

That is Joe Val. Joe's going to love that. I just gave Walker credit. Joe and Walker have this both in on the Quiet Light team. They both wrote books and they're a little competitive, but friendly. I love you both, by the way, if you guys are listening. Yeah. Joe is preneur and Walker. Diabol was by then Build is the name of his book. Both fantastic books.

Bear:

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'll check that other one out and then maybe I'll call which one is the strongest one, which is better so far. Yeah, yeah. We'll put it on the air.

Brett:

I love it. So question about footwear. So that surprises me. I don't know why it surprised me, but it does. So people are like, Hey, I don't want to wear my Nikes or Adidas or whatever workout shoes. They're like, nothing is meeting my needs here. I want you guys to make a shoe. What's the reason? Why are people saying they want footwear?

Bear:

I think part of it is we've have built an incredible amount of brand loyalty and we've kind of shown that anything we launched, the diehards will get it. So whether it's outdoor stuff or campfire or new workout stuff, they will come back. And it was just an obvious revolution. It's a, of course, we need to foot to do a footwear. And part of it is with our athlete marketing side, it makes a little bit harder to sign deals with athletes because we'd be like, Hey, we can do everything but shoes. And they're like, well, I guess I'll do another shoes. Shoes. So this will allow us to do full head to toe deals on the athlete side, which will be cool nice. But more importantly, we just look at our existing active customer amount and we're like, okay, if we order X amount of units, if we get 10% of these people to come by a shoe, we're looking at some outrageous numbers.

So it just made too much sense. And it's also fun for me. I, I'm very active. I work out all the time. And to be able to develop a shoe and then just be able to wear those, and it's just the fun development and we're going to get all the employees decked out, and then of course all of our athletes and influencers will get decked out. So it's just a cool development and I think it gives us a lot of opportunities beyond just a performance shoe, probably a running shoe. We have a canvas shoe that's more of a lifestyle sneaker that we'll be launching in August. So it allows for the sequels to happen that hopefully we can have disrupt the market a little bit.

Brett:

Love it, love it. And that makes all the sense in the world. Hey, one of the ways we learn is through failures or mistakes. And everybody likes to hear the crash and burn story or stub your toe story or, Hey, I screwed this up, but learn from it. What are some of the mistakes or the failings forward that you guys have had as a brand?

Bear:

Well, the first one happened really early and I think this was at the time a very big mistake, but I think it taught us a very good lesson that we still really hold onto. So the second order of the snatch shorts remember we upped it to 500. First order was 200. We sold through it, reordered 500. I was at Officer Candidate School. We received the order. We started shipping out the orders because people had pre-booked their orders. And what happened was they changed the adhesive they used on the padding to get it to stay at, kind of adhered to the fabric. So after the people washed it for the first time, the padding would disintegrate. So we thought we had just killed it. And it's order number two, you know what I mean? We're moving on and we have this massive customer service issue. I was at Officer Kenneth School, so I had limited communications.

So Mallory was reaching out to me, freaking out saying, what do we do? Long story short, we reached out to every customer prior to even the issue happening and saying, Hey, in transparency, there's probably a defect on this. We've already reordered no action required. We will ship you a pair as soon as it gets in. We think it'll be like eight weeks, but bear with us. I mean, just the response we got from that was so positive when we thought it was going to be a disaster in all hate mail, that it revealed that if you're just transparent and honest and you treat people and there's a human component to it, people will actually become more loyal. So ironically, it's like what should have been a disaster, actually built brand loyalty in the early days. And we still had that a couple times. I'd say nine years.

We've had a similar issue, maybe two or three occasions. We had a zipper issue on a a pair of shorts three years ago, and we did the same thing. We reached out to everyone, no action required. This might happen. If it doesn't happen, you'll get a second pair of shorts for free. No big deal. But we're replacing all of them. And just the customer service team, they came back like, man, the feedback's insane. People are thanking us and this and that. So I guess the lesson was you can take a negative and turn it into a positive, and it just totally reinforces how important the consumer interaction is because we're so used to talking with customer service agents that are either a robot or AI or this and that, and you just get on the phone with a real person that is a human and isn't confined by these parameters of how they can solve a problem. It was huge. So that was number one, I would say.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that so much because one, you guys were super proactive. You weren't like, Hey, some people may be okay with this. Let's just save a little cost and let's just only replace the ones that where people complain. Because for everybody that complains, there's a dozen more, couple dozen people that are just like, oh, this sucks. And they just move on and never say anything. So you were proactive, you took care of everybody. And young people see that human connection. They realize, oh, this is just a business run by people and they made a mistake or someone screwed them over, but they're taking care of me. That's all I care about. It deepens that relationship. That's super, super powerful. So kudos to you guys, noticed it and did the right thing fast, and I love that no action required where, hey, we'll replace this, but go here, enter your information, all that. No, I don't want to work for your mistake. And so you're taking care of people so that, that's awesome. Kudos to you guys. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from that. Any other mistakes you've learned from?

Bear:

I think the other biggest one is just inventory management. Long story short, during the height of the pandemic when it was just basically became impossible to forecast we just ordered just an absolutely outrageous amount of product based on what we thought was going to continue. And I guess, I know a lot of brands are in this boat right now where they have the

Brett:

Lulu Lemons in this boat as well. I just saw an article on LinkedIn, really, they're way overstocked.

Bear:

And you're starting to see a lot of brands. If you just do Google search on product, you'll see a lot of high high-end brands that are discounting dramatically on Google search and stuff. And that's a hundred percent why I think. So that was another big one, is as the CEO and mal, as the CEO weren't as involved as we should have been on those invoices that were going out, and had I just done a quick sanity check on it, I would've immediately seen, wait a second, that's like, that's 290,000 units of one collection. Let's reel that in a little bit. You know what I mean? I'm wiring 6 million overseas. Wait one wire. What I mean? But

Brett:

Everything was just so frantic and growing at such an amazing pace, and you're like, yeah,

Bear:

Yeah, we were. And everything was just firing on all cylinders. All right. I knew we were selling a ton, so like, oh, to make sense. And then once I actually dug into it, I said, holy, this, had we not been so profitable, that mistake, we would've been dead in the water as a business. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know what I mean? We just had 50% growth year over year. We would've been toast. So we got lucky. We were successful enough that we could weather that storm. Now we're in a really good position because a lot of this inventory, thank God is core items that we'll sell forever. The rest day joggers, you know what I mean? And things like black leggings, those are always going to be, we're never going to go, yeah, doesn't matter. They have 40,000 more than I need. From a cash flow standpoint, it was a nightmare. But again, we were able to weather it because we were successful. But that was the definitely our biggest mistake as kind of young naive entrepreneurs of just, oh yeah, send it the order in. And it's like, alright, we need to actually take a look at this because we're talking about millions and millions of dollars we're sending overseas that and in hundreds of thousands of units. So

Brett:

Yeah, inventory management, man, it's difficult projections. Just managing it, all of that is tricky. And then I think you got to highlight something that I think we're all prone to do. We're prone to say, what is my current situation? Okay, cool. It'll be like that forever extreme demand. Cool. We're just going to keep going up. Or it's really bad right now and it's going to be bad forever. So things always change. The seasons always change. Things ebb and flow, and the market has new tastes and new preferences and stuff like that. So yeah, always got to temper things a little bit. So love those lessons for sure.

So as we're kind of moving into the last portions here, the show, I want to talk about keys to success. And I love the Amazon analogy of a flywheel. And Jim Collins actually is the one that they coined this term and came up with it in the book, good to Great. But Amazon has this flywheel that they've kind of mapped out where it's a momentum machine, it's a compounding effect when things are working. And so the way there's works is if they offer more products at a lower price that attracts more visits. So more shoppers, more shoppers attract more marketplace sellers and the marketplace, which what you guys are doing on Amazon, huge part of Amazon's business. Well, more marketplace sellers leads to more products at a lower price, which leads to more visits. And so I left out some pieces, but that's kind of the gist of it. And so as you grow any piece of that, it just continues to accelerate and grow faster. What do you think, as you look at born primitive, what are some of the keys to your growth machine? Why have you guys been able to build and sustain momentum?

Bear:

Yeah, I think it comes down to three main points for us. We already talked about one of them, it was just positive customer experience. So that is a priority at all times with customer service, when we're in events, et cetera. I would call that in my mind an applied task, but a task that many companies overlook. Number two again, I consider this an implied task, but is not done by a lot of brands. You have to have great product and good quality because the way I see it, it's like this might be their only time they ever interact with the brand. You have to nail that first interaction because particularly when you look at just the kind of e-commerce metrics and all right, I have my CAC and A O V and LTV and return, repeat, purchase rate and all these things, first order of profitability, the formula breaks down. It's a giant math problem. The formula breaks down if they're not coming back. I look at other brands that are a onetime item type of brand, I'm like, man, how do they survive? Because it's tough. If I was selling washing machines, I'm not getting in that business because I, I'm able to sell 'em a legging. I know they're going to come back at a sports bra and then

Brett:

Well, we got to start making components to break. That's like the old may long ago, they were too good. They had to make one. Yeah.

Bear:

So for that formula to hold up, particularly when you're spending an outrageous amount of money on paid digital and paid social like that, you have to get them coming back. And it has. So, you know, got to nail the product ton of attention, deal, has attention to detail, has to go into that. And then I think the third, and I would say this would be our secret sauce, is just what does the brand stand for and what is your identity? For us, we've taken a pretty patriotic approach particularly the roots of the brand got, we've we, we've given a ton back to charity, a lot of veteran first responder charities, but cancer research, things like that. So using our brand as a platform to give back has been a huge kind of part of our ethos. And then just standing for hard work and determination and chasing your dreams. People want to identify with something, particularly with apparel. So I think it's important you have to have that because even if you have the first two, there's so much competition with leggings and sports bras and this and that, you're going to get drowned out because you're there. There's a million competitors because it's a hot space to be in. So there's got to be something more to it. It has to be more than just

Brett:

Apparel. Totally love it. Yeah. Sorry, did I cut you off there? That was

Bear:

Great. No, no. And I think the sub-component of that would just be having a marketing calendar that keeps people excited. So we do that with collections. So we'll launch five or six collections a year. I think that helps. Our repeat purchase rate and our LTV numbers are pretty insane. So that's why I'm willing to spend a lot on Facebook to acquire someone because I know what the metrics are beyond first purchase. But I think one of the ways we achieve that is by always having something new every month. There's something born primitive is able to talk about to keep them stoked on the brand. So

Brett:

Yeah, we all love the next thing. And without five collection launches or whatever, me as a customer, I may not really care for two or three of them, but there's probably going to be one or two that I'm going to love and I'm going to feel like I have to buy. And I want to keen on a couple of those things. So we got customer experience, you got great product and you got brand identity. So that, I think shift that people need to make, and I've talked to my friends at gorgeous e-commerce help desk, they talk about this and I totally believe it, that hey, every interaction with a customer is a chance to get a higher probability of a future sale. It it's a chance to get a referral. It's a chance just to make someone's day and increase loyalty even if you don't ask for any of those things.

And I think in a lot of ways you probably shouldn't, but just every interaction, if it's positive, it's really good. If you're doing what you're talking about where you had the mess up with a couple of pieces of inventory and you go above and beyond there, that really set that customer to be loyal for life potentially. So every interaction is an opportunity to do that. I love the great product piece because the, I'm on the ad side, so we're coming up with remarketing campaigns and bots, not Y campaigns or repeat purchase campaigns and email and SMS programs and all of that is no good if the product is meh. So sometimes the issue is not with your ad campaigns, is with the product. And so that's something you got to look at. And I love the brand identity piece. I think we underestimate the value here.

Why does somebody choose Nike over another brand or why does I love the black rifle coffee, right? That kind of lines up I think with a little bit, at least with your ethos it's just coffee, right? I don't know. I've had it, I've, it's not bad by any means, but it's just coffee. But they charge a premium and they have a diehard following cause of what they stand for. And so brand is super, super important. And so you guys have nailed that. And I think it's becau, I think at least in part it's because it's coming from an authentic place. Your brand is, it's who you are, it's who co-founder is. It happens naturally.

Bear:

And I think of those three, it's like which of those three is actually defendable? I think the only, the third one is defendable, right? Because totally can do the now. Second one is you're going to have to be really squared away and you're have to be very good and capable, but anyone can start sourcing stuff and knock off. So you know what I mean? So it's like what, someone can

Brett:

Do it almost as good and do it for 50% of the cost or something like that, that that's always going to happen. But the identity piece, yep, no one can steal that.

Bear:

And that was cool to see that come out in our meetings with the private equity groups is like that.

Brett:

Yeah,

Bear:

They know that and they know that. And I thought that, but it was absolutely validated in those meetings where it was like, okay, this is the brand identity is super important. That's what they're most stoked on. So yeah.

Brett:

That's awesome, man. This has been super, super fun. Any one thing I think that's always interesting to me, and this will be the last question, we'll talk about how people can buy your stuff and connect with you and whatnot, but as I talked to entrepreneurs and I, I'm privileged to talk to a lot of great ones. What do you consider to be your superpowers? So what sets you apart, right? And I know as an entrepreneur we got to be good at a lot of things. And in the early days we're like, well, I'm doing everything. I don't know. But what do you feel like are your real superpowers if you had to distill down?

Bear:

You mean me personally? Yeah. Well I

Brett:

<laugh> and I know you're a humble guy, you're a hardworking guy, so you probably don't like to talk about it, but just curious if you have any thoughts, sir.

Bear:

I think just for me it's just the work ethic and being scrappy. That's how we started. And now of course through the process we've become much more sophisticated. And I try to be a student of the game now. I listen to e-commerce podcast pretty much anytime I'm in the car and I read books and this and that, but early in the early days it was just grinded out, just outwork the competition. And I was balancing obviously being an active duty and running a business. So I had to be a little nuts in that regard. We didn't sleep a lot and it was a lot of late hours at night and early mornings and driving to events every weekends and it was a lot. I was young and energetic and I really was wanted to see this thing come to life. So I think that was probably my biggest leg up is that I was pretty relentless in Mallory was as well.

And then as we built it and brought in employees, I think that rubbed off on people as we brought 'em in. And that's kind of the kind of DNA of more primitive now go to events, these trade shows. And we were just down in Miami for an event called Waap in, I look at other bigger brands now in our space. I don't see any of their senior leadership in the booth. No, I mean me and my VP were breaking down the booth with power drills and you know what I mean? And our other senior, we're still in the trenches. And I think that sets us apart. And again, some of these other brands that have been our space for so long, I haven't seen these guys in five years at these events. And I'm like, what are you doing? You need to be in front of your people getting after it and getting deaths. So I don't think I have any special skills other than just being able to apply myself and really just work hard and try to achieve an end state. So

Brett:

That relentlessness, I love it. And it's one of those things where to build something extraordinary, you got to put in an extraordinary effort and or smarts and both, you're never going to build something extraordinary by just doing a nine to five. That's just not going to happen. Eventually you'd be able to work nine to five or maybe less, but in the beginning, no way. I love the quote of you can be successful in anything you want as an entrepreneur if you work half days and so you got 24 hours in a day, you know, got 12 hours that you're working seven days a week, pretty much. So cool man, really good stuff. So if someone is listening like, dude, I need to observe more of Bear Handlin in my life. Are you on the socials? Are you sharing stuff? Are you mainly just kind of head down?

Bear:

Not really. I think I might do a bit more in the future. I'm on Instagram at Bear Handlin not really on Twitter, but born primitive obviously we're really active on social. And then our

Brett:

Website get great social account for Born Primitive. So check that out. If you look at inspiration on how do we promote our brand or have a social presence for our brand, check out Born Primitive for sure.

Bear:

But yeah, that's, I'm not really a public guy too much. We're rocking and rolling over here in Virginia Beach. But little, I've by little have gotten more into the scene, obviously I went to the Blue Ribbon event and that's meet people like you guys. And I think I need to do more of that in the future because I'm realizing there's so much knowledge out there and so many good people that you can connect with that are solving the same. Totally. And that can relate particularly founders. It's like, oh my God, I finally can talk to someone who understands <laugh> and relates to this lifestyle. We'd break for lunch at Ezra's thing and we're all on our computers firing out emails, trying to catch up and it's like, okay, these are my people because they're all doing the same, you know what I mean? We're all nuts. We're all totally nuts. And

Brett:

It's awesome because, and I love my family. I've got a great extended family. I hang out with them a decent some amount, but a lot of them don't understand they're not building this or doing what I'm doing. And so I can share a little bit about what's going on, but not really. You need to be around your people. And so that's pretty inspiring. And I would say, now that I've listened to you on stage, seen you in a podcast, you've, you got a knack for this. You're pretty good at sharing knowledge and sharing your story. So if you enjoy it, I think you got to do more of it. I think it's going to be beneficial to you and beneficial to other people as well.

Bear:

Well, I appreciate that. Thanks

Brett:

Man. Yeah, yeah, man. And so then as people are like, okay, I got to check out more primitive, buy some stuff where can they shop? Sounds like they've got more avenues than they used to have just a few months ago.

Bear:

So our main sites born primitive.com, we also have international websites if depending you're coming in from another IP address I think we have eight distribution facilities all over the world. So just go to born primitive.com, it'll get you squared away. We're also on Amazon now, just our core products. So we're on Amazon Prime, you're looking there. And yeah, we got all kinds of stuff in the works. We got a swim collection coming out. We just launched our Miami collection Spring collections come in summer, and then campfire and outdoor in the fall Halloween, Christmas. We got all kinds of wild stuff coming out in the future. So tune us on Instagram, see all of our stuff coming out.

Brett:

I love it, and I say this a lot, but I think one of the best ways we learn is by observing what other companies are doing. So get on the board primitive list, follow them on social, watch how they do these collection launches, because there's some good stuff to learn there. So bear handling ladies and gentlemen Barry Crusher, man, SU, super fun. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. And we'll have to do it again sometime.

Bear:

Heck yeah. Thanks for having me, bro.

Brett:

All right, thanks dude. And as always, thank you for tuning in and hey, we'd love to hear more from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show if you've not done so? We would love that review on iTunes Makes my day. Also allows other people to connect with the show. And hey, speaking of socials, I am saying this publicly now for the third or fourth time, I'm committed to being on the socials a little bit more. So I'm posting on Twitter daily ish, and I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit. So if we're not connected there, reach out to me at Brett Curry on Twitter and the Brett Curry on LinkedIn. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Rabah Rahil has done it all when it comes to marketing. 

Rabah is the CMO for one of the hottest and fastest growing SaaS companies in the DTC world - Triple Whale. Prior to that, he worked on the digital marketing team at Whole Foods, was a part of an agency that managed traffic for Oprah, and owned and operated his own agency.

Triple Whale is a leader (and one of my favorites) in the world of 3rd-Party Attribution tools. Triple Whale helps you make sense of what channels, campaigns, and ads are moving the needle. It also brings all of your important data from Shopify, Amazon, and your ad channel into a single dashboard. 

In this episode, we talk about attribution from a high level and what platforms are getting the most ad spend right now. 

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• Why trying to get perfect attribution data is impossible (and why it’s not the point).
• A "party" analogy that could shift the way you view your ad channels. 
• With data from 6,000 Shopify stores, where are most advertisers spending their ad budgets? 
• Is TikTok where you should focus your time and budget in 2023 (the answer may surprise you)?
• Is Facebook slipping? 
• Where should I prioritize Snapchat?

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Rabah Rahil (LinkedIn)
• Rabah Rahil (Twitter)
• Triple Whale
• Triple Whale Podcasts - Ad Spend and You're Not Your ROAS
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are going to geek out and we're going to have fun, and this is going to be a high energy and hopefully entertaining but I've got my buddy Rabah Rahil on the podcast. I mentioned Geek Out because that's actually where we met was at an event called, yep, geek Out. But Rabah is the CMO of Triple Whale. Now, if you've been around the DTC space at all over the last couple years, you've heard of Triple Whale and if you're not very familiar, you're going to get familiar on this podcast, but we're going to talk about one of the hottest hot, most hotly contested topics in marketing, and that's attribution. Or another way of saying it is just how do we make sense of the data and what platforms are telling us and what GA is telling us, and then how do we make decisions on all of this? What is the truth? We want the truth when it comes to data and Rob's going to help us there. You can't handle the truth or <laugh>, you can't handle the truth. I love that. So Rabah man, you got a rich background. You were in the agency world, you worked for Whole Foods, you did some stuff with Oprah when you were doing agency. So give us the 32nd Rabah background. Why are you such a rockstar in this space?

Rabah:

Well, I appreciate that Laudatory introduction. I can assure you I am not as story as beautiful man over here. Brett

Brett:

Use the word laudatory. Yeah, he deserves a lot of law and praises. Yeah,

Rabah:

So I originally I went to school for economics. At one point in time I actually wanted to be an investment banker so I studied that and then I shadowed some investment bankers and I very quickly realized I did not want to be <laugh> an investment banker and mortgage on my twenties. So I got really nerdy. I totally see that. Yeah. I got really into websites building websites AWS stuff, photography, just super, super nerdy stuff. Then I had the epiphany that you can actually charge people more money if you make them money versus if you make them a cash register. So I would build people these gorgeous websites and then they'd come to me, he's like, is it broken? What's going on? It's like, no, your business just sucks. And so that was really my first epiphany into shifting into trying to make money. I had a really wonderful friend, she was a incredible yogi had a huge Instagram following, and we ended up doing an e-book together.

So I photographed the e-book, designed the e-book and then we sold it through her website, which I built, and then I ran Facebook ads against it. And this was back in the day where you could do some pretty awesome retargeting with Instagram. And she was, again, not massive, but she was maybe 500,750,000 followers, like a substantial amount of people. And we just started printing money. So that was my first foray into marketing. And then I just started skilling up. Like you said, I did a stint at Whole Foods, shut out. Really, really great place to work. It just wasn't my jam. I was actually there right before the Amazon acquisition. So the day I got hired, the Amazon acquisition was literally the previous day. So it was a really interesting dynamic in the sense of you had this really hippie corporate company by your gut stuff, and then you have the most ruthless C, not most ruthless in a pejorative sense, but just very data driven company. So there's a very unique

Brett:

Data driven there. Not a lot of perks. They're just cost cutting crazy. It was always interesting to me, I've, I've gone to some Amazon audiences or Amazon offices like the Amazon hq and you compare that to Google offices, they've been to several Google offices too, and then they're different world like Amazon is efficiency, cost cutting, they're still beautiful, but yeah, it's a different, exactly. It's not a hippie culture for sure.

Rabah:

Exactly. You're the VA column. Thank you. The other thing, so from Whole Foods, I went to Agency Life, like you said, I worked for a really great agency, had a Flatiron, they're amazing. We did a lot of app install ads, which was really I had never cut my teeth there. I've done leg genin and D to C, but not really app install ads. So that was really interesting. And I learned about MMPs. We used apps, flyers, so you had to aggregate all this data to make sure what's going on. So that was a really interesting it really made me understand the efficacy of aggregating data and understanding data across multiple channels, et cetera, et cetera. So that was really helpful. And then from that I did my own agency, which was awesome, running my own business. It was great. I loved it. I printed money.

I had a very unique model where basically would just partner with companies from 10 to 20, 25 million and helping them get to the next level. A easy way to describe it was like a mini CMO where I could sit across their whole marketing department. If I needed to deploy ads I could, but it was really people that just didn't know what they were doing, but had a really great product market fit and just had a ton of velocity in the business. So how could we scale them up? Met AJ and Max on Twitter, and then last August I came on board for a honeymoon period and then after that in September I came on full-time cmo. And as they say, the rest is history. It has been an incredible credible ride so far, but it is early stage startup is definitely not for the faint of heart. I mean, so true. Put in perspective. Yeah, I was running the marketing apartment by myself essentially up until March. So almost six months of writing the newsletter, deploying paid media, Facebook ads, Google ads, running the social

Brett:

Account, a podcast like yes,

Rabah:

Podcasting. I was actually editing the podcasts. I mean, it was candidly, it was too much. That's too much. It was too much. It wasn't the path, but it helped build the foundations that got us to where we are now. So it was definitely worth it, but I don't know if I would sign up for it again, <laugh> kind of the interesting part of not knowing you can done

Brett:

It sounds really fun. Editing podcast sounds great. Well, got to tip that to you, man. You've done an amazing job and the podcast, that host is great, which by the way, shout out to that the name of your podcast, and I love this. I don't know who named it but kudos, whoever did as you are not your roaz and it's so good. Thank you. I'm more than my roas. This is a freeing, such a freeing phrase, but that's super awesome. So how long have you been doing the podcast?

Rabah:

We did what, a hundred episodes so far? So we have or not a hundred in total. So have You're not your Roaz where it, it's similar to this where we bring on really interesting people, kind of that talking head stuff. And then we have another one that I host with Ash Mowan, the CMO over avi. And we bring, that's more tactical and DDC Hitt but we've had 30 ad spends and I think I've done a little over 50. So yeah, it's been nice enough to know that things need fixed sometimes, but at the end of the day, just getting started for people, man, if you go look at some of the biggest podcasts and go look at their first podcast, they're like Rogan's first podcast or all these other, yeah, they just get started. People, you just

Brett:

Got to start. Totally got to start showing up is huge part of success and you're never going to get better until you just do it and you got to be one. I

Rabah:

Couldn't agree with

Brett:

You more your first time. So yeah, that's awesome, man. So what I'd like to dig into a little bit I want to get into some juicy stuff right out of the gate, but first this is pretty juicy too. Triple Whale, you guys are, how many years old are you? Because I was hanging out with Max and aj, and I'll tell a quick story in a minute. I think at the very beginning of Triple Whale, or maybe they were kind of working on it behind the scenes, but it was not huge at the time and now it's massive. I can't turn around without either one of our clients using Triple Whale. Are people talking about Triple Whale, but how many years old is Triple Whale?

Rabah:

So we started again pretty much early, call it Q2 of 2022 or no, excuse me, 2021. So it's a little bit over a year old, but really it's almost just a year old because our big inflection point was when we launched the triple pixel and then gave people, there's kind of a bunch to it, but candidly, successful businesses are lucky, have great timing and a great product. That's really what makes it so we really got lucky. The market was very, very receptive. Exactly. And then if we, candidly, if Triple Pixel launched or Triple Whale launched two years ago or earlier, you could still drive within platform metrics. There just wasn't this need. And when people's businesses are blowing up, they're much more apt to see if something can help them versus when things are going good, it's really hard to sell somebody a text app.

Brett:

Yep, yep, totally. Yeah, yeah. And so interestingly enough, so we did a YouTube LA event. So at the Spruce Goose YouTube LA offices, Howard Hughes built these facilities back in whenever that was the movie that Leonardo DiCaprio was in called the aj, it's a wild back Howard Hughes. So the Hangar Google now owns that. So we did this YouTube event there and I was speaking talking about how to build your brand with YouTube ads and I met Max and aj. Max and AJ were there. No,

Rabah:

Yes.

Brett:

So I've got pictures I'll show you. We had a photographer coming so together there's like pictures of me chatting up with these guys, but they were there for one of their D TOC brands. And then later Max emailed me this, I don't remember when this was like, Hey, we're kind of working on this data thing, you should check it out. And so I saw the early stages of Triple Whale but then man, you guys have just exploded. And like I mentioned, we've got clients that use your platform to get a clear picture of their data. So I've got all kinds of attribution stuff I want to talk about. But first you guys also have a really inside look at ad spend, and I think this is one of those interesting things. What are the trends you're seeing, right? Because everybody's talking about, hey, you got to be on TikTok, and at the end of 2022 I heard people saying, well, we're going to reduce our Facebook ad spend, or I saw predictions that people are going to pull back on Facebook but what are you guys seeing in the data in terms of spend? Yeah, absolutely. And how many stores are you guys tracking because that that's an important part of this equation.

Rabah:

Yeah, absolutely. So before I go into that, I have to, every time Howard Hughes comes up, he's just one of the craziest characters ever. So have tell this crazy, crazy, crazy Howard Hughes story. So Howard Hughes, for people that don't know, he was this big business like magnate, but the end of the day he was basically inherited a lot of his business from his dad.

Brett:

He was from his dad. His dad was the business mine. Exactly. And he just lived off of that. He

Rabah:

Just, yeah, well, he just fell ass backwards into just super success. It was like he was trying to run his businesses into the ground and he would just print money Anyways, the too long didn't read. It's a crazy story, but one of my favorite stories of his was he didn't gamble and he became a recluse or later in his life and he went to Vegas and because he didn't gamble and he, while was recluse, he rented, I forget the hotel, but he rented out, I think it was the desert or something, I can't remember. But he rented out the top two floors, which essentially all the v i p rooms and Vegas, for people that don't know, the hotels don't make money from the actual hotel rooms. They make money from people going downstairs and gambling and he wasn't gambling and his whole security staff is Mormon and the Mormons don't gamble either. And so after the first month of staying there, the hotel person is like, Hey dude I like you, but we need these rooms for VIPs to spend money. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. So eventually the guy's like, all right dude, you're out. We're going to kick you out. We need these rooms. And so you know what he does buys the hotel just so he doesn't have to leave. So that is what a gangster move there anyways,

Brett:

When got a money, you talking about printing money earlier, this dude was printing money thanks to his dad who built a real business, which is a cash cow. Yeah, that's stores buy the whole

Rabah:

Buy what a gangster move. Yeah. So right now we are tracking a little bit over 6,000 stores, actually probably closer to 7,000 stores in 53 countries. We're getting pretty close to almost 10% of Shopify's gmv. That's gross merchant volume for people that don't know essentially a fancy term for revenue. So proper, proper dataset,

Brett:

Shopify's gmv.

Rabah:

Yeah, it's pretty, it's insane.

Brett:

It's a

Rabah:

Lot. Kudos.

Brett:

It's a, it's awesome.

Rabah:

Yeah, it's a lot. And so the big trends that we're seeing is kind of counterintuitive what everybody was saying Meta's back meta's still by far the biggest ad spend that we see across all of our clients Google has exploded as well. Again, it's orders of magnitude less than meta still, but it's still a substantial amount definitely off the back of Pax. From what I've heard, people are just having, and you can talk to this as well, Brett, but it's, yeah, we're doing

Brett:

Max Tmax across

Rabah:

The board. Yeah, it's been, is

Brett:

Doing well.

Rabah:

Everybody's seeing some really good results there. The tertiary channel for most people is TikTok. Candidly, TikTok has fallen it, it's still on this hypers stick growth, but it's still really, really small. And in 2022, we had some people get up to almost, they would it leap fro Google in terms of the marketing mix. But what we've found is people have, I won't abandon as too much of pejorative, but people have really migrated away from heavy TikTok spend because the ads just die really quick and they don't give you any warning. And so you could be sending, so we had people, I think the biggest spender we had was spending on upwards of 50 K a day on TikTok. That was the most I'd ever seen. And they just couldn't do it anymore because one day would be incredible. And then the next day everything died and that all that money was just basically burnt up.

And so all things being equal, they would rather have a successful ad on Facebook that could live for three months, six months, sometimes a year. Versus TikTok, you didn't get it there. Then you had Pinterest comes in under TikTok pretty close to it in spend, but definitely not in terms of year over year growth. And then Evan Spiegels just laughing all the way to the bank. But Snapchat is it is as close to Defunk as a ad spend channel as you get across our data where that's interesting. Yeah, there's just not a lot of people putting any money into snap.

Brett:

Yeah, I don't hear anybody talking about SNAP right now. My teenagers use it, they like it, but I don't know anybody that's spending money there. And this is a unique data set. This is a big data set, 6,000 stores, almost 7,000, 10% of Shopify's gmv, which is crazy. But these are D TOC stores and these are not necessarily enterprise D TOC stores. That's

Rabah:

A

Brett:

Very good point. E-commerce stores that are growing and you're doing multiple millions, lots of them and beyond, but not, you're not getting data from walmart.com or that type of thing.

Rabah:

So that's a really good point. Our data set. So our biggest clients are around that 400, $500 million year run rate. So definitely not small, but to your point, it's almost like, I'm trying to think of a new term. It's almost like D TOC enterprise. Cause a half a billion dollar run rate is nothing but, or it's not nothing, but it's not, to your point a Walmart a target, a be like, these are proper balance sheets. That's what I would consider enterprise to really color in the lines about a mil. If you think of a bell curve, my first inflection point is about a million and the second inflection point's about 50 million. So the bulk of our users are in that 1 million to $50 million year run rate. Yeah. So that's a really good caveat that you made there. That's a great point.

Brett:

Yeah, it makes sense. Cause I think if you look at who drives the most ad revenue globally, Google's got a decent lead, but Facebook is a close second and then Amazon's actually third, and then everybody else is way below that, man.

Rabah:

Amazon ads

Brett:

Business, your growth mix meta is the, that's the winner. That's where people are spending the most money. And personally, and we don't manage meta at OMG Commerce. We're a Google, YouTube, Amazon, an email shop. But I love that it's doing well. I think everything does better. We do better when Facebook is working. So I'm glad. Absolutely. I did. Interestingly enough, I was at a trafficking conversion summit. Ryan Dice was speaking, he interviewed like 10,000 marketers who was showing some data. He said, Hey, what are the three channels you plan to spend more on next year? What are the three channels you spend plan to spend less on next year? And the number one channel to spend less on next year was meta. And I'm afraid. And then No shame on Ryan Ice. He asked people and he just relayed the answer. But everybody was lying or everybody changed their mind <laugh> because people are spending money on meta again. And YouTube was actually the number three, I'm going to spend more money here. TikTok was the number one. Anyway interesting times for sure. So any other insights that you have from all that spend data any other chats or any other points of interest mean?

Rabah:

The big things are it, it's kind of corny and it's kind of a little bit elementary if you will, but sometimes there's a great stoic line that people need to be reminded rather than informed. And so really what we're seeing is people that have great economics, so they have margin to play with people that have a really, really strong community and people that have a really strong retention game. So whether that be clavio or attentive sms, postscript, what have you and again, it's not seismic shifting or is this going to change people's minds, but candidly it's just what we're seeing. The fundamentals are fundamentals for a reason. And so those are what we're seeing the businesses grow on. So it just is what it is. Make sure you have a community, make sure that your retention game is really strong. And then understanding your metrics and understanding the economics of your business are really what's driving the biggest growth in across all of our users.

Brett:

I love it. And yeah, I actually just posted on Twitter about this the other day where we don't want to get obsessed, although you should look at it and analyze it or lowering our CAC or rising, increasing our row as important. But though ad costs are always going to go up, competition is always going to be shifting, changing and increasing over time. What you should look at is how can I raise my aov? And that happens by building a good brand and having a good community, having a good product, how can I raise my lifetime value that that goes into retention and your email and your sms, how can I increase my conversion rate? And that goes into branding and having the right messaging and all these components go in there. It's focus and obsess on those things. And that's what I think is going to be the trend going forward is these little hacks, little wins, little tricks, tips, whatever it's going to be, good brand building. And then just using your platforms and your data to the best of their ability where people are going to win. So

Rabah:

Take a quick

Brett:

Note A quick note on TikTok, and I love what you said there because we've like, we've even kind of felt the polling me, we should start offering TikTok. Everybody's asking for TikTok. But then I started observing, right? And we get to see inside of Triple Whale and other platforms and stuff, it's some of our biggest advertisers, they were going hard on TikTok, but it was still only 7% of their ad spend, 8% of their ad spend couldn't really go beyond that profitably. And so then it's like, well that's important, but man, if you got only so much time in the day, you should spend your time on Facebook and Google and what's going to move the needle. TikTok is fun, but for me, I don't like it. But yeah,

Rabah:

No, I mean I couldn't agree with you more and that that's exactly, again, anecdotally as well as quantitatively through the data is exactly what we saw where all the big spenders are just like it's way better to get a winner on Facebook than it is TikTok. The caveat I will give you, there are certain things that can do well on TikTok in terms of virality, but usually they're at the lower price points. So you're talking about under $50 a O V kind of impulse purchases type type of stuff. But I would push back on that and say that's not that it's not a business, but it's more akin to a drop shipper mentality than it is building a brand and creating value for your users that you can then have to your point like an L T V play of I acquire somebody for X, but I know in a year I'm going to get Y dollars out of them. So just kind of throwing that out there that I'm not saying TikTok is totally defunct, but people that are building totally a brand that have actual economics in terms of real price points, not down at these kind of impulse purchases have had a lot of headwinds to deal with.

Brett:

And I, I'd love to clarify that, and I'll clarify too. This is not an anti TikTok ran, it's just more of a understand where TikTok should likely fit for you in your marketing mix. So open and Facebook and Google and YouTube, they're going to be the big dogs, almost certainly TikTok has its place, but maybe it's 10% of your ad spend probably not going to be 50% of your ad spend for any large advertiser anytime soon.

Rabah:

And just to wrap that up, listen

Brett:

To this. Yeah, please.

Rabah:

Yeah I was just going to say the 10% of that ad spend might cost you 30 to 40% of resources to make sure that ad spend can perform. And so that's where you start to get into some real conflict of, dude, I'm only going to spend X amount of dollars on this. Why aren't I putting those resources where I'm spending 5 million on Facebook and I'm spending 50 a month on TikTok? Why am I putting another 50 grand to spend 50 grand where I could put 50 grand to spend 5 million? The math just stopped. Totally. The math. Just don't math. Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah. And you know said it with the Facebook creatives, you have creatives that can last several months or up to a year, and we see that on YouTube a lot, like boom boom, Joseph ER's company. We had some winners where each of them lasted about a year. And so we just hammered that video for a long, long time. That's pretty fun. And that's not resource intensive when you do that.

Rabah:

Exactly. Totally

Brett:

With you. Yeah, this last a day or a couple days or whatever, so awesome. Well let's do this. I want to talk about some misconceptions, misunderstandings that people have when it comes to multi-touch attribution and trying to make sense of what does the customer journey look like? What's moving the needle where I need to spend more money, less money in that type of thing. But maybe first if it's interesting or if you have a unique take on this, how do you guys define or look at multi-touch attribution or how do you do it differently maybe? And then let's get into some of the misconceptions.

Rabah:

So ultimately, without getting too much in the weeds, we're looking at a bunch of really unique identifiers. For example we'll store somebody's battery charge or something and then you can do some really weird metadata stuff that's borderline creepy but helps you make more money. So there you go there. But candidly, attri or multi-touch attribution is still a really hard nut to crack in terms of making sure that that's a hundred percent. And other thing too that you get into is attribution is, so there's something called an asso tope where it's basically two lines that will never touch, but they're always coming closer and closer together until they just get infinitely close, but they'll never touch. That's kind of how attribution is how I see it anyways, where it's just never going to be a hundred percent. And so if you come in with that expectation, the

Brett:

Thing is, I don't think that's the point. Right, exactly. Maybe one of the misconceptions, I'm stealing your thunder potential here, but the point of multitouch attribution isn't to get it exactly right because it'll never be right. And to use I think this is a great analogy, so I used to do offline marketing, tv, radio, prints, stuff that was kind of fun. But if you were a approach at a customer that just bought Nike shoes and you said, well, okay, well what did it for you? Was it the TV ad? Was it the billboard? Was it the magazine ad? The person would be like, I don't know, I just wanted to buy it. I don't know what did it like? So there's not really a way to say what moved the needle fully. We can get really pretty close with online stuff, but you'll never fully know and that's okay.

Rabah:

Yep. Now, and so essentially to wrap that up in a bow is the multi-touch attribution stuff is really, really important. It's awesome we do it but ultimately you're going to want to look at different attribution models to your point. And so there's first click, right? Okay, I invited Brett to the party. He was the first person that heard about the party. Okay, cool. Well John actually drove Brett to the party. Okay, great. But Sally actually got money from Brett at the door for the party. Who do you give credit to for getting the money? Well, is it the person that invited you? Is it the person that brought you or is it the person that took your money? And so the answer is to your point, what do you want to derive from that? And so that's really where we give people a bevy of different attribution operations.

First click, last click, fractional linear if you want to spread it across. And not getting too nerdy in attribution models, but that's ultimately the whole point of having different attribution models is do you want to see who's the best at bringing people to the party? You want to see these best is inviting people to the party you want to see the best is getting people getting money from people at the party. And then you can start to really level up the sophistication in terms of how you're deploying your paid media. Because if you're just operating on last click, so we run a SaaS company, which is totally different than D two C, but if you looked at our analytics, you would say, why aren't you spending more on Google search? Google search is closing all this deal for you. And you're like, well, is it that we have a ton of brand equity? We have a ton of these things. And so it's not to say that Google search isn't important and you shouldn't have it in your marketing mix, but there's a certain aspect of thinking through to your point, that customer journey and what's going on. And then understanding what attribution model is useful to derive the data you're looking for is to me more of the show than saying, Hey, we need this perfect multi-touch attribution solution that tracks everybody through the, it's just fantasy world and it also gives you a misrepresentation of what's actually causal.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. It's so good. And I love that that party analogy by the way because yeah, if you were to look at that and just say, well, Sally's the one that collected the money, if I remember the name, the names, so let's just pay Sally money, let's get rid of Roba and let's forget about John. And eventually you got nobody at the party. Nobody. And I think I'm a Google ads guy, so I love Google ads, but you are right, especially for a SaaS company like yours where you got to understand it. And it's not like a 20 month thing. You're making a commitment. Exactly. It's totally worth it. It's awesome. But it's not going to just click on a search and buy it right away probably. But it, it's an important part of the journey. So yeah, you can't just say, well let's shut everything else off. Let's stop doing podcasts, let's stop speaking at events, let's stop doing other stuff and let's just do Google ads that would not work for your business. You would slow down tremendously. So really, really good. What of, we already talked about one misconception of trying to get perfect data cause it doesn't exist, but what are some of the big misconceptions that trip people up and keep them from being successful with their attribution?

Rabah:

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. I think the biggest thing is people think they need to be everywhere and across all channels. So I would recommend really trying to, so there's something called product market fit that I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar to, familiar with. But I like to think of things as well as channel product fit where finding the channel that really resonates. So I'm sure for you, there's a ton of people that you could just absolutely print money through YouTube ads that probably wouldn't succeed so much on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or something like that. And so I would say, especially if you're in that kind of one to 20 million kind of range where you're you in terms of run rate or you're, you're spending maybe a million dollars a month or below or something like that, really master a channel and really master your email, SMS and retention before you start to be everywhere.

Because when you get everywhere, it can one complicate the party analogy where you have this omnichannel that you have to track, but then two, it makes experimentation even harder. It just spins up complexity. And I think you should keep things as simple as possible for as long as possible. Complexity is really easy to introduce if you want to go across all channels, it's super easy to do. But I think being impactful across a specific set of channels versus I to your point, you were talking about where people, I need to be on TikTok, blah blah, blah. Sure, it's fun, test it, what have you. But I've, I've seen people that have way more success really ratcheting down, finding that channel product fit and then really drilling down into that channel and then once that channel starts to hit a ceiling. But I mean for example, for you, this is why it's in such a great business. The ceiling on YouTube is so high, I would argue it's one of the highest ceilings. It's huge.

Brett:

Yeah. I mean the inventory is almost limitless. Yeah, it's massive. And really every age group is there, right? I've got teenagers, they're there, my dad just turned 73, he uses YouTube for stuff and it's not hundred percent, it's not slowing down in any way. So it's massive.

Rabah:

So that would be, I guess my kind of misconception is you don't need to be everywhere. Be a specialist before you're a generalist. And so figure out what that channel product fit is, figure out how you can hammer that. And then really to your point back that up with a really strong retention game. Cause paid media's expensive and so you really want to bring that new blood in with that paid media. And then you want to close with much cheaper channels such as sms, email, community, things of that nature.

Brett:

Yeah, and I'm really glad you brought up simplicity. I was actually just chatting with a buddy of mine. We recorded a podcast too, but talked about, I think it was the Da Vinci said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, right? Sophisticated sounds cool and sounds really smart, but great. It's like we have a tendency, we want to make things complex. Well, I just need more data, just throw more data at me and then something will make sense. Or let's just be everywhere, right? Because that's what customers want. Yeah. It's probably better to be simple. Let's be strategic, let's be in the places that have that channel market fit, a channel product, channel product fit, and then double down on that. And then let's not get all the data points, but let's get clear data and let's look at actionable data that we can look at and make decisions based on. And so let's talk about that. What are some of the things that are some of the ways you guys are demystifying or making data clear for people? If you have any examples, that'd be awesome.

Rabah:

So one of the biggest things, and it's our most used feature, is our dashboard. So it's available on mobile as well, which is pretty cool. So you can have any metric anywhere, anytime. And it's holistic as well. So it's your total business. So we have a lot of blended metrics. So in terms of blended ad spend. And then we also have a interesting thesis called three ROAS to rule them all where we essentially have these three different roas. So when you're deploying paid media, there's three things you care about. Care effectiveness, efficiency and profits. Those are the three things that essentially drive your business. And so we have a metric called MER or blended ROAS or whatever your preference is, but ultimately that's your effectiveness heuristic. How effective

Brett:

Are I that it's like total sales from all channels, total ad spend. So you're looking at bingo, this global picture.

Rabah:

Yeah. And so what's nice about that is you can say for every ad dollar spent I'm driving. So if you're MER is a 10 just for every ad dollar spent, I'm driving $10 in revenue. Fantastic. The challenge there is if you only concentrate on MER or your blended, you get into that party analogy where you're only playing painting the last click person and then there's nobody at the party. And so that person's trying to collect money from people that are no longer there. So that way, that's why we created a second heuristic for your efficiency. So this is called new customer. And so Shopify bifurcates to customers into new and returning what we're doing is taking the new customer revenue divided by your total ad spend. And so that's going to give you your efficiency heuristic so you understand how much of new customer revenue are you bringing in compared to how much you're spending. And then the last metric that we use again, the profitability heuristic is going to be your gross profits divided by your total ad spend. And so you can understand am I putting the ad spend behind the right products to generate profit for my company? Because what can happen is not every dollar is created equal. And so ideally you are only putting paid media behind high margin, high velocity products because there just doesn't make a lot of sense to have all this revenue and you don't take any of it home.

Brett:

Yeah, that's fantastic. And I love breaking that down, looking at the roaz for new versus returning, right? Because those should be quite different. It's more expensive to get a new customer and you don't want to overpay to get a returning customer. So breaking that down Yeah, exactly. Is really, really good. So that's all fantastic. What are some of the new features, new things you guys are launching that you're really excited about? Cause I know there's lots of cool stuff going on right now.

Rabah:

So we just launched our Amazon integration, which was really awesome. So we're bringing in all of your sales.

Brett:

There's definitely a roar going on at the OMG commerce offices. I mean a lot of us are remote now, so we're like Amazon, it's here.

Rabah:

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, so that was a big one for us. Again, having that visibility in real time to understand how much you're spending on Amazon, how much you're making, and then how does that blend into your Shopify which this is really important. So again, having that holistic view and really it's definitely helpful for the media buyers and people that are deploying the paid media, but really awesome as the owner operator to understand exactly where your business is at, not only in terms of revenue, in terms of across channels, but also profits because we do do profit tracking. So the Amazon was a big one. We have some really cool stuff that we're doing with ai. So right now we have internal testing a generative ai. So we're scraping all of your reviews, your website, your past ads, everything, and then you tell us the product or the sku and then we'll do all that and we'll actually make the ad for you in terms of the creative, the headline, the copy.

And so that's our big bet right now is that we want to give tools or we want to give the media buyers and strategists augmentations where they can start to really either refine that product and so we'll get that blank kind of slate problem goes away where we give you something. So I think there's a few, there's zero to one creators and then there's like shapers slash and I think that the zero one creators are very rare and really expensive, but if I can give you an iteration and you understand your brand, you're like, Hey, I don't like this, but I like this and I changed this and I can get you 80% of the way there for 20% of the cost. I mean that's almost quintessential disruption theory of it's not perfect, all things being equal. I'd love the zero to one creator, but one, they're really hard to find.

Two, they might not make economic sense, versus you can pay 20% of that price, get 80% of the way there, and then you mold it and massage it into the perfect ad for you. So that that's something that's really exciting to me is that augmented media buyer, we have our rules engine that'll kind of fold into that as well. And so I think that's kind of our big bet where media buying will start to get all the little bells and whistles and levers will start to be abstracted way. And it's going to be almost analogous to chat G P T T where it's more about creating the prompt than it is understanding all the things. And so if you can make better prompts, you're going to get better output. And that's kind of where we're headed. So that's really exciting to me. What else do we got coming down there? There's

Brett:

A lot of <crosstalk>. I think that's one of the keys to life run in businesses, learning to ask better questions. And so that's sort of what the better prompts are. It's not just that I have to do the thing, maybe I just need to, how do I ask the right question to suss out what I want and get the result that I want? And that's super cool. And I would agree with you, there's a lot of people that are great media buyers or strategists on their platform or just good marketers where they could be way more efficient if they weren't creating everything from scratch. So if they're a starting point for different ads or different suggestions and then we're just tweaking it. I love that concept. And I really think, and I know this is what you guys are thinking too, that's where AI is going to help marketers the most, I think in the near term is like, let us get you, let's let us help you so you're not starting from zero. And then you can improve and enhance and then go wild on things. So that is awesome. So yeah, I think I cut you off though. Anything else you're excited about right now?

Rabah:

No, I mean those are the big ones. We have some really cool stuff in terms of we're moving to a fancy infrastructure to be able to handle people that are over a billion dollars doing crazy transaction flow kind of the more architectural stuff. But to your previous point about ai, the way we're thinking about it is almost like the internet where pre, I'm old so the kids won't get this reference, but people that had the internet and people that didn't have the internet or access to the internet, they were just so disadvantaged. And so I think that's what's going to happen with AI is people that understand, to your point, how to ask better questions, how to prompt better people that are using AI to augment their output are just going to have an insurmountable advantage compared to people that don't. And I think it's going to be very similar to what you saw if you don't have the internet, it's really challenging to compete with against somebody that does.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, that's a super good point. One thing I'll call out too, cause I've had the privilege of getting kind of front row seats and looking inside of Triple Whale and really I think you guys are top of the class, you're one of two. They're just a couple of platforms that I really like and really recommend that you guys are one of them. And one of the things that I like that I think you do better than anybody, I've never seen anybody that does this, and this is a simple ish thing, I'm sure it's hard to create, but the creative pilot where you get in the platform and you've got this view, and this is a podcast, so it's kind of hard to talk through, but it's just a beautiful way to look at here all my creatives and how are they performing, how are they stacking up against each other? Because sometimes it's a pain in the butt. You're looking at line items, sometimes you're looking in your ad account and you're like, this looks, this is looking at my tax return, right? Yeah. Just all great, all words and stuff. But the creative pilot is super cool. And I think I saw an early version, which may have only been Facebook because now the creative pilot works for YouTube as well,

Rabah:

Correct. And TikTok, yeah. Yeah. What's really cool about it is where the magic meets the road is you can make segments and then you can graph those segments against each other. And so what I mean, and those segments are built off of naming conventions, which is really cool because for example, you guys are an agency and if you take over an account that basically has no naming conventions in place or anything like that, you can actually change all those naming conventions without affecting any type of deployment or deliverability for the ads. And then you can do a post hawk analysis, which is really cool. And so what I mean by that, so say Brett is sell selling whale widgets and he has influencer one, influencer two, influencer three, he can easily make segments of those based off the naming convention. You can see what influencer is performing best or it angles.

So you have a price angle, you have a feature angle, you have a community angle, whatever, however you structure the deployment of your ads and your testing. And you can have a really easy way to not only visualize that, but you can also send a creative report card to whoever the stakeholder is to understand, Hey, here's how X, y, or Z is doing, or here's how that test went or for so on and so forth. Because I think creative is going to be, I mean everybody's preaching creative, creative, creative. So it's a little bit jumping on the bandwagon, but creative is going to be, if you can put better pardon in the war analogy, but better bullets in the gun, you're just going to have more success.

Brett:

Absolutely. Yeah. We believe that on YouTube. I know it's true on Facebook. It's true with search, it's true. Even with shopping and with display, the better, clear, more compelling you can get with your ads. And a lot of this comes down to testing and trying things and looking at the data and getting better and iterating. But those that can perform better with creatives are going to win. They can have a huge leg up. So awesome dude. Well, I'm nerding out and I've got so many more questions than I want to ask you, but we are right up against time, so No way. Yeah, I'm glad I looked actually, because we're about at time. I know you got a hard stop. So how can people check out Triple Will more? How can they find you? Cause I know you're active on the socials. We're not just real life friends, we're Twitter friends. I don't Twitter friend thing, but anyway. Yeah. So how can they connect

Rabah:

Current resurgence from your Yes, your defunct Twitter. You were back on the horse baby, let's go.

Brett:

I was Snapchat of twi. Yeah, Snapchat has, I took a 10 year break on Twitter. I was a big deal back at, not really, but I was doing something like 2010 and then I quit. Or 12 whatever.

Rabah:

10. That's good. Back.

Brett:

Yeah.

Rabah:

Feels good. Well, happy to have you back. Yeah, if you guys want to get more involved in Triple it's just triple.com. And then Shameless plug, we do have a fantastic newsletter that goes out every Tuesday, Thursday called Whale Mail. That's awesome. You can subscribe right@triplewell.com slash whale mail. And then I'm just on the Twitters at Robert Rahil, just my first and last name. Yeah, I'm pretty active on there sliding in my dms or mention me or anything like that. I try and get back to everybody. I'm not in the celebrity status. I am pretty terrible at my dms, but please DM me anyways. Now I'll figure out a way. I so dm,

Brett:

Just be patient like don't bug you if you're sliding. You got to be patient. Exactly. I'll, I'll link to everything in the show notes as well. But do check out Triple Whale. If you don't have a third party attribution tool, you need one. I really believe that as we go and grow in a privacy first world and all these things, like you need a third party attribution tool. Yeah, I do not say that lightly. Rabah did not pay me to say that but I believe it. And so you got to check it out. So yeah, I'll link to everything but the newsletter is fantastic. And also check out the podcast. So first one is your, you are not your Roaz. What's the other podcast name again?

Rabah:

Ad spend,

Brett:

Ad spend. So I'll link to those as well. So check those out as well. So Rava man, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. Can't wait to do it again.

Rabah:

I'm crushed for not coming to the Whaleys. I'm I steak through my

Brett:

Heart. I'm so hard. The Whaleys. I know you got to come to the Yeah, yeah. The Whaleys in Austin, Texas. Check

Rabah:

It out Whale do com or the whales.com. But we'll have you out to some more stuff. It'll be fun. It's, it's always a pleasure. I got to see you. See you at the gorgeous event. Everybody gave really high marks on your presentation there, so it's always good to see you spreading your wings. And then good luck at the B Ball game, cheering for you and your daughters

Brett:

Bring home. That's the whales. I'm coaching my daughter at a tournament in Lawrence, Kansas. Go Jayhawks. It's

Rabah:

A high school. One of my best friends is from there. Yeah, one of my best friends is from there. So yeah. Yeah, wishing you all the luck. But Brett, thank you so much, man. I know I rescheduled a couple times, so I really appreciate the flexibility. You're just such a gem of a human. And let me know if you're ever out in Austin and we'll go grab a bite and a beer.

Brett:

Totally worth it. Thanks dude. All right. Really appreciate it. Chat soon.

Rabah:

Thanks Brett.

Brett:

Bye. And as always, thank you for tuning in and we'd love to hear from you. So if you'd like to let us know what you want to hear more of about on the show, leave that review on iTunes if you've not done. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Brendan Bannister, the CEO of Naturalabs.io, is one smart marketer. 

We first met in 2018 when he was the CMO and Creative Director at William Painter. After taking my YouTube/Google course, he scaled ad spend on YouTube from $2k per day to $100k per day! 

We decided to start meeting and swapping ideas, war stories, and things we were testing. We soon realized the value of sharing this knowledge with others and decided to record a session and bring it to the world! 

In this episode, we dive into CRO, creatives, data-driven marketing, R&D for marketing departments, and the golden years for YouTube and Facebook Ads and how they achieved 13x growth for William Painter. 

Here are some highlights: 

• How the famous da Vinci quote, “Simplicity is Ultimate Sophistication” should be a guiding principle for marketers.
• Is media buying dead? If so, what is taking its place?
• How good brands are sort of like algorithms.
• “Design is hack” and what that means for your marketing efforts.
• The role “brand” plays in your ability to scale.
• Why Brendan is now living and working full-time in Dubai.
• Plus more!
  ‍

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Brendan Bannister (LinkedIn)
• Naturalabs (LinkedIn)
• Naturalabs (Twitter)
• William Painter
• Use Motion
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

‍

Transcript:
‍

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today I am delighted because I get to share with you a longtime friend, a guy that I like to talk shop with, a guy that I nerd out with, and we talk about all kinds of marketing topics together, and it's about time we shared that with the world. And so that's what we're doing today. But my guest is Brendan Bannister. We first met when he was the CMO and Creative director of William Painter, where he oversaw 13 x growth, 1500% growth on website visitors and lots of other cool stuff. So we'll unpack that, talk about that. Lots of lessons there. He is now the CEO and founder of Naura Labs, so we'll talk more about that and what they've got going on. They're pretty exciting stuff. And hey, we're going to talk growth. We're going to talk top funnel growth. We're going to talk about creative data driven marketing, and we're going to talk about CRO and other fun stuff as well. So with that, Brendan, how you doing man? Welcome to the show and thanks for coming on.

Brendan:

I'm doing good, man. It's been a long time coming and I'm excited. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Brett:

It has been a long time coming. And what I want to do first, so lot to unpack, talk about William Painter's success, the YouTube of Facebook success, all that was awesome. There we're talk about CRO and some of the data driven stuff you're doing now, but for those watching the video, they're probably looking and saying, dang, Brennan has got an amazing background. So it's a cityscape. You got these big windows behind you you got the microphone, everything looks good. You tell you're a photographer because you've like, you've positioned everything perfectly, but where are you in the world?

Brendan:

I'm in Dubai and well, it's not flashing anymore, but it wor was flashing or it is flashy now. It's the Burge Khalifa out there

Brett:

And that is that the tallest building in the world or second or something.

Brendan:

It's the tallest building in the world for now.

Brett:

Gotcha. Yeah, so Dubai, that is a place I've never visited heard lots of good things. My buddy Nick Shackleford has done some events there. I almost went, but halfway around the world, you are a California guy. And so when you and I met and hung out, it was in San Diego with the William Painter crew. But why, why'd Dubai? Why did you end up landing?

Brendan:

That's an interesting question. That doesn't necessarily have an easy answer, but long story short, my business partner partner and one of my best friends was already living out here. He relocated out here for another e-commerce brand that he was working with. And sometimes life just calls you in a direction and it called me out here and I came out here and it's been mind blowing, to say the least, probably I think the center of innovation in the world right now. And it's a great place to be for marketing life and just to be around the future of everything, in my opinion.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really, really interesting. I've heard stories and talked to a couple other buddies that were there for an event and they were FaceTiming me and showing me the hotel in the surrounding areas. It's a beautiful city. It seems to be a very clean city and just lots of really successful people from all over the world are hanging in Dubai. Right,

Brendan:

Yo, absolutely. It's the cleanest city I've ever been to. There's no trash at all. So that's really nice. And the level of success here

Brett:

Is that's basically downtown San Diego, downtown la No trash.

Brendan:

Yeah, it's pretty much the same.

Brett:

I love San Diego, but I was singing in Airbnb, speaking at an event, and I walked down this road, it was by Petco Park and lots of, it's beautiful, but I walked down the street and I was like, it smells like urine and pot and there's a lot of trash here. So it's like, it's part partially beautiful and partially just like, come on man, somebody's got to clean this place up. Anyway, so none of that.

Brendan:

That's a whole nother story. That's a whole nother podcast.

Brett:

Yeah, it's another podcast for sure. For sure. So that's awesome, man. Well really excited to dive in, love what you guys are doing now with Naura Labs, and we're going to talk about CRO and data driven marketing and some of that fun stuff. But I want to unpack the success that you had at William Painter first because such an awesome story, such a great product. Love the guys at William Painter. And so you were there, were the cmo, the creative director when William Payner really blew up. And also quick shout out to Raindrop and our boy Jacques Spitzer and the crew, they played an instrumental role in some of the creatives there, but really, you guys exploded. So kind of walk us through, what's that story, how did that unfold? Give us a few of the highlights and then we'll dive into some lessons there.

Brendan:

Yeah, we'll cut it down because I guess that was back in the glory days of YouTube. Some might say The Glory

Brett:

Days of

Brendan:

It. Yeah, hero. The Hero Video days. But yeah, long story short that was back in the day when Dollar Shave Club and Dr. Qua was kind of pioneering the YouTube hero video scene. And these agencies were just starting to pop up around. And we got connected with Raindrop Agency down in San Diego and produced that first hero video. And after quite a long time of studying YouTube, watching some of the courses that you taught, you put it on YouTube and it just popped. It just worked. And it scaled aggressively very fast, almost uncontrollably to amount to a period where it was pretty scary to see the level of scale that you would unlock in a matter of one to two weeks. I'm talking campaigns going from 2000 a day to upwards of a hundred thousand dollars a day in a week.

Brett:

That's pretty interesting. Those were the glory days, for sure. Yeah,

Brendan:

It kind of paved the way to, okay, this is working. Let's produce more hero videos. And we ended up producing several full top of Funnel Hero videos along with multiple Thanksgiving sales, black Friday sales, Christmas sales, and so on and so forth.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And a lot of the world has changed. Cause that was, remind me, what was that, 2019?

Brendan:

Yeah, 2019 when we did the first one. And I think we made Selma 2019 and 2020 as well.

Brett:

Yeah. So a lot of change in the world, obviously, right? Pandemic, yeah, supply chain issues, inflation, all kinds of stuff, just kind of thrown a wrench in everything. So it's a different world and increased competition. And I was 14 and all that, but a, some of the same principles still apply, right? Yeah. Is it absolutely as easy to scale today as it was then? Probably not, but it's still doable with the right scenarios. But let's talk about what was your role in that process? So 13 X growth, 1500% of growth and online shoppers, just amazing growth. What was your role and what part did you play in that?

Brendan:

Yeah I'm sure a lot of people know that have, not massive e-commerce brands, but smaller teams. Everyone wears a lot of hats and plays a lot of role. Yeah. But

Brett:

I was, you got to do whatever's necessary,

Brendan:

Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was pretty involved on the creative direction side of things. I did a lot big collaborative process on writing the scripts. James Schrader and I, who was in the videos for William Painter and also Dr. We worked really closely in writing those scripts and then coming up with stories to be funny, different types of backgrounds and opening scenes, hooks. The hook is the biggest one. Breaking sunglasses, jumping through banners and things like that just to grab attention. And then also really trying to learn how to add in direct response marketing. So presenting a problem and then giving the solution and walking the viewer through it in a creative, funny, non-invasive way. And then I was running the Google ad, so I was behind the scenes putting the audiences, running all the YouTube campaigns, doing search and shopping and all that good stuff.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. And that's a really unique skillset, by the way. And I'm sure people that are listening those that have been in the game for a while or tried to hire someone to run marketing or run marketing themselves, they know it's pretty rare to find someone that has both the creative skillset. You can really dive in and help write scripts and help come up with concepts and guide things and direct things. And to be the one in the background, building campaigns, setting bids, setting that account structure, and really managing the media portion and that strategy portion. So how did you balance both? It's super interesting.

Brendan:

I just love it. I love solving problems, and it's a different type of creativity. So being a photographer for the last decade or so, and then coming to the creative direction side of things, art direction, things like that. But then also creatively solving problems to be funny or to direct the actors on screen or to come up with unique ways to market towards people. One of the really cool things that we did is we built a whole full-fledged funnel using these YouTube videos. So we would remarket product page viewers with content that we created specifically for people that were on the product page, viewers. So for example, one of the scripts would start off, they'd already come to our website, looked at a product, and then we'd retarget them and the video would say, Hey, we noticed we were checking out our sunglasses. You look really good in them. You should go back and check 'em out. And I think that was a pretty unique type of remarketing where we're literally talking to the customer and it converted incredibly well. And that was fun because creativity mixed with marketing, mixed with psychology, mixed with just being fun, <laugh>,

Brett:

Dude. It's what I love about the game and it's what I've always loved about marketing, because there's some art and creativity and science and psychology, and why do people respond the way they respond? And you get to plan in all of that and craft a strategy, a playbook to navigate and say, Hey, how can we scale this brand? And how can we attract the right people and take them from interest to engagement to, Hey, I'm willing to shell out 150 bucks for a pair of sunglasses, all sight unseen, all just with online marketing and a great web experience. So yeah, exactly.

Brendan:

You've talked a little bit about demand generation versus demand creation. So that's also a really fun thing where you realize that there's a problem that maybe the organization, the brand you're working with doesn't have demand to capture, but it has to generate it and then capture it. So you have to create desire and then get them to purchase it, which is just another complex problem you have to solve creatively as well.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And I've kind of played on both sides cause I've always loved Google search and shopping, and that's query based traffic. That's someone searching for a specific solution or a specific product. And so that's more demand capture. That's where you're saying, Hey, I'm looking for this kind of car accessory, or I'm looking for this type of sunglasses to, you're capturing that demand. But in the case of something like William Painter, it's titanium sunglasses. They're basically indestructible. The original one has the hook on it, the little thing that's like a bottle opener that allows you to pop bottles and look like a model. I still remember the majority of your script, by the way. And so no one's searching for that. I want titanium sunglasses that I can open a can of beer with or a bottle of beer. I didn't know that existed because I haven't seen it yet.

So you've got to show that to me and generate that demand and then yes, I'm interested. And so see, the blending of those two is really fun. And I think you can, what I love about the Google adss ecosystem is you can find both right there. There's going to be some opportunities even before you go hard on YouTube, there's going to be some demand capture opportunities. But then absolutely, if you can go big on YouTube and tell the story and say, Hey, this is why you need titanium. Tim Ferris likes it, all these other people like it, you can step on. It's not going to break. And you can wow your friends by opening.

Brendan:

And then the demand capture

Brett:

Gets a lot more, it actually scales that demand and now you're in the money. What's that?

Brendan:

I said the demand capture gets a lot more fun once you do that on YouTube because then you scale.

Brett:

Yes, yes, you're, you're seeding that audience and getting them interested. And then you can close the deal through your demand capture campaigns. And I also love that this idea, cause we see this a lot, and this is something I talk about with prospects and what I'm speaking on stage is, hey, remarketing something we all do. Most people are bad at it, we're lazy at it. We create a one marketing remarketing campaign. We're running all the same creatives that we run in our other campaigns. That's better than nothing. But what if we segmented that a little bit and said, Hey, you've been to a product detail page, you just haven't pulled the trigger yet. So let's talk to you. You've been there, you checked out the product, you maybe didn't like it. And if you can add some humor and some fun elements, all the better. So we actually met, tell the story of how we met, I believe. I can't remember who reached out, but you guys had actually taken my YouTube and Google ads course that I did with Smart Marketer, the original one. The original one. How did we meet after that? I don't even remember now.

Brendan:

I think it was at one of the Blue Ribbon events, to be honest, it must've been one of the first ones. It might've been in Seattle. I think that might've been the first one I went to was in Seattle, but I can't remember.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. So we connected and kind of sparked a friendship where you guys took the course and ran with it and you added to it and your brilliance came out in that. And then we've just stayed in touch ever since, swapping ideas and taught and shop. Yeah. So pretty cool. Pretty cool. Awesome. Well, what are some of the takeaways from the William Painter days that you would say still apply today? Right? So if we're looking at and I like the delineation or the comparison you made there of demand generation versus demand capture. So what are some of the demand generation lessons that you learned through William Painter that still applies it? I know there are probably a few technical nuances that are different in a post iOS 14.5 world, but what are some of the lessons that still apply?

Brendan:

Yeah, that's a really good question actually. I think I'm a big person on branding. One of my biggest things is as being an artist creator is, I think, or actually one of my favorite quotes ever is design as hack. And I think that's true. And I think design goes into a magnitude of things. It's not just the product, it's not just the website, it's not just the creative, but it's all of them into one. And I call it the visual spectrum. And that is every visual touchpoint of your brand from the way you message people on a social media or on your text message to your email, to the colors you choose, to the fonts, to the type of creative, the iPhone creative, the professional creative, all of that creative comes into brand. And I think that is a very, very, very important part because when you're trying to create demand, you have to present yourself as bigger than life and bigger than you actually are.

That way people trust you, especially in this day and age when you're scrolling an Instagram or on YouTube and there's hundreds and hundreds of companies and brands and products being shoved down your throat. You have to stand out above the rest and people have to trust you. And if you have that niche for design and you have attention to detail and make the creative stand out, whether it's high quality or funny or attention grabbing, and the whole experience from point A to point Z is a smooth, cohesive brand experience, the demand capture and demand demand generation just becomes a lot easier because people trust you and they trust your brand.

Brett:

I love that so much. And I want to unpack that just a little bit, but explain that quote just a little bit to me. So design is hack, what does that mean?

Brendan:

So just as it sounds like if you're able to design something to a level that connects with people on a subconscious level, it makes everything easier. If I'm going to sell you a pen and the pen looks clunky or it's an odd color, I don't want that pen, but I want to sleek black pen, that feels good. And it might be the same components might cost the same to produce it, but if it's sleek and it looks good to the eye, it's way easier to sell. And I think just designing something and having the attention to the detail is that hack that makes everything easier.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And to give a couple of examples, obviously we could look at the examples that are always given. Nike can charge. Now I, I've just bought my, oddly enough, I just bought my first pair of Jordan's. I've always been a Michael Jordan fan. I just bought my first pair. But you can find some of the retro Jordan's for three to $500. You can pay $2,500 for some of these shoes online. So what's the, between that and a $30 pair of shoes you buy at Walmart? Well, it's brand and the materials are better and stuff too, but are they a thousand times better? I don't know. I'm sure not. And so that's all brand, but one example, and I think this ties into both branding and design of the product. I've kind of gotten into tea a little bit lately, still drink more coffee. So I've not abandoned coffee in my Americanos. And I've done a few pour overs, although I just haven't fully mastered that art. But I've got a fellow kettle, and this is a really sleek, elegant, long neck kettle. It's seen, sits on, it's beautiful, beautifully designed, nice wood handle. It's ergonomically correct and it looks amazing sitting on the counter. It's got, do you know fellow, have you seen this?

Brendan:

Oh yeah, I've seen their ads. I've in

Brett:

Their funnel,

Brendan:

Got

Brett:

Deep in their funnel. It's a display where you can choose the exact temperature you want to eat your water up to. So if you want green tea, you can go in the one 70 s. If you're looking at coffee, you can go 2 0 5, 2 0 10, whatever, 2 0 10, 2 10 2000 degrees. So you can heat it to whatever you want. And it's like three or four x the cost of a, I could get just a simple electric kettle for 20 bucks on Amazon or 30 bucks or whatever this is, 300 or 200. And so what is that? It's design, right? It's design, it's branding. It is, yes, functionally great too, but it looks great on the shelf. And so that product design, that design element of your ads that builds the brand, the brand is, can't overstate it, right? And we do a lot on Amazon, how brands grow on Amazon and brand is what can allow you to charge a premium on Amazon and protect your margins on Amazon where there's a lot of pressure to erode those margins. So love that. So design is hacked. So awesome lesson, awesome takeaway. Any other takeaways from the William Painter days that would still apply today?

Brendan:

I would believe that the majority of brands are very similar in nature. The systems of the internal brand is the same. The way the emails operate, the way the text message operate, the way Shopify, Google, Facebook, omnichannel, I think the internal systems are all 95% the same. And it's that 10 is the 10, five or 10% of how you brand it really and connect those pieces together that the entire ecosystem works. And I've found that over the years, consulting for various different brands and seeing under the hoods of very different brands of their entire layout, all the ads, the Shopify, the creative and all that stuff, you really see a lot of the similarities. And you're like, okay, well if all e-commerce is relatively simmer, then we can build a system of equations that allows us to plug and play into different organizations. And that's kind of what we know we'll lead into later. But it's really interesting to see that the channels talk to each other in the same way. And in essence, I believe that <laugh> in a nutshell, an e-commerce brand is basically just an algorithm and it's a plug from, it starts at the ad level, goes up through the website and all the way to the purchase. And as long as you can make it all connect, it works. And it kind of, yeah, it's very applicable across many different brands for a DTC at

Brett:

Least. Yeah, I love that. And one thought that just sparked is that this idea that, hey, everything has changed, but everything is still the same. And I think this applies to maybe whoa, deep philosophical, whatever, but if you look at platform, let's just say Google as an example, mission, Google's mission is still to answer people's questions, to connect advertiser with ideal buyer and make both happy. And it's organizing the world's information, but it's connecting things. It's just that the methods have changed. It's not just search, it's YouTube and the algorithm and YouTube that that's really good at predicting what content do you want to consume next? And based on your behavior, what products would you like to see and what products would you like to shop and see demonstration videos on or see ads on inside of YouTube or inside of Google? And so it's still a lot of the same thing, right?

It's just the way we're guiding campaigns campaign structure is different. Yeah, the way we bid is different. The way we used to bid on shopping and the way we bid used to bid on YouTube, it's shifted some in recent years, the algorithm has gotten better. In some ways it's gotten worse too because of lack of data, but the platforms are figuring that out. So it's like, I think you're right, and 90% whatever is the same. Those little nuances matter and you got to figure those out. But at the core, it's still the same. And people still buy for the same reasons. They've always bought, they brand matters and they want to solve a problem and they want the benefits and they want to see themselves in the product and all these things. It's just the tools and the methods we have to bring that to life are a little bit different. So yeah, I love that perspective. I

Brendan:

Would say it, it's even just going as far as just getting more simple. Instead of everything being so complex and guessing, it's really just about optimizing your brand, optimizing your shopping experience, decreasing friction, increasing quality, creative and A plus B, equal C. It's not that complex, but

Brett:

I love it. I kind of set some intentions and talked about, and we're recording this just right after the new year but setting my intentions for the year and three words I'm going to focus on, one is simplicity one is intentionality, and one is consistency. But let's just talk about simplicity for a minute. Simplicity is not dumbing down. Simplicity is not being just, simplicity is about removing ambiguity, making things crystal clear. Because if a habit is not simple, we're not going to keep it. If the message isn't simple, consumers aren't going to hold onto it and take action. If the message we share with our team isn't simple, no one's going to embrace it. We've got to really embrace simplicity and and I totally agree, and I think that's a big part of landing pages too, right? Not, I mean, you got to have enough elements there to sell the product, but how can we simplify? How can we make things more clear?

Brendan:

No, we actually have

Brett:

Be increasingly important.

Brendan:

We have three principles in Intro Labs and two of 'em the first one, and it's kind of like our three principles to design in life and philosophy, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the first principle is simplicity is the key to brilliance by Da Vinci. The second one is the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and we apply those to all design, all marketing, all theory we do. And it's really just about being more, being simple, being minimal, getting the point across without all the fluff and unnecessary jargon that we often add. We always add complexity because we think it's a complex problem, but it's really just a simple problem.

Brett:

Yeah, and it's one of those things too where if you're trying to communicate something on a landing page or through a video, you want instant understanding where someone reads it and they're like, ah, cool, I totally get it. I get what this practice is going to do for me. I get what you're trying to say. Rather than it's like I read the headline, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really know what you're talking about. Maybe I'll read more, maybe I won't. But you won this instant understanding which is super powerful. Yeah, definitely. Awesome. I want to get into cro, want to get into data driven marketing but let's talk about r and d for a minute. So this is something that you and I talk about a decent amount. I know that's kind of a passion of yours right now, but where does research and development fit into good marketing and how are you at mature labs and you individually? How are you thinking about research and development?

Brendan:

Another great question. So I think research and research and development is actually going to be the future ev e-commerce. I think as media buyers kind of get phased out, we are going to focus more on some building simple websites and being creative and adding the creativity into the ads. But then what we're also going to have to do is either have a whole team of researchers or an independent organization such as ourselves that will identify problems and provide solutions for you. And one of the things we really focus on is being an independent external powerhouse that can work with brands that can spend time focusing on how to solve a problem, whether it's how to decrease our cost acquisition or how to better sell a product or what product to design rather than someone that's at the brand being busy all day focusing on putting out fires. We are on the outside kind of like, okay, our number one job is to find a problem and not just find the problem, but give you a solution. And I think a lot of that comes down to marketing, CPAs, creative, how to stand out, how to be different, how to execute and iterate faster than the competition.

Brett:

Yeah, I really like that. I think we talk about this a decent amount internally to OMG and lots of chatter on LinkedIn and Twitter amongst marketers that, hey, this idea that media buying is dead, and I agree with that traditional where we're just creating a media plan, bidding up, bidding down, that sort of thing, nah, that you don't really need. That alone isn't super valuable. But the strategic use of channels and the strategic combination of different campaign types, I like to think about it almost, I'd like to use a football analogy, like an offensive coordinator. So you're calling the right plays, you're creating this team of campaigns and team of platforms to work together to get the ball in the end zone. And you're reading the defense, you're watching how the defense responds to things, you're calling the next play. But a lot of that I is r and d.

And so to continue on the football analogy, and my apologies if this isn't landing for some people in the audience, they're like, Hey, football, who cares? The best offensive coordinators, the best quarterbacks, the best coaches, they are studying game film all the time, film of their own team, film of their opponents. They're dissecting the data they're researching and then they're applying that, they're applying that and they're game plan. They're not on the field anymore. And that's kind of the way to a good media buyer, good strategies. They're not on in doing some of the stuff anymore. They're directing it and they're calling those plays. So what are some of the elements of research and development that you guys are focused on or the marketer of the future needs to be focused on?

Brendan:

Yeah, I think we're really focused on top of funnel acquisition because as, especially during the holidays, like CPMs are through the roof, CPCs, through the roof, CPAs, a lot of 'em through the roof with all the competition. And I think our main focus is on landing pages because simplicity, instead of sending someone to a product page that might not be optimized for that specific audience, we're focusing on, okay, who is our target audience for this specific product or this specific offer? How can we build a unique customized shopping experience for this person that walks in through the entire point a point Z in a nurtured way? I mean, imagine walking into Target for example, or yeah, Target's a great example. You walk into Target and you're like, where do I need to go? Where's my piece at? Instead of going through the entire store trying to figure out where that thing is you want to buy, you walk in the doors of Target, boom, it's right in front of you. You're like, oh, perfect, I don't have to search for it. I didn't know I needed this, but now I'm going to get this and that. And I think that's where the r and d comes in. It's like, let's create a nurtured, unique shopping experience that you can also connect to the creative. So it can be a creative from an ad level all the way through the entire purchase level, from point A to point Z is a unique, experienced made for that person to solve that person's problem or whatever it may be.

Brett:

I love that. I often find myself, I way prefer to shop online if I do go to a physical store, which I do on occasion, I'm like, man, can I just search for something or is there a search bar? Or I always go grab somebody and just ask because I don't want to, otherwise I'm wandering around the store, I'm worn on and not finding what I need. But I love that curated experience designed exactly for that person, so get what they need and so that they convert. So I think it's a good transition. Let's talk about CRO a little bit. So you guys at Mature Labs, you've got a really unique approach. You're building on Landers and they're both beautiful and highly converting, so you've got to show me a lot of what you're doing. Very impressed. What's your approach to CRO and kind of, so what's your approach? And we'll talk about lessons we can pull from that.

Brendan:

So CROs a pretty broad term, you know, could have CRO homepage, you have CRO on ad level, you can have CRO on the product page, collection page, stuff like that. Our main focus, and this is our third principle on interior labs, a principle called Gals Law. And in a nutshell, it basically states that a working complex system must evolve from a simple working system. You can't start with a complex system. So if you talk about a brand website in the terms of a complex system, you have all these different products, all these different links and stuff, and it's very difficult, it's very complex, very confusing for someone with a simple thought process to navigate. So our theory is, okay, well let's build a landing page that is a simple landing page to solve a specific problem for a specific product, whatever that may be. And we build a modularized.

So our intention is to build the entire landing page with multiple different offers that we can have at the start, multiple different modules that we can swap in towards the middle and bottom of the page. But the goal is to build one simple system, one simple landing page that works. And if it's not working, because sometimes you don't work when you launch 'em, you replace the header, boom, new header, new header, new header, new color, and you just change that starting piece until it starts to convert. And then as it starts to convert, you know, keep doing O to have negative feedback and make iterations. And slowly over time you start building a page that's more powerful and more powerful, more powerful, even by changing button colors, placements, offers and things like that. That

Brett:

I got to ask. I want to dive into that a little bit more, but you've shared now two of your principles or two, three

Brendan:

Was the third one.

Brett:

So I guess simplicity is the key to brilliance. A working system, a working complex system must evolved from a simple system. What was the other one? I

Brendan:

Missed it. Yeah, the second one is the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Brett:

Oh, of course you did say that. Yeah, so

Brendan:

It's simplicity, same

Brett:

But different. That's awesome, man. I love that. I'm going to writing these down that that's brilliant and love those key principles. So I think one of the things, and you're right, CRO is broad. It's like, hey, what's your marketing philosophy world? That's a pretty big question. But what we experience a lot, and I think what a lot of brands run into is maybe your issue right now isn't traffic. Maybe your issue right now isn't your ads, maybe your issue is your lander, right? The lander is not answering a specific question, it's not solving a specific problem, it's not talking about a specific product and in the right way to that shopper and getting them to convert. Obviously it all works together, but a lot of times people are blaming the ad or the network that they're advertising on the platform. They're blaming Facebook, playing Google, but blaming YouTube when really the lander just got to get better. Oh yeah. So how are you guys analyzing? So you've got a client with a product and if you can use a specific example, great, if not, no talking generalities, but how are you going about, okay, let's create a simple page for this. What are you trying to understand and then what are you trying to distill in that page?

Brendan:

Yeah, so it's so many different things and it's really just about finding what works. And that could be the design, it could be the messaging, it could be the creative. And I mentioned earlier about how I think all brands are an algorithm in a way. So let's just say in this world that we're in this imaginary world, we have a brand that has perfect creative and perfect messaging, and the ads are converting really well. We're driving lots of traffic to the website, but the website's not converting and we're not getting these purchases, but the ads are, we got good metrics at the ad level and that's because we're taking a working algorithm and plugging into an algorithm that's not optimized. The website could be super complex. The messaging's not right on the website, the color's not right on the website. So it's really about, okay, well how can we improve this website to make it convert better by changing the messaging or changing the offer or the colors make a big one.

We ran a really basic research case study for our client and we changed the color of the review stars on the product page. We had three colors. We had the on-brand black versus gold versus silver. And just changing the gold stars drove $5,000 of incremental revenue in one month. Just on one page we tested it, it was a one page isolated test, drove $5,000 of incremental revenue. And if you take that and extrapolate over the course of 12 months, you've got an extra 50 60 grand of incremental revenue there. But the interesting thing is all these ads convert on a metric called perceived conversion rate on the website, which is the algorithm guesses at what the conversion rate's going to be on based on the probability of that user converting. So if you can move that number up a slight incremental number by changing the product page colors or the button colors or anything, you're really making it easier for the ads to convert. And I don't think a lot of people are starting to figure that out in 2023, and I think 2023 is going to be the year of massive CRO at scale because they're like, oh, right, it's two, we've got a ad level b c O level on the website or whatever the lander is.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. Now I'm going to ask this question at the risk of leading people down the wrong path, and so I'm going to give a caveat and then I'm going to ask the question cause I know it's a question they never went right now is asking in their brain, and that is what color did you change it to? So it was gold. What color did you change as a review stars to?

Brendan:

So were for this specific company is very male dominated automotive industry. The on-brand color was black, that was the color they used. And we actually saw that gold had a 39% increase in conversion rate on desktop. Got it. Wasn't statistically significant on mobile. We didn't run the test for as long as we should have for various reasons but 39% is statistically significant on desktop, 39% increasing conversion rate for new users just for changing the stars to gold.

Brett:

That's awesome. So here, here's the lesson and the takeaway there. The lesson and the takeaway is not gold definitely, although it is in a sense, the sense is you start testing things, you'll get gold, but it's not that gold is now the winner in terms of your star reviews and how you display them. The key is you got to test it and the key is that these little things can make a big difference. I just led a training with our leadership at OMG on Atomic Habits and it's a great book. If you not read it, it's by James Clear talks about these little changes, these small habits, these simple habits, as you stack them, they compound. And one of the stories in the book, and I'll tell this in 20 seconds was about the British cycling team and the British cycling team for a long time, they were really terrible.

They won one tour of France in a hundred years. They were so bad that certain bike manufacturers didn't want to sell them bikes because they thought it would ruin their brand. They were like, Hey, if people see your cyclists riding our bikes, they're not going to buy it. So it was bad. This new coach comes along and he talks about this principle of the aggregation of marginal gains. So the stacking or the adding up of small incremental improvements. So they start doing crazy things like they clean the tires with rubbing alcohol and they test a hundred different suits to see what's got the least amount of drag. And they start testing pillows and mattresses for their racing team to see what leads to the best night's sleep. They start painting the inside of their trailers white so they can spot dust and get it out of there to keep the bikes clean.

They start doing all these crazy little things and you start adding all up all that together and you can see amazing results. They actually went on to it, I don't remember the years now, but they won five out of six tour to France races and then they were the pinnacle of the world. But it wasn't just like a lot of times we look at what's the one thing thing I can do? Give me a silver, silver bullet here. And that usually doesn't exist. It is, you've got to test lots of little things, but you stack a lot of little winds on top of each other and you've got amazing compounding results.

Brendan:

Absolutely. There's no shiny object and there is no one answer. Yes, despite what people think <laugh>.

Brett:

Exactly. We're all looking for it. We all want it but it's not there. And the bad news, it means it's hard. The good news is it's hard and your competitors can't figure it out either. And so it's where if you do, and then I love this idea of brands are an algorithm where it's all these things working together and if you can figure out the algorithm and guide it, you know, can see a big success. Well, I mean any other kind of general takeaways on CRO for brands and the way you guys approach it?

Brendan:

Yeah, I think it's what I've noticed over the last couple of years is that a lot of us marketers and creatives especially, we get too attached to emotion and brand. And I talk a lot about brand, but one of the important things is in the digital age of building a digital brand that's dictated by algorithms that are out of our control is that we have to use something called data driven creative direction or data-driven branding. And that is coming up with ideas that we want to test, but not being opposed to the potential that our theorized idea might not work. And we can't have our emotion attached to a color that we think is on brand. If the data's telling us to go for a different color, for example, the black looked better on this product page, it's more sleek, it just looks

Brett:

Smooth, it fits, it fit. It's more on brand, it fits the eye. Exactly, exactly. It's more plea

Brendan:

Into the eye and gold stands out a little bit more, but because it stands out a little bit more, converts better. And we have to be okay with changing and being fluid in the way our brand evolves, keeping some boundaries there, but being fluid with the way it evolves to work in the digital age to take advantage of the algorithms we have to work with algorithms not against them. And that starts at every level in my personal opinion.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so important mean, I know Gary V talks about you can't be romantic about certain elements in your business when the data changes you need to change. And when you see things that when the data is speaking, we should go in this direction, you need to go in that direction. And that doesn't mean you abandon your brand, right? You're building this brand, you're building brand equity. That's important. But sometimes we begin to think as business owners, as marketers, as CMOs, whatever, we're like, no, no, no. Black is our color. If we abandon black in this one element of our page, we're eroding our brand. Our customers won't like it. We know our customers, we know our brand well, you should probably test it. And so again, that doesn't mean scrap your logo every other month or something crazy like that, stick to your brand. But you got to test things. And being romantic about things that are not important to your customers is going to trip you up and really limit your growth and eventually potentially stifle your overall potential. So really good. Anything else you would unpack there on creative data driven marketing and any other ways you would describe that or unpack that? I love that. I love that term and I love the concept.

Brendan:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So as I've talked about, I think the creatives being more important as we move on, and we found this really, really cool software called Motion. I think the websites use motion.com, shout out to them. They're actually a really cool organization, small team, but amazing. And they connect to your Facebook and they will give you full on reports. And I'm not endorsed by them full for the record. They'll give you full on reports of all your creative in your Facebook account and your Google account. They're bringing on YouTube soon I believe. And for example, if you, let's say you run ads for a month, right? On Facebook and you see your top three your top three performing videos, what you should do for the following month is take those top three videos, make some iterations on those videos that you think might convert better and test those and keep testing.

So the idea is to over time, test all of your creative, but test the best ones. Make iterations on your best creative. So month one, you start with zero creatives. Month two you have iteration one by month six you have six iterations of those creatives that are getting better every single month. And that is data driven creative direction. And you can take it into applying new creatives, say month four, month five, you say, wow, these are really working. Whatever this combination of testimonial or hook is working, let's go make some new creative using this structure and boom, creative direction right there.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And you're always looking for that combination of right message, which is a combination of hook product, demo, cta, cta, a few other elements too. Audience in Lander. And so like, hey, are we tweaking that and was we're looking at the data, maybe we're seeing, hey, the conversion rate's really high, but the engagement isn't as high as it could be. So let's test new hooks. Or maybe the engagement's really high and the clickthrough good, but the conversion rate's not good. Let's test the landing page. So we're looking at the data, what is the data telling us? What story is the data telling us? And then let's iterate and make changes based.

Brendan:

Yeah, I do think data's becoming a buzzword in 2022 slash 2023. Cause I think a lot of people throw it around and I think maybe there's not as many people that understand it because it does get pretty complex. But basically just finding what's working, looking at that subset of what's working and making improvements on what's working to then guide your next decisions rather than just kind of guessing or using your emotion. Yeah,

Brett:

And I'm really glad you mentioned that because yeah, the solution is not more data. We need more dashboards, more complex dashboards. We need every data point possible that that's probably going to lead to share, that's going to get stuck in the data. What are the important data points? What are those important data points telling us? And then how can we quickly iterate and test and change to improve? That's all action. Exactly right. Take action. You are talking about data and that just means they're trying to get more of it and they still don't know what they're seeing even with more data.

Brendan:

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Brett:

Yeah. Awesome. Well dude, this has been super fun. I'm all charged up now, actually. I love it when there's certain podcasts where I record it and I've got more energy at the end of the podcast than at the beginning of the podcast. That's always a good sign we could go through. It was fun for me at least. Hopefully people listening enjoy it as well. But Naura Labs, so talk about this just a little bit. If someone's listening and they're like, dude, I need to hang out with Brendan or maybe see if I can work with them or whatnot, what do you guys do? Can people learn more about you?

Brendan:

So we have two major things. We have one's called brand architecture, and that's kind of what it sounds like. We basically just help brands build more efficiently, whether it's landing pages, whether it's coo, whether it's website optimization and we just want to improve your throughput. And then we also take, or we have a fractional CMO program, fractional ceo, CMO program. And it's basically just us looking at your brand, the whole holistic view of the brand. Not just the ads, not just the creative, but helping you come up with products to develop or when you should release those products, what the next step to growth is. Because growth is not just ads, growth is multiple different things, websites, products and all those type of things. And it's just a laboratory where we get to experiment and come up with ideas and test them and research and provide you with ideas to iterate on and to execute on. And our number one thing is identify problems, provide solutions and increase your throughput.

Brett:

Yeah. Love it. Love it. And so it's labs.io and we will link to that in the show notes. We'll share it on social so people can find it. What about on the socials? Can people connect with you on Twitter, LinkedIn, other places or with the company? How can people continue the conversation if they want to?

Brendan:

Yeah, no, we're definitely on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn is my name, Brenda bannister. And then you can also find Interior Labs on LinkedIn and Twitter at Naura Labs underscore io. And we're going to be coming out with a lot of content. We kind of created the studio here and we're going to be a content driven research and development firm. So hopefully we're putting out a lot of really interesting unique research stuff. We're finding what's working, what's not working, ideas, and just an overall place to just have an open dialogue.

Brett:

And so I think, hey, if you're in a spot where it makes sense, reach out to Brendan and start chatting with the team about what an engagement could look like. At a minimum, you got to follow this guy and you got to pay attention to what they're doing. And the content coming out here, I know it's going to be fantastic. I've had the privilege, like I said, over the last several years of just chat with Brennan on a regular basis and talk about what we're testing. And so as some of that comes to light, you're going to learn a ton. And so pay attention to that to content, to those videos. I will also tease, this is maybe a little premature, but I'm going to throw it out there since we're on the topic we're redoing that course. So the smart Google Traffic course is in a full reboot right now, which is super exciting. And so that'll be released sometime this year. Okay. We're working working with Ezra and team on that, so stay tuned. We'll keep you posted on the podcast and through other means, but we are, we're working on that as well, which will be really cool. So any closing thoughts, tools, recommendation, anything else you want to plug here before we sign off?

Brendan:

No, I just want to say thanks a lot for having me on. This is a lot of fun. I appreciate it. It's been great over the years working together. I've been building that Trail Labs for exactly a year now, and you've been a vital part in jumping on monthly and feeding back ideas. And I really appreciate that. And I think our core principle at the individual level, but also at the business level is build relationships, keep your reputation and work with the unicorn brands and unicorn people, and you're a unicorn brand and I truly appreciate that,

Brett:

Dude. Thank you. That means a lot. That means a lot. I appreciate that. And awesome. Yeah, good times. Really great content. Love seeing what you're doing, love the growth, and excited to see how this thing unfolds. And

Brendan:

Yeah, and I'll see you in Dubai soon. <laugh>.

Brett:

Dude, I got to get to Dubai. I guess I got to do it. I mean, it just seems like a lot of work to get there, but I got to check it out. I definitely do. So absolutely. Awesome. All right, man, fantastic stuff. Thank you so much for coming on.

Brendan:

Thank you.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Would love to get that five star review on iTunes if you think we deserved it. And also I am getting more active on social media. I had a Twitter account, or do you still do, but back in 2010 I was active or something like that. And then it took about a decade off. More than a decade, I don't know but I'm active on it now. So check it out at Brett Curry on Twitter, LinkedIn v Brett Curry. So I'd love to connect with you and continue this conversation on social media. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Retention marketing is crucial for any business. 

When the economy is thriving, you need retention marketing to cut through the clutter and help you stand out. 

When times are tough, as they may be in the near future, retention marketing is essential. During a recession, it’s critical to get the most out of your marketing efforts. 

The most effective way to accomplish this is to maximize your Lifetime Value (LTV) through retention and loyalty marketing.

That’s why, at OMG, we launched email and SMS marketing as a service last year. (email growth@omgcommerce.com to find out more). 

In this episode, I had the pleasure of hosting Daniel Budai, a retention marketing expert and the founder of Budai Media. 

Here’s a look at what we cover: 

• The mindset shift needed to impact how you approach retention marketing and loyalty. 
• Why you are likely not emailing your list enough and how emailing LESS has the opposite effect. 
• How to maximize your results by combining SMS and email marketing.
• How to create a user-friendly loyalty program that incentivizes desired actions, such as referrals. 
• How to use postcards as part of your retention and loyalty efforts.

‍

Mentioned In This Episode

• Daniel Budai (LinkedIn)
• Budai Media
• Budai Media Email Marketing Checklist
• Stamped
• Loyalty Lion
• Yotpo
• Post Pilot
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

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Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of Commerce. And today we're talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart. This is something I'm a passionate believer in and that is retention marketing. We're going to go deep on email and SMS and loyalty programs and it's something that we've always been a believer about at OMG Commerce. We've been added it as a service, SMS and email a little over a year ago because we believe in it so much. And really as we look at what might be ahead or where we might be right now, when you're listening to this recession, difficult times struggle. You've got to be really dialed into your retention marketing, but I would argue even when times are great, you need good retention and loyalty strategies because when you have those, then you can be aggressive at the top of the funnel. And so today my guest is Daniel Budai, the fam founder of budai Media team of just under 30 people working in exclusively in retention marketing. Very sharp guy. Really excited to dive in and get into this topic. I think it'll be very helpful for you and it's always going to be always fun for me to talk about this topic. And so with that, Daniel, how you doing? Welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

Daniel:

Yeah, thanks Brett for the invite and for the great introduction and I'm very happy to be here and share some knowledge hopefully.

Brett:

Great. So really excited to dive into some tips and strategies and ideas and mistakes that people are making and really make this valuable for everybody that's tuning in. But first, how did you get into this? So kind of gimme your 32nd or 62nd background. How did you become a retention marketing specialist?

Daniel:

Sure. So my story actually starts with geology. I studied geology at the university.

Brett:

I had a dollar for every time I heard that I would have $1. Okay, good. Yeah, keep going.

Daniel:

So that's where my story started. Actually. I wanted to work in the oil industry, but I couldn't find a great job there. So I pivot into marketing, I think that's a 180 turn, let's say <laugh>. That was a U-turn. And I started out with sales copywriting at the beginning. I really liked it, but I never really wanted to be very professional and one of the best in copywriting. I much preferred building a team around me, managing people, working on strategy. So that's how we started our agency around four years ago. And by now we grew to almost 30 people all over the world and we mostly work with US based and Canadian clients, e-commerce clients, and we help them to increase the lifetime value of their customers with different strategies with different marketing channels.

Brett:

I don't think you could get any more opposite from rocks and oil to digital, online marketing, e-commerce very, very tangible and analog. Very, very digital and virtual soup. Super interesting, but love that you made that pivot and love that you're having this kind of success. So let's dive in. We're both in similar spaces, OMG commerce is all D to c e-commerce, we do retention marketing as well. So I'm thinking about this a lot myself, but what are some of the top retention marketing mistakes that you see DDC brands making?

Daniel:

Yeah, that's a great question and I think before I start sharing some knowledge on this. So I think it really matters the level of the company where they are because with smaller companies, startups or companies just starting out, let's say below 1 million per year in revenue, I think they miss out on several tactics that they could use. So one of the most common mistakes is that they don't really segment their email list. They just blast emails and everyone gets the same emails. So it's not very personalized, the experience. The other thing is they just simply don't send enough emails. I remember when I had one of my first clients, I sent out only one email to the list and then I was like, okay, what if I sent twice a week and surprise we doubled the revenue and then I was, okay, what if we send out four a week and then guess what happened? We doubled the revenue again. So the formula was very simple. Of course you cannot do it, you know, cannot double your revenue all the time with this thing. But many companies, they are afraid to email their list and they miss out on this opportunity. So

Brett:

Yeah, one thing, I wanna just talk about that for a second, Daniel, cause I love this. I point a lot of people think that if they email too much, they're going to get a lot of unsubscribes and people are going to be upset and turned off and they're going to leave. But usually the opposite is true. The more you email to a point, the more people are engaged, the more they know you see your name, they feel connected to your brand. If you shift to the point where you're only emailing once a month or once a quarter, I know some brands that are doing that, then really all you're doing is you're reminding someone to unsubscribe. You get this random email and you're like, wait a minute, I don't remember signing up for that and I don't even really remember who you are. And so people unsubscribe.

So in a lot of ways, sending less leads to more unsubscribes. And yeah, we're big believers in that at least once a week, plus all your flows and everything. But ideally you can do more than that. And I know some brands, some influencers that email daily and that works, that can absolutely work for a brand. So sending more frequently is almost always a good idea for any size brand. And especially when you are segmenting your first point, segmenting and speaking directly to that customer, then they want to hear from you more, which is great. Okay, cool. So those are top two mistakes not segmenting, not setting enough. What are some other mistakes?

Daniel:

Yeah, yeah. So simply the volume and the segmentation can be a differentiator. When companies, they start out, I know many founders, they don't have time to write their emails or their marketing manager, but email has a great roi. So this is something they should take

Brett:

Ar arguably the best, arguably the best o ROI of any single channel out there. Nothing really beats email

Daniel:

And same applies for SMS marketing, but now let's stick to email more. So these are the two most common mistakes I can see. Probably the third would be to set up email flows at least five below 1 million a year. So set up these email flows because they are automated and even if you don't touch them in the next one year, they will still work and generate revenue for you. So it's a one time thing and then they work automatically. And then if we talk about a bit bigger companies, let's say middle one to 10 million a year, then I think segmentation is still an issue. Many of them, they still blessed emails, the same emails to everyone, same creatives. I think volume nowadays, they are aware of that kind of thing that it's important. They hire someone, they hire an agency, they hire a copywriter, they take care of that. I think probably the biggest issue that is just being organized. So having a content calendar, campaign calendar or sales event. Also, one thing that everyone should apply is having at least one sales event every month because you want to give an opportunity for your list subscribers to buy from you. And in e-commerce, we all know that it's crucial, you want to have a holiday Black Friday, Christmas, but even in months like January, you want to have something like International Dog Day. If you sell dog products or you can't make up holidays, actually totally,

Brett:

There's a holiday for anything. I'll just Google it. There's a holiday for literally anything or make up your own, which is totally acceptable.

Daniel:

Yeah, yeah. So you can make up something, but this is huge in e-commerce. Like come up with a chance, give them a chance to buy from you and you should really internalize this mindset I think. And then people, they will come back again and again and

Brett:

Yeah, I love this. And one thing I would wanna underscore too when it comes to this monthly sales event is that this can apply also if you're a brand that does not discount. And we have a number of clients who either don't discount or they only discount around the holidays and maybe one other time per year. But what you can do is have that annual, or I'm sorry, monthly event. And it can be for anything. Grandparents day, mother's day, kid day, national donut Day. There's all kinds of, there's really a holiday for anything. But you can do free gifts. We know a couple of brands that they will utilize premium gifts and include a gift with purchase. And the gift is often a high perceived value, so likely the same as if you're given a 20% discount or something. It actually costs them less to fulfill it. But then it also has the benefit of it's not training someone to wait for the discount, it's teaching someone to pay full price. So that's a great way to do it. Another way you can do it is bundles, bundling different products and making it convenient by bundling. And then someone's going to maybe just pay the same rate, but now they can buy the bundle and they get all that they want and it's easy, it's easier to shop. Yeah,

Daniel:

You could link, I would add one more, which

Brett:

Is my prescription. And that's cheaper if you're doing subscriptions cuz then you can do a discount there and it doesn't feel like you're cheapening your product. But yeah, go ahead Daniel, you got get an idea to add

Daniel:

To that. Yeah, I mean I think discounts, they can really devalue your brand as well if you use it too much, right? And if you use it, make sure that they get the discount for something. So for a certain action, yeah, you shouldn't just give a discount for no reason, right?

Brett:

Get a discount for subscribing, get a discount for joining our email list. So doing sub subscription products or join our email list or something like that. Love that idea. And I also love that you pointed out a promotions calendar, a marketing calendar. This is something we talk about all the time with our clients at omg. And this is important because ideally what you want to have happen is you want all your marketing to be coordinated. So if you're doing this big sales event for, I'm not sure why I'm thinking donuts it is morning time when I'm recording this. So maybe I got donuts on the brain, but National Donut day for your brand or whatever, an alternative to donuts, if you're going to promote donut day you want your Facebook ads, your Google ads, your remarketing ads, your email, your sms, all of it to be coordinated around that event as best as possible. And the way you do that is through a marketing calendar and making sure all your team and all your agencies are communicating and on board with that. And it just makes a huge difference. So I'm really glad you brought up, I brought that point. And I would also say and you highlighted this, I think there's still bigger brands. We mostly work with bigger brands at omg, bigger brands that aren't segmenting and that aren't sending enough either. So gotta look at those things. But any other big mistakes that you see D two C brands making

Daniel:

And let's say above 10 million a year. What I can see is that they actually over complicated things. So that's the other end of the spectrum. They do segmentation, they send many campaigns, but they over segment actually, they could spend their resources in a better way. And actually when we start working with these clients, and many of them, they already have 20, 30% of their revenue from email marketing and the SMS marketing, all of these channels, loyalty programs. And actually we come in and we just simplify everything we cut. Sometimes we cut like 70% of the flows and we can increase their revenue, the percentage of their revenue from these channels, from 30% up to 50, 40, 50%. So actually it's also an organizational program problem, but here we have to simplify things. Can you see the same thing with your bigger clients? They over complicating?

Brett:

Yeah, that does happen. And I think that this becomes really important, especially as you're scaling. So you're going that 10, 20, 50, a hundred million you have to be organized enough for short and all the teams have to be on the same page and communicating well. But you can get over optimized or overly segmented and you're not doing yourself any favors. We see this a lot on the Google remarketing side, and we used to be guilty of this too. We would create all these different list, all these different duration segmentations, a one day list, a three day list, a seven day list, a 14 day list, a 30 day list, a 60 90. And then we do all these segments and stuff. We still often build those audiences, but for a lot of brands, sometimes you just lean into the one, three and seven day audiences and that's where you get 90% of the benefit.

And so sometimes less is more, and simplifying things a little bit really does make a big impact. And one thing I might add to Daniel, that this is a mistake that I see, and this is more mindset and strategic than it is tactical, but I think a lot of brands make the mistake of overestimating how much customers are thinking about them. And I think this is part of why people understand emails. They're like, well no, we just don't wanna overwhelm them. They're not thinking about you, they're not thinking about you today. They're thinking about all the stuff they gotta do. So you've gotta break through the clutter and email them more if you want them to think about you at all. Right? But we also begin to think, well, hey, they've already bought for me one time, they'll be back, our products are good, they've purchased from us, they will be back.

Not necessarily. So there's so many things competing for people's attention ads on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, email, everywhere. So you've gotta still fight to get that customer back. And then a lot of times people think, well if they've been to my store before I don't need to be aggressive to get them back. But you do. You need to be aggressive to get someone to come back because again, competition is fierce. People aren't thinking about you, they're thinking about their own life and their own problems. And so having that mindset of we don't wanna annoy people, but you've got a culture or you've gotta nurture and cultivate that relationship and be very intentional about it and do so in a way that builds your brand and compliments your brand. But yeah, people aren't thinking about you all the time. You're thinking about your own company, which just kind of makes sense.

Daniel:

And I can see the same thing with different marketing channels. So yeah, most mostly with SMS marketing. So I can see so many business owners to be afraid of using SMS marketing. We will annoy people, we send out too many text messages and in most cases it's not a problem. And same with loyalty program. They are just afraid to be everywhere using an omnichannel strategy. And actually the good thing is you can measure everything. So you can measure the spam rate, unsubscribe rate, you can measure literally everything nowadays, almost everything. So you should just track the right KPIs on them. It'll be fine.

Brett:

Yeah, I remember one of the lessons I learned from an old radio advertising guy, a guy named Roy Williams, wrote a book called The Wizard of Ads. It's pretty great, pretty great for copy and persuasion and stuff. But he talks about how once you get to the point where you are sick of hearing your message or where you think feel like it's overwhelming, like, oh gosh, we're everywhere. I'm sick of seeing my own brand sick of seeing that's about when people are noticing you, right? Yeah. So when it's annoying, it's probably just beginning to break through the clutter. And again, you don't wanna pester people or have the exact same message, be fun, mix it up, be creative, but you know almost can't overcommunicate if you don't feel like you're overcommunicating, you're probably under communicating. And so that's important to, that's

Daniel:

A yeah.

Brett:

Yeah. Cool. So we talked about some mistakes. What are some next level strategies? So what are some of those, either email or SMS strategies that just not a lot of people are doing, but they should be?

Daniel:

Yeah, sure. So I think email marketing, I can see the market is really educated on this topic. It was very different four or five years ago, but I'm happy to see that this completely change, I think. So nowadays we also focus on more SMS marketing loyalty programs, push notifications, and we even send out physical postcards, believe it or not. So we add more marketing channels and we sing them together. Basically. I think SMS marketing, it really has its renaissance in the US now, and it's probably one of the highest ROI marketing channels I can see. So use SMS marketing, we usually use one or two text messages per week. And during Black Friday we send out even more. I think what you could do is really combine it with email marketing. So for example, in your text messages, you can refer to your email tomorrow or in your email, you can refer to your text message like tomorrow we are sending you a gift. And if you want to know what was that was this v i P thing, then subscribe to our SMS list. So you can really combine it two channels. And then there is the loyalty program, you can implement that too.

Brett:

And let's what I talk about SMS for a minute, and I'm really excited to talk with loyalty programs too. Cause that's something we don't do at omg, and I'm really curious to pick your brain on that a little bit. But on the SMS side we take a very similar approach. It's kind of that one to two times per week on sms. I think you can overcommunicate on text just because it is a little more personal. Basically every people open all of their texts, but that one to once to twice a week I think totally fine. But I love that combination where you are mentioning, Hey, did you get the email? Did you get this offer? Here's a link to it, right? So what are you guys seeing on your end when you layer in SMS marketing on top of email? How does that change growth and conversion rates and and ROI on the retention campaigns?

Daniel:

So I think this is the real power of retention marketing, not just email being alone because it's really a kind of situation, one plus one equals three. I think they really add up together. And if we implement, so let's imagine we have a new client, an e-commerce store, and then if we implement the first few email automations, we can get to 10, 15% extra revenue with these automations. If we add email campaigns, this can go to 20, 30%. If we add SMS marketing, then we can add an additional 5%. But here the numbers, they can be more extreme. So here's an example. We have a US based kitchenware store and we generate 30% of revenue from email and 30% from sms. Wow. In q4. So the same.

Brett:

That's

Daniel:

Huge. 6% altogether. That's huge. And

Brett:

Yeah,

Daniel:

Go ahead. And one more thing, because I know people, they are skeptical, so it's not because we use some very early pop up on the website or some gimmicks with the attribution. I know all of those, we don't do these. I think we have a very conservative mindset on attribution, but we still got these numbers with the seven figure store.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And then we look at it where if you're running a D two c, e-commerce brand and email and SMS aren't touching in that 30 to 40% of revenue, then you need to be doing more, right? And you probably need to rethink your strategy and your tactics. And I would agree with you, I love attribution. I'm also a top of funnel guy. I believe in the power of YouTube and Facebook and TikTok and other channels for top of funnel. And if all we did was focus on bottom of funnel, eventually our brand's going to dry up and we're going to run out of customers. So really, I wouldn't say that you could give full credit necessarily to email or SMS for 40% of your revenue, but it should be at least touching that much or at least should be a part of the journey for at least 30 to 40% of your revenue. If not, you're likely not doing enough and you are leaving sales on the table that are not closing because you're not doing enough with email and sms. So love that. All right. So let's talk loyalty campaign. So well first of all, how do you approach it? And then gimme a few, your next level strategies there.

Daniel:

Do you mind if I share another strategy or tactic regarding SMS and email

Brett:

Please? Yeah, before we go

Daniel:

To loyalty. Yeah, because this just came to my mind. So we have a few clients, and I really like these clients because they understand the importance of L T V. So they ran Facebook ads to a landing phase.

Brett:

And just to clarify there again, you said L T V, right? Lifetime value. Yeah. Okay, awesome. Yeah,

Daniel:

Exactly. Yep. Yeah, yeah. Customer lifetime value. So we worked together for a few years and I really like these guys. They really understand what we stand for as an agency and we really good clients. So they ran Facebook ads during Q4 and Q3 to a landing page where people, they could subscribe to the SMS list, v i p, early bird, early bird, black Friday list on SMS and email as well. And then we send these people regular emails in an email flow in Clavio and we could generate a big part of their sales before Black Friday with these early bird offers. And then Black Friday came and then we generated even more, but I think we collected a few thousand emails and contacts. And I think each email and contacts, it generated like 20, $20 in November. So I wanted to mention this because many people, they just drive the traffic to the product page or to the website, but here we really collected emails and then we converted them in the upcoming months. So I think that's still something very undervalued

Brett:

Now. Yeah, I love it. And think about that. So you're generating $20 in sales from one email address captured. Think about how that could change the math for your Facebook and YouTube campaigns. If you could start getting four or five or 10% of people to visit a page to opt in now and now you're getting $20 potentially per signup, that changes the math. That changes how aggressive you can be with your top of funnel strategies and you can push the envelope more and you can grow faster when you have those things dialed in. So love that. Thanks for mentioning that. Awesome. So loyalty campaigns how do you set them up? What are some of your next level strategies there?

Daniel:

Sure. So I think probably the biggest mindset mistake, let's say or mindset shift that everyone should have about loyalty. Many companies, they think about it just as a tool. You know, install this software, you plug it in, and then it'll generate loyal customers. But people, they are more complex than this one. Plugin and play two won't change their behavior. So you should really think about the strategy there. You should actively promote your loyalty program everywhere. Just look at the big brands, they do it really well. So the software is one thing, but you should be tactical about this, how you do it. There are several ways we usually customize it to the brand that we work with. But just a few recommendations. So I think where you should start, you can give them points based on their behaviors and probably referral is the most important.

You want to generate a good word of mouth. And then what we also do, we create a leaderboard so people, they can see where they are, how many points they have and other people, how many points they have so they can actually compete. It usually generates a very good competition between people and you should be creative what you give to them. So not just a discount or gift card, but you can do other things like again, I think you can take a look at big brands and you can get really good ideas. I think on Netflix, there is this movie now where Pepsi promised Jet or an aircraft and then there was a real guy who collected the points and he claimed the jet. And wow, of course he couldn't get it. But that's a crazy idea. That's sometimes crazy ideas for loyalty programs. They are really good.

Brett:

So you gotta have software. And then I think this is one of those things, and again, I'm not a loyalty expert, but I've talked to a lot of people that run 'em and stuff, but seems like it's gotta be relatively simple. They can't be overly complex or no one's going to really pay attention. Yeah, I love the fact that you've got rewards for the most important behavior, like sending a referral, the most important behavior that someone could have arguably. And then I love that that transparency of a leaderboard showing mate who's winning, who's out in the lead creates that healthy competition and makes people want to jump into the lead, get more points and they get more points by taking the behavior, taking the actions that you want them to take. So any recommendations on software or structure there? And no worries if not. And I know this is one of those things where strategy and tactics are more important than the tools you use, but any suggestions on tools?

Daniel:

We tried many. So if you are a smaller company, try stem, do io. It's also very affordable and they have many features, right? If you want to get more stamp

Brett:

Io, is

Daniel:

That right? stamp.io? Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah, cool. I'll link to that in the show notes too. Stamped, do io. Cool.

Daniel:

If you want to get more advanced, then Loyalty Lion is a great choice. And you can also check out your pool because it's a more like a platform. So they have several different things. SMS feature, loyalty, even more referral program. So check out YoPo as well. These would be my three recommendations.

Brett:

Great. So stamped.io, we have a number of clients that use that. It could be a review engine as well. Loyalty line. I'm not familiar with that one, but sounds great. And then I met those guys back in their early days. Actually. I met one of the founders at a magenta event in like 2014, but they've exploded since then, so. Awesome. Let's quickly, and we're on the back few minutes here, the podcast, but I wanna talk push notifications and then postcards. Let's talk postcards first. Cause I think this is one of those unique things that people miss. And in full disclosure, I am an investor in post pilot so I do like that solution for postcards, but I know that there are other solutions out there as well. But how do you like to look at postcards and why do you recommend them

Daniel:

Postcards? Sure. So it's still something that we experiment with. It's not like email or SMS that we use it regularly with clients. I think it can be a good fit for certain e-commerce stores. In my experience, it works really well with the older audience. So about 50, let's say. They are more used to this type of communication. I wouldn't use this with Gen Z or not even with millennials nowadays. So that's one thing. And then of course you should check the cost of this service as well. We checked it in Germany and in the US and I think it's the best for some special and big promotions. So I would use it a few times a year. I think we used it for Easter because it was related to this brand. It's a gifting brand, and we used it for Valentine's Day, which is, I think you all understand why it's a good choice for that holiday. So we tested this out and I think we just really sent out a discount coupon code with a very nice postcard. We designed it and also we connected it with other channels. So we mentioned this in the emails in the sms that look out because you will get a postcard, it's only for VIPs. And that's how we used it so far. The ROI wasn't that great. So we are still experimenting with it, but I think it's a place where you can stand out because yeah, it's really underused drive. So

Brett:

Yeah, it is very much underused. And I'm a marketing guy from way back. And I remember in the early two thousands, late nineties, I was really young then, but I still remember going to the mailbox and it was just full packed to the hilt. And most of it was marketing mail or junk mail. And now that's not an issue. So if you run a postcard or send someone something in the mail, they get physical mail from you, it's going to stand out. And so one of the things that, I did an episode with Drew Sak from post pilot I, I'll post that in the show notes as well, but one of the ways they use it, and I think this is worth considering, is they put it in their flows. So especially for reactivating customers that have fallen dormant and they're not purchasing anymore. If you think about email, and we're all believers in email, obviously that's what this podcast is mostly about.

Still your open rate may only be 30% or so. So there's just a huge chunk of your list that not getting your emails. So postcards can help fill that gap. I think it makes a lot of sense. If you're doing a big event or a big sale, get that to everybody through the postcard. You gotta track the roi, you gotta see it, you gotta be able to measure it and make sure it's going to work for you. But I think it also, I just got an email or a postcard from Smart marketer, Molly Pittman, my friends Molly Ezra and I was like, wow, this is really cool. And it's sitting on my counter and I'll probably see it three or four times before I either use it or throw it away or whatever. But it, it's just that it's something different and it will drive action, but it also cuts to the clutter, which I think is pretty powerful. So

Daniel:

Cool. It also integrates with Clavio, and it's interesting that you mentioned you use it for reactivation because actually we use it for the opposite. So we use for VIPs. Mm-hmm. And our thinking was,

Brett:

Sorry, I think that works too. Yeah, yeah. Use it for VIPs or your biggest clients. Yeah, that works too.

Daniel:

Our way of thinking was that this is a more expensive channel than the others we talked about. So let's use it for the highest LTV customers. That was our approach. But it's interesting to try it for reactivation. I'm sure we will try it for that as well. Yeah,

Brett:

It can even be a step in the flow of a welcome sequence or an abandoned card sequence where if someone doesn't take action after the first two or three emails, you fire off a postcard and see how that works and can integrate into clavia, which is cool. So what about push notifications? Is this something I'm familiar with but something I'm not an expert in? How are you guys using push notifications and what kind of results are you're seeing?

Daniel:

Yeah, so honestly, push is really simple. So the logic is quite similar to SMS or email marketing. And there is a prom message on the website and on the phone as well. I think only Android enables it. So it's not good for iPhones but it's good for Mac. So only iPhones they have limitations regarding push but there is a pro message people, they can subscribe there. And then you can send out automations, like abandon, car abandonment, welcome message or even a veba. And you can also send out campaigns. And we usually send out two campaigns a month. So it's not that many and quite similar to SMS in terms of length. So you should keep it short and to the point. I think you can also add an image there. So it's more visual than sms, but it's quite similar and you can add a few percentage to your revenue with this marketing channel. So it's really an additional thing. And talking about software tools, again, so we use pushout for stores, but honestly I really miss a great push notification tool from the market. And I'm still looking for something and my whole team. So if you know anything, then push out. Yeah, then

Brett:

Yeah, I really don't. And I remember first talking to some really smart marketers that they'll love push notifications a couple years ago as a shopper, as a consumer, I never say yes to push notifications, I just don't want 'em. But I know a lot of people do same here. And so I know it's a valid tool for marketing, but I don't know of a good tool either. But that's super interesting. Yeah. Well, Dana, this has been awesome, man. Lots of good insights. You're true pro. I know you guys run an amazing company. Any resources, tools, anythings you offer as an agency that we should mention to listeners?

Daniel:

Sure. So on our website we have many resources. We also have a podcast. Actually I invited you in my podcast.

Brett:

Yeah, it was on the podcast. Yeah, you do a great job, man. You're a great host.

Daniel:

That was a great conversation. Besides, we also have a blog. We have a lot of case studies, dozens of case studies, but what I would mention is we have a 50 point checklist about e-commerce retention and it's completely free. I think we can add the link to the description so they can find it, they can download it. Again, it's free and I hope it'll help you improve your own customer retention.

Brett:

Yeah, and we'll, we'll link to everything in the show notes, so check that out. But get that 50 point checklist. And Daniel, this has been super fun, man. I am with you. I am a big believer in retention and loyalty marketing. I think it's always important. I think it's even more important during difficult times or recessionary times. And I think it's what people need to focus on if we're pushing for profitability and pushing for overall health as a D two C company, you gotta get retention and loyalty, right? And when that's right, it opens up so many other opportunities for you. So Daniel, thanks for being so open and giving with your advice and thanks for taking the time.

Daniel:

Yeah, thank you. Thanks everyone.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We would love to hear from you. So leave us at review on iTunes if you feel like we deserve it. Also I am now active on the socials, so hit me up on LinkedIn and on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn. I'm the Brett Curry on Twitter. I'm just at Brett Curry, but my commitment is I'm going to be active on social media. So find me there. Let's continue the conversation. Let's talk D to C and growth and good marketing and hopefully have some fun. So with that, thanks again Daniel, and thanks everyone for tuning in and with that. Until next time, thank you for listening.

Chris Mercer - aka “Mercer,” is the man when it comes to measurement and analytics. He’s the guy the pros like Justin Brooke, Mike Rhodes, and OMG turn to when we need help.

If you haven’t heard (and I’d be shocked if you haven’t), Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is coming, and Universal Analytics (the current version) will go away in July of 2023. 

GA4 isn’t just an upgrade. It’s an entirely different animal. It has to be! Given how technology, user preferences, and policies around privacy have changed over recent years - Google is forced to abandon UA and build something completely new. 

In this episode, we talk about what’s new, what’s different, what we’re excited about, and what you can do to prepare.

Here’s a glimpse of what we cover:

• A simple way to understand events and how Google measures them in GA4. 
• Data storage and how to hold onto your data - If nothing is done, your data will be gone in 2-14 months. 
• What’s going away vs. what’s here to stay? 
• How to use GA4 to make better decisions.

‍

Mentioned In This Episode:

• MeasurementMarketing.io
• MeasurementMarketing YouTube
• Bit Quiry
• GA4
• GA4 with Universal Analytics

‍

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today is going to be full of nerdy goodness but also practical wisdom and good insights for all business owners. We're talking about GA4, otherwise known as Google Analytics 4. It's coming fast and furious, so you gotta get ready. So we're going to talk about what do you need to know how to get ready, how do we leverage and maximize this? And I have the foremost expert on the subject, A man who knows all about measurement and attribution and analytics and all that good stuff online. And this is actually podcast number two for Mercer but we were just talking, it's been forever. It's like 2018 the last time he was on. So I waited too long to get Mercer back on the podcast. And for those that are Mercer, what kind of name is that? His name is Chris Mercer, but I don't know anybody that call. I don't know anybody that calls you Chris. Does anyone call you Chris other than your mom? Maybe.

Chris:

Probably was just the family. And that's it. It still feels weird. Yeah, it's

Brett:

So true. Yeah, I don't know how or when that happened and maybe you can enlighten us on that, but everybody calls him Mercer, so that that's his name. But he's the co-founder of measurement marketing.io. We send our team through his training and Mercer and I go way back. We actually spoke, you and I were some pretty early speakers at TNC. Yeah. And we had a long run, man. We were speaking every year running into each other. It was kind of our annual thing when we would hang out. So first of all, why Mercer? And then I've got another history question for you because

Chris:

Growing up there's always been another Chris in the room. And when I went into sort of professional world, it became things like, oh, big Chris, little Chris, fat, Chris, skinny Chris, that it's like, okay, <laugh>, at a certain point everyone just goes down to last names. And that's what they started using. So I just kept it. I was like, okay, just Mercer, it's easier. And Mercer. And if I'm walking down an airport and somebody screams Mercer, I know they're talking about me. So

Brett:

Exactly. Chris made it so much easier.

Chris:

Exactly.

Brett:

Even so this is interesting. So there's this concept in psychology and the way the brain works called a reticular activator where our brain's always scanning for things that are Oh, yeah. Familiar or things that are way outta place. Your brain's always scanning. That's why in a noisy, crowded airport or whatever, you can hear your name. Oh, someone said Chris, someone said Brett. Is Chris still? Does that still trigger you or is it just Mercer?

Chris:

It's mostly Mercer. I'll, I'll hear Chris, but I'm like, that's not me. Cuz people that know me wouldn't have said that. So I'll let it until somebody says it again and I'm like, oh wait, that's me. Hang on. But yeah, typically Mercer.

Brett:

That's hilarious. Okay, cool. And then the other thing I wanna dive into. So I've would consider you and I both OGs, right? And that's not an old comment, we've just been in the game a long time doing this for

Chris:

A while.

Brett:

Yeah. Been doing, been doing it a while. And so I've just seen you all the time at TNC and we'd always talk, but in prepping I was like, Hey, how did you get connected to Ryan Dice and Digital Marker and that whole crew? So tell that story if you would. Cause I think that's interesting. How'd you get connected with Dice and Crew? Yeah,

Chris:

Well when we first started getting into this, it was back when I had as I hit the mic it was back when I had a WordPress agency to do WordPress sites. And we were kind of doing like, Hey, we'll deliver the site and we'll do cro, we'll optimize the sites for you. Cause we wanted to differentiate ourselves. And in order to do that, you gotta measure stuff. So we were giving people complete setups with Google Analytics, et cetera, et cetera. When we started doing that, almost immediately the referrals stopped from being, Hey, we need a WordPress site to, we already have a site, but sudden and such is at a mastermind. And they were showing me what you did with their Google Analytics, how do we get you to do that? Or can you show us how to do that? So we started doing that for a few people and one of those people actually was Justin Brook back in the day. So big

Brett:

Guy, Justin Brookman, friend, friend absolutely personal friend, friend of the show. Dude's a legend. Absolutely.

Chris:

So we were talking to him about different stuff and things that we were doing and he actually recommended us to Digital Marketer way back in the day of Russ Henneberry and Molly Pittman and everybody being out there with

Brett:

Ryan and team also friends, love Russ and Molly, shout out Russ and Molly for listening.

Chris:

Exactly right. I guess Hello again. And it was those guys, it was Russ and Molly that brought us in and was like, Hey, how do we use this analytics thing? And then we brought in tag manager and started showing them some things and the rest is history.

Brett:

That's awesome. And what's so cool about this, and I'm really excited to dive in the GA 4, but it's one of those scenarios where basically everybody's using Google Analytics, everybody throws the code on the site, it's there, but not that many people are actually using it, leveraging it, customizing it, making it useful. They've, they've got the code there and they've got some data but they're not doing much with it.

Chris:

And on that note, and this is something that we're really hitting hard and happen for a little while, but this idea of tool versus trade. So what happens is, let's say I want to be a really good chef. So I go to the food network, I'm watching all these chef shows and I see their kitchens and I'm like, I need to be a good chef. I need that $45,000 kitchen they have cuz it's the oven, it's the stove, it's all the fancy tools they have. So I buy all that fancy stuff, I put it out, remodel everything in the house and I boil an egg on it because I didn't actually learn how to be a chef. I just got the tools that the chefs were using. And my confusion was thinking the tool's going to make me the chef. And that's what's happened with measurement. It's so easy to get started with any of the tools, Google Analytics, tag manager, Looker Studio, wicked Reports, highs, it doesn't matter anything that's a measurement related tool to think that, oh, because I'm doing this, I am now doing measurement and I'm doing

Brett:

Analytics, I'm doing attribution, I bought tools.

Chris:

Right. That's exactly right. But they haven't learned the skill of measurement and understanding why you should measure and how you measure. And when you understand that that's what allows you to unlock the tools like Google Analytics 4.

Brett:

Yeah. Awesome. So any little tidbits. So I love that. I want to dig just a little deeper into that before we go into to GA 4. But what are some of the things that you believe business owners miss when it comes to measurements? So this tool versus trade thing, and I know there's a lot and there's a lot we can unpack, probably make the whole show about the question I'm about to ask you. But what are some of the bigger mistakes or the bigger misses when it comes to, Hey, I'm just using a tool versus I'm really understanding what I'm measuring? Yeah,

Chris:

I think a lot. There's a couple of them. One would be this concept that measurement now is a department. It is not a project. And I think a lot of people think, oh, measurement means I set up a dashboard, I get a report, things have been measured, so I'm just going to use that. And that's not at all what a measurement strategy does. That's just a report. And a lot of times, and this is how that measurement's gone wrong, is if you have a lot of data and a lot of information and no actions, everyone's like, I don't know what this means. And all that stuff happens. And you're marketing by guessing, which is what happens all the time with random maxim marketing, which I think is a Dan Kennedy term. But this concept of like, well we should change the headline, we should change the product images, we should change, we should add reviews, we should change the offer, we should change the price. And everyone's just guessing no one really knows. Or they professionally guess, which is when you buy a hundred thousand dollars mastermind and you're sitting next to somebody else who did a hundred thousand dollars mastermind and they all just guessing at a hundred thousand dollars mastermind level, but they're just guessing, you don't really know what to do. So that's a problem of not having a proper measurement strategy. So that's the one mindset is like measurement is now a department and organizations are quickly realizing I love

Brett:

That, love that.

Chris:

The second thing and why it is so important to be a department is because the whole point of measurement, and this is you and I, right? We're having a conversation, I'm going to say certain things. You're going to adjust what you say based upon what I say and vice versa. This is normal, this is how humans work. Nobody thinks that's weird or different. And yet digitally we lose our minds. We're like, well how can I measure the, I can't hear the conversation. It's a website. Well, yeah, but they're still having a conversation. It's just that you're not there. The website is, so how do you listen to the user's side of the conversation? That's what measurement does. So measurement is how we listen to their side of the conversation. And then marketing is how we respond to the conversation. What mostly happens is marketing, marketing, marketing and marketing and marketing. So imagine if I just never listened to you and I just kept talking and talking and you were like, Hey, how's the weather? And I'm like, and another thing and blah blah blah. At a certain point you're going to be like, this doesn't

Brett:

Work. Sorry. Yeah, sorry me, this is no good. You're not even to listen to me.

Chris:

And people are confused why conversions aren't there because you're not listening to the conversation, you're ignoring them. They're like, well this doesn't work, I don't like this. And you can tell things. Is it the above the fold that's an issue. Is it the ad coming in the way the setup? Was that the issue? Was it, is it a process? That's a technical issue. You can see all sorts of things in measurement when it's properly set up, but it does take skill and strategy and that's why it's so important. It's almost like a turbocharger that gets added to your marketing department engine. It's like those, they're, they're not se they're separate, but they are made to work together. So when you snap on measurement, especially now that we're in 2023, you gotta be efficient in probably what's going to be a downturn year for a lot of companies. You gotta get efficient with your spend. So how do you do that? Turn on the flashlight, turn on visibility, add measurement to your marketing and then it's easier to figure out what to do because the users are telling you because you can hear their conversation. That's the whole point of it.

Brett:

And that's so brilliant. And it does come down to data does not matter. It is not valuable. It's useless if you're not doing something with it. If you're not first understanding what is the data telling us? And then two, doing something with it. And I love that view of the data is really just showing you the conversation, showing you the prospect side of it. How are they interacting, how are they engaging? You're listening by looking at the data. I think that's brilliant. And yeah, what's so interesting about this year, and we'll see, nobody really knows what's going to happen with the economy right up, down, sideways, Armageddon, blip, who knows? But what I'm confident in is there will be opportunities for growth. There'll be opportu opportunities to gain market share, to do good things. I think we should enter this year with lots of confidence. However just always, and maybe even more so if there is a recession or a bigger downturn, you gotta make every dollar count. So don't pull back, don't spend less, go hard, but make sure you're not wasting anything. That's

Chris:

Exactly right. Be efficient. Exactly right.

Brett:

Be efficient. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Love it. Okay. That was a brilliant setup. I appreciate that. That was super fun. So let's talk GA 4, Google Analytics 4. So many changes. So many changes coming our way. Come on man. We got iOS 14, which now seems like ancient history but

Chris:

Still really I remember that. Still

Brett:

Impact. Yeah, yeah. But still feeling the impact. Google's got all kinds of change with audiences. We got performance max and smart shopping's gone and Facebook is changing things like everything is changing. So now our dearly beloved, our beloved universal analytics, the analytics that we all know and love and have had forever, it's going away too. Say it, but why? First of all, before we talk about what and what we need to do and stuff why the change to GA 4?

Chris:

Yeah, good question. I mean the short answer is cuz they had being Google in this case. So there's really three main things that are occurring that are kind of the superstorms of our world that will be here. They're not going to go away. They're going to be here for at least the decade. So the first is tech, right? Tech is changing rapidly. You mentioned the iOS thing when Apple and Facebook got in their tiff. So it's like that's going to happen. But keep in mind that's just the one everyone talks about. It's been happening for a long, long, long time. Apple's been changing stuff in Safari forever where they're limiting cookies and everything else. Chrome is dumping third party cookies. Eventually they say 20, 24.

Brett:

Now we'll find out say 2023 or

Chris:

Seven maybe,

But eventually they're going away, right? You've got browsers like Brave and Vivaldi out there that just disconnect measurement from the start. Can't measure. You have to go in and turn that stuff on, which of course no users are doing. So you see this stuff, ad blockers, extensions, all this stuff is out there all the time. Tech is rapidly changing. So that's essentially causing less people to be measured on your site. That doesn't mean they're not on your site. It means you can't tell they're on your site. How do you deal with that? So that's one problem. Then there's another storm, which of course is that gets all the headlines, which is privacy, just the actual laws that are happening, right? GDPR being the famous one, but Utah has got theirs, California's got theirs here in the states. States will certainly have one, probably not in the next couple of years, but it will definitely have a privacy some sort of legislation for that.

So it's coming down. The big shift on that is that the data has to be in the control of the users. So it used to be that I would click on, let's say I go to your site, I click on the little button on Facebook. Facebook back in the day, it'd be like that's my right, I own that. I can do whatever I want. Now it's not the true. Now I should be able to go back to Facebook and say, you know what? I'm leasing that like to you, but I want you to get rid of all my stuff. And they have to be able to do it right? And that's happening. Power of the data is not the platform anymore that collected it. It's still the user's data and that's an important shift. So that's starting to happen worldwide, mostly in Europe right now for sure.

But it will certainly happen in the us. Then the third thing that's happening is the thing that's kicked off the other two, which is the users themselves are just really getting tired of what I think in a lot of cases was lazy marketing, not putting in proper kills pixels and following you around with the shoe store stuff for eight months. And it's like putting in and publishers who put in a billion different ads and it just makes it a horrible user experience. So that people go, well I need to block these and that's caused it. So the users themselves don't want their privacy out there. They want to be in control of their data. They want to not be measured all the time or followed around cuz it's a little creepy what's been happening. So you've got those three storms, the tech laws and then the users and they're all colliding at the same time.

And all of these are essentially causing challenges because if you're using laws and they don't give you consent, well now you don't see them on the site. So they're there, but you can't measure their behaviors if they're a user using an ad blocker. Cause they don't wanna be measured. You lose it. If they're using Brow Brave or Vivaldi or something else, it's not going to work. Right? So less and less still the users are on your site when I emphasize that they're on your site, they're doing stuff, they're buying stuff, but you have no clue that's happening until the sale shows up. That's a weird thing for a market to be like, now you have to make things work. How do you do that? Yeah. So enter a

Brett:

Platform, this is how Google makes their livelihood. Gotta be able to measure this and show you this stuff. So you spend more, you spend more time

Chris:

Because you wanna spend more money on Google ads, right? Gotta gotta have that Performance Max campaign. Yeah. Yeah. So what's been happening is Universal analytics was a tool, and I kind of think about the Model T Ford. It was this car that was built for a very different time. It was built for, I don't even know, they went, let's say it's a max of 35 miles an hour or something. It wasn't built for. In Texas, our speed limits are 80 miles an hour. It would never survive on a Texas road. This is not built for that future. Well what if there is no road right? Model T's not going to do anything, right? It's not going to make it through. What if I wanted airbags in it? Well I might be able to replace the tires, but I can't put airbags in it. Just the structure isn't ready for the new world.

So it had to be rebuilt and they've been trying to snap on new things and they, they've evolved it over the years, but it's the same model T Ford at the end of the day. And it can only go so far. But that's what a model T does without structure. So instead it's like, okay, let's rebuild this thing from scratch. What does it look like knowing what we know about the internet? If you think about a platform like the original Google Analytics, it was built when there was like, no, we had mobile phones, but they weren't connected to the internet. People weren't thinking that. They were barely thinking about laptops back then, right? Right. Yeah. Let alone the Nest thermostat. That's internet of things. That also has an IP address that can be measured. So it's like, yeah, yeah, okay, now what do we do? So we rebuild it and that's what Google essentially did. They rebuilt it from scratch saying, now that we know what the world is, and I trust Google just because they have of anybody in the world, Google has the best view of what the future's going to look like when it comes to impact because they're literally making it right. They

Brett:

Always have even from the early days. But now they're shaping, they got the power to shape it more than anybody. And yeah, now they know that the web is 80% mobile and they understand and

Chris:

You're going to have internet of things coming in. That's another people aren't even thinking about yet. But that's going to be a thing. It's a really good point. So it's like, okay, we need to make something that can do all of that. Think about apps on a phone didn't exist, wasn't a thing 10, 15 years ago. Now it's like why do you not have an app? Of course you have an app, right? Everybody's got apps. So this platform was redeveloped with the world of what it is now today and where it's going to go tomorrow. And that's why GA 4 exists. So it takes care of tech challenges, it takes care of tech challenges primarily through modeling. There's a lot of modeling that it does. So it will kind of say to you, well we see, we know there's a hundred people on a site, but we think it's more like 150 and that's what it'll tell you.

And they're working this stuff out. This is in progress. But that's what's going to start happening. So you're going to have these modeled information where the tool's saying, here's what we think is actually a useful truth of what's been happening all the way through attribution being modeled conversions, behaviors happening on the sites, being modeled, all that stuff. The laws, GD GA 4 gives you control of the data. So you can come to me and say, listen, I want you to get rid of my data in goo all the data you have as a company. I want you to delete everything cause you're, we're all going to have to be able to do that stuff. So universal analytics, I can't do it. It's impossible. Yeah, it can't get it out cause it was never built for that. But GA 4 is, so GA 4 doesn't hold data very long, which is a key point.

It holds data up to two months in the beginning when it first starts out it's two months or you can flip it to 14 months, but that's it. No more going back in time and seeing what happened five years ago that user certain user data's not going to be there anymore. You'll see generic data, but you won't see user behavior data as much. So it's like, okay, well I can now control the data going in and I can do things with it. So it makes it a little more flexible for this world of laws that we're in with GDPR and other privacy concerns. And then it's like, okay, what are the users wanting? Well again, privacy and consent and everything else that goes in there. And that modeling helps to say, okay, we only measured X amount on your site actual in terms of the cookies and everything else that's fired, but here's what we actually think is happening and there's going to be some

Brett:

And what is that going to be based on? Cuz really Google's still probably going to be able to see some of that, right? They'll be able to see the actual

Chris:

That's exactly the point. Google knows they were on Chrome, right? So let's say they say, and a little bit is how you set it up, but let's just say Google generally knows because they're using Chrome, they use Gmail, Google Calendar on your phone, all the stuff that's a Google infrastructure. They know that you visited this site, they might not know the intricacies of what you did on this site, but they know you were probably on that site. And then they can measure because some people will have privacy stuff not worried about it and be measured. So they can take that sort of sample of what the audience is doing and then extrapolate and say, well we know these a hundred people did this. So probably if that pattern holds true, this other thousand people probably did this stuff too. And that's how they come up with a modeling. But who knows better than Google AI and machine learning. I get open ai, it's got a ton of stuff going on, but Google's got tensor and everything else they're doing and they're staying eerily quiet on that stuff. Yeah, it's not like they don't have it. They're in a lot of cases they think it's better than what open AI's done, but they're just not giving it out pushing. They're

Brett:

Not giving it out Performance

Chris:

Max and they're, they've got all these diagnostic tools that are feeding that algorithm. Again, I have no insider knowledge total guess, but if I'm Google, that's what I'm doing. That makes sense. Yep.

Brett:

Yep. Feed. Yeah, I think it's a really good guess mean, think about the presentations Mike Rhodes gave about Google's AI and how advanced it was. And they bought that company out of England that had the built the, what's the game? That's like chess, but it's way more advanced. I forgot to go, oh it was go, yeah, yes, go this machine that became better than all the top go players in the world. Anyway, that was like 2015. So all those sizes, it

Chris:

Is not sitting on a shelf. I promise you

Brett:

AI is all that. AI has been getting better and better and learning. And so yeah, nobody's better at AI and machine learning than Google. I think we can safely say that. So awesome. Okay, that's really, really good. They kind of explains the why. And I also think when it comes to privacy stuff too talked about this on a chat I have with Molly Pittman on her podcast, but I think companies get to a size Google, Facebook, others, Amazon would be in this category too, where I think they wanna do right by users or I think the users are driving some of this, but there's also this case of we don't wanna get sued, we gotta grow and we gotta do these things and the price gotta be good, but we could gotta mitigate lawsuits. And I think that that's driving a lot of what they do as well from the absolutely the privacy standpoint.

Chris:

Google doesn't want this data. And that brings us to an important point about universal analytics. Not only is it the Model T, but they're literally going, you know what? We're going to repo this car coming up. They keep doing it, they're going to shut it down, they're going to disconnect it and one day it's not going to turn on. Yep.

Brett:

Yep, yep, yep. Totally Cool. So what do we need to know about 4 that you haven't already talked about? So how else is it going to be different that we didn't already mention?

Chris:

There's a huge difference. So besides the fact of the strategy, it's going to be a more useful tool in for today and in the future. So for sure if for no other reason of using it, do it for that. That said, it is completely different. So this is in particular to those of you who are like, I've heard of this thing and I keep pushing it off. Stop doing that. Yes. And this is Google's fault. I firmly blame Google on the rollout for this in universal analytics and even in the regular, what they used to call classic analytics. And this is how Google, they bought this company called Urchin Analytics. Then it turned into classic analytics, then it's Universal Analytics,

Brett:

Which that's where UTM comes from. A little bit of internet history. UTM is urchin tag

Chris:

Tracking module

Brett:

Tracking module. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a fun little

Chris:

Trivia for you. But the whole point of that was they were literally just snapping stuff onto that same model T thing. So they made better tires or whatever else, but at a certain point they just had to rebuild it. So when they did that, they didn't just say, oh well here's Universal that we have, we're going to iterate from there. They threw that out and they said, okay, we're going to build from scratch. So the entire thing is different. Do not think it's going to be like every other time you have upgraded Google Analytics. And this is why I blame Google, nothing against them love 'em to death. But they messed up this rollout because they kept telling people this is an upgrade, which is what they told people with Universal Analytics when I'm from classic Universal. And it was like, oh, just change the script on your pages and now you got all these new features, it's the same thing but better.

And back then that was very true. Now when you get into it, people that are doing that, they go, what is this? It's a completely different platform. So it's going to have a learning curve. It is not hard, but it is very different. And there's a lot of it just like Universal Analytics has. So people that have experienced universal analytics have gone through it a few hundred times. You get used to it, right? It's the same at the end of the day. It's the same old thing. I tell people it's kinda like this, back in the previous life as when I was a waiter at the Olive Garden og, so

Brett:

Olive Garden on yes,

Chris:

Breadsticks and Salad, baby

Brett:

Red sticks.

Chris:

I remember getting this menu and going through everything and being in training thinking there's no way I'm going to remember this. All these details of what gets what and sides and what's possible, blah. Then I realized after a few days of this, I'm like, oh, I'm saying the same thing a hundred times a day. It's going to get pretty easy. And that's how you memorize a menu. It just do the same thing over and over again. That is kind of universal analytics. It's the same stuff and you just do it. You only, it's a landing page report. Once you get used to that, you kind of, you know it right? Once you learn your source media report, you kind of just know it. And that is there in GA 4, they just came out with the landing page report just recently and they have the source media reports, what they call the acquisition reports now. So those are all back there, but they look different and they're in different places. There's a different layout. So everybody who is not yet, if you've listened to this, you're watching this and you're like, I haven't made that movie yet, do it now. Get in there and get started with it. Cuz you're going to have probably, I'd give yourself at least 90 days to start getting used to this platform to get something from it, but it's going to take some time to learn.

Brett:

Well, not only that, and if you're listening to this in January, which we we're publishing it you've only got what about six months until GF 4? Exactly.

Chris:

Going back to Universal being shut down

Brett:

And you want a little bit of data, a little bit of historical data ideally. And we were telling all of our clients last year trying to get them to upgrade or to in install GA 4 along with Universal Analytics for a while at least by July. So you get some of those year over year comparisons if you get the data for 14

Chris:

Hours. Exactly. I guess, and this goes back to that rollout too. They kept telling people it's ready, it's ready, it's ready. Switch, switch, switch. And people would switch and they're like, it's not ready. And it was like the boy who cried wolf story where it's like, okay, at a certain point you just don't believe anymore. So I don't think you should believe Google. However, it is ready enough to start using. So to your point, you're going to have your universal that you've got for the next maybe six months, six, seven, whatever it's going to be. And then you've got the GA 4 stuff. And what'll happen is you'll get more and more used to GA 4 and then Universal, you won't miss when it's gone and it'll stop the way they're currently most current truth of it's rolling out would be they're going to stop collecting information July 1st, 2023.

So you can still access Universal Analytics, but it won't be collecting new information no more, no more new data goes in there as of July 1st. So that means you're going to have to have everything set up and worked out and figured out with GA 4, hence the 90 days, give yourself 90 days to figure it out, maybe another 90 days after that to perfect it and then you'll be off to the races. It's not going to be that big a deal, but it's going to be a deal, right? It's not huge deal, but it's a deal. So focus on it and put your efforts into it. One of the things, this goes back to the benefits of it is, is be what makes it a harder platform to learn is that it can do anything. I was talking to somebody about this today actually, where we were talking about things like Infusionsoft, right slash keep slash max classic, whatever they're going to call it in three months.

So you get this platform that right? So sure, so much stuff. It does a ton of stuff versus active campaign, which just does emails. So active campaigns a little easier when it comes to working with emails because it just does that one thing. Infusionsoft does emails, does campaigns, has APIs, has the cart system, has the affiliate programs in it. So it's a little more and because there's so much more back there to do, it's a little more complicated to do it, but powerful. So with GA 4, it's kind of like that compared to Universal. Universal would say, I know what a page U is and I can say E-commerce information and there's really few things it does and that's really it. GA 4, the way that they think about it is everything's an event. And the way that I think about this in my head is just, it's a behavior.

Everything's a behavior. What behavior you wanna record, I would like to record a behavior of a page view. When they view a page, I will record that behavior. What else would you like to record? I would like to be, behave, record the behavior of a click. Okay, I'll record the click and where they're going. When that click happens what else do you like to record? I would like to record scroll when they reach the bottom of the page, I'm going to record that as a scroll. And this is all on its own. This thing does this on its own and it can even do things like YouTube video form submissions. It'll do it automatically. Whereas Universal Analytics, that required a ton of customization, right? Yeah. Now with GA 4, it kind of does it on its own and there's different ways to do it. There's different levels to this, but just out of the box you can turn that stuff on and it automatically collects not just regular page views, but clicks, scroll form submission, video embeds that you have on YouTube that they start the video, play the video, all that sort of things.

File downloads. So things that people might not typically be measuring because they didn't know how to get that behavior measured. GA 4 just sort of starts from these multiple set of different behaviors that it can do. And then because of the model that it uses, what they call the data schema to get technical, but it's an event. And then there's things that describe the event. So an example of a click that's just an event, a behavior, a click. What do I need to know about that? Where I wanna know where they clicked too. Where they going, okay, well that's information we'll collect too. So now the click and information about the click, that's all it really is. But the beauty of what they did is they made it wildly so you can make anything and then details about anything you want. So for example, I could, if I'm an e-commerce store, right?

Say I'm a Shopify store, whatever, I got an e-commerce store and I can create an event called product engagement. Literally just make up that thing and say, oh, I want a product engagement event. Well what happens when product engagement, I wanna know how they're engaging with the product. So it could be product engagement and then clicking on images. So I know that they're virtually pulling the product off the shelf and maybe looking at it because they're clicking on product detail images. I could do product engagement and looking for size. So now I'm looking, oh, there's different sizes they're investigating for product engagement, looking at colors. So now I'm like, and now because I can literally put that into GA 4, I can get a story back that's perfectly built for me as an e-commerce store owner. So I could say, well I need to see all my product detail pages and I want to see, in other words, how many people saw the different versions of products that I've got.

Then I can see the conversion rates of who actually bought that and I might see two or three products are really selling a lot more than the other ones. Well then I can go and find out why. Cuz not only do I know the results, but I would know how that's happening. So I can say, well what's the engagements on these? Well, these top products have more engagement than these other products do. But what specific engagement? Well the ones that are really outselling tend to be the ones that people are looking at the reviews, right? Oh, okay, well maybe we should go back to these other products and enhance reviews maybe. Oh there's these other products have reviews from three years ago. Let's do an email campaign and get reviews freshened up now and then we would expect that's going to prove sales. So now measurement is guiding the marketing actions and it's not a guess, it's a better than average chance of success type of thing. It's all probabilities, but that at least focuses the effort so you can start to move the needle a little bit faster. And that's cool about GA 4 because you can do some really cool custom stuff pretty quickly with it, but at the same time, because you can do anything, it's like, well what do I do? And that's where planning comes in and learning measurement strategy is why it's

Brett:

It so important. That's what I've heard from our internal analytics specialists. And of course we just do set up and troubleshooting for our media clients. We don't offer analytics services outside of that. But yeah, they, they've said, Hey, there's a lot to, this is super complex. So when you can do anything, it also makes it harder to wrap your mind around all of it. But what you're saying though is that some of these things that we can view all these events, some of them are relatively simple to set up because G4 is kind of built to do it. It's

Chris:

Built for it. And to your point, and I get it because okay, I hear that too with our students with like CASA is really complex, but at the end of the day you're like, it is because there's a lot. But that doesn't mean it's complex. It's actually really simple. There's just a lot of simple, I mean, here's what I mean by that. Everything that I talked about, page views, clicks, scroll, purchase, add to carts, all the traditional e-commerce things, these are just behaviors. So all it does is collect behaviors and then details about those behaviors. That's it. So everything's just a behavior and the details about behaviors and

Brett:

Details about those behaviors.

Chris:

So I wanna know purchase, but that's right what they bought, but

Brett:

It does,

Chris:

Right? Behaviors. So

Brett:

Now are you able to then build segments where you can look at people that engage with a pdp? I wanna look at the people that clicked on images and looked at reviews and compare them to people

Chris:

That not, let me give you just an idea of the back and forth or the differences between Universal and GA 4. So Universal, they had this thing where you could set up, they called 'EM goal funnels where you'd have to go in and set it up, but the problem was if you forgot to set it up and you set it up after all the traffic hit, you were outta luck, right? You had to set these things up ahead of time and you would go and see the Gulf flow and it's pretty useful. Well in GA 4 there's what they call an explorer section what they call workspaces. So you go into the explorer workspace and you can set up a funnel report and you can literally say, I would like to see people who landed on this page, watched this video for 30 seconds then went to this product detail page and added to cart within 10 minutes.

And then you see your conversion rates pop up. So you can see a customer path, talk about listening to the conversation, right? So now you can see the conversation, then you can say, I would like that to be an audience. Let's send that to Google Ads so they can retarget them because they didn't buy yet and I wanna give them a coupon offer and just refresh that every 30 days. I wanna have whoever's done that in the last 30 days. But the key thing that they're just to emphasize is that 10 minutes thing, it knows time. Universal analytics never

Brett:

Knew time didn't no time, yeah.

Chris:

4 is built, it knows every single second. So you can literally ask it and build questions like that. Well, who's going through, who's buying a product? Maybe the people who are your highest ticket people are buying by time. They see the product detail page, they add to cart, checkout and purchase. They're doing that within 30 minutes. And the people that are low ticket are doing it within five minutes. So then it's like, wow, how do we slow down people? Cause we slow them down, they'll buy more. Yeah. And that's counterintuitive. How do I maybe add a little bit of friction that might, what are these people, oh well they're seeing other products because again, you can tell GA 4, I would like to know when somebody considers also recommended products that you might wanna buy, you can measure for that. And that's the beauty of this platform is it can do anything which is, it's again, very simple and at least theory, it's behaviors and then what do you wanna know about those behaviors? But because it could do anything, you just really have to think it through. So I do lots of notes and whiteboarding of what are we trying to figure out? What questions are we trying to answer? What information do we want to collect to get those answers? And then what actions would we take if we knew what those answers were? And then assuming it makes it through that, it's like, okay, cool, this makes sense. Cool, now let's go set up the measurement so we can do that. And that's sort of how that whole thing works.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. And yeah, that understanding and measuring every second is interesting, right? Because the way Universal Analytics worked, it was only if you closed the page or once you took one action, they could only measure the time between that and the next action, right? Exactly what they

Chris:

Called exactly right? Yeah. It would only tell the, so if you landed on a page and then you left and it had no measurable action, it would be like zero time on page. And even if you spent the time, maybe it was a really long blog post or a video or something, you watched it and did all these behaviors. Universal had no idea. Yeah, GA 4 will, GA 4 actually has, they technically brought back something called bounce rate. It was one of the most misused metrics in the world for sure. But they brought it back. But they have a better version of it called Engaged sessions. So it literally counts to 10 seconds and you can change it up to 60 seconds. So you have that ability in the settings, but within 10 seconds it goes, okay, they're still here, they're now engaged. So even if I land on one page but I stick around 10 seconds, it goes well, they're engaged, they're still here.

That's an important metric to know because there's a big difference between somebody that comes to a product detail page and leaves within 10 seconds and didn't buy and that's why they didn't buy. Versus somebody who comes to a product detail page, sees the product, investigates the different sizes, looks at the different colors, and then doesn't buy, right? Two different problems. One was, Nope, wrong place, I'm outta here. And maybe there was a mismatch on the expectation that brought 'em there. The other one is just didn't get 'em around. They're looking, but maybe they missed a color they were looking for. Maybe the,

Brett:

Yeah, maybe they're not ready. Maybe they're just shopping. Maybe they're shopping for something.

Chris:

Maybe they little push, right? Little discount coming in. But why give the discount to somebody that wouldn't even stick around 10 seconds? They don't need that. And more importantly, why put that crowd in an audience to have Google Ads do that? There's no point that you want the people who are engaged with your brand to actually be in that audience. And that's the power of GA 4. And that's really really why, I mean, at the end of the day, this is why Google's doing it. We mentioned earlier, so you can spend more money on Google ads, but that's okay,

Brett:

The money on Google ads. And so Google ads get sued. That's like, there you go.

Chris:

And hopefully it's driving more results because if you're feeding their algorithm, this is the buyer I want, and then you say, well go find other buyers like that and you're using Performance Max or whatever else to do that, well now Performance Max is getting smarter cuz their algorithm is getting better quality data from you because it's coming from GA 4, right? Right. So there's a lot of reasons to switch over to this platform and again, expect the learning curve. Nobody, the only reason I think people will really get spun out of this is if they think it's going to be exactly universal. And because they quote no Universal, they're going to know GA 4. That is not true. It is a completely different platform. So you're going to have to get in there and learn it, but give yourself 90 days and as long as you give yourself that 90 days of playing around with it and you don't really have to use it and it's not detrimental if it didn't work and all that sort of stuff, within 90 days you're accidentally going to start getting good at it. That's going to happen. And you're going to be like, ah, this is not a big deal. And then you just sort of build and grow as you go through.

Brett:

That's awesome. So you've already touched on a few of these things that are really cool, but anything else you're really excited about with GA 4 that's that's going to be an improvement. Make our lives easier, make our lives better, that you haven't already talked about. I know you've already said mentioned several.

Chris:

There are a, there's a lot in the exploration section that they have. So this is where it's, they broke it up in different workspaces, they called 'em. So there's the reports and Universal just had reports like that's all they had in GA 4. There's a report section that has some of the standard reports, not as many but I think that's okay. Cause Universal most people weren't using all the reports anyway. So you have the reports that shows what they call lifecycle of reports. So it's how did we acquire the users? What actions, behaviors did they take? What were the results of those behaviors? That sort of stuff. And you get some information around demographics of the users. Same stuff you would do with the Universal Analytics. Then there's this other section called explorations where you can really customize and that's what they want people doing.

It's back there going, okay, well I wanna build a report that answers this very specific question. And you can do that. What used to be Custom reports and user me Universal Analytics is now that it's called Explorations and there's a bunch of different ones. So you can do the goal of the funnels like we talked about before. You can do Path reports where you can see, I wanna see people who purchased, what did they do before that? What did they do before that? What did they do before that? Or people who landed on this page. And then you can go backwards and forwards with pathing reports, which is pretty cool. You got lots of segment overlap reports, user explorer reports that are back there, LTV reports, cohort reports. So anybody that is into data, it can do a lot more than Universal ever could hope to. So that's there, there's a whole advertising section that's really there to push budget in the Google ads for the most part. But it's useful, right? Because that's where you start to see, here's how all the different traffic sources are working together to cause a purchase or whatever the behavior is you're trying to measure for. And it's really easy to see

Brett:

How it's easy. Any insights on the advertising piece? Cause I have not dug into this much on Google Analytics, but I know what or g4, but I know with Universal Analytics as an example, it would severely under report YouTube ads, Facebook ads, anything top of funnel because it's still, even if you didn't have it set up as last click it still, it just favored things that were further in the funnel. Do you have any clear insights into how advertising measurement might be different, better and how attribution might be different?

Chris:

It's a good question. To some extent it's going to be the same. It depends upon how you set up the attribution though, right? So now GA 4 has this whole data-driven thing, which of course is what Google Ads is mostly set to where it's like, Hey, let us tell you. And to be honest, I don't actually like that cause I've just control freak and I hate black boxes or

Brett:

Not. What the model model you're using you, we were whatever model we want,

Chris:

Whatever we wanted, trust us. It's like the smart goals I used to do in Universal Analytics we're like, ah, don't use smart goals. It's like, we'll tell you what you should be going for and then we'll spend your money. You're like we'll tell you the goal. That's too much black box. I would prefer not exactly but GA 4 does have this data driven attribution that can be in there as default, which wasn't something that Universal is particularly good at. So it can start to get a little bit better when it comes to some of that. I personally still like last click. And then measuring for what is a much, much easier now because remember everything's an event. An event is just a behavior and it's collecting behaviors and details around this behaviors. And then because you have a list of all these behaviors, it'll start collecting stuff and you're like, oh, it's clicks and scroll and purchases and whatever else.

Lead generation, lead gens or signups or sharing. Imagine all the behaviors that are happening on your store that you don't know about. GE 4 can collect those and tell you. And what's cool about it is you can go in there and you can call them conversion events. So universal Analytics, people are probably familiar. You have goals, go goals don't exist anymore. Everything now is a conversion. So it's an event, but it's a particular important event. I would like this to be a conversion event. And you literally, you see your list of events and you toggle, you push a button, it's like, yep, make that a conversion, make this a conversion event. I wanna know when this happens. And that's it. Super easy to set this stuff up. Wow. And then you can start to say, okay, well that's a conversion event. Well I can hook that into Google Ads and now Google Ads can start going after that and say, oh, the objective is to get more signups and so I'm going to do that.

And I took a little conversion event, hook it into Google Ads and it's off to the races. So there's a lot of stuff they're doing to help with that. And again, it's in process. I absolutely don't wanna say this thing is fully cooked. I don't think it is, right? I don't think it'll be for years to be honest, but it is 80, 85% there. There's a few nuances that are a little annoying, but at the end of the day, I can use it to make marketing decisions. And for me I'm like, cool point. As long as I can do that, I can

Brett:

Make it happen. If you're able to make good marketing decisions, good business decisions, what it's there for. Do you still have your clients mostly running Universal, universal Analytics and GA 4 together? Or do you have some people that are just 4 exclusively at this

Chris:

Point? We are mostly GA 4. Let's say GA 4 primary is probably how I would say that. Where there is Universal analytics there, just in case we need something. But almost everything is GA 4 NICE primary. So all GA 4 would hook into Liquor Studio or something else and we can build a reports so that they can see it kind of on their CEO dashboards a little easier to get through than the GA 4 interface, but it is GA 4 that's powering all

Brett:

That stuff. Yeah. So is there any solution, and maybe it's through Looker Studio, which used to be Data Studio, it's what we use for our reports and stuff. So this 14 month expiration of data, is there any way to keep data longer, you just have to create customer reports and save 'em or

Chris:

What's a great question? So the answer is no, because that's a whole point is they don't want the data cuz they don't wanna be sued by Europe when Europe's like why do you hold people's data for five years to really need that for business reasons? And Google's like no, but we can't get rid of it. So they're automatically going to flush that data. However, one of the, again, benefits of GA 4 IT and it can get a little techy, but it's important because again, measurement's a department in an organization now. Yeah, it is not just gimme your report, you have to keep up with measurement because tech is changing, laws are changing, users are changing. You have to keep up with that. It's like seo, you didn't just learn SEO and then people it 20 years ago are not doing the same stuff they do now, right? They've evolved. Right, totally. Same thing you have to do with measurement, right? So when it comes to Google Analytics 4 and it's, it's got all this information coming into it again, it's got modeling. So I can tell you kind of what's going on there and forgive me man, I'm losing my train of thought. What was the question? God, yeah, I got caught up. Got caught up in that, but I had the answer in my head. I just lost it.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. That's hilarious. I was actually looking at the time, so what was I asking you? I was asking you, oh, the data, how long to can you

Chris:

Oh, perfect. Yes. 14 months. Okay. Big big query is the short answer. So the in Universal analytics, you could connect Universal Analytics into BigQuery, which essentially makes a copy of all your analytics. It is now your data you control, you can do whatever you want with it. It's not Google's anymore, right? Nice. So that's Universal Analytics. But that was only available for the 360 accounts, which was the paid version, the ones that were 150 K a year. So that was just something that most companies couldn't do with GA 4 by default, they give you this free connector to BigQuery. Nice. And honestly, I think this is what Google's doing. This is all conspiracy, but I believe this to be true. Imagine if Universal Analytics today, if everybody that had that account was paying two or $3 a month for it, everybody Google would be

Brett:

Awesome. It's insane amount of money.

Chris:

So what's happening with GA 4 is Google Analytics 4 connects into BigQuery. It's not that hard to set it up different. It's a skill. So it's a little different. But once you get it, when you get your account created, you connect it and every day it just dumps the data into BigQuery. So you have a copy of your data. So then what you do is you start using BigQuery as your database, as your data source. So initially you can use GA 4 for maybe the first 14 months, but if you start asking questions about what happened 4 years ago, well that'll be in your big query cuz you've made copies of all that data. And to your point, it is your data, it's your copies now. So they are automatically setting this up where it's easier for small businesses to have copies of all their data. But the important part is it's not Google's data anymore, it's yours, it's

Brett:

Your data. But BigQuery also you pay for, right? You pay for sure

Chris:

That. And that's exactly right. So BigQuery is a cloud-based database that requires it. But we've been doing it for months or more than months now at this point. And I think our about every month, give or take, and don't quote me on this, about every month I think we are almost paying almost 2 cents a month.

Brett:

Okay?

Chris:

Right? Not expensive. Not expensive. You could put a dollar in the kitty and that won't get spent probably for a year for a lot of companies. Now that said, what if it ramps up a lot? Right? Well it depends what you do with BigQuery database and how you use it. But if you're just backing up stuff, it's relatively cheap. So well within range for small businesses and over the years, maybe you grow into two or three bucks a month, not a big deal. Now if you start using it all the time, it'll ramp up. But you'll understand if you are using it all the time, you will understand that cost. And it's still relatively cheap.

Brett:

Still super cheap. But to your point, it's infinitely more than free for Google. It's exactly right. Makes a big difference. Well this is exactly right. It's super fast. I have so many more questions, but we're coming up against time and man, this has just been awesome. I really appreciate it. A couple thoughts, what do people need to be doing now to get ready? Cuz July is coming. So what do you need right now to get ready?

Chris:

So two tips. One would be start, you have to start get the code and put it on your sites and get an account up and running. The big, big, big tip I would give everybody is Google's putting this wizard out that says like, oh, connect universe analytics. And we're going to automatically going to port it over to GA 4. Most companies don't have proper measurement anyway. So if you just copy over the junky universal analytics and you put it into your fancy kitchen of GA 4, you were essentially just going to be boiling an egg with your fancy kitchen and now you're never going to figure out how to cook because you got all this junk in it. So I would recommend you start from scratch. It's like Google did start from scratch with GA 4. Build it in the way that you want to build it while you're using Universal Analytics.

Cuz right now we all can still do that. So use Universal Analytics as your primary production platform if that's what you're currently using, very quickly move into GA 4 so you can get practice. Give yourself 90 days and just constantly repeat this phrase, I'm getting good enough to get going and I will come back and make it better later. And give yourself permission to do that. Because I think a lot of people think I need to be perfect at this right away. I saw this person on a podcast and they said it was so easy. Well, it's easy for me cause I've been doing it for years, right? Yeah. But that's done the same.

Brett:

This is your language anyway. And so you do it every day.

Chris:

That's the thing. I'm numbers tolerant, right? Yeah. Like numbers. But I'm not a, I don't wanna stay in a report all day long either. I need to get marketing, I need to grow my companies like everybody else does. So if you just focus on using this platform to get a little bit better every time and you realize at a certain point you're just going to, there's no more to it. You just gotta keep rinsing repeating and then you get better and better and better and better and it'll happen naturally. So give yourself the permission to do that. And obviously we've got tools, tools that people can use if they need it. We've got migration checklists and everything else they can start working with.

Brett:

Love it. Love it. And I do love that mindset of give yourself permission, you're going to get better because you've tried to be perfect. You try to absorb it all in one fell swoop, you're going to get frustrated, you're going to get overwhelmed, you're going to quit potentially. So yeah, like that mindset and that approach for sure. So yes, let's talk about what tools, what resources, what do you have available to make this easier for folks and so they can really lev