In the DTC space, there are always headwinds.

Supply chain issues. Amazon account shutdowns. Meta or Google ad account issues. 

And new headwinds pop up daily.

That's why I love this conversation with Aaron Nosbisch so much. Aaron and my buddy Nick Shackelford run Lucyd - a social ad agency that focuses on CBD and Cannabis products, and now Brez, a very tasty THC drink that's legal in all 50 states.

At Lucyd, Aaron and the team grew from nothing to one of the largest CBD agencies in the world. And the road was anything but easy. The story is a crazy one and even involved Aaron emailing Mark Zuckerberg directly when he was getting nowhere with Facebook support.

At Brez, they're building a THC brand publicly. The wins and losses are right there for everyone to see. 

This interview is fun, inspiring, and insightful. Here's a look at what we cover:

• Why "hacking" your way to solving difficult problems isn't the answer. Being really, really good at the fundamentals is the answer.
• Why building in public is more fun and likely less risky than building in private. 
• What being "mission-driven" looks like for a CBD/THC brand.
• What's working on with X (Twitter) advertising, and what should we expect next year?
• The two ways to innovate. 
• Plus more!

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Show Notes:

• Brez
• Lucyd
• Monq
• Chase Diamond - LinkedIn
• Nick Shackleford - LinkedIn
• Cann 
• Aaron Nosbisch - LinkedIn 
• Aaron Nosbisch - Twitter

Transcript:

Brett:

It is time for another Spicy Curry Hot Take. The part of the show when I get just a little bit spicy. Here's my advice to you and my advice to me. When things get a little bit tough, when things get a little bit dicey, when we're facing some headwinds, stop complaining and go back to the fundamentals. Now in this episode, I'm interviewing Aaron Nasbisch. He is the founder of Lucyd, an agency that works with CBD and cannabis brands. He and my buddy Nick Shackleford launched Brez, which is a THC drink product. It's fabulous. So I still hear merchants complaining about iOS updates and how that's been unfair and they've never been able to recover. Or I hear people complaining about supply chain issues or other things that are unfairly preventing them from growing. But what we uncover in this episode is that when things get tough and they will get tough, this will be business.

We have to go back to the fundamentals. Now, Aaron and his team did some really cool things back in the day, even emailing directly Mark Zuckerberg, which you got to hear the whole story there when he just could not get ad accounts to stay approved and operating. But ultimately, there are no hacks. There are no shortcuts, right? We've got to focus on the fundamentals and just be better, just be better than really anybody else out there doing what we're doing. And so stop complaining doesn't help, right? Focus on the fundamentals and enjoy this interview with Aaron Pic. You'll hear lots of great stories. There'll be some nuggets in there that you can apply to your ad account and growing your company, whether you're selling skin cream or widgets or apparel or something hemp or cannabis related. And so with that spicy Curry hot takeover, enjoy the show.

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 fascinating topic. We're going to talk about conscious compounds. This is a subject that I've never talked about on this show. We're going to talk about CBDA little bit, but from the perspective of marketing and advertising and growing your e-commerce business because there are lessons in this story that we're going to look at here that will apply to you whether you sell widgets or supplements or anything online. And so really excited. I first met my guest at the Blue Ribbon Mastermind in San Diego, California. We were both speaking at Ezra Firestone's event. And so my guest is Mr. Aaron Nspi, and Aaron is the founder and CSO former CEO of Lucyd, which is an agency that we know actually quite well that helps CBD companies grow online. But he's also the founder and CEO of Brez, which he partners with my buddy Nick Shackleford on. And so we're going to talk about that story. It's a fascinating, fascinating story. The story Brez, also a very tasty beverage. So we'll get into that. But Aaron, man, welcome to the show. How's it going? And thanks for coming on.

Aaron:

Absolutely, man. It's going great. I'm very glad to be here. I'm excited and flow and feeling good, and I'm grateful to be on the show. Man. It was cool to be together at Blue Ribbon Mastermind recently and it's going to be really cool to chat through everything today. I

Brett:

Was super excited to sample Brez. Of course, I've been hearing from Nick and watching what you guys have been doing but had not tried it yet. So I got to try in San Diego is fantastic. So we're recording in the morning. How many cans of Brez are you in at this point? Are you all coffee in the morning and Brez in the afternoon?

Aaron:

That's a great question.

Brett:

Actually, let's back up. What is Brez first and then answer that question?

Aaron:

Yeah, absolutely. So Brez is a microdosed cannabis and mushrooms and a can. It's a social tonic. So we've essentially created a feelgood tonic that uses no alcohol, no tobacco, nothing harmful. It's only hemp-derived Delta nine T HC cbd and then Lion's, Maine mushrooms. And so we put those all into one beverage and it created a very fun non-alcoholic feelgood drink that people have been really loving. Man. We just launched it on four 20, which is the national cannabis holiday. So that was kind of fun. But what what's really interesting about Brez is Brez is a t HC Seltzer. And most people when they hear T HC Seltzer in that regard, they think, oh, that's illegal. They can't have that on my state or don't now able to buy that or ship that. And the thing is, because we extract the TC from him, and because it's below 0.3% TC by weight, it's actually legal in all 50 states. And so that allows us to be one of the first people to sell weed in a can and ship it to people's doors legally. Kind of cool.

Brett:

Yeah, such a cool story. So then answer the question, we're recording in the morning. How many cans of Brez in are you or is that the afternoon and the morning is coffee?

Aaron:

Yeah, for me it's an afternoon thing for the most part in afternoon to the evening. I think anytime you would drink alcohol, I think Brez is a great alternative. All the fun without the poison, the hangovers or the regrets. So I think it's great for that. We're actually working on a Lion's Mane only version, which by the time we publish the show might be released where we launch it next week. And so that one I would probably have one in the morning. I'm definitely around noon for sure, but these days I'm a cappuccino. Cappuccino in the morning guy to get it going.

Brett:

Cappuccino. And I'm assuming, because you seem like a pretty clean eaten guy, are you like no sugars, no additives, just espresso and milk most

Aaron:

Days. Most days. But today I did a cappuccino that was a little seasonal and even had a donut with it as well. So that's really off my record today.

Brett:

No judgment here. You got to enjoy a donut every now and then

Aaron:

Went in the Midwest.

Brett:

It is the right thing to do. Exactly. Win in the Midwest. Yeah, so true. Yeah, I love cappuccinos, love lattes. Usually I keep 'em pure. I do kind of a coffee with a creamer is my go-to cool. But dude, I'm a big fan of Lion's Mane, so I love functional mushrooms. I've been experimenting with different functional mushrooms. That sounds kind of wild. Got to be careful what group you say that in. Experimenting with mushrooms, but functional kind and lion's mane is excellent I think for brain function and alertness and cognition, and so I'm a big fan of that. So I do want to get in, this is going to be practical. We're going to talk about ad strategies. We're going to talk about what do you do when you market something as challenging as CB, D, because there are lessons for all of us. We're going to get into some of those things, but I want to get more into the story of why, because you're really passionate about this, what you call conscious compounds, very passionate about it. So kind of give us the story, why start Brez and why is this such a passion project rather than just something you want to do to make money? Yeah,

Aaron:

Great question. Okay, so I'm going to back up a little bit and then I'll tell a little bit of the story, but I'll do my best to make it quick. Long story short is I originally got into the eCommerce game when I was 13. So I've been doing it for quite a while now. I'm 29, so 16 years of a traditional experience. I started on MySpace and big Cartel and yeah, I loved it, man. Just like being able to build stuff and then put it on the internet and people buy it. What a concept. And I liked the happiness that it drove it. It's like getting a Christmas present when something arrives that you bought online. It's magical. It was a very special experience. Absolutely. So I was doing that and long story short, I'd really cut my teeth with a brand called Monk, o and Q.

It was the first portable of aromatherapy diffuser. So we essentially took the vaporizer technology, we stripped the nicotine and tobacco out of it. We added only essential oils. And for those who don't know, essential oils have terpenes in them, which comes from all plants. All plants have these terpenes in them or terpenoids. When you smell the terpenes go past Alf factory bulb, which signals to your brain that promotes an effect. And so this is where the concept of aromatherapy comes from, which is a multi-billion dollar industry in itself. So I really cut my teeth with this brand called Monk. We tried to advertise it. Well, first off, I loved what I was doing. We were giving an alternative to smoking. We were giving an alternative to your aromatherapy ritual, something you could take with you. It's a natural non-harmful thing that will help you feel better without causing any harm.

So I really liked that energy and I think that was something I was personally looking for a long time. It's like, how can I have fun? How can I feel better? How can I cope and have a good time without causing myself harm? Most of the things that society pushes on us to feel better, they're actually really harmful for us, and they ultimately just leave you to feeling worse. The most notorious and obvious probably is alcohol. That's the one that everyone knows of. But it's not just alcohol, it's tobacco and it's overeating. It's eating unhealthy things or binge watching TV or it's all of it. So if Monk, it was, I was looking for personally something that would help me feel better without making me feel worse, something that would help me. So we scaled bunk and it did really well. We became top 50 fastest growing companies in America, two years in a row, top 1% of fastest growing advertisers on the meta platform.

And just a little precursor to that. So if you can imagine, this is vaporizer technology. So it's like a portable aromatherapy diffuser. If you've ever seen aromatherapy diffuser, you've got a little basin of water, you put essential oils in it and it breathes out. It diffuses the essential oils. So we essentially made that portable in this pen. So I tried to advertise it and medic kept saying, no, you can't advertise e-cigarettes, you can't advertise vaporizers, all this stuff. So I wrote a letter to Zuckerberg and I said, this is pure innovation. This is not an e-cigarette, this is not a vaporizer. This is not used tobacco or nicotine or anything like it, which is how you define it in your policy and you need to let us advertise or you have forgotten what innovation is. And I sent that over to Zuckerberg and no one had responded, but the next day our ad account was unlocked, and so we became the first non vaporizer.

Brett:

You sent an email to Zuckerberg or you sent a letter letter like email licking a stamp and put it in the mail?

Aaron:

Yeah, I'm not even sure how the post office works. I told you e-commerce since 13, you're too young for that. That's awesome.

Brett:

Yeah. So message, you're like, I'm not going to just go to the top. Lemme talk to your supervisor. I'm sending a message to Zuck. And something about that resonated and

Aaron:

Voila, I didn't think he was going to answer. I didn't really know what was going to happen, but I just googled and I'm like, Facebook support, it's not worth a damn. So I was like, I better just go. I just better find an email and send it to someone. So I sent it and this was now what actually happened that made all that work. I don't know, maybe he got it, maybe he forwarded on. Maybe it was that I called out this innovation thing, I don't know. But our ad account was unlocked and that was incredible because at the time there was no products anywhere similar to a vaporizer product that was on this platform being the first type of product on this, it taught me a lot. It taught me mainly that there's two ways to innovate. The first is the obvious. The way to innovate that most people do is that they either don't know the rules or they throw out the rules and they build something new.

That's traditional innovation. Let's just start from scratch, a pin and a white piece of paper, or don't even use a white piece of paper draw on the walls. That's innovation. Now there's another form of innovation though, which is learning the rules really, really well and then building new rules on top of them. So this is what you see politicians do on a regular basis. So this is where you can build new innovation through laws or bureaucracy or democracy. And you can do this in a lot of different areas. So essentially the innovation idea was here is if I understood the policies really well, which is that you could only not advertise e-cigarettes or vaporizer due to them being nicotine devices, then this is not a nicotine device, so I should be able to advertise it. And so it allowed us to innovate upon that policy. So we took that same level of that same principle that I was using to innovate in that realm. I got into C, B, D and hemp. I actually first started my own CBD brand, tried to advertise it on meta. I don't know if you've ever tried to advertise CBD before Brett, but it's a pain in the ass and you get shut down every which way possible.

Brett:

It is the least compliance friendly type of product. Even CBD products for pets or like you mentioned CBD, it just throws up major roadblocks, lots of headwinds. You're constantly fighting disapprovals and stuff. And so yes, it is a challenge.

Aaron:

It's terrible. It's terrible. You get shut down. And then that's the thing. It's like, it's not just can you get an ad live or can you keep an ad live? It's not like the ad just gets rejected, your ad accounts gets shut down and then your business manager gets shut down and then your profile gets restricted from advertising. And so these are not simple fixes for someone who doesn't do it or doesn't know how to do it. So it becomes very, very challenging. So I gone to cbd, I tried to advertise my own stuff. I did it for a while and I was like, oh my gosh, I figured out this is great. And then we got royally shut down and then I started, I actually got out of the CBD game for a minute there, started consulting brands. And when I started consulting CBD and hemp brands and cannabis brands on how to build scale and exit, which is something I was just personally passionate about, which co-related to aromatherapy, it's interesting about cannabis and aromatherapy as they both use terpene technology, the terpenes and the plants is what is a part of what influences the effect of cannabis.

And so it was an easy jump. So when I started consulting these people, they all wanted to know how to advertise, how can we advertise our CBD brand? How could we, I had more experience than most anyone in this space or even in the space of new age or edgy product advertising in this realm. So I kept working on it and kept working on, kept working on it, and I kept running into walls left and right. I reached out to my friends at Facebook. So Munk became one of the fastest growing advertisers, the platform. So we got invited to headquarters a few times and met some cool people like OMG Commerce and others and that kind of era. And so I kept trying to do it. My friends at Meta sent me this internal policy of what was allowed and what wasn't allowed. And they essentially said, you could educate consumers about cbd.

You could drive to hemp topical products or you could drive to news about cbd. And I thought, holy cow, I'm on top of the world. I got the internal policy from Meta. I'm going to be able to advertise this stuff. It's going to be great. And I tried it and I just kept getting shut down left and right every which way. And it worked for a little bit, but then it would just all get shut down. It got to head during the 2020 election, which was the Trump election, and during election periods they turn up the sensitivity of the platform. So they want to try to prevent misinformation so everything gets shut down in that period. So all my accounts went shut down all at the same time. And I was like, man, I'm out. There's no more CBD advertising. This thing's dead. It's impossible if I can't do it with all this time energy, no one can do it.

It's not going to work. And I decided I'm going to give it one more shot. And I called my buddy Chase Diamond, who's an amazing guy, and he was close friends with Nick Shackleford. And I thought if I was going to pull this off, I would need high level relationships at Meta that I could speak with regularly to find out the nuance necessary in order to keep my ads live and compliant. And so I called Nick, I called Chase, chase connected me to Nick, and I told Nick, I'm like, Hey dude, I dunno if this is going to work or not, but I'm telling you, if have the highest level support, which you have to have million in monthly spend or quarterly spend in order to get that level of support, if you have that high level support, I think I can talk to Meta and get a deal and get on the same page about how to do compliant advertising.

And I think they'd agree with me. And so Nick said, well, why don't we do this? Let's try it and if it works, we'll make a deal. And so he let me try it first by just speaking with his rep, which was very generous of him, very kind to even invest the time, energy or resources. And I just made this a lawyer level case to meta about why my ads were compliant, how I'm following all the rules laid out in the policy, how I'm creating new things and gave examples of other products. And to both my surprise and Nicks, they agreed and said that our ads were compliant. And so then we started advertising compliantly for Metter and then Charlotte's Web and every big major CBD and hemp brand in the world after that very quickly. So then Lucyd quickly grew to the largest cannabis social advertising firm in the world. And it's not that hard to grow to the biggest quickly when you're the only one who can do it.

Brett:

You're the only one that can actually run ads that stacks the deck in your favor. But something really important that I want to kind of underscore here, and we'll get into some ad strategies and stuff in a minute, but I think it is really good for all of us to hear this because I was just on a call yesterday with a brand who is still bemoaning, and this is 2023, moving into 2024 bemoaning iOS 14.5, and they're like, we've never recovered. And they're just this defeat us mindset. And I'm like, man, if we're still locked in that mindset, there are guys out here. There are people out here like Aaron that are advertising illegal products and they're not illegal, but I mean viewed as illegal in the mind of these platforms, but they've found a way to get approval. And from emailing Zuck to talking to people that have the highest level of support to putting forth a lawyer level case, you weren't going to be stopped by this until every nail was in the coffin.

And so really good entrepreneurial lessons there. And I think just a reminder, business is not going to be easy. And so you've got to be willing to do whatever it takes to get there. And so kudos to you for continuing to fight. And we got to support loose a little bit on the Google side. And so we got to see kind of the inside of that and love your business partners. And of course Nick, we go way back. And so that's awesome. So you became the biggest agency helping CBD products, and then where did Brez, how did that Yeah,

Aaron:

Totally. And you're so right. It's challenging across the board. And I'll tell you honestly, if we were an agency doing anything else other than C bd, it would not have made sense. And I think I told you this back when, or we talked about it a little bit back then. It's like if I was an agency advertising for other clients or having other clients, it would've been a really dumb move to try to focus on CBD like this. It just took such a level of energy that it took everything to be able to pull it off and then keep pulling it off and then iterating with it. The thing about CBD and him, it's an evolving policy. It's an evolving legal landscape. And so you got to constantly be on top of them. Fact that if we were in another agency trying to get into space versus building agency around the hemp, it allowed us to pull all of our resources towards one objective, which is just not a responsible mover for anyone else. And so that's why it worked. It was that. And just like any business success, it's not a single variable. It's 15 variables that should never have aligned that happened to align, that made it work and stuff,

Brett:

And the ability to go all in on to solve a really complex problem. And you're right, and that's why as an agency, we were just like, we're not doing CBD. We may consult with you guys or whatever, but we're not doing cbd.

Aaron:

I would never either, if I had another agency, it would generally be a bad idea. I mean, it's a little easier now, but it still takes a lot of resources. So anyway, so we started doing that and started doing that for a while. And so we caught the whole CBD boom. So the CBD boom was kind of like 2020 between 2020 and 2022. So people realize, hey, there's a legal version of cannabis. This helps you with your sleep, it helps you with your stress, it can make you less worried and give you a little bit more pain relief. So all these beautiful, amazing things. And so people loved it. So people were buying it off the wazoo and all these brands were scaling and the industry was scaling. It was really exciting and it was federally legal. So you have none of the scalability challenges that you have with cannabis in traditional cannabis regulated markets.

You can't open, sometimes you can't open bank accounts, you can't do interstate commerce, you can't ship across state lines, you can't do e-commerce, really. And so there's all these challenges that prevent the cannabis industry from existing successfully in the cpgc world, and we have access to those with cbd, with the exception of advertising. So anyway, so did that for a while and then we started hearing about Delta eight. I don't know if you've heard about Delta eight very much, but I have not. So Delta eight, a lot of people started seeing it at smoke shops or your local gas station. It's like, Hey, this is a cannabinoid, which cannabinoids are part of the active ingredients of cannabis. And it was, oh, it comes from hemp. And because it comes from hemp, this Delta eight cannabinoid is legal, and they say it's like THC, but it's a little different.

So it was kind of this weird thing. You kind had this synthetic vibe to it, but you just heard about people selling it and they were starting to scale. And so we started seeing the CBD industry trying to tail off and wind down a little bit. Yet this Delta eight industry was starting to pick up. And so WALL started looking into and essentially as a psychoactive, natural cannabinoid found in hemp and cannabis, but many people haven't really heard of, but it gets you high, you'll feel it. So there was a couple lawsuits around it like, Hey y'all, you guys can't sell this. This is a psychoactive compound. And they were justifying against saying it's legal because it's below 0.3% thc, which is what the law says for C BD and hemp extracts. And so it went to court and it ruled in favor of the Delta eight brands saying that they were in the legal right.

And so that was a huge deal. So then they're like, oh, holy shit. So then people realized at the same time, well Delta nine T hc, which is the same THC, if you had a marijuana or a joint, that's Delta nine T hc, you can extract it from hemp. And the law says actually, if it's below 0.3% T HC by weight that it's legal. And so long story short, it became apparent that you could actually make Delta nine T HC products if they came from hemp and if the weight ratio was correctly correct. And that would be legal in all 50 states. And that's a huge deal because that essentially means that we've wrote into law that THC is legal, and I think that gets confusing for a lot of people because the little nuances there, but that's the same T HC you'd get in an edible or a marijuana or whatever.

And so there became the whole legal market for TC that just popped up overnight. So I had a few people come to me and ask, Hey, do you think you could advertise for this on Meta and Google and some of these others? And I said, I don't know. It's a hemp product and we do a lot for hemp products, so probably I could. And so I kept trying it and it was working and we started doing it and we started scaling a lot of hemp brands on the Delta hc, and it became clear that this is what people were actually looking for when they were buying cbd. The thing is, people when they went to cbd, they were looking for a light cannabis or a diet weeded, a minor buzz, something that's not going to put them on their ass, but they're going to feel good from it. And they weren't really getting that from cbd. They might've been getting stress relief versus sleep.

Brett:

CBD is too mild, right? It's too tam. It's too tam. But CBDs actually has a great impact, though I'd use CBD gummies and it got a little bit of a softens the edge just a little bit like you're feeling a little bit amped up, it's going to be good, but it's not. I mean it's kind of miles apart right from T

Aaron:

Hc if you're looking for a little bit of a buzz if you're looking for a light cannabis, it's not really that. It's not that. And I think that's what the reality is. I think the majority of people that we're going to it we're actually looking for that when the steal nine movement, it's all of a sudden it had the same excitement of C bd, but it had the stickiness of T hc and that's what you need. Because the thing CBD might try once, like okay, it's nice, but I don't have that feedback loop. If something's working really clearly and effectively or a lot of people they don't get that T hc definitely get that. So I had some people come to me asked if we could advertise it, tried to advertise it, and it worked. We were able to do it for a handful of brands.

I'm like, holy cow, this is game changing. We're the first people to advertise TC products on social media and that's a whole nother league above cbd. And so then there's a couple brands. There's a brand called Can, I Dunno if you've heard of that before, CA, not it's a beverage, they make a TC beverage similar but different. And I started drinking their beverage. I'm like, holy cow, this is the medium that cannabis has been looking for forever. The ability to drink your weeded or you don't have to smoke it. It's not offensive to other people. It's culturally acceptable because we're already in a drinking culture. We already have bars and lounges, people already drinking social events and it was low dose, so it was a fast acting because a small molecule and low dose. And so I started drinking them and I was like, this is just the future, fundamentally the future.

And so both those guys came to me and asked if I thought we could advertise and if we could make it work. And so we started advertising and it worked and it was doing really well. And I realized that this is the of drinking, that this is the future of cannabis and that I to get the game that I could take this industry for pretty far and that myself and my team and my partners that we could do some really great work. So then it was just a lot of luck after that, man, I went to a cannabis and psychedelic conference and I just spread the word that I was looking to start this and that I was looking for the right people. I had a guy came up to me and he brought me this nano emulsified lions mane, which was the first of its kind extract of Lion's, Maine mushroom.

A lot of people have tried Lion's, Maine. It's a nice product, but it's not very concentrate. It depends on how concentrated you get it. So we make a concentrated form of it, an extract of it, and then we nano it, which creates a very potent and fast acting version of Lion's Maine. And you feel it, you feel instantly within just minutes of drinking it. And that combined with the T HC creates a very social happy buzz that gives you a very similar experience to drinking a cocktail but without the poison or the negative side effects. And so when sometimes you just meet projects that make you build them, and this was one of those,

Brett:

You almost couldn't not do this, right? Everything lined up. Your passion, your experience, your background, the connections, you almost couldn't not do it.

Aaron:

That's exactly, dude, that was exactly the closest thing to a calling that I've ever felt in my life, honestly. And when I felt that, I was just like, in fact, I tried not to do it. I was like, oh, this is a distraction from Lucyd. We got so many good things going, I just can't do this. It's a bad idea. And I just let go and went for it. And so then I came up with the idea on January 16th, and then we launched the brand on April 20th. So that was three months. It's insane, man. It's the fastest I've ever done anything in my life and it took a lot of energy, but we moved quickly. And then it's one thing to build something and hope it does great, but it's another thing when people love it and people loved it. We had really, really good responses right out of the gate. And then we went scaled from doing batches of 1500 cans around then four 20 to we just finished our first batch of 400,000 cans. Wow. Yeah, man,

Brett:

Kudos to you, man. It's a great product. I got to try it in San Diego. Really enjoyed it. And one thing I kind of want to double click on really quickly, and then we're going to dive into some ad stuff and some strategies there, but it seems like there's this movement, obviously the younger generations are more cannabis than ever before, but there also seems to be maybe less of a desire to consume alcohol too for younger ages. And Huberman who love his podcast, he's not anti alcohol fully or anything like that ethically, but he's just like, yeah, it's kind of poison. You should really limit it. I had told you before he hit record, I've basically stopped consuming alcohol altogether. I was more of a couple times a month social type drinker. Anyway, I enjoy wine and bourbon and stuff, but I noticed it just was wrecking my sleep. And so I've pretty much backed off on it altogether. But when I had Brez, I felt good. And so yeah. Is that a trend? It seems like it is, and it seems like you guys are just at the right time for it.

Aaron:

Yeah, great question. I don't have the exact date off the top of my head, but I know that the decline in alcohol consumption assumption is higher than it's been in a very long time, especially with younger people. But it's across the board actually too. And what's interesting about that is trends typically go up not down, meaning your grandson or your kid tells you what's cool typically. Usually grandpa or grandma doesn't tell you what's cool. So the fact that the younger generation is changing is kind of like, wow, if the younger generation has tolerance, discernment or whatever, this temperance to not drink, then I think parents are starting to check themselves a little bit. And I think this is a thing about alcohol, man. Everyone knows it's bad for us. There's no one that's like, yeah, that's good stuff. I'm going to drink some more of that.

So I feel happier and stronger tomorrow. It's a net negative. I'm not saying it's not fun. I used to drink a lot. I don't drink anymore. And it was as much fun as I had with it though. And I had some great memories on alcohol. The juice was never worth the squeeze when you saw it holistically. And that's the thing, I think what's actually happening is it's not just that kids are just raking less, humans are becoming more conscious, information is spreading easier. We're becoming more intelligent as a society. And this has already happened before we were all smoking tobacco, doctors were smoking cigarettes in the emergency room by delivering a baby. It's crazy. And then we all realized, hey, that's probably a bad idea and causing cancer and killing us. We should probably stop doing that. And now we all look at tobacco, it's the worst thing since whatever is arsenic.

And I think that that's coming for alcohol as well. I know alcohol's been around for thousands of years and people have been drinking forever, but we used to cut our legs off when we got shot before as well. We used to put leches on our skin to suck out sicknesses. Society just evolves. And so the reality is that alcohol is poisonous no matter which way you look at it. And as fun as it can be in the moment, it always takes more than it gets. And there's also funny things about alcohol, man, now that you drink less or you don't drink, if you go up to someone and tell them you don't drink, the first thing that they do is justify their drinking behavior, which is like a funny thing. Yeah, yeah. You don't do that with orange juice. If I'm like, oh, I don't have any orange juice. No one's like,

Brett:

No, it helps me.

Aaron:

It

Brett:

Improves nicely. Really Does it? Yeah. Yeah. And just super interesting. I love following trends and where things are headed. And so I would agree with you to a large degree that I do think alcohol consumption is likely to continue going down. Will it disappear? I don't think so, probably. And there's something that would make the case that wine is good for you and things like that. And I'm not here to debate either side of that. I just know for me, consuming very much at all, wreck the way I felt, and so pretty much stopped. Let's pivot a little bit and talk ads. So you guys have had to be very creative in keeping ad accounts up and running. And this is something that we see a lot. We help companies on Amazon, we help companies with Google and YouTube and on Amazon we got skin cream getting disapproved and we get warnings that, hey, this is a toxic compound or this is an illegal substance, and we're like, it's skin cream. And so we got to fight these battles with that on occasion. And so what are some of the things you've learned in the journey of growing CB, D and now THC products that you think apply to any business?

Aaron:

Yeah, good question. I think that truth is typically simpler than most are willing to accept. And so that's where I'd start with it is a lot of the advice I give will be kind of like, oh, that's obvious, but it's because people, I forget who said the quote. Maybe Hermo is like experts always do the fundamentals or something like that. Always. So I'd say first and foremost, you need to have a healthy ad account. That's just the key. That's the magic. If you know how to, most people when they try to do things that they think that they're not allowed to do or that they're concerned they're not allowed to do, they try to hide or pretend or they try to break the rules in a way that the machine won't tell. And you got to remember, this is a trillion dollar company who is really inclined to make sure the right stuff is on the site and the wrong stuff is not on the site.

So if you're trying to break the rules, they've probably thought through it to a degree or they have some type of system put in place. And so I say my first piece of feedback on how to advertise anything is make sure your ad account is healthy. Reduce the number of rejected ads in your account, make sure you set up your verification, install the copy, do the things that meta recommends, put some ad spend behind a few very safe ads and warm the account up. Get a few transactions on the credit card just so it knows that it's a healthy account. These are basic things, but a lot of people when they say, Hey, I want to advertise Ccpd, or I want to advertise a sexual wellness product, or I want to advertise maybe a skin product that uses some whatever, it's, they try to just brute force it.

And that's where most people mess up is if you go in there hot and heavy trying to do things that either you're not allowed to do or you think you're not allowed, so you're acting kind of fishy, then the system, it's a pattern recognition machine. It's going to find those patterns that other people have done before you, it's going to see them and it's going to shut you down. So first and foremost, got to keep your ad account healthy. The best thing you can do is reduce the number of rejected ads. Start with safe ads that are just clearly and obviously compliant. Warm up the accountant a bit, do the thing that recommends that a quality advertiser would do, and that gives you a good baseline to even start exploring what's possible. Yeah,

Brett:

I love that so much. And I think it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, hacking is not really the way, it's being better at the fundamentals. I was using this analogy the other day, a good football team, I love the NFL, I love the Kansas City Chiefs. A team never gets to the point where, well, we're so good, we don't need the fundamentals anymore. And if you were to look at, you compare the chiefs to the Panthers or something the best versus the worst or whatever, and you're like, oh, the Panthers are garbage and this, but if you looked at it though, they both have billion dollar facilities. If you were to talk to the coaches on the Panthers, you'd be like, these are the smartest football people I've ever talked to. World-class athletes, all these things are amazing, but one executes the fundamentals and one doesn't. Of course, one has Patrick Mahome and the other doesn't a thing as well. But yeah, you got to have the fundamentals. And I think that's where people have to focus as we move into 2024, you've got to be really, really good, really buttoned up at everything because that scales hacking, getting around things that does not scale. It does not scale whether you're stealing skincare or something with legal THC, it doesn't scale if the fundamentals aren't there.

Aaron:

We call it finesse at Lucyd. The thing that we have that other people don't have, we have finesse. We just know how to do it well, we've been doing it well for a long time. And that's, see me and Nick and other people, we don't hold any secrets in our companies. We're very loud and proud about what we do and how we do it. And this goes on to Brez where we build the company entirely in the open and share it with the world while we're doing it. But it's finesse. Gary V talks about this a lot. You can tell someone how to do something a thousand times, but it doesn't mean they're going to do it. And so I think that it's key. There's other tactics in the CBD and hemp world which apply other places, which is like we drive to hemp meta.

You can advertise hemp products. So we drive to ads and landing pages that say hemp or don't mention hemp. We've kind of gone from the very compliant agency to now we're a little bit more of activist and what we think, we kind of think that some of these policies are a little archaic, so we try to evolve them a little internally as well. You've got players like XX allows you to do any type of advertising for any cannabis product, for example, so you can do hemp advertising. So that's more of a tactic of how we do it, but those things evolve. We also do CBD education. So if you educate the consumer about cbd, so what does CBD feel like? Driving to an article that says, what does CBD feel like? That clicks over to your homepage, that's considered an educational article, and that is a compliant way to literally use the word CBD in your ads.

So those are more of the tactics, but those are things you can find anywhere. You can watch my videos online, you can just Google around and find some tactics, or you can just go find ads from people like us who are running them and replicate those tactics. But the real things that people need to be focused on is how to be a healthy advertiser in the first place. And this applies whether you're doing cbd, tc or if you're selling skincare or sunglasses. If you're not taking the time to treat your account with the respect it deserves, which is keeping it clean, keeping it healthy, not just rotating and rolling through rejected ads, not ignoring policy or feedback source, but addressing those things, then you can keep your account in a very healthy and happy place where meta is going to support your efforts rather than push

Brett:

Against them. Just really quickly, any insights on advertising on X or are you guys advertising on Twitter slash x or you not really gone there yet? Yeah, we

Aaron:

Do. It's great. So this is my insights with this. It's traditionally built for big awareness-based advertisers, and now it's going through a transition into more direct response advertising. The ads used to be very Addy and now they're not so Addy, they're becoming much more native to the feed. I'll tell you my big secret in X advertising is I think they're going to become a leader in direct response sooner later. They allow for most types of cannabis advertising, which is very unique and special of them. And I'd say, so this is the secret. I don't think advertising on X is a direct response funnel like you see with Meta and like you see with Instagram, I think advertising on X is contextual conversational advertising, which means that you listen to the conversation that's occurring and then you advertise into the conversation that's occurring with relevant information and they're more time sensitive, so they won't last a long time, but they'll be more time sensitive, relevant.

So for example, open AI's, CEO gets fired and you run an AI startup launch an ad that's topical to the moment that's happening and then spend behind that, and now you're just amplifying a boost, a post in a very relevant conversation. I think that type of advertising is future of X advertising, and I actually think it's going to shift the entire model of consumer advertising in general because it's more real. It's less of me like, Hey, buy my shed. And it's more like, Hey, what do you care about? Let's have a conversation about it and here's some added value, and if you want to hear more from me, click over

Brett:

Kind of thing. Yeah, contextual, conversational advertising. And that's why people are on Twitter, right? They're on Twitter to have a take or to read other people's take on a hot topic. And so I've always been a huge fan of the advice to join the conversation taking place in someone's head. I love that marketing advice. What are the thoughts in someone's had? Speak to those thoughts, join that conversation. But on Twitter, on X, you're joining that conversation that's happening there. And so yeah, that maybe more shortlived is maybe in the moment, but yeah, what's my riff on Sam Altman being fired and rehired and all that stuff, and what's this take on CB, D? And so really smart, and so maybe less of a true DR funnel, but you're contextually relevant. And then that does lead to engagements.

Aaron:

And the people who figure that out, Brett, I think are going to make so much fucking money so quickly, whatever their project is, people who figure out how to do that first. There's moments in advertising this because been in the game a long time. I've been in the game a long time. There's moments of switch, and in that switch moment, there's a lot of opportunities. TikTok shops could be one of those. Instagram, there's been different ones throughout the past, but I think one that's happening is Twitter has to become a viable advertising channel, and it's not going to work the same way that the past ones have. So the question is how does it work? And when you have people like Elon Musk owns it, you have innovation on your side and they want people to innovate and figure it out and support them in that journey. So we have some really good friends at X that help us. We work closely with Alexa over there who runs sushi, wrote the cannabis policy for their advertising platform. And so these guys are very, very smart and fun, innovative people. And so we we're advertising on X currently for many of our clients, we're planning do more and we're planning to bring it in, roll it out for Brez as well in the very near future and kind of experiment with that. But it's easier when you have a bigger budgets that makes it easier to

Brett:

Experiment because it was kind of still designed for large advertisers in the beginning. So you got to kind of keep that in mind. Well, we're nearing the end of our time, but I do want to talk briefly about this decision to build in public versus build in private. And you kind of referenced Gary V and I know both you and Shaq are very, and Nick Shackleford are very well-spoken and you've got followings online, so it kind of made sense from that perspective, but why build in public versus building in private?

Aaron:

I think it's more fun as the short answer. People are so fear mode driven most of the time, and it's a shitty

Brett:

Protecting, darting.

Aaron:

It doesn't actually lead to anything more or generative. It leads to less. And I'd say taking your bag of gold or your good fortune and go hiding in the corner leads to decay and rot. It doesn't lead to growth. Miserable life. Yeah, miserable life. So I think the beautiful part of both my journey up to Brez and Nick's journey and VINs journey, we had a little bit of experience about doing things privately and a little bit publicly and solve the pros and cons. Anyway, long story short, our thought process is if we build in the public, we'll be able to community source feedback, we'll be able to community source support, we'll be able to give Brez just momentum under its wings and that that would ultimately help us achieve more quickly and more effectively and solve mistakes and problems quickly. Iteration is the name of the game, no matter what business you're in.

And so by building in the public, it's nothing to hide people. If we're doing something wrong people or we're doing something that could be better, people let us know pretty quickly and then we iterate and people come out of the woodwork to support people. They want to support the American Dream. The idea of an idea of a business becoming a successful business is a fun story to be part of, so that's why we did it. So the cons are like, why shouldn't you build them public? Well, people are going to rip you off. People are going to copy what you're doing and take your sauce and go run their own stuff. That's all. It can happen anyway. It can happen anyway in the first place, but in the second on, second off, it's one thing if it happens and no one knows who you are.

And then those people get popular. It's another thing if you're the namesake in this space and then someone else comes up and it's like, oh, like Brez. Oh, you're doing something like Brez. Isn't that what Brez is doing? And so you kind of have some momentum on your side already and some support on your side already. So for us, I think there's pros and cons no matter what you do in life, but for us, we thought it would just be more fun, more productive. We'd be able to help more people in a furthers mission. At Brez, we're on potential through cid, by spreading these conscious compounds, building in the open, it teaches people, it teaches people how to do it and how hard it's, and the challenges and the bullshit that we run into and the great things that we run into and how we resolve them. It furthers the idea of reducing suffering and maximizing potential by giving people education and training them with skills and resources on how to build and start their own businesses and suggesting to them that building in the public would probably be a good idea for them as well. Awesome.

Brett:

Yeah, I think even if you just look at it from the, yeah, we're getting feedback sooner. We're building this army of people that support us and they're rooting for us and they're buying our stuff, and it makes a lot of sense. I'm rooting for you guys. I love watching things unfold. Love the product you guys are doing good work, man. Doing good work at the agency, doing good work at Brez. And so people are watching this and they're like, all right, I got to try this Brez out. It is legal in my state. How can they check it out or just follow the journey?

Aaron:

Absolutely. Drink Brez.com. So drink BRE z.com is where you can check it out. It's also at Drink Brez on any social, and my social is in here. It's at Aaron j Noch, N os, BSC h. Feel free to tag along and follow us. And there's, you can use the code euphoria and I'll give you $5 off for store if you want to give it a shot. Sweet.

Brett:

Give it a go. And again, that's Brez. BREZ. And then also Lucyd the agency. So Lucyd the agency. And that's L-U-C-Y-D, correct? That's

Aaron:

Right. We are Lucyd.com.

Brett:

Yep. And you guys help exclusively with CCB D and related products?

Aaron:

Yeah, at this point, cannabis, the whole thing's collapsing between hemp and cannabis to just one thing. So cannabis, adaptogens, and even some psychedelic brands. That's kind of our specialty there. Nice.

Brett:

Keep up with the good work, man. I'm going to keep following you. Keep rooting for you. So Aaron nasb, ladies and gentlemen, Aaron, thanks for the time, man. This was super fun.

Aaron:

Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me. This is a blast. See you

Brett:

Later. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear your feedback. If you found this podcast helpful or inspiring or informational, share it with somebody else. Let's get the word out. Go support Brez as well. And with that, until next time, thank you. Listen.