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.

‍

‍

No one knows more about eCommerce growth than my friend Ezra Firestone. Arguably, no one is a more interesting interview than Ezra either. This episode does NOT disappoint. Ezra bootstrapped growth for Boom from $0 to $40mill + per year. He also recently bought another high-profile eComm brand (more on that in the show).This episode is straight fire. Here’s a look at what we dive into:

• How Ezra is approaching email marketing and email list growth in 2022. I’m guessing you’re missing his email strategy - even if you consider yourself an email marketing pro.
• How BOOM is approaching front-end offers.
• Why you should consider inventing a holiday and how BOOM has done that.
• Growing your SMS list.
• Plus MUCH, much more!

‍

Mentioned in this Episode:

Ezra Firestone

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram

   - Twitter

   - Facebook

BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

oVertone‍

Zipify Pages‍

Smart Marketer‍

Blue Ribbon Mastermind‍

Klaviyo‍

Postscript‍

Attentive‍

Dan Kennedy‍

Jay Abraham‍

Native Deodorant‍

Northbeam‍

John Grimshaw‍

Molly Pittman‍

Train My Traffic Person

‍

Transcript:

Brett Curry:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on what it takes to grow your business online. Season one is built on the old business adage that it really takes three things to succeed. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often.

Brett Curry:

Today, my guest is none other than the e-commerce legend himself, Ezra Firestone. If you're serious about growing your e-commerce business, then you have to pay attention to Ezra. And arguably, there's not a more interesting interview than Ezra Firestone. He bootstrapped Boom by Cindy Joseph from zero to now, $40 million a year in growth. He now owns and operates Overtone, a $25 million a year e-commerce brand. He also co-founded Zipify Pages, Smart Marketer, and he's the mastermind behind my favorite e-commerce mastermind, Blue Ribbon.

Brett Curry:

This is a wide ranging discussion. We talk about things like cold plunges and samurai swords. But yes of course, we spend most of our time talking about e-commerce growth strategies. We look at Ezra's really unique approach to email marketing, and how much of his ad budget he's dedicating to growing his email list. We also look at SMS marketing. And we look at how to invent a holiday, and what that looks like. And then we're also looking at how Boom is crafting and creating front end offers. You won't want to miss a minute of this show. I hope you enjoy my interview with Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability. All right, I am absolutely stoked out of my mind for this next guest, and personal friend of mine. We do some work together. I always count it a joy when I get to talk to this guest. And so, to have this uninterrupted time to dive in deep on strategies, it's going to be amazing, and I'm glad you get to listen in. And so if I look at, man, if you need tactics, if you need strategies, if you need help for how to take your e-commerce business to the next level, and if you need to get a little bit spicy, you need Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

And so today I've got the man, the myth, the legend. He's flexing if you're watching the video. Got Ezra Firestone on the call. We're talking about eight top strategies to just blow up your business this year in a good way. We may not get to all eight, we'll see how it goes. But with that intro, Ezra, what's up, man? How you doing? And welcome to the show.

Ezra Firestone:

Brett, the Fury Curry, I'm fresh out of the cold plunge, dog. One minute, 30 seconds, 32 degrees. My whole body is red, I'm shivering, I'm shaking, we're podcasting. Happy to be here man, thanks.

Brett Curry:

It's hilarious. You hopped on the call and I was like, "Oh no, something's wrong with Ezra. He just doesn't look right." It's like, well, you just got out of a 32 degree bathtub. Of course, your body's in shock. But I appreciate taking the time to do this. And man, it's just always, always fun to chat.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, man. And just watching your journey, I seen you come up in the game from back in the day, when you had an SEO agency. You know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

From way back. I don't even know if it was 2008, 2009, it was a long time ago. 2010, whatever it was. And then to watch you rise to be one of the most prominent voices in the e-commerce world, and also to have a top 2% advertising agency, maybe you guys are top 1% at this point, I mean, you run all of our stuff. So it's been fun to watch your journey and just happy to be on the podcast.

Brett Curry:

Dude, thanks. It's been so fun to grow. I credit you and your community with a lot of that growth. And your approach to having fun, and doing what's right, and being extremely successful, and that blend, is awesome. Your motto, for those that don't know, is "Serve the world unselfishly and profit." And actually before we get into tactics and strategies for this year, and there's some amazing ones, can you talk a little bit about that for those that are new to the world of Ezra Firestone?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a description-

Brett Curry:

... Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's a description, not a statement. It's how I have seen things work. That when you are in a role of service, unselfishly with the goal of serving, you do profit by the very nature of serving. And it may not be monetarily. Maybe it's spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, energetically. But my goal is to serve. And I find joy in the act of service. I think there's a lot of value, and fun, and enjoyment, and good. And also in business, if you can truly serve a community, you will be profitable. And so I think that's just a description of how it goes. And also it's what I'm looking to do. I'm looking to serve the world unselfishly and also profit. I want to take care of my family. I want to take care of my community. I want to put resource towards causes in the world that I find noble. And I need fucking money to do that. Right?

Brett Curry:

Exactly. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And the way going to get that money is by helping a group of people out with solutions to problems they have.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. If you look at, what is leadership, what does it mean to lead a company or to be a CEO, it's really serving. Serving your team more than commanding and dictating.

Ezra Firestone:

100%.

Brett Curry:

And how do build a brand, how do you build a business? It's serving a community. It's serving the needs and meeting the needs of buyers. And so, yeah. I love it. So it's really, really just-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. And then just because you're serving a group, doesn't mean you can't sell them stuff.

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

Ezra Firestone:

Selling them stuff is also serving them.

Brett Curry:

Because people want to buy stuff, right?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

They want to have those needs met. And retail therapy is a thing too. So one of the greatest acts of service you can do, is sell a good product to the right person.

Ezra Firestone:

I'll tell you what dude. You and I both know that this last six months have been the most intense and stressful on the personal side of my life, with some health problems of some family members. And I done fucking discovered stress shopping, bro. I had never done that. I'm not a guy who buys shit that I just don't need or want. I'm willing to buy things. I have a lot of money, and I didn't come from money. I now have more money than basically everyone that I know, and I'm not against purchasing things. But I usually purchase things that I really like. I'll buy a nice espresso machine, or I'll buy a nice skateboard.

Brett Curry:

Which I've had espresso from that espresso machine. And you pull a mean shot of espresso, my friend.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. I will spend money happily on things that are enjoyable and that I will use, but I don't just buy frivolously, until now, dude. I bought six pairs of the same Chelsea boot. When I turned around, I was like, "What? I have lost my mind, dude." This is stress shopping.

Brett Curry:

Why did I buy this?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

I think one time I was on a call with you and you just recently bought like a samurai sword or something. I don't think it was actually a samurai sword, but it was some kind of sword.

Ezra Firestone:

A katana. Yeah, it was a Japanese katana. I use it to chop wood for my sweat lodge. So that was actually a useful tool. It's good for chopping kindling.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. That's awesome, man. Super fun. So people are buying right now. The economy's pretty hot, and certainly there are some issues too. But people are buying stuff. So let's dive in. You recently wrote a blog post, which I'm going to link to, so you can see this in the show notes, talking about eight top growth strategies. And first of all, for those that don't know the journey, talk about Boom by Cindy Joseph and how it's grown.

Ezra Firestone:

(singing)

Brett Curry:

Because you guys are set to do about 40 million this year, right?

Ezra Firestone:

So I started this brand in 2010. Took me to 2014 to make my first million dollar a year in total revenue. By 2016, I was doing 17 million. This last year, I did 42. This year I think I'll do 47. Top line revenue at about a 25% EBIDA margin, so maybe making six or 7 million a year in profit on that.

Brett Curry:

Which is amazing. Amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

I got about 30 employees at that company. I also own Zipify Apps, about a $10 million a year software company. Also a couple million bucks in profit on that, maybe about 60 employees there. And I just bought a company called Overtone Color, which has about 20 team members. It'll do about 25, 30 million this year. And I got Smart Marketer too. And I'm just a guy. I didn't go to college, I have no special skills, other than that I'm a good communicator and I'm willing to put my foot down and do the work, and ask for help when I need it. And I think my story shows that if... I'm a complete failure in the eyes of the school system. They labeled me a dumb kid, and someone who was not going to be successful. And I think for anybody who doesn't fit into the mold, who maybe is dyslexic, or maybe has some reason why the general society is telling them that they can't be successful, the internet opens up an opportunity for us.

Ezra Firestone:

And there's skills that we can develop. Advertising, direct response marketing, landing page optimization, copywriting, product development, podcasting, social media, that can support us in taking care of our families. And I didn't come from resource, and so I wanted to create that. And I've been able to, and I've been doing it now for 17 years. I got pretty fucking good at it. I made every mistake you could make. I didn't pay my taxes, I did all the stupid you can do. But I did it when I was younger, and earlier in my... And I didn't have podcasts like yours to learn from. I had a bunch of creepy dudes on an internet forum who were shilling fucking gambling and porn. That was when I got into the game.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Online marketing was a bit of a dark place back in those early days.

Ezra Firestone:

You didn't want to say you were an internet marketer. It wasn't good.

Brett Curry:

No, no, that was not prestigious. No one looked at that highly. For sure.

Ezra Firestone:

So yeah. So I've been doing it a long time now, I'm really good at it. And I've been talking about it since about 2011. I was one of the first people to start blogging about e-commerce. And by the very nature of being one of the first, I became popular. Not that I was anything special than anyone else, but I was the first to do it, and so I got real popular. And I've stayed in that space of documenting my journey. And I got a bunch of people who think it's cool, and follow what I do. And I'm pretty good at it, you know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And I've been able to successfully train and educate, and bring up in the game, thousands and thousands of internet entrepreneurs over the years. You being one of them who I've impacted.

Brett Curry:

Big time.

Ezra Firestone:

Not that I did anything for you, other than show you what I was doing. So yeah, so I like talking about this stuff.

Brett Curry:

It's been so amazing to watch that progression as well, and getting to see behind the scenes, seeing you operate with your team. So I've been to your house and I've hung out with the inner circle of Smart Marketer and Boom. And of course we were on calls, and our agency serves you and stuff. So I've seen you in a lot of different capacities. And man, you're the same leader behind the scenes as you are on stage. You care about people on stage or one on one. You're extremely smart and strategic, and you get marketing, and you understand human in nature, and you take massive action. All kinds of stuff we can break down. So it's been really fun to observe that and get the front row seat of that as well.

Ezra Firestone:

I can also do a cool poker chip trick. Look at this.

Brett Curry:

Is that right? Oh, look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Wait.

Brett Curry:

Look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Hold on. Damn, that was not cool. I dropped it. Hold on.

Brett Curry:

We're going to try this again. So if you're listening, just take my word for it. He's a great poker chip-

Ezra Firestone:

My hands are frozen. My hands are frozen. We should probably get into tactics.

Brett Curry:

Do not attempt a poker chip trick out of a cold plunge.

Ezra Firestone:

People are going to be like, "Enough of this bullshit, dude. You should talk about some tactics." We should talk about some strategies.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So here we go. So let's dive in. One thing that we've seen you guys operate on, we're running this on YouTube for you, but you're buying more email leads. So talk about that. So this is top strategy number one, buying more email leads. What does that look like, and why?

Ezra Firestone:

Dude, nobody's talking about email. Everybody's like "SMS, video ads." This and that. Well guess what has always been since I've been in the game, about 25 to 40% of my business? Literally since '05, dude. Emails.

Brett Curry:

Email. Email.

Ezra Firestone:

I've been sending motherfucking emails since 2005. And it is to this day, it'll be 36% of Boom's total revenue this year.

Brett Curry:

It's crazy.

Ezra Firestone:

And nobody-

Brett Curry:

Email touches 36% of all purchases through Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, it's last click, dude. It's last click for 36% of my purchases.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

So why would I not be putting so much energy in growing that list? Nobody does it. Everybody just runs top of funnel video ads, conversion ads, and they hope that when somebody comes to their website, their onsite popup, or their card abandonment, or their exit intent, are going to capture the email lead for them. Great, do that. But also, you know what I'm doing? Gated content. I'm doing giveaways. I'm doing all kinds of different straight up lead generation campaigns. One of my best ones, is we use these things called pre-sell articles, which are basically articles that are story-based, like, "Five makeup tips for older women." Or "Seven makeup tips for women who wear glasses." Or "How to overcome perfectionism in your fifties." Or whatever kind of content that our community is interested in, that leads back to our products.

Ezra Firestone:

And we use those in our email auto responders, we run ads to them, we mail them to our email list. We use them everywhere. At every stage of the sales process. What we also do, is we gate them. So we put an opt-in front of it, and it says, "Hey, enter email address here to get our five makeup tips for women over 50." We run ads to that with a conversion objective for the lead event, the lead event fires on the thank you page. They enter their email address, guess where they get dropped? On the same pre-sell that I'm running at the top of the funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But now we have their email lead, and we put them on a automation sequence, to warm them up and try to sell them. And if they don't buy, we put them on our bucket list. I also run giveaways every six weeks. And basically those are my two main top of funnel lead gen strategies, is gated content and giveaways. But I'll do Facebook lives, and I'll do other things as well. But if you just do gated content and giveaways, you should spend about five to 10% of your total marketing budget on email lead generation. Because some people take a little longer to warm up than others. So if you're only running conversion ads, you're going to miss out on growing your audience in a way that could be beneficial for you.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. I love this so much, and it's something that we've observed you doing, and something we're talking about now with other clients. That, if you can grow that email list, and if you're properly running email marketing, you're going to be able to convert that at a really high rate. And so gated content, so information people want, and/or giveaways, great ways to drive that list. And I was looking through some of your notes here. Looks like over the last 12 months you spent about 200,000 buying email leads that have then generated 750,000 in sales. So about a 375% return on add spend. That's not bad. But that's not like-

Ezra Firestone:

And that's with excluding anybody who was already on the list, dude.

Brett Curry:

What's that?

Ezra Firestone:

That's with excluding anyone who was already on the list. So those are new leads.

Brett Curry:

Just strictly new leads. So that really changes the game, because you could be looking at those campaigns and thinking, "Well, I just drove an email sign up. I didn't make a sale there, so it's not really worth a whole lot." But then you've got to look at that whole picture. What did those email subscribers do for you over the next six to 12 months? And in your case, it's a 3.75 X ROAS, which is amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

Pretty sweet. I mean, not that everyone's going to have that result, but it's worth doing, still, nonetheless.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So, all right, awesome. So strategy number one, buy more email leads. I'm sold on that idea. Idea number two, launch new products. So talk about how Boom is approaching launching new products.

Ezra Firestone:

So to have a successful e-commerce business, you have to get your repeat customer rate up. Ideally over 30% of total revenue comes from repeat customers, people who bought from you once before. The best way to do that is to sell them more of what they already bought, if it's consumable. Or to introduce new items that they might want from you. And by the way, if somebody knows you, likes you, trust you, you're putting out content, you're engaging them, you've delivered a good product, they're going to probably want to buy whatever else you have to offer if it's tangentially related to what they bought in the first place.

Ezra Firestone:

So what we do is we send a customer survey every six months to our two X buyers, and we give them a bunch of stuff, like "If we were going to add more colors, what colors do you want? If you could wave a magic wand, what products would you have us create?" We have a 20 question survey. We say, "Hey, five people who take this survey are going to win $100 gift certificate to the store". We get a couple thousand responses. Based on that, we figure out what products to make next, based on the desire of our community.

Brett Curry:

That creates your product roadmap.

Ezra Firestone:

As an example, 50% of people wanted a mascara, 46% of people wanted a lip gloss, and 53% of people wanted an additional color of Boomstick. We released all three of those products last year, based on that information. They were our three best product launches ever. We just released the Boomstick color last week, we sold 15,000 units in 18 hours. 650 grand in revenue in 18 hours.

Brett Curry:

Whoa. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again. You sold what?

Ezra Firestone:

We sold 15,000 units in 18 hours, dude. We sold out. 650 grand in 18 hours. Now of course I've got a mature company, but the point is that this process gets better over time. So when you're developing a new product, you're doing it in desire to your past customers, in relationship to their desire. And for us, you have componentry, formulation, and secondary packaging. So componentry is like, what is the component that it's going to go in? Well, the Boomstick, we already have that. That's great, we'll reuse the component we already have. The formula is, what is it going to be, why is it going to be that way, what are the benchmarks other brands are doing that we want to meet? We go through a bunch of iterations, we send it out to our best customers to test. It takes us about six months to a year to develop a formula.

Ezra Firestone:

And then our secondary packaging, is what is the box, what's the write alongs, what are the inserts? We get all that together, we run a photo shoot for it. And then we do an early bird. "Hey, we're going to launch this new product. This is what it is. Get excited, sign up for it to hear about it first." And then what happens is, as they're signing up, and as they're posting on social about it on the thread, we're finding out what they want to know. They're asking, "Is it hypoallergenic?" And we're like, "Oh shit, we don't have hypoallergenic on the sales page. It is hypo allergenic." So we add that to the sales page. The questions they ask, they become the FAQs that we put on the... So we use the pre-launch as a way to build out the marketing material. Build out the FAQ, build out the sales page.

Ezra Firestone:

And then we launch it, run ads to it, do emails to it. And then it becomes part of our ongoing marketing. Put it in bundles. And you can do this too with products you already have. So you can reformulate them to make them better than they already are. Based on feedback, you can change the componentry or packaging, make it more sustainable. You can bundle it with other items to make a kit. So you can renew and make better products you already have, and relaunch them, as well as introducing new items. But for us, we are aiming to introduce four new items a year, which is once a quarter, which is hard to do.

Brett Curry:

That's aggressive. That's one a quarter.

Ezra Firestone:

It's hard to do when you're making them all from scratch.

Brett Curry:

It's hard to do, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's a huge, huge part of the business. So yeah, it's really important to continually making the products better.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And it's interesting that it's also fairly risky, too, to launch a new product. Will it go well, will it not go well? But the approach you're taking, it really eliminates a lot of the risk. You know that if you deliver a good product, which you guys do, you know how to do that, you're delivering exactly what someone is requesting, and exactly what someone wants.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, and they also then can become a new top of funnel sales processes. So we can run top of funnel ads now. So for our mascara, I mean, that's our second best seller of all time, and we can run it at the top of the funnel because everybody's interested in mascara. And we didn't have one before. So we couldn't run ads for it at the top of the funnel. So we were missing a customer acquisition funnel there that we were able to add to the business.

Brett Curry:

Love it. And so then this actually directly ties into it. So this is strategy number three. Create more front end offers. So talk about that and how that's evolved for Boom, more front end offers.

Ezra Firestone:

I think that's mature business strategy. For Boom, we did 10 years where we had one front end offer, which was our Boomstick trio.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Boomstick.

Ezra Firestone:

And all of our social proof, all of our sales funnel optimization, all of our pre-sales, all of our video ads, all of our email sequences, everything was about that front end offer. Just make that as deep as possible. Have marketing assets for it, loyalty assets for it. Just really work on that and scale that. And that's a lot easier to go deep rather than wide. And a lot of people have a thousand skews, and they can't do that. Like with this product, this brand, I bought, Overtone, I got a hundred skews. So it's hard for me to have one front end funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But for low skew e-commerce, it's easy. You just pick whatever your widest and best seller, and most relevant seller is, and just focus on that. But once you scale that, now you got to start introducing new front end offers. There's only so many people who are interested in a multipurpose blush stick. Some people aren't interested in blush, but they're interested in mascara, or lip gloss, or brow gel, or whatever. So we've now introduced a bunch more products to the... You're right, my voice is kind of frozen. It's funny, I sound like a frog.

Brett Curry:

You're good, dude. Hey, you're so you're bringing the fire, even though I'm feeling cold for you.

Ezra Firestone:

I usually have such a rich, deep voice, man. Anyways, it gives us the ability to have more fish hooks in the sea.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Love it. Love it. Let's go on to the next one, and this is related to number one, but this is now strategy number four.

Ezra Firestone:

By the way, another front end funnel is one of those lead gen funnels, too. Even if it's leading to the same product.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Ezra Firestone:

It's a new top of funnel way of getting people in the mix. That's a new funnel. It doesn't have to be a new product.

Brett Curry:

Totally. And so looking at that, and what we've observed, working with Boom, working with other successful brands, is that a lot of them have one to three really successful top end funnels that they just push hard on, almost forever. And then with some tweaking and changing, and then you've got all your backend stuff as well. So, yeah. Really, really good. So let's talk then about strategy number four, growing your SMS subscribers. So diving into text based marketing. So, tips or suggestions you would give there for growing that list and utilizing SMS?

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, the 80/20 of SMS is this. Have the collection at checkout, where you're collecting people who check out from you, who click the little box to be collected. And have a two step opt in. First, get the email, second, incentivize for the SMS. So they come to your site, you say, "Hey, get 10% off, entering your email address". They enter it. "Hey, by the way, do you want an extra 5%? Give us your SMS". Klaviyo lets you do this, Postscript lets you do this, Attentive lets you do this, et cetera. Those are your two main ways to collect. And that's 85, 90% of the value. You can do other shit to collect, but it's not worth it. Just do that. And then when you send an abandoned card email and they don't open after 18 hours, slide a text in there, via Klaviyo. So connect it to your email logic, and do your-

Brett Curry:

Is that usually the way you do it, where you'll email first? And then if there's no response there, then you text?

Ezra Firestone:

Always. Yeah, because SMS is more expensive. So we'll use it as a... And you can only do this if you're using Klaviyo, because it talks to it. You can't have Attentive in Klaviyo, because they don't talk to each other. So if you're using Klaviyo, Klaviyo's a little more expensive for SMS, but if you're doing it the way I do, it doesn't matter, because you're only using it as a... You know? You're using it as a way to capture the people who aren't responding to email. Instead of just blasting them with both, and spending the money for that. So, if they don't respond to the card email, we'll slide an SMS. If we go purchase email, they don't cross-sell, we'll slide an SMS. And then once a week, you broadcast your bucket list with a piece of content or a sale. That's it. That's all you need to do. Have an opt in pre purchase, have an opt in at checkout, use it in your automation sequences, do one broadcast a week, your solid potato salad, you have 85% of the value you can get from SMS.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. You really go beyond that, it's just going to be tiny little gains. And potentially a difference-

Ezra Firestone:

It's not worth it. It's not worth it.

Brett Curry:

Not worth it. Not worth the effort.

Ezra Firestone:

Just spend your energy acquiring more customers.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally. And so those weekly broadcast on SMS, are you doing a mix of promotions and content?

Ezra Firestone:

So those will be content. The best piece of content from the week will drop via the SMS. And then if we're running a sale, that week, we won't send content, we'll send about the sale.

Brett Curry:

And your best piece of content pulling from the way Boom is doing it, it's based on blog, is that right? So you're writing blogs weekly or something?

Ezra Firestone:

We send three pieces of content to our list every week. Maybe it's a long form article, maybe it's a user generated content video, maybe it's a recap from a Facebook live we did. Whatever. We're sending content every week, at least three pieces, long form written articles, videos, user generated content. We've got a whole social media content engagement system. And so whatever worked the best that week, we'll drop to the SMS list. And then every six-

Brett Curry:

Nice. So you're emailing that content initially. So you're emailing-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, we're emailing that, we're posting it to the blog, we're posting out to social, we're amplifying it. We're doing the whole system. And then the best shit, we drop to the list, which links over to the blog. And we drop to the SMS list. And then every six weeks we're running a product launch or a sale. So that sixth week will be a promotion via SMS.

Brett Curry:

Got it. And anything you can say about response rates, metrics? How is SMS working in comparison to email? I know it's just designed to be a compliment to email, but anything you can say about stats, performance?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, SMS gets better response rates, but you have smaller lists. And you get way more unsubscribes. So it's-

Brett Curry:

And you got to be really careful about spam related stuff.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

People get pretty hot on-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot you got to worry about with that. But basically it works really well, and you should use it as a compliment, and not instead of... And you should do what I'm talking about, which is basically 80/20 it.

Brett Curry:

Not really standalone. You're not going to just be like, "Hey, SMS is my one strategy."

Ezra Firestone:

Some brands do. Some brands do. But I think if you ignore email, what are we doing?

Brett Curry:

Right. For most people, it's just a beautiful compliment, and a way to really increase the effectiveness of email. But it is a compliment. Awesome. So now we're going to move into strategy number five. I actually love this one. I love all of them, this is all gold. But this is something that was kind of an aha moment for me. I first heard about a strategy like this, it was made be Dan Kennedy back in the day, maybe Jay Abraham. I go way back, man, looking at marketing stuff. But you're talking about inventing a holiday. So there's this idea that people need a reason why. They need a reason why I should buy now, they need a reason why your product is better. And sometimes an invented holiday is a great reason why you should buy now. So, talk about invented holidays, and talk about what you're doing at Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

So excuses to communicate are important. And we take everyone we can. We communicate on Earth Day, we communicate on Animal Friendly Day, we communicate on National Dog Day. Because people like that kind of shit.

Brett Curry:

They do. People like it.

Ezra Firestone:

And everybody has a dog, and everybody likes the earth, and so on and so forth. And we do too. And so we are always doing emails like that. Like, "Hey, it's Earth Day. And you know what? We care a lot about sustainability. And these are our most sustainable products, for these reasons." And whatever. And so we're constantly mailing on using the fake or created holidays as a reason to communicate on social and on email. And so we made up our own. We made Pro-Age Month. We are the first people to say pro-age. Now it's a commonly known thing. Now you've got a million knock brands, but we spent 40 million over six years, popularizing the concept of pro-age, back in 2010. And now Allure is stealing it, and it's like we have penetrated the mainstream with this.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

We've entered the zeitgeist with this concept. And so now it's a thing. And so we want to claim ownership of that, because we do own it. You don't never own an idea, but we created that movement. And so we created Pro-Age Month. And the month of August is Pro-Age Month. And we tell pro-age stories, and we've got a logo for it. And we are claiming our rights to the pro-age movement. The pro-age revolution that we started in 2010. And a good way to do that, was to create a holiday around it.

Brett Curry:

Create a holiday, create a month, and people love that. And it's such a great conversation starter and connection point. And if you think about one of the big components of building a brand, is just building that connection and that community. And sometimes odd or unusual holidays do that. And inventing your own holiday, I think it's brilliant. I think more people should look at it. And I think a lot of brands lend themselves well. Maybe it's not pro-age for you, and Ezra owns that anyway, so back off, really. Seriously.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, whatever. You could say pro-age if you believe in that. What I find, is most people say pro-age and they don't actually know what it means. Which is hilarious. They'll be like, "Pro-age..." this or that. And then they'll have anti-aging skin drops.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. "But cover your gray, and no more wrinkles." Yeah, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

You've missed the point here.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. But inventing a holiday, pure gold, I love it. Anybody can do it. And so highly recommend that as well. So we're getting tied on time, so we're going to have to maybe move rapid fire through some of these or just save some of them for the blog. But number six is, list products on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

What are you guys doing there for your brands? Talk about that a little bit.

Ezra Firestone:

Amazon will make up 20 to 30% of a good brand's sales. And you're going to miss those customers if you're not over there. And our-

Brett Curry:

Because some people only buy on Amazon. That's just it.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, yeah. And we waited 10 years to put our products on Amazon, because we could fill the demand that we had with... Our supply chain could barely fill the demand we had from direct to consumer. But once we beefed up our supply chain, and we realized that adding to Amazon wasn't going to cannibalize our direct to consumer platform, we added our main product on there, and it just crushed. It just added 10 to 15% of incremental sales.

Brett Curry:

Immediately. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

So now we're adding every one of our products, once every two months, onto Amazon. You guys are running all of our ads over there, doing all of our A plus lists. All we do is do the customer support, and create the assets for the page. You guys literally do everything else. You run all the ads, you optimize all the pages, you handle all the seller support. You do fucking everything for us. So it's great for us, because it's a channel that really works, that we don't really have the expertise for, that you just do for us. I mean, we pay you for it, but probably not what you should get paid. Because I think you give us a deal. But-

Brett Curry:

We do. We do. But, gladly. We gladly give you that deal, for sure.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. So it's been really good for us.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's been amazing, it's been fun to execute on our end for sure. And one thing we noticed with you, we noticed this with native ... as well, client, friends. And we don't run their Amazon, but we observe. We run their Google and YouTube. Is that there's some expectation that when you launch on Amazon, there's going to be some cannibalization of your store's sales. And certainly that happens some, but this has been mostly incremental growth for you guys, right?

Ezra Firestone:

100% incremental. There's been no cannibalization whatsoever. Which is crazy, because I was sure there was going to be. We sell it at the same price, and some people just like to buy over there. And I think what was happening was a lot of people were seeing our ads on Facebook, going to buy on Amazon, not finding it, and then buying knockoff brands. Because they only buy on Amazon.

Brett Curry:

Buying something else. Buy knockoff. Yeah, we experienced that. That'd be a topic for another podcast. The copycats and the people that were...

Ezra Firestone:

...

Brett Curry:

... really leeching off of your brand name on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Nightmare.

Brett Curry:

But yeah, nightmare for sure. For sure. But we're getting there. So yeah, big believer in Amazon. And what's interesting to me, and this is where Boom and Overtone are set up perfectly for Amazon, is that success on Amazon in the long term, and I think even right now, is based on building a brand. So taking the community building aspect, the brand building aspect that you're doing off Amazon, and do that on Amazon, that's where you see long term success. It's not just hacking the titles and the keywords, and the bullet points, to try to inflate your ranking, or using super URLs, or some other strategy to hack your ranking, but building a real brand.

Brett Curry:

And that's what you guys are good at, and that's what we're helping you with. And it's working. It's working on Amazon right now. So let's talk, and this will probably be our final concept for the podcast, and I'll push the final one, people to go check out on the blog post. But the seventh strategy for growth, is advertising on television. TV? What? Come on now. So what are your thoughts on TV? And this has been fun to watch too, but what are your thoughts on advertising on television?

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's really only for very, very, very mature brands. Because the minimum that you need to do it is 350 grand. Minimum. Just to test. And that's a two month test. And you also have to produce television quality ads. Now we were able to use user generated content. We spent 50 grand on a TV commercial produced by a fancy agency, and at flopped all crazy. And then we made our own ad, based on UGC that we had. And we crushed. So we're much better direct response advertisers than these TV agencies, it turns out. Which we should've known, because we've been fucking running direct response ads for 15 years. Makes sense we would know what would work, versus what they produced. Even though what they produced, it was a whole... We could talk about that another time. It wasn't very good.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's hard to tell how successful TV has been for us. We've spent about half a million dollars over the course of six months, and I think incrementally, it has been successful. But we're having Northbeam, which is a company you hooked us up with.

Brett Curry:

Shout out to Northbeam, Austin, and the folks there.

Ezra Firestone:

We just turned it off, and looks like sales are down 15K a day since we turned off TV. We'll see. I think TV is great for omnichannel presence. If you're spending three, four, 500K a month on social media ads, you should add in TV at 10, 15% of your budget, to reach more people, and reach the people that you're reaching on social in a different area. And for us, we just turned it off to see how it's going to impact whether we run it or not. And so we're still trying to figure out the attribution on it, and how well it's working. But our sense is that it worked pretty well.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And that's a great way to test it. Turn it off, see what the impact is there. And it also helps tremendously to have a tool like Northbeam, third party attribution. Brilliant stuff, check it out. And we're seeing some similar things. So first of all, I got my start in TV, radio, print. So I still really like TV. I'm still involved in local TV just a little bit with a friend of mine. But I love this strategy. I think it is for bigger brands. But yeah, if you're spending multi six figures on Facebook ads, YouTube ads, then TV may be something that you check out. But along a similar vein, we're testing now, we tested it with Boom and with a few other clients. Creating some awareness, we call it awareness layer YouTube campaigns.

Brett Curry:

And again, you kind of need something like Northbeam in place, to really see the impact of this. But the idea there, is as well we're just going for low cost engagement, low cost views. We're seeing CPMs for some of these awareness level YouTube campaigns at six bucks, five bucks, which is crazy low. But there's something to be said, and this is marketing 101, old school stuff. If you talk to the right people enough times, with a right message, so right message, right market, right media, you're going to get results. And so obviously you got to be ready for it with budget, and you have to have the tracking in place to really make good use of it. But I love that you guys are testing TV. And I also love the fact that it wasn't the super duper polished stuff that worked. It was what we do. The UGC stuff that did well on TV, too.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. It was UGC. And we started doing video view advertising on Facebook, when iOS 14.5 happened, because Facebook lost all its data. So we started running video view campaigns to all the audiences that we used to run conversion campaigns to, to let Facebook build up some data of the people who watched most of our videos. And then we would follow up with those people and run conversion ads to them. And now we're doing that with YouTube as well. And I think that strategy post iOS 14.5 on both networks, where you spend a thousand bucks a day at our scale, running video views, or maybe 10% of your overall spend, is a great strategy. We're doing it at Overtone too.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, this has been amazing, Ezra. So that's seven of the eight tips. Hey, to get that eighth tip, check out the show notes, go check out Ezra's blog, smartmarketer.com, and get that final one. But Ezra, as people are listening, I know we got some super fans-

Ezra Firestone:

I'm cold, man. I'm cold. That's what's going on.

Brett Curry:

You're cold. Then yeah, you need to go warm up, dude.

Ezra Firestone:

I do. I need ...

Brett Curry:

Get your robe, get your blanket, go sit by the fire, or something like that. But for those that are listening and thinking, "I need more Ezra Firestone in my life." How can they connect with you, where should they learn more about you? Where should they do that?

Ezra Firestone:

I'm on Instagram @ezrafirestone, I'm on Twitter @ezrafirestone, I'm on Facebook, Facebook.com/MeetEzra. I'm on smartmarketer.com, which is a blog that I have, I'm on zipify.com, which are my apps for Shopify. But you can find me on social media. I'm on YouTube, all the social media networks. Whatever ones you use, I'm there. You can Google me on there or search me on there. And yeah. Thanks for hanging out, hope it's been some kind of helpful. Appreciate you, Brett. I love that you're between two ferns over there.

Brett Curry:

That's a hilarious show. And you're not the first person to say that. They're like, "Dude, are you between two ferns here? Are you Zach Galifianakis or what? What are you doing?" I'm a little more courteous to my guests and a little more on topic, but that show is hilarious.

Ezra Firestone:

It's awesome, dude.

Brett Curry:

But another plug that I'll make here as I'm sitting between two ferns, is, do check out Smart Marketer. Molly Pittman, John Grimshaw, running that with Ezra's leadership, Ezra started it. But some amazing resources there. Train My Traffic Person. So if you got in-house media buyers, you need to send them through Train My Traffic Person. You get to learn from me too, I'm a faculty member there teaching YouTube and teaching Google. But check that out, smartmarketer.com. Highly, Highly recommend it.

Ezra Firestone:

Thank y'all.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Ezra, appreciate it, brother. This has been amazing, thank you so much. And see you next time.

Ezra Firestone:

Talk soon.

‍

I’ve never met anyone quite like Miki Agrawal.

‍

She’s incredibly creative. No really. She once hosted a “funeral for a tree” at an old cathedral in NYC hosted by comedians and actors. It drew a crowd of thousands, generated millions in free press and helped shed light on the toilet paper waste that her company TUSHY can help solve. 

‍

She understands trends in marketing. She knows how to grab attention. So much so that she was banned by the NY   transit authority from running subway ads. Which led to a PR fight that she won…and in the end, got more press and attention than if they hadn’t been banned. 

‍

She’s also warm and kind and FUN. 

‍

She’s created multiple 9-Figure businesses and has garnered some pretty incredible recognition. She was named "Fast Company's Most Creative People", “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum and INC's “Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs”.

‍

She’s also the author of #1 best selling books Do Cool SH*T and Disrupt-HER.

‍

In this episode we unpack Miki’s wacky, impossible-to-forget and wildly successful marketing strategies and tactics.

‍

Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

• How Miki was banned from advertising on the NYC subway and turned that into a huge PR win for her brand THINX
• How to use Accessible + Relatable language 
• How to create ads that are both effective and “fridge worthy”
• How iteration is perfection
• How to start with play to create great ideas

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

Miki Agrawal

   - Website

   - Instagram

   - Link Tree to Resources

TUSHY

   - Website

   - Instagram

Thinx

   - Website

   - Instagram

Wild

   - Website

   - Instagram

“Do Cool Sh*t” by Miki Agrawal

“Disrupt-Her” by Miki Agrawal

“Zero To $100 Million” on Mindvalley‍

Cap Con 5
Ryan Daniel Moran‍

Toto‍

“Funeral for a Tree” by TUSHY video on YouTube‍

Butt Con by TUSHY

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast. We explore hot topics on eCommerce and digital marketing. We feel feature some of the brightest minds, with some of the SPT perspectives on what it takes to grow your business. Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that, what it really takes to succeed is three things. One: have something good to say. Two: say it well. And three: say it often.

Brett:

My guest in this episode is Miki Agrawal. She's the founder of TUSHY, but she's also the entrepreneur behind several other wildly successful companies. I don't know anyone better than Miki at the, have something good to say and say it well, aspects of growth. And so just a couple of accolades. Miki was named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People. She was also named by Inc Magazine as one of the Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs. She was also my favorite speaker, and she's also one of the favorite speakers that most of the events that she attends.

Brett:

We're going to dive into some crazy wild stories from her entrepreneur journeys. We're going to learn why she was banned by the New York subway from running ads there, and how she actually overcame that and then ran some pretty powerful ads on the New York subway system. We're going to talk about how she creates events that are just, blow your mind. Like, they had a funeral for a tree, and there's a reason why they did that and got millions of dollars in free press. And she talks about how to craft things that are both artful and fridge worthy, but also effective. And so, I think you're going to absolutely love this interview. And so, lean in, buckle up and enjoy this interview with Miki Agrawal.

Brett:

Over 81% of consumers are opted into text message messages from their favorite brands, and that's where Attentive comes in. Meet Attentive, the company helping thousands of innovative brands connect with their customers through personalized text messaging. Attentive's text marketing platform lets you grow your subscriber list, interact with customers in real time through two-way conversations and drive the war revenue. Brands who use Attentive see $55 in sales for every $1 they spend. See what Attentive can do for you, at attentivemobile.com/omgcommerce. Attentive: drive sales with text message marketing.

Brett:

All right, well today I am abs absolutely thrilled that my guest is Miki Agrawal. Now, I was recently at an event, CapCon 5 in Austin, Texas. My good friend, Ryan Daniel Moran was the host. And there was a star-studded lineup of speakers. Amazing, blow your mind speakers. And I got to say, Miki was probably my favorite. And I hope that some of my other friends that were speaking don't hear this, because I don't want to hurt their feelings. It's just that Miki was amazing. And so, Miki is the founder of a number of really transformative businesses. Most recently, TUSHY. Also, THINX and WILD. She's also author of some amazing best-selling books. Do Cool Sh*t. Disrupt-Her, which I'm actually in the process, I've gone about halfway through it right now. And even though it has "her" in the title, Disrupt-Her, instead of disruptor, it's for dudes too. Right, Miki? And so, I'm actually getting a lot of value out of it. And so, we're going to talk about growth and having an amazing marketing message, and thinking differently and all kinds of great stuff. So Miki, welcome to the show, and how's it going?

Miki:

Yes. I'm so happy to be here with you. And just, the thing that I just can't, I'm just so like, I love is that you have eight children, and you're sitting at the table with 10 people every night for dinner. That just blows my mind.

Brett:

Yeah. The level of noise at the dinner table is sometimes crazy. And we do this thing called highs and lows, where everybody goes around and tells their high of the day. You have to have a high of the day, you don't have to have a low of the day if you don't want to, but it is required to have a high. And the noise level is crazy, but it's also super fun.

Miki:

I love that you do that. That's beautiful, that's amazing.

Brett:

Yeah. So, part of what attracted me to you, Miki, and why I was so thrilled to chat with you afterwards. Is one, you're a master marketer. And the way you craft messages and the way you get attention, it's mind blowing, which is awesome. But you're also like, you believe in strong women, right? And I've got six daughters and I just, I want them to conquer the world. That's probably a weird thing to say, but I want them to just do whatever they feel led and whatever they feel passionate about doing. And so, love the energy you bring and the inspiration you're bringing to young women as well.

Miki:

Six daughters. I mean, it's just, yeah. Like, I think about the food bill just for that dinner, just for those meals, just now. It's just [crosstalk 00:05:10].

Brett:

The food bill is crazy. So I'm happy to talk about that with anyone offline. Yeah. So, when you include groceries and eating out, it's a median household income. It's a lot of money, yeah. But grateful to be able to do it. I wouldn't have it any other way, but it is completely [crosstalk 00:05:28].

Miki:

I love it.

Brett:

So yeah, it's awesome. Well, let's talk about a few things. So if you would Miki, give people kind of just the quick background on you. Because we're going to dig into some of the specific messages that you use at TUSHY and things like that. But give people the background. Like, how did you become this, because not only were you my favorite speaker at CapCon, but I've seen, you were voted best speaker at Inc and Fast Company, and some of these other big events. Everybody loves what you have to say. So really, how did you get here?

Miki:

Well, I'm one of three children, and the interesting fun fact about the three of us is that we are all born within one year. So I have an identical twin sister. The third sister, who's 11 months older. So we're actually, we're Irish twins.

Brett:

Yeah, Irish twins and identical twins [crosstalk 00:06:18].

Miki:

Irish triplets.

Brett:

Okay.

Miki:

So we're twins, plus Irish triplets, yeah.

Brett:

It's insane.

Miki:

Yeah. And then we grew up to a Japanese mother and Indian father. So my mother's from Japan, speaks with a thick Japanese accent. My dad is from India, speaks with a very thick Indian accent.

Brett:

I'm doing the audio book of Disrupt-Her. And you do the Indian accent for your dad, an it's just amazing. You do such a good job, yeah.

Miki:

But yeah, his most, the thing they always say is, he says, when he meets somebody, he goes, "Very good vibes". Or, "Very bad vibes." And immediately, because yeah, he can sniff people out just by "their vibes".

Brett:

By "their vibes", okay, I love that.

Miki:

By "their vibes".

Brett:

That's awesome.

Miki:

Yeah. And I grew up in Montreal, Canada. In French Montreal, in the south shore of Montreal. In a town called [foreign language 00:07:12]. And it's like, I grew up in French, like literally, we were the token Asians in the most French neighborhood ever. And so, it was really beautiful to grow up in this true mosaic of cultures. Japan, India, French, American. And then of course, Canada attracts so many, I mean, every culture, every religion, and they're all celebrated. And so of course, growing up in a household of just diversity and then going to school with just all diverse kids, I think we just learned to question everything. And to look at things from different angles. To be like, oh, this is how the Indians look at it, this is how the Japanese look it, how the French look at it, and the Americans look at it, this is how the Canadians look at it.

Brett:

It forces a fresh perspective, rather than just everybody being the same.

Miki:

Totally. So it's a mosaic versus melting pot thinking. And I think that that mosaic thinking creates beautiful picture. When you think about a mosaic image, and it's just this, all these colors and all these textures, and all of the different historical context of things, creates a different frame than just a single pain. So I think I was very blessed in just being born where I was born, to be given the various perspectives. To not just be like, okay, this is the way it is. It's like, wait, is this, or should I question it? And is there a better way, or is there more thoughtful way? Or that kind of thing.

Brett:

When did you realize that, hey, I might be an entrepreneur? Or have you ever? Like, is that really a conscious thought? Like, when did you think, hey, I'm going to build companies? And not just companies, but wildly successful and disruptive companies.

Miki:

Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just genuinely unemployable. I think I'm just like, you're not my Indian father. That kind of vibes. Where like, anytime someone told me what to do, blood would rush to my head and I would just get really frustrated. I would, I don't know, get triggered or something. But no, I think I just always beat to my own drum. And I think because of this questioning, because of this philosophy of looking at things from different perspectives, I think I just always had different ideas that I wanted to put out in the world. That entrepreneurship, when it was introduced to me, I remember, I'll never forget. I met my very first entrepreneur, standing in line in New York City when I was 22 years old, at this Armani party.

Miki:

I was invited to my very first VIP door, or whatever. [crosstalk 00:09:47] And I was like, oh my God, I'm so cool. It was like, Armani. You know, whatever. Back when it was really cool to go to those things. And I remember standing in line, and in front of me was this gentleman who I'd met. And his name was Graham, and he's now since become one of my dearest friends. But I met him randomly, standing in line in front of me then. I was 22, and he was in his mid-thirties when I met him. And I was like, "oh". Like, "What are you up to?"

Miki:

And he's like, "I'm an entrepreneur."

Miki:

And I was like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

And he is like, "I have my own business." And this is, by the way, in 2001, when entrepreneurship wasn't a school thing. Nobody was getting invested in, it wasn't a thing. I mean, Facebook wasn't even there until 2006.

Brett:

Now it's super trendy. Everybody wants to say entrepreneur, stamped that on their [crosstalk 00:10:33].

Miki:

Now, everyone. But back then, nobody. It was doctor, lawyer, investment banker, management consultant. Going to work for a company. Becoming a whatever at a company. Becoming a person who starts a business was just not even in the lexicon, in the zeitgeist of culture back then.

Miki:

And he was like, "I'm not in firm."

Miki:

I'm like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

He's like, "I have my own company."

Miki:

I'm like, "Well, what do you do?"

Miki:

And he's like, "Well, I started a company called treehugger.com."

Miki:

And I was like, "Oh, that's cool."

Miki:

And he's like, "And I sold it." I think he sold it to Discovery Channel, whatever.

Miki:

And I was like, "Wow!" And then he, the next day, invited me to this brunch with a bunch of other entrepreneurs. And that's when it was my big ding, ding, ding moment. I can start my own company, I'm going to do that. And I think in life, we just get given these gifts of chance meetings. And either we kind of get opened by it or we close to it. And I was sort of just blasted open by the possibilities of that. And I think that's what really put me on the course of this new way of thinking and being, and then carrying forward.

Brett:

That's amazing. And I do want to, let's give kind of a brief overview of some of the companies. Just to give people some texture and some more context. So your mind was blown, and you're thinking, I could do my own thing. And then you have, and you've been wildly successful. Really at, essentially, everything. But can you give a quick rundown of the companies, and what they've done?

Miki:

Yeah. Well, I will first start by saying, one of the biggest stories that changed the course my life was when I was 22. After that time, 9/11 happened, and that was a huge turning point in my life.

Brett:

Yeah, because you were an investment banker, working down on Wall Street, right?

Miki:

Yes. The World Trade center was my subway stop every single morning. And it I was working at Deutsche Bank, in investment banking. I call it douche bank.

Brett:

Wow. Someone was asking for that, honestly, right? Deutche Bank, it's so close to douche, you're going to make the jokes, yeah.

Miki:

Know what I mean? Yeah. So yeah, when I was there, yeah, 9/11 happened. I was supposed to be there, and 2 World Trade Center was my subway stop every single morning. And I would walk upstairs to 2 World Trade Center, at the cafe there. And I would get tea with my girlfriend, who worked on the 100th floor. And then I would walk across the street to my office, directly across 2 World Trade Center. And then 9/11 happened, and it was the first day of my life, the only day of my life that I slept through my alarm clock.

Brett:

That is crazy and amazing.

Miki:

Yeah. And 700 people in my girlfriend's office died on that day. Two people in my office died. It was one of those, just like, you can't make this shit up. Like, this is not a real movie, that kind of level of unfathomableness.

Brett:

Unfathomable, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah. And so that single experience, again, it's those moments that I kind of really recognize as these turning points in my life. And that was a big turning point in my life. Where I was like, wow, I could die tomorrow. And when you're 22, you don't think about death. I feel like we start thinking about death after we have children, in a lot of ways. And I'm just always making sure I'm not going to die. Do you know? And I'm sure, with your eight children, I don't even know how [inaudible 00:13:50]. You know?

Brett:

Yeah.

Miki:

But death, it's just not a thing, when you're a kid, when you're 22, you're just sort of like, whatever.

Brett:

You're usually not thinking about it at all, yeah.

Miki:

Just not thinking at all. But then, because I had this near potential death experience, and people around me died, and I was just sort of like, wow, this is a real thing. And I really felt my mortality in that moment. And it was like, wow, I got to make every single day count.

Brett:

Got to do something, yeah. We're going to blink and we're going to be 70, right? And so, what are you going to fill your time with now? Yeah.

Miki:

That's right. And so yeah, for me, it was, I wrote down three things. The first was to play soccer professionally, the second was to make movies, and the third was to start a business. And that sort of set me on sort of a total path after 9/11,.I played soccer for the New York Magic, I worked in the film industry for a couple of years, and then I started my first business, which was in the restaurant space. And so, my first business was born out of a stomach ache. We know that famous thing, necessity is the mother of invention.

Brett:

Yes, so true.

Miki:

Yeah. So the first business was born out of a stomach ache, and I couldn't eat pizza anymore. It was my favorite comfort food, but I just couldn't eat anymore because it made me bloated and gassy, and just so gross feeling after I ate it. And it was full of bleached flour, processed cheese, sugar-filled sauces, processed toppings, it was all that. And so yeah, I basically started New York City's very first gluten free alternative pizza concept. And 17 and a half years later, we're still in business. Almost 18 years this year. In November, 18 years.

Brett:

Amazing. And it's called WILD, correct?

Miki:

Called WILD. Just go to @eatdrinkwild on Instagram. We have a couple locations in New York City, and one in Guatemala.

Brett:

And [crosstalk 00:15:42] for surviving the pandemic. I couldn't imagine owning a restaurant during the pandemic in New York City. That had to been just absolutely brutal. So grateful, yeah.

Miki:

It was nuts. My partner Walid is incredible, and he's such an ingenious person. He has lots of [inaudible 00:15:57]. Where actually what we did was, we opened up, on Seamless Web, three restaurants, out of our restaurants. So during the pandemic, not only did we have our regular standard fair, but we opened up two different restaurants, working out of our kitchen. So basically, we made tacos and we did burgers, or whatever, so that people could order from us multiple times a week.

Brett:

Oh, super smart, super [crosstalk 00:16:24].

Miki:

So, take away. And not just have our gluten-free pizza stuff every week, but they would have tacos one night, and different stuff. And so we just opened three different restaurants under the same roof during the pandemic. And then we got the outdoor cafe seating. And that, our business all came back. And it was actually incredible, because it felt like a bit of Europe being in New York, with all the outdoor cafes everywhere, and people walking around with the menu. It was just, it was very romantic, very beautiful. So the rest restaurants was the very first business I learned. I think I learned so much of the thesis around people and psychology in my restaurants, that then led to building Thinks and led to building TUSHY. Both now valued over nine figures, well over nine. And so I, what I learned at WILD was, when I stood outside my restaurant for almost seven years, handing out little pieces of pizza, just handing them out.

Brett:

That's how you grew the business, was samples, yeah.

Miki:

Exactly, yeah. And getting people to try. And I would also test. Like, if I said healthy pizza, people wouldn't come. But if I said, farmed fresh, healthy farm to table pizza, people would be like, oh, what does that mean?

Brett:

Yeah. Nobody wants healthy pizza. That sounds cardboard.

Miki:

Exactly.

Brett:

But farm to table pizza, interesting. And so, you were testing out those messages as people were walking by?

Miki:

AB testing, literally like email, subject heading.

Brett:

I love that.

Miki:

You know? And it was such, seven years of, it was genuinely like double PhD in human psychology and what led people to come closer to attract them, or to kind of move them back. And it was a really interesting thing. Just by standing, literally person by person, like hand to hand combat, just really getting to know people.

Brett:

Fascinating.

Miki:

And that experience led to this thesis, understanding, that again, built THINX and TUSHY. Which was having a best in class product. Like, if someone bit into it and they're like, Ugh.

Brett:

It doesn't matter, yeah.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:30] my underwear. Like tight now, I'm wearing my period-proof underwear. It was so amazing because, I started my period today, I went to my bathroom. You're like, I have six daughters, don't worry about it.

Brett:

So, it does not bother me in the least. Like, yeah, this is a common conversation around my house, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

Think of the podcast first, though. First to confess on the podcast, which I embrace this, I welcome, this is awesome.

Miki:

First of all, every single human being is here because of a women's period. So, you're welcome. You know?

Brett:

Yes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:59] Be more uncomfortable. Yeah. So today, this morning, I went to the bathroom and I was kind of like, there's a little bit of blood everywhere. And so I basically sat on my toilet, used my TUSHY bidet, washed myself clean, And then put my THINX underwear on. And I was just like, ah.

Brett:

You're like, this is amazing.

Miki:

I solved my own problem twice. Just now, in this moment. And that's when I was like, yeah, this is why these businesses are doing well. Because genuinely, they truly, truly, truly solve problems that we face every single day.

Brett:

Authentically solving the problem, not just identifying a problem and kind of addressing it just for a cash grab, but you authentically solve the problem.

Miki:

Needed it, yeah. Which is why in my book, Do Cool Sh*t, I talk about the three questions I always ask myself before starting any business. The first question is, what sucks in my world? That's to start with me, a problem in my world that sucks. And then question number two is, but does it suck for a lot of people? Because if it just sucks for me, then I'm kind of a diva or whatever, and who cares. [crosstalk 00:20:04].

Miki:

And then the third question, which I think is the most important. Which is, can I be passionate about this issue, cause, or community, for a really long time. We know the saying, it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. People don't want to sit in that discomfort for a really, really long time, and then they quit or decide to leave early, and they don't kind of get through it. I think about the entrepreneurs, I think about the musicians, I think about the actors, I think about all the people in my life who've made it. And they've made it because they've kind of grinded for a really long time. And they made through it, and they just stuck with their passion, they stuck with the thing they truly believed in. And so I think, yeah, what sucks in my world, has sucked for a lot of people. Can I be passionate about this issue? I think the passion piece is the most important. [crosstalk 00:20:49]

Brett:

It's super important. And this is something I think you may have shared at CapCon already with somebody else. But, tactics without the underlying passion are worthless or it's going to be short lived. Tactics only work for so long. Like, you've got to have that passion and that drive to push through all the messy and confusing and heartache and suffering that you have to go through as a business owner. And so yeah, the passion is super, super important.

Brett:

Now, why do you think you're so attracted to difficult things to sell? So we'll start with pizza first. So, selling healthy, gluten free pizza. When you started the business, gluten free wasn't trendy. Like, gluten free wasn't a selling point. It's not something you want to stick on all your labels. Because people were like, what are you even talking about?

Miki:

Yeah. And no one was talking about farm to table, no one was talking about [crosstalk 00:21:36], no one was talking about seasonal.

Brett:

None of that.

Miki:

This is in 2003-2004. I mean, it was still super nascent, all of those conversations, it was extremely different.

Brett:

Yeah. And when you started THINX, which is period-proof underwear, no one was really talking about periods. Or, not wanting to talk about it. And maybe some people don't want to talk about now. [crosstalk 00:21:50] But yeah, you just got to get over it. But then also TUSHY, a bidet. I still remember so many conversations just as stuff started to get in the news. People were like, "Oh, bidets are nasty."

Brett:

And I'm like, "How is it nasty to use water to clean yourself versus dry paper?" But anyway, you're choosing these categories that are difficult. Like, it's new to people or taboo to people. Why do you think [crosstalk 00:22:13]?

Miki:

Well, it's a culture shift that I'm interested in. I think from a creative perspective and as a creative challenge. Like, how do you change people's behavior, is the hardest change to make. And then how, how do you utilize innovation and creativity to do that? And so I think from a creative kind of person's perspective, it's like, wow, this is a really fun challenge to tackle. How do you get someone to change their behavior when it comes to food? When it comes to habits? Daily habits that they've been doing their whole lives, not even their whole lives, but for generations. To get them to try something new, and not only try it, but adopt it fully. I mean, that is why Toto hasn't made it to America yet. That is why the tampons and pads, which were invented by men, which is fine. But not that fine, cause they're made for women. So it's just, it's like, those are the most pervasive products in the world, because it's taboo. And so, how do we enter these conversations in a way that's artful? In a way that's accessible, and we're using the best in class product?

Miki:

And I think those, my thesis that I learned from the pizza, from the restaurants was that was that, was the three prong. Prong number one is best in class product. It has to be a best in class product. It has to be a big day that, when I clip to my toilet, it actually feels good, it looks good.

Brett:

It adds to the appearance of your bathroom. Like, it makes your bathroom feel better, cleaner.

Miki:

It makes it more upscale and cool. It makes people want to bring you to their bathroom when you're having a dinner party. You know like that? Or when you're wearing THINX, like when I'm wearing my underwear right now, I feel really sexy in them. I feel really taken care of in them. I know that I'm protect, I know that this product works. So, best in class product. The pizza, when I eat it, it tastes the most delicious pizza. It doesn't even taste gluten and free, it tastes the most delicious pizza you've ever tasted. So, best in class product, no question, that is baseline. Second prong, to really shift culture, is art. Using art to really challenge conversations.

Miki:

And I talked a little bit about this at CapCon. When I remember putting our first TUSHY ads up, or our first period ads up, out in the world, whether online or offline. People's first reaction were like, wow, that's so beautiful. And then their second reaction's, oh my God, they're talking about poop, they're talking about periods. Like, oh my [crosstalk 00:24:49]. But their very first reaction was leaning into the art and the beauty of that. And I think that, that opens up people's hearts and minds. Art just does that, and for everyone at every level, does that. It opens, art just gives people something to lean into. And I think when they're leaning into something, it makes them be curious. And so the first thing is, can we design from a lens of art? So, we hired all artists, we hired all creatives. I think art is such a beautiful lens to shift people's perspective. I mean, that's why people go to museums, people look at magazines, people look at nature as art. And a place to go and really open up our souls, open up our perspectives, change the way we look and see things.

Miki:

And I think that really lends itself to giving people the space to question their existing thinking. And I think that's all we need to do, is give them that space to question, and they can make the decision for themselves. And so then, that's the artfulness, the best in class innovation.

Miki:

And then the third part is the accessible, relatable language. I think we so often want to be so heady, and so clinical, and so technical, and so medical, and so academic, and sound really smart. And make everyone feel we've been and doing all this patent pending work and whatever. And it's just like, people don't care. They want to know, does it work? Does it make me feel good? Does it support me and does it support my life? Like, what's the point of this? Like, I don't care about your terminology.

Brett:

Patent pending.

Miki:

And like, I don't care about high sounding or smart. Like, whatever. And then, I tested all of that. That was all tested. I learned that, the more we speak from our space of truth, the more we speak from our place of that lit fire inside. We talked about that at CapCon as well. The more we speak from that real, true, authentic place, people respond. Because it's real, it's true. It's not coming from like, I wonder what they want me to say? And I'm just going to say it that way. That doesn't feel good, to receive that kind of inauthentic message. Like, imagine if you're receiving a text message from a best friend. And you can tell when they're being inauthentic or they're authentic. You can tell when your sister or brother is being authentic, you can tell when your wife or husband is being inauthentic or authentic.

Miki:

And so it's just that, can we write copy, can we text, can we write our messaging in the same way as we're texting our best friend? And I think that is such an important way to think about messaging to people. Because we're just being bombarded with advertisements, with so much people shouting at us. And we don't want that. We want authentic truth, we just want that juicy truth. And I think that truth is really what, that truth, coupled with art, coupled with the right beautiful aesthetic, the right innovation that you would want to use where, on a daily basis. That together, creates change, creates culture shift. And I've seen that time and time again. Across Wild, across THINX and across TUSHY. All three of them share the same philosophy of best in class product, artful aesthetic design across every touchpoint of our brand, and accessible, relatable language across every touchpoint of the brand.

Brett:

I love it so much. And really, when you combine all of that, plus you go back to the starting point from your first book, Do Cool Sh*t, it has to be addressing something that sucks for you and sucks for a lot of people. Right? So it's got to be that. And so then, when it's addressing a real issue, and then you've got the artful design and best in class, and it works. And you got the accessible, relatable language. All that comes together and it just works.

Brett:

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Brett:

What's so interesting and what was so powerful for me. And I remember talking to the guy that was sitting next to me at CapCon, and I made a couple comments about this. I've been in the ad world for a long time. So there's the brand building space of advertising, which is interesting. There's direct response, which I followed and studied for a long time. And I've worked in the infomercial space and stuff. But you have this ability to create stuff that looks beautiful. Like, you just want to look at it. It's an ad for a bidet, but you want to look at it. But, it also kind of makes you say, I'd like to try that. Like, I would like a clean butt too. I would to do...

Brett:

Because I think sometimes people, they go too far into the art. And it's abstract, and like, I don't even know what you're trying to say to me. Or I'm talking about patent pending, and all aloof, and who cares. So, how do you strike that balance and how do you create something that's fridge-worthy? As you'd say, artful and fridge worthy. But also, that connects and makes you say, I want to buy that underwear. Or, I want to buy that bidet. How do you do that?

Miki:

Yeah. Well so first, just to quickly unpack the word fridge-worthy, for those who don't know what that term means. Fridge-worthy simply means the idea that, you know when you walk into your home, and you go to your kitchen and you see your fridge? You go out, before, you go to grab a beer or whatever from your fridge. You see your fridge, and on your fridge are emblems of your life. You see pictures of your family members, of your eight children in your 10 person family.

Brett:

They take up the whole fridge, exactly.

Miki:

Yeah [inaudible 00:31:16] all over. You have invitations to weddings, you have little postcards from family members, you have little pictures of nieces and nephews. Or whatever it is, right?

Miki:

Hi, Stan.

Miki:

And my challenge to my team has always been, can you create something so beautiful, so artful and so personal, that it can make the small real estate on your fridge? That it can really make that small personal space on your fridge, that it can take up that space. That you can make something for TUSHY or THINX so beautiful, something so cool, that it can live in your home in some way. And so we design from that lens. And from that lens that, again, hits you personally and makes you feel something.

Brett:

It does cause you to shift and think differently. Now it's not just about, well, I'm going to choose blue. Like, you're thinking about everything differently.

Miki:

Yeah. Like, what is it that's going to make, how does it make me feel? And that's a different lens to creating.

Brett:

For sure.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

So then, how do you blend fridge-worthy then with some true sales power, or some power to make people say, I want to buy this.

Miki:

So I always say to my team, in the art of it, I still need to know. I mean, it depends. Like you said, there's top of funnel stuff, where you want to create intrigue and mystery. And that kind of stuff is like, if you look at our TUSHY Bellagio spot that we just shot. I just shot this ad, where I finally figured out, where my friend is this genius rigging person. And he rigged 10 toilets with bidets on them, with our TUSHY Ace bidets on them. That we can play them like a piano.

Brett:

Like the Bellagio fountains?

Miki:

Bellagio fountain.

Brett:

I got to see that, then.

Miki:

I'll share, I'll text with you right after this. It's crazy. And so basically, it plays. So we made this like, (Beethoven's 5th). And just this wildly weird thing. And we don't show you very much about it, but it just says at the tagline at the end. Which makes you mysterious and makes you want to click and see what the hell this is. So there's that mystery and intrigue, which hooks you into wanting to know more.

Brett:

It's a curiosity play, yeah.

Miki:

Pure curiosity play, pure top funnel. Just stuffing people in. And then we spend the rest of the time, really converting them to the bottom, bringing them down the funnel. Educating them on the product, the value propositions and all of that. So that's the one strategy.

Miki:

The other strategy for top of funnel. I always think about prospecting. I always think about, how do you get people to both fall in love with our brand, with our ethos, with our playfulness, with our just [foreign language 00:33:56], with our love of life? They can feel it in this thing, but they're also understanding, what is the product? How does it work? Why do I need it? So it really answers those questions. And maybe like, why do I need it?

Miki:

Like, we just shot another commercial with the singing toilets, with the kind of the playing toilets. Where, it's this very Wes Anderson, weird thing. Where it's like, five people laying, they stick their heads in the toilets at once. And they're laying on these, which kind of represents the heated seat. And then all of a sudden, we start spraying. Like, I start kind of smushing ice cream on this guy's face. And then, this one woman takes a chocolate cake and squishes it in her white glove. And then she smacks it on the ass of white pants on this guy. So it kind of represents all taking a shit, basically, the chocolate looks like shit. And then the sprays go off, and then we get clean. And it's this debaucherous clean thing. And then we press the blow dryer, and then we're getting blow dried. So you're seeing the value, of how it works. Like, you're seeing, we press the remote, and then the nozzles go off and it starts spraying. It's clean. And then you press the dry, then it just blow dries it. So you see slow-mo, the hair blow dried. We walk out frame. So you're kind of, you're getting the idea of what this thing is. But you're still intrigued, tickled. You feel good vibes, you feel "very good vibes". You know?

Brett:

You're probably laughing. You're probably like, I can't believe I'm watching this. But it's also product demonstration in a really fun and creative and crazy way, which is super cool.

Miki:

Yes. And so, it's a lot of things. And I always look at, what are our best performing ads? Our best performing ads are the edutaining ones. Ones that are hilarious, and the ones that educate. Tells you, why you need it, how it works and how to use it.

Brett:

Yeah, totally makes sense.

Miki:

You know? But in a really simple, easy way. And so, yeah, it is an art and science, and they have to go hand in hand. And, creative and marketing always do sometimes have this natural tension, but I think it's a good tension if you have the right leadership.

Brett:

It's a healthy tension.

Miki:

A healthy tension, yeah.

Brett:

Love it. So one thing you talk about a lot, and I remember you showing these examples. That, you'll use actual statements from real customers. And you also talk about campfire stories, sharing campfires stories as a team or whatever, to kind of stir up creativity. So, can you talk about that a little bit? Like, how do you use customer statements in your ads? And then, what about campfire stories?

Miki:

Yeah. So, I always think like, our best advocates are our customers, our users, who love our products. It just, it makes so much sense. And so many times, companies are scared to, they don't want to bother their customers. But if customers love it, and you're asking them, hey, just fill in the blank. THINX is blank. Or, TUSHY.

Brett:

This is my favorite, yeah. Just fill in the blank. TUSHY is, fill in the blank.

Miki:

Fill in the blank. TUSHY is, blank. Just fill in the blank. And within 24 hours, we got 1000 responses. For things specifically, it was, THINX is Mary Poppins in my pants. THINX is strength, freedom and dignity for all women. TUSHY is...

Brett:

One of them was, eye candy butt bliss. I wrote it down. I got the thing.

Miki:

Yeah, eye candy butt bliss. It's like, TUSHY: you could eat off my butt hole. You know? And just like, my rusty starfish has never been so clean. Stuff like that, where it's crazy, hilarious, random.

Brett:

Especially when you know that it was a real customer that said it. It's like, okay, that's super fun. And I'm now totally entertained by reading this.

Miki:

Yeah, by real. And we always say, name of the customer, from a real pooping human. And so, we now use these campaigns, as actual campaigns and taglines for our company. Because our customers know what's best. And we don't have to oftentimes scratch our heads to ask ourselves, what creativity can we use? We can literally just reach out to our customer base, and they'll give us, and they're delighted in giving it to us. And if they see it in the world, they'll be like, oh my God, that's my line. And they now feel even more connected.

Brett:

And then they totally will put that on the fridge. They will totally put that piece, and share with everyone they know.

Miki:

And they'll share it with all their friends, tell everyone they know. And it engages people, attracts them. The same thing with PR. I talk about that a lot. Like, we do a ton of inbound marketing, inbound PR. And we've gone viral so many different times. And it's because, again, studying the psychology of people. Like, how do you create intrigue? How do you create mystery? Where, they want to complete the storyline. So often, people are like, send press releases, and hope that the press will write about them. But it just never works. It piles up on people's desks. Versus, you send these mysterious boxes where you have to assemble this thing. Or like, unscramble a riddle. So recently, we just launched our TUSHY Ace, part of our electric bidet seat with the most beautiful remote in the world.

Brett:

It's the heated seat, right? Which by the way, if you've never experienced a heated toilet seat, it is pretty magical, it really is.

Miki:

Heated seat, warm water, blow dries your butt. Best blow dryer on the market. It's not like where you have to still use toilet paper, because this is a nice strong blow dryer. And it looks an Apple product. It's the most gorgeous remote. Our design, it's just, it's the most beautiful product. And so, we were launching this. And our team, we were like, okay, we are going to create mystery around this product. And so, we put together these deck of cards. And these deck of cards that we made, we made actual TUSHY deck of cards, designed by hand, by my designers. And we had this instruction sheet for the press. And we said, pull out all the royal flushes.

Brett:

Nice. Royal flushes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:40:03] And so, they'd pull out the royal flushes. And they had to unscramble the royal flushes, based on the riddles that they were given. Like, for the diamond royal flushes, this is the riddle. And you had to unscramble it based on the different words. The letters that appeared on the 10, jack, queen, king, ace. There was a letter hidden, that then unscrambled based on the riddle. So then, it made the press have to work hard to actually unscramble and send the responses. And then once they get the TUSHY Ace product and install it, they're going to feel they've accomplished something. Like, they actually, they feel so much better.

Brett:

And they're so engaged, and you've delighted them.

Miki:

They're so engaged.

Brett:

You've just made their day in so many ways.

Miki:

Instead of just sending them a product, review it. You're almost like, dance monkey, dance. Versus like, let me bring you into this fun, mysterious story with us. And we're going to be surprised and delighted together. And we're going this extra mile for you, to make you just regale in the delight. And I think that, that is what people want in life. They want to be just surprised and delighted. They want to be regaled. And like, "Oh!". And giggle. They want their heart to flutter.

Brett:

They want magic, they want mystery, they want excitement, they want to be kind of caught up in something. Right? Not just reading.

Miki:

Who doesn't want to be caught up in this ,"oh', moment. And it feels so good and it just enlivens our being.

Brett:

So, how did that work out? How was the press' reaction to that?

Miki:

Well I mean, this one, we just sent them out actually last week, so we're still underway. But guess what? The fact that we had almost, I think it was like 20 press asked for these cards. Because first, we were like, we're going to send you a mysterious package. Are you willing to take it? We need your home address, because we're COVID times. And so we had, almost 20 press gave us their home addresses, to send them the mystery packages. And so that already means that they're hooked. And we did this before, for THINX. Where we had people go and smash bricks, and they had to open the bricks and look for these invitations. And 80 people showed up to our event, after they smashed the THINX. 80 press RSVPed. We had another event, where we poked a hold in eggs, and put these mystery scrolls in them. And then all 20 press showed up to our event, because they wanted to crack open the egg and look at the scroll. And we said, you can't open them until you come to the event.

Miki:

So it's just, creating the mystery, creating the intrigue. It's human nature that, when they start something, they want to finish it. They don't like incomplete story lines, they like to complete story lines. And when there's an incompletion, there's still this intrigue, this mystery that keeps you wanting more. And so, we're in that storyline right now, with the TUSHY Ace, and I'll let you know how it goes, but I feel very confident.

Brett:

Yeah. That idea of opening and closing loops. Once a loop is open, people want to close and they want to figure out. They want to solve the mystery. That's why cliffhangers work, and all of those things.

Miki:

And in relationship and romance. When you're romancing, you're seducing. It's the same kind of storyline. It's so much fun, that game.

Brett:

Yeah. And I know you've got to go, so I've got two quick things. But I also want to mention, just briefly. You talked about two stories, two events. Because you're the master of doing these just crazy, off the wall events, that also work. So, one was ButtCon, and one was the Funeral for a Tree, for TUSHY. Are those outlined in one of your books? Because even if nothing else...

Miki:

Not yet.

Brett:

They're not? Oh, dang it. Okay.

Miki:

Not yet, but my next, maybe. I might have a Do Cool Sh*t sequel, and talk about TUSHY in that.

Brett:

We'll highlight that, or I'll find the story, that I can put. Anyway, I'll let the audience [crosstalk 00:43:41].

Miki:

I'm happy to share them really quick. I can share them over the next couple minutes, no problem.

Brett:

Okay, just do it quickly over the next two minutes, yeah.

Miki:

Sure, yeah. So again, it's all about creating unorthodox events, unorthodox gatherings. That make people go, "Huh? What are you talking about? What is this?" So we held two kind of events before COVID happened. And we're going to now resume them once COVID's now finally, hopefully at bay. But one of them was called A Funeral for a Tree. And the other one was called ButtCon. The Funeral for a Tree is, we actually held a real funeral for a dead tree at the Judson Memorial Church, which is the biggest memorial church in all of New York City. In Washington square park. We had a 400 seat capacity, and we sold out. And we had a 25 part choir. We had Matthew Morrison, the actor, is one of our dear friends, playing the reverend. We had his wife, Renee, who is one of my best friends as well, who played Maple, the wife of the dead tree. It was just the most wild experience. And the people who came...

Brett:

People were reading eulogies. Which, I got to hear one. It was hilarious. Just super funny and well done.

Miki:

I mean, it was just comedy. It was sad, it was beautiful, it was inspiring. It was all of the above, and people left so inspired to save trees. [crosstalk 00:45:14] And to do it by buying TUSHY, by doing all kinds. You know? But it wasn't a marketing...

Brett:

It didn't feel like a sales pitch. It didn't feel a, "Hey, here's your coupon for TUSHY." As you walk out the doors.

Miki:

For one second. It didn't feel like. It just felt TUSHY opened my eyes to these important things. [crosstalk 00:45:31].

Brett:

We are killing a lot of trees because of toilet paper, and here's how we can help solve that.

Miki:

That's right. 50 million trees are cut down every single year because of toilet paper consumption. 30 million cases of urinary tract infections, hemorrhoids. All these health hygiene issues, not to mention planetary issues. All these things could be alleviated by just using a bidet, using TUSHY, under $100 product. You know? But we didn't even say any of that stuff at our Funeral for a Tree event. That was, we just put on this amazing event, brought to you by TUSHY. And people just were like, this was the most inspiring theatrical event I've ever been to.

Brett:

You get an insane press on it.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:46:07] Amazing press. And same thing with ButtCon. We held this event called ButtCon, which was all things butt-related. We had butt lift surgeons, we had anal reconstructive surgeons, we had anal porn stars, we had cake sitters who makes money on sitting on cakes as a living. We did a class on making money on your ass. I mean, just crazy things. Like, we had Kim Kardashian's physical butt trainer, came and showed us how to do butt exercise. We had twerking champions doing the twerk, teaching people how to twerk. Just name. We had gut doctor, Dr. Mark Hyman, who is one of my dearest friends. And he did a whole gut and butt session on how poo the right poops, and what the right poops look like. We had, again, every walk of life in the realm that touched the butt, or gut, or the poop space was there. And we had 49 press, of the top, top, top, top, top press came to the event. Because they were like, what the hell is ButtCon? We had to see for ourselves.

Brett:

They said, "What are you doing?"

Miki:

What are you doing here?

Brett:

And the press you got from both those events, to pay for that kind of exposure would be almost impossible. But you got it because you did some crazy stuff.

Miki:

Yeah. It was truly, again, another reminder that just, what you put in. When you put in, like, if you build it, they will come. And you have to build spectacles. Again, things that surprise and delight. Things that make people go, I need to go and see what this is about. And that's the most important thing.

Brett:

I love that, I love it. So I know, you've got to go. So just kind of in closing. If people are listening to this and they're like, I need more Miki Agrawal in my life. And so, where can they, one, go to find your books? But also, just experience your marketing. Because hopefully, this has opened your eyes a little bit. Like, you need to pay attention to what Miki is doing from a marketing standpoint, you're going to learn a lot. So, how can people get more Miki in their life?

Miki:

Yes. Well first, you can also always come check me out on Instagram where I answer most people's questions pretty directly. Like, people have questions, I'm pretty good about responding. So Instagram, just @mikiagrawal. You can also go to mikiagrawal.com. If you subscribe to my mikiagrawal.com page, you'll actually get one disruptive move every week to do for yourself and for your business. So it's 52 disruptive moves. So that's just on mikiagrawal.com. And of course go to helloTUSHY.com. Check it out, get a TUSHY bidet. It's the best gift of all time. Holidays, it's the gift. It's just the best gift you can do for yourself. I mean, period, end of story. From a health high hygiene, confidence, feeling sexy, feeling good perspective. And then you can also, oh, if you want to learn about the strategies. I mean, definitely, Do Cool Sh*t, Disrupt-Her, check out my books. But then, if you want to actually learn about all of my tactics, of all of my strategy and building my companies from zero to $100 million plus, I built an actual course called Zero to a $100 million on Mindvalley.

Brett:

Mindvalley, I'll link to that in the show notes.

Miki:

If you go to my link in bio on my Instagram, I link to a free masterclass, a one hour masterclass which goes into a lot of these campaigns. But then, it also links to the quest, the Mindvalley quest, Zero to a $100 million. So, definitely check it.

Brett:

Beautiful. Got to check it out. I got to check that out. I got to watch that. And I'm going through Disrupt-Her right now. I absolutely love it, I highly recommend it. I like the audio version. I'm an auditory learner. And you narrate the books, so I get to listen to more Miki as I'm driving around. So that's been awesome as well. So Miki, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this. I've been inspired, and got some new ideas cooking around in my head. I know other people have too. So, really, really appreciate it.

Miki:

Yay. I was happy to be here.

Brett:

Awesome, thank you so much. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What do you think about the show? What do you want to hear more of? Less of? Let us know. And until next time, thank you for listening.

Brett:

Are you a D2C brand spending over six figures a month on paid media? If so, then listen up. My agency, OMG Commerce, and I have worked with some of the top eCommerce brands over the years. Including Boom, Native, Groove, Monan, Organifi and dozens more. And every year, we audit hundreds of Google, YouTube and Amazon ad accounts. And we always find either significant opportunities for growth, or wasted ad spend to cut, or both. For example, are you missing YouTube ads? Whatever you're spending on top of funnel Facebook, you should be able to spend 30 to 50% of that or more on YouTube, with similar returns. So if you're spending 300,000 to 400,000 a month on Facebook, you should be able to easily spend a 100,000 to 150,000 or more on YouTube. Visit omgcommerce.com to request a free strategy session, or visit our resource page and get some of our free guides loaded with some of best strategies for YouTube Ads, Google Shopping, Amazon DSP and more. Check it all out at omgcommerce.com.

‍

Nick Shackelford was a pro soccer player for the LA Galaxy turned online marketing super star. You’ve probably seen him featured in FOUNDR magazine or speaking on stage of the wildly successful event he co-founded - Geek Out. 

‍

I first met him when we both spoke at Ezra Firestone’s event in Denver several years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since. Nick is a master of media buying. He knows how to build agencies. And he has a really fresh take on creatives. We go deep into his creative process in this episode. Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

• How a lack of diversity in your ads could be killing your results.
• Nick’s agency’s creative process. This is pure GOLD.
• How to use Amazon reviews to jump start your creative process - This strategy is so simple, so effective, you’ll kick yourself for not having used it.
• How a tool called Monkey Learn can help you key in on the right words and hooks to use with your audience.
• Why audience targeting is nearly dead and creative is KING.
• How Nick uses Creative Strategist and why you should consider one too.
• How to work with the algorithm rather than against it.

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

‍

Nick Shackelford

   - LinkedIn

   - Twitter

Geek Out
   - Website

   - Events

Konstant Kreative‍

Structured Agency

Design Pickle‍

No Limit Creatives‍

Penji‍

Video Husky‍

Chubbies‍

Facebook Dynamic Creative‍

Josh Durham‍

Groove Life‍

Aligned Growth Management‍

Necklet‍

Monkey Learn Word Cloud‍

Luca + Danni‍

Northbeam‍

Triple Whale‍

James Van Elswyk

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

In this episode, we talk about the creative process that will supercharge your Facebook and Instagram ads. My guest is Nick Shackelford. You've probably seen Nick on stage at one of your favorite e-commerce events, or you've seen him featured in Foundr Magazine or in a host of other places online. More about Nick in just a minute. In this episode, we talk about the fact that audience marketing is nearly dead and why creative is almost all that matters. We talk about how Nick uses creative strategists and how you should consider using one too. We talk about how Nick use Amazon reviews to kickstart the creative process. This approach is so simple, so effective, so powerful, you'll kick yourself for not having used it before. We'll also talk about a tool that you can use to choose the right words and the right hooks for your ads. Plus, we'll unpack Nick's entire creative strategy. So lean in, buckle up, and please enjoy this interview with Nick Shackelford.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, attentive, One Click Upsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

Well, I am absolutely geeking out about this episode and this guest. That was a little bit of a pun, you'll find out more about that in a minute. But, longtime friend of mine, absolute rockstar in the space. If you're paying attention to digital marketing at all, you've probably heard of this guy or seen this guy or you've heard the name. And so, today I'm absolutely thrilled to have Nick Shackelford, aka The Shack, on the podcast. And we're going to dive deep into really several things related to marketing. And if you've been listening to this season one of the Spicy Curry Podcast, we're really talking about three things, right? Have something good to say, say it well, say it often. Regardless of what changes in the online world, you've got to do those things. And so we're going to talk about what's working now, what's not working now, how to crush it like Shack does.

Brett:

And so a couple of interesting things about Shack for those that may not know, he was a professional soccer player for the LA Galaxy, and then decided, "You know what? I want my field to be online marketing rather than running around the soccer field." And so we actually met. We met at Ezra Firestones event, right, Shack? We both spoke at Ezra Firestone's event. I don't remember where that was or when that was. Was it maybe Denver, I don't know, three or four years ago?

Nick:

It was. It was Colorado.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. And I just remembered two things about you. One, you had an amazing strategy for influencer marketing on Facebook, two, you were rocking a killer hoodie, and three, you just had this swagger about you. And then as I've known you over the years, you always have a killer hoodie on. So what is the secret to getting great hoodies?

Nick:

Oh man, I actually am wearing one of them right now. This is an appropriate hoodie when you're just working at home 24/7. So this is [inaudible 00:03:41], which is another e-commerce brand that if you guys are in the space, they definitely do some interesting things. You should definitely talk to Davies. He's a smart, smart guy as well.

Brett:

Would love that intro, let's talk to him. You look like you're ready for a mountain expedition and/or you're ready just to chill at home and be super cozy.

Nick:

I like options, so the fact that I'm able to do both at a will is what I want to play with. But no, what you do, it's been fun to watch the growth of this, especially with the people that are doing it for a long time, because sticking with your theme of say it often, those that are usually saying it often are able to continue to be around because they've been preaching the same thing consistently. It might change a little bit, which trust me, I think 2022 so far, I mean, we're only 19 days into it. But yeah, there are a lot of things that have changed over the times, but we haven't stopped saying the same things, right?

Nick:

We talked about this at GeekOut. You came and you were like, "Hey, this is the consistent stuff that you have to do." And it's shocking... Maybe it isn't shocking, maybe it isn't. People forget what they have to continually do, and so reminding them over and over and over, they just might not be ready to hear it. So I always say, you always start with the basis so everybody's at the same page, but then you can get really to the nitty-gritty stuff, which you do so well, so I see you, brother, on this.

Brett:

Love it, man. Love it. So let's do this, we're going to dive into all the stuff you're doing right now on Facebook and Instagram and other platforms and what your creative genius is. And got an episode in season one here with Justin Brooke, my man, talking GDN, but I know I've seen him publicly say, "If you're not paying attention to Nick Shackelford, you're missing out, because Nick or The Shack knows what he's talking about." So tell me about GeekOut, or tell the audience. I know about GeekOut. I spoke at the last one in LA, and it was fantastic. I had so much fun, so much fun connecting with your group, with your audience. I could really nerd out or geek out. But tell me about that event and kind of what's ahead for this year.

Nick:

I absolutely will. Yeah, I was very fortunate you made it out there. GeekOut started five years ago now, and it started with the fact that I couldn't go to my partner and tell her, "Oh, babe, look at these campaigns. Oh my gosh, isn't this great?" Roll her eyes, she just didn't really care as much. And then [inaudible 00:06:04] James, he felt the same way. So we were geeking and nerding on all these things. We have a different vibe about ourselves, and what I mean... I literally have to explain this. We have the ability to deliver content and aggregate a room of people that want to learn, make money, and continue to build their business, but still feel open to talk about, "Hey, my employee just sued me," or "I'm going through this issue with my partner," or "I'm going...." these really intimate things that you don't feel comfortable expressing unless you're in a room that's safe and comfortable.

Nick:

And it just started happening organically, because I'm that way, right? I'm okay with things being very public. There's a couple things that I don't want to have super public, but I'm pretty much 99% out there on every channel because I do believe building in public builds relation, and there was no better way for us to do this except doing it in person. So this started, again, five years ago, and I remember we did it in Las Vegas literally on a couch. We thought we were renting a mansion, of course. Like all things in Vegas, you thought it was, and we figured what it really was. We got there, and I remember there was a putt-putt. One of the selling propositions on Airbnb was, "Oh, use our little putting green, and it was amazing." It was two holes, and I'm like, "Oh my God, what are we're going to do?"

Nick:

So we had a good run, but the thing that we never lacked was the quality of content. And so we've ran it back. We've done Tel Aviv. We've done Barcelona. We've done LA, Miami, New York, and we're gearing up for this year. We will be the only event that will do, I think, double digits of events this year. We're planning for 10. I think we'll probably, knock on wood because of where the world is currently at, get about six. And the first one starts in Dubai right before Affiliate World, and then we'll bring it back in for San Diego and Miami. Brett, I think I told you this before, it's the one business that I have that makes me the least amount of money but brings me the most amount of happiness, because you truly get a seed connection, and it's something that we've really, really gotten away from in the world for the various reasons that all of us are experiencing together, but it's just become way more important to me.

Brett:

Yeah, it was just phenomenal. I can't wait. I've been talking to my team about it. I've been bugging you for dates, because I'm blocking these out. I'm coming to speak at as many of these as I can or attend those that I can't speak at. It was just an amazing place to be, other like-minded, super smart marketers. I know you've had this experience. You were talking about talking to your partner. You can't really talk about ROAS. She doesn't care, right? I can't talk about ROAS to my wife. She glazes over. But you become acutely aware of how many acronyms we use in this space, right? ROAS, LTV, AOV, CLV. It's never ending, but this is your people. You can geek out about any of those things, but you can also talk about deeper stuff, people stuff, preparing for exits, buying companies. It's an awesome group, testament to you and to James, but just high level people, man. I would put it on the short list. If you could only attend a couple events this year, make sure one of them-

Nick:

[inaudible 00:09:22].

Brett:

... is GeekOut. I can edit this out later if I need to. Is there a rebrand coming too? Is it going to be GeekOut, is going to be something else? Or should we talk about that?

Nick:

Yeah, absolutely, we should. It's going to be called a GeekUp for two reasons. One, we have to level up, and so adding in that geek element is something that we still want to keep. And two, there was already a trademark called GeekOut Events. So as much of the branding I want you guys to be like, "Oh wow, that's so clever," I'm like, "Well, we kind of got into a situation."

Brett:

We're geeking out and leveling up. We're geeking up. This is amazing. Yeah, that's [inaudible 00:09:58]. Well, its going to be... I don't care what you call it, but GeekUp is super cool too. So if you attend only a few events, make sure one of them is GeekUp. And so I'll link to everything in the show notes. You can google it and check it out and stuff like that too. So fantastic, man. Any other notes on the event itself?

Nick:

Well, okay, so the segue into what I'm focused on a lot right now outside of the three businesses is we started GeekUp because it was about sharing and learning and getting that feedback of what's happening, and that led me to Konstant Kreative. We have almost our first year under our belts, and it's purely content because... Dude, you're a YouTube guy. You do good YouTubes. We don't do YouTubes, but we do a lot of Facebook, and we do a lot of Instagram, and we do a lot of TikTok, and we do a lot of Snapchat. And I used to be such a big teacher and proponent of strategies and hacks and tactics. I'll raise my hand here, I was one of the biggest people talking about various hacks and strategies 2017, '18, '19. 2020, I got a little quieter. 2020, I got real quiet. In 2022, I'm on that same quiet band because it just isn't as sustainable as it once was. I don't want to say we did this on purpose, but I like to think I did or had a feeling, my spider senses, for the new Marvel movie, which is fantastic, is tingling, and I was like, "Dude-

Brett:

That is a good movie. And actually, quick side note, the new, or new-ish, depending on when you're listening to this, Spiderman movie got us into the whole Marvel series. We watched Spiderman No Way Home, and then now we're going back to the beginning. We're, I think, three movies into the... It's like 30 movies. If you do chronologically through the Marvel series, it's nuts, but my family and I, we're going through it all, so it's super fun.

Nick:

Oh my God, I am not a movie person, but I will watch though. It's culture. It's so culture. Okay. What put us into this position was understanding that content was never going to leave us, and so we put so much time and effort into building. We weren't first to do it. There's Design Pickle. There's No Limit Creatives. There's Penjee! There's Video Husky. There's so many other people that do this content on demand thing, but we had to do it ourselves, because arguably, I've never gone through a pandemic. I'm 31 years old. I didn't know what would happen if I couldn't understand how much revenue was being driven by each one of our employees across our entire company because I didn't know what I needed to go potentially [inaudible 00:12:26] so I didn't know what loans I needed to go get.

Nick:

I needed to know that I could do a dollar earned or average per each one of our employees contributing to the bottom line. Sometimes in just an agency space or sometimes in business space, you have admins or project managers that might not directly tie to bottom line. We know they impact it, but we don't really know what they drive. Designers are another one. Editors are another one. Copywriters are another one. Unless you're in this performance tower, you know each email or each thing you write, you get dollars back on. If you aren't structured that way, you're like, "Dude, I don't really know how much money's coming in from these people." So we actually built this service and fed it to ourselves. And I think the term is dog feeding ourselves.

Brett:

Yeah, so this is a Google term. So it's called eating your own dog food. They borrowed it from Purina or Puppy Chow or something like that, where literally that company, they would eat their own dog food. It's a metaphor for using your own stuff, right?

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

You believe in your product so much, you use it. Yeah.

Nick:

Oh, so thank you. I actually didn't know where that was coming from, and I'm glad you [inaudible 00:13:29]. We built it for ourselves because content... If you're like, "Nick, what are you about right now?" it's content, and it's volume of content at a cost effective rate. Listen, before the pandemic hit, a lot of people didn't really open up their mind to the quality of support, quality of company building that you can do offshore. I'm not saying outsource. This is a complete different thing. Outsource to offshore is completely different. Offshore are full-time your employees, your people, your values, your systems, your processes. Outsource is white labeling. You don't know what's going on. They're delivering you something, you're going to wrap in a bow, you're going to deliver. So I'm going to be very clear on that.

Nick:

This was something that when we started to understand quality of talent allowed us on the agency side to operate at 35, 40, 55% margin at times on various months, you can do the same exact thing on a content iteration, say. The only issue that a lot of people don't get right when they're like, "Hey, I need a performance editor," or "I need a performance creative person," it's because they themselves don't know what they want. Here's why. There's a subjectivity in this that everybody can't get away from in the romanticism toward a brand they own or towards the content that's being shot. I'm sure you experience this, or do you?

Brett:

Absolutely. Totally. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we are our own biggest enemy, or often the brand owner is their biggest enemy in terms of getting creatives that work, creatives that actually connect and compel and move people to take action. Yeah, sometimes we're romantic about what we think that structure should be or what we think that message should be rather than focusing on... Let's not do something that's completely off brand, of course, but let's do what works. And sometimes you have the brand, or sometimes the agency gets in the way of that.

Nick:

It's so true because we're hired to do two things. Now, if you're hiring a branding agency or hiring a shop that needs to be really up here and be oh, really meta on things, God bless. I'm not in the space to where I can afford to create something that doesn't drive revenue. You're in the same boat. We have to validate the costs that we have for a lot of our partners. And so when you have this subjective idea of what happens, and I'll get into what testing, what we're doing now, what 2022, at least the bets that I'm making in this first quarter on how we're building out our testing and how we're building out our, at least our internal content structure. And actually, I'll fucking go into all the things, because I think the more that this information gets out there, it might actually spark some interest on your side, and you might have some interesting feedback for me too, so-

Brett:

Totally, totally. We're going to talk about one thing really quickly, and then I want to dive into the specifics.

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

Actually, two things really quickly. What'd you say the name of the company was, the content company?

Nick:

Oh, Konstant Kreatives. Sorry.

Brett:

Konstant Kreatives. Awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. But I could not agree with you more, right? I think in fact, back when we first met in Denver at Ezra's event, a lot of people were talking about hacks and here's little tricks and tips and things you can do to make Facebook and YouTube and all that work. And certainly, there's always going to be some hacks, but success is way more, way more about having great creatives, sticking to the fundamentals, and just being relentless, relentless on testing, relentless on looking for new angles, and then really just being consistent in what you're doing and doubling down on what's working. And so love that you're doing that. I got to learn more about your company there too so I can refer some people to you. But yeah, so let's dive in there. What is your process then for finding the right angle and getting that... Because you talk about volume of creatives too, right? You got to be testing pretty frequently, especially on Facebook. Not as much on YouTube, but especially on Facebook and Instagram. What's your process like?

Nick:

This is something that we think is an ongoing debate, kind of ongoing analysis. Let's think of it this way, you used to go to optimize campaigns at an ad level or an ad set level or even the structure of the campaign level, and we're having to do a lot of this before we even get to the campaign launch. What I mean by this is, before the conversation of cancel culture or before the conversation of inclusion really was being had, a lot of the ads that we saw were generally white males, white females across every brand, across every company, thin, thinnish, and you didn't really think about, "What if [crosstalk 00:17:49]

Brett:

Which is really just silly. But you're right, that's just the way it was. Yes, it was crazy.

Nick:

Yeah, it was silly. Listen, I'm not ignorant to who I am and what I am, but when you look at brands that are buying this, brands don't have this data. You can't run a quiz to be like, "Hey, what do you... " I guess you could, technically, but I don't know how it would come across us. "Who do you identify with? Or what do you identify as? Or what race are you?" You can't necessarily ask that, but that's the type of [inaudible 00:18:17] that you have to get done. Say, when we give a shoot or when we give content for others to see, "Hey, what do we need?" We usually recommend, "Hey, we need two different races and two different genders, and we need sizes of those genders to be appropriate to what we actually think is our customers buying."

Nick:

It's a great example, the Team Chubbies. Chubbies makes unbelievable male board shorts. I think they get an underwear too now, but makes male board shorts. And if you watch the progression over time of who was used in their content, fit male, white or black, fit male, white or black, little thicker, white or black, little dad bod, white or black, little larger, white or black. Do you know why? Because they're looking at all the-

Brett:

That's their audience, right? How many fit dudes are out there? Right? Most of us have dad bods. Not you, you're a former soccer player, but yeah, dad bods are everywhere.

Nick:

These are the frat guys that are buying it. And they literally... I've listened and watched the progression of this, and they're like... I'm sure that some people want to aspire to look great, but there's a point where you can get turned off by this, and you're like, "That's not really who I am." So it's this progression, this conversation of the testing begins at the inclusion of what's in the content. That's just a side note. I went on a tangent. I apologize there.

Brett:

Yeah, but I love it. I'll just, I'll key in on that. And so it's a side note, but it's important. A buddy of mine runs an athleisure business and they sell a lot of leggings. And so their models are very diverse, Latinos, African Americans, whites, every race, but also normal looking people, right? These are not all 98 pound supermodel. It looks like normal people, but they're joyful and they're smiling. And they are killing it because people look at it and say, "Well, that's me. That's my body type. That's my style." And it's so needed right now, so I'm really glad you brought that up.

Nick:

It's so true. And it kind of goes down to the typical structures that we run if I were to get a little technical in this. We still launch with dynamic creative. We still launch with... Dynamic creative is probably the first step. If we don't have a full hard belief, and this is the campaign structure, if we don't have a full hard belief in any one direction, whether it's like, we know this is worked in the past, but we're just trying to iterate on the value prop, or we're just trying to iterate on the USB, the box opening, we're just trying to iterate on a specific thing, we will still let Facebook choose or dictate the direction we need to go into up into-

Brett:

So by dynamic creatives, you just mean you're... Explain that for people that don't know the Facebook platform well.

Nick:

Thank you very much. So when launching a campaign, there's DCT, dynamic creative testing, which is a tool that you let Facebook choose. Essentially, you're going, "Hey, we don't want to impose any campaign restrictions to force spend," let's say on an automatic budget campaign, an ABO. You go, "I just need you to spend all my budget on these specific creatives that I, the media buyer, have told you I want you to spend on." And CBO can do that too with a little bit of limitations, but that's easiest communication I can give you on that. The dynamic creative testing [crosstalk 00:21:11]

Brett:

You're basically saying, "Hey, here's our creatives, and Facebook, you go wild and you find the winner."

Nick:

Exactly. We are not imposing a restriction on where money can be spent. We're letting the campaign dictate that. And that is... It's basically taking away the bias that we have of letting Facebook say, "Hey, we have this algorithm, we have this info, we have these consumers, and we're going to run this type of campaign on it."

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Now I will have some of my media buyers look at me and go, "Chef, I won't always run this route," but that's the baseline that we start with, because if somebody has pushback on me, say, let's say David or Scott have a conversation, they're like, "Nick, I actually believe that's not the best use of this campaign, because we're only trying to compare two main concepts." And we'll say, Bernie says, "We'll use the athleisure brand here." We want to understand which color way of these leggings are going to be the one that hits or which price point of these leggings are going to hit. That doesn't need to be dynamic creative tested. That needs to be controlled and tested equally across the board. So that to me has probably been the biggest change. Before, I would launch all with minimum campaign budgets or some sort of structure where we're going audience testing, kind of put that after the fact, because it's not as impactful unless it's going to be purely based on the content or creative and the structure when you go live with it.

Brett:

Yeah. I love that. And so really, I mean, if you look at what is our job as advertisers, whether we're agencies or in house or solopreneur, whatever the case may be, our job is to make great creatives, but to feed the algorithm, to let the algorithm, whether that's Facebook, YouTube, or Google, let... The algorithm's smart. And in the long run, the algorithm's going to do a better job than you are in a lot of ways, so how can you feed it and give it enough creative so that it finds the winners? Or how can you do a very specific test? Like you were talking about, right? I'm testing two creatives, because I'm trying to find is it black or is it pink on the leggings that are going to hit, or is it this price or that price? That type of thing, a controlled test, but either way you're trying to say, "I don't know the answer here on what creative's really going to work, but we're going to find out." And then once we find out, then we're going to go all in on that, so-

Nick:

Because you and I both have these conversations with brands that talk about, "Hey, what's your brand book? What's your stance? What do you stand for? And they have the idea of who they want their customer to be, but it's not always what Facebook will agree to be or Google will agree for it to be. You have to let the replies come in. You have to let the data speak for itself. And I'm shocked. And I don't know if this is in your portfolio, we have about 116 brands right now, 117, I believe. The amount of post-purchase surveys on where you've heard from me or what information they're gathering is probably less than 15%.

Brett:

Totally, a very few of our clients are doing them. I think you've got to do it though, because you're going to be surprised by the answers you find out.

Nick:

Exactly, especially understanding touch points now the attribution is dropping a little bit, touch points and understanding where these people are coming from or how much I should be allocating per channel. We had a very, very intelligent brand, I'll say maybe 2020s, called Rove Concepts, which are a large... It's a larger retailer. It's a furniture, so purchase path takes a lot of time. You got to include your partner. A lot of it is generated interest on Facebook, but a lot of it is actualized on Google, XYZ. And these guys were making... This is the first company or brand that came to Jake myself and goes, "You know what? I understand that we gave you these [inaudible 00:24:37] a platform. I don't know if you guys are actually impacting the bottom line because it shows Google having way more conversions than you guys." I'm like, "Heck is going on?" I'm like, "Well, okay, I get it. I'm sure there's... It's an expensive piece. There's thousands of dollars. Can we just put surveys on the back of this? Or do you have this already live, or can you share this information?"

Nick:

A lot of what we started to see was, although that might not have popped up in the platform, a lot of it was saying I heard first about you on Facebook or Instagram, yet the conversion value, all the revenue was coming from Google. And I'm going, "You can't tell me to stop or that's going to be lowered." So we did a hard test turning off paid social, top of funnel. What do you know? Numbers dropped. Yeah, we wouldn't have been able to cover [crosstalk 00:25:22]

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. I was just talking to a buddy of mine, Josh Durham, who used to be the head of growth at Groove Life and at an agency, and he talked about the same thing, doing those post purchase surveys and realizing that, man, 70, 80% of customers are going to say, "Hey, I first heard you on social, I first heard you on YouTube," or something like that. And I love Google, right? I'm a Google guy, but search and shopping sometimes takes the credit, especially branded search. You need to run it, but branded search often takes credit for a sale that, really, Facebook or YouTube generated, right?

Nick:

Sure. Preach to the choir [inaudible 00:25:59]

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. So, hey, I want to circle back to creative really quickly, and then we can talk attribution again in a minute, because there's some important notes there. As far as creatives go, what is your process? How are you guys coming up with hooks for the actual creatives, and what types of creatives are you launching with? I just want to give people ideas on what should they be testing next or how should they go about their creative process, or how should they talk to their agency to get them to do things more like you guys? Can you talk about your creative process a little bit?

Nick:

I can, yeah. We have one baseline process that we run with or usually use outside of if someone already gives us [inaudible 00:26:39]. Say a brand was coming to us and they already really had, "Hey, we know who our girl or guy is. Here's what we've learned outside of optimizing and looking at the current campaigns," we start with this process where we begin on Amazon, we begin with Reddit, and we begin with competitors. We don't go to the own brand stuff just yet, because we don't want any biases coming in from marketing messages that consumers might be regurgitating back. If you look at Amazon, there's very honest reviews at one star, two star, and even the three star, very honest reviews that use layman's terms that are common, that they're looking for solutions or points. And a lot of it on Amazon, actually, they don't really care about the brand itself. From the experience, from the information I have, they're not necessarily going to Amazon to find Lulu Lemon, they're going to Amazon to price shop. They're going to Amazon for the efficiency and the effectiveness of getting that product as quick as possible.

Nick:

You're not going there looking for a specific brand. You're usually typing in the product in which you need. Hydration packets, coats, clothing, that's the things that you're really searching for, so you usually get people that don't really about crap about who the brand is or what, and they're not going to hold back from you, because it's pretty anonymous at that point, or what have you. So what we started to find out is, before a brand would come to us and before they're like, "I don't know what talking points or hooks or explanations that need to be in this piece of creative," we go to the Amazon reviews. We probably export between 50 to a hundred. We drop it into a word cloud.

Brett:

So you're looking at the actual reviews from those customers or from competitors and from that category as a whole?

Nick:

Correct. Thank you very much to the clarification. We do not go to the brand own yet. We go from the competitors of the same exact product. So if I'm selling leggings, I'm going to the number one competitor with the most amount of reviews, similar in the legging side. I want to know why this product is winning. I want those five stars and four stars, isolate those by themselves. And I want those one stars and two stars, isolate them by themselves. I use three as a lever if I don't have clear messages of things to say or not say based on the four and fives, and the ones and twos.

Brett:

Got it.

Nick:

Four and five might be skewed.

Brett:

Right.

Nick:

One to twos might be skewed, but the threes might you my answer if I don't find it in the two buckets tracking with me.

Brett:

Totally. And this is brilliant by the way. I absolutely love it, yeah, because you're looking for real pain points, real motivators, real things that customers care about, and you're looking for their language, which just makes all the difference in the world.

Nick:

Because we are going to do market stuff. We're going to try and be cool and cute and playful. We'll do our best to not, but we sometimes fall into these categories. And I'll use one brand for this called Necklet. Necklet created a latch system that's magnetic that allows for stacks of jewelry to not get tangled. Brilliant. For women, or men, mainly for women that are wearing necklaces that don't want it to be tangled because they want to wear multiple, it's absolutely brilliant. It's genius. And the mechanism is a magnet on the back. What is it solving? Is a magnet strong enough? Is it latching? Does it pull your hair? These things are questions that the brand might not necessarily know. But guess who's going to know? The people that are buying it and the people that are leaving those reviews on Amazon. They [inaudible 00:29:51] will tell you exactly how feeling, whether this is a dumb concept or not.

Nick:

So we found out a lot of this. No matter how beautiful it might look, no matter how the feeling of joy might be portrayed, the mechanism is still the most unique value proposition for them, so we better go speak specifically towards. That, to me, was after we got from a competitors, put it into a word cloud. I think the easiest one you guys could use is probably Monkey Learn. It's called monkeylearn/wordcloud. I think you have to potentially set up an account. It's free, but if anybody else has a word cloud generator that is better than that, please hit me up. I'm always looking for more tools.

Brett:

Monkey Learn, and you're looking for... And this is like a word cloud builder?

Nick:

Yeah. So it's called Monkey Learn, and then it's a forward slash word-cloud or wordcloud. I'm not sure exactly on [inaudible 00:30:36], but I can pull it for you right after this. And that way, I'm able to aggregate all my star reviews. I would say it's easier if you... The more, the better. The more, the more accurate. Drop it into this word cloud, and it's going to generate and pull up the most commonly used words and tones. And that way, now here's your messages. Here's your information. Here's the things that you need to use. This, Brett, I'm telling you, this thing has allowed processes. Because if you don't know where to begin, that's where you go right away.

Brett:

Yeah, because if you don't have something like this, you're just going to begin with that discussion around the boardroom. It's going to be virtual, right? But you're talking to the client, you're talking to the brand owner, you're talking to the marketing director, and you're like, "Well, hey, our customer is this, and they believe this and they want that." And that's valuable, but this is amazing, where you're saying, "Okay, let's see what the people, the real customers are actually saying, and let's aggregate that. And let's look for tone and let's look for actual words." Yeah, just absolutely brilliant. I love it.

Nick:

The next step that we take from is... Say we already have this, say somebody already has this understanding, the next step that we have here is, where are you lacking? Where do you think your brand or your audience has not been addressed? This is usually right where we get in the conversation of inclusion, usually where we get in the conversation of, it seems like we're over indexed on a certain demographic, a certain gender, certain size. That, to me, is something that we really, really spend a great amount of time. We're very fortunate. We're in LA, so we have a melting pot of people to pull from, and that's something that we know, as a unique advantage, we have to leverage. So that generally is our second conversation that we have, of like, where can we do some tests to where we're not doing something that's not on brand, we're not doing something that we have fear of isolating a consumer, but we have the ability to actually get real learnings in a direction that we never ran before. Here's an example, Luca Danni, which is [inaudible 00:32:29]. It's a bangle and accessory company, bracelet.

Brett:

It's called Luke and Danni? Did I hear that right?

Nick:

Yeah. It technically reads Luca Danni, but Luke and Danni is what it is, and they sell bangles, they sell bracelets. Well, in this test, they usually always show the wrist, and it's the wrist of the woman buying it and the various women buying it. And they actually started seeing a little bit of a performance increase on the thicker in which the wrist began to [crosstalk 00:32:59]

Brett:

Interesting.

Nick:

And I'm like, why is this? Then you look at the export of the purchasing behavior of the people buying it. You have the strong representation of the Bible bell, strong representation of the south, strong representation of a little bit of the east coast. But you're like, "Wow, okay. I think some of our demographics are not the assumed thinner audience that we once believe there to be, so how do we mix this up?" So now we have wrists of all shapes and sizes. You hear me?

Brett:

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're there. I thought I lost you for a minute. Yeah, so wrists of all shapes. This is so important. What's really interesting, I going to key in on something that Ezra Firestone mentioned to me a couple years ago, where they notice, BOOM!, their brand BOOM! and Cindy Joseph, it's really women over the age of 50, skin care, makeup, and really good stuff, but they found... They thought, "Well, what if we went a little bit younger with our models, or a little bit younger with our ambassadors that we have in the videos." And they started getting complaints. People were reaching out saying, "That's not me. This person is younger than me." Right? We sometimes forget that people really are looking for, "Can I see myself in this video? Can I see myself in this product. And is this for me?" And if it's not, then they're likely not going to buy, right? And so fascinating test, that, hey, thicker wrists, bigger wrists lead to better results. Diversifying your models leads to better results. You got to explore and got to test. That totally makes sense.

Nick:

Anybody can do this too. That's probably the biggest thing that I want to drive home, is those testing of using Amazon first and Reddit first because the natural communication, community already being built there within your competitors. It's not rocket... The way you present that information, the way you speak to it really will pull in on the expertise that you have, but this isn't rocket science, man. We have anywhere between 100 to 150 brands at any time. And if anybody's looking for analysis of their creative or performance or angles or whatever they're taking, they go this direction, because they know they can get it, they can get it quick, and they don't need to wait on other people to do it. So it's something I would definitely like to pass that forward.

Brett:

Yeah. Love it. What else? What do you see working on Facebook right now? And I know that this stuff has a tendency to be short lived, but in terms of length of videos, what are you finding that's working, or maybe, maybe there's different links, different angles for cold traffic versus remarketing? What are some of the kind of tips and ideas you're seeing there?

Nick:

Well, I'm going to caveat this [inaudible 00:35:25]. We are using two tools. So we're using North Beam and we're using Triple Whale, because we are making-

Brett:

Both fantastic tools.

Nick:

I completely agree. We have to make sure that we're looking at the correct amount of information or data and it's purely based upon a third party tool that's giving me the direction of, okay, this campaign, this ad set, this purchase path is making the most sense for us, so-

Brett:

Yeah. And just a quick note here, because I know the guys at North Beam and at Triple Whale, great platforms, but I'll talk North Beam for just a second. The way it works, it's basically first party data. So they put a first party pixel on your site, they put DNS record there where now they can have an infinity timeframe-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... click attribution, right? So instead of attribution being only seven days, right? So after click happens, and after seven days, Facebook can no longer track it. With something like North Beam or Triple Whale, you track it forever, right? And you can go back and say, "Hey, this one YouTube click or this one Facebook click led to a customer who bought 20 times." Right? You can see all that data, because then these tools integrate with Facebook, Google-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... Shopify, your email platform. They pull all that stuff together. So anyway, this isn't a commercial for those tools. We don't make anything from those tools, but you need that data to know what's really working and what's not.

Nick:

Well, we never used to have... We always needed this.

Brett:

We both needed it, yeah. And [crosstalk 00:36:42]

Nick:

We can get close without it. And now we can't. So now when I'm looking at campaigns, so I'm looking at what's working. Right now, let's go January 19th, 11:50 AM, Wednesday, 2022. What's working right now is images. I'm now getting images with plain background colors, bold colors. I'm saying yellow blues, pinks and purples, and big bold text. Call outs of the pain points of the consumer. And if I were to be more specific, this is primarily top of funnel, and we're having very minimal branded elements here, because all I'm trying to do is build engagement, build a little bit of direction that I'm trying to go in this place, it's just the right path for me to go down towards, and it is the quickest thing that can be launched. It is the easiest thing that can be made.

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Pain points, value propositions, big, bold colored text, and maybe, if you really want to include it, what does the product look like? Is can just be a product on a white image or somewhere the left or right side of things. We're using this top of funnel aggressively for two reasons. One, if we can get the engagement, and if we can get some sort of understanding of people agreeing with it, or maybe it say other way, not agreeing with it, but that you're usually just seeing the comments, the shares or the engagement overall, I know I'm on the right path. I need to make an image or a more detailed image, shorter video or longer form video to run top of funnel. This is Facebook specifically. So our launching period right now is major callouts with the value propositions or with pain points that we believe for each brand with that color text to kind of pop off page. Second, if that is already being done or something that's already going down that path, we are going with 30 to 45 second videos.

Nick:

I was a huge proponent of sub 30, generally around 15 seconds, but I need this bigger audience for people to pull from, because things on platform, the pools of remarketing are not as quality as they once were because of the drop in reporting. So the more that we can have people engaging or watching the videos longer, I'm running all of our remarketing, or at least our reengagement middle of funnel, off of these audience and pools of creative that we're actually spending more time, that these consumers are spending more time on.

Brett:

Got it. So you're running... So yeah, I remember, and I'm not a Facebook guy, but I remember people talking about, "Hey, shorter creatives are working 15 seconds and things like that," which I'm sure is still the case to a certain degree. But what you're saying, and this totally makes a lot of sense, is 45 seconds, 30 seconds to 45 seconds to your cold traffic audiences, because then you can remarket to people that have watched half of that or all that or whatever the case may be, and now that's a much better audience than maybe the remarketing audiences you would get from someone who engages with a 15 second video. Did I understand that correctly?

Nick:

You did, because we need the... Well, for just a stronger audience. And I don't know what happened. I think the biggest thing that we've seen, if we're talking remarketing, the content, I'm not too sure. I wouldn't feel comfortable speaking about what's working across the board for our brands because it's very [inaudible 00:39:44] and very particular.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah.

Nick:

But one thing that is been a constant is, we need more periods of time. We used to be able to be very segmented, and like, "Cool. One to seven day, you're going to get this message. 8 to 14, you're going to get this message. 15 and on, you're going to get this. It's not working for us. We can't get... I hope it is for others because it was so incredible to push them down a purchase path, but we're going 30 days, 45 days, the largest pull in which we can get from, I think the largest pull is probably around 90, but the biggest pull that we can pull from, I want that to be my remarketing pull, and it's just a mixture of various engagement testimonials of videos of them reinforcing the product or the brand. That's the only thing that I know I can get some consistent benchmarks on, because other than this, there's just no consistency.

Brett:

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And as platforms are being more restricted on audiences they can build and how they track and how they report, I think in a lot of cases, we're just going to have to simplify, right? Some of the hyper segmentation of this seven day audience, 14 day audience, 30 day audience, some of that is going away. We're seeing that on Google too, actually, so I think that's probably pretty widespread at this point. Going simpler, going broader makes sense. How are you coming... Because I know, especially on Facebook, Facebook is hungry for new creatives, new concepts. How do you go about refreshing content so regularly and finding winning angles? Any insights there on process that you can share?

Nick:

So I don't have a... Ah, I got some stuff. So I don't have a firm one on this because it really is going to depend on budget. So I'll put a caveat there. The more money you have, the general amount of testing that you can do at higher volume. The only difference between a big budget and a little budget is that a big budget learns quicker, so it's no difference. The process is [crosstalk 00:41:37]

Brett:

You're doing the same things. It's just the speed at which you're doing them is what the budget really dictates.

Nick:

Exactly. Exactly. So I want to put, "Oh that's my brand is not spending 25,000, 50,000, whatever it is." I can't do that. You can, you just can't do as much or as quick. We did start the Konstant Kreative, why we built this is because we believe that there's an internal revision of content. There's an internal revision in planning of strategy for content. And then there's a marketing message. Generally, if it's evergreen, without talking about mother's day, father's day one-off moments, if the general process is happening, we are iterating on a seven day and a ten day window. Let me explain. Our current organization structure is, we operate in a pod system. So we have our copywriter, our senior media buyer, junior media buyer account manager, and channel specific buyers that we need to plug in.

Nick:

But the general makeup is admin, media buyers, strategist. We then started to build a new department, which is our creative strategist. Their core role is to analyze campaign performance on creative specifically. They don't care about the audience. They don't care about interests. Just the performance of the creative. Give that feedback into the client. Give that feedback into our creative director to shoot more content. And their job is to come up with the concepts of, "Here's why here's where I think the angles are going to be going towards." Now, it's various and different for all because the budget's going to be different for all, but it's usually out of two things. The increase of quality of life, that's one core concept, core understanding. Why is this product going to increase the value of my life or make my life better? Then, in the same flip side is, if I don't have this, how terrible or how poor or how unfortunate or how much struggle will my life have?

Nick:

So with those two deciding factors of how much I'm going to increase or how much I'm going to decrease, then we come into the concepts of positioning for each one of these products. So with that frame of mind, we have a seven day sprint to a ten day sprint of analysis, seven days to get the campaign running and live. First two, generally speaking, are not spending a tremendous amount of money, unless something works or unless we have... This is a commitment that the brand or us have [inaudible 00:43:48]. We are spending this money. We got to learn. I say 10 days because there's a little bit of updates attribution. You know, if you're running Facebook, data comes in very sporadically, so we want a little bit more time to run this. It's unfortunate because, at least for our team right now, gone are the days of launch a campaign on one day, slam budget on the second day, turn the campaign off on things that didn't work by the third day. That's more drawn out to a five day, seven day [crosstalk 00:44:14].

Brett:

Yeah. Totally.

Nick:

So if I sat there and go, the analysis that the creative strategy team needs to be doing is on that three day, five day, seven day, ten day window, because that's going to include a full week plus weekends and give you back on that Monday, because you're usually not going to get that launch data on that early, early day. To me, this is an ongoing iteration, it's an ongoing sequence of conversation with the brands, and I'm actually doing a pretty decent case study on what's happening on this. I'm going to unveil it live at Affiliate World, because we're working with Motion app-

Brett:

Nice.

Nick:

... which has some really good data on what's happening, where it's happening, and what insights that are having on their campaign, elements needed in creative. And then we have a large volume of assets on the constant side. So I'm trying to pull all the assets that we've seen perform before and all the assets that we've seen being requested, trying to pull a correlation between the two. And it should be some interesting stuff that we're going to find out, because a lot of this that people don't have, and I hate to hate to call it out, but they don't have a process of feedback loop. They don't have the understanding of when they need to go back and analyze and launch it. They can come up with great ideas, but how long does it take for them to make that test, or how long does it take for them to get information back to the people to create more?

Brett:

Just absolutely fantastic. So unfortunately, we're kind of running out of time, which is a bummer because I would like to continue to geek out or geek up here with you, but I want to kind of go high level for just a minute and just a few questions that I think will help anybody. And I think as people have been listening, hey, we got really technical, we got into some details, so pass this on to your media buyer. If you are a media buyer, I'm sure you're just salivating and loving every second of this. Let's talk high level, Nick. What should people be focusing more on in the coming year? And what should they be focusing less on? Meaning, kind of how are things shifting? What do we need to be really keying in on to get results? And maybe, what are some things that used to be important to pay attention to that now aren't?

Nick:

Great question. Fantastic questions. If you're media buyers or your agencies or your team is coming to you with audience insights or campaign structure insights, I would encourage them to let that go and encourage them to stop spending the time in finding structures and more spending the time on the research of what are these campaigns doing? What are the messages being said in the creative or content? And it has always been content first.

Brett:

All right, Spicy Curry listeners, here's the deal. Nick's audio cut out towards the end. Now, the good news is you heard 99% plus of what Nick had to say, but what you missed is kind of important. You missed how to get a hold of Nick. How can you follow him? How can you learn more about him? How can you get in touch with his agency? And so I'm going to tell you right now. The first thing is you have to follow Nick on Twitter. His Twitter game is an A plus. If you're in the DOC space, e-comm space at all, you got to follow him. And his handle is @iamshackelford. So letter I A-M Shackelford, so check that out. His agency is Structured. So structured.agency, check it out. They cut their teeth on paid social, but they also, Nick and Chase Dimond run an email marketing agency, so check out structured as well.

Brett:

And then one of my favorite events now. I think you should check it out. The events do get a little bit technical and nerdy, but GeekOut that Nick runs with James Van Elswyk, great event. So that's geekoutedu.com. So, check that out. You will not be disappointed. And as always, we want to hear from you. If you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with friends. Also, this is a brand new podcast, so go give it a rating on Apple iTunes, if you don't mind. It will make my day. It will allow other people to find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Few people understand Facebook Advertising and Direct Response Marketing like Molly Pittman. You’ve probably seen Molly on stage at events like Traffic & Conversion Summit or Social Media Marketing World or you’ve seen her and Ezra Firestone create amazing content through Smart Marketer. In this episode we dive into a subject that is often glossed over - creating great offers and building acquisition funnels. Without a great offer, your ad efforts will fall short. And great offers aren’t just about discounting. 

‍

It’s the perfect subject to help you win in a privacy-first online world. 

‍

Here's what we cover:

• How Smart Marketer and BOOM are building and launching new acquisition funnels every month.
• How to test offers via email before investing in ad dollars.
• What metrics we should pay attention to in a post iOS 14 world.
• 3 ways to get more testimonials.
• What is likely to change in the future and what most likely won’t. 

‍
Mentioned in This Episode:

Molly Pittman

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram

Smart Marketer‍

Smart Marketer Podcast‍

Ezra Firestone‍

Traffic & Conversion Summit‍

John Grimshaw‍

BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

“5 Makeup Tips For Older Women”‍

“The State Of Paid Ads In 2022”‍

“Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert

“Good to Great” by Jim Collins‍

“Turning the Flywheel” by Jim Collins

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest minds, some of the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that all it takes is three things to grow. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often. My guest today is Molly Pittman. She's the CEO of Smart Marketer in partnership with Ezra Firestone. We're talking about crafting irresistible offers and building acquisition funnels for e-commerce.

Brett:

So, lean in, buckle up, and enjoy this episode with Molly Pittman.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

My guest today really needs no introduction, but I'll give a quick introduction just in case. Today, we're talking about a variety of things. We're going to talk about getting the right offers, and we're going to talk about acquisition funnels. We're going to talk about getting the right mindset as a market, as a media buyer, and as an advertiser.

Brett:

I have the one, the only, Molly Pittman joining me on the show today. Really, if you haven't had the privilege of hearing Molly Pittman, well we're about to fix that, but you've missed out. Molly is a legend, debuted at Trafficking Conversion Summit. It's been years and years ago now, I don't even know how many years. But just blew up and everyone was like, "Man, Molly Pittman is the best," and she is.

Brett:

Now she's partnered with my buddy, Ezra Firestone. Molly is the CEO of Smart Marketer, and I get to observe what she's doing there, what the team is doing there, and they're cranking out amazing content, amazing training that I get to be a part of at some level, which is super fun for me. We're going to dive into what's working now and a variety of other things.

Brett:

Molly Pittman, welcome to the show, and thanks for taking the time.

Molly:

Hey, let's do it. What's up, Brett Curry?

Brett:

What's up? What's up?

Molly:

I'm so happy to be here. I'm so happy to be here. Hello to all of you listers. You're listening to an awesome podcast, huh? When Brett reached out to do this, I was like, "Hey, it's about time." I know you've had podcasts in the past, but excited to hear you more regularly. Yes, love working with you Brett, from the agency side of things, the faculty side of things at Smart Marketer. All of our students love everything you have to share. So, thank you for having me.

Brett:

We get to collaborate on some content. Any time I can go somewhere and hang out with you, John Grimshaw, and Ezra Firestone, I am saying yes to that. Anytime I can make it happen, I'm doing that, because you guys are awesome. [crosstalk 00:03:14].

Molly:

I don't know how much work we get done, but we have a lot of fun.

Brett:

A decent amount of work.

Molly:

I'm kidding.

Brett:

Totally. When we get together, like the last time we all met at Ezra's house, Ezra just cooked some really fancy, simple... He went into full-on chef mode for everybody, and it was pretty amazing.

Molly:

Hey, Ezra is the servant leader. I think we were there-

Brett:

He really is.

Molly:

... hosting a live workshop, and Ezra was like, "Hey, my job right now is to cook and make sure you all are fed." Good example of leadership right there.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:03:49] make some lattes, or pour some espresso shots. He had this amazing espresso machine-

Molly:

"What do you need? I got it."

Brett:

Yeah. The funny thing is, I'm like, "So Ezra, are you going to drink some espresso?" He was like, "No, I gave that up." He quit. All right, so you're just making for everybody else.

Molly:

That is something that I love about what we're doing at Smart Marketer, is its different from any culture I've ever been a part of, even if it's a day of consulting inside of a business where we really do have fun first. We get our stuff done. We meet our goals. We serve the world. I think that that fun part is what a lot of people are missing out on. It is okay to have fun, and it actually makes the rest of it way more enjoyable and profitable.

Brett:

It's stress relief. It allows you get the right mindset, like fosters creativity when you're having fun and enjoying what you do, and enjoying who you're doing it with. Yeah, you guys do such a good job with that, and Ezra kind of drives that forward where it's like to serve to the world unselfishly and profit that mantra is true. It's not just something that sounds good, or sort of feels good, or looks good on a shirt. It's the way you guys live and the way you guys operate.

Brett:

I think it's part of the reason why we get along so well. We're huge advocates of culture, and putting people first, but also letting people shine and be themselves. You should enjoy working with one another. It makes a difference.

Molly:

Have more fun, y'all.

Brett:

And have more fun.

Molly:

It also allows a lot more longevity in this business. This year, I've been doing this 10 years, which isn't as long as a lot of you, Brett, or people like Ezra, but it's still a decade.

Brett:

Wait a minute. That sounded a veiled "old person" comment there.

Molly:

Well no, I just know your story.

Brett:

It's all good.

Molly:

You have seniority.

Brett:

A little bit. A little bit, yeah. In Internet years, a decade is forever. Yeah, I started like 2004, so I'm definitely the old dude when it comes to all that.

Molly:

Yeah, but you know a lot of my story where I had the opportunity to intern, and then become the VP of Marketing at Digital Marketer, and had an awesome time at that company. But man, I was grinding then. A lot of times, I felt like crap. To be in a situation where I still get to serve the market, still get to teach, still get to be in this business, but feel really good about it, the best part of it is I know I can do it for so much longer now.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah.

Molly:

It's a long game. It's not a short game, y'all.

Brett:

I'm really glad we brought this up. It was not planned. That feel good, have fun, and it will bring out the best part of you when you work as well. You'll be able to produce better when you're doing those things.

Brett:

Let's dive in, Molly Pittman. We've got a lot of ground to cover. We're going to talk mindset. We're going to talk tactics. We're going to talk strategy. I also want to talk about your dog rescue. We'll get to that in a little bit. Let's talk about offers for a minute. Those that have been listening, and hopefully you're listening to every episode in season one of this podcast, we're talking about something good to say, saying it well, saying it often.

Brett:

One of the things you and I were chatting about, and I love this, is that you're really focusing on your offers right now, and what offers are working, and what offers are not working. It really digs into that saying things well, and also saying them often. Talk to me a little bit about... We have two angles we're going to look at. We've got Boom on the e-commerce side, Smart Marketer which is kind of on the info training side, but what offers are working right now?

Molly:

Yeah, great question. First, I want to talk about what an offer is. I realized during our Mastermind call last week that people use this word to describe a lot of different things. That causes confusion in itself. There are a few different ways to talk about an offer. Really, what I'm talking about today are acquisition offers. Essentially, what vehicles are we using to start a conversation with someone who's never heard of our brand before, and turn them into a buyer?

Molly:

A lot of times, that means a lead magnet, or a pre-sale article, or some sort of coupon. It definitely depends on the business and where you are currently. The more, especially post-iOS 14 with all the crazy stuff happening in paid media right now, the more that you can focus on your offers, the better that everything is going to go. I mean that in a few ways. Number one, putting more time into offer creation. I would say in both businesses, other than making sure our products, the things people are buying, are good. Other than that, I would say offer creation is where we spend most of our time, at least at the C level.

Molly:

When it comes to marketing strategy, offer creation is where we spend most of our time. Sometimes, we'll release an offer that John, Ezra and I have maybe spent 15 hours discussing. It looks like an opt-in page that took 30 minutes to write, but so much time and effort went into the psychology of what it is, and the delivery of what it is, and how it sets us up to sell. It's really, really spending time here. As the CEO, I'd be like this is one of my still most important duties every single day.

Molly:

The second part of it is thinking about the way you deliver it. People miss out on this part of offer creation because what we don't realize is that someone might be interested in solving a particular problem, or they might be interested in a particular topic. But they may not be interested in the way you're delivering it. Let's take Boom for example, a pre-sale article that Ezra has been using for over five years, that's the best acquisition offer ever created for that business is five makeup tips for older women. Simple pre-sale article, we optimize for purchases, there are different products on the page. It's an amazing, amazing pre-sale article.

Molly:

Well guess what? It also works really well as a lead magnet. A way we've been able to scale that business is to take that pre-sale article, turn it into a simple PDF, and put it behind an opt-in wall. There are some people that would rather give their email in exchange for an asset, and see that as higher value. There are some people that would rather read an article. So, this isn't just about the creation of new offers, but also the repackaging of assets that you already have to deliver them in a way that's going to reach more of the market that you're trying to reach based off of how they like to consume information.

Molly:

It's why videos and still images are equally as important on a paid traffic platform, because there are some people that like people. There are some people that react images. It's important to keep both of those in mind.

Brett:

I love that. So, what is the offer, and really crafting it and thinking about how do we make this offer irresistible, how do we craft this article so that someone says, "I have to have that. One, that designed just for me. Two, that's solving a real problem or it's meeting a real need. Three, I got to have it right now." [crosstalk 00:11:29] those things. Then also, how you actually deliver it.

Brett:

I want to break that down just a little bit. You had mentioned that sometimes you, John, and Ezra spend 15 hours crafting an offer where it looks like just a simple page, but you're really thinking about this. This goes way beyond the, "Oh, should we do a 10% discount? Or a 15% discount?" That's what I want to talk about here.

Molly:

Yes, but it's also different. What I would see, I would say, in 90% of students, is they spend those 15 hours on the ad, and "Oh, the offer, I'm just going to throw a page up there." It's like, no if you have to choose, it should actually be the other way around.

Brett:

The offer, yeah. Yeah, it totally makes sense. Walk us through a little bit. What is your process as you're thinking about crafting an offer? What questions are you asking? What are you thinking about? What do you want to have in front of you as you're building that irresistible offer?

Molly:

Of course. The first question is, what do we need? What need is there in the business that we are solving with this offer? So, the need might be "It's Q4 and we want to monetize, we need a sale, we need a promotion." Or the need might be, "Hey, we need more of an evergreen acquisition offer-"

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:12:48] need as business [crosstalk 00:12:49].

Molly:

As a business, exactly.

Brett:

Yep.

Molly:

So, is it more promotional? Monetization? Or do we need something more acquisition that's evergreen that's going to continue to bring new customers in? It always starts with what does the business need right now? We try to create one of these in each business once a month we're creating a new offer. A lot of times, we're using other offers that we've created in the past, but we try to create one new offer every single month. It first starts with "What do we need? What does the business need right now?"

Brett:

Awesome. Then what comes next? You understand "This is what we need. We need something evergreen. We need a quick hit in this area. This is what need as a business." What do you look at next?

Molly:

What are we going to sell? What is the true end goal of this offer? Maybe the end goal is for Smart Marketer, we're going to sell our Smart Paid Traffic course, and we want to do that on an evergreen basis. We always work backwards with offers. If you don't, you're going to end up with a funnel that doesn't really make a lot of sense, that might have a really attractive front end offer, but doesn't transition to the sale, which is the opposite of what we're looking for.

Brett:

Yeah, totally, totally makes sense.

Molly:

Then we pick-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:14:10]. Yeah, please keep going.

Molly:

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Then we pick the medium, so what medium do we feel is best suited for this particular scenario? That definitely comes down to business type. It comes down to what's already working in our business, what can we do more of, also what can we do that's different from what we've done in the past because maybe we have four or five evergreen acquisition offers running in our ad account. To add another, we either need to go after a different audience or we need to have a very different offer type that isn't going to compete with what we're currently doing.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Let's look at some examples here related to Boom that I think will help people a lot. You guys are working on an acquisition funnel every month, and that acquisition funnel I would assume, starts with an offer. Is that where that begins?

Molly:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Brett:

What does that look like? Can you talk about any examples there for Boom?

Molly:

A great example of this is going back to "Five Makeup Tips for Older Women", the pre-sale article. We know that that works, so we know that this audience wants makeup tips, or they want to have discussions around makeup. What is something similar but different that we could do? Last year, we launched a lead magnet. We switched the delivery. It's not a pre-sale article. It's something you're opting in for. We're collecting the email address, and then going for the sale.

Molly:

So, using what we know works, but changing the conversation a little bit. Instead of five makeup tips, it was, or is, a 10 Minute Makeup Guide. So, still speaking to makeup, but now speaking to women who are less maybe concerned about the tips, but are more interested in the fact, "Holy crap, this only takes 10 minutes." That's an awesome speed and automation hook. That would be a good example of saying-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:16:16] how to take care of your makeup, or how to do your morning makeup routine in 10 minutes or something like that, that's kind of the angle or the thought?

Molly:

Exactly. That came from a need of we have scaled the current evergreen acquisition offers as much as we can across our paid traffic sources. We need something new to talk about. We need to be able to walk into the party and have a similar, but different, discussion. Okay, let's change the topic and let's change the vehicle in how we deliver it.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. The five makeup tips, and yeah we've had the privilege of running that on YouTube for four years or five years or something, and it still works. The five makeup tips is great. It does appeal to the curiosity. People are like, "Okay, well I would like makeup tips. I'm over 50," and I should not, by the way we were talking old jokes, I'm not over 50, and I'm not a woman either, so you're thinking "I want to know what these tips are," so there's a little bit of curiosity and there's also some benefit there that you want to get, which is cool.

Brett:

But this 10 Minute Makeup Guide, that's speaking to someone who says... It really resonates well with that over 50 powerful women audience that Boom is after, is they're like, "I don't have time for makeup, and I don't want to take the time. 30 minutes getting ready for the day, no way." How did you guys land on that? Was that something that you heard consistent feedback from customers? Is there something you guys started to pick up on, because you know the customer? Where did that come from?

Molly:

In both businesses, these ideas usually come from the customer, or feedback to anything that we're doing from an organic standpoint. In our businesses, that's the benefit of social media. It's not that we're going for all this organic traffic, which is nice, but not always sustainable. We use social media as a way to test different conversations with the audience. Usually, this starts, for Smart Marketer, as a blog post, for example, and Boom, too.

Molly:

Last year, we've released a blog post about our "Love Demo Love Formula" which is a formula we teach to [crosstalk 00:18:23]-

Brett:

Formerly known as "The Testimonial Sandwich", so there was the artist formerly as "Testimonial Sandwich", that "Love Demo Love". Feels better.

Molly:

It's a formula, a template that we teach for ad creatives. We see that that does really well on the blog. The email has high open rates. People are spending a lot of time on that page. They're clicking on whatever call to action is within that blog post. Wow, this is something our audience is interested in. Can we turn this into some sort of acquisition offer? Sometimes, it also comes-

Brett:

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:18:54] clarify, just so people understand because you may be lost like, "What are you talking about? Love Demo Love, and with Testimony? What the heck?" It's Ezra's tried and true ad formula of starting with a testimonial, a real user-generated content testimonial, or maybe a couple, like one to three, product demonstration in the middle, product video demonstration in the middle of the video, and then you close with more testimonials or more love. So, "Love Demo Love", and also what used to be called the "Testimonial Sandwich".

Brett:

So, anyway, I just wanted to clarify for those that are like, "What are you talking about?" All right, go ahead.

Molly:

A lot of times, it comes from conversations with the audience, a response from the audience. Then sometimes, it comes just random inspiration. For Smart Marketer, an offer we're working on right now that's going to happen soon is the "State of Paid Advertising in 2022", which is a free four hour workshop. It will show an analysis we did of over $60 million in ad spend. That just came from a random idea I had in the shower, what would this audience be interested in, how can I help set them up for 2022? It's not always coming from the customer. Sometimes it's just a random idea that comes in when you give it space.

Molly:

Usually, it is coming from something that already exists, or that we see from competition, or other people out in the market.

Brett:

Just an interesting side note, are you an idea in the shower person? Is that where your ideas come from? I'd just be curious to know where do your good ideas come from? What's the space where disproportionately you have good ideas coming from that space?

Molly:

It's really whenever I give it space. That's the key. It's usually, in today's world where things are so busy, forced space, time away from my phone, which is the shower, which is driving in the car, or hiking. If you guys are interested in this topic, read "Big Magic" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's one of my favorite books. I read it in 2015 or '16, but she basically explains how this works, like how does creativity actually work and how can you set yourself up to be more open to cool ideas? The cool ideas are out there. Most of us are just too shut off, too busy, too addicted to what we're doing to allow the ideas to actually come in. So yes, any time you give it-

Brett:

What was the name of that book again?

Molly:

"Big Magic".

Brett:

"Big Magic". Love that. I'm going to check that out. Just a quick note here, because I've always found this fascinating, I have zero good ideas in the shower. I really don't know that I've ever had one positive, useful, meaningful idea from the shower other than "Hey babe, we're out of shampoo." That's all I think about in the shower. However, for me, two places that I get disproportionately high amount of good ideas, one is if in the morning if I get up when it's still quiet, and I have eight kids so it needs to be early in the morning when it's quiet, but if I feel like I'm ahead of the game, if I feel like there's nothing that I have to do right that second and I can just kind of sit in the quiet, good ideas come from there.

Brett:

The other place, and this is an odd one, but on airplanes. I sit on an airplane. They shut that door. I never pay for WiFi, I just don't want to. Some of the ideas that have shaped OMG, that have shaped the agency, came from me sitting on an airplane. I don't know why. That's my shower time. I even said a few times, I'm like I should just go fly somewhere and then fly right back, and I'm going to get great ideas.

Molly:

A lot of people do that. I have a friend who took a flight to Hong Kong and back, and never even stepped into the city just to write a book. The reason for that Brett, those are different forms of meditation. It's the same thing. It's essentially cutting off stimulation that is-

Brett:

Right, there's nothing else.

Molly:

... keeping your brain busy so that your mind and your soul can be quiet, so that these ideas can really formulate. That's the key.

Brett:

I love that. I love the fact that I'm not the only one that loves... I don't even like sitting on airplanes, but I get the best ideas. Anyway, cool. That's awesome. Cool, so thank you for chasing down that rabbit trail. I think that's so useful. Where were we though?

Molly:

We were talking about offers that are working right now, and I was chatting about the 10 Minute Makeup Guide, the workshop we're doing for Smart Marketer, and just saying that lot of the ideas comes from what you guys say, what we see as a need out in the market. A lot of them are random, unique, creative ideas, which are fun too.

Brett:

So, really fostering both, so you kind of need a vehicle or a mechanism to collect that feedback from customers, and then you need to create space for yourself to have these good ideas, and then bring it together with your executive team to get the idea when you're relaxing or whatever, and then you bring it to the rest of the executive team and you hammer that out. It may be 15 hours, but at the end of that time you've got a killer offer that you can really use to grow the business.

Molly:

Yeah, Brett, and some other steps that I didn't mention there, just to sort of round out the actual tactical, how do we get it out the door. Once we have the idea and we feel good about the offer, we feel good about its ability to do what we need it to do in the business, then we go into action mode actually creating this thing. That usually looks like a brainstorm call with our copy team where we discuss what is this, and how is it going to be presented?

Molly:

We talk about the big hooks, what are the big selling points of this offer, what problems does this offer actually solve? Of course, how do we want this to be delivered? Is it a PDF? Is it a pre-sale article? Is it a simple opt-in page where we're giving a coupon, like you said? How will this be delivered. Then they're able to go and make it sound good, not only the page in which we're selling the thing, but also the delivery of the thing. Then of course, that's passed off to design, it's passed off to our ads team and everything starts to get into motion.

Brett:

It's so good to get copy involved early, because that's such an important part of everything else. You have to be able to really strike that cord and make people want it, and copy is such a huge part of that. I love that you do that fairly early on.

Molly:

Yeah, and it's not just writing the copy that is the offer. It's also the selling of the offer. Even if it's a free thing, you're still selling someone on the idea.

Brett:

Totally. Totally, yeah.

Molly:

Every new acquisition funnel is first tested through an email promotion to the list, because we don't want to go out and buy-

Brett:

Okay, so you build the product, you test the email, email to the list first.

Molly:

Yeah. Of course, it's always going to convert better to your list than it will to paid traffic. We want to test it to the list first before we start to buy ads, mainly because we want to see of course, what's the conversion rate on this thing if it's free, and does this actually generate sales? We can create offers all day, but if it's not meeting the need of the business, then it's not going to work. It's first tested to email. That also gets some good traction going on your pixel so that Facebook and Google can start to see what types of people are taking action on this page, get some momentum.

Molly:

Then we stop for a second. We look at heat maps. We look at conversion rate. We look at the performance from a data standpoint. We make any optimizations that we might need to make, and then it's ready to go to you and your team, and hand over to our media buyer for paid ads.

Brett:

I love that. I love that. So, you're testing to the email list first to understand does this convert. And hey, if it doesn't convert to your list, it's not going to convert to cold traffic.

Molly:

Exactly.

Brett:

So, does it convert, and at what level, and kind of understanding that a little bit. Then you're going to run some ads and start getting conversions, trying to pixel, finding out what's what. You pause that. You then look at heat maps, make some tweaks/optimizations to the funnel itself. Then you go ham on the advertising at that point.

Molly:

Then it's hopefully ready for scale. Probably half of these that we create don't work still to this day. That's okay. We say, "Let's put it on hold for a second." It's never that this just doesn't work, and we're not going to use it ever again. It's "Hey, let's put this to the side and try to figure out why it didn't work, and maybe we can use it later." There are a lot of times that we just can't get it to work, and that's okay.

Brett:

Right. Really, you guys are the best. You're the best in the world at some of this stuff. If you've got a 50% success rate, what's everybody else going to have? That's likely to be 50% or maybe less even. What's interesting, we just walked through that four step process you guys go through, most people it's like think for five minutes about an offer, maybe it's more than that, but think about an offer and then "All right cool, let's throw a bunch of media behind it to see how it does," where you guys are testing with your audience or email list, you're running some small tests and ads, you're getting data, you're optimizing and then you're going big. I love that so much.

Brett:

It kind of goes back to one of my favorite business principles that comes from Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great", and a book called "Turning the Flywheel". He's an awesome... I'm sure everybody's heard of him. He talks about this concept of firing bullets and then cannonballs. He used kind of this old warship analogy. The idea is fire bullets to make sure you got something that works, and then fire a cannonball rather than a lot of people fire a cannonball and they use up all their gunpowder, and all they've got available, and they're like, "Well now I've got nothing."

Brett:

So, test small and then go big.

Molly:

Also, understanding that these offers are not channel-specific. A lot of people create an offer, which they don't spend a lot of time on. They set up a Facebook campaign. They run it for a few days, and then scrap it all. "Oh, this offer doesn't work, and Facebook ads don't work." It's like guys, no it's so much deeper than that.

Brett:

Totally. Totally. Your kind of creating these acquisition funnels then for Boom, and spoiler alert, Boom is going to be releasing new products this year, which is great. Your kind of creating one of these acquisition funnels for each product. That was another thing too with Boom, and Ezra talks about this a lot, that it was just the Boom stick trio, or just the boom stick, that's all that you really use for cold traffic. Now you're building these acquisition funnels for other products, which is huge, and which is going to be a game changer.

Molly:

Look, honestly acquisition funnels are way easier for e-commerce than info or services.

Brett:

They are. They are. No doubt.

Molly:

Info and services takes way more of relationship buildup before someone purchases. It's mainly lead generation through a workshop, or a webinar, or a lead magnet, or a challenge, or a mini series, or whatever the hell people are doing today to try to convert someone into a customer or client. It's a little bit of a different ballgame than e-commerce. A lot of the plays with e-comm can be easier. A lot of the offers that Boom runs are simple. It's direct to a product page for a lip gloss, direct to a product page for a mascara, direct to something that's a direct sale essentially. Where with info, we've got to dance around it a little bit more. The offer creation is even more intensive for that business type.

Brett:

Yeah, it is.

Molly:

Like me. Good lesson, what Ezra has been able to do with Boom I think after working with us at Smart Marketer, is realize that there is a huge hole in the e-commerce space for offer creation that isn't just a giveaway, that isn't just direct to product page, that isn't just a coupon. That is a big reason Boom is able to excel, because we do understand pre-sale articles. We do understand lead magnets.

Molly:

Boom is even doing webinars. They're called "Ladies Night". These principles work for both business types, and there's actually a much bigger opportunity in e-commerce to get more creative with your offers because other e-commerce businesses are simply lazy or don't know how to go about it.

Brett:

You nailed it a little bit ago when you said that in a lot of ways offers for e-commerce, it's simpler. It's more straightforward than it is to do info products. Info products, you really got to get to the core of what this thing, and what is it going to unlock, and what are all the emotions we're trying to tap into here, and uncover here.

Molly:

And give way more value first.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. How do you do that? So kind of blending some of those principles, it's super powerful and it's definitely helped Boom get to where it is today without a doubt. Cool. We've got a few additional things I want to talk about, and not a whole lot of time to do it-

Molly:

Brett, hold on. I want to add one more thing. This is one of the biggest reasons that you might be failing to scale as an e-commerce business. If you are only relying on the people that are clicking from a Facebook ad, and directly converting and buying a product, you're missing out on a huge part of your market that just isn't ready to buy in the moment. If you're able to generate the lead, if you're able to nurture them via email, if you're able to set up a funnel where they get some sort of discount, especially if you add some scarcity, your scalability will increase in a way that you never understood, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your advertising. It's just that you are having a conversation with a different part of the market. That's all it is.

Molly:

So, if you are struggling to scale, it's probably not the ad platform, and B, the e-comm company that is willing to go outside of the box.

Brett:

Yeah, totally agree. It's not just I need to bid differently, I need a slightly different campaign structure in my ads manager or inside of Google Ads. Those things may be true, but often it comes down to offer and having the right funnel. Are we actually getting people to give us their email address and get a direct conversion as well? Do we have a nurture sequence? Do we have a remarketing sequence built in? All of those things really unlock the ability to scale rather than just "How do I bid differently or change my campaign structure?"

Molly:

Brett, I would say that your most successful clients, and the ones that you like working with the most are probably strong in this area. As an agency, that's a dream.

Brett:

No doubt. No doubt.

Molly:

The issue you usually have an agency is that you're great at running ads. You only have a few places to run ads to. There's only so much you can do.

Brett:

Yeah, that's one reason we love working with Boom.

Molly:

Just emphasize.

Brett:

You guys get it, and we're just able to work together and crush it. That's fantastic. Cool. Any quick insights, and I kind of designed this podcast series to have a long shelf life, but let's talk about a few trends. What's working right now, or what are some trends inside of Facebook ads that you're seeing right now?

Molly:

Good news is, as we do each year, we're seeing a huge decrease in ad cost at the beginning of the year. Almost 50% cheaper in most of our ad accounts in the analysis. We did over $60 million in spend than what we were seeing Q4, which is a huge relief with the dumpster fire that Facebook was the last six months of 2021.

Brett:

No doubt.

Molly:

That's a huge sigh of relief. We're also starting to see more accurate reporting, or at least I think we're all getting better as marketers getting our stuff together from a tracking standpoint. So, things are looking up, and we are working on offers, working on creative and copy right now so we can really take advantage of the next few months of cheap traffic, and try to do everything we can to set us up for a big Q4 again this year.

Brett:

I love it. Just one thing to keep in mind, this is going to likely always be the trend. Advertisers panic in fourth quarter because costs are going through the roof. But the costs are going to come back down in Q1, so be planning, and be thinking about that, and what's your acquisition strategy going to be in Q1 and then as you lead into and get ramped up for Q4. So, that's awesome.

Brett:

Any other specific trends you want to talk about now? I also want to dig into a mindset just a little bit, which will be fun.

Molly:

Really quick, I wouldn't say this is necessarily a new trend for right now, but it's something we've been preaching for a few years that I just literally cannot emphasize enough. I was actually just on a training call with some of our students, and one of them sells physical products. He's in the snack and wellness space. His Facebook ad results that I was looking at were incredible, $0.04 clicks, 15% click through rate, $3.00 add to cart, numbers I have not seen in years.

Molly:

Guess what he's doing from an ad perspective? It's native advertising. It's user-generated content. It is simply telling stories about people in their own words the experience that they had not even specifically with your product. This was a weight loss product. So, his best performing ad was a picture of a beach with an arrow to a certain area of the beach. The copy was telling a story from the customer's standpoint of, "Last year I went to this beach and I couldn't even walk up the stairs without getting out of breath. I felt terrible, and my health wasn't great. This year, 12 months later, I've gone back to this beach. I've lost 90 pounds. I was able to run around, and I really enjoyed myself."

Molly:

Those weren't the exact words, but that's how simple it was. It wasn't an ad about the product. It wasn't an ad about how great this product was. Absolutely nothing about features. Really, not even a lot of benefits other than the benefits that were woven into the story. This isn't necessarily new, but it's what people are still missing out on when it comes to Facebook and Instagram. These are true social platforms. People are used to engaging with stories from family and friends. Use imagery and copy that is that. It's really that simple.

Brett:

I love it. I don't really ever see that changing. We spend a lot of on YouTube and running YouTube ads, and we're seeing similar things in that videos, and usually you need slightly longer videos on YouTube than you do on Facebook in most cases, but still that user-generated content, those testimonial videos that you could weave into your YouTube ad works there too. I think it's always going to work. As long as it's an authentic, genuine testimonial that really hits on "Here's how my life has changed. Here's why I love this product. Here's my story," people eat that up. I think people will always eat that up if it rings authentic.

Molly:

Because it's a testimonial, that's not what makes it work. We chat about this and then students submit a testimonial, and the first line is "I love this product so much." It's like, guys that's words of customer, but it sounds like an ad. We need to start with things like, "As a mom of two, I didn't think I would have time to do X, Y, and Z." How much more relatable is that? It doesn't feel like you are being sold to.

Brett:

Yeah, one time we had a prospect, and we ended up not working with him. He submits these videos and you could literally read the people that are supposed to be customers. You could watch their eyes reading from a teleprompter. I'm like, "Guys, this not going to work." You want people to be sharing real emotion and their real story.

Molly:

Yeah, well sharing a life story. It's not about why the product's great. It is sharing their story and how it fit into their lives. So, we ask three important questions to get really good testimonials. If you ask these questions, it will set people up to give you really good answers. What was life like before you bought this product? That has them describe that undesirable before state, starts to tell their story. What is life like afterwards? Now they're talking about the after state, the benefits, how much better they feel. Then if you were to re-commend this to a friend, what exactly would you say? When you say it like that, they take off their "I'm a salesperson for this company" hat, and they put on their "Oh, I'm writing a message, or speaking a message to a friend. I'm going to be real about how this product helped me."

Brett:

Love that so much. Actually, since I'm such a believer in testimonials, but getting authentic ones, I created "The Ultimate Guide", I don't remember what I called it, but how to get authentic customer testimonials. It's on the OMG Commerce website. Check it out. I'm not sure if I have those exact [crosstalk 00:40:34]-

Molly:

That's sounds like a good offer for your agency, Brett.

Brett:

It's a good offer. Yeah. We can do that as an offer too for Smart Marketer. It's so true. The difference between a really good testimonial and then an average testimonial is two different planets, two different universes. Getting a good testimonial is worth it's weight in gold. Having one that's average, is really going to do nothing for you, or one that's weak. Anyway, I love that.

Brett:

What was life like before? What was life like after? What would you say to a friend? I love that so much. It's also good, you want to give someone a little bit of help as they're creating a testimonial. Otherwise, it feels like they're staring at a screen and not knowing what to say, or looking at a blank page or whatever. So, giving them some help is key, for sure. I love that. Love that.

Brett:

Let's take just a couple of minutes, and we're going to be short-changing this topic for sure, but I wanted to take a couple of minutes because this will be fun and I think it's useful. It's been a difficult road the last couple of years for e-commerce, entrepreneurs, media buyers, online advertisers, not rough [crosstalk 00:41:47]. E-commerce has grown tremendously. That's been good. E-commerce has grown, so no complaints there.

Brett:

But it's challenging times. I know you train a lot of people, you train a lot of entrepreneurs and media buyers. What are you teaching people about mindset and how mindset impacts results?

Molly:

Mindset is everything in this game. I don't think any of us are maybe even better marketers than one another. It's your willingness to stay committed, and to continue forward. It's what we talked about earlier with us being okay with half of the work we do not actually being used. Or as a media buyer, it's not even about who can set up the best ads. It's about who can continue to troubleshoot and optimize to make each piece of the campaign better so that they can move forward.

Molly:

This is personal development, a concept that most of you have heard of before, but it's really the difference between having a scarcity mindset, or having an abundance mindset. For me, I choose to be grateful. I choose to not get upset with these paid traffic platforms. I choose to look at things with the glass half full. I think that if there was anything unique about our culture at Smart Marketer, that is it. We have all chosen this mindset.

Molly:

There is going to be trouble in anything you do. I think as a human, the last few years have been hard. It's easy to get down. Of course, I still get frustrated, angry, depressed. All of those things occur. But I try to choose to bring positivity to our business, try to bring it to our employees, to our offers, to the trainings that we provide. It really is a completely different experience when you choose to do that.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. I'm a really positive person. I'm naturally upbeat. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. But I have my moments. I have moments where I want to curse Tim Cook for the latest iOS update, and why are you killing a good thing, Tim Cook? Or whoever else is making the decisions at Apple. We can get in that mindset. It's okay to be frustrated and complain a little bit, but don't stay there.

Brett:

Get to a better place, because you're right, it's not just who's the smartest, it's not just who has the best campaign structure, but who can show up consistently and do the right thing, and who can be okay with "Okay, I got one, two, three campaigns that I wrote that didn't work, but then I had an offer that hit and then it scaled to the moon." Who could handle that?

Molly:

And who-

Brett:

Yeah, please add to that.

Molly:

[inaudible 00:44:31], and who actually cares? It's why I so believe-

Brett:

Exactly.

Molly:

... in the mission of our business that Ezra initially set out, serve the world unselfishly, and profit. If you truly care about the group of people that your business serves, and you care about the way that you're changing their lives, even if you're selling a toothbrush and you're helping their mouth to be cleaner, it doesn't matter. If you truly care about that, it changes the energy of the business.

Molly:

I can tell you, if you asked me "Molly, what is the difference between students that succeed or don't succeed, or friends that I know in the industry that have done great things, or people that are struggling," it really comes back to mindset, and it comes back to an authentic, genuine, caring for the group of people that you're serving. If you have that, and you stay consistent, there's no way that you can't make this work.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. If you can really be passionate about your customer, and I would even say about your team, then that's way more powerful than just being passionate about your product. I think both are important, but being passionate about your customer and about your team, that's really where's it at. One thing I discovered for me, and hey I've got lofty goals, I want my business to succeed and I want to it to grow, I think entrepreneurship, and businesses, and capitalism offer a lot to the world. If it's just about money, I burn out quickly. I get to a point where I'm like, "I don't really care anymore."

Brett:

But if I think about who I'm serving, and I think about that business owner that my agency is helping accelerate growth for, if I think about team members who were helping accelerate their individual growth, and I get to see someone step and lead a call, or mail a presentation, or come up with a strategy.

Molly:

Nothing better.

Brett:

I'm like "Whoa, I never thought of that." That is so fun for me, and so rewarding. Then when you key in on that, then guess what, the profits are better too, and then the business grows better too.

Molly:

Brett, aside from the money, I saw a study last year that rated digital marketing as the most stressful job or career path out there, even above brain surgeons, or people working in the medical field.

Brett:

That's crazy, yeah.

Molly:

I believe that. Think about it, we're basically day traders.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:46:47] so much out of your control, and that's a scary thing. There's so much out of your control, it's scary. Yeah.

Molly:

Exactly. To be able to sustain that, and the changes, and the stress, and the fact that what we do never really turns off unless you choose for it to do so your mindset and who you are as a person, and how you treat yourself and the people around you, that is will what will sustain you moving forward more than anything else.

Brett:

Love that. So good. So good, Molly Pittman. All right, so people that are listening that are like, "Holy cow, I need more Molly Pittman in my life," where do you suggest people go? Obviously, there's lots of stuff people are going to enjoy at SmartMarketer.com, but where should someone get started, or what are some cool things, what are some offers you got going on right now?

Molly:

Yeah, check out SmartMarketer.com. There are some free resources there, depending on what we have going on at the time. I know this is coming out a bit later, Brett, so we do have that State of Paid Advertising in 2022 workshop coming up. We have lots of free resources on our website. If you want to follow me, I'm most active on Instagram @MollyPittmanDigital. I also read all of my DMs, so if you have questions, thoughts about this, I love hearing from you all and I would love to hear from you on Instagram.

Brett:

Instagram, check it out. What's your handle again?

Molly:

One more quick thing, Brett.

Brett:

What's your handle again on Instagram?

Molly:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Brett:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Molly:

Of course, if you like this format, you like podcasts, John, and Ezra, and I do have a podcast, The Smart Marketer Podcast. So, check that out.

Brett:

It is an intact podcast, where you get to be a guest for a couple of episodes. It was tremendously fun. Check out the Smart Marketer podcast. I'll link to all of this in the show notes as well so it's easy for you to access. With that, Molly Pittman, any final words? Any final words of wisdom, re-commendations, or asks of the audience?

Molly:

Keep doing it. Just keep at it. Take care of yourself. Maintain that balance in your life. Don't get sucked into this world so that you lose who you are. Or if you do, quickly bounce back from that. Just enjoy. We're living in a really cool time as humans, and there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. When have we ever had the opportunity to do what we're doing from a business standpoint?

Molly:

It's complicated, but also the world is truly at our fingertips. Find a group of people that you align with, that you're interested in, that you want to help, and figure out how you can serve them, and figure out what you can sell to them. I just always go back to being grateful that we are able to work in this way. It's really, really cool. Hopefully, you guys enjoy it too.

Brett:

I love it. It's a super challenging industry. It's always changing. It's very stressful. But man, it's fun. It can be fun, especially if you have the right community around you. If you can find that balance man, it's an awesome place to be. Check out Smart Marketer. Check out the community. Get to know Molly Pittman. Follow her on Instagram.

Brett:

With that, thank you so much for tuning in. This show would be nothing without you who tune in and listen faithfully. If you haven't rated the show, please do that. Leave a review. It helps other people find the show. If there's somebody that you're listening to this and you're like, "Whoa, this person needs to hear this episode," then share with them. That would mean the world to me, and I know it'd make a difference in somebody else's life as well.

Brett:

With that, until next time, stay spicy.

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