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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast. With your host, Ty degrange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance, marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing. We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings and growth markets, marketing and life. Time to nerd out. Check your biases at the door and have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
- [00:36]
B
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty degrange and I'm pumped to have Aaron Orndorff on the call. What's up, Aaron?
- [00:49]
C
I don't know if you say that to all your guests, but my goodness, is that true this morning. Pumped. I am pumped as well, Tyler. I'm so glad we made this freaking happen, dude.
- [00:58]
B
You. You've always bring the energy. You always bring the knowledge bombs. We always have just. I feel like our conversations are always just like firing on all cylinders.
- [01:08]
C
I almost made the joke in the preamble about we should just record every time we hang out. We'll splice it. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So this is. This is the real deal, though.
- [01:16]
B
Yeah, this is the real deal. We're. We're doing it live. This is like the, you know, the super bowl, the warmups, the. We've gotten through the spring training. It's game time. We're in the. We're in the mix. We're in the arena.
- [01:28]
C
Dude, lower those expectations. We just piled on way more than we could ever deliver on. But let's go. Let's try.
- [01:34]
B
All right. Mid season game. It's good stuff. So for those of you who don't know Aaron, he's a stud and a mensch, and he has done some amazing things in software and e Commerce and D2C comms. Specifically. He is the VP of Growth at Vermont. I might be pronouncing that wrong.
- [01:52]
C
Nailed it.
- [01:53]
B
Nailed it. Maybe jump in, Aaron, and give the audience a little bit of primer on what is Vermont?
- [02:00]
C
Oh, I thought you were going to ask. A primer on Aaron Orndorff. We're going with Vermont first. I get to pitch out the gate. Yeah, yeah. Vermont is an e commerce SaaS platform that operates on a subdomain, so think headless. That essentially connects your ad platforms on the acquisition front end and your Shopify or E Commerce platform on the back end. What I like to say is Vermont lets you create funnels the same way you create ads. Landing pages, embedded PDPs, custom carts, and I just did my little one two, three. That's the funnel layer in between those ad platforms on the front end and Shopify on the back end. That's the shortest of short versions.
- [02:40]
B
That's impressive. And just to kind of unpack some terminology for folks that are not as Shopify Pro as you, not as DTC com pro as you and I. When you say headless, can you just give us a little bit of a primer on that?
- [02:53]
C
Yes. Rather than existing inside of your Shopify storefront, headless means it operates on a sub domain, so it's separate from. So it's not governed by the usual rules. Sort of like the gravity and the physics of your Shopify store, which is really just. That's even fancier talk for just the css. All of the theme elements that Love, hate, relationship most folks have with their Shopify theme, I would say love, hate relationship, especially on the growth marketing side of things, because there is a lot of limitations. It does what it does and it does it well. Right. That's the second you step out of that. That's when you run into issues. And that's a lot of the stuff that Vermont tries to help with. So that you can experiment, play around really at scale and volume and speed. That's the benefit.
- [03:43]
A
The Always Be Testing podcast is sponsored by Round Barn Labs. RBL is the growth agency. They are a leader in efficient customer acquisition and pound for pound, the most experienced team in affiliate marketing. For the last nine years they've worked with brands like Oculus, Amazon Grammarly, ebay, Atlassian, Scotch Quarter, Live Nation, Hatch, Puma, Hoppin, Stubbo bar, recession, PacSun, SunBasket and more. They've generated over 100 million in media, spend over 250 million in traffic, generated, 500 million in revenue generated. They go beyond the data to give you the why and the revenue generating recommendations to grow and create a paid marketing flywheel for your brand. So if you're a consumer e comm brand looking to go from 8 to 9 figure revenue per year, or an enterprise brand looking for a higher quality of data, rigor and growth, check them out@round barn labs.com.
- [04:48]
B
Adjustable, faster, agile. You can make some more moves, run some more tests.
- [04:54]
C
And a lot less dangerous too, because I've done this as well. Like I don't know how much backstory we're going to go into, but I literally came up through Shop. We're going to go there, we're going to go there. Okay, so I'll jump ahead. I literally came up through Shopify plus in particular, gosh now about eight, nine years ago I think it. I've got to do the math again at some point. I'm such. I don't know if I've ever told you this. I am such old school. D2C e com when I started at shopify plus helped write the OG original website for plus and literally wrote pieces about what is SaaS and why you can trust the cloud with your e commerce store versus on premise. That sort of thing. Like that's how old I was. We had to define those terms way back in the day. Yeah. So that's, that was really my. My sort of like initial claim to E commerce thing.
- [05:43]
B
You're dropping some major DTC ecom street cred and some major Shopify street cred. So just, just for those out there who don't know, that means Aaron's been around, knows his stuff and listen to what he has to say when it comes to this.
- [05:57]
C
That is true. But in the very same breath I always have to point out I fell ass backwards into that opportunity and it was the like career trajectory defining opportunity. It shaped everything else. I was not an e comm person. I was a writer, a blogger, I was a content marketer and I just haphazardly connected with this wonderful human being named Tommy Walker who had unbeknownst to me because I didn't know who he was, just been picked up as Shopify plus his first marketing hire. It was just this w wild confluence of events and I just kept saying yes. I can write about multi channel e commerce. Go to Wikipedia. I can write about the difference between that and omnichannel. Go to Wikipedia Gartner and all the different. I just kept saying yes and figuring it out. So it was absolute, just wild fortune on my end.
- [06:47]
B
You just crushed some amazing background questions and crushed one of my favorite questions of sliding door moment in your career. And it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, it's okay to spoil it. We nailed it first. Like sounds like a pivotal career moment for you.
- [07:02]
C
Very, very much so. Prior to that I really lived like a few distinct lives. So I was in military National Guard, couple of deployments. I went to seminary in one of my previous lives, multi campus church ministry kind of stuff. And so this whole marketing life kicked off about 1112 years ago now. And I think there's a nugget, there's a nugget in how this actually all started this, this what you call it a slide, like a slope change or.
- [07:30]
B
Step change sliding door moment kind of.
- [07:33]
C
A dude sliding door moment. So I kid you not, I was writing like a madman, trying to make myself look like I was somebody when I wasn't anybody. So I wrote for anyone and everyone under the sun from mainstream publications, like, eventually got up on the New York Times, but I was like Business Insider, fast company entrepreneur to niche publications. And one of the niche marketing publications I wrote for was Conversion xl, now cxl. Great. Yep. Down there in Austin. Mm. Mm. And I do. I used this now defunct, doesn't even exist anymore SAS tool. And what it would do, it was scrape the entire article that I'd written and had published, and it would find all the names that were mentioned and coordinate them as best it could with their Twitter handles. And then I would load all of those up into Buffer and I would do an oandso. I included you in my latest piece for Blank. Could you check the links to make sure they're right? Which is also just a little psychological hack of, like, open loop. Ask a question. It wasn't. Please share this. And so I would drift those out about an hour apart from each other. And I didn't know who Tommy Walker was. I had no idea his relationship with CXL and Peplaja. I didn't know about Shopify. I sent that out. It was an automated message. I don't know how many of these I sent over and over and over again with nothing to show for it. He saw it. He DM'd me. And the rest is like, my history is just wild when you show up one foot in front of the next and just keep like, the more I show up, the luckier I get. The more work I put in, the luckier I get. That is so pivotal.
- [09:05]
B
I think you nailed it. It's like this. This bias for action, this energy, this production, this willingness to ship and not necessarily let imposter syndrome or analysis paralysis get in the way. It's like, hey, go for it, put it out there, have some thought behind it. And good things happen. If you show up like that, don't.
- [09:24]
C
Be afraid of the crickets. There's going to be a lot of crickets, especially when you're. If you're getting started on social or just trying to, or even just doing promotion, I mean, there's. There's always going to be crickets, and it can be really scary to post out into the ether. It can even feel embarrassing. But there's actually nothing to lose in most of these situations. There's actually nothing to lose and a lot to gain. The only thing to lose is that little Bit of like art. We're self centered and it worries us and you know, the fear and the ego, that's. Those are all lies.
- [09:53]
B
Yeah, I've been there and we've gone through our waves of it and it's amazing what happens when you commit and stay consistent and keep producing and take those learnings and try to improve. It's. We're actively seeing it happen in real time.
- [10:07]
C
Dude. Consistency. Consistency, I would say is the most underrated superpower. When someone shows up having done the thing they said they were going to do and they do it over and over and over again. That sounds so basic. You're shaking your head right now too. That immediately puts you heads shoulder. It towers you above 95% of everybody else out there that's doing you response.
- [10:36]
B
Rate bias for action. Sounds cliche. It's an Amazon principle, but it's real. And then that consistently of always showing up. I've heard people in the past use like the gap between the say and the do and if that gap is narrow, you're in.
- [10:52]
C
And it's magical. When I experience someone who does that to me, whether it's a team member, an employee, a boss, it can go up and go down. It is. Trust is built and it really does make you you immediately. It's wild how that consistency makes you stand out because it's so rare.
- [11:10]
B
Yeah, it's brilliant. And what a. This might be like the overarching learning takeaway from this pod, but. But a great one. And we'll come. We might come back to it. So, so zooming out, we got Fermat. Right. They're the, they're the middle layer for those listening and curious for dtc. Com, you guys are basically coming in and saying we're going to improve and build funnels between the, the cart experience on the front, on the back end of Shopify and the ad experience that they're seen in. Meta, Google, et cetera.
- [11:38]
C
Right, Exactly. Yep.
- [11:40]
B
Love it.
- [11:41]
C
Bridging that gap and doing in a way that creates consistency congruence. Matching the ad to the landing page experience as close and in some cases one for one as possible. Matching offers matching audience, those sort of things we can dig into a little bit. You know, sort of the nuance along those lines. But it's really just like taking hardcore marketing principles. Like one of the rules that I love is that it's the rule of one, one job. Have you heard this before?
- [12:11]
B
Tell me about it.
- [12:12]
C
The every element of an ad, an email, a blog post, you know, you fill in the Blank of whatever that like sort of the unit marketing asset is that every element of that thing has one job to do. All right, so this is front of mind for me because I also recently, about three, three, four months ago, I got picked up by the wonderful humans at the nine operators and marketing operators, the amazing. Yeah. So I'm running their newsletter now. That's like my one outside of school on the weekend kind of thing I'm doing for them. And never in my life has this, this idea of the one job become so important to me because it's like you pour your heart and soul and blood and sweats into a long form email packed with value. And you know what? It doesn't matter if the entry point, the subject line doesn't do its one job which is to get somebody to click inside and open it. You've got that subject line has one job. It is the same with like an ad. The headline of the ad or the hook on the front of the ad is to get somebody to stop. So it's this idea of like and the congruence then between every single one of those steps so that it naturally leads to the next. That's where power comes in. Momentum.
- [13:25]
B
Wow, this is amazing. I think this is a short masterclass for people that they need that reminder. From a writer's perspective, from a marketer's perspective, each stage has one thing, one goal and one objective. If you miss that mark on that one, not going to make it to the next stage and certainly not going to make it to that conversion event.
- [13:46]
C
Yeah, exactly. Especially when it comes to ads, hooks, emails, text messages, those sort of pieces right there where there is a split second decision, am I down for this or not? Am I going to keep scrolling? Am I trashing it? Because then everything else that we work so hard on is for nothing. And it's so easy to forget that. And it's kind of almost like the distribution first principle of like instead of just creating something beautiful, which I'm very much prone to, I love creating dude beautiful long form content. And I think if there's anything I'm actually known for, it's doing that in the E comm world for sure. So like I am the king of long form that cares way too much about everything that freaking goes into it. So I've had to have, you know, I've just had to beat into my own mind and heart again and again and again that if I can't get eyeballs to this first, it doesn't matter. It's I've Got to get eyeballs to it. And so building with distribution in mind.
- [14:44]
B
From the jump, that hits me so hard and I'm, I'm getting better at that myself. I've written, we've had almost 60 episodes of the pod. We've had almost 60 newsletter, art newsletter pieces put out by myself for the RBL Flywheel newsletter on Beehive. Not to plug it too hard, we've done a ton of blog posts before that with the team and through RBL and the business. And I'll tell you what, I feel like a little bit like you. I kind of err on a touch of the nerdy side and I love to like go super deep and our pal Chase and others will read it and go, man, that's freaking encyclopedic drop right there. But I have to remind myself like, hey, what's the goal here? How are we bringing people in? Is it getting enough of those eyeballs? Are we thinking about distribution? Which is funny because our entire job when we counsel clients is we distribute like, like nobody. And then when it comes to me and our content, sometimes it's forgotten. You gotta, gotta bring it top of mind, dude.
- [15:41]
C
It's that old cliche, you know, the, the cobbler's children have no shoes or whatever.
- [15:47]
B
Yeah.
- [15:48]
C
Oh, you work so hard on it for the people that are giving you money. And then when it comes to your own stuff, it's so easy to forget those principles. Which is why I bring up the email thing, because that's just so. And actually the reason I did it is because. So the week previous, previous to this week, biggest open rate ever in 70%. And it ticked a little bit past that. I've never had an email pop that hard. That was. And it had the highest click through rate. Just a monster. And then the very next week, I absolutely whiffed it. And we're sitting at like a 45, 48%. And what it comes down to is the, in the, the content, the meat inside of it was the same. I just fucking missed that subject line hit. It just did. It didn't stand out enough. It wasn't. Yeah, so it's, it's front bind for me because that dual experience of, of winning and then losing.
- [16:39]
B
Would you mind just double clicking on that a little bit for the audience around like the learning of like what, what do you think that hit so well on the 70% and what do you think sort of missed on that lower percent, if you don't mind.
- [16:51]
C
So it was a magical, the subject line that hit like 70%. It was for Jones Road Beauty, Cody Plofker's technology stack. It was his agency and technology stack. And right now we're rolling out one of those every week for all the different operators brands. So now, Cody Plofker, Jones Road, very popular. Not in the subject line. What the subject line simply said, because this is for the operator's newsletter. What the subject line said was I think it was like 30 plus tools revealed. And then this is probably one of those things that I had the idea like on like I send it on Mondays. I get it all done over the weekend because it's my little side thing and I said it on Monday and I'll bet you anything that actually came to me Monday because one of the things we did inside the newsletter is we batched them all by like 5 star rating, 4 star rating, 3 star rating, 2 star rating. So they actually went pretty hard on some of the tools that they're and the agencies that they're not happy with, right?
- [17:44]
B
Oh yeah, yeah. Kind of a.
- [17:46]
C
What I did was I had different star emojis because I love formatting. So inside of the newsletter I would do black highlighted background, white text. And then I found these star emojis where there's a solid black star and an outlined white star. There's just two, two different types of emoji. And I loved the way it looked inside of the newsletter with the black background and then the stars with the white outline. It looked really nice. So I took that and I did five black stars and one white outlined star with black in the middle. And so the subject line was 30 plus tools revealed, star, star, star, star, empty star. And it fit right inside of like I went, I go to my Gmail now. I literally sent myself preview after preview after preview. And I just look at it and I'm like, is this gonna. And what's the preview line? And I think the something about $100 million tech stack ranked and reviewed. But it was that combo of like it just the you're going to get 30 tools revealed and then the star rating just immediately I think clicked with people of it was like oh, like literally clicked. They clicked it. They clicked. That was the thing. So it was a great coming together of those two that just hit.
- [18:56]
B
That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm assuming the alternative, the later version the next week just didn't have those elements quite as much. Didn't have that appeal, didn't have that visual.
- [19:08]
C
The next one was someone else's tech stack and it wasn't on them that I, that I whiffed it. But it also had this fabulous 20 Black Friday tips from Connor McDonald from Ridge. It was great, it was great content. But I led with the 20 plus Black Friday tips and I think at this point that's just so oversaturated right now that there was nothing that made that stand out. Now if you got into it, you'd have been like, oh dude, this guy's bringing it. Like if I want someone to tell me about, you know, these are the people I want to tell me about how to do things. So and. But it was just too, it did not stand out I think was the problem. Yeah, try again next week.
- [19:49]
B
That's amazing. And just kind of exploring this a little bit further. Do you out of curiosity and maybe even in other roles like are you. Do you like to do split testing in kind of real time for some of the sends and email and have you any interesting learnings there?
- [20:04]
C
Funny thing is I've never really gotten too many interesting learnings because I think split tests, especially for email, I just haven't been able to get like a good statistical like you know, with an a B test email send, you know, give it a two or three hour delay, that kind of thing and then it picks the winner. I just don't think that's enough time for people to actually interact with it or gather enough data around it. But what I have found, and this is immediately applicable to like the work that I do at Vermont is you can test at scale in the sense of like if I have more than a thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand email addresses and I'm going to send them all out either a sequence, an offer, an invitation to our next big, you know, panel webinar thing that we always blow out of the water. That's where what I really like to do more is simply I just send two different emails, split the list and let it run and ride. Or in particular, oh my gosh is seeing the difference in the open rate for a immediately after signing up email and just split it over time for like I'm going to run this one for a week, get about a thousand people to sign up for it. What's the open and click through rate there and then do it for another week. What's the opening click through rate for a different subject line. So those are kind of like the just the nuances that I found where it really helps for some reason about you just have to have a critical mass large enough sample size is. Is maybe the thing. Yeah. And then Running it a week at a time, another week after that has really helped.
- [21:33]
B
I think there's something obviously important about kind of hitting a similar population. But I also like your call out that you got to give it enough time to bake because then that's like a classic conversion rate AB testing fail opportunity that people often don't always get. There's so many of those statistical nerdy terminology that are quite fun when you get into them. And like a lot of times people have a tendency to go, oh, called it, I was right or oh, that surprised me, let's declare a winner. And it's like, you got to give it enough time.
- [22:08]
C
You got to give it enough time. And then the thing that I'm working on a giant piece right now on experimentation and CRO conversion rate optimization for Vermont. It's going to be like the next big like Aaron Ordorf magnum opus. It's going to be like, all right, I'm so deep in it right now. And one of the things that really surprised me going through that is how vitally important AA tests are where you just, you send the same thing or it's the same ad.
- [22:33]
B
We did that a lot in our testing. Yep. I love that.
- [22:36]
C
And it's like no one said it out loud to me until it was about, it was probably like 2 years ago ago when I was working in the SMS side of things and we would just run these AA tests of pop ups, run the same pop up, pretend it's an a B test or even with text messages to a large audience doing AA test of the same message to, you know, split your list in half and you would get wildly different results. And I was like it almost undid like my whole belief in like objective truth and math.
- [23:04]
B
Yeah, you got to test for that false positive. You got to rule that out.
- [23:07]
C
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
- [23:09]
B
Amazing. Aaron, what are you most excited? I mean there's a lot of excitement in your voice and how you're thinking you got new crazy, awesome, insightful content dropping regularly. Stepping back, you know, looking at the Vermont opportunity and just other exciting things happening in your world. What are you most excited about right now?
- [23:28]
C
The biggest struggle when I got into Vermont about four or five months ago now, maybe six, was there was a lot of buzz around it because our CMO Rob O'Rejil, previously Triple Whale, he's just a one man roadshow and I.
- [23:44]
B
Had him on the pod and called him the pied piper of D2C comm and I think I nailed that one.
- [23:49]
C
Dude can like mass eyeballs and create buzz like nobody I've experienced before, especially in the SaaS side of things. There's a few other folks that maybe I'd put into that category. But. But the funny thing was, so there's all this sort of like, buzz building. And I came in right after Fermat announced his Series A. So you talk about a wave of buzz, and it was A pretty like, is a who's who also as far as, like, the investors and who led the round. And, you know, so it had all this momentum and buzz. And the, the joke inside of Vermont was, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Neat, neat. But what do you do? I've been on your homepage like five times. I cannot figure out what you do. So my, my big contribution, I think coming in was like, really taking that seriously because I experienced it firsthand when I made the announcement, I'm going to Vermont, it was like, oh, that's so dope, Aaron. What do you do? That sort of thing, right? So, as strange as it sounds, is one of the things that really, really excites me right now is I think we're finally unlocking and starting to tip into people understanding this idea. What Vermont lets you do is create funnels the same way you create ads, especially on a paid media acquisition, growth marketer, performance marketer side of things. Same way that you like to chop it up, you like to test offers, you like to test headlines, you like to test CTAs. And you know, creative velocity is the key to winning. That is like one of the few truths is you pump enough creative that isn't bad with your best bets into the machine that is Facebook, and it's going to go find the people that this appeals to, as long as it's appealing enough. And the key ingredient there is enough creative velocity and volume so the machine can go do what the machine does. And then there's this enormous disconnect between that and what's the arsenal you've got to actually send people to once they click the ad. So this whole simplicity of like, we're going to let you create funnels the same way you create ads. That's like the first level of understanding. The second level of understanding is then differentiating. What is it about the landing pages that I can create the custom PDPs that are embedded inside those landing pages so that we're not just pushing the choke point down one step from a beautiful landing page, and then, oh, everybody always gets the same pdp, that sort of thing, even on into the cart. Now there's a lot more nuance and it's just, it's so difficult to figure out how do you say these things in as few words as possible. But that's really exciting to me because when I see people get it and I'm in a lot of these slack channels because we do a lot of managed service, like we index hard on the service side of software as service. And a lot of like the folks that I know have come in and started testing it and they're starting to see results and it's watching those light bulbs come on of like the ease, the, the speed of it and what's possible that I'm just trying to capture and then figure out how do I put that really into words? Because that, that's my jam. It's how do I put into words that are advertisements, words that are emails, words that are landing, words that are long form copy. It's a challenge, but it's really fun because it's something like I believe in because I've got to watch it behind the scenes.
- [26:57]
B
I love that there's so much, you know, there's so many brands and software tools I think that are early stage or even later stage where you look at it and you're like, oh, it seems really cool. But I'm not quite clear on what they do. I'm not really sure where they position in the market. And I think I've seen brands completely turn around when someone like yourself comes in, is able to clearly articulate that position and that value prop and that pain and just keep it simple and be like, oh, I know what they do now. I got an analogy, I got a picture in my mind. I have a sense of what their reason for being is and why they're important. And kudos to you for doing that. I remember talking to you about that and literally talking to Raba, looking at the brand, I was kind of like, yeah, they're doing something in the D2C COM and software and Rob is awesome, so must be great. And then like couldn't wrap your head around it. And then you came in and it was like, not to be overly critical, but you came in. I think you've done an amazing job of really lifting that up for people.
- [27:59]
C
Oh, and there's at least three lessons in there. The first is if you are new anywhere, those first two, three, four weeks that you're at a new organization, whether you're full time, whether you're coming in as a consultant or a freelancer, fractional, whatever, that brief window where you have the eyes of an outsider is wildly valuable and typically undervalued not by the organization but by the individual who's coming in because we feel like we should understand there's something I must be missing. So I'm not going to say out loud, I don't get it. I'm going to just go try to figure this out out when one of the most valuable things you can say is I don't get it. And I'm going to get it in about two weeks and as soon as I get it, I'm no longer not going to be able to not get it right. I will have like, I'll be in it and I'm going to lose my eyes of an outsider. So at the very least to capture that in some sort of written verbal form where you always pay attention to your first impression of a brand, of a tool, of a description. And even if you don't have the bravery or the courage to say it out loud because you are nervous about like I'm supposed to get this, but I kind of want to like just push on people who might be listening to say, like if you're in that position. That is so helpful. It's one of the most helpful things you can do.
- [29:20]
B
It's so funny because I remember us talking briefly about this in the past and the analogy comes up again of like that scene from the movie Big and Tom Hanks is in the boardroom and he's like, I don't get it. And the guy kind of loses his mind. He's like, what do you mean? The numbers are going here and this is what that. And this is what we're going to do. And Tom Hanks looks around, he's like, I don't get it. And it's like. And everyone's mind just like opens up and it's like, oh yeah, this outsider, this beginner is, is dropping knowledge and helping the business. And the senior guy going through the traditional charts just starts to lose his mind. It's such a great. I want to cut to that scene right now. And it's.
- [29:57]
C
And it takes like to combine bravery with ignorance is like a wonderful freaking thing. It really is. Because that's the scary part. Most of us, because we're not, you know, children and grown up bodies, we're grown ups and grown up bodies so we don't have the wants to look ignorant.
- [30:12]
B
No one wants to be like, I'm.
- [30:14]
C
Supposed to know what this is, so I'm just gonna ask. Ah, yeah. Oh man. Yeah. If you do social Clips for this. I hope you splice it in. That'd be dope. That'd be so good.
- [30:23]
B
Let's do it. No such great, great learnings. And you know, Aaron, you're kind of on the, on the growing cusp of, of some big things as a VP of growth. It's not an easy role. It's at any company. Can you kind of share a bit more about like, you know, what drew you to it? Obviously there's, there's people, there's growth, there's opportunity. Kind of like some of the exciting opportunities and challenges with the role like that having having been involved in growth for a while, it's growth. Something's near and dear to me and it's an exciting title, exciting job, but it's also has a lot of challenges. So I'm just trying to maybe drop some of that on the audience that might be helpful.
- [31:04]
C
Tell you so after Shopify plus, I was there for about four and a half years, I think it was maybe coming up on five. I then got picked up by Common Thread Collective as their VP of marketing, which was my first like big boy title, big boy job kind of thing. So I was there for about two and a half years and then went back out into the consulting world for a hot second. Got picked up by a company called Recart, which is SMS marketing, text message marketing. And it was when I was at Recart that it was the first time in my career, by necessity, that I had to be on the front lines of sales. I'd never done this before. And it started as an experiment where it's the same thing we've been talking about. In that case, it wasn't that people didn't get it, it was the opposite. Everybody gets what SMS text message marketing is in E commerce and why it's important. And the people that are most valuable are the ones that have been doing it for plus two, three, four years because they've got a list of a hundred thousand, a quarter of a million, half a million, maybe a million subscribers. It's as a business that is wildly like disproportionately valuable than someone who's getting started. So the idea was you have to be able to not like explain what it is to somebody, but distinguish yourself. What's your competitive advantage? And so Recart, what that came down to was I had to figure out what are the five things we do, no one else does. And when I had that first initial, like, I think these are the five things, then there's also this. Let's Go back to the idea of like the subject line or the hook, Right? Because one of the positioning statements I really, really like is, you know, how blank instead do this. So recard it was, you know, how you suspect you're overpaying and don't really trust the results. It took a lot of work to get there. But we're talking about text message marketing. I started vetting this with people that I knew in the industry. I'd be like, can I have 15 minutes of your time? I want to pretend to pitch you and I want you to be mean to me. So we would go into these meetings, I'd be like, all right, I'm going to pretend now. Scene. And I would open with that line. And 99 out of 100 people are like, yeah, I know. I'm pretty sure I'm overpaying. And I also really don't trust the results that my SMS platform is telling me it's driving. So there was like this. This nod that went with it and then it was distinguishing what are the five characteristics that set this apart from everything else. All right, so it was like the opposite of what doing now with this expansion on how to define a new category. So that's a big part of what I was so excited about. What drew me to Vermont is actually doing that frontline sales gave me that taste for growth for real. Like, dude, was it negotiating freaking contracts, understanding our profit margin, knowing what we could go to and we couldn't go to? Like, I'd never done that in my marketing life before I was on the front lines. Nothing makes you feel more powerful and like a winner than when the ink goes on. Go like, dude, you feel like you are contributing to that business and you are. And nothing hurts as much as losing at least for someone like me who isn't built to be a salesman. So growth was like that next thing of, okay, I just swung really hard from marketing into sales and marketing. I think the middle point, like, growth would be, what if I could take these skills that I've developed and continue to hone from the front lines, but find a place where they've got that army of people with thick skin that can take it called salespeople who are just. They can take it where Aaron Orndorff can't. But to understand them with empathy and be able to, like, that was like the perfect coming together of, like, what's the next frontier for me? I think that's growth. I think that's what that is. And that's the opportunity that Vermont gave Me.
- [34:55]
B
That's awesome. It seems like such a. It's somewhat of a perfect storm. And to take those more mature, semi. More mature business experiences of CTC and Shopify, certainly Shopify, you can bring that to something that was earlier stage that's building critical mass, that just got series A funding, got a good rapport with leadership and team talk about growth and impact. And seeing that result just viscerally like right away is exciting.
- [35:24]
C
Yeah. And I love living in the spreadsheets and the dashboards and clean data and fighting my way to get to clean data and understanding. Man, like, nothing feeds my soul more than someone saying, here's the KPI. This is it. Define it for me. What is it? Is it marketing qualified leads? And if it's marketing qualified leads, we got to have a really high bar for what is the qualification plan process so that it's actually an ICP fit. And there has to be a very clear action they have taken to make them marketing qualified so that they then will become sales qualified. And in our case, it's like the. You have booked a call, it's on the calendar. One and two, you do fit through all of the, you know, third party data enrichment information you give us on your way in so that we're not just. We're not just booking leads to book leads. Right? That's garbage. That's a recipe for huge disconnect, especially between marketing and sales as the two organizations. But marketing can hold itself to this really high level of accountability and say, all right, this is the number to hit. I love going and just attacking that number. Moving the needle.
- [36:36]
B
That's. It resonates with me so hard and it's a great reminder for everyone out there. You kind of alluded to kind of this growth that you're seeing, this performance with Fermat. The things are starting to click and jive. Go, well, what is it you think is contributing to that? What are some of those kind of intersections that are working?
- [36:56]
C
This is the. Okay, I don't know which question I hate more. I think I tweeted this a while ago. I don't know which question I hate more, especially from leadership. Why isn't it working? Or what's working? Why is it working? Now, I say that a bit tongue in cheek because I always prefer the second to the first. Like the first is actually really uncomfortable when it's happening. Why is nothing working? What? Right. What's broken is a way more emotionally uncomfortable place to be than trying to figure out what's working. But that really is like, sort of like the. Again now, like the joke inside of. Because we're just like, we're recording this right at the end of October. I'm not sure when it'll drop, but we're on the cusp of just having the best freaking marketing month. And I mean in that. In that way of like, not traffic, not demos booked, but like this, like, really high level of qualified, that sort of thing is just on the cusp of smashing it at like a record level this month. And so the question is why? And so I dig into. It's so funny because I think what it really just comes down to is, you know, I can't not think in terms of. Taylor Holiday, CEO of Common Thread Collective, my boss for about two and a half years. Probably shaped me number one. Number two spot of people that have shaped me as a professional in my career. And he's just got this great. Fill the sponge, squeeze the sponge. Fill the sponge, Squeeze the sponge and fill the sponge is. We're gonna do a bunch of top to middle activity within the funnel. We're gonna build up the email list, we're gonna grow our audience, we're gonna make sure we have as many addressable people who are paying attention to us as possible. Let's fill the sponge and then squeeze the sponges. All right. Mfers and I started this with like, our emails, in particular our email sequences. It's like, you hit a point and you're like, okay, the goal for the next two weeks is get them to unsubscribe or book a fricking demo. If they're a fit, that's it. And it's almost like this aggressive attack. But that's the kind of thing of what I think we're experiencing right now is really, there's no better answer than we got a really good marketing team who's been doing a lot of really cool stuff. They've built a ton of awareness. On the back of that, we've had a couple few events online offline irl, we've done some content drops and all of this. These things have conspired together to build our email list. We have more people we can reach out to. It's the right people because of what we're doing. Like, there was this build, build, build, build. And then it's like this coming together of it's October, Q4 is upon us. If you're going to do something, do something now. So there's like this natural impetus in the market to now's the time to take action. That Combined with. All right, so, you know, my. My growth marketer, lifecycle marketer, Kat, who. She and I are two peas in a pod and could not be more different humans, but love attacking those numbers. Just like, all right, let's hit it. We are going to go smash this email list until they say stop or okay, I'll show up and talk to you. Like, that's the. It's that hard of a push. It really is. Yeah.
- [39:53]
B
That's amazing. Aaron, this has been amazing. Coming down the home stretch, gonna hit some fun personal questions and career questions. Kicking it off. So what, is there a mentor or coach or career influence that you want to acknowledge that's just been a great counsel for you?
- [40:08]
C
I already mentioned the two. I can't help not mention Taylor Holiday looms enormously large in my life. I still devour everything he and Common Thread collective puts out. And the wonderful human Tommy Walker. And Tommy's very, very similar to Rabba Tommy. We used to joke around about if we were the Beatles, he was John Lennon. He was out there talking about I am the walrus. And I was like, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. I'm the Paul McCartney. What's the hook? We need a radio single to move units. So those three, those two, and then Robert right now actually, too. It's just that perfect sort of coming together.
- [40:41]
B
Love the Beatles analogy. It's good stuff. Is there a SaaS tool that you've kind of just kind of switched on, not for mop, but something that you utilize that you just want to recommend to the audience that you perhaps rave about?
- [40:55]
C
I mean, the one tool I cannot live without is Superhuman. It really is the email platform. It is. They just also, they keep upgrading their integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce. It's amazing. It's one of those, like, I could not live without it if there was a second one. I'm actually quasi kind of falling in love with Clay. They used to be like a personal CRM and now they'd, like, integrate with everyone under the sun for data enrichment. And you can do some dope stuff with queries inside of clay. You can really do some damage. So that's a hot one right now that I'm falling in love with.
- [41:30]
B
That's amazing. I love that. I'll be honest. Superhuman. I'm a little bit falling out of love, but I might need a little primer with you to be like, okay, hold up here. Let's get back in. Let's nerd out. Let's get some nice templates and systems. In place because I think it is quite powerful. I think some of the others just basic stuff is caught up, but I might need some education to get lured back in.
- [41:53]
C
I couldn't live without it. It's one of the few.
- [41:55]
B
I love it. And on the consumer side, what's something you bought recently that you just can't live without or kind of raving about it?
- [42:02]
C
I'm a mad fan of Plum Deluxe tea. They're out of Portland, Oregon, so hometown hero kind of thing. They came into my life at the perfect time, and I think it was I connected with Andy, who's the founder. He operates it on Twitter. And I can't remember the series of events that happened, but it was one of those my lovely wife was talking about. I kind of wanted to get into loose leaf, but I'm not sure how. And I was, here comes Andy and here comes Plum Deluxe. And so I got her this loose leaf tea and I had like a little book with it. And then the thing that you do, and I got her subscription to it, and it made me a hero when I bought that for her. So then I went to Andy and I was like, my guy, who are you? How do we connect? How do we become. Yeah. And so I just cannot preach the. Yeah. The good news of Plum Deluxe, it's amazing. And they've got a fabulous Facebook group. Andy's a gem of a human being. Go. Yeah. Their starter kits are amazing.
- [43:01]
B
Very cool. It's so funny. I had. I think it was last holiday I found a stellar tea. Like, really high quality. I want to say it was maybe through goop, but they have their own brand presence. Like, GOOP just was curated them and they were phenomenal. Like, the flavors were off the charts and it got me involved into it. And similarly, like, when I gifted it to my wife, she was just like, wait, thank you. This is insane. And like, still having it now and, you know, periodically. It's great. I can't recall the brand, but kind of similar experience. What's something that the folks in the audience might not know about you that you want to share? Fun fact, surprise, hobby, silly quirk.
- [43:43]
C
I am confident to the point of defiance when it comes to what I think a marketing strategy ought to be and the execution of that strategy and what I then also think we ought not to invest in. Okay, so I will take really hard stances on. No, we don't need to do that, because that's not the bread and butter. We haven't. We haven't got the trains to run on. Time yet. Why are we painting them with race stripes or some nonsense? Right? I am that. And at the very same time, I am wildly insecure, Never expect anything to work. Am genuinely surprised when it does. Like, this month, we're, like, winning this month. And I almost don't want to say it out loud because I'm like, oh, it's not going to last. That's all gonna fall apart. Or like, something's gonna show up there. So, like, it's this weird tension that I. That I live in between, and maybe that's just encouraging for people that they might not know about me because I have sort of like a bombastic presence on social, and I'm really excitable, that sort of thing. But no, no. An inch below the surface, a centimeter below the surface, I'm like, I don't think this is gonna work. Everyone's gonna find out that I'm terrible at this. That sort of thing.
- [44:53]
B
It's like, I'm almost hearing you as, like, a passionate, you know, constantly progressing pessimist. You know, you're like. And I think that that's okay and that's healthy. Human nature. We protect ourselves. My CEO and I have a little bit of that dynamic where sometimes I'm pessimistic. He more often is. And I'm kind of hard charging the vision and the positivity. It's a balance and it's. It's very interesting.
- [45:18]
C
And as long as that defiance doesn't turn into bullheadedness, because the other piece of it is that that insecurity or the not expecting it to work or that sort of thing really does make me open to correct, like, the analytics of maybe this is like, a great one to end with is. So I've relaunched Vermont's homepage with, like, you know, my magnum opus of Create phones. The same way you create ads. We have these visuals that are just can popping on desktop. We create custom mobile versions of them as well, but I only have enough time to put together the first four, and there's actually spots for eight logos. So we create these four funnels that you can click on the homepage and it cycles you through. Like it goes. True classic. I think Armor. Armor was one of them. Like, big brands, right? They're just like, oh, these are beautiful. No, no, no, it was. It wasn't Armor, because the one I ended with was. Was. Armor was in the middle of the page. And I was like, no one's going to click through the first four buttons and hit the fifth one. And then realize they can't click it. And I kid you not, I cannot remember how this came up. I think it was. Yes, it was. Literally, our CEO comes into the website channel inside of Slack one day and he's like, you know, not all the buttons for the funnels on the homepage work. And I was about to fire back. Yeah, yeah. No one's clicking all the way through the first four to get to the fifth. Like, who. Who does that? So I pull up our heat map and guess where there is this giant red people are rage clicking the middle one. And I was like, no, I was wrong. Time to go make the rest of them right now.
- [46:46]
B
That's amazing.
- [46:47]
C
If I'm proven wrong, it's like, all right, I gotta change what I'm doing. I was wrong.
- [46:52]
B
And I think that's magic. It's like, this sounds so cliche, but the whole notion of strong opinions, loosely held, willing to let go of those beliefs once they're debunked and move on, that's come up a lot on this pod with smart, really great people like yourself. So what a great thing to wrap with. What a great thing to end on. So many good learnings. Aaron, thank you so much for joining and, and dropping your knowledge today.
- [47:18]
C
Absolute delight. Ty, thank you so much.
- [47:20]
B
Thanks, man. And for folks that want to learn more and connect with you, Aaron, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [47:26]
C
I'm Aaron Orndorff on the Twitter's X. Same name on LinkedIn. Pretty easy to find low hanging fruit. Like a few things that I put out, come into my DMs and I'll smile. I'm easy to put a smile on my face. Twitter LinkedIn engagement is my love language, so if you want to butter me up and then swoop in, go for it. VermontCommerce.com, put that in the show notes or, or whatever. Go check out what we're up to and let me know if there's anything on the site that you really wish you could click but you can't.
- [47:54]
B
Love it. That's really funny. Way to. Way to finish strong. Aaron, always a pleasure. We did it and have an awesome rest of your day.
- [48:01]
C
Thanks S.