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Built Online
DON’T Use Paid Ads | My #1 Organic Marketing Strategy No One’s Talking About (ft. Luke Yarnton)
00:38:28
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- [00:00]
A
Time and time again, we found that the real value we could deliver for merchants was getting these nano influencers and micro influencers talking about their brand and activated. So that sort of made us step back and say, all right, what's the most effective way we can get these micro influencers and nano influencers activated? Because that's what the brands care about the most.
- [00:18]
B
Welcome to Built online. I'm Cody McGuffey, and this podcast is all about one thing. Building the business of your dreams. Selling art, teaching classes, starting a blog, launching a brand. Whatever your passion is, we show you how to turn it into real income. I created Everbee to help anyone with a dream start and scale business. Ever be, ever be, ever be, ever.
- [00:42]
A
Be, ever be, ever be.
- [00:44]
B
We now serve over 800,000 creators all across the globe. On this show, we bring on real entrepreneurs who've done it. They share their secrets, they share their failures, the exact steps that. That you can take to get started. What if you can get one golden nugget out of today's episode? And it's the breakthrough that takes you from just dreaming to actually living a life on your terms. At Everbee, we believe that every human is a creator, and every creator should own a business. Luke, what's going on, man? How are you?
- [01:11]
A
Excellent to be here, Cody. Excited to chat today.
- [01:14]
B
Yeah, man, happy to have you on too. You're calling in from Mexico City. We were talking about earlier.
- [01:19]
A
Mexico City. Yeah. So I apologize if you hear some, like, crazy street food noises outside. They were always sort of, like, going up and down my street around this time, trying to get you buying some tamales or something similar. So excited to be here. It's a fun place. I'm from New Zealand originally, so living in Mexico City is. Is very different to. To where I grew up, but I'm loving it here.
- [01:39]
B
This is the world we live in, right? Like, this is like creator commerce. This is like the digital nomad entrepreneurship remote game that we get to play. Fortunately, if you. If you set it up in the way that you want to play it, that way, you can. You can be calling into a podcast. From Mexico City to Austin, you're building a company that serves the United States and also UK and, like, you know, like, it's just. This is the world we live in.
- [02:03]
A
Exactly. No, I feel so lucky to be in the position I'm in at the moment where I sort of. The world is my oyster. I can come and go as I please, and I've had the opportunity to live in some super cool cities in Recent years while I've been doing sort of different endeavors around the world.
- [02:17]
B
That's amazing, man. I'm excited to dive in. What you're working on today and how it actually could help a lot of, a lot of our existing audience that are listening to this and also just like just talk about E commerce and talk about just online commerce in general and how they can leverage affiliates and their existing customers to create more revenue for themselves. It's a really, really cool space. I'm really passionate about this also. I've always kind of felt like the majority of our revenue should come from our existing customers recommending us to somebody else, which is the most ideal form. But I'm excited to talk about all that with you.
- [02:54]
A
Yeah. Excited to get into it. Absolutely.
- [02:58]
B
Let's talk about what you do first and then we'll kind of jump into the rest of the stuff. So let's get that out of the way. What are you working on?
- [03:04]
A
Yeah, so I'm the founder of a business called the Rave and our core product is we help businesses identify in real time influencers who've bought from them. So we know that for every 10,000 customers, 250 of them are going to have more than 3,000 followers on one of the core platforms. And we consider the core platforms YouTube X slash, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok of course. So we are helping brands identify who of their actual real life customers has the ability to amplify the brand. And so we're taking, I guess taking traditional influencer marketing and tipping it on its head. So traditional influencer marketing is that you've got someone on your team who going to spend eight hours a week doing cold DMs to an influencer who's never heard of you before, begging them to post about you, perhaps sending some free product their way. And we know that 65% of the time the free product that gets sent out never gets posted. So we're saying what if in a different world you had a list of all of the influencers who already know and love your brand, who already have the product and are using it on their in their daily lives and just activating them and building an ambassador army out of them as the main sort of growth force to drive your brand forward.
- [04:28]
B
Really, really cool space. Something that is very, very obvious to me, at least I'm hoping it is to everybody who listens to this because so often what I run into or what I hear about on in the Facebook group or any or anything, it's like, oh, I have this website. Oh hey, and I. This celebrity purchased from me. I didn' but they purchased me like a year ago, you know, and it's like, oh, that's interesting. It would been cool to know that right away when it happened and right when you're the brand is top of mind to them. I don't know what I was going to ask you next of like how do you actually reach out to that person and all that stuff. We could talk about that, but the idea is like you have everyday people, they have followers now. Like they have an audience themselves. A lot of these people do and that's an opportunity for them to partner. Especially if they authentically bought your product, then they will probably authentically share their product or even if you activate them, they'll share your product with their audience, which is really cool.
- [05:24]
A
Exactly. Yeah. And I think you touched on a really interesting point there where the concept of influence and what it means to be an influencer has changed dramatically within the last sort of three to four years. And so that was one of the key influences into actually starting this business. And the way it started was that through the COVID times I went down this rabbit hole where I created myself as a micro coffee influencer where I was posting. I'm not sure if you've probably seen them on TikTok now where you have the really slow espresso pull into an espresso cup set to some sexy music among my peers. And sort of through TikTok I started growing a small audience, maybe 3,000, 4,000 followers, getting some good views on on my videos. Some of them sort of like peaked around that 10k view mark and I realized that sort of through that process I became the go to person that people would ask for any coffee advice, coffee purchases, beans, machines, they'd come to me. I was the wise old owl in the coffee space. And I realized that I probably generated $20,000 worth of purchases to some coffee brands that I love, either with selling equipment or selling actual beans. That was through like responding to DM's friends coming to me. The Reddit comments used to sort of like blow up as well, but I tried to go to some of those brands that I know and love and say, hey look, this is me, this is my following. Would love to join your ambassador program or like help support you guys in some way and would love to be able to clip the ticket off the back of that. But when you rock up with three and a half thousand followers, they're like, look, it's sort of not really at that minimum threshold that we typically like to work from. So that kind of is what brought around the version 1.0 of this product is like what if we just fully democratized affiliate marketing and allowed anyone to share with friends, family and followers and earn real cash rewards. So that was kind of like version 1.0 of what we're doing now.
- [07:35]
B
I think influencer marketing is one I want to drive down. The point of, is a major, major source of revenue and traffic and just it should be a main piece of anyone's marketing strategy at some point. Whether it's your first, second or third, you know, channel. That's up to you to decide as a brand owner. But I would, I would put it pretty high in the list of things to consider at least I wouldn't recommend if you're starting the business to go after like all five of your channels like Facebook and Google and also SEO and also like creating my own YouTube channel and also going out to your affiliate like pick one, but have this in consideration as one of them. Because it only takes like one influencer to really kind of shoot up your brand. It only takes like one deal with one product to really make that like life changing moment for you and your business, I would say. Would you agree?
- [08:26]
A
Absolutely. And look, we've seen this time and time again. So obviously the core product is the influencer identification piece. But we've got like a fully fledged out referral and affiliate business that we can plug into the back of that. One of the key examples I like to wheel out every now and then is we partnered with this carry on luggage bag. They're not a huge brand but they're like, they're in that sort of 5 to 10 million a year Shopify space. And we found this one. So this one influence sort of automatically onboarded themselves after we'd sort of identified them, sent them the automated sign up link and YouTuber around the 5K subscriber mark. But given the opportunity and sort of afforded the same abilities that a real influencer might have, despite the fact that they're small following, this person's gone on to generate I think more than $180,000 worth of sales for this brand. Now it's like a, they've just said look, this is a cool opportunity. I know how to create a video. I'm just going to absolutely thrash out this opportunity and see, see just how much juice I can squeeze. And time and time again you see these small businesses where if you, if you just catch that right influencer at the right time who loves the brand, gets what you're doing. Their ability to absolutely change the trajectory of your brand is very clear.
- [09:51]
B
Yeah, I get it. I get it. I want everyone listening to this to get it too. I mean, it doesn't really matter what your brand is. If you sell like a coffee accessory or you sell win products, you have one person that buys from you authentically and they just really love it. And if they like share it, it can make a difference to your, to your, to your company. It's really cool the way it works. And the same thing, I even think about like local businesses too. I know this isn't like, it's not. I think of like an H Vac company, for example, right. Somebody that sells air conditioners and heaters. There's people that have influence that go and become a customer. I know this isn't like the icp, right? This is like just an example. Extreme example. Like they have followings too. Like, so it kind of, it goes across all business. Business sectors.
- [10:38]
A
Exactly. I mean, look, I think the, the logic behind the way you interact with an influence has been changing a lot lately. And it's been cool being in the seat that I'm in now. So you can sort of watch the way that businesses change the way that they're going to interact and sort of plan out these, these influencer engagements. Where now it seems like if we were to rewind the clock five years, the strategy was let's get the biggest influencer possible and let's get them to post about me once and we'll just want to get that top of funnel awareness. But now, and it's pretty well documented that there's this sort of inverse relationship between follower count and trust and authenticity. Where now the new approach is let's build this army of ambassadors around us that have influence, but let's make sure we do it in a way that's sort of mutually beneficial because we don't want that one post and done. We want to have posting about us or talking about our brand to become like a learned behavior from that particular influencer creator where every time they have a gap in their posting schedule, they're going to remind their audience that this is a brand that I love and this is a brand that I really respect and enjoy and it's part of who I am as a creator. And, and doing that regularly seems to be the winning strategy today anyway, is this we want to constantly be top of mind with the brand. So I guess that I think that's one of the key takeaways for the listeners here as well. If I can offer some advice. It's like make sure that you're very strategic with the way you engage and build a relationship with these creators. You want it to be built in a way where they're constantly thinking about your brand and they're being rewarded in a way that they feel benefits them and, and will want to do it in a, in a repetitive way. Yeah, the one and done is gone.
- [12:27]
B
The transactional stuff is not only is it not effective for anyone, it's also if the, the influencer wants to be transactional, you should run also. Yeah, like it doesn't work anymore.
- [12:40]
A
Exactly.
- [12:41]
B
And, and it shouldn't work actually. It's, it's not a relationship, that's just a transaction, you know. So I want to talk about your product specifically as an example. So let's say Sally, let's, let's call it Sally has a store called Sally shoes dot com. Okay.
- [12:56]
A
Yep.
- [12:57]
B
And she's you know, integrated with the rave and she, she gets 10,000, let's say a thousand orders. Right? A thousand orders y that come through and let's say in a given time, let's call it a month. She had a great month. And what, what would your product do at that point? Like what tangibly like what does it look like?
- [13:17]
A
Yeah. So what we're going to do is we're constantly looking at those orders to identify when someone who's made a purchase with more than 3,000 followers has made a transaction. For her particularly, the most common use case is we are integrated into her Klaviyo email tool which is just a tool that sends out post purchase emails and stuff. We're consuming the information, the customer profile that's been created, we're tidying that up a little bit using some clever in house tools and then we're looking at a bunch of different influencer databases that exist around the world. We're sort of canvassing between 15 million and 20 million influencer profiles on any given day. And we're saying, oh cool. This person here, Cody, who just bought some shoes from selleyshoes.com has 20,000 followers on his TikTok account. So what we're then going to do is this is sort of the clever outreach that looks authentic, that might not be 100% authentic, but it's just a really simple email that goes out that says hey Cody, Sally from Sally's Shoes here, saw you made a purchase from us earlier and I think you'd be a really good fit for our creator team. Or ambassador, army or whatever they want to call it. If you're interested, just drop me a note and let me know you're keen and we'll get you added in and onboard it. So the key there is it's not aggressive sell to the influencer. It's like a serendipitous transaction. So serendipity email, where it feels kind of light and organic. You've acknowledged that they exist, you've acknowledged that they bought. It's for them to opt in if they want to. We then follow up with a automated Instagram DM in parallel. And just a question, you have to be very careful when you're doing automated Instagram DMs. We work with this really clever some young guys out in California who have built this sort of AI based agent that is indistinguishable from a human. If you seem to be using a lot of these automated DM tools, it'll get your Instagram page shut down pretty quickly or get you on the naughty boy list. So we'll send six hours after that or in a daytime, provided it's a daytime hour. Six hours after that it'll be an Instagram DM from your either personal account as the founder or from the brand account saying, hey, not sure if you saw the earlier email I sent you, notice you made a purchase. I think that's so cool. If there's any chance you'd be interested in joining our creator team, let us know and then you can sort of lightly touch on some of the benefits there where it might be like, you'll get free items, you'll get access to our early access to exclusive drops. We'll sort of reach out to you and ask for advice around what we should be doing next season.
- [16:03]
B
What do you think is the call to action that is important there? Like, is it like, hey, let's jump on a call together and let's talk about it, or is it like sign up at this form or what is like the, the ideal call to action?
- [16:13]
A
So. So that varies depending on the follower count. So we have conditional logic around if they have more than 20,000 followers but less than 30,000 followers, typically they'll want a little bit more information. So often you'll include like a zoom link or something where they can jump in and have a chat to you or someone else in your team around that. For that 3,000 to 20,000 follower count, you can kind of automate that, but maybe add a little bit of sort of like localization and personalization as you go where it's more, hey, if you post like our biggest winner that we consistently see is like delivering value to the brands you work with is hey, just saw you purchased from us. We'd love to refund your order if you're happy to post about your recent purchase on your Instagram story. So that's really good. Top of funnel awareness. You can do that in a way where you encourage them to possibly add like an affiliate link to the story post where the hook there is that they can make up to $5,000 a month by using your affiliate link and sharing with their audience. So that stuff's pretty easy to get those sort of micro and nano influencer edge of the scale posting about you in almost like an automated fashion.
- [17:28]
B
Would you guys. Did you guys also. Do you guys have any roadmap to eventually build the actual affiliate tracking system as well with this, or do you guys just integrate with other ones?
- [17:38]
A
No. So we've got that ourselves as well. So that was. The version 1.0 of the product was what if there was a really simple referral and affiliate platform all in one? That was refer a friend, get a Venmo payment. We wanted every single shopper, regardless of their follower account, to be able to get real Venmo cash rewards for sharing with friends, family and followers. So that's sort of what led us to this point is because. And we got it to about 200 merchants using the platform, 70,000 plus accounts that have been successfully referring friends, family and followers. But time and time again, we found that the real value we could deliver for merchants was getting these nano influencers and micro influencers talking about their brand and activated. So that sort of made us step back and say, all right, what's the most effective way we can get these micro influencers and nano influences activated? Because that's what the brands care about the most. And that's why we sort of like built out this identification piece, just so we can double down on getting the links or the activation in whichever way the brand thinks is most beneficial to them.
- [18:46]
B
Sure. How does. Let's say that in this. In this scenario, Sally Shoes was purchased from Cody, for example, and Cody purchased them. And Cody has 20,000 subs right on. Let's call it YouTube. And Sally asks me, hey, we'll refund you your purchase. You know, if you just post. Post something on, I guess, Instagram. Um, and I do it. Let's say I do it right. But how. Now that's step one completed. But like, how do I. We talked about being sustainable and Making sure it's like repetitive. How, how do what, what would you recommend Sally does now?
- [19:23]
A
Yeah, so look, we, we can see that you've performed the behavior that we, we the ideal behavior that we want from you. So that means we can consider you like team Sally now. And we know that getting top of funnel awareness, if Sally is sort of onto it with performance marketing, she knows approximately how many views or how many clicks she would have got from your post and how that compares to what she's been paying through her performance marketing.
- [19:52]
B
Like Facebook ads, Google Ads.
- [19:54]
A
Exactly. Yeah. So for Sally, it's probably a no brainer for her to like perhaps send you a new season drop every time the season rolls around. And based on the idea that she's probably going to get some, some free word of mouth out of you for.
- [20:10]
B
For Sally to who in this case, she's never experienced influencer marketing. She doesn't know how to communicate to influencers.
- [20:16]
A
Yeah.
- [20:17]
B
In a way that she doesn't want to be disrespectful. But also like she wants to get things done but she needs to like, she doesn't know she's trying to like learn how to build a relationship. And also like all vir email by the way, like none of this stuff is like. Yeah, so how, how should Sally, what kind of, what should her mindset be when she's communicating with cody who has 20,000 subscribers or followers.
- [20:37]
A
Yeah, look, I think there's some truth in the fact or the idea that people often overthink and overcomplicate what it means to speak to a creator. And in this particular case here, these are real customers. You can speak to them the same way you would speak to any customer. A lot of what I'm doing here was informed by my upbringing. I grew up behind the counter of a menswear store in Auckland, New Zealand. And so you learn that and the benefit of growing up behind the counter is you can physically see with your own eyes who's coming into the store, who's leaving, who's the man about town who you know is like well connected and has that sort of network effect and who's not and treat them as you would any customer. I think if you start putting them onto this bizarre pedestal, it sets these bizarre expectations of what should come from the, the relationship. And I think a lot of merchants that I work with and brands I work with make themselves very small in these conversations where you're speaking to someone who spent their hard earned cash on a product that they love. It should feel collaborative. They care about your brand, generally speaking. They should want to help lift you up. And it's about finding that middle ground in a way that benefits the, the creator and benefits the brand. And it should never be like structured in a way that's going to like be beyond what you can afford to pay on a, on a cost per acquisition basis, for example.
- [22:08]
B
Yeah. And I think that's where this really golden Luke, really, really agree with all that. I think, I think I'd like to talk touch about too is let's say that Cody's the, Cody's the influencer in this case, right. Where maybe I'll change it because I don't want to be the influencer in this case. I'm going to say some bad things about here. Yeah, let's say, let's say Betty's the influencer, right. And she's got 20,000. She's got 20,000 subscribe followers. Betty has worked hard to build her audience to what it is today as well. Right. And she does, she does trust Sally's, Sally's shoes. She's really excited about the Sally shoes. But like she can't just go about like doing deals that she's, she's already doing brand deals with like other people that are paying her, you know, $2,000 at $2,000 a post or 500 a post, whatever it is. And so is there anything like that that typically Sally should be kind of cognizant of of like, hey Sally, I appreciate it, I love your shoes, but I do, I do have an affiliate or I, I do have brand deals, but it charges 500, you know, proposed. Yeah, sure.
- [23:16]
A
Look, I think that definitely needs to be considered on a case by case basis. There will always be these creators that want some sort of fun to unlock a post and obviously the complexity of that post is going to increase the price. So a 45 second Instagram reel is going to be more expensive than a simple post where you tag the brand, which is going to be more expensive than purely just showing your product as part of some other post. And it's for you to understand like what is the real benefit here and what am I expecting to get out of that?
- [23:56]
B
I agree with that.
- [23:57]
A
That's why one of the key sort of value drivers or the value that we unlock is around the nano, influencer, micro influencer, 2,000 through 10,000 follower count. They have huge amounts of trust with their audience, the highest level of trust. And because they have such a small audience, they don't have thousands of businesses reaching out, trying to get them to post about them.
- [24:21]
B
Almost none, actually.
- [24:23]
A
And that's why. Exactly. And that. That's why if you can offer them a refund, that might be enough to move the needle. And they're the ones where, if they can have some success using an affiliate link. And now they've got $75 rolling in every week from. From folks purchasing based on the content that they've created, that's when you can build this really, really positive, mutually beneficial relationship with this creator. And typically they're on the app, so you want to get them while they're got that small follower count. If you can deliver some value as they grow your product, your brand becomes not necessarily attached to that them as a creator, but it's something that their followers are used to seeing. And every time you can get another post out of them, it builds that trust time and time again. That magic sort of the advertising rule of seven or whatever they call it, where you need to get the seven impressions to. To affect change.
- [25:16]
B
Exactly. I think all this is golden and I won't even take it further for, for Sally here. And she has Betty. And let's say Betty has, you know, 3,000 subscribers, 3,000 followers at this point. Sally needs to change her mind, in my opinion, to. To. I. I hope. I hope that Betty does a post about us. To. Yeah, I want to get Betty's feedback here on like, what. Our product, how. How she likes our product. And I actually want to invite her into my process and I actually want to share our product roadmap with her. And I want to. I want to ask her opinion on. And I actually want to build a real, an actual, real human relationship with Betty here. I want to understand her kids. I want to understand her.
- [25:58]
A
Her husband.
- [25:59]
B
I want to understand all this stuff because she's my buyer's Persona. She's the person I purchased myself. I want to actually learn from, like who is purchasing my shoes. And with this relationship building, Betty becomes more bought into to my brand. She's like, wow, Sally really cares about her company and her customers.
- [26:18]
A
Yeah.
- [26:18]
B
So now she really has an emotional connection now to actually want to help you build up too. And you're actually trying to build her up too, so it becomes a very mutually beneficial thing. And this is called relationship building, you know.
- [26:29]
A
Exactly.
- [26:30]
B
But Sally doesn't have this experience doing relationship building, so that's why it's really important for her to hear this, I believe.
- [26:36]
A
Exactly. And look, I think you've touched on a really important point there. And, And I'm a Firm believer. The best asset you can have in terms of like the best marketing asset in 2025 is an engaged group of creators that want to collaborate with you, with you as a brand. Like you see a lot of these brands who are going to be setting up discord servers, slack groups, Facebook groups like you. I think you've yourself of like sort of your fans having one of those specifically for the these creators that know and love your brand. We call them ambassador armies ourselves. That's what we try and help people create. But the reason that's important today is that the landscape is changing so quickly. It's no longer that you can just have like one single piece of content that's absolutely killer. The content requirement changes sort of day after day, week after week. So you need this group of people who can help you create whatever content is is required for today. The as we've seen in recent years, performance marketing has dramatically changed. No longer is it possible to get a customer acquisition for $2.50 through Facebook. That price is eight times more expensive now based on these IDFA changes. So being able to exist outside of the frameworks that you're traditionally governed by in terms of marketing, so freeing yourself of the reliance on performance marketing spend and even the way that people transact like the massive growth of TikTok shop away from traditional e commerce platforms, having this team of people that have influence, have people that know and love them and trust them that are on your team, it de risks the business significantly as well as giving you the ability to leverage that love that you have for your brand in so many interesting, cool, innovative ways.
- [28:21]
B
I totally agree. I'm realizing that we're already 27 minutes in and we should move into rapid fire questions. Are you ready?
- [28:29]
A
Fire away.
- [28:29]
B
What's your favorite business book?
- [28:32]
A
Favorite business book. Never split the difference. It's not particularly a business book, but it's a negotiation good in terms of any negotiation that happens in business. Be that between like I've used it a lot for helping frame some of the conversations between brands and influencers. And then obviously the merchant sales side of things, I reread it once a year.
- [28:53]
B
I love that. What's one thing that you wish that you knew before starting your business?
- [29:00]
A
Look, I think that's a trick question because I think part of it is just you risk by answering that question. Having people think that they need to know more than they do know to get started. But actually it's just getting started is the key thing. Is a quote from Elon Musk that I Love that. He compares sort of starting a company to eating glass while staring into the abyss. And eventually you stop staring, but the chewing continues. So I don't think there's a single thing I wish I knew beforehand. It's a learning process and I guess learning how to learn is maybe ironically kind of the key answer there.
- [29:40]
B
Love that. What's the worst advice that you've ever received about business?
- [29:44]
A
I think there's a. One of the reasons I'm on this entrepreneurial journey I'm on at the moment is based on the fact that the business culture in New Zealand is one where purely by sticking around for as long as possible and being part of the furniture, you get to grow through your career. So it was sort of like, take your time purely by being there, you're going to see some success. Where I think that's absolutely the wrong approach to sort of unlock any sense of growth or happiness in life. It's go out there and do what you need to do to make it happen.
- [30:23]
B
How would you define a creator? Who is a creator to you?
- [30:28]
A
Yeah, so I think a creator is a loaded term. I personally don't love that as a way to describe influences and creators, but I think anyone that can wield influence of any size can be a creator. So me as someone who had at one point, 1,000 followers on my silly little coffee TikTok channel, I was an effective creator in that I could wield influence and I produced insights or ideas or something visually aesthetic that pleased the people that followed me in a way that would hopefully get them excited. And that continues anyone who's. Who's trying to. To show something they love, be that an audio format or visual format or purely just facilitating a conversation with friends around a specific topic.
- [31:19]
B
How about products format? Like. What about like somebody actually creating a product, Selling a product? Absolutely.
- [31:24]
A
Yeah. Yeah, 100%.
- [31:27]
B
So it doesn't have to be content in your eyes?
- [31:29]
A
No, no, no. So, yeah, I guess this is where it's such a weird term is that it typically gets associated with. With content creation and in the media space. But I think it's. It's broad way beyond that.
- [31:41]
B
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Who do you think should be a business owner or an entrepreneur?
- [31:48]
A
I think. I think everyone should. Does everyone want to know? I think one of the motivations for this is that I'm in a very, very strong, steadfast belief that more small businesses make the world better.
- [32:06]
B
Me too.
- [32:07]
A
When I very much agree with this. When we. We lose businesses through consolidation, I believe that leads to less happiness in the world. I think it gives you freedom, it gives you autonomy. There was a very clever man who once came in to speak to our business school. It was sort of his, his leading pitch was no one ever got rich working for someone else. So I think business ownership, no matter what scale, whether it's a micro or a nano scale of business ownership or people like yourself, Cody, who are trying to build something more meaningful, is a very effective way to unlock economic benefit for them and their community.
- [32:49]
B
I completely agree. I think I agree. I'm still framing this. That's why I asked this in every single podcast, because I'm actually trying to frame my own strong opinion around this too. But so I need diverse answers from very, very smart people to kind of help frame mine.
- [33:01]
A
But yeah, and look, I can add. Sorry, I was gonna say I can add some context there, which is like I'm from a family business. Like we're third generation retail business in Auckland, New Zealand. Not huge aspirational business. But I see directly the benefit of our business to the community that we exist in, whether that's supporting local sports teams or boarding community initiatives, or employing and giving like fair employment to members of the community who want to come and work there. So it's seeing. Especially when I was traveling through to the United States, I traveled to the US a lot. When you get out of like the big cities, these main streets with boarded up windows that have sort of been gutted by big business coming in and destroying the will of the people to at least try and creating a local business that serves the community, like that breaks my heart. And I think that's such a terrible outcome for a community that someone can't go and buy their own trousers in their local neighborhood. They have to go to some big gross mall that's like a 45 minute driveway to get their pants.
- [34:09]
B
Yep, completely agree. I think everyone should be a business owner. I'm not saying everyone needs to be a full time business owner. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that everyone should own a business. And today's world, 2025, you can, every single person can own a business.
- [34:21]
A
Exactly.
- [34:22]
B
It doesn't have to be full time. You can work your full time job. If you love your job and you're so passionate about your job and what you do. Beautiful. But you can also own a podcast. You do it on the weekends. You could do a one hour per week on the weekend. And that actually can be a business for you. You know, you could, you could Own a brand with. In today's world, like, you can actually print on demand, have a brand and actually own it with no inventory, does almost zero overhead, and I think can run and you can work on it probably one hour a week. Now, am I saying it's gonna be super successful and is it gonna be easy? No one ever said anything about easy. Easy and business ownership. Not even in the same conversation. Yeah, but it's totally possible. And I think that you grow a lot from being a business owner and like, professionally, personally, spiritually. And then your kids grow the most from watching you being a business owner. Like, look at you talking about your family business. I'm sure you're thinking about your parents, your grandparents, whoever. Yeah, you just. You just grew from just watching them operate with stress, with responsibilities, with being generous to the community around them, paying employees, how to pay somebody fairly. It's challenging. These are not easy things to do and good. We're not going after easy. We're going after growth, you know?
- [35:37]
A
Exactly. No, no, I. I think that's absolutely true. And like to sort of bring it back to what we're doing here. I get so much satisfaction seeing, like all these Venmo payments firing out to these little micro creators that are using our affiliate and referral technology. Like, I think there's like 3,000 folks that earn more than a thousand dollars every month on our platform. And that's like a meaningful amount of money. And these are micro creators that. This is just sort of like cash on the side mostly.
- [36:06]
B
But it's a dream. It's a dream that they have to eventually, maybe do something different with their life or grow this thing to be bigger in your life. It's. You're supporting a dream indirectly. Beautiful. Yeah, I feel it very much the same way every be. We. We do it internally in our company, where we actually have a report that comes out every Monday about how many creators, how many orders they actually created in the last seven days, 30 days and all time. And also how much revenue those was generated all time in 30 days and 90 days and so on. But yeah, over $3 billion our creators have created all time. It's becoming so impactful. You're like, wow, this is so fun. And we even got started. We're barely even started. But just the impact alone with that is like how many families are being fed, how many dreams are being fulfilled, how many doctors bills are being paid, you know what I mean? And we get to play a little tiny piece inside of this.
- [37:03]
A
Exactly.
- [37:03]
B
This massive story. So very cool.
- [37:05]
A
Yeah. And look, not like I can go down the rabbit hole of like the not not fan mail but the messages you get from someone every now and then about how their wife was recently had some medical bills pop in. So having this extra like 750amonth coming in that they have been making from sharing their their favorite athleisure wear using our links, these sorts of things they, they keep you going. Obviously it's a bit of a roller coaster ride businesses like ours but that sort of keeps some fuel in the engine, keeps things moving. It's the good stories.
- [37:38]
B
Completely agree with that Luke. Where can people find you? Where can people find the Rave follow.
- [37:43]
A
You follow your story the Rave co you can find us there. Otherwise find me on LinkedIn. Luke Yanton I think there's only two Luke Yantons on LinkedIn. I'm the one that looks like me. So don't like honestly don't hesitate to reach out. I'm always getting cold outreach especially from like New Zealand upand coming business folk who just want to bounce ideas off me. But look my, my door's always open. I love to jam. Don't, don't be a stranger. Feel free to reach out.
- [38:10]
B
Beautiful Luke, thank you so much for coming on man. It's been a pleasure and I'll look forward to talking to you soon. We'll do an ever be integration soon with with the Rave with email and also the store.
- [38:20]
A
Looking forward to it.
- [38:21]
B
Awesome. Thanks Luke. See you.
- [38:23]
A
Thanks.