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Nick Sharma
Welcome to season 11 of limited supply, a place for hot takes on what it's really like building and scaling consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. Let's get into today's episode. As a brand, you know that you're spending hard earned dollars driving traffic to your site. The problem is 98% of that traffic is anonymous. You don't know who they are and once they leave, it's hard to find them again. There's a new tool called Instant that helps you identify these visitors and get in front of them. Instant gives you another chance to convert these shoppers into buyers using their RET marketing platform. You can use their platform to send about two to three times more site abandonment emails, which you already know generates meaningful revenue and build audiences to retarget on meta. Double your abandoned flow revenue and increase your roas with Instant. Want to see it in action? Sign up by March 26th to get 50% off your first month. Just go to Instant One Limited to claim that 50% off. That's Instant One Limited foreign. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host Nick Sharma and today we're going to talk all about subscriptions, the subscription laws that are changing and what's going to be rolling out in April. All the things you need to make sure you include in your emails and your backend and your messaging on your PDPs. And we're going to talk offshore hiring. You know, we're not going to talk too holistically about offshore hiring because everybody kind of knows what that is. But I'm gonna actually just give you the exact hiring playbook that I use when finding really sharp offshore talent. So sit back, relax. Hopefully you're at the gym, maybe you're just chilling on a couch, maybe you're on a drive. In either case, we're about to dive into it and I hope you're ready. Okay, so the first thing I wanna talk about is offshore hiring. And this is something that a lot of times gets a weird misconception in our industry because, you know, offshore has like a negative connotation, but it's really not that bad. I'll admit I used to be in the camp of being kind of in the offshore is not that great bucket. But I think that that was largely a thing that was created mainly because I didn't know how to properly onboard talent that was not, you know, US based talent or kind of like the normal way that I'd previously hired. And so the first few hires that I made that were offshore were actually you know, one of them was, or two of them were developers in the Philippines. One of them was kind of like an assistant in the Philippines. I'd used a third service to also have an assistant in the Philippines, which that one worked out well. And then I'd also hired somebody to do some customer service style stuff and that one didn't work out well. And it just kind of left me thinking like, either I'm clearly missing something and didn't want to invest the time to figure it out, or, you know, it just doesn't work. So fast forward a few months or a couple years actually, and my friend Austin who started Morning Brew sends me a text and basically says that he just hired a CFO from this company called Oceanz and that you know, he's going to buy into this company and that I should give them a shot at trying to revive or redeem my thoughts on offshore hiring. So, you know, I basically made a job description that I thought was nearly impossible to find. I was like, this person's got to know Shopify, they've got to know Facebook, Facebook ads, they've got to know Figma design, they've got to have an iPhone so I can text them and facetime them. They've got to be down to work late Friday night, early Saturday morning or late Saturday night if for some reason I ever need that. And you know, they have to be like obsessed with this job. And I basically thought I created an impossible job description. And then all of a sudden I get the resume for Ramiz, who's my assistant now, he's in Sri Lanka. He was the former head of E Commerce at Ogilvy in Sri Lanka and knows everything that I had laid out and is now my right hand guy for basically anything I need to do. And so with Ramees, I ended up then hiring another probably four or five people from oceans in Sri Lanka. And we've built out a nice team there. They all hang out on the weekends, which is awesome. They get to go to dinner and, and kind of like create a culture there, which is awesome. And I soon will go there and spend time with them too. But we've also now started to think, okay, what are some other roles we could try to bring offshore? And I'm always a fan of starting to test these things just with myself or with any kind of side projects I have going on. And so we just did this with a role, a design role for me just to kind of have a designer personally for all the different side things that I do. And you know, that way I don't have to lean on the Sharma brand's design team, which are like super senior UX UI people. And so I wanted to go through basically what my whole hiring process was in order to find this person. And this hiring process is something that we've landed on kind of by way of going through this process with, you know, hiring a handful of people. And, you know, now we'll probably end up hiring 10 to 15 people that are outside of the US this year between South America and Sri Lanka. And if anybody wants to get in touch with the recruiter that I use and run this entire process through for the South America stuff, you can go to nick.co South America. And if you fill out that form, then my guy will basically reach out to you from that form. He only works with a few clients, so fill out the form and then, you know, he'll reach out from there. Okay, so. So I basically outlined this process that works well for me and works well for us. And it's been used by myself. A few of my portfolio companies have used it and also hired very successfully. And the beauty is that with this process, you can also hire quickly. Like we, meaning myself and the others who have now used this process with the same recruiter. We've done this in two weeks, we've had our first hire in and four weeks by the second hire. So the process kind of goes like this. You start with a very specific. Well, first you start with a recruiter. And the reason I prefer to use a recruiter is that with a recruiter, you, you know, like, if you're, if your boots on the ground in New York or LA or wherever you are, Austin, you kind of know the culture. Even if you're really anywhere in the us you understand this culture and kind of how things work, Right? But if you're talking about different countries that maybe you've never even entered, like, I've never gone to Brazil, I've never gone to Sri Lanka. Not only do you not know their kind of local culture, but you just don't want to be in a spot where you could ever be taken advantage of or, you know, end up meeting the wrong people. You end up getting scammed in some way. Like, there's just those kinds of things that come to mind. And so that's why I prefer to use a recruiter. You know, I know people who have now built a team of, you know, 30 plus or 10 plus or 20 plus in these different places, and now they'll sort of have somebody who's Like a chief of staff for, for offshore or they might have like somebody locally who's like the, you know, the local chief of staff in Sri Lanka. Ramis kind of plays that role for me where, you know, he's kind of like the, the go to guy for anything that somebody might need while they're in Sri Lanka. Okay. So that's why I end up choosing to work with a recruiter or even a company like Ocean's, because, you know, they're, they've vetted the talent, they're basically going out and headhunting. They're not just, you know, you're not just finding people who are looking for work, which is, I think, also how you find some of the best talent. So start with the recruiter. Next step there is to create a very specific job description. So what do I mean by this? It's not your typical job description that you might post on LinkedIn. It's going to have a lot more color and a lot more context because this is something you're giving to a recruiter. You can actually think of this kind of as like a brief. And the way that I like to think about writing briefs, really, any sort of brief, whether it's a creative brief for ads or in this case, you know, recruiting brief. I like to put as much context on the page as possible. So, for example, if I know that I'm hiring, you know, for this role, not only do I want to make sure I give background on the company and where we're based and what we do, but I also want to include, you know, how many people are at the company, you know, how large is it, how small is it, why should somebody be excited? What kind of output should this person expect on a daily basis? If they're a designer, maybe it's, you know, X amount of assets being produced. If they're a video editor, maybe it's, it's X amount of videos being produced. You know, if they're, whatever it may be, try to quantify the output and ideally on the, you know, upper end of that, because what you want to do is make sure that, you know, you're not giving context for somebody else coming in and you have misaligned expectations of what you expect them to do versus what they expected they would be doing. The next thing I like to include is the hours and the time zone. You definitely want some sort of overlap with your own time zone. I'm in Eastern, most of our teams in Eastern or Central, we have a couple people in Pacific. So most of our stuff Aligns with Eastern time. And there's definitely some hours where people are not fully on all the time. But that's because, you know, we don't want people to be up through the entire night. And so just making that very clear on the brief is also important also how you plan to communicate with them on a daily basis. So whether it's slack, whether it's text, whether it's imessage, whether it's Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime, email, whatever it may be, make it very clear how you plan to communicate on a daily basis, how your company communicates. For us, that's basically slack for 99% of stuff. And anybody who's working directly with me is probably also using imessage a good amount. You want to basically treat this like a brief, you know, in the same way that you would give examples or mood boards or link to other things that, you know, could help give additional context. The more the merrier. Think of this as like giving inputs to an AI prompt. Right? The more stuff you can put in, the better it's going to be able to go and recruit somebody for you. Now, once you go about this, you know, their recruiter is going to obviously have some questions. They've likely already hired for all of these roles for other companies, which is the best part. So they already know kind of what to look for. They may have candidates that they think are already good. And what I like to do as a second step of this process is basically ask for candidate video submissions. So throughout this entire process, the goal is to maximize efficiency, right? So you want to make sure that you can, you know, the worst thing about hiring is having to be on every single phone call all the time. And so what I like to do here is just based off the brief that I give the recruiter and the people that they find, I want them to record a quick video and almost like a video submission saying, hey, my name is Nick, and I'm interested in this role of, you know, designer, and this is why. And, you know, here's where I live and here's who I am, and this is what I've done before, and this is why I'm going to be a good fit. And here's some of my hobbies, and, you know, I hope to work together one day. Something like that basically allows you to maximize efficiency by making this process asynchronous. Right, where you can watch the video. If you're still satisfied and still excited about this candidate, then you can move them forward to the next step. Now, the next step is a very easy to follow test project. So the same way that we just went all out on putting everything on a brief, you create a brief for a test project, something that they can do within one to two days and turn around and send back for a designer. I basically created a brief for a new brand and you know, it was a skincare brand and basically said, here are the value props here, the benefits, you know, here are the assets here, the font file, all that kind of stuff. You know, put together a wireframe, put together a UI design, and then give me a prototyped figma file that I can look at and scroll through and see the animations and all that. That came back in about two days. And then along with that comes a loom video that explains the whole project. So they should walk through what's the project they did, how long did it take them, what are the tools and the processes and the softwares they used, any sort of roadblocks they came across, any interesting things they found out as they were putting it together or things they want to call out. So the third step is then the test project. The fourth step is the loom explainer. So now those come back to you, both of those, a loom video and a video to the actual project. You review it, see if you've got any questions for them. If you do, you can ask them over email. And then for this role specifically, we ended up doing a secondary project which was that it was more of a, in a, in a condensed time. So, you know, me personally, I tend to do things where I might say, hey, it's 4:00, I need this deck by 6:00. Or, you know, hey, it's basically I just, sometimes I just need things done at the last second. And so we added actually a second part to this, which was, hey, we're going to tell you that at this time you need to be online to do a test with us. And then we give them the test and it's basically like, hey, you've got two hours, three hours to turn this around, do it as quick as you can. Try to keep all of the standards up and all of the execution still at a high level. And this allows you to then understand whether if somebody can turn around something in a fast environment, this step might be different for you. It might be that it might not be that you need a ton of time, it might be that they have to go do research. Whatever it may be, you can figure out how this step is kind of different, but it's basically like a secondary project where you're taking the worst case scenario of what they might be put into and then basically stress testing that. And the reason I like to do that is it just lets you see whether or not somebody can handle that. Ask early on versus you know, you don't want to have this issue later where you need something and then all of a sudden you can't get it and you wish you tested for this earlier. Now once you get both the test projects done or just the single test project done, then you watch the video, look at the project. If you're happy with that, then go into the interview. So this is a proper zoom or Google Meet or FaceTime, whatever you prefer. Nothing too formal. You've already basically seen the work and you've kind of gotten to know them asynchronously through this process. So this is kind of where you want to lean in and just make sure that they're a cool person, a normal human, a culture fit. You can ask them questions, they're going to ask you a bunch of questions. Probably going to want to know, you know, what's the team like, what's the environment like? They have oftentimes, at least in my experience, when you talk to candidates from South America or Sri Lanka, they've actually worked with American companies before. So they might have questions about how you go about certain things or how you may do things or you know, what is PTO and what are days off and what are hours. So just make sure you're prepped with all of that kind of stuff. The next step is to go to the offer letter and the onboarding. So, you know, standard process. I would recommend you work with your attorneys specific to employment and make sure that you know, they have any sort of country specific language or guidelines in order to protect yourself or your employees and just to make sure that you're not doing anything the wrong way. It's very easy to do things the wrong way. So I always recommend just checking in with your attorneys. You know, one, one or two hours of their time is a lot cheaper than paying for it in another way down the line. Second thing is, as they're getting onboarded, I would recommend using therapy. It's this new payroll company we found that just came out of yc. They've been great. They live in our Slack channel and they've helped us do all the heavy lifting to make sure everybody's paid on time. So that's who we use for all of our international payroll. And then the last piece is just ongoing management and incentives. There's this misconception that offshore talent is, you know, it's just different. But in reality, the best advice I have is just don't treat them like they're offshore talent. Just treat them like a normal US based remote employee. You know, no one is technically. Well, technically everybody who's out of the office could be considered offshore. And that's kind of the way to think of it. Everybody's just remote. And you know, as long as you get good, talented people who are genuinely good human beings, then you know, everybody is just like a normal employee. So the same way you do promotions or incentives or, you know, company parties or, you know, doing things that contribute to company culture, you do all of the same stuff and it works out perfectly. If you've got any questions on any of the offshore stuff, shoot me a DM on Twitter or shoot me an email. Always happy to help. And again, if you want to use my recruiter, just go to Nick Co SouthAmerica and fill out that Google form. Hundreds of brands like Garrett Popcorn, July Luggage and Selfie Leslie are making six figures in incremental revenue through Instant Supercharged Retention marketing platform. It takes 15 minutes to go live and you see results just within days. You most likely already send site abandonment emails, but because most of the traffic on your site is anonymous, you don't get to email 98% of these site visitors. Instant gives you another chance to convert these visitors into buyers and send two to three times more cart abandonment emails than you were before, helping you double your abandoned flow revenue. Want to see it in action? Sign up by March 26th to get 50% off your first month. Just go to Instant One Limited. That's Instant One Limited. Next thing I want to talk about to round out this podcast episode is I want to talk about subscription. So subscription is actually a line item that we do a lot with at Sharma Brands to optimize for getting more subscribers out of your traffic, getting more share of subscribers from new customers, reducing churn countering any sort of payment issues from subscribers you know, who have dead cards even just thinking about how we surprise and delight, keep subscribers happy, treat them differently, et cetera. So I just want to go through some thoughts that I've compiled and also some new laws around subscription that are about to hit in the next couple of weeks. So let's start with what makes a good subscription business. So what makes a good subscription business to me is basically something that has a recurring need or habit. So something that customers use and run out of on A regular basis. Coffee, supplements, skin care, pet food, personal care. If people love a product and run through it, you've definitely got an opportunity for a subscription business. What's next? A seamless customer onboarding and experience. So something that's very easy to sign up to, which most people are pretty good at this part, easy to manage. I'd say 35% of people are good at this part, easy to cancel. I'd say like 25% of people are good at this part. So easy to sign up, easy to manage, easy to cancel. That's what creates a high ltv customer around subscription. You know, contrary to what you may think about making subscribers, making it easy for subscribers to cancel. If it's hard to cancel or it's, you know, glitchy or just not easy to use, you're not going to have a happy customer. And a happy customer is a long term customer. So I would recommend doing that. There's also some laws which I'll talk about which are about to kick in that are going to force you to be, you know, much better about this. The next thing is a cadence for subscription. Most apps offer 14 days, 30 days, 60 days and 90 days. Nine times out of 10, I'll tell you, 30 days is all you need. It's very, very, very rare that you need anything more or less. There's some exceptions like, you know, HelloFresh, if you're getting food delivery or dog food delivery, you know, depending on how much how big your dog is or how big your family is. And I think HelloFresh has to deliver every week. I'm not sure about most pet food brands, but there's exceptions there. Also wine clubs, you know, you don't want to make it look like you're encouraging people to have a subscription to drinking. So a lot of wine clubs will do every quarter, basically every 120 days. But for most brands that exist, 30 days is pretty much perfect. And for brands that you know, are not, they didn't fall into that bucket. I just mentioned at the beginning around what makes a good subscription business. You know, what does a membership look like? This is something that we've seen take off quite a bit. A lot of brands are starting, starting to play around with this membership model. And so I went and found three brands that are doing membership well. I believe they're actually all powered by Inveterate, which is what we've used before also for membership. You know, basically they've got three brands that I looked at and took some notes on. So Bilt is A clothing brand, kind of like Cuts, they make men's apparel. So they charge 50 bucks a year. And every purchase you do as a member, you get 20% off. And then you get free shipping and returns, which is might be table stakes. You get member exclusive discounts which might be, you know, table stakes and then priority customer service. So basically for 50 bucks a year, you get 20% off when you purchase and you know, if you make enough purchases, basically I think if you make over 250 bucks a year in purchases through Bilt, that's worth it for them. Liquid IV, I pulled up because I remember they had this $5 membership which had a ton of members and it's now free actually. So if you go to their site, the Liquid IV membership is now free. It's now converted. So basically your main benefit of being a member, which is free, is you get 2% cash back, which can then be redeemed as Liquid IV purchases, which I thought is genius. That's basically the Costco model, except there's no membership fee and then you get early access to new flavors of products. Again, table stakes. Then I was thinking, okay, there's got to be one that has like a subscript membership business that is just like, if you see it, you would think, this is so good. How can I not do this? And the brand I found literally says on its landing page for the membership, it says, the best benefits are so good, the membership pays for itself. And that's Dr. Brandt. It's 59 a year and you get 20% off all orders, all one time orders. If you're a member, you get 25% off all subscriptions. You get a free gift at sign up which is A$30. I think it was like a microdermabrasion product, something like that, but it was a $30 value, which again, if you're a skincare brand or you know, Liquid IV could probably benefit from this too. You know, you've got this high margin between what it costs to make the product and what it sells for. In skincare, you know, average margin might be 90%. So that $30 value actually only cost them $3 to make, but they can arbitrage the spread of 27. You also get $20 cash back every three months plus 10% cash back on each order. And then you get priority customer service. So this is actually a. Dr. Brandt's a phenomenal example of building a membership that is very much like a no brainer. You know, somebody would see this added to their cart and think, wait a second, I'm going to add 59 bucks, but I'm about to get $30 back now and then I'm about to get 10% off this order and then I'm about to get 20%, $20 in cash back and then I'm going to get 20% off the order plus 10% cash back. If I'm reading that right. That sounds amazing. And you know, it's pretty obvious why, why that seems to do well. The next piece of subscription to focus on, which a lot of people don't, is churn reduction. So figuring out what kind of software you can use. There's a few different options to help reduce churn for payments and cancellations. Most subscription apps will actually have this in by default. So you know when somebody goes to cancel, do you have questions or options for them to skip a current order versus cancel it? Or swap a product to try something new versus cancel it or add a free gift to incentivize them to stay versus cancel it. The other one is the payment token. So if somebody's payment token or card fails because the payment token is no longer valid, do you have any mechanisms in place to continue running that card and obtain the money that you're owed? A lot of subscription companies I believe don't do this by default because it's kind of more of a gray area thing. But I know of some brands who have either built something custom to try to do that just keep running the card until it goes through or they figure out other ways around it. But definitely something to look into because a lot of brands are obviously doing that and getting through those issues content wise. I think that content to subscribers should be different than your one time purchasers. So the stuff you put out through early access, the stuff you put out as promotions, anything you send out on email or sms, I think that should all be different when you're speaking to subscribers versus when you're speaking to just one time purchasers. It doesn't mean that you don't have the same content, but you just make sure you address them differently or you know, make sure that they get something earlier than the one time purchaser. You want to basically make them feel like they're being treated like a VIP as a subscriber. In the past I've even run ads to audiences of people who are subscribers to thank them for subscribing in a video views campaign because that's where CPMs are super low and you can just choose the exact audience to go and target from there. Okay, now last thing I want to go through is upcoming subscription laws that are starting to hit from the FTC in April 2025. So there's a number of new rules starting to hit and they'll basically hit businesses that fall into these categories. So one is free trials. Either they sell a free trial mainly just that they sell a free trial into a subscription. The second one is subscriptions that automatically renew without prompting customers. So, you know, that might be something like your alarm system at home. You know, I don't think, I don't, I don't have a home alarm system because I don't live in the suburbs. But I don't think ADT is sending out, you know, notification emails to all their customers saying that they have an upcoming charge for their subscription to adt. The next one is called pre notification plans, which means any offers made after an initial purchase, I'm assuming with the hold of a payment token, AKA post purchase upsells and you know, basically post purchase upsells in this case. And then the fourth one is a continuity plan. So this is basically what normal subscriptions are in. In the context of direct to consumer, it's billing that happens continuously at regular intervals with no set end date. So what is now going to be required? So one is, the first thing is explicit consent. So someone needs to check a box confirming that they're opting into a subscription. You have to see this now or sorry, not. You have to, you start to see this now on Shopify Checkout, where they have the messages at the bottom on the left side where you know, you have to check a box to confirm that you're signing up for a subscription. Or there's just messaging saying that, you know, are you aware that you're signing up for a recurring payment? The second one is that subscriptions now have to be very easy to cancel. So we've talked about how the New York Times used to make you call and go through so many hoops to cancel their subscription. That's not going to be illegal. If you cannot cancel as easy as you subscribe, you're creating a liability and potentially creating a class action suit against your brand. The third one is transparent disclosures. So make your information about the subscription very obvious. How often is it charging? What amount is it going to renew at? If it's a trial to subscription, what will that renew at? You know, once the trial rolls into a subscription and when. You also have to make the subscription portal for customers very easy to understand, easy to navigate and easy for them to see their own customer and billing information. The last one is reminders and notifications. So most subscription apps in our ecosystem already do a good job of this, where they've got an email that goes out in advance of a subscription charge, but you now have to send a notification in advance of a charge if you don't. They also need to include direct links to easily cancel a subscription if a customer wants to. And lastly, if somebody cancels, there needs to be a clear confirmation email that goes back to the customer and clearly outlines that the subscription was canceled and what the effective end date of that subscription is. So those are a few things. I'll definitely put those out in a newsletter just to make sure everybody gets their hands on those and is not blindsided by any of those. But those are the two things I wanted to go through mainly today, offshore and subscriptions. So I hope today's episode was helpful. Next week's episode is also going to be a fun one. We've got four or five fun topics that we're going to cram in there. If you've got any questions, as always, hit me up on email, hit me up on Twitter if you've got any feedback, things you want to hear more of, less of, et cetera. Do the same and I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on cpg, retail and E commerce. 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