Nick Sharma (0:01)

Welcome back to season 12 of limited supply, the only commerce podcast with unfiltered and refreshingly hot takes. I'm your host, Nick Sharma, and when I'm not recording, I'm behind the scenes scaling your favorite celebrity and consumer brands. Let's start talking all things direct to consumer Today's sponsor is Omnisend. Email marketing that actually makes sense. Omnisend gives you powerful features without the clunky, complicated and overpriced experience. Email SMS flows reporting everything you need. Learn more about how Omnisend stacks up against its competitors at NICK co. Omnisend all right, welcome back to the final episode of season 12 of Limited Supply. First of all, this is the 144th, I believe, episode of Limited Supply, which is a special number because in elementary school that's the biggest multiple you get to 12 times 12. Regardless, today we're going to do a fun episode again. As you know, we always do these listener mailbag episodes at the very end. So I'm going to basically spend the next probably 30 ish 40 ish minutes just diving deep into a bunch of questions. We got Again, these questions are all derived from the limited supply slack community. That's slack.limitedsupplypod.com or just try Nik Co Nik Co Slack. And both should get you to eventually to a landing page and then to a form where you put your info in. And then within 24 hours my guy Shin will get you in and you'll be in the Slack. That's where there's about five and a half thousand people now talking on a daily and weekly basis. There's a bunch of channels built out. We have a bunch of programming. We have guests who come in and do talks or webinars or Q&As and whatnot. So that's where these questions are all derived from. So if you want to participate and put your question in for the next time we do this, which will be probably season 13 episode 6, then go ahead and jump in the Slack and be on the lookout for that or just message Shin or myself directly in Slack and one of us will make sure that your question makes it to the next episode that we do. So without further ado, let's get started on the Q and A. First two questions actually come from Christy Brown and she says, how do you test the skill of a marketer in the day and age of such deep expertise in data? Well, it's a good question and you know, I don't know whether it is the, the fact that there's more Funding coming back into the world of consumer brands and direct to consumer and cpg, or whether it's the fact that there's a lot of M and A activity, which is then, you know, getting the entrepreneurs excited to come back and build again, or if it's just the fact, you know, maybe it's just the whole thing is just starting to work again. The flywheel is coming back. So. So basically the question from Christy is, you know, how do you test the skills of a marketer? I'll tell you a couple of things, Christy. The easy answer here is you need a good test, right? You have to have a test that is contextually relevant to what you need done. So it's hard to answer this off the top of my head, but I'll tell you kind of how I think about it in a couple of different ways. First off is you need to understand, like, what kind of marketer are you hiring, right? The term marketer. It's like saying security. You just need security. Well, you can have different types of security. You can have a bouncer at a door of a club. You can have a private security. You can have a former military guy, you can have an ex cop. But just like there's that. There's all these different types of marketers. And, you know, a lot of times I get a question from, let's say, a founder who's hiring a growth marketer, or maybe they're interviewing candidates. And a lot of times I can just look at the resumes and say, actually, this person's probably not right for you. This person is actually a good fit. They. This person's not. And the reason is I just look for patterns. So I try to first understand what is it from the actual brand that they need filled in this role of marketing, right? Is it that they need a growth marketer or a performance marketer? Is it a brand marketer? Is it somebody who is the founder? Actually the real CMO disguised. But this person just needs to be somebody who can keep up with the founder and execute ideas, because that's a very possible role. That's usually, you know, the first, some of the first two people hired on the marketing side. The other things to think about, you know, what kind of like, commonalities do you have in your brand versus where the person you're hiring from comes from? So, for example, I remember we were hiring people for, I won't say, but there's a portfolio company of mine we were hiring. We've probably interviewed, I don't know, four or five, six People and these are like final interviews. And a lot of times before I even get on these calls, I can just tell because I can look, I know for example, this product is a hardware product that you also have, has a subscription component and now it's not Jolie. Even though I mentioned that a lot. You know, I can look at the background and say, oh well, this person's only sold really high AOV products and they've done it at a brand that has a really good brand. So if you're selling really high aov, let's just say really high AOV cookware at a company that has a really strong brand, you probably don't have the chops it takes to do testing and learning and figuring out product market fit as an early growth marketing hire. Right. Because the circumstances that person walked into was the brand is already decently well known. We don't have to really fight for the brand to be known or for our ads to get attention in that way. And the product is high aov. So we can spend a lot, we can afford really high cac. Now how does that translate to somebody who's buying a hardware product for you know, call it $89 and then a subscription, a six month recurring subscription for $25. Right. It just does not relate because the economics are so vastly different. The way that that marketer is likely trained and programmed to do performance marketing is wildly different than what this new company may be looking for. And yes there are mark, there's 100% marketers that both or can flex both or can learn and you know, can go from one entire demographic and style and type of company to a completely different. However that is not, that is not like 95%. That's you're talking about 5% of people. You know, the person actually that comes to mind when I think of that is Connor. Who and I wasn't talking about Connor or Carraway or Gruens, but Connor from, from Caraway is now at Gruens and he's killing it. There's. And you can tell because if you click on their ads or if you look at their ads and see how they're changing, you can tell there's got the Connor touch there. But that said, it's very rare to find people like Connor. That's why Connor's in high demand. Most people, if they're used to selling apparel right at one spot, they're probably really good at selling high catalog stuff. If they're used to selling supplements on subscription, they're probably not going to be the best thing to sell, you know, a $41 time product because it's completely different way of advertising. So that's like my general philosophy on when you hire marketing talent, you have to really just make sure that these people understand the context they're going into, right? Not just the context of where they came from. And you as the person who's hiring need to be very meticulous about. Not only do you have to do a marketing test, right? And usually that's like basics. It's like help me figure out a customer acquisition problem or flow or you know, we have to do X and Y amount of days. How would you do it? The problem is like that's all just chatgpt able as a test. But what you really. I guess the other thing I would say too is if you remember in a previous episode, I go back to that concept of, you know, tell me about a time. So if you're hiring somebody, right, and you've got a subscription product, you could say, hey, tell me about a time where you started working at a brand or you've worked on a product that didn't have a lot of brand awareness and had a low CAC ceiling and was also a subscription product. And also, you know, you were acquiring first time customers break even or profitably and you want people to tell you about that time. Now, whether it's good or bad does not matter. You want to know that there is prior experience there. Okay, so a couple of the things I had in my notes, these, you know, you can't just look on LinkedIn and Twitter for good marketing talent. The best ones are not on there. Some of the best ones are, but most of the best ones are not. Also, you want to make sure that there's some sort of an X factor to a marketer you hire. So if you're just hiring a marketer who does the basics and they're good at this, that and the other thing, there's no real X factor. They're probably good in a larger organization or a place where there's a lot more structure and very clear. I hate this word, but very clear. Swim lanes. I hate swim lanes because I can never stay in them whether I'm swimming or I'm at the office. But you know the traits of a great marketer, right? Fundamentals behind analytics, copywriting, media buying, how do you shopify, how to merchandise, what's an offer look like? But you want to have somebody who kind of has like, who brings to the table that extra edge, right? Like if you're hired. If you're a founder or a CMO or you're a, you know, VP of marketing and you need somebody, you want somebody who's going to come in and own, you know, performance marketing. They can't just be good at performance marketing. They have to have that sort of edge as to that edge, the vision, that flare, that fire underneath them that's going to get them, you know, to basically take your brand to the next level. Curiosity and scrappiness are definitely key here, and those are a couple of things I always look for. You know, one thing that I wrote down as red flags when I'm hiring is people who take a lot of credit for things that they didn't do. So that's why I love the tell me about a time stories because you can hear if somebody's giving credit to other people on the team, it's probably a lot more real than when somebody's like, yeah, I did that myself or oh, that, yeah, I did that whole campaign or I did the rebrand or I did the web. It just, it's obviously a lie and you're not being slick by trying to say that you did everything yourself. All right, last thing I'll say there and then we'll move on for real. This has been a 10 minute answer, but last thing I'll say there is the best talent is not looking for jobs. So do not expect to find them on a LinkedIn Easy Apply post or, or for them to write into you or for them to be tagged. You know, you have to go out and find these people. My recommendation is to go find people who are at organizations that are potentially similar and have not been promoted in a while. So those are the people that are likely to jump. Another one from Christy is maximizing the use of AI for selling. So I'll give you my quick spiel on AI today. Actually, funny enough, 25 June I am hosting a AI summ at Webster hall in New York City. So if you're not there, then you should be at the next event, which you can find by going to Nick Co Q4, the letter Q, the number 4. That's our Q4 summit happening in September in New York City. But here's how I think about AI. I think generally AI is four stages, right? Stage one was Anonymous Indians. That's what I call it. Everybody else gets offended. I think it's legit. It's basically just if then statements or it was that there's a bunch of data being collected. It gets sent to a Data science team in India. It gets sent back, and that's the AI or where I really got it was Amazon's ghost stores. They did their Amazon Go stores and they had a thousand cameras at the top that would feed over into India. And there was literally anonymous Indians watching you check out and adding stuff to your order. The second wave is where I think we are finishing this wave right now, which is like mass consumer AI. This is your mom using ChatGPT. This is honestly, this is really any of the basic models. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google, Gemini, now Google Veo. If you haven't played around with VO3, it's insane. I would highly recommend spending 45 minutes doing that at night. This is consumer AI and this is things like, you know, asking questions. You can upload basic documents or now in ChatGPT, I believe if you have plus or pro, I know definitely for Pro, I think potentially for plus, you can actually connect other data sources. Your Dropbox, your Google Drive, your calendar, your HubSpot, all this other kind of stuff. So you can actually give it more data and context to, you know, make it more dangerous, which in turn for you makes life more convenient. We're going into what is now, I think, SaaS AI, which is the third wave. SaaS AI is companies like Motion or Triple Whale or, you know, basically any of these companies starting to incorporate AI within their platforms. And this is not meaning AI in the sense of if then statements, but is there a model that is learning things, that is researching things, that is analyzing things, that is making recommendations, I.e. understanding patterns, that is watching videos, that is listening to audio, that's producing, you know, producing things like briefs or reports or analysis, things like that. That is, that's what I see as the, the wave we're about to enter into. And that's honestly what I'm most excited and talking about today at the AI Summit, specifically around Triple Whale's AI product. I don't know if you've seen that, but it is probably like my jaws dropped on the floor after seeing the demo with Max. And also this, like the Triple Whale one, for example, is where you can actually start building agents. So, for example, we have an agent that we built or actually that Ari on my team built. It's called the Ariagent. And I believe it's a full creative analysis and creative brief writing based on past analytics and data. You know, you could have another one that does. Like, I had one that did full research yesterday and put together a bunch of reports for me. You, you can Almost think about like if you were to take what are routine tasks that employees are doing today? Analyzing creative, putting that into, you know, looking at the patterns, understanding them, putting it into a brief, sending it to the creative team. If that's an employee's job, that's now an AI agent, right? I think I saw something yesterday that said it best, which is your job today. Because of how advanced AI has now become, your job is 300% harder. Sean Frank, who said this, and I think I agree in the sense that a lot of these jobs are not a lot of these jobs, I'll say, because that's going to trigger people. But a lot of jobs can be replaced by AI and especially AI agents. And let me tell you something, AI agents is not one person or one instance, right? An AI agent is almost like a team captain or a chief of staff. And then underneath that you've got, you can create like yesterday I had an agent create 44 agents beneath that were all doing 44 different tasks and then brought them all together. So that's like, that's, that's where we're about to go. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that being activated. The last wave of this is open source AI. And open source AI is going to be interesting. I don't know specifically what that looks like yet, but this is what I imagine is going to be coming. And this is essentially people like myself can create a nickbot, which we actually already have and it's being tested now. You know, any, any, basically anybody with a following or an audience can create something. You know, maybe Sean Puri creates a storytelling AI. Like it just helps you write better angles or hooks for your stories, right? He can then probably lease that or sell that or do something where he's making money off of that. I think that's where open source AI is going. I think those are the four waves. It's basically anonymous Indians, consumer AI, SaaS, AI and open source AI. Now where do I think you can use this? I would start with triple whale. Triple whale and motion is probably where I'd start. Look, you can use Chat, GPT Pro, you can upload a bunch of stuff and you can ask it a lot of questions. And as long as you train that properly, you can actually get really good stuff out of that, especially on the pro side. However, the easiest places to start in my opinion is going to be triple. Well, and the reason, and this is not a shill or anything for triple. Well, the reason is because what they do that Most that every other AI company has not done, especially for E commerce, is they do a very good job at organizing and segmenting the data that feeds into Triple. Well, so whether it's your Shopify or Klaviyo, your store reports, your organic, social, your Amazon, whatever it is, right? This data all feeds in and it has to be organized in a way that Triple Whale can actually consume it and understand it and then its AI can help you. You know, whether it's write a media plan forecast or build a creative brief or whatever it may be, Triple Whale is the best at doing that kind of like data organization piece. And that is one of the biggest things that people need to learn about and focus on and think about is as you're moving toward a world with more and more AI, how are you making sure that the inputs are clean and organized and segmented? Because the AI is not going to know if you have messy inputs coming in, right? So if your data is not clean going in, then you're going to get bad outputs and you're not even going to know you have bad outputs. Outside of that, I would say, you know, the kind of the basic stuff you're probably already doing or talking about, you know, writing copy or giving you ideas to brainstorm off of, etc. But I would say the thing about AI is people are wondering, you know, when is AI going to come and take. It's already here, it's already taking over. I know numbers of companies who are replacing existing employees with AI because why would you add more overhead if you don't need it, right? Doesn't make any sense. Ever feel like your email marketing tools are working against you? The more you want to do, the more they start charging you. With Omnisend, customers can earn $68 on average for every dollar they spend. Why pay enterprise pricing for features you don't even use With Omnisend, it's so good, it's boring. Which is how it should be with email. No clunky dashboards, no unnecessary roadblocks. Just a platform that lets you focus on strategy and revenue. Learn more or try it for free at Nick co Omnisend. That's Nick Co Omnisend. Next question comes from Mike. He asks, does Nick have any Shopify themes he recommends? Well, I'll tell you, Mike, normally I'm not one to nominate themes because I do not like to be liable when things break. And by break I mean that. You know, a lot of times there are. If you buy a theme and a theme makes an update, you may Be in a bit of a pickle because your theme may update, but any sort of code or apps that you have on the front end, that update may mess something up there and vice versa, you might have a theme and you might have an app get updated that breaks the theme as a result. So as a result, I don't normally recommend themes. That said, we had a brand, huge brand that wanted to build a test like they wanted to launch a brand as a test for very cheap. So we built their website on a theme called Local L O C A L by Crown Themes Crown with a K, K, R O W n themes. It's 360 bucks, but it comes with a lot of things that you would need and you can work with the designer to customize it. So it's got all the basics in there. But then you add your branding. You know, you want to make sure you have, you update colors, you update fonts, you update photography. That should get you probably 80% of the way there. The real things that you can't do in a theme are like custom ux, you know, add any sort of custom sections, which I guess you could, but you would then have to still develop. So it kind of beats the point of buying a theme. But highly recommend it. And if you have any questions, they have really good support too. So I've reached out to them and they respond almost immediately. Next question's from Veer. Have you seen brands effectively that is profitably using only static or image ads, no videos till what revenue do you think it's possible? Veer, let me tell you something. I have and I think the problem, if you're asking about this, is that you're not looking hard enough. You're likely looking at all the brands that everybody talks about, right? The Ridges, the Jones Road, the Groons, the Caraways, the Hexclads. But you're not looking at brands that are doing 5 to 30 mil. A lot of those are running statics and tens or hundreds of statics. A lot of them are using AI. In fact, I've seen a lot of brands using AI video now. So they're just making stuff. With Veo, Vo makes 8 second clips. In Vo3, you can't stitch clips together because it doesn't let you upload a prior screen shot from the last frame of V of the prior video. But in VO2, if you don't have sound and you're just getting B roll and you need 30 seconds of B roll, you can create all that in there and stitch together and keep the same faces and whatnot. AI statics is big, AI videos is big. And then, oh, the last piece is a lot of ugc. So whether it's, you know, UGC you're getting commissioned from creators, external creators, whether they're UGC people or people who just deem themselves to be content creators for brands, which honestly, I hate, I think that is some of the corniest content. And those same faces that end up across six or seven brands, it's very corny. Instead, I would recommend if, you know, honestly, you as the marketer or somebody on the team. I used to make videos and ads all the time when I worked at Hint and just do it myself. I remember even buying a Sony camera and I got in trouble for it because I was so frustrated about waiting for. Waiting to get assets all the time. When I had a white wall in the office and I had the bottles in a fridge, I could spray them, get that condensation. Look, take the photo, I could have the thing edited and live within 30 minutes. And here we were paying, you know, studios and professional photographers and all this stuff. So if you need, like, UGC stuff, you know, even if it's just simple content to be made, try to make it yourself. You can have an employee do it. You know, I think the best. Some of the best ads we always run are just founder UGC ads. If it's helpful, you can DM me on Twitter. I'll send you like a template or a brief outline creative brief slash outline template for founder ugc. But otherwise, yeah, you should totally try statics. Like, look, the thing is, statics have a lower CPM out the gate, so you already actually have a better shot. It's on you to decide two things. One, how well is your brand received when somebody sees it? And two, how good is the creative to get the click? That's the only two things you have to focus on when it comes to ads. It's not on you to sell the product in the ad. It's not on you to get the conversion in the ad. You just need for somebody to see your ad and to think, oh, I think I've seen that before, or I think I've heard somebody talk about that before. Or I think that's a cool brand. Or that is a cool brand. What are they selling? And then part two is, is the ad good enough to earn a click? So if it's not, I would. I like. What I normally do on Meta is basically say, all right, let's look at cpm. Let's look at click through rate. Let's look at or sorry, cpm, then frequency, then click through rate, then cost per click and then view content. And then cost per view content and then add to cart. Cost per. Add to cart. Initiate checkout. Cost per. Initiate checkout, purchase or subscription or if you have a custom conversion event and then the cost for that. And what this lets you do is just very clearly look at the dashboard and obviously it's not 100% accurate because all those numbers that Facebook ever shows are just modeled. It's just their own math. But it'll give you a good directional picture of understanding where is the drop off happening? Is it that people are click, you know, is your CPM super high? Okay, then whatever you're sharing is not aligning with the audience. It's going to. Is your CTR high, but your CPM is low? Well, that means that you're targeting the right people, but your ad's not good enough to get a click. Is your CTR high And your CPC is low. But then. And your view content is high, but then your add to cart slow. Well, then you're just doing a bad job explaining once people get to the site. So look at that and analyze where exactly it is. Right? A lot of this, a lot of times people run ads and it doesn't work. And they're just like, it doesn't work. If you remember that movie Get Hard by Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart, they're trying to figure out like, okay, where did this money go? Who stole all this money? And Kevin Hart just writes it on the board and points to it. And that's what I'm trying to do here. Open the board, right? Open that list of the funnel and ads manager that view and then just look at it and point to where the drop off is. That's what you gotta fix. So it might not even be that it's your static ads. It might be that your product page sucks. It might be that your checkout sucks. It might be that the messaging in your checkout is not strong enough or it's not iterating the benef again. It might be that what's promised in the ad does not match what's promised on the landing page or the product page. So focus on those things. There's definitely a way to make ads work, especially static ads. You have to just know why they're not working. Right. Okay. Ross asks for brands in the 20 to 50 million a year range. What is the best influencer strategy that you've seen work? Well, I would say that for brands in the 20 to 50 million range, 20 to $50 million range, there's a few things that I think work well and I'm going to just go through all of them and give you my two cents on where I think they work best. So the first one is YouTube organic sponsorships. So this is like you're watching Graham Stephan, right, the finance YouTuber and you see a Morning Brew ad at the beginning. That's something that Morning Brew paid for to be at the beginning of the video. They also pay to have their URL at the top of the description, right? Something like morning brew.com Graham maybe the beauty of those is that those campaigns do really well in their flight time. Now you have to obviously work with a good consultant who knows what creators move revenue and ideally has a relationship with them so you get better pricing or an agency that does the same. In the past, I've always worked with Sentis C E N T U S. I don't know if they're still in business. I hope they are. They're the best. They're also who actually Morning Brew uses. But if you run these the right way, usually within two weeks you see a very fruitful, like very fruitful analytics, right? Whether it's clicks, signups, installs, downloads, conversions, subscriptions, et cetera. So YouTube organic sponsorships with creators do really well. And the other reason they do well is after the first two weeks, once it pays you back for the next two years. As long as the video is evergreen, meaning if Graham's videos talks about, you know, how to save, how to understand how cash back works across different credit cards, right, that's sort of an evergreen video. That video is going to keep getting played for the next four or five years and everybody's going to still see the Morning Brew ad and think that they should go click it or they are going to end up there. And that is exactly what happened. Now, on the B2B side of influencers, it's basically the same thing as like a podcast, right? Especially if they have a video component. The long form content is where you've got amazing relationships with an audience. And it's also the reason there's higher trust is because there's a lot more work that's put in honestly on both sides as the consumer of it and also as the producer of it. Next influencer strategy is the easiest one, is just whitelisting authentic content. So how do you make authentic content with creators, right? Send them the product, make sure they like it, then decide to Run the ads or do a partnership together and then whitelist that stuff with them. Honestly, the reason a lot of the big celebrity whitelisting stuff doesn't work is because it's so obvious those are just paid for versus something that's a lot more authentic and then whitelisted. Next one's a variation of that, which is you seed a lot of product to affiliates or creators who are accepting free product, then you ask them to post content, they post it, they can earn affiliate off of the content that they post and you can go and put money behind any of the ads or any of the content that does above the organic baseline of engagement. So let's say organic posts get like 12,000 views on average. You know, if this one's getting 60,000 views or even 25,000 views, you might want to say, hey, we should go spark that. And you can give a small percentage of ad spend to the creator as a fee for basically using their content in an ad. Next one is just a variation of that too, which is just, you know, you don't do product seeding and sparking ads. You just sort of build out an affiliate program with TikTok or something like social snowball off of TikTok. These ones are a little out of the box, not so whitelisty. But one is co branded products. So these I don't know if I would recommend at a 20 to 50 million mark. I think you're generally focused on growth for the, for the, like the core products and the core brand. So maybe it's a discount or a flash sale or something related to the influencer. But co branded products are possible and I've seen them do well. Next one's advertorials. So you could have the advertorials be coming from an influencer's own blog or website. You know, I don't know how many influencers these days have websites or blogs, but it works. And I know there's a company called Grapevine that does this where they, they started with my subscription addiction, but now they've got like 3,000 creators who all have blogs, Instagrams, Facebooks, et cetera. You can create content with them and then whitelist across the entire thing. And then the last one is simple, but more on the receiving end of the whitelisting, which is just dedicated merchandising. So having a landing page that calls out the influencer name, that calls out why, you know, why is this influencer doing a partnership here? What's the connection? What's the relationship? You know, is this authentic. Is there a real reason that this person's working with this brand? But dedicated merchandising, you know, a nice landing page, a bundle, an offer or something like that, a custom coupon code, you know, like Nick20, for example, goes a long way, especially with the audience of influencers. All right, so that's all the time we have for today. I realize we only got through like four or five questions, so there's still a lot left here. I think what I may do is squeeze some of these questions into the first or second episode of season 13. So if there's any other questions that you want answered, drop them in Slack. Otherwise I've still got about seven questions here. I'll choose the best five or so out of these to start with and we'll go from there. But this was an amazing season. Season 12, we brought on more people, got a lot of great response from the people we had on. So I'm planning to bring back a few more heavy hitter guests. Or not bring back, but go and scour and find and lock in a few heavy hitter guests to bring on. Specifically in that range of 30 to 80 million dollars in revenue. I find that that is kind of the biggest evergreen sweet spot in terms of, you know, if you're a brand that's doing 150 million or you're doing 5 million, the advice of that growth stage is usually very helpful for both sides. So I'm going to work on that. I'll be back soon for season 13. Don't miss me too much. If you do, you can always email me and@sharma.com I appreciate all the emails that I get from you guys and you can also find me on Twitter R. Sharma. If you're not already subscribed to the newsletter, go to Nick Co email to sign up for the newsletter that goes out every Sunday. And until then, I hope you have a great time navigating this world of e commerce. I believe I'm only out for a week, so I'll see you in about a week. Have a great weekend. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG retail and e commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.