← Limited Supply
Loading summary
Transcript60 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to season 12 of limited supply, the only commerce podcast with unfiltered and refreshingly hot takes.
- [00:08]
B
I'm your host Nick Sharma and when.
- [00:09]
A
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. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Today is also going to be a slightly different podcast. I am taking a talk that I did at ECOM north in Canada, which you could go to ecomnorth.com right now and sign up for the next conference. But it was an amazing conference. I think it was the first one they actually put on. They're putting on the next one this year and they brought together all the biggest brands of Canada in one room that a bunch of speakers, myself included, I got the honor to speak in the morning and it was a great talk. It was very insightful. A lot of people had great things to say and a few of you had asked me to put it out here on Limited Supply after last week's episode. So I wanted to go ahead and do that. If you're listening to this on Wednesday, I'll be in Dallas at Sub Summit. If you're there, say hi. And hopefully also the Knicks won last night, but I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you have any questions as it relates to the talk or Ecom north, feel free to DM me and as always, you can DM me with anything that I can be helpful with.
- [01:43]
C
So Nick and I met in New York not that long ago actually and he's got an incredible story. He comes, he's in the E commerce world, but he comes from the tech world. He never went to college, got his start in San Francisco during the tech boom. You joined a beverage company and you have Sharma Brands which is just doing incredible work. Why don't you give a brief intro by yourself?
- [02:06]
B
Sure. So my, my two minute backstory is I was a terrible student in high school as I think many entrepreneurs probably are at some point. I started doing social media management for different celebrities including Pitbull and Priyanka Chopra. I actually a Canada based band called Magic. They had that song Rude and that parlayed into right after high school finding an ad tech company that was Launching cold, emailed the founder, got myself an internship, then got myself a full time job there. So I skipped deferred college for a year and I worked there. And then the plan was to go back, but I never did. Spent two years at the ad tech company, learned everything about advertising, bidding, programmatic advertising, how publishers work, et cetera, et cetera, and then ended up basically freelancing, doing media buying as a freelancer for different publishers, different brands. One of those brands was a beverage company and ended up going full time with that beverage company called Hint. It's a flavored water company based in San Francisco. Then spent two years there building that e commerce business to tens of millions of dollars. And that's when I learned the word DTC or direct to consumer, and spent two years there. Then got brought out to New York, joined an agency and then ended up starting my own probably a few months later. And that's what Sharma Brands is today.
- [03:32]
C
Sweet. You started that five and a half years ago, right?
- [03:35]
B
Correct.
- [03:36]
C
Now you guys are at 60 plus employees. Brands like Feastables, Leon Gomez Beckham. Like walk us through how that whole thing happened.
- [03:46]
B
I mean, you know, initially I was always very intentional about making sure that the, the brands that we work with are prominent logos. Right. The idea was that in five years from now, if I go raise a fund, I should just be able to open a binder of logos. And that should be the reason that you want to invest in this fund. I don't know if I'll end up doing that, but that kind of chase or that journey has definitely helped us make sure that we stay working with the prominent brands. I think also from a service standpoint, we, you know, like I always talk about this Sharma red carpet that our clients here, and that's essentially this idea that whatever our clients need, we'll figure out, you know, an answer. And we also have this, this rule internally. It's the five minute rule. So if a client messages us on slack during the weekday before midnight Eastern time, we owe them a response within five minutes. So I think a lot of the things that we do on the client services side, the red carpet, the five minute response, the fact that we do a lot of this growth under one roof, you know, we're not sharing data with multiple agencies, makes it very attractive to celebrity brands.
- [04:48]
C
Five minutes.
- [04:50]
B
Five minutes. Yeah, it's legit, dude.
- [04:52]
C
I don't know if I would want to work for you. So you're one of these people that has not just built a successful agency, you built a personal brand around you, you know, you're like a celebrity in the E commerce world. Was that always the intention? Did you want to create a Nick Sharma profile in addition to Sharma Brands, or did that just organically shape up and curious if somebody else in the audience wants to create their own personal brand? What advice you got for them?
- [05:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think the people who intentionally try to create a personal brand are the worst people to do it. Like, you know, they're the ones posting on LinkedIn with essays that get four likes. And the reason is. The reason it gets four likes is because it's so disingenuous and it's just not. It's not you. It's not authentic. Right. My stuff kind of started as a joke because I was doing all the social media stuff for celebrities. I would just test stuff on my own accounts that kind of helped me understand how to, you know, what gets people to engage or what gets people to follow, what gets people to click and then fast forward. When I joined this beverage company, I thought, let me just take the wins. The things that I do that worked well, let me just put them out on Twitter, see what happens. And I remember the first time I did this, it was about an advertorial campaign that took us from 25 customers a day to 5,000 customers a day within two weeks. And immediately when I came to New York, or the first time I came to New York with Hint, I had all these requests in my DMs of people who wanted to meet up and get coffee. And I thought, these people are so smart. It's the founder of Morning Brew or the founder of eight Sleep, like all these amazing brands and media companies, and it was all just a result of me posting wins on the Internet for other people to feed off of. And so I kind of always have the mentality too, that, you know, there's enough seats for everybody to eat together. And. And so, yeah, the idea was just take the wins, put it out on the Internet for everybody else to get. And. And yeah, that sort of just honestly ended up building its own audience. There was never. There's never been a plan to, like, build an audience. I've never had follower numbers I'm trying to hit or engagement numbers I'm trying to hit. Everything's just kind of been organic. Even the newsletter, when that started, right. That was initially, that was just to give a launch deck to a bunch of people who listened to a specific podcast I did with a podcast I did with a YouTuber. And the way that you would get it was, you had to text a phone number with a keyword, but a lot of people internationally couldn't text the number because they had a UK number, Brazil number, whatever. And so I thought, all right, let me set up an email capture page. And that got, you know, a few thousand submissions overnight. And then, you know, the newsletter started growing. Now that's just, just under 100,000 Sunday readers.
- [07:29]
C
Wow. So this was never your goal. Like it was a byproduct of just focusing on the things that actually matter 100%.
- [07:37]
B
And I think that's the key to personal brand is you, you know, the percentage of people who are scheduling posts or writing a bunch of posts at once and scheduling them out. The percentage of those people that don't end up building a genuine form following or engaged following is pretty high. I think the ones that are more off the cuff. Doesn't mean that if you schedule it's not gonna work. It just means that, you know, from a content standpoint, you gotta really put out what you're doing or really think about it as documenting versus creating content.
- [08:09]
C
You mentioned a couple minutes ago how you were very selective with the brands you wanted to work with. It's almost like you were qualifying them rather than them qualifying you. And that's a very important mindset shift. Was that from the get go or was that because you had enough traction that you could actually be in the seat of the qualifier?
- [08:32]
B
Honestly, I think it's a combination of both. Like, I think we're very fortunate that all of our clients have been inbound. And generally there are people who have read the newsletter for six to eight months. They become the best clients for us. So I think we're lucky in the sense that we get to filter through the leads that come in. But at the same time, I think that we're very good at a specific thing. And there's, there's, you know, there's, there's two ways to run service business. One is you're very selective about who you work with because you know exactly what you're good at. And you're very confident in the overlap that you can have with a, with a client. Right. Potential client, and the success that'll come from that. Or you just take everybody on as a client. And I chose to go the first way. It's a much slower way to grow as a business, but the quality of work that comes out and the excitement around the work is much better.
- [09:30]
C
Yeah, it's very much in line with the long term thinking approach. You're not just Gonna take anybody. You have the values and the guardrails within which you. Amazing. You know, I've had a few people here ask whether they should be working with an agency or have their own in house teams. I work with agencies. I've also had my own in house teams and I was never able to quite crack the agency model. I just felt that having our own people in house made more sense. So for somebody who's getting started, what would you suggest to them they look out for when working with an agency? And also how do they make the decision of doing it in house versus working with somebody else?
- [10:14]
B
Totally honestly, it depends on a few things. So this is actually my favorite question to get by email, which is, you know, here's my contacts. Should I go in house or agency? And the answer is it really depends if you're, you know, if you're just starting a brand, you're bootstrapped. You're just starting a brand, you're about to spend less than 50 grand a month or you're planning to spend less than 50 grand a month on ads, you actually don't need either. You need a freelancer. You need somebody who you can buy a third of their time every month and they will, you know, 33% of their brain is entirely focused on proactive thinking about how you're going to hit your goals. When you're going 0 to 1, it's really a game of testing and learning and you have to be testing and learning very quick. So using an agency doesn't really work when you're going 0 to 1 unless they're the ones launching you. You know, if you've launched, you've already gotten out, you've tried some stuff, it's not working. And then you try to hire an agency that's just not going to work. That's a recipe for failure. It's very rare that an agency that can take on a small client, I'm talking, you know, less than, call it $15,000 in monthly fees, not even spend, but just fees. It's rare that an agency can take on less than 15k in fees and truly move the needle in the sense that, you know, they're the talent that's going to help you go 0 to 1. A lot of the times what Aaron was talking about is like figuring out how you get that product market fit or crack that code or find that angle, find that messaging. And that's really what you got to do to go 0 to 1. I have this concept where, you know, I say all you have to do is get to 3k a day in, in your daily shopify revenue. Right. Once you're at 3k a day, you're at a million bucks a year. Then you got to get to 5k a day and then you got to get to 10k and then 15k and all you have to do is just slowly increase that increment. But you know, don't try to go balls to the wall up front. Just figure out how to get to 3k a day, consistently figure out what works and then go to the next thing. Once you figure out your product market, fit, the messaging that works, the angles that work, you know, what type of ads work, what type of offers work, then it actually makes sense to get an agency if you don't have them from, you know, the pre launch stage. Yeah, generally I think like, you know, from a spend standpoint, if you're spending more than a couple million dollars a month and you're not doing a lot of testing and learning, like you know what works, you're just spending the spend and you're spending, you know, a million or 2 million, it probably makes sense to bring that in house when you think about the percentage you're going to pay out. But if you are doing a lot of testing and learning, you're trying to figure out, you know, how to crack that code, how to go from 10 million to 30 million or 30 million to 80 million. That's where an agency can be helpful because you just get more bodies. You know, your dollar gets stretched further in terms of how many people you can get, resources you can get to work on your brand versus if you do that in house.
- [13:00]
C
You spoke about offers just now. I remember you guys worked with Jolie, the beauty brand and you had this offer for them where they're just an insane conversion rate, 80%. What goes into a good offer? Like how do you craft an offer that's just irresistible, get people to take action?
- [13:19]
B
Yeah, so I think I always prioritize convenience. Right. So convenience as it relates to the person coming to the site, what is the most convenient thing for them or how do you frame something to be convenient for them? For the Jolie example, this was Jolie. Does anybody know the brand Jolie? It's a shower head, filtered shower head brand. So it's a shower head but it's positioned as a beauty tool. And when we launched this brand, one of the things that we created in the beginning was this water report. And this was the founder's idea where you could put your zip code in and we would go through the EPA's API with Klaviyo immediately, put your zip code into the API, grab the stats of the chemicals in your water, take that metadata, put it into your Klaviyo profile, fill out an email template and send it out within a minute. And you could still do it if you just Google Jolie Water report. And the idea was that initially this was lead gen and really just testing messaging. This was pre launch. So we were trying to figure out what are the headlines that are getting the best click through. What type of imagery is getting click through. Is it lifestyle, UGC studio, black and white animation, video ads, static ads, et cetera. And so through that testing, we ended up getting to this 80% conversion rate. And granted this was just emails, but the quality of the people we were getting and the conversion rate that we were seeing led me to believe like, I gotta put all my money in this thing, this thing's gonna rip. And it absolutely did. But what goes into a good offer? I would say, you know, good pricing, you gotta think about sampling. So if you're a consumable product, you know, let's say you're a beverage or a food product or a snack, you need to think about who's this going to? Is this going to a family of two, a family of four, you know, is everybody going to get to try an equal amount of flavors? That's how you get repeat purchases, right? When people start to find their flavors, some sort of a discount upfront always helps. You can always do cash back up front. You could do, you know, hellofresh started doing something where they give you now a gift on your third subscription order. So I think the thing with offers is there's so many ways to do offers, so many levers. You can pull discounts, cash back, gift with purchase, you know, whatever it may be. And so to me, I feel like you got to test a bunch of offer stuff. And if anybody has questions on that, you can email me. I think I have an article I can send on how to build the perfect offer.
- [15:48]
C
Just curious, did you launch Jolie or were they already out on the market?
- [15:52]
B
That was a brand that we helped.
- [15:53]
C
Launch and that was the first offer. You got 80% of the first offer.
- [15:57]
B
Yeah, well, it was just for the water report, so it was really there. The science was really about figuring out the perfect landing page. It's the same one that if you, if you Google it, it's online now. But, you know, essentially trying to figure out, okay, how do we. The idea was, you know, we can't just sell a shower head. No one's going to buy a shower head.
- [16:14]
C
Right.
- [16:14]
B
No one's going to buy a filtered shower head. We have to position this as a beauty tool and really, really show you how this impacts. You know, it's kind of step zero in your skincare routine or your makeup routine. And so. So that was kind of what we were tweaking to figure out with the landing page. And eventually we got to nail it.
- [16:32]
C
Mm. So I guess positioning it.
- [16:33]
B
Right.
- [16:34]
C
Because Showerhead, this.
- [16:35]
B
Yeah. Is everything. I mean, there's another. There's another humidifier brand called Canopy in the states as well. And both these brands, Jolie and Canopy, follow this formula, which is, you know, if. If you want to be beautiful, you subscribe to our products, and if you stop subscribing to our products, you'll become ugly again. And this formula takes these household appliances and has turned them into beauty brands, like legit beauty brands. And so, yeah, positioning goes a long way. Right. I think that is. I think that. I mean, that's what Aaron was saying about the weighted blankets. Right. Everybody sells weighted blankets. But, you know, Hush is the one that took off here. And it comes down to positioning and how you. How you message it, how you massage that messaging, your tone of voice, how you are perceived by your customers, you know, how you're perceived by the greater market, all that kind of stuff.
- [17:26]
A
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.
- [18:04]
C
I'm just curious about how involved you are when these offers are being crafted. I mean, if you have 60 people to maintain that level of quality, how do you disperse that throughout the company?
- [18:17]
B
Yeah, it's funny, like, I think of Sharma Brands as a productized version of me. And so, I mean, I'm very involved in all the strategy piece. I'd say a lot of the executional stuff gets handled by the broader team, but any of the strategy or critical strategy is usually crafted by me. Some of you may know Ari Murray. She's my chief. Yeah, I Heard a couple of woos there. She's my chief growth officer and so she, she's kind of my co pilot on all things growth. So she helps craft a lot of the offers or a lot of the nitty gritty stuff.
- [18:51]
C
I guess having a good team, that's important.
- [18:53]
B
Honestly. Having a good team is everything. There's. You can't really get far without having a bad or with having a bad team, you can definitely get far solo and maybe with the use of AI. But as soon as you start building a team, if you're not careful of who's on that team or how those contributions are being made or how those results are being, you know, the accountability of results that the team members are pulling, it could definitely destroy a company for sure.
- [19:23]
C
Talk to me about CRO Conversion Rate Optimization. You're. You've talked a lot about that. I've heard some great insights. What, what would you say are the three main things somebody needs to keep in mind when they're thinking about conversion rates?
- [19:37]
B
I think I always keep a few questions in mind that you know. Okay, so the first thing I would say of the three is these five or six questions, you want to just answer them back to back. It's, you know, what is the product? How is it going to benefit me as a consumer if I order it today? When do I get it? What happens if I get it and I don't like it? How does it compete with everything else on the market? And if you just keep answering those questions over and over again with your website, your pdp, your landing pages, even your ads, you know, if you think of those five questions as sections on a landing page and every section has to hit one of those five, that's a great CRO tip that helps increase conversion right away. Cause you think of elements that are necessary but maybe not included on the first pass. Another one is. Or actually yeah. On the email side of things, using email collection where you're asking for zero party data increases your opt in rate quite a bit. And then using we use a software called Black Pro, but there's a few others that exist where you can use AI to understand the patterns of traffic on your site and then deploy a pop up based on the traffic pattern of the user that's currently on your site, we've been able to get up to 12 to 15% opt in rate, which is huge when you think about the spread of people who you're not getting. If you're getting a 2% or 3% opt in rate, the last one is I would say use like think of your pages as oceanfront real estate. You know, oceanfront real estate, prime real estate. You don't want to let it go to waste. Whenever you see white boxes on your site, get rid of that, fill it with something. You know, if you've got product images that are an image on a white background, that white background is room for you to draw arrows and write benefits and put awards or put, you know, value props or ratings of stars. I would say yeah, kill the white space as much as you can. You know, try to be efficient. Think about if you're selling to a fifth grader or a grandma or somebody who's two whiskeys in. Those are the three people I build sites and landing pages for. Grandma, somebody two whiskeys in and, and what I say the third one was a fifth grader, fifth grader. Mainly because of the copy. You don't want to get too complex with copy. The non PC thing to say is most people on the Internet are idiots, right? And so you have to assume that. You also have to assume that they have very slow Internet connection, bad wifi, an old phone. So you want to build experiences for those people and then it'll over perform for people who have good WI fi or you know, are browsing on desktop.
- [22:17]
C
You mentioned AI. How do you see AI in E commerce like automation? Where do you think that's going?
- [22:25]
B
I think, I think a few places. I think like on the op side we'll probably see AI get used a lot more. You know, whether it's a script reading in an order and deciding, you know, which insert to put or what gifts with purchase to put based on their past history, things like that. I think we, we definitely use AI when it comes to product recommendations on the front end of websites. I think there's a lot of use for AI when it comes to creative. Right. When you're thinking about ad creative or copywriting, obviously ChatGPT is a terrible copywriter, but it gives you good ideas, you know, you can input. Hey, I'm a weighted blanket brand selling to, you know, women who shop at Whole Foods and are between 30 and 45 years old. And you know, give me 25 headlines that POPSUGAR would write about our, about our weighted blanket and its benefits. And you know, those are 25 headlines you could test on Facebook, 25 advertorials you could test so you can use it in that way. I think, you know, we see in the beauty world we see AI coming out with a lot of things around like finding the Right. Shade or skin tone or matching skin tone to different beauty colors or products and their colors. What was the other one? Oh, yeah, the other one would be like, you know, kind of just the concept of using multiple AI agents. I think somebody, there's some companies that are. One company I can think of that has come out with this, but I haven't tested it, so I'm not going to say it, but I think in the future there's going to be a world where a single person builds a hundred million dollar brand with the use of 25 AI agents that they artificially create and train individually like employees to work together. But I think we're still a little bit away from that.
- [24:12]
C
Can't wait for that. You also invest in brands, right? And I've heard you say that getting the idea right is easy. Getting your branding right today is also not that complex as it used to. But the third factor you said was the operator. And so when you're investing in companies, how do you think about the investment process?
- [24:35]
B
Yeah, I mean, a couple things I think about. One is like, is my mom going to use this? That's always the best test, right? If there's some AI regenerative photo editing tool that's going to charge a bunch of money or if it's the, you know, 37th men's skincare brand, you know, I'm generally not excited. I want to find something that has some sort of innovation and also something where the operator is excited to go and just crush it. I think my best investments are companies where, you know, the operator has a chip on their shoulder. They're trying to, you know, prove something to the world. But I also think, you know, you gotta, you gotta figure out how, how is this company getting to their $10 million mark in revenue, otherwise it's not investable. Right. There's a lot of companies you want to invest in, but they have to be good investment decisions too. So I tend to look at distribution. You know, what is their unfair advantage on the distribution side? Is it that they have somebody who's got a massive following that's going to help push? Is it that their, their dad owns the factory that's making their comforters? Is it that their, you know, their mom is the president of merchandising at Walmart and that's how they're going to get in and get their first po? You got to figure out what is the unfair advantage they have. Because an idea is obviously great, but the, the distribution of that idea is what's going to bring your money back. Right. And also allow something to be investable if something is not, if there's no method of distribution, it's not really investable yet. I've definitely slowed down on the investing side, generally just focused on investing in companies where distribution is set or distribution has become quite obvious. Yeah. And I guess also the other thing is like, does it solve a real world problem? Like, does it solve a problem that is actually needed? Or is this just another product or another software company?
- [26:33]
C
I want to talk about cold emailing you mentioned earlier, and I've heard you talk about how cold emailing is a skill that can really make or break somebody's career. And I've seen it myself. Like, people that are good at cold emailing do get a response from the people that they would never have thought, what's the next Sharma playbook to cold emailing? And also, is that part of the reason you've been able to land like Feastables, Beckham, Selena Gomez?
- [27:04]
B
Honestly, I would say the reason we were able to land these big ones was through content, like putting out long form content and content kind of being the way for everybody else to see in my brain and kind of see how I think before they decide they want to work with us. The cold emailing has been great for so many other things though. How many people here have sent cold emails in the last 30 days? Wow, we got no hustlers in here. Come on. Okay, I see some hands going up. I mean, for me, cold emailing is, you know, it's like the magical key that can do whatever you want it to do. You know, you could talk to Mark Cuban within five minutes if you cold email. Or you could get in touch with you and come speak at this event, whatever it may be. A cold email is something that I think everybody should send at least a cold email a day. I mean, why not? It'll take you four minutes to do. You could do it while you're pooping. And so the cold email, really the key is at the end, whoever's reading the cold email just needs to be able to say yes, no, or talk to this person instead. And so you just need to write an email that gets to that answer. It should be something that's very short and sweet. You got to think about somebody being super busy, you know, reading this email as they're getting into an Uber, getting out of an Uber, maybe just about to sit down and they're waiting for the waiter to come take their order. You know, something that's like a 15 second read. Max, you've got social proof in the first line, you've got your ask in the second line. And, you know, get to a yes, no, or talk to this person.
- [28:39]
C
And what if you don't have social proof? What if you're not Nick Sharma?
- [28:42]
B
Then. Then you do the same thing I did when I had no name, and you just. You just lay it out. You say, hey, hey, Mark, I'm a huge fan of Shark Tank, blah, blah, blah. I run this company, and this is how old I am, and this is what I'm trying to do. Here's my ask, you know, let me know what you think.
- [28:58]
C
So you telling me got Mark Cuban on the phone Monday?
- [29:01]
B
Yeah.
- [29:01]
C
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [29:02]
B
There was one time where I opened Twitter one day when I was. When I was just waking up and I saw Mark Cuban was in the news for something. Morning Brew responded to him and said, you know, we'd love to have you on our podcast and. And discuss this thing. And I immediately took a screenshot of that because I was like, you know, here's the before picture. And then I emailed Mark and I said, hey, a friend of mine has a podcast that gets 2 million downloads. They'd love to have you on to talk about this. Do you have any time today to do it? And, you know, his response came within four, four minutes and said, let's do it. And then connected him with Morning Brew. And he was on that show. He was on the show at like 2pm that day. And so, yeah, it's not hard to like people. Everybody reads their email, right? If anything, everybody reads their email. They probably don't read their DMs. They definitely read their text, but not everybody's number is accessible. But everybody reads their emails. Even if their assistant reads their emails, the emails stay in the inbox to get read by whoever the person is. And a lot of times you can just guess the email. If it's not a Gmail address, which is rare, then it's usually just like first at Company or first initial, last name at Company. If you use, like, superhuman to do email, then you can just type the email in the. In the send box and press Enter. And it'll validate it on the right side. It'll tell you who it matches to. Or you just Google Free email address validator, put the guesses in and see which one comes back as green. And then, yeah, then you have a good subject line, a good email. Get to a yes, no, or talk to this person, and you'd be surprised, like, whether it's you know, whether it's for banks, whether it's for content creators, whether it's for manufacturers, whether it's other brands you want to partner with, whether it's a distribution partner. Like, cold emails get ahead, they get in front of people. Good cold emails will catch people's attention.
- [30:49]
C
Don't have a lot of time and I want to leave some time for Q and A. But last question for you, Nick, is what's your vision for Sharma Brands down the line? I mean, I know you come from the tech world and you found yourself here, but what does the long term look like for you?
- [31:07]
B
Honestly, it'll depend on our clients. I would say. Like we, you know, we want to continue building that red carpet experience in different ways. We've just built a tech team, so we've been noodling, We've, we've built some software over the last couple of years. You know, when we build sites, I'm not a fan of paying for monthly bundling apps on subscription, for example, and so we built some of this stuff on our own. But I'm excited to see what else we can do. There's so much software out there that, you know, I don't think that's needs to be paid for. You know, if you have a cannabis website, you shouldn't have to pay 40 cents for somebody to opt in with consent about their age every time they do it. So, yeah, we'll build some software probably and see how we can have that cater better towards the needs of our clients. But other than that, I think just continuing to grow brands.
- [31:56]
C
Okay, does anybody have any questions for everybody here? We'll need the lights on because I can't see anything. Anybody? They'll get back there.
- [32:12]
B
Hi, Nick. Great insights. Thank you so much for coming here and taking the time. Just one question. What time do you check your emails? What time do I check my inbox? Yeah, if you send me an email at any time to narvon.com, i'll check it within five minutes. All right, thank you so much. I see one over here. Who, who wants. After this guy? Who wants the next question right here, you can just scream. Yeah, think that I'm thinking right now.
- [33:02]
C
Is when consider versus quality execution.
- [33:23]
B
Got it. So when do you know if an ad is considered a success or failure? But also how do you understand if you did your success? Or like, how do you understand if that test was done properly? I see. What do you sell? Well, wait, I'm sorry, say that one more time. Okay, cool. Well, so, okay, so there's, it's kind of like a four dimensional question because one, one is or two dimensional, one is success or failure, one is did I do it right? Right. I would say the do it right question is something you probably want to try to figure out a framework for or rubric for before you put it into a test. Maybe that's a checklist of did I hit on benefits? Did I make it clear what the product was? Did I include social proof in this ad? Does the ad tell the person exactly what benefit they're going to get from using the product? When you're testing, you want to try to isolate everything to one variable if possible. That said, I think when you're first starting out and you're spending your first $100,000, most of the iterating within the ads is not gonna be the thing that moves the needle. It's gonna be figuring out what is that angle. So let's say you sell, let's say you sell like a colostrum, right? If you're iterating on the ad about hair regrowth and you're going back and forth on okay, is this version of the hair ad better or is this version of the hair ad better? You're not going to see much difference between the two at a small level of spend compared to if you're like, all right, hair is one angle, anti aging is another angle, better sleep is another angle, no brain fog in the morning is another angle. And just testing different angles like that. The best place to find those angles I've found is TikTok and Reddit and of course your comments on ads or customer service messages or social media DMS where you're getting questions. Those are probably, that's probably the best way to think about it is focus more on the angles that's gonna sell somebody into the product before you go into the nitty gritty. Once you find, okay, there's an angle that's working, meaning the ad that you put up is getting a strong click through rate. Then you can start to figure out directly in the funnel where is that leak happening. So think of it as a pipe running across this room. The person comes in on the left side and you got to figure out where the holes are along the way. It might be that the PDP doesn't have a comparison chart. It might be that the checkout doesn't reinforce social proof. It might be that you don't have a return policy listed on your PDP and you want to just plug these holes, but you got to first, start with the beginning and make sure you're getting the click. And then once people are getting to the pdp, are they adding it to cart? If not, that's where you got to diagnose the problem. Does that help? A little bit. Cool. I can also chat after. It might be something more specific.
- [36:42]
C
Okay. Unfortunately we're out of time here, but if anybody has questions for Nick, he's going to be here all day, so just grab him or shoot him an.
- [36:49]
B
Email because he tests the letter n.sharma.com yeah.
- [36:54]
C
Thanks man. Thank you for doing this. Huh?
- [36:56]
B
Of course. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG Retail and E Commerc. 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.