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Marketing Operators
DTC OG Ezra Firestone on How the Game Has Shifted and What’s Working Now
01:26:08
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- [00:00]
A
We have a very special guest today. We have Ezra Firestone. Thank you so much for being here.
- [00:05]
B
Happy to be here. I love E commerce. Obviously when I started people thought you were in porn or gambling. Like if you told them you were an Internet marketer or you were in E commerce, they didn't know what you were talking about. I'm not anti dropshipping. I'm anti selling made products that don't add value to the world. If you're a brand, you also need to be a media company.
- [00:22]
C
I'm thinking for our listeners, like if they were to get one piece of advice for you where they might be under indexing, do you have a recommendation?
- [00:27]
B
Do less, think more. I used to drive the car, now I navigate the ship.
- [00:33]
A
All right, we've got a great guest today. We've got Ezra Firestone. I followed this guy for years. He is like the OG of ecom. So many things that we use today. Just like common practice. I think he really pioneered. He's an awesome guy, really smart, really funny. He's hilarious. So super excited to have him on. Before we get into the show, you're going to love it. Just want to thank our sponsors. We got Motion, Rich Panel, Prescient AI, aftercell and House. We couldn't do the show without them. So thank them, please. Let's get into the show.
- [01:33]
C
I want to talk to you quickly About Motion's new AI creative strategist. These are AI agents built by Best in Class D2C operators. And what's unique about these is that you are using agents to analyze your creative using real data from your meta ad account. It's like chat GPT but way more relevant with way more context. So Connor Rolan, I, I ran some of these this morning. Let me, let me walk you through them. So a couple quick things here. One, these are you'd see in the top right of your Motion dashboard you have account wide tasks that you can have these AI agents run. But the first one I want to show you actually is Jess Bachman's critique. This ads messaging which is at the ad level. So this is our best performing creative last week. You can run this task here. I've got it open here as well. And what we hear from Jess is that one, he loves a concept, instant differentiation. But what I found interesting and kind of painful as always when you realize there's ad creative that you don't absolutely love, we use the headline almost as rare as winning the lottery. These are like one of eight unique designs and Jess says that is hyperbolic and undermines credibility. And I 100 agree and I took this to my team and we're taking action on it.
- [02:33]
D
Yeah, I love it. I think this stuff takes a lot of time to manually do like you could your creative strategist, especially at brands that are at the scale of ridge. Like your creative strategist could spot, could spend all day, every day just like looking through top performing ads and low performing ads and just trying to come up with reasons why they work or don't work and like what the next steps are. So I don't think that this agent necessarily totally replaces that. But now you're starting at level five instead of level zero. So the amount of time it saves you is, is huge. And it just empowers your team to go and action things instead of sitting there and kind of getting stuck in analysis paralysis all day long.
- [03:11]
C
The second task I ran was find new customer Personas by Jimmy Slagel and Alex Cooper. They have an agent called Marvis and this one was cool. I got to upload 500 reviews and then it identified people that we might not be speaking to or can better build Persona funnels around which we talk about on marketing operators all the and I thought this was extremely helpful traveler with tech. I mean between our luggage, between our wallets, between our power banks, this is like exactly who we want to speak to. So I felt they nailed identifying some, some new and maybe underserved Personas for us.
- [03:40]
D
I feel like this is so important. I talk to marketers and brand operators every now and again and they're like, oh, like we're at 10 million, 20 million. We've hit a wall with Meta and I ask them some, some kind of pointed questions and they haven't launched new creative in a long time. And I think this right here is like the absolute starting point for brands that have maybe hit a wall or haven't hit a wall, are just looking to continue to scale. Because how do you scale Meta? Will you reach new people? How do you reach new people? You create ads that speak to those people. And like this is such an amazing starting point for that and it's based on your real reviews. Like what better, more trustworthy place to start?
- [04:15]
C
100%. That's all to say. Motion is giving teams an AI adoption cheat code, making it accessible to every D2C advertiser. And best yet, you don't need a Motion contract to use this. You can agents for free. Test them out in your Motion account today. So try it out@motionapp.com.
- [04:32]
A
We have a very special guest today. I'm going to introduce him in a minute, but before we do, I need to give Connor McDonald a little because he prides himself on being the Cal Ripken of the pod. He thinks he's, you know, 72 for 72. We are about to record the other day and he texts us and he's like, hey, guys, I'm not feeling great. We got to cancel today. And I just don't know if that counts for the streak. Does the streak. Is it still alive? The streak still counts.
- [04:56]
B
The streak's alive. I think the streak's.
- [04:58]
A
We didn't record it, but Connor, Roland and I could have taken it.
- [05:01]
C
I did have to reschedule, but it. No, but it was Connor rolling last week.
- [05:05]
A
Oh, I thought you were sick. Did I mix up the Connor?
- [05:07]
C
I think it was the week before. We've. We've had the behind the scenes inside baseball and marketing operators is we are struggling to get all three guys on the calls, but it's smooth sailing from here. I'm going to go 100 for 100 easy and then maybe I'll take a week off.
- [05:19]
A
Love it. You'll earn at that point. Well, good. Just, just giving you some. But we have a very special guest today. We have Ezra Firestone. Ezra, would love for you to introduce yourself. Thank you so much for being here. I had such a great time listening to you at like the Google event last week. It was, it was awesome. Great to finally meet in person after all these years. And we're thrilled to have you on the pod. How you doing?
- [05:39]
B
Right on, man. Happy to be here. I love E Commerce, obviously. And you know, you guys are young, up and comers in the game, making stuff happen, doing the damn thing out there, building brands, operating, and it's just a beautif thing to see this community like become real. Because when I started, people thought you were in porn or gambling. Like if you told them you were an Internet marketer or you were in E Commerce, they didn't know what you were talking about. And it was like a bunch of creepy dudes on a forum and there wasn't a community. And, you know, we didn't have people to guide us and help us. And it was like you definitely didn't understand that you had to pay taxes and didn't save money for that. You did all. You made every mistake that you could make because there wasn't people who were there to like support you. So I think it's really cool what you guys are doing for the community. And yeah, you know, I've been in the game a while. I started with Google AdWords in 2005 and I was selling cheese on commission junction all the way back then. So, yeah, I've been. I've been in the game a while and found my way to E commerce really, like in depth e commerce 2007. And I became one of the biggest dropshippers in the game at that time. And my. My competition was IVG stores and now. What is now? Wayfair. And you know, those guys, the Wayfair guys, they were like 10 years ahead of me in age and also sophistication. They understood systems, processes, delegation, you know, cash flow, inventory carry. It was all drop shipping. It was all like exact match domains and SEO and drop shipping. But I did really well in that era. But I was a really. I was 18, you know, I had 20 or 30 dropship stores. I was. I was America's number one mullet wig, afro wig, Elvis wig, clown wig, King Louis, the 13th wig retailer on the Internet back in the day for like 2007 to 2010. So, yeah, I was like, in the game. And it was really wonderful and learning along the way as a young business owner. And round about 2011, blogging had become a thing. You know, it's like there was mommy blogs and it was like a thing. And I was like, you know, maybe somebody wants to hear about this E commerce stuff. Like, I'm certainly interested in it and it's a lot of fun and like, I want to talk about it. So I started a blog. And. And it just so happens I was kind of the only blog. And therefore Shopify picked me up, and therefore BigCommerce picked me up, and Entrepreneur.com and Forbes magazine and all these big entrepreneurship events. There was just like nobody talking about it. And so by virtue of being one of the first, I think I got promoted and picked up and then like, hey, I did a good job. I was actually sharing. My whole strategy has always been, I'm just gonna say what I'm doing. Not that I think it's the right thing or the only thing, but it's like, this is what I'm up to and this is what's working for me. And check it out, you know. And then that blogging thing turned into like a little side business where I was like all of a sudden a influencer. I guess before there was a word for that, I had a following and people were like, interested in coaching and events and masterminds and all that kind of stuff. So that was really Wonderful. And about 2010, I transitioned from selling other people's products to selling my own products. I kind of figured with like, you know, this was drop shipping people here. Drop shipp. Think China and Taiwan and India. It's like, no, but back in the day, it was like, you know, a company in. In Ohio that made bar stools, or it was like, you know, some company out of New Jersey that made gift baskets. And you would. You would sell American goods, and they would just supply it, and you'd fax them the orders. I mean, it was like that old school, the. The. The wig business. Cody Y As a. As a hatu you'll. It was. It was two HIDIC dudes in Midtown. It was this dude, Moodle, and this guy Elliot. And Elliot was like the size of a. And you'd walk in there, this big hanger in midtown, and Elliot would have, like, a literal, like, g. Mini, miniature garbage can full of mini apple pies. And he'd just be banging down apple pies, and he'd be telling you about all the wigs because, you know, the hidic, they were also selling all the human hair wigs to the HIDIC community. And then Moodle was in the back, and he was like the opposite. He was like this skinny, tiny dude, was just, like, working the numbers. And I. I'd go in there and talk Yiddish chef, you know. So, anyhow, long story short, selling other people was only as fun as it was and only as profitable it was. And you didn't know if they had it in stock, and you couldn' get tracking numbers. And so I decided it would be a good thing to make my own products because then I could kind of control the whole thing. And the first brand I really launched was Boom. Had the idea for Boom in 2008, launched it in 2010, took about 2014 to hit our first million in revenue. And then we were off to the races. And then I did a bunch of other brands, and then I ended up selling Boom. And, yeah, I've been in the game and really love this industry. So this is kind of a long winded intro, but the long story is, dude, I didn't make it out of high school. I am just some bum off a couch who fell in love with this stuff and has been doing it. And, you know, showing up every day with a positive attitude and doing the best I can do and asking for help when I need it, and it's gone pretty well.
- [10:26]
A
And to give my perspective, like, I think you're. You're probably very humble about some of this. Like, I think my perspective is that a lot of the things that are very par for the course that like you'll see like DTC Twitter threads on every day on like listicles and landing pages and upsells. Like I really feel like you're the first person to popularize that that was talking about like pre sale pages and advertorials and landing pages and, and post purchase upsells and so got to give credit where it's due. But I feel like so many of these things that are now just like everybody is doing. You either were the first person talking about or came up with.
- [11:00]
B
Thanks, man. Yeah, I, I, I definitely invented post purchase upsells for Shopify and then they got mad and they built it into their system, which was cool. I love Shopify and I'm happy we got built in natively. But yeah, I mean, I think again, you know, did I invent the idea of the advertorial? I don't think so. I think, you know, soap operas back in the day were the initial listicle and then they would have product placement in there. It's like this concept was around, maybe I brought it to E Commerce. But you know, the, the, the, I took some traditional marketing stuff. I had a traditional marketing a little bit. I grew up selling stuff at the flea market. So like I understood how to sell things, how to capture attention and you know, hey, we, we have a similar lineage in some way. And like, what's interesting about what I think about sometimes is like every, you go back as many generations as I can count, my family has been merchants. My great grandfather Abraham, before the war was a merchant in Colombia, which was, which was Ukraine and is now Russia. He was like, he would get bulk, you know, cotton and wool and he would take a three week journey with a covered wagon to Vienna and you have it turned into su and shoes. And then he would drive back to Cola and he'd sell it to people on the side of the road. His son who was in that wagon war broke out. You know, he ended up making it to America after the Holocaust. Lost his family. He was, he had a, a, a, a clothing shop on the Lower east side when the Jews were selling shmas, when, you know, we were in the, in the garment business and he had a clothing store on Orchard street that did really well. He started working in it and then he eventually bought it out and he did really well. You know, he would sell like a fully tailored woman's blouse in the 50s for like three bucks. And then he wanted to give that business to my dad. My dad was not interested. He became a hippie and wanted to be an actor and, you know, moved to a commune, which is where I grew up. And we didn't have any money. And so we sold stuff at the flea market. So, you know, that was the way we made money. A little bit money we did make was by selling stuff at the flea market. So that's three generations back. Every one of them sold things, was a merchant. I just, I do the same thing. I just have access to the whole world. Like my dad and I, it was like flea market. Whoever came, my grandpa was Orchard street. Whoever was on the street, my great grandpa was whoever he could find on the side of the road in his local town. It's like we have this incredible power, this amazing not known before our generation resource where we can reach people with messages anywhere in the world. Global supply chain. When I started, it was not a global supply chain. You only could sell in America. And that was a wonderful thing. Now we're international, man. We got A, A3PL in Canada, we got A3PL in the UK. So it's like those of us, and we're still a small community. People see the D2C Twitter and we're getting big. It's like, not. Dude, we are a small, tiny, tiny, tiny little group of people who are actually turning these levers and have this kind of like cultural and societal power and responsibility to use the digital medium to spread positive things in the world. Not just cheap, made in a sweatshop in China, or, you know, content that scares people or freaks them out or makes them feel bad about themselves. It's like we have a unique opportunity and responsibility, and I think we're really lucky to have that.
- [14:12]
A
Yeah, but Jews do. Jews are just merchants. Like, my, My mom talks all about her. Her Papa Sam who sold cars, and her dad had probably 12 different careers. And like, Harley talks about it all the time as well. How he was like, you know, selling. Selling T shirts and stuff. And I'm the same way. I like, I don't necessarily. I never thought I'd work in beauty. It's not like my goal, it's not my passion. But I'm like, hey, this is a great opportunity. Great, great margins, Great way to sell stuff, you know. So, yeah, we got in our blood. If you know me, you know how cheap I am and how much I love saving money. This year is all about cutting costs and staying lean. You've seen me talk about it on Twitter. I cannot stand watching great D2C brands, even mediocre ones, get ripped off by SaaS vendors in 2025. So many of them are charging way too much over promising and under delivering and so I can' to see it. So I don't want to see it to happen to you. I absolutely won't have it happening to me. You've also seen that I'm all in on AI. And both those reasons are why I love Rich Panel so much. It's about half the price of the beautiful software that we used before. It was built specifically with AI in mind. We made the switch to Rich Panel right before Black Friday last year, and I almost regret not switching sooner. We had zero downside. The implementation was pretty immediate, which actually shocked me. I was a little worried about it, not going to lie, but it just went off without a hitch. We saved money. We leveled up our CX at the same time. So here's our numbers. We cut our CX team from 18 to 10 agents, not before Black Friday. But since onboarding to Rich Panel, with our order volume staying the same or even going up, our CSAT has stayed rock solid at 4.2 out of 5. I'd like a little bit better, but that's, that's stuff that we can do. AI is handling 70% of the tickets, which is awesome. So our ticket to order ratio has gone way down from about 40% to 14%. So we have fewer full timers. Our revenue employee has gone up. We don't need as many people to get back to people and able to be a little bit more strategic with where we allocate our resources. So if your current CF CX software needs more people, is more expensive than you want to pay, and has some janky AI solution, I highly recommend that you check out Rich Panel. Rich panel guarantees a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back again. It's super easy to switch. They take care of data migration, staff training, all that good stuff. So you can go live in under 14 days. So check out richpanel.com and tell them you heard about them from the marketing operators podcast.
- [16:26]
D
Ezra, I'm curious because we've had a, we've had a lot of brand owners on and I don't, I don't think we've ever had, We've never really talked about the drop shipping side of E commerce and that is really like how E commerce got going and now everyone owns their own brands and. But what can you talk to like talk about like the, the Business model and the unit economics of, of drop shipping. Like you're selling all sorts of things, wigs but and then they're, and then you're sending a fax number to the people that actually have the inventory and then they're sending that out. So like what, what is your margin on that wig? What how are they making their money on that wig? Like could you speak to that a little bit?
- [17:02]
B
When I was a drop shipper, keep in mind, I was a drop shipper 2007 through 12. The visibility source was not contextual targeting. It was not social media advertising. Yeah, Facebook came around around 2011 but you know, we didn't really start ramping up our Facebook traffic until 2013. You know are you had the Google display network but at that time the only piece of context you had on somebody and I'm going to answer your question in a second. But at that time the only piece of content you context you had on somebody was the website they were visiting. You had one data point. Now you have multi data point contextual targeting. That's Facebook, that's TikTok, that's you know, Instagram, et cetera. But back then the visibility source was search and that was the way I came up. And search at the time was affordable. You could, you could buy search for reasonable and and you and it was SEO by the way. Half of your traffic if not more was organic. Right. It was squadoo lenses and hub pages and article marketing and blog networks and whatever you were doing to rank. So a bunch of your traffic came free. So you didn't like right now if you look at a traditional e commerce business in today's landscape, whichever way you want to do it. If you're if social advertising and influencer marketing and ambassador marketing and paid creators is your core engine, your cost of marketing is between 25 and 40% of your revenue. You got a million dollars in revenue. You're spending, let's call it 300K on marketing. It was. The economics were way more efficient back in the day because Google search was way cheaper. And so you know, I might be buying a wig for 15 bucks and selling it for 35 and still having plenty of margin to run ads and have profit. But that's because the visibility source was more affordable back then. Also the drop shipping brands that work the best were like when I sold electric fireplaces, dude, they were like 6, 700 bucks, 800 bucks, 1200 bucks, grandfather clocks, you know these, these expensive AOV things were where the real like you were talking about like now I understand scale. Back then I was like a, you know, I was working at a yoga studio in Midtown Manhattan, 60 hours a week trying to like side hustle this drop ship stuff. But scale like this, the real. The brands that really made. I mean the wig business did ended up doing a couple million bucks. But real scale came from the higher AOV items. And I think like drop. That kind of drop shipp American suppliers and sometimes international suppliers where you have high AOV or you have a million skus, right? Like, you know who still drop ships, those big auto part retailers. Like I'm in this Harvard. I'm in the basement of the Harvard Club in New York City in an underground bunker. That's why my lighting looks all weird. And I'm holding a mic that I brought from home upstate, you know, because my buddy Drew Sanaki, one of my oldest friends in in E commerce and I'm one of his first investors in his app Post Pilot that he's kind of well known for in our industry now. But he was a OG E Commerce legend way before Post Buy it. He was. Dude, he was in O4 dropshipping. He had a drop ship E Commerce furniture business. But he and I helped him with this deal. Bought a. He bought a auto parts company out of AutoZone. They have like a million SKUs. So long tail, you know, thousands of skus that you can rank for organically and run ads for super exact match. Like tons of keywords. Those brands still work for drop shipping and so does high aov. But the stuff that, that like what, what made drop shipping famous in our generation? Because I'm. I'm a little younger than Drew, about 10 years younger than Drew. I'm probably about, I don't know, five or 10 years older than you guys. But was this like Chinese drop shipping where you're buying things off Alibaba for 50 cents and trying to sell them for 25 bucks and like that is just bad for the world. I never did that. I never believed in it. And I always spoke out against it. And I thought this is not good for our industry. This is not good for the world. This is like this. These products are clearly being made in a poor way by people who are enslaved a lot of the times. Like it's like. So I think that I'm glad the unit economics of that doesn't really work anymore because I don't like it as a high level sort of idea of what to do with your business life.
- [20:58]
C
What I think is interesting about dropshipping right now is like what you just described gave it a lot of negative connotations, I think where people directly associated with like low quality products being chilled on Facebook. I think we're going to hit this point where like people re embrace it again. You know, Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, talks about it being functionally a process improvement. It's more efficient to sell the thing and then ship it from the manufacturer if you can pull that off without sacrificing quality. And if you look at something like Shopify Collective right now, where I can attach my store to hexclad.com and sell my products there, that's a form of drop shipping. So I think we'll see it like get repopularized over the next couple months or next couple years.
- [21:38]
B
Let me clarify my position. I'm not anti dropshipping. I'm anti selling crappily made products that don't add value to the world. Number two, I personally, as a business owner, if I'm going to go out and spend my time and energy to create something, I'm sure as heck not doing it to market someone else's brand. Now if you can get a turnkey solution, like Cody and I shared a manufacturer for our beauty products and I had them set up turnkey where I would ship them my componentry. They would fill it, box it, label it and then put it to Amazon. Or they weren't shipping it direct drop it to my3PL so it's, you know, it's like I didn't have to touch it, it would go to my 3PL, I'll go to Amazon. Like if you can get some turnkey situation, maybe there's a supplier who will create the product and ship it out for you and you're promoting, but they can put your own label on it. Like you're sort of white labeling. I think that's better than straight drop shipping because drop shipping, it's like you're going out, you're spending money, you're running ads, you're getting and you know, creators and then it's like all to build someone else's brand equity, which I think is ultimately not in your best interest.
- [22:37]
A
So you talk about where, where the game has been, right? Like SEO blogs, you know, obviously Meta had its heyday and stuff like that. Like, what's your playbook today? I know you're still running brands, you got some brands like what's your playbook today? How has the game shifted and like where is your attention going to, to distribution right now?
- [22:59]
B
So I put on an event called, I think we called it Content and Commerce back in 2017 and sort of our philosophy was if you're a brand, you also need to be a media company. Because ultimately what we saw back then was that attention ultimately was what dictated like the success of capitalism in a way. It's like Meta wants your attention and Google wants your attention and TikTok wants it. And guess what? Shopify doesn't want your customers shopping on your website. They want them shopping in the shop app where they can shop from all the Shopify stores and check out through shop pay. And so it's like everybody is trying to win attention and whoever wins the most attention ultimately wins the game. And it's sort of a sad thing in a way because what these, some of these AI algorithms have figured out is that like, if they people off and freak them out, that will get their attention. So there's a whole, like, there's a whole bunch of stuff online that's designed to like, get your attention by being super sensationalized and super to try to make you angry or try to make you scared. And like, it works, right? So you gotta be careful about what you let into your mind, not just about what you put into your body. But for us in business, we have always thought of ourselves as companies that sell a philosophy, that have products that are related to that philosophy. So let me give you an example of this in our my information business. So at Smart Marketer, when I launched it, it wasn't just, hey, let me blog about E commerce, it was let me take a stand against the mainstream hustle grind, sacrifice culture of, you know, entrepreneurship and talk about integrity and communication and living a pleasurable life and having time for hobbies and relationships and family and taking care of yourself and making good things in the world. And like, so it's like that's my philosophy. And some people don't ride with that. They're just get rich quick, drop ship, whatever. It's all about making money. But the people who do stay with me. I got people with me since 2010, still on my list, still hanging out with me because they believe in what I have to say. And I make content that is related to their life experience and the experience that we're sharing collectively as entrepreneurs. And boom is the same way, right? We were the first pro age. Like, hey, we've got this new idea about what it is to age and be a woman and we have products that support that. So my play has been and has been getting more and more content and media. I Want to have. I want people to be paying attention to me and engaging with me. And I think there's a guy I saw on Twitter, I spoke to him at an event. I can't remember his name, but he had a sword that's a store that sells swords. And he was telling me. He's like, yeah, man, I built a YouTube channel to build an audience in the anime space. And then I use that audience who follows my content and likes me, and I sell them my swords. And I think he's pretty popular in our. In our industry. And so that is what. Yeah, there you go, Isaac. Yeah, there you go. That's it. And he was a cool guy. So, like, look, the fundamentals never go away, right? You gotta get people to know you exist. Best way to get people to know you exist in today's world is to pay for it, unfortunately. You got to pay Meta, and you got to pay Google, and you got to pay TikTok, and you got to pay creators to make content that's going to be engaging, and you got to do hooks and angles that are relevant. And it's like, you got to play the game. You got to build your sales funnels, you got to do your email marketing, got to make your product continually better. You have to do all that. And one way that you can stand out from other brands is by telling better stories, having better content, and thinking of yourself as a media agency. And I go to these events. I'm fortunate enough, thankfully, people like it. I have to say, it's really nice that people still want me to speak at these things. I'm kind of shocked about it, but it's wonderful. Like, this Google thing. I never thought I'd get close to the Google hq. I do not look like a guy who should be speaking@Google HQ, but I got to speak there, and it's super fun. And, like, people come up to me and they say, hey, man, I saw your ad where you were the Big Lebowski. And it was my favorite ad that I've seen in marketing for E commerce. I do these, like, fun ads that are, like, nostalgic to my childhood that people in our. Like, I don't know if you've seen any of them, but, like, we did the Godfather, we did the Big Lebowski, we did a few good bits. We just did Wolf of Wall street that's about to come out. And so it's like, that is a kind of storytelling that this industry isn't seeing. And so then I stand out when you see it. And so I'm focusing on how do I tell better stories and connect with my audience on a level deeper than just my products. You cannot ignore the direct response. Sell your product thing. But you can add the layer of storytelling and engagement, and you think about what. What engages people. Nostalgia, controversy. You know, one way that I use controversy. I don't like controversy as a form of marketing. Feel free to stop me. I'm going to ramble for a second, so interrupt me at any point.
- [27:33]
A
Goat. Keep going.
- [27:35]
B
So I get marketed all over the Internet. Cheech and Chong, THC Edibles. They think I am their guy, man. They really are hitting me with these ads. And it's like, listen, I enjoy plant medicine, dude. I'm all. I'm listen. But I'm not buying that stuff on the Internet. That's just. So I'm not actually their mark, but they think I am. And I'm a fan of Cheech and Chong. I grew up on a commune, man. And that was my era, right? They were, like, huge when I was a kid, like, you guys. You guys might be a little too young for Cheech and Chong, but they were legends. I mean, just. Just unbelievable. So I. I go to their land. I like to look at the landing pages that I get marketed to. I'm a marketer. I want to see what's out there. And so I go to their landing page, and I see the absolute best us versus Them, like, page that I've ever seen. I'm like, gosh, like, I used to do us versus Them marketing. I stopped because. And you guys are that are in SaaS world. You know how nasty the B2B SAS us versus them is. People will tear you apart. They're better than you for all these reasons. You suck. Like, B2B. SaaS is the nastiest and meanest us versus them that I've ever seen. And people go against me at Zipify in the same way. But I was like. I saw it, and I was like, man, us versus Them used to be, like, a favorite of mine and sort of a way to stir up some controversy, but, like, in a way that's not too negative. And it's sort of a flavor of before and after. It's like it's cut from the same cloth of before and after. And so I was like, you know what I think with my brand Navage, which is a nasal irrigator. Well, first on Cheech and Chong, I took their screenshot, and then I showed us versus Them at a speech that I was giving. And I showed a bunch of us versus Them examples and I got a dm. And afterward it was like, hey, thanks so much for the shout out. And I was like, I didn't shout anybody else. I looked at his bio and I was like, Chief Marketing Officer Cheech and Chong. And then he had the biology was responsibility is heavy responsibility, man. That was his little byline. And so I started talking to him and now we're helping him with marketing, which is, I think is actually my greatest achievement. Forget about pre sale articles and upsells and all that marketing. Cheech and Chong is like, I think my greatest business. I decided to do an Us versus Them with Navage. Navage, we do. It's a big company, right? We do like nine figure brand. And Neti Pot is like. So Navage is a nasal irrigator, right? And a Neti Pot is kind of like the well known industry thing that cleans your nose. And the cool thing about Neti Pot, the reason I wanted to do Us versus Them is Neti Pot is like Band Aid or Vaseline or Q Tip, where it is the. What people think of as the category. Even though it's a brand. Like if you buy a Band aid at Target, it's not actually a Band aid. It's a, it's a wound cover Target brand. It's not the Band Aid brand. But you still call it a Band Aid, right? Because it's like. So I was like, we can go against them. Because it's like, yeah, we're better than any pots. What you understand is the category. So we did. It worked extremely well, dude, within five minutes. And I will, if you, if you guys show any visuals on this, I can pull it up or send it to you after. Within three days. Our number one competitor, who granted is much smaller than us, they're coming up fast on Amazon though. They're eating some of our lunch. Had an us versus Them ad against us at Navage. And dude, this ad now has thousands of comments. Thousands. It's crushing. And I'm like, dude, why did I have to karmically let this into. I knew this was a bad idea to do Us versus Them. Now they're doing it against me and it's working super well. So I guess what goes around comes around. But I don't even remember how we got onto this Us versus Them.
- [30:49]
A
I forget too. I'm trying to think of it.
- [30:51]
D
And we can do, we can do visuals, by the way, if you do, if you let me forward anything you want to share.
- [30:56]
B
Check this out, bro. This is wild. They smoked me, dude. All right, so this was our us vs them against neti pot, which then we did like a pre sale article that we went to and stuff. And then here you can see this is these guys coming after us with Navage. And I was like, and this ad is killing for them, man. It's like, it's sad. And then this I was showing some other examples of like, you know, grooms is the up and coming greenhouse beverage or green drink. And they're going against athletic greens and they got a really successful espress them for that. This a brand. You know, I buy these diapers and they. And by the way, when you're doing us versus them, the best way to do it is then to go to a landing page. Like one of the things we are teaching at Smart Marketer is like, you know what I call who and why marketing followed by what and benefit marketing. So like who is the person? Why are they interested? And then what is the product and what's the benefit specific to them? And then your ads are that. And then your, your landing pages are the same way and you've got multiple avatars. Here's some other examples. And this is, I wanted to show here is kind of like this is it. It's. You can see this is pakas, which is the socks I buy. And then I was getting ads for their competitor.
- [32:00]
A
That's our, that's our friend Zach, friend of the Pod Hollow.
- [32:03]
B
Is. Are they pakas?
- [32:05]
A
No, Hollows at our friend Zack Stuck runs Hollow.
- [32:08]
B
So these guys, pakas I think are doing us versus them against them. And I bought from this ad so it's working. And then here's the before and after. You can kind of see like similar flavor. And then this is like my soap brand. And so I was just showing some other examples. Here it is in the software space. Before and after.
- [32:24]
A
I know they work my, my thing with that and I'm not like completely opposed is like you very rarely see it from a category leader. And I'm big on like category creation and like demand creation and like, you know, you don't see, you don't see like I see them a lot and I'll see them through like my subscription addiction. But like I'm trying to think of example but like you don't normally see the category leader who's kind of running those. And it's usually like the smaller one.
- [32:47]
B
Because coterie is a straight up category leader in that organic diapers. I agree with you. In that, that the tone of it is not what you would want to set for your brand. Which is why I was never gonna do it. But then it was like I got a little greedy, I think. And then I did it and then I got smacked in the head by these guys doing it against me and I'm like, okay, well maybe I shouldn't have done that, you know? So I, I don't. I agree. I think it's a little tacky, but I have to say it works.
- [33:16]
C
If you run a D2C brand and you're still throwing all your budget at meta in Google, it might be time to add a smarter, more profitable channel to the mix. Let's talk about Rock dads. Rock Dads put your brands directly on the checkout pages of premium e commerce sites right in front of real buyers who've just completed a purchase. It's not a discovery play. It's not broad targeting. It's high intent net new traffic with verified identity data and zero creative lift. Here's what makes ROKT ads different. One, you only pay for performance. No clicks, no cost. Two, no wasted spend on repeat customers. You upload a suppression list and ROKT only targets NET New Buyers. 3. Higher AOV. Higher LTV. These aren't looky lose. They're real customers in the buying mindset. Rockdads is powered by after sell by rokt, which means DTC brands now have access to enterprise grade tech that is powered checkout experiences for giants like Ticketmaster, Macy's and Disney. Brands like Jones Road, True Classic, Mugsy and Ridge are already seeing it work. And now after sales, opening up early access to the marketing operators community. Here's the deal. Qualified brands can claim $10,000 in free ad credits to test rocked ads and see the results firsthand. Head to aftercell.com to claim your $10,000 offer and start scaling smarter. I'm surprised and I don't know if you have a perspective on this. The competitor there. What's the competitor that's doing it to you now?
- [34:34]
B
Now they're called Nasal fresh.
- [34:35]
C
Okay, so Nasal fresh. Why wouldn't nasal fresh do it to Neti Pot? Like Neti Pot is the band aid of this space. Like why would they go after. You guys aren't up and coming in that category. So I'm confused why they would go like that many degrees away.
- [34:47]
B
Yeah, I think we, that we kind of created the category of powered nasal irrigation NETI Pots manual. You do it by yourself. We're a powered one that forces the water through it's got a little engine and kind of push it through. And they're sort of of stepping into that category of electronic medical device. And any pot's just a little plastic cup. This is an electronic medical device that, that has saline that pushes it through. And so we are sort of an adjacent category and we are the market leaders in that adjacent category. And I think that's why they're battling against us. And frankly they're winning market share. I mean they're doing a good job and they're, they're former smart marketer customers also. They were like, I know them. They're like yeah, we took the courses and stuff. Like damn dude. Yeah, that's.
- [35:27]
A
Yeah, yeah. The thing like I have no problem and this is completely subjective and like who am I to pass my judgment but like, like I'm looking at the, the some examples. It's like it's one thing to go after like ollipop going after Coke. It's like, you know, everyone knows Coke is the bad guy versus going after like another DTC brand or like a similar sized competitor. Like I think there's no problem going after Goliath, you know, but it's like when it's coming after I assume our.
- [35:50]
B
Brand morals and integrity. And I will tell you what, a lot of the people marketing against us seem to not care about our well being or telling the truth and they're just out there trying to win a sale and like, like I don't know, you know, it's like it's a cutthroat world out there, dude.
- [36:05]
A
Connors, do you guys, do you guys get them from competitors like Connor Ridge? Like I know that, you know you talked about that. You know there's so much demand creation you guys do and there's more Ridge Wallet searches and wallet like I would imagine there's a lot of people kind of piggybacking off of that with us versus them. Do you see it a lot for sure?
- [36:19]
C
All the time. I mean we have, there's two types and this is basically like we had the opportunity of going from bulky wallet to slim wallet. So that was our like us versus them which was like massive market opportunity and now we're seeing people like chip away at us where, whether, whether it's a direct knockoff or 80% off or whatever like true drop shipping stuff or more reputable brands that have different sorts of wallet silhouette designs. Going after Ridge. We see that all the time. We've never done it like do any of you guys have a perspective as to Whether if you were cmo at ridge, you'd be doing competitor, like us versus them ads.
- [36:51]
B
How big are your competitors compared to you? I mean, what I understand, you guys are big. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [36:56]
C
Like, any recognizable wallet brand is like no bigger than a third of our size.
- [37:01]
A
You've done. Have you done like. Like, we'll do generic. We'll do just like traditional foundation. We'll just put like a generic AI generated one. You do that with wallets. Right, But.
- [37:10]
C
But we'll. We'll position it against, like the classic bulky wallet. We won't go after any sort of layer or whatever design.
- [37:16]
B
Yeah, totally.
- [37:16]
A
That's probably what I would do. I think it's a personal decision, but that's probably what I would do.
- [37:20]
C
Oh, and we've built a business, man.
- [37:21]
A
A ridge wallet.
- [37:23]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [37:24]
B
Can you fit this much stuff in a ridge wallet? I got a lot.
- [37:27]
C
Oh, yeah, dude.
- [37:28]
B
Really? Okay.
- [37:29]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [37:30]
C
Experience.
- [37:30]
B
I'll buy one I like. I'm not gonna ask it for free. I'll buy it, but.
- [37:34]
C
And right now, if you buy on ridge.com youm'll be entered for a chance to win a Lamborghini.
- [37:38]
B
Oh, I mean, I don't want a lamborghini, but awesome. I'll give it away. I'll sell it and use the. Use the money.
- [37:43]
A
Think about the ads you could create in that thing, the Lamborghini.
- [37:46]
B
I could be Tai Lopez. I'm good, bro.
- [37:50]
A
I want to talk about that next. I call them Persona funnels. We just had like, Connor on from. From ridge. But, like, this is a big strategy for us is what do you call it? You call it the who.
- [38:01]
B
Who and why Marketing followed by what and benefit marketing. It's not as clean of a name as Persona funnel. I like that better.
- [38:07]
A
Talk about a little bit. So this is just like a paid social strategy, Creative strategy that you're doing.
- [38:12]
B
What I found, my experience was that after iOS 14.5 update initially, which was, I don't know, 2021 maybe, you know, after that, the general. It used to be, dude, I could have a general broad message, One or two landing pages, one or two video, and I could scale to the moon. And it was a wonderful and beautiful and glorious thing that I am grateful for and thank you to the gods of facebook for that time that existed. Now that doesn't work anymore. It's like now the only way I'm able to. I call it horizontal scaling. Where I need these, like, specific use case, you know, particular, like look at. Think about navarage firefighters People who live in cities, people who take care of their lawns, who want to, to not be as exposed to allergies, people who are podcasters or singers, so on and so forth. Like, I have these specific kind of like people that would be interested in this for a particular reason and I have them telling that story and then I have pages that are related to that that then lead into my product pages. And it's like that gives me for whatever reason somehow the ability to scale my ad spend in a way that I could cannot do with general broad messaging. And so, so it's just working from a, it's the only way we've been able to scale spend is by having these avatar based sort of like, and, and the more the merrier frankly that that can fit, you know, and, and then we're still doing like, you know, we're still like, we're not all broad, you know, we got interests and we're doing all kinds of crazy stuff. So. But yeah, it, I just can't scale spend without it is my problem. I would like to not have to do it.
- [39:51]
A
That's what, that's what we're finding where I think we've, we've always been pretty general with our messaging and creative and it scaled to, you know, a certain point to 160 million last year. But we're just finding, we're just not, but we're just not reaching the same people. We're sorry, we're not reaching new people as we want. And yes, there's definitely, like, I will.
- [40:09]
B
Tell you, there's this issue of banner blindness. And basically when you get to that size and I've got brands, it's like you've reached everyone all. There's 40 million women on Facebook over 45 or whatever and you reach them all 30 times. It's like, like you got something has to break through that's different. Whether it's a new channel, a new territory, a new message. But it's like you sort of reach a plateau of how much you can penetrate with one message angle, territory, channel, product, you know, which is why our focus has been a lot on product development. And can we get, you know, hey, you know, who doesn't necessarily want a multipurpose blush stick? Somebody who only wears mascara and eyeliner. Well, we better get into that category. You know, it's that kind of thing. So it's like customer acquisition can also come from adjacent desires from your consumers that, that aren't your core product.
- [41:01]
A
Yeah, tell me, tell me your thoughts on this. Because that's our focus and that's by far our biggest focus right now. What we found is like product development alone doesn't do it. And I have some suspicions about Meta. Like there's, you know, millions and millions of purchases that we have in our ad account and pixel on one customer. And as we're developing products for a different customer, like, like it doesn't work to just throw them in the ad account. Have you seen that at all?
- [41:22]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [41:23]
A
Like, I feel like sometimes you'll go like tinfoil hat. I wouldn't be surprised if you're the type of guy like, do you go separate ad account, separate pixel. You think creative. Like, what are your thoughts?
- [41:32]
B
Well, it's interesting because in the THC space, you end up with multiple ad accounts, multiple pixels, because you're fighting, you're fighting compliance. And you'll find sometimes a brand new ad account with no history all of a sudden does better and you don't know why. And so, yeah, I dabble in that. And I also think that you're right, that your pixel history is a blessing and a curse in that you get boxed into a certain, you know, so it's like the way that they do their, like, I was fortunate enough to help Facebook develop their e commerce engine that exists that, you know, the Facebook Shop and all that. Like six years ago when that was launching, I went to Facebook hq. I was a real big Facebook advertiser. I talked them through all the things their store needed. I talked to them all about how the technology worked. Like I was a part of that behind the scenes initial launch of the Facebook Shop. And one of the things that I learned, which is probably common knowledge at the time, but kind of like gives you a sense of their algorithm, is like, they'll take a look at your customer, right? Back then, you know, lookalike audiences look like audiences, not, not as, as wonderful as they once were, but back then they were pretty sweet. And what they would say is like, okay, we're gonna find, we're gonna take, you know, your average customer and we're gonna say anybody who has 13 data points in common with that consumer is who we're gonna. And this is what they told me at the time. Who knows how the algorithm has changed? But they said they had three categories, right? Category one was converters. These people are likely to convert. They're going to click this ad, they're going to go do the action you want them to. Then they had clickers. These people are most likely to just click but not convert. And Then they had, you know, scrollers and viewers. These people are going to scroll, they're going to view they might like, but they're not going to click. Okay, so there's sort of like three categories at the time. And then what they would do is they would take your, your, your, this is all getting back to your pixel and why it's a curse to you. In some place, in some cases they would take your sort of average person and they'd say anybody who has 13 data points in common with that, that individual, we're going to put into this lookalike audience and then we're going to first show it to the converters and then once we've run out of people who we've labeled as converters, we're going to then show it to the clickers and then we're going to show it to the viewers. Now of course people's behavior changes, the messaging matters, all that stuff. But basically your $160 million in sales, predominantly driven by Meta and all those consumers in there are then affecting what the algorithm, who, who it shows, you know, when it's looking for more people for you. And maybe those people aren't the ones who want your new shampoo product because they were cosmetics people people for example. So, so in that case, if it's a totally different sort of use case, you might want to try a new ad account.
- [44:10]
A
Yeah, we've seen some weird stuff like we launched a fragrance and, and you know, we were going in the all consolidated stuff. This is probably two years ago, year and a half ago. We launched fragrance in like our normal stuff with our normal makeup products and like our, our normal stuff just went like performance just went so far downhill. Just like was so confused. So I'm like normally a fan of leaning into ASC AI, but like we're definitely finding that you can't just do that. And I think we're going to take.
- [44:35]
B
Some bigger, that too. But then you also got to do interest targeting and you know, the old school strategies as well. And it's like unfortunately I'm waiting for Apple to release their advertising network because why would they cripple Facebook and Google and everyone else's ability to see what's going off, going on, off of their platform? If they did not want to scoop up this, this, this, this revenue from advertising, the, the amount of money that Facebook and Google and them are making, it's bonkers. And so at some point Apple's gonna, I think they already released their ability to do ads in the Apple app store and you can start doing some commerce ads. But like that's gotta be coming and I think when that comes, maybe the targeting will be a little bit smarter like it used to be because the targeting has certainly gotten stupider since iOS issues. I'm a big believer in Amazon and Shop App App. I think those are underutilized by our D2C community. I'm long Amazon, I'm long the Shop App.
- [45:33]
D
I keep hearing the same things from people lately. I'm being asked to do more with less. I have big goals to hit, but my budget is tight and every marketing dollar needs to work harder. I know I'm hearing this at hexclad. I'm sure a lot of operators are hearing this at their brands. Super relevant right now. Incrementality testing is the best way to figure out what's actually moving the needle so you can move around your ad spend in a way that's backed by science. All three of us use House for incrementality testing. We all love it. And House is now working with more than 40 of the top 100 DTC brands, which is pretty insane. I can speak personally for hexclad. The amount of insights that we've gotten, especially on our view based channels and how those are driving impacts in efficiency and revenue for our business is not only super valuable, but only possible through House. You know, channels like Connected TV, YouTube, TikTok, these very view based channels that don't garner a click the same way that Facebook and Google does have been really only measurable through Geo incrementality holdout testing and the actionable next steps from these tests in terms of deciding to scale up or down or keep spending where it's at is is really amazing. House helps you run experiments on your channel so you can confidently answer the questions you've always wondered about. Things like like what channels are actually driving my business? How much should I be spending on each channel? What's the impact of my ads on Amazon or retail sales? How should I structure my Meta and Google accounts to make sure they're spending dollars in the right way? The beauty of House is that it's built for marketers. The science under the hood is rigorous, but the platform itself is simple. So you pick a question, launch a test in minutes and get real results fast. Every customer is paired with a measurement strategist, someone who understands growth and brings a clear strategic point of view. They will get to know your business, help you build a roadmap of impactful tests, and guide you as you operationalize Incrementality in your day to day. Even if you're brand new to testing, you're not doing it alone. It is very much no in no way. Like go sign up for the platform and figure it out on your own. You have a partner in these customer success reps from House who's been in your shoes. And now more than ever, you need to make every marketing dollar count up. Level your measurement with House by going to house IO forward/formators, that's H A U S IO slash operators and start allocating your budget with confidence.
- [47:49]
C
I'd love to talk about both, both of those. Where do you see brands taking missteps as it relates to Amazon?
- [47:57]
B
I mean, not like, like a lot of brands are trying to drive sales away from Amazon. So for example, they'll have like, like they won't run Google Ads to their Amazon listing, they'll only run Google Ads to their store for. But it's like, hey, guess what? Amazon has what, a hundred million prime members who just have a one click inside their little phone and kind of only buy stuff on Prime. And if you're not there and promoting, they don't promote their Amazon the way they promote their D2C. And it's like for me, I'm omnichannel, baby. I didn't want to be. I wanted to only be on my Shopify store until half the freaking country only bought on Amazon. It's like, okay, all right, I'm promoting Amazon too. I'm all in, dude. I'm running ads over there, there. I'm building creators over there. I'm building out my listings A plus. I'm split testing things. I'm launching stuff. I'm going for organic rankings. I'm doing, I'm treating Amazon as if it were my Shopify site. I'm building direct response to it. I'm running outside traffic to it. I'm like fully embracing it as a channel that I'm going to figure out how to market and optimize on every level. And people are not doing that. They're just like, oh, Amazon's my brand traffic. You know, I just pick up my brand there. It's like, okay, but you could have a lot more there. You could win in the Amazon category. So I think the there's under indexing and some people still aren't even listed there. And it's like, dude, we put boom on there. The reason I didn't have boom on there for so many years was I had supply chain issues and I was filling the capacity of My own supply chain through direct response. So why would I go to Amazon? I want to keep the customer data and I have them buy on my own website. Once my supply chain issues were fixed, I put myself on there. The first year was like $6 million and it was just like all people searching for my brand, they were buying these knockoff products from China and stuff. So I think you got to defend your own brand is number one. And number two, I think there's a lot more marketing and optimization available on that channel and platform than people recognize now. Maybe some people recognize it, but if you just look at the average hundred brands that are doing, let's call it 5 to 10 million bucks or more, I don't think they're indexing Amazon heavily enough.
- [49:48]
C
And if I. So if I'm a brand that wants to start doing paid media behind my Amazon listings, would you say I should start with like non branded search or social or like what, what would your order of operations be?
- [50:00]
B
I mean it would first be to max out any and all Amazon ads themselves, right? Because Amazon ads is its own thing. You could do video ads, you can go target people's listings. You could do sponsored display where you're showing up at the top of categories. You could do brand, non brand, exact, max phrase match, broad match, Google style. Like there's a lot in Amazon advertising. You could do Amazon dsp, which I don't actually recommend, but they've got like, you know, their own display network going on. Like, so there's, there's a lot of internal. You could do Amazon Creators where you're going out and maybe you're using Levanta, which one? People aren't using that anymore. But like you're getting creators and you're getting them on your listing and you're having people, you're running ads to those creators. Which by the way, one of the things we're seeing is like the, the Amazon Creator network is fast growing to catch up with TikTok. It's wild. It's all the TikTok people coming over to be creators on Amazon because they're getting commissions. So I think the Amazon creator space is like, like, dude, this is, it's a frontier for Amazon right now. There's a lot of opportunity there. We're getting a lot of sales through the Amazon Creator network. I have a lot of brands I don't tell people about because the brands that I tell people about get copied, which I have. No, I don't feel any. It's like, okay, what am I going to. I'M going to show everything I'm doing and expect people not to want to do it. Rock and roll man. But I've got brand, I got, I got brands in the home category. I have brand, I have a whole little business of only Amazon brands. No D2C at all. Because Amazon is actually a different business model. The unit economics are different. When you're solely Amazon and you're not spend spending money on Facebook, meta, Instagram, tick tock, you know, Google, Google Ads and all that, you're just running Amazon like you can run a nice little business there. There's some problems with it obviously because Amazon's like volatile and people can attack your listing and there's all kinds of problems. But unit economics of it are pretty good from a profitability standpoint when you're solely Amazon business. But yeah, I'm a big fan man. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Now if you want to say how do I then start sending traffic to Amazon? Well one, one interesting thing happens is I would say, and you guys can correct me if you see difference here, but I would say there's a 15 to 30% direct response social paid traffic attrition to Amazon. I would say 15 to 30% of my paid spend that goes to social ends up with a buyer on Amazon. That's the only way I can explain my Amazon sales is, is that it's. And that's about what it seems when we look at all the data. Okay, so, so you're getting value from your paid social to Amazon already anyways which indicates that a lot of people want to buy there. So why not try your Google retargeting to your Amazon listing and see how that goes. Maybe, maybe retargeting after 14 days or something after you tried to get them to your site. Like you could start small with that or you could start running Facebook through like what we used to do is like Facebook through a pre sale page have the option to buy on Amazon. I mean now the technology exists where you can put it through your own. What are they called? Not Amazon affiliate, but you can kind of track it. So I would just literally start considering Amazon as an additional purchase place that you were happy about and promoting it any way you could instead of like I don't want people to buy here.
- [52:58]
C
Awesome. I'm super on board with that. I do want to talk about Shop app too. So like I think, I think paid media strategies for Amazon largely unexplored, agree with that Shop app probably even less explored by brands. So like what are you seeing work there?
- [53:11]
B
Well, I will just say about the Shop app that Shopify is dumping untold amounts of money into this thing because they want it to compete with Amazon. Right? It's like you open up your phone, you have your Amazon app, it's got your credit card in there, it tells you when your products are shipping, you can do your customer support resolutions right in there and you can shop from all the third party vendors on Amazon in one order. And that's a wonderful experience. And I think Shopify would enjoy the same if all their consumers were using this app, which is why they're giving cash back. Shopify is funding, they're incentivizing their consumers to use the Shop app by giving them cash. I got like 300 in shop app cash right now that I need to go spend because I buy from a lot of Shopify stores and they give me that. So basically right now it's going to be between 1 and 5% of your total sales of a store. It's not going to be more than that because hey, Shopify has like 100 million people who've downloaded this thing. Actually, maybe it's a little less, but it's in that territory. So it's growing. But because Shopify, arguably the biggest technology player in our space, is dead set on making this a channel. Because in e commerce, you know, the big battle in E commerce right now is actually for who controls the purchase. Meta wants it on Meta Shops. TikTok wants it on TikTok Shops. Amazon wants it there. Google wants it on Google Pay. Apple wants it on Apple Pay. You know, Pinterest tried to launch their shops, didn't work out. Shopify wants it on Shop Pay. Whoever controls the transaction gets the merchant processing fees first of all and controls all the customer data and the flow of that. And so Shopify is very, very, very incentivized to ensure that their Shop app is a success. No brands are. All you got to do is set it up, optimize it. Run the Shop app campaigns inside your Shopify backend admin, which is really easy to do. Make sure your store is optimized. If you're running merchandising on your website, also run the merchandising on Shop app. By the way, one click Upsell by Zipify, which is my company, we're the only upsell inside of Shop app. We can do upsells right inside there. We co developed it with Shopify so you can do that now. Like it's just a cool place and I would I would say if we are three to four years from today, that 1 to 5% might be 5 to 20% of your total revenue available from that channel. And for me it's like, hey dude, if 5 or more percent of my overall brand revenue is available on a channel, I'm going to go optimize every little thing I can. Now let's talk about out also Shopify. I was at their, I went to their Shopify developers conference called Shopify Unite in, in Toronto last month and they released this thing called Shopify Catalog. Not Shopify Catalog the way you think of your products, but Shopify Catalog which is an API to every product on every Shopify store that exists that they're feeding right into the LLMs, you know, clarity chat, GPT and then it's going to be checkout directly integrated into Shop Pay. So this is kind of like an extension of the Shop app in a way. Of course it's in the LLM. But it's like it's this same idea of how do we get all the Shopify products that exist in the world and have them out there for consumers where they are shopping and have the purchase point and checkout point be Shop Pay. And it's like dude, it's going to be wild. And your Shop app feed and your LLM feed is all going to be the same thing. And so you got to optimize it.
- [56:23]
D
Do you, do you feel like there are any early movers brand wise that are like really doing a good job of optimizing for search discoverability?
- [56:32]
B
And here's an interesting thing about those tools because I was actually about to invest in one. So what those tools cannot factor in is context. So when you're using an LLM it gains context on you and then it's going to tailor the results to what it knows about you and your history of using it. And when those tools are checking your ranking, they're opening up like an incognito window and they're doing a fresh search. So like that is good information but it's not the complete picture because it does not have the context of the user that's fed into the LLM and what, and, and what the LLM knows about it over time. And I think you know, right now like the LLMs are kind of like early Google I, I, so I was gonna invest into an a company that does exactly this. It tells you how you're ranking physical products in, in LLMs. And so I got to understand the technology pretty good and I got to understand what we, we currently know about what the LLMs are taking into account and unfortunately the established brands have a, in categories, a very high advantage at the moment because they have reviews, they have tons of social proof, they have websites out there that rue them. They got a bunch of people linking to them, there's content. So like the established brands are going to dominate in the early form until there becomes a real, well, first of all chat, GBT and all these ones, what are they going to do immediately is they're going to launch ads. So you kind of don't have to worry about SEO in a way because, because very, very shortly you'll be able to run ads inside of these things and optimize that and get a whole bunch of value. But from an SEO perspective, it's like if you don't have your rich snippets on your website, rich snippets is like metadata where Google reads your reviews and they read your site links and they read, you know, so like you got to have every rich snippet available. So rich snippets can also tell like if you go to, if you search like one of my products on Google, it's going to show you the price, it's going to show you the color, it's going to show you the brand, it's going to be the manufacturer. So you want to have your rich snippets in on your site fully dialed. Because that's really important because they're right now they're scraping data, the LLMs. But as soon as Shopify gives them the catalog API, they won't have to scrape that data anymore. So the scrape data will become the second tier. Right now it's the first thing that they look at is all the scrape data they can get. Once they have the API, it's going to be how well filled out is the back end of your Shopify. Do you have every attribute filled out? Do you have additional attributes filled out? Do you have multiple pictures? Do you have a super full product description? Know what some people have have is they'll use like a landing page builder. And so their product description and their sales page will be in the page builder. It won't be in their description section of Shopify. In the back end, it won't be like full. Well guess what, if it's not, if your description section in the back end of Shopify isn't full, what Shopify sends through the Shopify catalog API to the LLMs is going to be truncated. So now you're diminishing yourself. So there's some, some, some tricks and stuff you can start doing early. But the key is like make sure you're fully filled out everywhere you possibly can be and go out, make sure your rich snippets like your old school traditional SEO is set up well for search engines and you'll be like ahead of the competition. And if you're like established like us, you got reviews, you got social proof, you're running ads, it's like, you know, like as an example, I saw an ad from Tai Lopez and it was like, I'm the number. You know, Chat GPT says I'm the number one Internet marketer advertiser in the world. And it was like a list. I was like number two on the list, which I thought was cool just to see that in an ad. But it's like I don't know how he screwed with the, the LLM or whatever to get that result. But like I've been around for a long time as an Internet advert. I don't make much content these days. Molly Pittman is my CEO at Smart Marketer. She runs the company. I do a podcast here and there. It's like I'm not the face of that thing anymore. I haven't been for a long time. But the Chat GPT still thinks of me I think because I just have so much history. So it's like those brands with a lot of history I think are going to benefit early.
- [60:05]
D
Got it. So, so you like it for us, you like it for like our, our brands, right? That we have it.
- [60:11]
B
I think it's harder for people to start than it, you know, than it is for us entrenched brands to like be successful with that. But I do, I think you can be. And the key is, and this is like my big thing, I didn't grow up with money. I worked a full time job until my businesses allowed me to go down to part time. And then one day a week it's like you optimize everywhere you can. You know what people aren't doing, they're not going and looking at their abandoned cart. Email automation sequence and seeing which email does the click rate go from. The click, the open rate or the click through rate go from like, sorry, the open rate of the email go from, let's call it 25 to 18. And then optimizing that email, it's like we're still doing that stuff anywhere we can optimize. We are. And that's the mindset of a successful operator is I'm not above hard Work and I do the best I can, wherever I can.
- [60:55]
D
Can I, can I ask you a question about that, Ezra? Because you have, I mean, I don't know how many brands you own or are an owner of, but it seems.
- [61:02]
B
Like a lot of.
- [61:02]
D
But I, I assume you've placed teams to run these brands. Maybe a mixture of internal and external, but you're obviously clearly still very technical, very in the know on all the, on the, all the bells and whistles and dials and buttons to, to, you know, hit in a, in an ecom brand. Like, can you just explain where you're at as an operator in these brands and like how you stay sharp and like, what's that, what's that balance look like?
- [61:30]
B
Like, so I think I have the benefit of. I grew up in this industry and I watched it change over 20 years. And I think when you have that context, right, like my horizon of E Commerce is all the way from when e commerce was 3% of total sales and now it's like 20 or something. So it's like I've just been in it forever. And I also was a do it yourself founder, Solopreneur. Had to learn how to build a team, how to learn how to delegate, how to learn systems, processes. Like if I had known all that stuff, I would have been Wayfarer. They're now one of the biggest companies in the world. I didn't understand all that, that back then. So I've kind of like traveled every level and my viewpoint was that I couldn't be the CEO of more than two brands at once. I was the CEO of boom. And then boom. We bought a couple brands and rolled them in. So we're like a little conglomerate that made it way harder. And I was also the CEO of Zipify at the same time. So be. To actually be an active CEO, I was successfully for two eight figure plus brands, CEOing and growing both of those while also doing what I only do now, which is I'm no longer the CEO of any brands. So. So I think two brands, if you're going to operate them as Max dude, if you want to live any kind of pleasurable life outside of that. But you know, in 2021. So if you would ask me before 2021, I would have said I'm, I love this game. I love making products, I love marketing, I love building brands. And back up off me, I'm gonna do this till the day I die. I love it. I'm, I'm into it. And hey, I'm maybe not working you know, 40, 50, 60 hour weeks like I was when I was coming up, grinding, figuring things out, you know, staying up all night after my full time job. Like I have a normal work life now, but like I love doing this, why would I stop? And by the way, I don't come from resource and people, I think the game is resource generation. Generate resource, use it towards causes in the world that you find noble. Take care of yourself, your community, your family, and then things in the world that are meaningful to you. And I want to generate resource and use it it. And so that was my viewpoint and attitude and I liked it. And I would, I would buy and invest in brands. I invested in a whole bunch of stuff and I would maybe be on the board or consult or you know, maybe a monthly or weekly meeting if I was really heavily invested or had some, you know, maybe a salary as a, as a, as an ongoing consultant to a brand I invested in. So I had a bunch of deals like that. Well, two things happened concurrently. One, I sold 70% of my biggest brand for a very, very, very large sum of money. Money. And I sold to private equity and I got to see to a private equity company that owns billion dollar brands. And you know, this was my first rodeo at a, at a, at a big brand. I've done eight figures before, but never the size of where I was. And so I got to see from them what my blind spots were, how to, how to scale and also how to coach and manage and support a CEO. And I realized, wow, I don't think I'm giving Molly the kind of support and coaching and structure culture that I could be that these guys are giving me. So I kind of learned the private equity model through being purchased and then being the CEO for them for a few years and like watching how they supported me and coached me and helped build out value creation plans and kind of like showed me that game. And I had a daughter who was born premature, who lived 19 months and then died of cancer. And after that it was like, dude, do I care about selling a makeup stick? Like I just did not. I could no longer do it. I didn't have the same goals, desires, interests. It was just like immediately I my desires and interests and where I wanted to spend the bulk of my time changed. And I love so grateful for my entrepreneurship journey. I'm so grateful for the opportunity and time that I was a CEO and an operator. And now what I do is I buy into brands. I'm usually between, you know, 20 or from 20 to 80% and or, or I build them with like the Amazon company. We built that from scratch. I just have an operator. I've got a CEO and a CEO and a team and I, I provide finance, so I provide money, I provide strategy, I provide connections, network support, you know, agencies, so on and so forth, whatever the brand needs. Like, I just bought into this company. Pretty, pretty big steak. It's a, it's a cell phone radiation case company. Company. So it basically protects your phone from, protects you from the radiation of your cell phone. And this is two wonderful founders who built this thing and they kind of had gotten to a spot where they're like, hey, we could use some support. And I'm, I was a user of the product. They were smart marketer customers. They saw me using it on a webinar. They're like, you're using our stuff? I was like, dude, I've been using your product 10 years. I'm like, my mom freaked me out about this when I was like 15 and she's all freaked out about radiation. So I got that from her and I love this thing. And I ended up buying in and like, hey, I meet with them once a week and we talk about the value that, you know, what our value creation plan is. I connect them with agencies, I go meet with them in person twice a year. We do like a, you know, a quarterly board meeting and a bi yearly planning session. So I'm very involved. Like a weekly meeting, a quarterly board meeting. Like I'm helping them scale. But I have a, I have a big percentage of that, right? And I have other companies where I'm not as involved or I have a smaller percentage or other companies where I have a bigger percentage where they don't really need me as much. And so what I really, really, I love founders. I love, I think entrepreneurs make the world a better place. I think they bring goodness into the world and like affect change and create positivity in their communities. And I want to be a part of that and I like being a part of it and, but I don't want to operate. I'm done operating. Thank you very much. It was good. I enjoyed it. You guys are young man, you got energy, you're full of piss and vinegar, you're bright eyed and bushy tailed your spring chickens. It's like you guys operate, you know, and frankly, Molly's a much better operator of smart marketer than I ever was. You know, these guys at Amazon are much better operators at Amazon Brands than I ever was. Hey, I know supply chain, I know manufacturing Like I know stuff, I've been doing it forever. I talked to them about it. I can still stay in the weeds of it because I've been in the game. But I don't have to go in and send an email out in Kovio or build out a Facebook ad or do any of that stuff anymore. Now here's the difference. I used to drive the car, now I navigate the ship. That's the big difference. I'm just a navigator now. I just talk to people about what they do instead of doing anything myself. And it turns out it's a useful position. Once you've had some experience, you can be really impactful in that role.
- [67:35]
A
We're about halfway done through the year. H1 is almost over. We're prepping for the second half of the year. We're also prepping for Q4, which is huge for us. And our budgets are going to be the highest then. And when our budgets are the highest, we're going to need the most granularity and the most confidence knowing where we should spend our dollars. And that's why we turn to Prescient. Prescient is an MMM and most MMMs, they use 60 year old regression models. They're not really built for D to C. Prescient you can get readouts really quickly if something is changing, which again DTC is really volatile so you can't rely on an outdated MMM that you're only gonna get one readout a quarter. One thing I love about Prescient so much, you're able to see the halo effect. So upper funnel spend, which is again is huge. We love to fill the funnel prior to a peak moment prior to Q4 holiday, something like that. We're really able to see the halo effect that has. Because sometimes you're not gonna see great attribution from YouTube campaign or from TV campaigns. Well, prescient plugs into all that and it can actually tell you your base plus your halo. So it's been really helpful for us to understand and actually have confidence to invest in some of these upper funnel channels that are harder to measure with other ways. So I love Prescient. I can't tell you all the technical stuff behind it, but I can tell you it gives me and my team more confidence, know where we should put our budget, especially in some of these pesky upper funnel channels that are much harder to measure. And again, don't wait till Q4. It's going to be too late then. We're halfway through the year. But we've really got to all lock in for the rest of the year for Q4. There's a reason we use it. Hexclad, Holo, socks, coterie and 100 more leading brands so highly recommend checking it out. Go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo today.
- [69:05]
C
So this process of buying into brands at, like, really meaningful stakes. We've talked a lot about whether it's like, maximizing value on Amazon or the Shop app. We talked about Persona funnels. I'm curious, you've done this a number of times now. Like, what is there, like, a highest leverage use of your time as you jump in and you say, hey, this is where I can provide the quickest amount of value? Because I'm thinking for our listeners, like, like, if they were to get one piece of advice for you where they might be under indexing, do you have.
- [69:30]
B
A recommendation in terms of, like, what to put attention on in order to scale?
- [69:36]
C
Yes.
- [69:37]
B
Do less, think more. So, you know, you'll hear Jeff Bezos talk about this concept of wandering. Jeff Bezos. Say whatever you want about him. I'd argue he's one of the greatest e commerce entrepreneurs ever, maybe of our, I would say of our generation. Right? I mean, it's hard to deny that, that. And he, he did this podcast recently. I have to find it for you guys. But basically he was like, yeah, half of my work life is wandering. I just wander around the office and I talk to people and I think and I, you know, have tea. And he just thinks, he, he, he, he figures out how to be able to think clearly and he lets things come to him. He goes talk to somebody. So it's like, I do a lot of thinking. I, I think deeply. I set space, space. Like, I had this thing when I was coming up. I called it top level Tuesday. And it was every Tuesday. No meetings, no calls, no computer notebook for at least four hours thinking about anything related to the project. Anyway, where do I want to go? Where am I now? Is it maybe my Facebook ad funnel? But, like, clear space and time to think. And one thing that is all these, like, new age, you know, health science people will tell you is that you do your best thinking while you're walking. Because we evolved walking around. And so, like, I live in the middle. I live deliberately in the middle of nowhere. I'm in the forest. I got 170 acres. I walk around my forest and I think and I enjoy the trees and I feel the breeze and I think about my projects and I get good ideas, man. I'm like, it's like I capturing something from the universe or something. So I, I would say figure out a way to create time where you're not doing. Because as operators and as young up and comers and as people are trying to build things, you're always. Everything's always a fire right in front of you. There's always something right now right in front of you on your computer. There's some going down. It's like if you're always in the now, you're never looking at where you're. You can't see the mountains up in the distance when you're turning the corner in on the car. And so I think that I underutilized that when I was young and it has been very powerful for me in my older entrepreneur. I mean, not that I'm that old, but I'm old enough to have been doing this a long time and you know, love it.
- [71:41]
C
You know, I'll also. I appreciate you calling us young. They're on, on our little corner of D2C Twitter, we're considered old heads now.
- [71:48]
B
So are we.
- [71:51]
A
I think the operators podcasts are the old ones.
- [71:54]
C
I've been referred to a number of times as old head.
- [71:56]
B
There's no shot you guys are in your late 30s. No, no, you're not even close. You guys are diapers, man. You're young. Connor Rowland.
- [72:04]
A
Are you. Are you 30?
- [72:05]
B
Probably not quite.
- [72:07]
D
Not quite. Couple weeks. Couple weeks.
- [72:11]
B
You guys are wonderfully. Hey, you're clearly successful and kicking butt and having fun and doing good. So hey, you know, age is irrelevant. I was the youngest guy until I wasn't, so. But yeah, you're definitely young.
- [72:24]
D
But it's cure. It's cool to hear your, your story, Ezra. And I think, you know, I, I've been thinking a lot about this. Like you can't be a good ship steerer unless you were a ship controller at some point because you don't know what to like you're steering in what direction. And I've seen, I've seen this happen before where you have like, you know, big marketing exacts from like Unilever come into like a fast, quick growing startup like an E Comm brand. It just doesn't work because they just don't have that like hands on keyboard. Like I'm gonna go shoulder deep in this experience and like they're just not, not able to effectively steer the ship and manage the team. So it's been, it's cool to hear your, your progression as like an operator to more of a, a ship steerer. If you will.
- [73:08]
B
And I think, you know, you guys will get to your late 30s, you know, I'm, I'm 39 in a month. And you may find that you have less desire for the kind of work you're doing now and more desire for what, what you would call higher level work knowledge work where you're strategizing, thinking, supporting, and maybe you're spending a little less time in front of the computer and you know, you're outside more, you're with your kids more or whatever. You know, it's like something happened to me around, I mean, definitely went with Audra, but it was even before that, it was around 34, 35, where I was kind of like, okay, maybe some, you know, and it was really. I have to give credit to Drew Sanaki. He introduced me to the concept of, I had no idea about private equity. I didn't come from money. I wasn't in business school. I just learned all this stuff. I as, you know, as I was going. But Drew was like, hey man, because, you know, we've been buddies forever. Let's buy brands, let's support founders, let's like. And I didn't even understand it. And so what he was, he said, hey, come help me consult with private equity firms. So for several years, Drew and I would, would basically, if you have a private equity firm, like the private equity firm that bought Slim Fast, I think it might have been Unilever, they bought Slim Fast for like a billion dollars out of bankruptcy. We helped them with that deal. We went and looked at the E Commerce, we gave them, we looked at the analytic Google Analytics, the AdWords we gave them. They paid us a big chunk of money to like assess. And so we got to like, look at all these big deals that these private equity and venture capital funds were doing, because we were sort of like an E commerce team that could come in and say, hey, from an E commerce perspective, here's the value of this. It's, you know, it's, it's predicated on SEO. So it's risky or whatever. And so I think I really have to give him a lot of kudos for introducing me to this world. And even the concept that, that you could, I didn't know anything beyond operating.
- [74:46]
A
That's cool. Yeah, I'm, I'm 32, two kids hoping in my mind 35, like done, I'll like Sprint till then, hopefully, you know, is buying it private equity maybe, but hopefully that's it. But yeah, I definitely, I definitely think.
- [74:59]
B
Like, do you think you'll okay, let's imagine, let's, let's just paint it. Let's wave a magic wand at. You're 35 years old. You got Unilever, you got L'. Oreal, you got Procter and Gamble. They come, they pay you, you know, a quarter of a Billy or whatever, they pay you for your brand. Half. I don't know how much you're worth. Whatever you're worth, and you get a really wonderful payday. Do you stay in the game in some way or you say you're. How are you feeling? Are you going to be done? Like, you don't want to do it anymore?
- [75:19]
A
No, no. I'm, I'm like type A. I, I, I'm going to be one of those people that's, like, it's really hard to, like, go and not do anything and, like, identity is up and work and stuff. So. No, I, Absolutely.
- [75:29]
C
But you'll at least be podcasting.
- [75:31]
B
I mean, we know.
- [75:32]
A
Professional podcaster, Twitter. Twitter influencer. No, I mean, I mean, big golfer. So I think that would take up a lot of my time. I think that would be something I could, like, dive my teeth into. But at least now, like, I think, and maybe I should do this, but, like, I would probably not be working as many hours. I probably would, like, if, if I thought I was going to be doing this for 10 years, like, I would probably do it slightly differently.
- [75:55]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So you're sprinting now because you're like, hey, it's a short window. Yeah, we'll see if it's a good.
- [76:01]
A
Strategy, but that's where I'm at right now.
- [76:03]
B
While you can sprint, baby. That's cool.
- [76:05]
A
I got one last question, and then maybe we'll wrap. You wrote something. So you got agency, you got SaaS, you got brands, you wrote something. I don't know how many years ago, but you wrote a blog comparing the different business models. It's been a while since I've read it. I think you went with brand as, like, you know, the top one. Do you still feel like that? Has that changed at all? Like, if you're starting one or going all in on one today, like, are you still, like, yes. I think a brand is the easiest and best way to be successful. Or would you go with a different one?
- [76:33]
B
Well, I think it's fundamentally dependent upon your goals. Right. My goal is $100 million liquid in a bank account after taxes. I'm getting there. And so that's one of my goals. I got 60 hippies to support, you know, so I Got, I got, I got, I got. I need some resources around here. And then my second goal is, is businesses that are pleasurable to run, that don't require my direct operating input on a regular basis. And so, you know, when I did that, that was back in 2018 and I was kind of comparing information publishing, so speaker, coach, author, course seller, mastermind, op, you know, et cetera, to software, to E commerce. And because those are kind of the businesses that were popular at the time. And any business needs marketing, which is get people to know you exist, get them to buy your stuff and then deliver a good enough product and good enough experience that they come back. It needs product. So the thing that you sell them has to live up to the promise that you made because the best promise wins in the marketplace. Not the best product, but the product has to live up to the promise that you make. So it needs a really good product and then it needs support. And when you look at software, okay, number one, marketing, it's about the same for every business. You got to run ads, you got to build out funnels, you got to of like, it's like marketing is pretty much the same level of difficulty no matter what you do. If you're doing it at scale, software, it's actually a little easier because the pool of people is smaller. There's only 2 million Shopify merchants. You know where to reach them, they're on Twitter, they're wherever they are, either in the communities. It's a little easier to reach that than it is to reach a woman over 50 in Ohio. It's like harder to penetrate that ecosystem because it's so much bigger. The software industry is smaller. I would argue it's a little bit easier because it's a smaller group and you know where to get them. Okay, but, but in general, marketing is somewhat the same level of difficulty. Then you got product. Well, at software you have front end engineers, back end engineers, QAs, CO, you know, project managers. It's like a code base and your, your, your product is actually people now. There's AI adding into that. And so it's a nightmare because your code base is talking to other code bases that are changing. Shopify. Change something, it breaks. You have competitors who are breaking the rules. You don't get to break the rules. You, it's like, it's a nightmare. The product, it's a never ending rabbit hole of madness. I would never wish upon anyone ever. The hardest thing I have ever done is build an eight figure software brand without question. So hard. And from a product Perspective now with courses, it's like, dude, the courses are great but they go out of fashion within three to four months. It's like the content's outdated now. You got to do it again. So you got to keep the courses up to date. You got to like talk, you got to go do the events in person. It's like you got to make the content. It's a lot, lot of production. Like the product is energetically intense usually because it's based on you a freaking influencer. So it's like the energetic intensity of content production when it's, when you're trying to do it at scale for an eight figure business, it's kind of hard, man. Product wise with E Commerce it's like, dude, I sell you a tub of goop, wonderful goop, handmade goop, you know, the best goop you can get. But at the end of the day it's a tub, some coup and it a label on it, a jar. Now we got, you know, post consumer resin recycled plastic jars, ocean waste plastic jars. We got, you know, screen printed. So we're not putting pl. But like at the end of the day it's like more jars, more labels, more goop, seal them off out the door. So like supply chain for E commerce. It's all made by third parties. It's your third party manufacturer. Maybe you're in. We're in New Jersey with that one guy. We're still got a product with him that you're with. It's like you go, you find them, you go meet them at trade shows. But they're doing all the heavy lifting now. You got to make sure they're not ripping you off. You got to make sure that you're tracking where are they getting the ingredients? Ingredients that they're putting in the thing is it leading to the deforestation of the rainforest in the Amazon where they got their freaking canola oil or whatever. So there's some. But like product at scale for E Commerce is so much easier than software or services. Services are a nightmare because you are the emotional punching bag of whatever the brand is that you're selling the service to. Whenever things are going bad, you got to talk to them, you got to deal with people, they're punching you in the gut. It's like services is a nice nightmare. So from a product perspective, E commerce is easy, easier by far in my opinion. Okay, number two, number three is support. Listen, when you're doing services, when you're doing information publishing courses, the knowledge worker that does that support. When you're doing software. The knowledge worker that does that support has to be smarter than the business owner or person going through the thing has to know more about it. So it's like your, your level of knowledge worker is so much higher for a services agency or a courses business business that E commerce is like refunds, you know, ingredients. Like I got stay at home moms in Minnesota who can work with their kid on their lap because it's just easier. It's a lower level of knowledge work. It doesn't mean you're a stupider person or a lower level person. It just means you're doing a level of knowledge work that is not as difficult as. So it's like easier to get those people, they're more affordable, it's easier to train them. If you get turnover, it's easier to replace them. So support is easier. Product at scale is easier. And marketing about the same with any business business. And by the way with E Commerce, it ain't attached to my Persona. You don't care that Ezra Firestone was the one who made zipify and you can get teams to run it and it's like you can sell it. Now software is actually the best one to sell because software trades at a multiple of revenue, not a multiple of profit. E commerce trades at a multiple of EBITDA services, agencies and courses. Businesses kind of suck to sell. I know Taylor Holiday just sold his congratulations, happy for that guy. But like the multiples suck and it's a nightmare. It's like you're arbitraging labels. So if you're going to sell a business, your E commerce business gets you a nice multiple. Now when I sold we were getting nine and a half, 10 EBITDA multiples. Now you're getting three and a half, four, maybe five. So the multiples have come down when you're selling a big brand these days, depending on if you someone really needs you as a strategic buyer. But dude, Eileen Brand all day long. Now let's play devil's advocate for a second. E Commerce is my passion. E Commerce made me what I am. E Commerce was my first. It's like I'm the E Commerce guy. What am I, what am I going to say? Of course I'm going to say E Commerce. Like so you know, you could argue this commerce guy talking about E commerce, he thinks it's the best. So sure, I hear that. And yet I still maintain my viewpoint that it's the best.
- [82:36]
A
Pretty pretty convincing argument. No, it's actually very similar. I was just curious if it changed at all. Seems like it's pretty similar to what you had probably seven years ago.
- [82:46]
B
Let me tell you one thing though. If the goal is just cash flow, you don't want to sell something. Something. You just want to make cash at a high margin. You can't beat an agency business. The margins on an agency are unbelievable. What? It's your. Usually when you're starting it, it's. There's no overhead. It's your time for money. E commerce. You got to run ads, you got to buy product. There's all this overhead. Software. You got to build a product, dude, Services, bro. You can just sell them without. I mean, of course you have to get the lead in the first place, which means you would have probably had to have a referral or a network or maybe ran an ad or made some content. You had done something to get the con, the client. Client. But once you get the client, like, we were running ads for this cookie company, dude, they were selling almost a hundred million dollars a month of cookies. At a certain point, blow your freaking mind. I know they had retail and everything as well, but it's like, I mean, we were getting checks of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in commission for running their ads. It's like the labor arbitrage there, the profitability there. It's like agency. If you're just trying to start something up. Like, I. I think if. I think it goes employee. You work at a company, company kind of sucks, you know, in a way. I mean, no, no, for me, I could. I did it, but it was always never wanted to do it. They set your hours, they control your destiny. Self employed. Oh, that's wonderful. You choose when you work. You set your own hours, you set your rates. That's kind of the agency. You're sort of self employed until you build a system and you start arbitraging labor and hiring people to do it for you. But if it's like, how do we make quick money at high profit without a bunch of overhead? Agency and consulting, man.
- [84:11]
A
Makes sense. All right, I think we're pretty much out of time. You guys got anything else?
- [84:15]
B
Any.
- [84:15]
A
Any last minute questions for Essence? Ezra?
- [84:17]
C
No, this is fantastic. I gotta. I have no questions. I've got notes that I gotta work with my team.
- [84:22]
B
Let me, let me. I've been asked by my team at zipify to be more of a promoter and supporter.
- [84:28]
A
Go for it.
- [84:29]
B
If I may, if you are on Shopify and you're interested in an Upsell app that does a bunch of really wonderful stuff, we've been around forever. We are now super, super deep in AI. We've got some really cool stuff. We've got big brands using us, and we would absolutely love for you to give us a shout out shot. And, you know, we can set it up for you. We have it. We have a concierge agency where we'll basically run all your upsells. You know, split test your product page and your checkout and your post purchase and your thank you page, all that jazz. We're doing it for Cheech and Chong. And if that doesn't give us any kind of credibility, I don't know what will. Yeah, we'd love for you to check out Zipify. One click upsell and you get a free 60 days on it at Zipify.com OCU60 and thank you so much for letting me talk about that. Beautiful, beautiful.
- [85:10]
A
Awesome. Ezra, this was awesome. I don't want to keep you in the basement of the Harvard Club for too long. No, you gotta get out of there.
- [85:16]
B
I look terrible with this light over my head. I was considering doing it like this. It turned the light off and maybe that's better.
- [85:22]
C
This is way more of. Yeah, like an ominous vibe, for sure.
- [85:25]
B
Yeah. It's so weird in this little cubicle, you guys. Anyhow. Yeah, thanks for. I enjoyed it, guys.
- [85:31]
A
All right, well, thanks, Ezra. This is awesome. Thank you so much, man.
- [85:33]
B
Thanks, God. Bye.
- [85:34]
A
Oh, man, that was a good one. Ezra is the best. I guess we'll let Connor keep his streak alive. Mr. Cal Ripken, as always. If you enjoyed this, Please subscribe on YouTube. Share it with a friend. Share it with your team on Slack. Share it on social if you will be so kind. Again, thanks as always to our sponsors. We got motion rich panel impression, AI after sell and house. Five tools we use, I use every single day we pay for. And the show wouldn't be possible without them.
- [86:00]
B
It.