E039: Scaling to $20M+ in 2 Years With a Team of Six: Dan McCormick of Create Wellness

Summary

Marketing Operators: Scaling to $20M+ in 2 Years With a Team of Six: Dan McCormick of Create Wellness

Release Date: December 24, 2024

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Introduction

In Episode E039 of the Marketing Operators podcast, hosts Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, and Cody Plofker welcome Dan McCormick, the founder and CEO of Create Wellness, a rapidly growing company specializing in creatine products. This episode delves into Dan’s journey of scaling his business to over $20 million in just two years with a lean team of six, exploring strategies, team dynamics, marketing innovations, and future plans.

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Guest Overview: Dan McCormick and Create Wellness

Dan McCormick introduces himself as the co-founder and CEO of Create Wellness, a company that began with Creatine Gummies and has since expanded into various creatine-forward products. With over eight years in e-commerce and experience at notable D2C brands like Away and Parade, Dan leveraged his expertise to build a modern creatine brand aimed at demystifying and popularizing creatine supplementation.

Dan McCormick [04:47]: "Create was a combination of my personal passion and all the learnings I had built up over the last almost decade around building a CPG brand."

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Scaling Strategies: Revenue and Team Growth

Dan shares insights into scaling Create Wellness from its inception to generating $20-22 million in net revenue within two years. Initially relying on outsourced agencies, the company transitioned to a small in-house team to maintain control and drive growth more efficiently.

Dan McCormick [15:07]: "About two years old. We'll do about 20 to 22 million in net revenue this year. We've six full-time employees now."

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Team Structure and Roles

The core team consists of two co-founders—Dan handling product and operations, and his fiancée overseeing finance and operations—and four additional employees. Key roles include an SVP of Marketing, a video editor, a head of operations, and an influencer/social media marketing manager. This lean structure allows for high efficiency and rapid scaling.

Dan McCormick [16:27]: "The SVP of Marketing oversees growth and brand. She's probably worth four or five full-time employees in and of herself."

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In-House vs. Outsourcing: Pros and Cons

Dan discusses the strategic shift from outsourcing to in-house operations, emphasizing the benefits of having team members deeply invested in the company’s success. While agencies offer expertise, in-house employees provide greater accountability and alignment with company goals.

Dan McCormick [22:40]: "Employees generally have a bit more skin in the game, care a lot more, and can go more all-in."

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D2C Evolution and High Leverage Operations

The conversation highlights the evolution of Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) businesses, moving towards high-leverage, lean operations. Dan compares his approach with traditional D2C 1.0 (large teams, high spending) and D2C 2.0 (bootstrapped growth with increased headcount), positioning Create Wellness within the emerging D2C 3.0 framework—maximizing efficiency with minimal personnel.

Cody Plofker [43:20]: "This new phase of DTC is really fun and cool to watch."

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Product Expansion and Market Positioning

Initially launching with creatine gummies to differentiate from commoditized creatine powders, Create Wellness expanded into single-serve creatine powder sticks. This strategic move addresses consumer preferences for convenience, precise dosing, and improved taste, further solidifying the brand’s position in the market.

Dan McCormick [62:57]: "We're putting creatine powder in single-serve sticks. There's a dearth of single-serve creatine products on the market right now."

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Marketing Tactics and Innovations

Dan elaborates on innovative marketing strategies, including personalized landing pages and leveraging influencers. A notable experiment involved listicle landing pages, which, contrary to initial expectations, outperformed traditional formats by allowing targeted, niche-specific content.

Dan McCormick [77:53]: "Listicles have been outperforming any other landing page format we're doing."

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Challenges in the Supplement Industry

The supplement market poses unique challenges, including saturation and the prevalence of counterfeit products. Dan underscores the importance of maintaining product quality and adhering to rigorous certifications to build consumer trust and brand integrity.

Dan McCormick [41:32]: "We have to fully commit to certifications and health and safety to ensure our products are trustworthy."

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Future Growth and Hiring Plans

Looking ahead, Create Wellness plans to achieve 2-4x year-over-year growth by adding three to five full-time employees. This expansion aims to sustain high revenue growth without proportionally increasing headcount, leveraging the company’s scalable business model.

Dan McCormick [32:45]: "We're expecting 2 to 4x growth year over year. From a headcount perspective, adding three to five more full-time people."

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Communication and Culture in the Team

Effective communication and a culture of high leverage are pivotal to Create Wellness's success. Emphasizing transparency and efficiency, the team utilizes tools like Slack for streamlined communication and fosters an environment where employees are empowered to make decisions and drive results without micromanagement.

Dan McCormick [49:45]: "The correlation between how someone communicates in Slack and how good they are at their job is very strong."

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Test of the Week: Landing Page Personalization

Dan introduces their latest experiment with personalized listicle landing pages, tailored to specific demographics and use cases. This approach has yielded surprisingly positive results, enhancing user engagement and conversion rates by providing relevant, targeted content.

Dan McCormick [75:45]: "Listicles can pump out a ton of them super quickly and make it super targeted to whatever the ad is focused on."

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Influence and Marketing Insights

The episode touches on the impact of influential figures like Joe Rogan in amplifying brand visibility. Dan recounts how organic mentions from Rogan significantly boosted awareness and credibility for Create Wellness, illustrating the power of influencer partnerships.

Dan McCormick [69:15]: "We've been sending him gummies forever now, and recently, he called us out by name and confirmed he's been taking our product."

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Conclusion

Dan McCormick’s journey with Create Wellness exemplifies how a focused, high-leverage team can achieve substantial growth in the competitive supplement industry. By prioritizing product innovation, strategic marketing, and a lean operational structure, Create Wellness stands as a testament to the evolving landscape of D2C businesses.

Dan McCormick [71:32]: "We're building the modern creatine brand by listening to consumer needs and delivering products that meet those needs effectively."

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Notable Quotes

• Dan McCormick [04:47]: "Create was a combination of my personal passion and all the learnings I had built up over the last almost decade around building a CPG brand."
• Dan McCormick [15:07]: "About two years old. We'll do about 20 to 22 million in net revenue this year. We've six full-time employees now."
• Dan McCormick [22:40]: "Employees generally have a bit more skin in the game, care a lot more, and can go more all-in."
• Dan McCormick [62:57]: "We're putting creatine powder in single-serve sticks. There's a dearth of single-serve creatine products on the market right now."
• Dan McCormick [77:53]: "Listicles have been outperforming any other landing page format we're doing."
• Dan McCormick [41:32]: "We have to fully commit to certifications and health and safety to ensure our products are trustworthy."
• Dan McCormick [49:45]: "The correlation between how someone communicates in Slack and how good they are at their job is very strong."
• Dan McCormick [75:45]: "Listicles can pump out a ton of them super quickly and make it super targeted to whatever the ad is focused on."
• Dan McCormick [69:15]: "We've been sending him gummies forever now, and recently, he called us out by name and confirmed he's been taking our product."
• Dan McCormick [71:32]: "We're building the modern creatine brand by listening to consumer needs and delivering products that meet those needs effectively."

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Key Takeaways

• Lean Team Efficiency: Scaling significant revenue with a minimal team requires strategic role allocation and leveraging both in-house and outsourced expertise.

• Product Innovation: Introducing novel product forms, such as creatine gummies and single-serve powders, can differentiate a brand in a commoditized market.

• Marketing Strategies: Personalized marketing tactics, influencer partnerships, and innovative landing pages enhance brand visibility and conversion rates.

• Operational Flexibility: Balancing in-house control with outsourced services allows for agility and scalability without excessive headcount growth.

• Authentic Communication: Maintaining clear and efficient communication channels fosters a productive and engaged team environment.

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Final Thoughts

Dan McCormick’s experience with Create Wellness provides valuable lessons for entrepreneurs aiming to scale their businesses efficiently. By focusing on product differentiation, strategic marketing, and maintaining a lean yet effective team, Create Wellness has successfully navigated the challenges of the supplement industry, setting a benchmark for future D2C ventures.

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For more insights and strategies on scaling your business, subscribe to the Marketing Operators podcast and stay tuned for upcoming episodes.

Transcript

[Cody]

I'm, you know, generally a fan of Elon Musk. I think what he's done is exciting. But Starlink WI FI in Los Angeles leaves a lot to be desired for those that don't know. I've been. I've been recording from LA for the last four weeks, and Cody and Connor have been putting up with me cutting out maybe every like 10 minutes. We've got a pause for 40 seconds. Dan, our special guest day. You're going to get a taste of that. So let me just quickly air out some grievances with the Starlink WI FI service. I apologize for the. For the. For the poor connectivity.

[Dan McCormick]

You know what. What's a podcast without airing some grievances to kick it off, you know?

[Cody]

Yeah, it's like kind of what the medium's for, I think. Yeah.

[Dan McCormick]

Cool.

[Cody]

All right, we're here. New episode of Marketing Operators. We've got Dan McCormick, one of the leading innovators in the. In the gummy space. Dan, welcome.

[Dan McCormick]

Very excited to be chatting with you guys. I feel like I've been friends with each of you for a while and have never actually spoken to any of you live, so this is a little bit surreal to be finally connecting with you guys outside of DMS on X.

[Cody]

It's actually the only way that I interact with anyone anymore. I'm either DMing them on X or I'm podcasting with them. Those are, like. Those are the extent of my social interactions.

[Dan McCormick]

It's kind of a beautiful life, right? This is, like, I'm sure perfect for mental health and everything.

[Connor]

Well, Connor and I are trying to organize an IRL hangout sesh, so we might be. That could be the end of this all if that actually. If that actually happens.

[Dan McCormick]

Oh, man. I'm sure the conversation there will be riveting. A bunch of guys that haven't interacted with humans in real life all hanging out. I know. I'm nervous, myself included.

[Unknown]

I never know what to say when I meet somebody in person that I've, like, talked to, you know, on X or even, like, done podcasts or, like, done zooms before you meet him in person. You're like, do I say, nice to meet you? Like, is this the meeting? Or do we consider, like, the online stuff the meeting? And it's like, nice to see you.

[Dan McCormick]

Well, jokes aside, has been awesome to follow each of you both what you're doing with your respective businesses, but also how you're growing kind of the media marketing side of things with the podcasts and the newsletters and all the other things that you, you do outside of your, your day job. So it is, jokes aside, really cool to get to chat with you.

[Cody]

Yeah, 100%. Likewise. And we're super stoked to have you on. Before we get into it, we'd like to thank our sponsors, Motion, Prescient Rich Panel and House.

[Connor]

So when I took over as head of growth at Hexclad, one of our biggest priorities in 2023 was to grow our revenue, our top line revenue, by scaling paid social, specifically through more creative testing. Everyone knows that as you spend more on Facebook ads using the same creative, the same landing page, the same offers, your efficiency gets worse. That is a nature of, of scaling paid media. As you spend more, you reach more people. As you reach more people, quality of traffic degrades. One way to offset this is by enhancing the amount of creative that you're testing. And like I said, that was a huge strategy of ours in 2023. It continues to be this year and it's ultimately what let us spend over 50% more year over year while maintaining our one day click row as we probably 2, 3, maybe even forex our creative output in 2023. And that allowed us to scale our Facebook account efficiently. Now, Motion allowed us to understand out of that enhanced creative output what was actually working the best. You know, shots on net is great, but in order to do it effectively, you still need to understand which of those shots on net are doing the best so you can scale it up effectively. In Motion let us understand what was working exactly while 3, 4, Xing our creative output and ultimately allowed us to scale our Facebook account very efficiently in 2023 compared to 2022. So if you're in the process of setting up your creative flywheel and you're about to really enhance the amount of creative testing that you're putting into your ad account, then you also need a tool like Motion to understand which of those creative tests are working and which ones you should be spending more on and less on and doing more of and less of. So, so if that's you and that's the stage that your brand is at, then you need to be booking a demo today or creating a free account@motion app.com Motion offers a monthly subscription plan so you can dodge those annoying annual contracts. And if you mention the marketing operators, podcast Emotion sales team, you can get 50% off your first month.

[Cody]

So we can get right into it. I'm a, I'm, I'm a longtime user of Create Gummies, but Dan, maybe you could give a rundown to the audience who, who you are. A little bit about your background, a little bit about your background and what you're doing today.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah. So. Dan McCormick, founder, co founder and CEO of Create Wellness. We make creatine products. We started with the Creatine Gummy about two years ago. We've since kind of moved into a bunch of other creatine Forward products. The general idea here being that there's a very long and upwards trend on creatine supplementation in the US and there's not really yet a modern brand built around creatine. And we think there's a massive opportunity to be that brand that's synonymous with, with creatine. My background is I've been in E commerce now for about seven or eight years. Worked at a bunch of the kind of buzzy venture backed New York City D2C brands of the the late 2010s like Away and Parade and learned a lot about what it means to build a modern brand and also learned, you know, some of the mistakes and pitfalls that a lot of these brands fall into. And so in starting Create, it was kind of a learning of, you know, if I were to start one of these perfect or one of these brands from scratch with all those learnings, what are the. Some of, some of those things I can take advantage of what some of those learnings I can bring into this brand, but also what are some pitfalls I can avoid by design when starting this, this company. So I always like to say Create is a combination of a personal passion. I've been taking creatine for well over 10 years. I'm. I'm not a bodybuilder but I'm, I'm someone that takes my health and wellness seriously. And I've always appreciated creatine as a, as a supplement but also just from a business perspective. Create was like very intentionally designed with an understanding of what makes or what should make a D2C company or CPG company successful today. So it's a natural subscription product, it's high margin, it's a misunderstood and underpenetrated market, but kind of this massive Runway to mass market appeal. You can build a really successful E commerce standalone business but there's very like a very natural transition to Omni Channel. And so yeah, it was this Create was the combination of my personal passion and kind of weird obsession with creatine and not understanding why everyone didn't take it. And also kind of a manifestation of all the learnings that I had built up over the last almost decade at this point around building a CPG brand.

[Cody]

Dude, amazing. We want to get into like team management. I think you've got a really unique structure that I'm excited to talk about. We want to talk about growth strategies. I do want to kind of double click on like just the idea generally. We had Zach stuck on a couple weeks ago who's gotten like at this point, multiple brands from 0 to 1 to 8 figures, which I think is super exciting. We were talking about like how do you identify early trends and take advantage of those? And you kind of laid out some of that like, okay, you don't understand why more people use creating. I'm curious if there was, if it was like always kind of back of mind for you, like a creatine would be a great business. Was there like a light bulb moment? How did that, how did, how did, how did you like initially decide to get into it?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, I think a lot of it was inspired from taking, taking this idea of like misunderstood products and the misunderstanding generally not being based in any kind of logical reason. So we saw companies like RO, for example, take erectile dysfunction pills in late 2000s. There was this weird stigma around ED. No brand really wanted to touch it. It wasn't like a product that people really found sexy or appealing. It was really misunderstood. But it turns out with kind of the proper form factor, with the right go to market strategy, with the right branding, you could take this, this product that was largely under penetrated, no pun intended, but had this massive market opportunity and so was looking forever as like someone that was in E commerce but didn't actually run my own brand for this product that kind of fit a bunch of those characteristics of. It's super misunderstood. But if you're able to inject a little bit of education, a little bit of modern go to market strategy, improve on form factor, even just marginally. There is this whole pool of customers that otherwise like would never even consider taking the product. Um, and that's kind of like with creatine, you know, it's 2 to 3% of the population today that takes creatine. That's wild. It's like a general purpose supplement that almost anyone could meet. And so the thing with creatine is that like 2 to 3% of the general population takes it today. There's no reason why that number should not be magnitudes of order higher. Something like 50, 60, 70% is a believable, I think penetration rate with a general purpose supplement like creatine. And so I was looking for a product that checked A lot of these boxes and had a really long Runway if you were able to establish yourself as the main brand in the category. So that's how I landed on creatine as a, a, a supplement. The gummy was really just how can we enter into this market in a way that's not like super commoditized on day one? Creatine is a commodity like, like collagen, like sodium, like any number of ingredients that you can find in the grocery store. It's a commodity. And I knew that going in. And so the gummy differentiated a little bit tougher to replicate. Creatine specifically held a lot of stigma with it. The gummy was able to kind of toss off some of that stigma. It's not a white powder that looks like cocaine and a narcotic or whatever. And so the gummy was really just a way of how can we make this like a differentiated product and also product that's marginally better from a consumption experience. Because a big belief here with products in general is that if you can just make marginal improvements on convenience, on consumption, on taste, that can actually lead to major changes in behavior. And with the product that you're meant to take on a daily basis, that can have a really long, a really big impact over the long term. So yeah, that's, that's how I landed on creatine.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

When you were in the market. Right, Sorry, sorry Connor. I real quick, because you said something Dan, that I just wanted to like double check. You said you're in the market for this category, right. So like you are presumably like a user of creatine. You knew the market very well. Like this was not a market that you came into from the outside in. Like you are a part of it. So you understood the nuance of it and like where there was opportunity.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, like a lot of people. I started taking creatine in high school and you know, freshman year I played football, basketball, baseball, thought I was going to be a college athlete. Soon realized my stature was not going to allow me to pursue those long term. So switched sophomore year to being a three season runner. But it started taking creatine. Loved the benefits freshman year and just never churned off of it. It was probably like one of the few cross country runners in the country at the time that was supplementing with creatine, something I just always really enjoyed and um, and never really like experienced the negative benefits that you'd hear about. With creatine. You grow up and you think it like especially back in the day, you'd hear that it's a steroid. Your hair is going to fall out, your kidneys are going to be destroyed. Like, God forbid you tell your mom you're taking creatine in like 2010. She would think you're on drugs. And so that was never like my personal experience. I never had those negative side effects. So it was always something that was in the back of my head. Fast forward to like 2021, 2022, there's this major spike in creatine demand and the supply could not catch up with it. And so there's this major shortage. The only creatine that you could buy online in 2022 was this product, creatine HCL from Raw Labs. Actually GMC, who's a great partner. But GNC is like white label HCL brand. It was the only one you could find online and it literally tastes like battery acid. And so taking that product out was the first kind of light switch moment for me. I was like, wow, this literally is inedible. And people are forced to take this. If you can just make it a little bit marginally better than this, you can unlock this huge market of people that would potentially be taking this on a daily basis. But yeah, it's, it's something that I have taken for a while and, and continue to take to take today.

[Cody]

Dude, amazing. All right, I, I, I want to get into the, the team management stuff. But before that, obviously it sounds like a fantastic opportunity. Huge market. You think it could be 100 million plus people in America taking creatine at some point. Like, that's, that's obviously super compelling. Was there anything else you considered at the time? Anything else that checked all the boxes of being what, what you would think would be a great B2C brand?

[Dan McCormick]

Not really. At the time I was running, I was running a, a business. Not all dissimilar from the, the podcast business that you guys are doing now with my brother. And the plan was let's run Not Boring Media, which is a newsletter, podcast, a bunch of online things. The plan was to do that with him for a period of time and run the media business, invest in companies, get out of the D2C game, and then kind of came up with the, with the idea while doing that, was running it on the side for a while, and then eventually thought the opportunity was big enough and important enough that it made sense to do it full time.

[Cody]

Totally awesome. Everyone knows ad comments are super important for social proof, but they're a mess to handle. Spam trolls, customer questions, good reviews at Ridge. We had four full time people to moderate all of this, which was expensive but necessary. One of the reasons we moved to Rich Panel is we knew they'd be launching new AI tools and they just launched their AI social media manager that handles all of our ad comments. It's built right into Rich Panel, our help desk software. We which no other help desk has anything like. In the first two months, AI handled 11,000 comments, saved us 760 hours of work. It's like four months of one person's time. And the best part is it didn't cost us anything else. It came with our regular subscription. If you want to learn more about Rich Panel, you can join one of their weekly migration webinars. It's 40 minutes. They show you the platform, how to switch from your current system and how much money you can save. It's great for CX teams to evaluate Rich Panel and see if it's a fit for your business. If you want to add social media superpowers while becoming more efficient, go to rich panel.com book a spot for their weekly migration webinar and get your CX team a spot too. Okay, so what I want to get into, what I think is so incredibly interesting about create is revenue and headcount. Could you give us an overview? You guys are only two years old, 18 months old, something like that. What, what scale are you guys hitting? How many people is it taking and where do you see it going?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, so we have our two year anniversary in nine days. So just about two years old. We'll do about 20 to 22 million in net revenue this year. We've six full time employees now. I think notably for the first like 18 months or so it was just me and a bunch of outsourced agencies and partners. I made a total 180 on like how to, to build a D2C team. I think transparently. I was like super late on bringing a lot of those competencies in house and was probably giving some like bad advice on Twitter about how to build a D2C team for a while. Yeah. So today it's like call it 20 to 22 million in net revenue, about six full time employees and growing really quickly from a revenue perspective, but likely not from a headcount perspective.

[Unknown]

What's only, don't you know, you don't have to answer, but I feel like you've been pretty transparent which I, you know, really appreciate and applaud you for just how, how transparent you've been online. The good and the bad. What's like payroll as a percentage of revenue?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, we just started pay like October is our first full month of payroll. So I don't have the exact number for you, but I want to say, you know, something around $80,000 of payroll.

[Unknown]

Okay, awesome. Cool. What, and what are those roles that you brought in house?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, so the two co founders of the business, my fiance and I, she runs finance and operations and we both kind of veer in and out on a bunch of different topics within the business. But we are the two co founders of the business and then we have four other employees. One is an SVP of marketing. She oversees growth and brand. Really like probably should be starting her own company at some point. She's a very talented operator from a marketing perspective, but really just understands how to run one of these businesses. And so we brought her on as our first employee. She's probably worth, you know, four or five full time employees in and of herself. She brought on a video editor as a full time employee, which is not where I would have immediately gone. It seems like a role that you otherwise could pretty easily fill with an agency or an outsource partner. But we brought that on full time right away and that's been a really good decision. We pump out ads and content at a super high clip. Today we have a head of operations, a influencer and social media marketing manager. And yeah, so that's, that's the team of six.

[Connor]

Taylor Holiday would love that, that second hire. I couldn't help but, but think of that when you said that that was his big hot take, what two months ago, like your, your next.

[Cody]

You said it should be your highest paid. Yeah, right.

[Connor]

Yep, yep.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah. Well, I can't divulge whether or not she's our highest paid, but I would say super like this role, it sounds silly. And then when you think about it a little bit, it's like, all right, these businesses at this point kind of are just like video editing businesses. You obviously need product, you need a bunch of other things to make it happen beyond, beyond the scenes. But your ability to produce high quality short form video is if not the most important thing, one of the most important things that probably all of our businesses do.

[Cody]

And that's what I like about like the original premise or the business model. Right. Is it's this like relatively low SKU count, high margin, high LTV product like you have. If you have product market fit with those sorts of economics, then you are. Yeah, I love the idea. You're just like a media company. You're just like how do we create enough ads? How do we position this correctly? And in that case it's like of course you want someone who can edit videos.

[Dan McCormick]

Totally. Yeah. You want someone that can edit videos, you want someone that can interface with creators that are featured in those videos and then you want someone that can kind of allocate budget properly across all the places that you're inserting those videos. So yeah, it's, it's a mark like obviously we take our, the product really seriously. There's a whole outsource team kind of behind us on the product side of things. The dirty secret with the supplements industry is that like very few people are actually manufacturing their supplements. Everyone partners with co manufacturers that go through the super rigorous certifications. Cmgp, nsf, Kosher. There's all these certifications that make it super hard to start one of these facilities. And then once you do start it, you can Service call it three to 10 brands within a certain product category. And so our business, like almost every business in the supplement category works with manufacturing partners that handle the vast majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to product.

[Cody]

Totally. What was the, what was the 180 like? It's been a while since I've, since I've read your tweets from a year ago. But like what was that transition from how you initially started the company to what, what the plan is now from a org perspective?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, I mean I think there was something romantic and probably egotistical like at the time. I love the idea of I can kind of just run this business by myself. I'm not particularly good at anything, but I'm not bad at anything either. Like I understand how growth marketing works. I have a decent brand eye. The product is something like operations. You can kind of figure out if with a little bit of elbow grease and like I, I grew up in operations so it was something where I thought that I could kind of get pretty far just with the toolkit that I'd built myself over like the decade or so in, in E commerce. And then in terms of actually producing a lot of the, the work output could just partner with best in class agencies, freelancers, consultants to actually produce a lot of like the, the actual work output. That was true. And it allowed us to move really, really quickly for the first call it 18 months. And I'm not sure if you guys, I feel like I've heard you Connor speak about this before but like, and probably both of you Connors around, hey, just kind of go through phases within the business with agencies where some sometimes they're super helpful and then all you really want is to have full control. And you can only have full control if they're full time employees. And then you kind of swing the pendulum back a little bit where actually an agency really helpful to kind of outsource and get some of the expertise back injected into the business. And so we're just kind of in that phase of the business where we're from, you know, everything fully outsourced to bringing everything house. So we full control. And I'm sure at some point we'll, we'll outsource some of these activities or at least bring additional help on from agencies and freelancers in the future. But that, that's the 180 is that one. You know, I quickly learned that I'm quite limited in terms of my capacity to care about something 18 hours a day, every day and like bring the same level of energy that I needed to for the business to continually grow like 10 to 30% month over month. And two, it's just way more fun to do it with people that are just as bought in as you are on a day to day basis. Totally love agencies, whatever. But like they only care as much as like you could have an agency that's your best friend and then you know, you, you turn off that agreement and you never hear from them again. They don't check in on your business. It turns out they don't necessarily care about your business, they just want to service you as a client. But employees generally, you know, they, they have a little bit more skin in the game, care a lot more and generally are able to kind of go more all in.

[Connor]

Totally smart.

[Cody]

Love it. Yeah, I, we've gone back and forth and then Cody, I'd love your take on this because I know you guys have done a lot of hiring this year, but we've gone back and forth insourcing and outsourcing. I got what at times has been great advice and at other times has been terrible advice. It's really up to the, the it's user error ultimately. But I was at the manscaped office in 2020 and they were like yeah, we hate outsourcing. They were hu. They were like they were going to do 150 million that year. All internal team, just super tactical. Like had hired great, had great managers, came from different agency backgrounds, just like knew how to execute. And I was like dude, that is awesome. And I think for a while we like took that approach and, and that is super valid if you hire correctly. And you know what you're doing but then you hit this point where you become like self reliant to a fault and that's what, that's where I think you end up like wanting to seek outside expertise, extend bandwidth and not be, be as you know, dependent on your own ability to execute. So we again we've gone, we've gone back and forth. But Cody, what's that looked like for you guys? I know you've hired a lot this year. Was it insourcing? Was it just net new roles? How are you guys thinking about it?

[Unknown]

Yeah, we, we hired a lot. I would say I've always been pro in house and I think for a lot of roles it makes sense. But I think I was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Dan. I was like I had like an ego thing about in house. I was like we're going to do it in house, we're going to bring it in house. I just like thought it was better. I kind of started with that with like paid media and like you know, I stand by that. I mean it really just depends like what your, what your background is. But I think you know, I think for the majority you should have media buying in house because it's, you know, it's important and it's commoditized and you've got to understand like your, you know that's you, that's your biggest line item. So you really have to understand how that impacts bottom line contribution margin and that's going to be easier to have those, that communication internally to talk with your demand planning team and your stuff like that. Like if you're trying to get beyond just like in platform media buying. But I also think you'll be able to align incentives better. I think creative, it, it depends and we've gone back and forth. We just made a pretty big hire of a new creative strategist who will start in January. But we've worked with agencies. We work with agencies. Yeah. So we're, we're mixed. Like we don't have dev internally. We have a dev agency. We're letting them do, you know, design as well. We'll still work with some creative agencies. We, you know we, we have a, an agency for TV buying. So it's mixed. It depends. I think you want to just try to align incentives as much as possible. I think you got to figure out like be really true to yourself like where are your strengths as a brand? And then I think you will do some fluctuating between insourcing and then outsourcing. I will say as, as as things grow. And I'm super jealous of Dan's business that, you know, since six employees, I think all of us wish we were at that and we're that lean. But there's a lot of additional costs that come with bringing people internally that just compound at scale. You know, you can't just be like, oh, I'm paying this agency 10k a month so I can hire somebody for 120k a year. Like really? You can hire somebody for 85k a year equivalent to that if you're getting, you know, 401k and bonus. And we give everybody lunch and we've got rent and stuff like that. So, yeah, if I were to do it again, I mean I would, I would stay as lean as possible and I would probably do a lot more outsourcing and, you know, overseas work than we currently do.

[Dan McCormick]

Cody, listening to you deliver that very polished and stately answer reminded me to congratulate you that on the new role.

[Unknown]

Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

[Cody]

Dude. Huge faux pas. We didn't start the show, edit that in.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah.

[Connor]

But now we might have to kick Cody off the show because now he's a CEO, now he's an operator. That's.

[Cody]

But he's a marketer at heart. That's what I told him before.

[Unknown]

Yeah. And they're not going to have me on the show, so you guys are stuck with me. They already got four.

[Connor]

So I, I have a. I have a question for you, Dan, about your, your team stack. Is this svp? Because like you guys are, I mean, what channels are you on? Your own Facebook. You're probably doing a lot of retention. You have a nice website that looks like you're updating regularly. I mean, I just looked at it, had a lot of seasonal updates to it. So someone's designing that, diving that, building it out. Like, is this person, is this svp? Like what, what are, what are they doing on a day to day? Like are they pretty like hands on keyboard? Are they hands on keyboard and some things but not others. I do have. You have to outsource some stuff I would imagine because like in like what, what does that mix look like between like what that person's doing and then I assume maybe they're also managing some outsourced resources. Like I'm just, I'm curious what that like, what's that person's role like and what's that like, like responsibility stack look like?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah. So the, the SVP of marketing title, I think probably she's super deserving of it. And probably you would see that and think that the person's not super involved in the day to day tactics of the business. Essentially she runs our growth and brand marketing on a day to day basis. She has a team underneath her internally, but she also has a number of roles that are outsourced. Whether it's like TikTok media buying, which is something that we don't need to develop a core competency in, but we need to do on a day to day basis, we'll outsource little things like that to freelancers. So she's managing internally, she's managing teams externally. She's working with us to set goals, hold the rest of the team accountable to those goals, make sure, like you said, that we are executing against our marketing calendar, undertaking opportunities like Applovin pops up. We're like, oh, we had never thought about Applovin. What do we need to do as a team or a company to like get on this platform quickly, make sure we have the assets we need to succeed, get integrations and analytics set up to make sure we're properly measuring it. So there's like a million different things that she's, she's really, you know, running the marketing side of the business at a super high level. Everything from like setting forecasts and goals and building team structure all the way down to like, all right, she's going to also for the app loving integration on North Beam. So she's like everything from the smallest task to the largest task. And that's kind of what we needed to bring in for this role. On a lean team, it would have been pretty disastrous to bring in like a traditional. And I think you guys all have this perspective on like what a CMO is, but someone that's just like very.

[Unknown]

This isn't the podcast to like hate on cmos. Just want you to know you're talking.

[Dan McCormick]

I love cmos, but I know you mean it would have been pretty disastrous to bring in a big company CMO that didn't have any expectations around day to day marketing task management. She has.

[Connor]

You didn't need a unilever marketer for 10 years coming in to help grow, create gummies that their best skill set is making a nice deck that represents what. How. How they spent $100 million with no attribution to show.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, I get what you're saying. I just shit on cmos on the CMO podcast. If I was to shit on Unilever, who's our largest investor, that would be a double whammy. So love cmos, love Unilever.

[Unknown]

Hilarious.

[Connor]

That's awesome. What about like retention? Like I'm just, I'm curious who's like so all right, retention. Tell me about retention. Tell me about web like affiliate. Like who. Who's running?

[Cody]

Who's doing the work? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan McCormick]

Who's doing the work? So we still utilize like agencies and freelancers. Retention. We were with two guys for a while that didn't have name recognition but were awesome. We moved over to structured which maybe some of you worked for previously or definitely worked with in the past. And they're basically running our emails, like eight to ten emails a month. And then you pay for the incremental emails on top of it. Build out flows, help us execute against a marketing calendar website. This was like a big change for me in the last 10 years when I was at away we had teams and teams of engineers. We're running on what was called Solidus on the time and it like it's essentially backend for e commerce websites. Shopify, we kind of just like did a one time build and then can maintain things pretty easily without too many dev resources. So we don't have an agency of record for maintaining the website or doing development work. We will sometimes bring in people to build landing pages. That's another thing. Like the website's great and important I guess but the vast majority of our traffic runs through replo landing pages that are disconnected from the website. And so I guess to answer your question like yes it's. We still utilize a bunch of outsource experts but now it's just like managed by an internal team of six versus just Right.

[Unknown]

What about creative as well? Like are you building any creative? I feel like you, you guys have a strong like creator influencer, you know, network. Is that done internally? Is that you know, agency? How do you guys source creative?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, so that's all internal. We have an influencer slash social media manager that is reaching out to creators, managing the content flow, giving deliverables or giving scripts, getting deliverables, holding people accountable which is a big thing with, with creators. And then that's all passed off to our video editors. Taking that content and cutting it up organic for organic content or cutting it up into ads. But that's like one of the core workflows that we do have now fully in house.

[Cody]

So. So you've got. It sounds like a very like as it stands now it sounds pretty scalable. Right. You mentioned hitting 22ish this year. The first full month of payroll was October. So a lot of these people I know you hired in like the, the back half of the year essentially. How much are you looking to hire more from here and what does that look like? And then, and then how large do you think create can get with you know, x amount of heads?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah. So we were just doing our 2025 planning today. I won't, I won't say exactly what we're aiming for from a top line perspective because that's only going to set ourselves up to fail there. We. But we're expecting, call it 2 to 4x growth year over year. From a top line perspective headcount, we plan on adding three to five more full time people which would be doubling the team. And so if we're even if we double revenue and double headcount, that's still great leverage on that headcount. Just the way the absolute numbers work out. But we think we can achieve that call it 3 to 4x scenario as well with a similar level of headcount. Because the business, as you guys all know with your business models just scales really nicely from a marketing perspective. So if you can identify a few winning ads, you can scale hundreds of thousands of dollars a day against that and it doesn't take a ton more resources to service that scaling piece of ad that, that scaling piece of ad creative. Which is a long way of saying we think that this business model specifically has a ton of leverage behind it from a, from a headcount perspective.

[Cody]

Totally. Did you have anything, Connor?

[Connor]

I was, I'm so I'm curious. Is, is the SVP of marketing is, are they just like the point person, like the guardrails, the orchestrator of all these other components, whether it's internal team, outsourced team, like are they managing all this so you can go focus on other parts of the business that are, you know, outside of growth marketing and brand marketing?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah. So that piece of the business is where I would say I focus the vast majority of my attention still. We said this at the top, but essentially these are growth and brand marketing companies. And so I think it's super important for the leader to be like very involved in those activities. Despite the fact that this SVP of marketing is extremely competent and I have full trust in her and she's done it before. It's still like in order for me to be a good CEO of the company, it's my belief that I need to be very good at growth marketing and brand marketing. So I am involved in the day to day very heavily on that side of the business still.

[Cody]

Did you know that platforms over report performance 65% of the time. In a recent study, house found that 82% of incrementality experiments showed that platform reporting was either underreporting or overreporting by more than 25%. And 60% of the experiments showed discrepancies of more than 50%. Is why marketers are moving away from platform attribution towards incrementality measurement in order to maximize their growth and efficiency. This is one of the many reasons that the three of us, Connor, Cody and I all work with House. So what is House? It's a self serve experimentation platform that allows you to configure regional tests and control experiments to measure incrementality and identify points of diminishing returns. What does that really mean? They tell you, hey, These are the 40 zip codes you need to exclude from this campaign and we can look at what results did you drive in the targeted regions compared to that holdout group? Really awesome. We use it all the time. As an example, we just identified a lot of our non branded ring search and shopping campaigns were not nearly as incremental as Google as was reporting. So we've been growing a ring business over 100% year over year and spending less on Google. So we've been able to be more efficient with every dollar spent. House is built with cutting edge methods by PhD economists and data scientists who have built these solutions before at companies like Amazon and Google. The House platform allows you to test all your marketing channels, both online and offline, measure the impact across all your sales channels, dtc, retail, Amazon and calibrate your platform reporting for incrementality with House. Discover your marketing's true ROI and unlock new growth with House. Go to House IO operators spelled H A U S IO slash operators to start your incrementality practice today. So one question I had written down, so I know you guys saw it, but I was, I was like we're obviously talking about this incredibly high leverage team. And the reason I was so interested is I think we just see more and more of this Zach stuck in it as an example. Dan in the Create team as an example, I talked to more and more teams that are doing 20, 30, 40, 50 million plus at like, yeah, 4 to $5 million in revenue per full time employee, which I just think is very unique. Bridge in 2024 will land at over 2. We'll be at like 2.2, something like that, which I feel actually great about. That's higher than it was.

[Unknown]

Million per employee.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Okay, let me do our math. I, I always do Just like payroll as a percentage of revenue.

[Cody]

Right?

[Dan McCormick]

I think I have a hot take here on this whole like and this is going to seem like because like I just did this for the past two years and talked about it a lot but like it seems super easy now to start one. Like every, you know, every white dude on the Internet is now starting a hydration stick pack company, right? Like everyone has now seen that. They've seen these case studies out on Twitter where it's like, oh, you can have a one to two person team and start like a $16 million, you know, supplements business. Now everyone is doing it, which is only going to make it harder and harder and harder. And essentially what I think is going to happen is that it turns out like that doesn't really last. Like that doesn't really last for years and years and years, which is what it takes for one of these businesses to ultimately be successful or to have a successful outcome. And so I think we're going to see, we're already seeing it. A bunch of like very, very mid supplement brands started by like one or two half ass, like they're like half committed to running the brand pop up over the next one or two years because it's now super easy. There's services like keychain to source manufacturers. There's a whole ecosystem around marketing agencies. Shopify makes it super like all the things that I certainly benefited from and kind of like shitting on myself right now. But I think there's going to be this wave of people that see what a few examples do around starting these one to two man supplement businesses, think it's super easy and then basically like 18 months in realize that maybe this wasn't the best choice. And I think that's all good and well, other than the fact that I don't know if I want a bunch of like mid supplement brands out there. Like that's not the category where I think you want like someone kind of half assing the job when there are health products, like if there's one keychain, it seems like they have a great business and all that. But like I don't want any Joe Schmo off the street to be able to go and like easily source a creatine gummy and then like sell it on their Shopify website without any kind of like commitment to certifications and health and health and safety and all the things that like it takes to, to run one of these over the long term. And again I say that with like the full recognition that I just did that over the past two years. And like, maybe I'm just talking my own book here but, but you care.

[Connor]

And you can tell you care and I think like that it's natural selection. Right. The people that don't care are going to have a low efficacy product. Their consumer is going to figure that out. Like natural selection is going to, going to win out there. But that is like, that is interesting. Like what, what, what did you have to do to start selling a product on the Internet that people are going to eat multiple times a day? Like is, is it scary easy? Like should I be, should I be concerned right now about, about the food products I'm buying online?

[Dan McCormick]

Well, I think for, for better or worse, it's much easier to start one of these businesses today. And there's going to be companies that take that responsibility really, really seriously and there's going to be companies that frankly don't give a shit.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Dan McCormick]

And it's going to be really, really hard to tell the difference between those two companies. Companies we operate in a category where like, and you guys, I'm sure all had knockoffs. Our number one knockoff, I'll call them out right here, it's a company called Beast Bites. They have zero creatine in their product. They're selling a completely fake product to hundreds of thousands of like mostly teenagers on TikTok. And there's just like not much that the, you know, the regulatory bodies can do about that. And there's only so much you can do around, educating the consumer around, hey, like this product is fake. You're taking it for health and wellness reasons and it's completely fake. So I guess no shade at Beast Bites other than you sell a fake product. But yeah, but it's a, it's a.

[Cody]

Great point that like I was making the point around right now being an opportune time to build these like really high leverage businesses. Your point being in specific categories? Because mine was not supplement specific. It's obviously supplements. There's a really clear path there with AOVA, with the LTVs, their consumption products. But you're saying in certain categories those things will just get competed away. Creatine maybe being an example or whatever else, you know, you look at like coffee alternatives probably same sort of boat where a brand five years ago it was kind of, there's a lot of white space to have a coffee alternative. You could be a really lean team and scale it really far. I still don't think that gets around. I still think at the end of the day, and this is, I think what create is, is that you are still choosing a business model that just inherently has higher leverage to it. Right. Versus a, you know, you were at Away or even at Ridge where it's like growth for us looks like massive new products, new categories, new products within those categories. They're incredibly low LTV relative to a supplement brand that is just inherently harder to scale. And I think entrepreneurs today are maybe building, choosing to build more economically advantageous businesses and then the tools are available and outsourced agencies are there and you know, the whole space is more mature so that you actually can scale it. You guys are doing it in really high integrity way so that you can also achieve that, that great outcome that you're looking for. And I just think that's a really exciting time. Like, I just think I'm super excited. Zack Stuck and his sock brand that he's very public about now. Another example of doing 20 million-plus with I don't know what he'd consider full time employee on that brand, but it's like four or five. Yeah, it's like really small. And that's just a really, it's cool to be a part of that. And that's why, that's why I like kind of geeking out on him.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah. And that whole tirade was not to discourage entrepreneurship and people starting their own businesses. It was more so just around the fact that like I'm sure we all know or in group chats where someone's like, oh, I'm going to start a supplements brand. And I'm not sure that's the category where we want everyone, like jamming out on side projects is around supplements that we're ingesting every day.

[Cody]

That's super fair. And not being willing to eat whatever you get an ad for on Instagram seems like a good rule of thumb.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Unknown]

So I feel like, I feel like there were like three phases of D2C. Like, I feel like DTC 1.0 was like away and Casper where it's like, let's raise a ton of money. Let's build these giant teams, let's spend a ton. That didn't work out great. I feel like TTC 2.0 is kind of like Ridge and Hexcloud and Jones Road. It's kind of like, hey, let's bootstrap this thing, but let's grow it. But we're also growing pretty big company, pretty big team as well. Probably not quite the same leverage as you and Zach have. And I feel like this DTC 3.0 is kind of like what you guys have going on. Which I can tell because I know, I feel the same way when Connor talks about it. He's just jealous. Like, like he just wishes that he had that. Like I do like for employees. I'm like hell yeah. Like you just sit around and run Facebook ads all day.

[Connor]

Like that's stressful. That's for sure.

[Unknown]

Yeah. But I feel like that's this like new wave where like these tools are available. And don't get me wrong, you still need product market fit. Like I think you have that I can tell you guys iterate and also launch new product lines and categories. You're just doing it in this really high leverage way like Connor saying. And these tools are available like Shopify, like Replo, like Rich Panel, like all of these things that just make. Make it really efficient.

[Cody]

Motion impressions, all of them get them in there.

[Unknown]

North Beam. Yeah. But like these tools that just make it very easy where you can get a replo template and test and you don't need, you know, a team of engineers like you had at a way and you're just able to do a lot of the self these things yourself. So I just think this new phase of, of of DTC is, is really fun and cool to watch as well.

[Cody]

If I could jump in quickly because I, I do not deny there's a bit of jealousy, but what I, what I think is what, what. What I get to and I talk about with the team and we've talked about this before a little bit on previous episodes is like identifying those areas of high leverage and still instilling that within the business. Right. Like I think that's why we build out like our creative pods where it's like I want a team of. I want a media buyer and I want a creative strategist who's sourcing content creators to be to zero in on how are we selling luggage and we've got our offer and then we're allocating budget. So like. So Dan's team of five or six is basically what Like I want that little pod existing within Ridge, trying to scale travel and then as we scale. Actually let's say they're scaling wallets. As they scale wallets, that will trickle down and that will sell knives and that will sell pens and that will give brand awareness around rings and things like that. So it's like you want to build that tip of the spear, that high leverage kind of piece of the business and scale that. Because I just don't see any way around growing without doing that so it doesn't look all that different. That's why I wouldn't say it's like total jealousy. I just think we also have to support like a more complex business. We just, we just do from a product category, channel perspective. Like have a lot more going on, requires more people to manage.

[Dan McCormick]

And in reverse, I'm super jealous of each of the ways that your three businesses show up in like such a polished. And when you do something, you do it in a big way, whether it's new product categories. With Ridge, like you launch luggage and everyone knows you're launching luggage, whether it's Hexclad, you're partnering with the Yankees and not just doing it in like a one off Instagram post, but you go throughout New York City and you see it on billboards, you see it on the yes Network. Like you're doing things in a very cohesive way. And then with Jones Road, you guys are doing retail in a big way. It's not like you're launching like one little retail store as like a kind of a de facto billboard. Like it's a full retail strategy and you have the resources and the teams to see a lot of these things out in like a way that has more lasting power than a lot of the things that these brands that are high leverage don't really have. The, the. A lot of the things I will say we. But generally these lower leveraged brands like, or higher leverage brands with less resources, a lot of things we do are just more ephemeral. Like there's not as much lasting power behind the brand campaigns or the omnichannel strategies or the, the product expansion. So there's pros and cons to each. I would say.

[Cody]

Yeah, 100%. That's a, that's a good takeaway. I've got, I've got. This is a bit of a, a tangent from the current conversation, but I had written down and I don't know how true this is or not. Is there a way like internally you guys are, you guys are, whether it's like you know, project managing or having meetings, that you're also trying to make employees as as high leverage as possible? This is naturally happen. Or like does it naturally happen given the business model or are you also taking a concerted effort internally? Like are you using AI, are you using unique tools to like try to make from an org perspective yourselves as scalable as possible?

[Dan McCormick]

I know you guys specifically at Ridge, I'm not sure at Hexclad and Jones Road, but I know you guys are really good about recording meetings and notes and doing things in a very structured way. I'm terrible about that personally because I can't do it. I feel weird holding other people accountable to like meeting agendas and note taking and recordings and all that. That is something where we're not great at using AI beyond just like everyone having a chatgpt plus subscription I would say where we are good at kind of moving quickly and finding leverage is just like I'm pretty lax about decisions. Like everyone kind of has the agency to make decisions within their piece of the business and it's the right decision, I'll celebrate it. And if it's ultimately the wrong decision, I'm pretty quick to kind of just move on and to the next activity, next decision. And so that's where within our kind of high leverage team we can find more leverages less around like the tools or the productivity hacks or the meeting setups or things like that.

[Cody]

Are you guys thinking at all about how to, how to make internal employees higher leverage through like any unique sort of workflows or new tools?

[Connor]

How to. I don't, I mean I think it, I mean it's up to the leader to facilitate goal setting and accountability to that goal setting. Like I'm not. Cause I'm, I'm the same as Dan. Like the last thing I want to do is spend a bunch of time being hyper anal about like the formatting that, that someone comes to a one on one with or like I, I'm bas what my job is to say hey, like here's how you know you and I get the most value out of this one on one. Here's the information that comes to that. Like here's a formatting a format that I found work but like I don't need every person that reports into me to have the same exact formatting. As long as the information they're bringing to that call is the same or the way that or they're sharing like their updates and their progress they're making towards their keywords. Like honestly every person I report to they're actually, they're doing the same thing but in different ways. Like it's not a good use of my time to like be like micro anal about that. Like it's my job to produce great outcomes and as long as we're doing that, I don't really care how each individual like updates me or tells me the progress they're making on their key results. Now where that, where that changes is if all of a sudden the format they're using or how they're giving me information, it's not productive. Like all of a sudden I'm. We're not getting. We're not spending good use of our time or they're not reaching their key results. Right. Like, to me, the only time I've ever fired people is when I have repeatedly outlined and agreed and shook hands with them on what we need to do. And they've repeatedly not done that. Like that's the only way I'll really fire someone outside of like in inside, like just work performance, you know, I guess guidelines, like other, you know, there's things outside of that like you do something crazy that. But whatever. Like it's not Dan's best use of time to like go and micromanage that. Like get the information you need, produce the outcomes you need, set expectations clearly and like the rest of it's going to take care of itself no matter the. Whether you use like a super tight templated one on one document or an AI tool to like summarize things like all that's kind of kind of noise in my opinion. It's like whatever works best for you, works best for you.

[Cody]

I love that answer.

[Dan McCormick]

I would say the one thing where I have seen kind of correlation between someone's ability to be like good at technology and good at the job is. And this will probably have some disagreement here, but like if you're good at Slack, communicating in Slack, you're generally pretty good at E commerce. Very seldom do I find someone that's like a poor communicator on Slack, either in how they structure their messages or how responsive they are or how clear they are in their writing and they're bad at their job, like I feel like that's a hard thing to game. And so if I am a stickler, and this is weird, but I'm a little bit of a stickler around how people communicate in Slack. Like I expected certain levels if it turned to me.

[Unknown]

I was about to share. I want to hear what you guys do, but I'm so anal about it.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, there's a certain level of professionalism is the wrong word. But like when you're communicating and I came from a way where like famously, unfortunately, like everything was written in Slack, I think at the time. And so that has kind of stuck with me where it was a culture where like you're kind of measured how good you were at Slack was like how good you are at your job. And that was probably overkill. But again today, like I. That's the tight Correlation I find between how serious does somebody take communicating in Slack and how good they are at their job.

[Unknown]

Two most important things in E commerce, naming conventions and Slack.

[Cody]

That's all it takes, nine figures from there.

[Unknown]

Yeah, no, I think it's, I guess a cultural thing. I just, I have this just like type A Jewish anxiety. So I'm just like, for me nothing is ever like good enough or like no, we're never moving fast enough. So it's just like always go it go, go, go. Like does why does this need to be a meeting? Like that's like one thing like I'll see in Slack yesterday. So like yeah, like why does this need to be a meeting with eight people? Like just send a fucking Slack and I can say yes or no to it or things like that. Like I think just being really thoughtful about how you're spending your time and what are you doing and what are you wasting time on? As few meetings as possible as process only to help increase how fast your teams can work. Not to get in the way of it. Right? Because I found at, you know, at scale and as your team grows, you actually do need more process sometimes because you have to repeat things when you know there's not a good process. So I've actually found that process can really help speed things up if you're taking a lot of time to it, but you also don't want process that are slowing you down. But yeah, as few meetings as possible. Getting really good at async communication, you know, and then having the right people. Like, like I think even this conversation about, you know, the SVP is, is interesting is like what I've learned. Like, you know, especially we've hired a lot of directors. Like I really want senior ICs and like, you know, Silicon Valley has 10x engineers. Like I want, I want employees that have 10x output. Like give you an example. Like our, we did a director of people, you know earlier and part ways from like last year. Like he wanted like four people on his team and he was just like super slow. We hired a director of people this year. Got you know, maybe one person on our team. She has an office manager. She hired 27 people this year by herself on top of doing everything else. And granted like I get slacks from her at night and like the goal isn't always to work at night but like you want people that when they are there they are efficient, they're working their butt off. They're not taking two hour lunch breaks. So I think some of that is just, we just really want like this, like senior strong, individual contributors. And I would much rather pay somebody, you know, 200k that can get way more done than get, you know, three people at 100k each. I think those. And then yeah, even these like, like these like communication guidelines. Yeah. It's like everything we do is in a channel because I got so sick of back and forth private dms and you have to do it to one person and then, hey, she said this. What do you think of this? I'm like, just do it in a channel. Reply on the thread. I hate when now when it's not in a channel. So we have channel set up for everything and when people reply below it, I'm like, no reply in the thread, please. It's just like saves so much time. You can just like versus having to be like, hey, product said this and op said this. I'm like, just put in the appropriate channel. I can follow it. Like you can say yes or no on it. So I think there's a lot you can do. I'm not saying like AI has changed the game on any of it, but I think hiring the right people, just having that culture of intensity and urgency and then being diligent with your communication meetings, that kind of stuff. Foreign We've been talking about upper funnel channels a lot, especially leading up into, you know, peak moments. And honestly, it's been one of the biggest unlocks for us as a business is, you know, helping us reach net new customers and getting them into our funnel. But the challenge is historically the stuff is very difficult to measure. You're not going to see it, you know, in platform ros clicks. So one of our secret weapons this year has been prescient AI. We onboarded with them about midway through the year and it's been a game changer and helping us to measure some of these very difficult to measure upward funnel channels like tv, like linear tv, like streaming. They've been able to move really quickly that the team's been great and actually get betas up with new channels that we've been testing. So it's been great. We've been loving it. We're able to, to see and forecast if we were able to scale and spend on some of these channels, you know, what our incrementality would look like. Pression has become a really important part of our marketing workflow. It's, it's one of the main tools that we use to set our budgets every month. And yeah, it's just become a really important, you know, part of our stack that, that we feel like we can't live without at this point. We love the unbiased cross channel measurement it has. Also love the halo effects where we're able to actually see how it's impacting. You know we're just on D2C but I know brands that are on Amazon they're, they're able to get halo effects to actually see how their upper funnel spend and their D2C spend is impacting Amazon. So it's just become a really big part of our workflow and I can't recommend it enough. We're using it, Hexclad is using it. Symbiotica Coterie and and dozens more impressions blowing up from everyone I talk to. Can't say enough good things about it. If you want try it to measure some of these upper funnel channels that we're talking about, go to pressionai.com operators to book a demo.

[Dan McCormick]

Totally unrelated question for you guys for our business, like Q5 is perhaps more important than Q4. I know you all are very gifting and cyber5 focused. What does Q5 look like for you? Is it still like because CPMs are lower, maybe purchase intent isn't as high for your categories but because CPMs are much, generally much lower. Is that A an area where you're taking advantage or is it, is it really not as important Outside of health and wellness?

[Connor]

We're, we're, I mean we're kind of like habit forming adjacent and historically we actually have cut our, cut our sale like around last ship date for holiday and then we'll run some sort of like gift card offer through the end of the year and then, but, but this year, A because we have some big numbers we're going after and B because historically we have really strong Q ones and for all the reasons you mentioned, we're actually planning just to run our offer right through December, even past holiday because it's such a big like all right it's January, I'm start eating better, start cooking my own food like that. Like we have historically big Q ones so we think that because of that Q5 could be even bigger with us. Then you top that on less, less competitive competition in the auction. Less people are running offers so we, we're going to run it right through. We're not planning to even pivot the offer at this point. If it slows down, maybe we'll like rebrand it to get some fresh juice out of it. But our current offer stack like there's a lot of variability in the products that you could go after. The only caveat is there that we've started stocking out of some things. But yeah, we're going to run it right through and, and this will actually though be our first. This will be our first year running like our, our holiday sale kind of right through Q5. So we haven't tried it in the past, but again, for all those reasons, we think it's going to hit pretty hard.

[Cody]

We're doing something somewhat similar. We'll be extending our like holiday sale offer a little bit later in the year. And then what gets interesting is at least last year we saw travel was like seasonally really relevant. So like, if you look back over the last like eight years, we'd run like new year, new wallet. And there's some like, nice messaging around reorganizing or decluttering that aligns with like the minimalist wallets. Never all that impactful. It's not like someone is resolving to reduce the size of their wallet in the way they might like go to the gym or cook better. But for travel, we saw it perform really well last late December and then, and then early January this year. So we're actually going to shift a lot of our marketing efforts and as we expand categories, it's just there's different seasonal periods. Like post Q5 will be in like a Valentine's Day mode. We'll focus on rings. So we're trying to adapt that way and it just feels like more times out of the year we have different categories that have some more seasonal relevance and we're leaning into that a bit more.

[Unknown]

We, we, we always do pretty well. December always takes us by surprise in, in a good way or, you know, we don't have any offers or launches usually. And then January crushes. So yeah, definitely that period. You know, we always expect like after shipping, cut off, demand to die. And like there's a few, there's a day or two around Christmas that's soft and then right after it just picks up pretty hard. I think everyone realize they didn't get the gift that they wanted, so they buy it for themselves. And then obviously CPMs drop and then it goes. I think we do beauty probably does pretty well. January, we always do really well, like extremely well in January. So I think we'll be really aggressive with it this year. Have some new strategies, launching and some new products as well. But I think definitely, you know, we fall into that new year, new me thing. Not maybe quite as strong as health and wellness, but I think beauty's probably the second would be My guess, are.

[Cody]

You guys doing anything different this year, Dan, or like any, any big plan, plans to try to unlock further growth?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, I mean I, I think Q5 generally we are like directly in that lower CPM, higher purchase intent kind of venn diagram just being within creatine supplementation. And so we're looking to take advantage of trends there. We'll run kind of the standard new year, new you, new year, stronger you campaigns that I think play really well. But this period between like the 26th to the 15th of January was on a, like on our called meta. Today from the 26th through the first in health and wellness or through the 31st is 3x the scale of an average October day. And then from the first is 4x. And then each weekend up until basically March is 3x October scale for health and well. And so it's just a super important time for any product that's in our category. We're not doing anything super inventive there. We're, we're launching new products and we time that up to, to line with this higher intent. So there's something extra for us to talk about but from a campaign perspective pretty down the middle on, it's a good time to kind of kick off resolutions and take your health seriously.

[Cody]

Dude. Awesome. I actually want to talk about the product expansion because we talked about it being like low SKU, high LTV. But you guys are, you guys are expanding SKUs. You've got the powder out now. Maybe there's more stuff coming. What's the thought process behind that?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, it's kind of funny when you, you build a brand like diametrically like opposed to creatine powder and then like you feel the need to launch a creatine powder. So the overarching goal of the business was like let's build the modern creatine brand. It's going to be really hard to do that from a cold start with just another creatine creatine powder. So let's create this category of the creatine gummy. And so that got us really far. But my view is that for every one person that buys creatine gummies, there's probably like four to five that will be more interested in a creatine powder. But we didn't want to just jump to the traditional kind of manifestation of what a creatine powder is. It comes in a 500 gram big plastic jug. It's inconvenient, it's messy, it's generally like super triple X branded for, for men specifically. And so we are putting it in single serve sticks, form factor that has kind of proven out to be really popular over the last couple of years for a bunch of reasons. You can do flavoring in single serve ways. It's more convenient, it's precise dosaging, really easy to travel with. And so we're putting it creatine powder in these single serve sticks. And surprisingly, we would probably do it anyway if the category was really crowded. But surprisingly, there's like a dearth of single serve creatine products on the market right now. So it's something we're really excited about. But yeah, I think the general idea here is like, we want to build the creatine brand. In order to do that, we need to produce products that creatine products that people want. And people want creatine powder.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's really interesting. It reminds me, my friend at Dr. Squatch, like they had a very similar approach where they like, they create the brand around this like natural bar soap, which is awesome. And you could scale that business high ltv all these things. But then they, this was their Sydney Sweeney video. They. And they railed against the body wash that like had all these chemicals or whatever. The Sydney Sweeney video a couple of months ago that went super viral was like, they were like, yeah, people in Walmart, in Target, at Costco want just a body wash. They don't want like a fancy natural bar soap. So it's cool to see like you actually the beachhead is with some like novel form factor. And then it's like, okay, at the end of the day, people do want the, the powder or the, the, the body wash. Yeah.

[Dan McCormick]

I feel like with all these businesses like it, it's always a balance between how hard and fast you are to these like brand rules. Whether it's, you know, we don't do sales like a, a way famously didn't do discounts or Black Friday for a while. And then it turns out that like, it's really helpful for top line to run sales sometimes when people are looking to buy suitcases. Same thing here. It's like, we hate creatine powder. Oh, we don't hate creatine powder. It just wasn't advantageous for us at the time to launch a creatine powder. And now it is. And so I think that's kind of one of the learnings here is that you should be flexible with, with how you show up as a brand and ultimately just kind of listen to what the consumer wants and try to Deliver a product or service that. That meets those needs in a. In a way that doesn't totally go against everything you stand for, but, you know, kind of meets the consumer halfway.

[Connor]

It's just. It's an absolute masterclass in positioning. Like, you guys have taken a product that's existed for a long time and has had a lot of, like, negative connotation, and you put it in the most approachable, fun way to eat a food in the world, which is a gummy. Like, it's just. I always, I always talk about like, one of. My first experience with an E Comm brand and scaling one was when I was actually at Zach Stuck's agency working on a brand called Cheeseburdie. That they took an existing technology and they just positioned it brilliantly. They said, we are. We are a. A safety brand by women for women. They took an existing technology, a safety alarm. They packaged it in a, like a pastel, modern feel, and they made it just like, really fun and exciting. They put a little carabiner on it that made you want to clip it to your backpack. Like, I feel like you got your. The way that you're growing in, in like, positioning creates not too indifferent from that. Like, you just have made it so accessible and fun and enjoyable, whereas it wasn't before. And, and it's just like, I think you guys are doing great marketing, but I think that's like the, the baseline of all this that makes your great marketing work really well is how your brand and product are positioned.

[Dan McCormick]

Oh, thanks. Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to like, we, we would always get questions when we're first kind of coming up with the business and pitching it and whatever. Like, oh, so it's just like creatine in a gummy. And the answer is yes, it's just creatine in a gummy. But like the, the. The marginal or incremental convenience of the gummy. Like, most people are much more convenient with a gummy versus a powder and with something like creatine that you need to take every day to see the kind of. The full benefits of it. That's just like general, like that marginal convenience. Especially for people that are lazy, which is everybody. It tends to have like a big impact on. On how they interact with the product.

[Cody]

I don't know. I don't know what your guys is like morning stacks look like in terms of like vitamins and things, but I, I am approaching gummy exhaustion. The other morning I had my three create gummies. I had some grooms gummies. That. That team sent me some. Then I had some fiber gummies. I'm like, all right, this is. The novelty's wearing off on me, guys. Yeah, maybe. Maybe I'll switch to the powder.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, no, I feel kind of the same way. I'm like, building a little creatine set. I take, like 10 to 15 grams of creatine. Most people are taking somewhere between 5 to 10. So I can have a few gummies, have some powder, eat a lot of steak, and kind of stack it together that way. But I would agree. Everyone's launching a gummy product now, which is. Which is great and I think ultimately will be good for the category leaders. But there's only so many gummies you can eat during the day.

[Cody]

Totally. So I think we've got a test of the week to hit. Anything else we want to talk about before we go?

[Unknown]

I got one question. How. How. How do you get Rogan talking about you?

[Dan McCormick]

So he was talking about creaking gummies in general. This was like six months ago. So it turns out Joe Rogan, the. The. The formula for that podcast is he could have any guests in the world on that podcast. And he brings the conversation back to aliens, trans people playing sports, the JFK assassination, MK Ultra. And now, for whatever reason, Joe Rogan feels the need to talk to whoever's on the podcast. It could be Elon Musk or it could be Derek Moore plays More Dates. He feels the need to talk about creatine. He starts with the same line every time. He's like, have you seen these studies on creatine? It actually turns out that it's really helpful for sleep deprivation. Every, literally every other podcast now, he brings up that. That sentence, but he talked about creatine gummies. Like, I don't know, three to four months ago. I DMed him on Instagram within two minutes. He responds being like, no, I'm actually not taking your brand, but send me some. And so we've just been sending him gummies forever now. Or I guess the last three to four months. He never mentioned us by name. And then this past week with Derek More Plays, More Dates, he, like, called us out by name and confirmed that he's been taking our product now for a little bit. Yeah, super helpful for.

[Unknown]

Yeah, I was gonna say any lift from that.

[Connor]

Yeah, dude, the long term Rogan effect is insane. We still get people saying they heard about us from Joe Rogan, and that happened two winters ago, that he, like, plugged us organically on his feed. It's insane. I mean, we didn't see a big bump for us. It wasn't a big bump. It was like small bump. And then like, we still see Rogan as one of our top responses as like the second question when. When people select podcast. It's fucking awesome.

[Dan McCormick]

I mean, there's a world in which the Forever Chemicals conversation becomes one of his. Like, one of his. You know, he works into every conversation.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Dan McCormick]

And in that world, he could be talking about, you know, how hexclad is the product that he chooses to stay away from those chemicals. Yeah, that. That would be good for everybody.

[Unknown]

Did you guys see after the election, everyone was like, the left needs a Joe Rogan to go on.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

I feel like. I feel like makeup needs a Joe Rogan podcast to go on.

[Cody]

Well, did you know, it's funny, Joe. Joe Rogan sounds like known create user, known hexcloud user, known Ridge Wallet user. He probably could listen to. To the marketing operators as far as.

[Unknown]

We just got to get one more product in there on them.

[Connor]

Have you.

[Dan McCormick]

Did you just need some miracle?

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Connor.

[Cody]

No. For a long time, we sponsored like, anybody. We talked about, like, Joe Rogan Peripheral. This was like 2019, 2020. Like anybody, any. Any alt comic that would be on the pod, we would sponsor them. So it was like Tiger, Tiger Bailey, Theovon, all those guys. Tony Hinchcliffe we sponsored for a while, so we like peppered around him. And then he's mentioned a couple of times that he. That he uses the Ridge Wallet.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

[Dan McCormick]

You guys are so good at identifying that, like, that wave of creator that's about to become super, super famous. Who do you think that is over the next, like one to two years?

[Cody]

Well, dude, it's so tricky. I mean, we were really like, we were so incredibly early to the ovon. It was kind of crazy. The only people sponsoring his podcast were us in Gray Block Pizza, which is a local Santa Monica place. And, and we have two guys on the team. They both still work here. One is Sean, the CEO. His brother James is just like deep on podcasts and YouTuber. So like, he, he. He gets them early. And there were a number of examples of that early on. I think there's less of them now. It's just so much more competitive. People blow up faster. I don't have, like a great. This creator is going to be huge in the next couple, you know, months or whatever. I wish I did. We're working on it.

[Connor]

Luckily for us, we can just follow whoever's in a. Like, it's like, oh, who Just won the next season of a Next Level Chef. All right, great. We are already deep in bed with Fox, and then we can, you know, kind of jump off and leverage that to start a relationship with that creator. So, like, all right, who won the. Who won the latest cooking TV show? Like, great. We already have, like, inroads with them. Let's go. Let's go figure something out.

[Cody]

Dude, that's insider influencer marketing. You got to be careful with that.

[Connor]

Yeah, exactly. Cut that out, Connor.

[Dan McCormick]

I think some. Some unsolicited influencer advice for. For you. The technology brothers, I think, are going to be. I don't know if you've seen those guys. It's like John Coogan, Jordy Hayes. You know, Jordy a little bit, right?

[Cody]

Jordan was one of our first employees. Technology brothers. Huge plug for them. They are going to be huge. They have the perfect format. Those guys are awesome. I Dinner with them last week. They are going to crush it.

[Connor]

Where are they? Which are they? A YouTuber?

[Cody]

No, there's a YouTube channel. I mostly listen to the podcast, but it's Tech Bros Pod on Twitter.

[Connor]

Okay. I'm gonna. I'm adding it to the to do list to look into this.

[Cody]

Yeah, they're really good. They have a very special format. We should sponsor it, frankly, like, yeah, that's a great one that I. I get similar vibes from them that I did from like, early. My first million episodes. Sam Parr and Sean, like, that thing clicked, and you could kind of tell. And then it took off. And I. I do think Technology brothers would be in that bucket too.

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Talk. Is that it, or is that a different one?

[Cody]

Tech Bros Pod.

[Unknown]

I'll have to have you send me the link.

[Connor]

We. We got plugged organically by. By my first million. They were just talking about, like, Sam. Sam was talking, like, very untechnically about website and, like, just like the immediate brand valence you get sometimes from visiting a website. And he was, like, using ours as an example. He's like. He opens up our homepage, like, I just immediately want to buy. And we should have jumped on it. We should have jumped on it in the moment. This is, like, a few months ago. I still kind of want to reach out to him and send him, like, a my first million engraved. Because that's what happened to Rogan. Like, we sponsored a podcast episode and got a sweetheart deal on it. I think it was, like, 50 grand because someone backed out at the last minute. I'm like, all right, we got to go hard for Rogan. Like, JRE logo on the middle of the pan. Same with the cutting board. Sent him a Curie knife and a cleaver and he organically plugged us in feed, which I've never seen him do. It looked and felt like a like a paid for ad and it was like the most like the best result you could have ever gotten from like an organic product seating. And now I want to go back and and do it for my first million and see if we can get Sam Par to to start chatting about us on his Twitter and on his show a little bit more. Fingers crossed.

[Cody]

Totally. All right. Sick. You want to hit test I think Dan, did you put this in or someone else says the the LP testing?

[Dan McCormick]

Oh yeah. So I, I, I'm not sure I was super familiar with the the test of the week format but something we are testing and maybe I'm totally not following the format here. I don't know if you, you all are seeing this. We've tested a bunch of different landing page formats recently and historically Listicles right now are working super, super well for us. Historically they have not actually worked all that well for us. But for whatever reason over the last call it four weeks seems to be outperforming any other landing page format that we're doing. Great thing about Listicles is that you can pump out a ton of them super quickly and make it super targeted to whatever the ad is focused on. And so an easy one to kind of pump out a bunch of different iterations. Not that hard to design in the first place and seem to be working for us. And I'm sure that's not how this segment generally goes, but that is something that we're currently testing.

[Cody]

No, that works. And you're saying each these landing pages have something specific about them. Like are you speaking to a particular demo?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, exactly. So let's say the meta ad features a girl that goes to the gym. 5 reasons why gym Girls are taking Creatine Gummies. Let's say dad focuses with a, you know, a, a 75 year old dad talking about muscle loss. 55 reasons why people over 65 are taking creatine for sarcopenia. Things like that you can get super, super niche on. You can also make general landing pages that like kind of capture a wider audience, but you can really narrow in and those five reasons can kind of be the same regardless of whatever. Like, like the top two can maybe be personalized to a specific audience, but beyond that it's just like general company information because no one's ever reading beyond the first one or two?

[Cody]

Yeah. Big hacks. No, I love it. We've done. We've done a lot of that in the past as well. And it can be like, pretty lightweight personalization between pages.

[Dan McCormick]

Well, rad.

[Cody]

Appreciate you contributing to the test of the week, Dan.

[Unknown]

Can I follow up on that? Like, yeah, like, how. How big of a lift have you seen? Because I've always wondered and I'll see like, athletic greens doing it and what. We've tried some stuff, but, like, how big of a. Of an impact do you see from personalizing it and like, how. How specific should you make them?

[Connor]

You know what I mean?

[Unknown]

Like, do you have just like a few pillars that you'll use or is it like literally, like this concept took off? I need to make a page for this concept. How. How much of an impact have you had and how. How wide do you go with it?

[Dan McCormick]

Yeah, today I wouldn't. I wouldn't say the, the true values. And like, how specific can you get? It's more just like you can easily build a landing page for these kind of demographic pools or these use case pools versus like kind of cross venn diagram and like a bunch of different things to get a very specific point of the page. So it's like male, female, are they taking it for lifestyle or like, very specific fitness goals? How old are they? But it's not like the most specific landing page crafted just for Cody.

[Cody]

Cool. All right, I think we call it a wrap. That's the show. Dan, thanks so much for coming on, man. It was a pleasure.

[Dan McCormick]

Thanks, guys. It was fun.

[Cody]

All right, thanks again for Dan for coming on. The marketing operators. I think it was a great episode. Hopefully you all feel the same. Make sure to, like, subscribe, share with your friends and your family. As always, thank you to our sponsor, sponsors, Motion, Prescient Rich Panel, and House.