E058: Marketing in a Recession - Cuts, Bets, and What You Can’t Afford to Lose

Summary

Podcast Summary: Marketing Operators E058: Marketing in a Recession - Cuts, Bets, and What You Can’t Afford to Lose

Release Date: May 6, 2025

In Episode 58 of Marketing Operators, hosts Connor, Krista, and Cody delve into the intricate dynamics of marketing during a recession. Titled "Marketing in a Recession - Cuts, Bets, and What You Can’t Afford to Lose," this episode offers invaluable insights into navigating economic downturns, making strategic budget cuts, and identifying essential marketing investments that can sustain and even propel businesses forward during challenging times.

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1. Current Marketing Landscape in a Recession

The episode kicks off with a candid discussion about the pervasive impact of the recession on various market sectors, with a particular emphasis on the beauty industry. Krista shares alarming observations:

"From what I've seen and where I'm sitting, Beauty is really struggling... it's just clear this is a pretty rough year." ([Release Date Timestamp: 09:00])

Connor adds a nuanced perspective on the fluctuating performance within different segments:

"What we do, which I think is interesting, is on a weekly basis we look at Google trends for our own brand queries... and what we've seen just the last couple weeks is like some pretty significant declines." ([09:07])

The hosts collectively recognize that while some sectors like health and apparel are faring slightly better, the overall market sentiment remains fraught with uncertainty.

2. Budget Reforecasting and Cuts

Transitioning into strategic adjustments, Krista outlines her company's approach to budget reforecasting amid rising costs and diminishing margins:

"We're absolutely trying to optimize for that profit percentage. Which means, hey, let's be less aggressive on media spend. Let's cut that back." ([14:49])

Connor echoes this sentiment, emphasizing the importance of reallocating resources to high-impact areas:

"We've been thinking about where do we want to take our foot off the gas pedal in order to save the most time and energy that we can?" ([17:01])

3. Strategic Hiring and Operational Adjustments

Amid financial tightening, the trio discusses prudent hiring strategies. Krista explains a deliberate slowdown in hiring, focusing only on essential roles:

"We're trying to keep headcount and that cost down while we figure this stuff out." ([13:29])

Cody supplements this with his strategy of renegotiating vendor fees and moving from percentage-based to flat-rate payments to mitigate financial strain:

"We've had some vendor partners that are great and they're like, totally... we've reduced fees and kind of asked for a year-long commitment." ([28:39])

4. Optimizing Marketing Channels

A significant portion of the conversation centers on optimizing marketing channels to maximize ROI. Krista emphasizes the importance of identifying and maintaining high-performing channels:

"Any situation where you're like right now, any situation where you don't have the data to show that or you have this like a gut feel that's like, I just feel unsure. I think you default to cut that." ([38:43])

Connor adds the necessity of incremental testing and strategic cuts to ensure that essential channels remain untouched:

"We are not going to cut how we measure those ad channels. That becomes even more important over the next couple months." ([34:00])

5. Vendor Management and Cost Negotiations

Negotiating with vendors emerges as a critical tactic for sustaining marketing efforts without inflating costs. Krista shares her proactive approach:

"We're asking vendors that we see as important to work with just to give us a discount in price... it's like kind of win together, lose together." ([27:23])

Cody complements this by detailing his negotiation tactics, including shifting from variable to flat fees and capping costs with agency partners:

"I've gone through software lists... sorting it by need to haves and nice to haves and cutting what's not core to the business." ([29:58])

6. Creative Strategies and Marketing Tactics

The shift from quantity to quality in creative production is highlighted as a strategic pivot. Krista describes her company's redirection towards higher-quality, story-driven ads:

"We're making more YouTube ads... which naturally has more high production value, more story arc, more brand forward." ([66:45])

Cody discusses the integration of value messaging in their campaigns, emphasizing savings and cost-effectiveness:

"We're leaning a little bit more into the more savings stuff... it's more cost-effective and just persuading people more." ([65:33])

7. Long-term Adaptation and Growth Strategies

Looking beyond immediate challenges, the hosts explore strategies for long-term resilience and growth. Connor speaks to the importance of maintaining flexibility and preparing for eventual market recovery:

"We're not going to cut all newness, it's just being more strategic about what newness are we investing in." ([24:52])

Cody adds that companies should focus on core business areas and prepare for post-recession opportunities:

"What can we do to position ourselves to be set up for that?... there are things that we can do to make our company better even if it means we don't grow." ([80:04])

8. Pricing Strategies and Consumer Behavior

Adjusting pricing strategies in response to altered consumer behaviors is another focal point. Krista warns against hasty price increases without thorough testing:

"Be careful about just raising your prices. You might raise your prices and be hurting yourself more than you're helping yourself." ([72:45])

Connor emphasizes the need for meticulous incremental testing to avoid detrimental pricing decisions:

"Measuring the incrementality of price changes is pretty straightforward and awesome to do..." ([73:14])

9. Innovative Marketing Approaches

The episode concludes with a discussion on innovative marketing approaches that can thrive even in a recessionary environment. Krista introduces the concept of pay-per-performance models and strategic partnerships:

"Shared mailers, shared direct mail... shared whitelisting. It's a partnership ad... splitting the CAC in half." ([77:58])

Connor reflects on the necessity of evolving marketing strategies to remain competitive:

"It's almost better to just blanket meta and acquire customers that way... securing ad channels is crucial." ([80:34])

10. Final Thoughts and Advice

Wrapping up, Krista and Connor offer pragmatic advice to marketers navigating recessionary pressures:

Krista: "If you don't do that [80,20 audit], you end up with at least some bloat, maybe a lot of bloat... trim the fat." ([35:32])

Connor: "What do you not cut next is like, what is the apparatus that supports the best deployment of those dollars?" ([38:00])

Cody concludes with a heartfelt reflection on the importance of maintaining focus on essential, revenue-driving activities while being open to strategic cuts:

"Do you want to keep revenue up? Maybe profit's not our main KPI or is it profit?... be careful about cutting incremental spend." ([43:16])

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Key Takeaways:

• Prioritize High-ROI Channels: Focus marketing budgets on channels that consistently deliver high returns, and rigorously test the incrementality of each channel to identify and eliminate inefficiencies.

• Strategic Budget Cuts: Implement zero-based budgeting, cutting non-essential expenditures, renegotiating vendor contracts, and shifting to in-house operations where feasible to maintain financial stability.

• Adaptive Hiring Practices: Slow down hiring plans, prioritizing critical roles that directly impact revenue generation and operational efficiency.

• Value-Driven Creative Strategies: Shift from high-volume creative production to high-quality, value-focused messaging that resonates with consumers' heightened price sensitivity.

• Long-term Resilience: Prepare for post-recession growth by maintaining flexibility in strategies, exploring innovative marketing collaborations, and positioning the brand to capitalize on reduced competition.

• Pricing Vigilance: Carefully test pricing strategies to ensure adjustments enhance profitability without alienating cost-conscious consumers.

• Innovative Marketing Models: Explore pay-per-performance models and strategic partnerships to optimize customer acquisition costs and expand market reach efficiently.

This episode serves as a comprehensive guide for marketers seeking to navigate the complexities of a recession, offering actionable strategies and insightful perspectives to sustain and grow their businesses amidst economic challenges.

Transcript

[Cody]

What's up, guys? I feel like this has been a while. Has it been a while since it's just been us three?

[Connor]

It was Connor and Krista and I last week, I feel from Taco and the week before that, I think it was just me and you, Cody, you know, who's been here every week, though.

[Cody]

And then I feel like maybe I missed it might have been you guys would have. Still something. I don't.

[Connor]

Whatever. What episode are we on? I'm like 59 for 59.

[Krista]

That hit rates. That hit rates high, man.

[Cody]

That's why they pay me, the big bros. Wow.

[Connor]

Reliability.

[Cody]

I was just in GA4. When's the last time you guys have logged into GA4?

[Krista]

I haven't been in a while, man. I'm using edge mesh for all of our. Of our. Like what? I used to pull GA4 for our. For data from.

[Cody]

Yeah, I was. It was just like the first time in like a month probably. I was like, this is crazy.

[Krista]

What were you looking?

[Connor]

What were you looking for?

[Cody]

Yeah, I want to see if we have any chat GPT sessions yet or conversion.

[Krista]

Wait, hold on. So this is like, this is new ground for me because I've been like hearing the whispers of. Of like advertising coming to Chad GPT. But are you actually able to like attach a ut, like if someone were to like come across your brand and like a link to your website, they.

[Cody]

They do. I saw. I saw people tweeting about it just like sharing OpenAI's, you know, demo of it. So I was just super curious. So I clicked on. I, you know, searched something I knew we would show up for and clicked on it and looked at, you know, the parameters and it. It automatic. If you click through it, it automatic chatgpt for source.

[Krista]

Oh, what? So did you have any traffic?

[Cody]

I haven't gotten there yet because I haven't been in. In a month. It's not. I'm not as quick as I used to be.

[Krista]

Where do I even go to find this?

[Cody]

Yeah, exactly.

[Danny]

Takes.

[Cody]

Takes a little bit longer than it used to, you know, Gotta dust. Dust off the cobwebs.

[Connor]

We've got a. I'm looking now. We've got 182 sessions from Chat GPT over the last seven days.

[Cody]

Hey, pretty good.

[Krista]

Is it just. What's it called? Oh, oh, I think we might. That was L7, Connor.

[Connor]

Yeah. Yep.

[Krista]

Hey, we got, we got. So we have 50, 31 from chat GPT not set as the media. Looks like 53 total.

[Cody]

We had 92 users.

[Krista]

Two conversions, bro. Two conversions, $1200 of revenue. That's a good average order values coming out of chat GPT. That's high intent right there.

[Cody]

92 users, 84 of them new. Look at that net new visit rate, guys.

[Connor]

Gotta scale it.

[Cody]

Top of Funnel.

[Krista]

You heard it here on marketing operators first Chad GPT, your best new Top of Funnel channel.

[Cody]

It's awesome. That's awesome. It's fun. All right, first of all, before, before we get into this, I want to thank our sponsors as always, could not do the show without you guys. So thank you so much to Motion, Prescient Rich panel after Cell and North Beam. Thank you guys for being here from day one being amazing. Sponsors being the reason why this podcast can happen for for everybo. So if you've been doing scrolling DTC, Twitter or LinkedIn like me, then it's impossible to escape all the conversations that are happening right now. There's obviously a lot going on with AI, image generation, ChatGPT 4.0, but there's also a lot of financial pressure, tariffs, economic, consumer spending, not looking great. So a lot going on right now at Jones Road. We're definitely feeling, you know, a lot of pressure, but we try to keep our team very lean. So try to enable our team to get more done with the amount of creative volume that we need to output. You know, to be honest, do as as little hiring as possible. And you know, again, I think there's going to be a lot more teams looking to do that and I really think AI is starting to get at a place where it can really start to automate and take over some workflows that you're seeing. So if you've been wondering about how you can make all of this nonstop talk about to seem more practical, I highly recommend you book some time with a team over at Motion. I just got off a call with Reza, their CEO, to go over their agents, what they're building. He showed me behind the hood and. And it's awesome. I honestly think it's going to change how DTC teams are going to use AI and agentic workflows to systemize ad processes. If there's a thing that your team is doing and they have it in their head, and it's a process that they're doing. It involves data or creative strategy and they can write down what the steps are. It can be automated with emotion agents. So you might have seen the release of the expert agents, which are the AR workflows created by some of the world's best creative strategists, people like Barry Hot. Dara Denny, Mirella Crespi, Alex Cooper. On and on. These are the AI agents that analyze your own Facebook ad data right inside Motion and they can, they can help you understand like Jess Backman's where in the funnel you're probably putting your spend and have an opportunity what iterations you can make. Is your creative diverse enough? There's some customer research stuff. It's just awesome. But, but these are all again, super specific built on your own data. But Motion has a lot more on their AI product roadmap that we've been lucky enough to get a sneak peek of. So whether you're a seven, eight or nine figure brand and you want an edge on this stuff, I recommend you go book a call with their team so you can get a private tour of what's coming next with their AI. You can get a first look at their next batch of expert agents and also see how they're going to help brands like Jones Road, Hexclad and Ridge to automate a lot of the creative processes with their AI agents. Also, if you mention you came from here, the marketing operators podcast, you'll get 50% off your first month and it's all monthly contracts, so very little risk. They won't make you sign an annual thing. I'm excited. I think you'll be excited. Go to motion app.com and again mention the marketing operator sent you. All right, so what we're going to talk about today in a recession, so I don't want to talk about tariffs. We, Connor and I joked two episodes ago that, you know, we're doing what good marketers do and we're talking about creative. We're not going to talk about creative today, but we're not going to give tactical tariff tips because we have no idea what's going on with that. But I do think it's timely. Whatever happens with the tariff situation, I think it's pretty clear this year kind of sucks. From what I've seen and where I'm sitting, Beauty is really struggling. I reached out to our meta rep last week to get some data and also the finance team that we're working with just shared some like, you know, public companies like L'Oreal and like a few other like public companies just, you know, as they're reporting their earnings and Beauty's struggling. It's, it's probably going to be like a flat ear in Beauty and then amongst different segments are down and up. So, you know, I think it's clear and just everything, you know, CTC is sharing Or Taylor is on the pod tomorrow. Like it's a pretty rough year. I think there are probably some bright spots. It seems like some health is doing a little better. Seemed like maybe some apparel was doing better and then the tariff stuff. I don't know about you guys and in your markets I guess before you want to share anything of like how your, your vertical seem to be fair and so far.

[Connor]

Well, yeah. Beauty being flat. I mean. So big year for being ugly, huh? It's just, it's back. People don't mind anymore.

[Krista]

What do you call that person?

[Cody]

Being ugly is okay. No one's got money to, you know.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you know, to. I'll speak quickly about Ridge because the wallet market's super weird. Like we're such a big percentage of it. It's like hard to track. It's hard to benchmark against other wallet brands. What we do, which I think is interesting is on a weekly basis we look at Google trends for our own brand queries across our different categories. So Ridge carry on, Ridge Wallet, Ridge R. We also track against non branded queries for those same things. Men's wedding bands, carry on, men's wallet, etc. And what we've seen just the last couple weeks is like some pretty significant declines. I was just going over this today with my team but like carry on queries last week were down 10% year over year. Men's wallet was down 3%. Rings were maybe like up 3% but that's like they had been trending much higher for most of the year. So that's where we've been tracking it which very anecdotally feels like it's gotten quite a bit softer over the last couple weeks.

[Cody]

But that's where everything is down.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the best data that, that I've had available to for us specifically.

[Krista]

Yeah, we're so also looking at like brand search terms using our, our our friends tool over at Marathon. Just like that share of voice and our year over year growth rate on, on brand terms still looks really good. Um, I think that's generally driven by the Super Bowl. It's like a pretty clear moment in time where that growth rate in terms of year over year search volume for our branded terms grew and we still look really good compared to our competitors and I would actually say are getting an increasing amount of that overall share of, of all the brands that we've inputted into into their platform. We also met with Google this week and they were sharing some like category wide data and it Seems like there's a lot of other categories that are hurting a lot more compared to like the kitchen, home, good space. So I think like big macro picture. I think we're on the, on the positive side of that, which is, which is really great. And then business wise, like, we've, we've been performing well, but it's also hard to tell because we just launched a Mother's Day sale and Mother's Day is huge for us. Like we, it's our second offer moment of the year. We have a ton of evergreen time between mothers or between our like February sale and Mother's Day. And it's just like, it's such a great moment for us to message too because it's the perfect gift for Mother's Day. So it's going to be interesting to see like what happens once we're through Memorial Day because I think that'll be a lot more indicative of like long term performance. I will say our CPMs are looking, are looking nice for the first time. And I can't remember how long we're actually seeing decreases in CPMs, which I think is, you know, I'm probably getting ahead of myself here, but I think there's probably a lot of brands pulling back ad spend as a, as a reactionary whatever thing to the tariffs. And I think there's just probably less people in the auction that we're competing with now, which is I guess a silver lining.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, no, that, that makes sense. I, I could see them going down. So. Yeah, I mean, I think it's category dependent, but I think macro kind of just total retail seems, you know, seems soft. I hate like, not taking accountability. Like there's a ton that I think we could be doing better, but also like, you know, you gotta, you gotta be mindful of, of the category you're in and how the market's doing. It's, it's so funny because like, I didn't really pay that much attention to it when things were good, you know, classic marketer. It's like, oh, we're crushing it. Our, you know, beauty's up 14. But no, it's, it's not, it's not beauty, it's us. Like, I'm great, I'm crushing it. And then like not doing well. It's like, it's the market. Nothing I can do, guys.

[Krista]

That's how you gotta do it.

[Cody]

Yeah, so, so, you know, it's a tough year. Like, I don't know if you guys have been looked at the poly market, you know, Bets, but I think the chance of a recession is in like the 60s. I, I saw like Jamie Dimer someone say that like, you know, recession would be like the best case scenario. I'm like, well, what is the worst case at that point? I don't want to know. Maybe, maybe not answer. But so whatever, whatever you call this, whether it's the tariff uncertainty, just as volatility, whether it's recession, whether it's a consumer recession, like things are challenging, it's clear, like prices are high, inflation is high, there's a lot of uncertainty in the market. Consumers are just not spending and not having the same fun. So it's challenging and it's going to vary depending on your market and what you're in. But we have to adapt, right? Like, we have to do the best we can. So what do you guys. And so I have a conversation like, what, what do we do in these times? It's, it's super open ended. I can kind of, you know, pinpoint it a little bit more. But like, what are your first thoughts that, that you guys are thinking about of like what you do in a time like this compared to normal good times?

[Krista]

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think macro, we're certainly slowing down and doing less. You know, we had all sorts of hiring plans, we had all sorts of strategic tactical plans that were going to be driven through additional resources, additional, additional people to focus on those things. Um, but we definitely are, we're not pausing, we're not halting hiring entirely, but we are certainly like slowing down and being a little bit more selective on, on like which people we really needed the most versus which people, you know, we would like to have because we want to do those things. But, and I do, and it's not that the things that we were planning to do are or wouldn't create like more value than that person cost to hire. But we're basically saying, hey, we think we can probably go without that tactic right now and thus that person right now. So that's been one area we've, we've definitely been, been making some changes in is, you know, pulling back on our hiring plans a little bit. It's not like we won't hire those people eventually, but let's just take it a little bit more slower, really hire the essential people that we really, really need. Because not doing those things is like actually hurting our business versus the, hey, these things are nice to have and the things we'll be able to do with these people are great. But we can, we can pause it a little bit and just keep headcount and that cost down while we figure this stuff out.

[Connor]

I have a quick question for Connor. Are there any specific like tactics or projects that you've put on the back burner given this like more conservative or tentative approach?

[Krista]

Yeah, I think like creative production has, is a, is a big thing that has, has changed where we are definitely taking a quality approach more than ever. And that actually required a lot of shifting and thinking and operations because from 2020 to really through, you know, the first part of this year, we were very much playing that creative volume game and it had a lot of value for growing our business. And now we just like, we, we think we need to shift to quality and taking like different, bigger swings. So creative created like ad production roadmap, really cutting that back because we were planning to hire more creative strategists, you know, more creative ICs, editors, designers, stuff like that. So we're kind of like peeling that back, peeling back the roadmap and just trying to really take like big meaty swings that we think will have, will have big upside. So that, yeah, that's one, one probably pretty big example.

[Cody]

I was going to. So you said you're obviously looking at your hiring plan. Are you, are you guys like looking at total budget and meaning like revenue forecast and is that coming down or changing at all just based on like how the market is trending?

[Krista]

Definitely. I mean we're not, we're, we're doing some reforecasts. I mean basically what, what's happened like on a, on a unit economics level, like maybe this is obvious, but everyone's cost of goods are going up, everyone's landed, margins are going down. That means your EBITDA margins going down. So we are absolutely trying to optimize for that profit percentage. Which means, hey, let's be less aggressive on media spend. Let's cut that back. But that also means we need to be less aggressive on, on our revenue targets. Let's roll that back a little bit to accommodate the, the lower ad spend, which ultimately means we can be doing less tactical things that we may be needed to do to support, you know, X extra dollars of spend. So it's like it starts at that level, right? Like we're going to spend less, we're going to re forecast revenue, we can do less ads, then we can have less creative strategists and video editors then that's how we're thinking about it. But yeah, definitely. I mean we're, we're, we're basically, we're creating all sorts of scenarios that are like, hey, if this thing lasts throughout the year, here's what we probably need to do to our revenue and spend forecasts. If this thing's for three months and then it goes away, like we can kind of go back to the old forecast. But we're, we're taking this sort of worst case scenario approach.

[Connor]

So one thing I would add to that because obviously, yeah, Connor, you did a good job laying out, I think, what everybody's experiencing. And then when it comes down to reforecasting for us, there's parts of the business, and I've talked about this many times over the course of the 50 or so episodes we've done, is that there are certain parts of the business that we're over indexing in in terms of like time and effort. We've got these new categories that we have to spend significantly more time to develop content to test. We just don't know how to scale travel in the same way that we do something like wallets or rings or whatever else. Or we're getting into like tech and power banks now. So a lot of that reforecasting can come from where do we want to take our foot off the gas pedal in order to save the most time and energy that we can? So not only not like, I guess my point being reforecasting a dollar down, depending on where you expected that dollar to come from, can mean vastly different things in terms of time and energy.

[Krista]

Saved and like the resources required. Right. Like for you, a new product rollout might have. Have totally, like a big A plus launch is probably not maybe totally different, but maybe many different. I mean certainly many different tactics and then different people doing those things. So whether you say, hey, we're actually not going to launch this product this year versus we're going to just like make less ads. Like different, different roadmaps. Right?

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah. So I'll answer the question quickly. We've had a very similar experience to Connor and the hexcloud team. Let's reforecast down. Let's think about it from a. What is taking up? Where are we getting the lowest ROI on our time spent? And let's try to forecast down those dollars. So part of that comes from like categories also. All our different categories are affected by tariffs in different ways. We don't need to get into that specifically, but like, that's a big piece of what we've been focused on over the last couple of weeks. And then the second one similarly, but I'll call it out as like an explicit thing is our newness. So we looked at our merch calendar, you know, six months into the future, five months into the future, what were we planning on buying today that we may no longer want to buy? And that's actually where there are certain things on our merch calendar. Like, I'll give an example. This isn't going to surprise anybody. We launched a mini everyday folder. So like a miniature knife that goes on your keychain. Awesome product, super cool. I'm using it every day now. That is just not a particularly high leverage product when you think about you can't run ads for it. It still requires PDPs and bundles and content and emails and things like that. So what are, what are examples of those in the future that we can just cut from the roadmap so we can save that time and energy that wasn't resulting in a lot of dollars and dedicate it to more high leverage opportunities. So from a reforecasting standpoint, those are kind of the two approaches that we've taken.

[Danny]

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[Cody]

Yeah, I'm with you. I think just have to get super diligent. Yeah, so we, we have, we call it a budget. Like for us like budget should be locked, you know, and then for the year and then we'll, we'll reforecast monthly if we need to. But if we are way above or below, like we'll do a full p and l re budget and we just finished, you know, after Q1 process of that. And so yeah, that goes into everything that's full revenue bill. That's you know, by, that's by product, that store expansion, reforecasting stores because we've been missing on those and I think like stores are a good, are a good proxy for like how the market is doing and things like that. Because you should be you know, flat or up same store sales but you don't have like the volatility of like oh here, how are your ads performing or stuff like that. So I think like you can just look at like. And we have like a thing that measures traffic and stuff like that. Like so for us that's like a really good just like index and proxy for like how, you know, how demand is overall. And then obviously budget hiring costs, obviously tariffs are getting calculated into that. So yeah, we're preparing for that. We grew 50% last year, you know, original budget. We were never planning to grow that much but it's coming down. And we're also trying to have a scenario where we prepare for a flat year. I don't think that'll happen, but there's no chance we grow 50% this year even if things were good. But so we want to be prepared for that and you know what that looks like on a cost side and marketing spend and, and, and, and all that. And it's, I think I feel like incrementality is a key here. It's just like really figuring out what to cut. And I think there are things that are nice to have that, you know, feel like need to haves and then hits a fan and like, you don't necessarily need them. But I also think like on the marketing side, like, you don't want to cut growth, right? Like, obviously you need profit. You got to figure out where you're trying to go. Like, are we trying to continue to keep revenue up? Maybe profit's not our main KPI or is it profit? But like, you do want to be careful about cutting, you know, incremental spend. So like, what, what, what if you guys have cut things? Like, what are you cutting? I know Connor said creative, they're cutting total media spend. That comes down with it. Cmax. Sounds like you guys are cutting some, some launches that, that even if they're incremental, they're just less marginally efficient.

[Connor]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just some newness is the absolute best thing we could do for our business. So we're not just like cutting all newness, it's just being more strategic. About what newness are we investing in? Mini folders. The example I used earlier, we won't invest in new wallet designs and things like that there some of those incremental stuff that we can do. So we're obviously going to like, we're gonna stick with the plan and for 2026, we're gonna double down there. Right? Other things we've cut, we cut SEO. I was like, look, I think, I think we'll continue to organically rank for a couple months while we figure out.

[Cody]

What were you spending?

[Connor]

Not a lot. It was like we had a contractor, we had someone managing it internally, we had a VA who was helping with the operations. It was like, okay, yeah, literally like just a couple, couple thousand dollars a month. But we cut that. We cut a lot of vendors. We had an external dev agency that we had on retainer. We cut them, we cut some of our outsourced performance, creative partners, stuff like that. And a lot of those conversations are just like, hey guys, we're gonna go into like cockroach mode. Like, we're gonna be in a holding pattern for the next couple months. Would love to be able to re engage in Q3. Like, it's not as if we were ever unhappy with the services, but right now we're trying to cut, we're trying to be as lean as possible. Let's like start from. It's like zero based budgeting.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

How do we, how do we cut back as aggressively as possible, See how the next couple months go, see how tariffs shake out, see how customer demand shakes out and then kind of build back as strategically as possible.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. Before I share as Connor, you guys doing any, any cuts like that? Like thinking about either vendors or channels or strategies?

[Krista]

Yeah, I mean luck. Luck, I guess luck. Maybe luckily, maybe not. But I think luckily for us, we were already, that was our, that was a plan of ours headed into the year was like we thought we were, we were over indexed on a bunch of outsourced partners and the plan was to cut a lot of those outsourced partners and then bring a lot of those resources in house again. So we were already like doing the kind of the cutting of the fluff. The area that's we've pivoted a little bit is like how much of those, how much of that resource do we bring directly in house right away? So that's where some of the pivot's been. And then we also, you know, and I had mixed feelings about this, but I, you know, I think it's, it's very fair and I think our, our, you know, Danny kind of explained it best. Like, you know, when we perform well, our vendors that we work with also see the benefits and we've performed well for a long time and the vendors we worked with that are definitely, you know, very important to our growth are, you know, very important to us and it's kind of win together, lose together. So we haven't been afraid to go and obviously there's a way to approach this. But like we are asking vendors that we do see as important to work with just to give us a, a discount in price, you know, especially ones we've been been with for a long time and we've had great relationships with. It's again it's like kind of win together, lose together. It's like when we're hurting a little bit, we're asking you to bear a little bit of this, of this pain with us. So, you know, we've also been asking vendors to take like you know, some of, somewhat of a reduction in their kind of evergreen, you know, subscription or monthly scope while, while we're also getting hammered and by the way, not definitely not asking them to match like what we're seeing. Right. We're not saying hey, because Our, our cost of goods have gone up. X We want you to also decrease your rate X It hasn't been like that drastic of an ask, but we are making those asks of our, of our vendors. And like most of our vendors, it's also like a kind of, you know, these people that are truly partners are going to receive that well. And we've had like really good feedback and conversations with some of our vendors and partners about this and they totally get it. So that's been like, I've really appreciated that out of our, our tech partners and our agency partners that we are working with. Like, they've really understood our position and like the pain we're feeling and have been really just have received that, that ask and that feedback really well, which I appreciate.

[Cody]

Yeah, we're pretty much the same. I, I love this. I don't know about you guys, but like, that's where I'm spending like a lot of my time right now. And same thing, like when we were budgeting for this year, I just wasn't thrilled with things. And it's easy to get sloppy and you know, have vendors, you know, you're continuing to work with but maybe aren't, aren't working and driving, you know, growth any longer or they're, you know, paid more or like. So one of the first things that I looked at anyone who's on a percentage of spend and like move them to flat just negotiate and it was just like, hey, I'm, I'm not comfortable with this. As their business grows, like, we'd love to keep working with you, but like, it doesn't work at this level. And we've had some vendor, you know, partners that are great and they're like, totally. And like one of them, like there's like a media agency, like, well, we'll, we will actually pay less. We're going to spend way more on their channel and we'll pay them less this year than we did last year. And like, but we're not going anywhere. And like, we weren't. We probably would have looked into other options because it just would have been unsustainable for us to continue paying a percentage of spend based on that channel. But like, you know, I, like, it's just so appreciated and I've, you know, referred the guy business and just like, you know, he's thinking long term and that's what I want for from a partner is like someone that can think with us. So we've had multiple agencies do that and I've kind of reduced fees and you know, kind of asked for a year long commitment but I'm, I'm happy to do that. We've definitely cut anything that's like underperforming like we're about to, we just signed with Paul street so like we'll, we'll actually have a lower base, we'll have commission. So like I am normally a fan, this is a little contractor. I'm normally a fan of, you know, flat fee, non variable. I think in a time like this where growth is really uncertain, I'm actually slightly more okay with the variable fee because I don't want to pay a high flat fee if growth is not there. And I'm, I only want to pay the commission if it like it is incremental. So for like, for ad creative, like we're bringing on multiple ad creative agencies but we're going no flat fee, only percentage of spend on these. I, I, I don't want to bring on five that are, because we still need volume and we still want to invest but how do we de risk it? So that's it. If it's an existing partner then, then I'd rather, you know, put a cap on it. Yeah, we just have a list of softwares and I've just gone through it and I've gone through it 50 times probably by now and asked my team to do the same and sort it by need to haves and nice to haves and it's cutting and it's, it's so funny because so many things that you know, the beginning of the year your team is asking for, they're saying is it you know, a need to have when shit really hits the fan and there's 145 tariffs on China, it becomes a nice to have really quick.

[Krista]

Yeah, yeah. The whole business case like you know, we use this business case template and internally when you want to make a new hire and the need for those has become even more important. I'm like if you guys really need this person, you better make a banging business case because we are really looking at everything with, with a magnifying glass more than we ever have. Cody, I wanted to ask you and I guess Connor too, did you have any vendors or technology partners respond like poorly to you saying hey can, can we get a, we would appreciate a discount right now.

[Cody]

I just sent out, I fired off like a bunch of emails this week so I haven't gotten a reply on a bunch of them. The other thing I'm doing so I'll have a different email and like this is like Finance operators plug Maytab like this book, like, it's the same email that Sean sends out. And I'm sure we're all doing the same thing. This book, double your profits is like, incredible. I'll have a different one. If we're coming up on a contract renewal, right. Because it's one thing to ask for our existing contract to be changed, but if I know, like we're coming up on a klaviyo renewal or something like that, like, I'll just go, go at it ahead of time and do it. No, I had one actually that matched us on like a 10% discount, like right away. And I'm like, I did not ask. I'm so pissed about that. But they're like a friend and that. I'm like, you know, didn't want to push it too hard.

[Krista]

Yeah. And I mean, I'm sure these, like, I'm sure these tech, these ecom tech companies are hurting too. I mean, I guarantee you they're, they're signing less business right now.

[Cody]

Oh, for sure. Agencies, too. I've talked to some agency owners. Like they said, just, just their, their pipeline has just plummeted. You know, people are probably not starting new things right now. What do you, what do you not cut? Like, how, how when you're looking through the list and you're looking at your spend and your creative spend and, and your agencies you work with and you know, your, your, your software as you work with, like, what's the business case? How. What do you, what are you like? Absolutely not. You are not touching this. Our business will go to, Our revenue will drop if we take this out.

[Connor]

Well, you know what's funny is Taylor Holiday has a really good podcast on a brand's best response to increasing cogs and tariffs. And I'm not going to walk through the whole thing, but like, it depends on your inventory and cash position and like, what does it make sense for you to do in the, in the immediate and medium term? But like, one of the first things we don't cut is ad spend. It's like, it's like more important than anything to turn the inventory you have into cash. At least that's the position that we've been at. And it's also certain types of inventory for us, the stuff that's going to be more affected by tariffs. We won't get into the specifics of it, but yeah, it's like, okay. No, we actually, ad spend is the, essentially the last thing we want to cut right now. And then it comes down to what do you not cut next is like, what is the apparatus that supports the best deployment of those dollars? So it ends up being like, we're not cutting ad creative. It's like, we'll continue investing there. We're not cutting media buyers. We're not cutting like that's, that gets pretty close. Like the 80, 80, 20 of the rich business. Like, we're so customer acquisition oriented that it's like we need to be able to spend dollars as efficiently as possible. We're not going to cut how we measure those ad channels. Like, that becomes even more important over the next couple months as we like try to remain as lean and efficient as possible. So that's kind of the system that we need to maintain. And that's, I guess that's where I would stop. I mean, we're not going to cut like you start getting into like E Com. There's a lot of really important software that goes along with E Com that is driving incremental revenue that we've proven over time. We're going to keep that. You look at the retention team and it's like we're not gonna cut Klaviyo. We're not gonna cut Postscript. Like, yeah, it's like, it's like not that hard to put together. Like, what is the 8020 of what the 80 20. What's a 20% of people in time and effort that leads to 80% of the results and you maintain all of that. And I think that's like retention E Com paid for our business.

[Krista]

I, I fully agree with that. And what I would add on top is we're also like, I think what everything you just mentioned is like what is driving performance of the business today. And then the, the on incremental thing I would add to that is we're also not cutting what we are like our big bets for the like that we're working on now that we think are going to be driving growth for the business three months from now, six months from now, 12 months from now. We're also. And that's a little harder because obviously it's a lot easier to say, well, I can tell Facebook's driving most of this revenue today. Like, that's pretty easy to measure. But there are certain growth and brand strategies that we are continuing to invest in even though it's going to cost us money because we, we think that the, the value of that down the road is worth it. So like, there's some organic content strategies we're working on right now that are definitely very cost like very costly right now. I mean, we're not going to launch them for a while yet. Like just like it's all it is is a cost right now. We're still investing there. We have some paid media strategies that are requiring production and stuff like that. We're still continuing forward with that roadmap. So it really is like a good forcing exercise and that whole 80, 20 audit. Because I think if you don't do that every so often you end up with at least some bloat, maybe a lot of bloat. And it's kind of like a good, it sucks to do it at times, but it's a good exercise to really trim the fat and be like, all right, these are the things that are driving performance now. Here's the things driving performance in the future. Everything else can go.

[Cody]

You're also in a, you're, you're in a good position and you guys are in a fortunate enough position where you're able to do those things right. Like I don't know that your tariff situation, but at least brand size and just the success you've had that I think you can play and think a, a long term game a little bit more versus like there's a lot of brands that are like, hey, like I can't even think like if I, what's going to happen next year? What content I'm going to invest in next year because like if I don't make these cuts, I'm not going to have that, you know.

[Krista]

Yeah, yeah, they don't have the, the, the benefit of even being able to think more than even two weeks out.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And we're, and we're similar because I think my first, my first thought is let's, let's cut, let's cut. You know, And I think again, I totally agree with you guys. If something is non incremental and it's just like bloated opex, like let's cut it, right? And I'd rather go a little bit more aggressive with it and like overcut. It's kind of like, do you guys remember when Harley was on and he was saying that they call it like chaos or something like that, right? Like where they cut all meetings and like you think you have to add things back but you really don't have to. And whatever gets added back was like really needed. Like that's kind of the approach I'm taking. So like we're about to cancel credit cards like because, because we, we've just had these like small expenses, like a Zoom account. Like, no one knows what the login is, right? I'm like, let's just cut them all. We'll see what gets bad act, you know, added back. We'll see what's not. So I think, like, right, if. Long story short, if there's like OPEX that you really don't think is core to the business or driving revenue, like, cut it and you'll find out. And I'd rather overcut, you know, but let's say, let's say somebody's listening and maybe a smaller brand, maybe whatever size brand, and they're, they're a marketer and they're getting pressure from finance to cut marketing spend. What advice would you have for them? How would you advise them to go handle that conversation? Or how have you guys had that conversation in this time?

[Krista]

I mean, I think it's, I think it's what Connor just said. I mean, I think anyone that's been at a brand for a while, like, they should have a, a pretty strong feel for the channels that they feel really confident about in terms of just overall performance that those channels drive for the business and the incrementality of those channels. And I think any, any situation where you're like right now, any, any situation where you don't have the data to, to show that or you have this like, gut feel that's like, I just feel unsure. I think your defaul to. To cut that. Whereas for us, it's like, I know Facebook's very incremental for us now the argument is like, at what spend point is it not? But when we're bringing total spend down, which means Facebook's coming down, I'm like, I have no doubt in my mind that that is driving huge impacts on our business. So for me, that's easy to not cut other channels. Like, I'll say it, the app Loven, like, I have a lot of mixed signals from that channel. I have like house readouts that don't look good. I have MT data that looks good. That is going to be a lot easier for me to cut right now compared to a meta. Maybe that could change, right? Maybe I get some data on app lover in the future that like, wow, okay, this has changed how I'm thinking about this and, and I would not do that. But I think that's, that's the approach you got to take right now.

[Connor]

Yeah, I, I would agree with that. I really like the, the chaos monkey analogy of what Harley said. Yeah, it's really good. But what, what I will say is one thing I said internally, when we were thinking about, like, where do we want to invest less or where do we want to make cuts was we were actually thinking about it. It's almost like you want to unleash the chaos monkey on only certain parts of the business because if you don't do that strategically, just the ones that.

[Cody]

Are not under your control.

[Connor]

Yeah, exactly. Go do that over there. But no, really, I mean, I'm making the exact same point that I did earlier, and I think it's a really obvious one. But, like, there is an 8020 of, of any business, and if you unleash a chaos monkey unknowingly on the 20% of your business, driving 80% of the results, the, the risk reward on that is terrible. Like, even, even you'll find out, though.

[Cody]

You'll find out quickly. If it's really that important.

[Connor]

Yes. Okay. But if you're, well, it just comes down to, like, it depends on what kind of cuts you're making. If you're talking about if you don't have a lot of inventory. So I talked about Ridge wanting to maintain volume. If you don't have a lot of inventory, you want to order less because it's going to come in at, you know, twice the cogs it otherwise would, then you should be thinking about reducing ad spend, running super efficiently, and stretching out the inventory that you have on hand. In which case you could say, today the 8020 of my business is spending money on paid social ads. But I'm willing to unleash the chaos Monkey on that 20% because, because that is, from an inventory perspective, what's best for my business right now. And you'll get perfect clarity on, like, was it the 8020 or is it actually more like something different, a 2040 or something? So I will say that. But the, the, the flip side of it, for a brand like ours wanting to maintain volume, where it's like, oh, if we cut media, buying contractors or something that are like, really important in the deployment of ad dollars, at least strategically, then all of a sudden you mess up a, a month or two. And that was terrible. It's like, okay, yeah, you saved 10k on contractor costs and you ended up misspending a quarter million dollars. It's like, that's really, really stupid. I'd rather not even broach that in the short term. That would be, my point is like unleashing the chaos monkey in the, in, in what you expect to be the lower leverage parts of the business.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I, I, I totally agree with that and definitely starting there.

[Danny]

We have zero customer support ticket backlog right now, which is awesome. And it's all because we switched to Rich Panel at the start of Q4. Q1 is usually when we're absolutely drowning customer support tickets from Black Friday and holiday season, but right now we have none. So was it risky switching our tech stack right before peak season? Sure, but I couldn't be happier with the decision. Since switching to Rich Panel, we've gone from overwhelmed to having an empty inbox, which is the place we want to be. Here are three of my favorite things with Rich Panel so far. Number one, if you know me, you know I love saving costs. So we save costs on the actual software by 50% right away. Much better deal. We also, I love it.

[Cody]

The features.

[Danny]

We have better features, better support. I see our team going back and forth with Rich Panel. Even the CEO Amit is in there all the time giving our team support, building out new features for us. Immediate impact. The analytics are great as the, you know, the automations are amazing. The AI social media moderator as well, you name it. There's just been so many features that have we've been able to add on to either reduce our tickets or increase our efficiency, which is the name of the game. Second thing is we've actually had 1.26 million in revenue generated from our CX team in the last four months, literally turning CX from a cost center to a profit center. And third is getting early access to all their new features that are being released like updated analytics, dashboard, a bunch of AI stuff, AI social Media Manager, you name it. It's been super helpful for us. You probably have a backlog of meta ad comments if you're one of the operators and spending heavily. And that's where I love the AI Social Media Manager. You're able to set everything up, automate it. It's able to learn from your best agents, your best replies. People think it's, it's a human, it's amazing and it's allowing us just to get back to everybody, offer a better customer experience, answer questions to get our ads performing better. So I love it. If you want to join the 2000 plus, 7, 8 and 9 figure brands that switch to Rich Panel to save money, save time and keep your customer service team happy, I highly recommend it. We switched at a really important time and they came through for us. So if you want to slash your customer support expenses by at least 30% overnight while reducing tickets, go to richpanel.com/demo to book a call and learn more. That's rich panel.com/demo.

[Cody]

Well, one thing I think about like when it comes to like incrementality, media spend, so, so actually first, just in general for me, having a lower opex I think really helps because I feel like to cover a higher opex, you need more contribution and you need, you know, it feels like we have to grow to cover that. It is not even like the numbers thing, but just like psychologically I feel better about not needing to grow and not needing to force growth if our OPEX is lower. And so like that's one thing that has helped me, I think, is getting that as low as possible, shifting things to a little bit more variable so we don't have to push into it. Because otherwise I, I, I, I feel this temptation to like, need to overspend, to try to like force growth when it's not there. And like you're probably going to left end up with less contribution there. So just, even just like psychologically optimizing for that, you know, feels, feels a lot better. So that's where I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm on the side of cup. Again, that's opex. That's not things that we think are like incremental. And then when it comes to like media spend and, and incrementality, totally agree. Like, you don't want to cut it. You don't want to cut upper funnel. Like, yeah, there are a lot of things that you could cut and you might not see a difference today. Like, right, like Reach campaigns, tv. You might not see it, but it's going to hurt you in a few months. But two things I think you should always be testing incrementality. You should double down on channels that you're not totally sure of. I've been thinking about leverage a lot as well because like we had a MMM readout and it was like, hey, you should probably be spending on TikTok and you should probably be spending on Applovin. But like the amounts were like $2,000 a day. And I'm like, our team is extra lean right now. Like it's just not worth it to be spending a thousand dollars a day on TikTok, even if that thousand dollars a day is like our most incremental spend. So I think leverage, which I feel like I had Connor McDonald's, like, voice in my head, you know, all the time thinking about that. And then I think the other thing is like your marginal return curves are probably worse right now. Like, I think you should if you do have house tests and geolift tests, you should probably revalidate those because let's say you used to be able to spend $30,000 a day on a channel at a 1.5 IROS, you're probably spending $20,000 a day now at that same IROS. Like, I think the total levels have to come down. And so just to like, not assume that you can still spend the same amount at the same return, which means there probably is some fat, rather than thinking about like a, like a binary, like cut, spend or don't. Like, like we were overspending on meta and that top 15% was like wildly unprofitable. And I think that, like, that having that discipline if possible, like, that's probably where you should be cutting with your media spend. Like, don't cut total, right? Don't cut an entire channel if you think it's incremental. But like, there probably is a lot that you can save by finding, like, where. What's your limit on each channel, even if it is an incremental channel.

[Krista]

And almost erroring on the side of caution, right? Because I think, I think the point you're making is, okay, we can assume that, that, that the 15 we saw at 30, now we're seeing a 15 at 20 per day. But that assumption's coming from consumer confidence is really low. Like, really, really low. So that's where that assumption's coming off. So it's like, it's a very conservative bet that you're making, which I like. I think that's a good approach and I think you probably want to err on that side. And I don't know about you guys, but I have been having way more merchandising conversations with our demand planning team than I, than I care to have. I do not envy those, those folks working in demand planning right now. They have like the hardest job in the world right now. So everyone give your demand planning team a hug emoji tomorrow or a hug in the office. But so many conversations about, like, oh, we now cannot run this offer that we were planning to run, but now we have to push this one. And I don't know exactly what we can do for fourth of July, but, like, here's what I, I know we can do. Think we can do what we probably can't do. Like, there's been so many conversations like that which then ultimately leads into how we merchandise offers on site, which leads to how we merchandise offers in and marketing. And you just, you got to be nimble, right? Now I've been having a lot of thinking a lot about that.

[Cody]

No, my, my, my, my thought on like the, the retesting assumptions A like you should be doing it in general. It's one of the KN mentality testing gets. But like when you run a holdout in July at $10,000 of spend and, and you get it that Meta is this much incremental that tells you at that time period in July at $10,000 to spend how incremental Meta Meta was. That doesn't tell you how Meta is performing in January at $50,000 to spend. But I think sometimes people will take the IROs they got and be like that is our blanket IROs on the channel.

[Krista]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And I think if we ran a test again this time it's, it's like, it's like normally being able to bench 3:15 and then you go for like a run or you're like have three drinks and assuming you can bench three 315 again like the circumstances change, like the situation change. And I think just with the economy, even if you're doing it same spend level, my guess is everything is less efficient. So when I used to be able to spend again $50,000 a day on a channel and, and be profitable that whole way through, well now I maybe can only spend $40,000 a day on, on a channel and I, so I do think there, there are, there is some level where you actually can cut and you know, maybe not be as inc. Like maybe you cut some revenue but you don't lose any contribution margin. I just think it, I, I think it's a slippery slope and a nuanced conversation. I don't think people should like altogether cut marketing. And I 100 agree with you guys that like cut opex like mark, like don't cut the thing that's driving revenue. But there probably is some nuance in terms of how to like optimize your media to make it a little bit more efficient, especially during these times.

[Connor]

I think that's a great point. Yeah, I think that's a super good point. Let me, let me ask you guys a question. So we talked about how do you reprioritize within the organization and cut opex? We talked about like in the very short term, how might you optimize your marketing mix to be as efficient as possible? I think that's what most brands are doing currently. I've had a couple interesting conversations with like software providers recently and they said the conversations they have are like brands are not trying new stuff right now, which Makes total sense to me. We're not trying new stuff either. It's like let's, let's bunker down, let's get in the holding pattern, let's lock in what we know works and be as efficient as possible doing it. But then I was talking through like well what do we think that looks like three months from now? I don't think that's a strategy forever. And what is, what is a marketer's objectives or how might their strategies change three months in the future given this new paradigm of extremely high cogs. I have a couple thesis theses, I'd love your guys thoughts. One is I think we go from and this has happened to a lot of brands already but we go from like being able to drive volume no longer really being an option that you have to be as efficient as possible with, with very small growth. So how do you do that one? Do we see even more of a focus on something like cost caps like are there bidding strategies on meta to like reduce downside risk of max conversions and you're spending unprofitably. I wrote down here Cody what you said like actually moving towards a percentage of spending cost model with external partners so you're only paying for when you're seeing success. I could see that happening. And then I was thinking about like I'll say these last two quickly. I was thinking about like the random channels that I think can be very efficient and very low cost and somewhat reliable. So like I think about a Tap Joy. I don't know if you guys have ever spent money there mobile ad network. When we ran on it years ago it was you'd pay on a CPA basis. So it was like basically an affiliate platform and it would be behind like you know you could earn more diamonds in some weird mobile game if you like bought a Ridge wallet. It's not sexy ad inventory at all but it's but being a like a CPA model it's like extremely reliable. You'd prove out whether it's incremental or not or whatever. But like Tap Joy I think about Rocked or Rocket the owners of After Sell where it's like okay yeah that is probably a very predictable cost cat channel that you could go to. I go back to thinking about like a disco which it's been a long time since. I don't know if we've ever talked about disco but they kind of had their, their peak a couple years ago. But that's that post purchase recommendation software that's like you're basically exchanging impressions on other people's checkouts for impressions. You're providing them on your checkout. So it's like yeah, that is a no cost channel to like quote unquote acquire people. None of those are going to grow your business. But is it going to be able to acquire a handful of customers every single day at a really low cac? Do we see marketers focus more on those channels? Is question number one.

[Cody]

And then two, can I answer or.

[Connor]

Let me hit this last one just super quick. I could see brands finding other ways of generating profit. This was a, this was a thesis of mine like many years ago. We haven't reached it yet. But do we, do we see brands move into drop shipping like relationships with something like a Shopify collaboration? Do we see advertising options pop up and like rock kind of has some like that in their post purchase flow or like this was another thing a couple of years ago that never really picked up. But like email list swaps. Is Hexclad and Ridge going to do an email list swap? Because we'll be able to get $0 cacs if we each blast a million people. So those are my two ideas. What does marketing look like three or four months from now? And do we see brands are getting more creative with the way they're generating profit?

[Cody]

100%? I think yes. If we don't know how long this is going on, you, you can't be in this position forever. And that, that definitely agreed. And I think yeah, while people aren't doing new things now, right. If this is how it goes on for 12 months, like do we not do any new things? You know, so I, I think one thing that we're thinking about is like yeah, again what is core to our strategy? You can't do everything new. But like what are the two to three areas of your business that are the priority and like how do you not cut those? That's, that's the 80, 20 rule you guys are talking about on the, on the second question. Yeah, I think necessity is the mother of invention. I think you'll see a lot of those things and, and marketers will get scrappy and, and we'll, you know, continue to do it. Shared mailers, you know, shared direct mail, like all that kind of stuff. Especially like you'll see it from brands who like probably thought they were above it and was like oh that, that's, you know, that's, that's beneath us. Like we're too much of a brand to do that. You'll see a lot more of that. I Got hit up by somebody. I don't even remember the name of it, but it was essentially shared whitelisting. And so it was almost like a virtual bundle where it's like shared whitelisting. I think it would become as like a partnership ad. Let's say it was between like Jones Road and Hexclad and then it would go to a lander that has almost like a virtual bundle.

[Connor]

Right.

[Cody]

And so you're just splitting the CAC in half and like, no idea if that works or is a good idea. But I think you'll see a lot of like really crafty, creative things like that.

[Krista]

So I wanna, I wanna, I agree with you. I think I, I think generally these pay per performance models or like swap models become way more prevalent. Anything that's optimizing for just efficiency, manual bids. I wanna ask you guys a question on who, who wins in, in this scenario. So a lot of brands are reforecasting. They're, they are trying to optimize for a bottom line percentage and making that as high as possible to offset lost in cogs. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. Brands are spending less. If brands are spending less, there's less ad dollars in the auction. If there's less ad dollars in the auction, CPMs drop. Cool. So CPMs, we're seeing it in our data like we're paying less to reach people, which is awesome. I love that. Who really like, who has, who is like the most uniquely positioned to arbitrage that. Like, it's not a bootstrapped brand obviously where like cash flow is super, super important. Is it like, is Target gonna come in and just like really win? Because all of a sudden they're paying 5 to 15 less to reach a thousand people. Is, is that teemu. Are they going to come back in and win? Like, who's gonna really be able to arbitrage that, that decreased cost to get eyeballs in, in these paid media channels?

[Cody]

Well, I think it's, I think it depends why they went down. I think if it's just many advertisers pulling out of the auction just due to, you know, less demand, my guess is conversion rates have decreased by the same amount or more.

[Krista]

Yeah, right.

[Cody]

So any, it's like a case where low CPMs is not necessarily a great thing. It means that there's less demand because there's less, there's less demand for those eyeballs because. Because those eyeballs aren't worth as much. So that would be my guess. So you're not going to see like a reduction in CPAs. I hope I'm wrong. The one area where maybe that's a little different is like if like Timo or Shein has like pulled out of the auction because of tariffs, that's because they're they were spending so much and their business model is now unsustainable. That that's not the decrease in CPMs is not necessarily reflective of like overall consumer confidence and conversion rate and then there might be like a net positive there.

[Krista]

Yeah, yeah.

[Cody]

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[Krista]

I think, I think the premium brands win in this, in this situation. I think like fellow has this, fellow has this, this espresso series one on pre order right now they're selling it for $1200. I don't think fellows customer that buys this gives a if there's a recession or not. I think they're so strapped with cash that they're buying this twelve hundred dollar special machine anyways. And that fellow now is just going to be like oh we're even way better off now. Like we can just spend the same amount and like reach, reach more people or spend a little less and reach more people. I'm like I, you know I don't know where we're will fall in the mix and we're definitely on the premium end of. We're not the most premium cookware there is but we are certainly in the top 85th percentile I'd say. So I don't really know where we'll shake but I think like some like of these ultra premium brands that have consumers making where household incomes like really really high. I just don't know if the, if the current consumer confidence applies to them as much as it applies to everyone else.

[Cody]

I have like two ways to look at it. There's a really good book written by Dan Kennedy who's like a direct response OG called Marketing to the Affluent and like he shares some numbers in it on like why you should market to the affluent and you know shared some like 08 like you know stuff like numbers. But if like majority of people are paycheck to paycheck and if you're marketing to somebody like that who might have a certain amount, you know of disposable income and it drops by 10% like that's pretty much like all of their potential spending power. But if you know an affluent person, somebody who's making you know high 67 figures a year, you know like with, with a good amount of cash in the bank like their spending power drops 10% like they still have a very good amount of disposable income. So I do think that there are a lot of advantages to being positioned in that kind of premium way. I know like lower end stores started feeling this a little bit more and then kind of crept up to you know, mainstream. The one thing I, the, the other thing I would say is especially now that there's some market correction and like The S&P 500 is down and asset prices are going down maybe by Design maybe by not that part does hurt the people that have assets, which is more affluent people. So I think whether that's real or not, I think there's multiple ways to look at it and I don't, I don't know what is true, but I think there could be a few ways.

[Danny]

To look at it.

[Connor]

Yeah. I'll add a couple more things. I mean, one, luxury brands tend to outperform during market downturns because their buyers are less affected. So I think your spot. I think you're right directionally, Connor, you have to worry how many of the hexclad customers are truly that person. I feel like one. Yeah. You know what I mean. You guys are obviously fantastic cookware, pretty expensive, but you're not like Gucci, right?

[Krista]

No, exactly. That's what I was going to ask. Like who is the. Who is like the poster child brand that wins in this situation that we're like describing right now? I don't, I don't actually think fellow might not be the best example. I was just using that because they have this like insanely expensive espresso machine.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I'm not quite sure. I don't think it's. Ridge, for what it's worth, like I've actually said, I think we are very much at the whims of. Of consumer confidence, particularly with the wallet. And we are at like, I would not call it luxury price points, but like we are the. We are the most expensive wallet the vast majority of our customers have ever bought, spending a hundred dollars to $150. I think whether it was when people were getting stimulus checks during the recession, we felt it very positively when people were. When people start to feel squeezed in their finances, when gas prices were Super High in 2022. Right now when there's a lot of uncertainty, we feel it first almost. I think we're like a great kind of bellwether for the market. I always say. Then I say it somewhat jokingly, but like as soon as you're. You're concerned about your finances, one of the first things you don't buy is of the $150 minimalist wallet. It's like that is not an essential purchase if you are worried about putting gas in your car, food on the table. So I don't think we are. I don't think we are in the bucket of luxury that will benefit from a market downTurn and lower CPMs and have the ability to scale from that perspective. What we do have is we have a lot of room. We've been a very premium price product for a long time. We have a lot of room to go down market when we need to. So like in April we, and we should have said this at the very beginning in terms of like again it depends on what your inventory and cash position is. For us we launched a earlier promo than we otherwise would. We had a few things on markdown that we didn't last year it led to a ton of growth. So it's like we have that, that lever available to us because of the price point we've held ourselves at for years. A couple of things that I would say if you were in the position to absorb costs when your competitors aren't, you can actually become more price competitive. So for us a great example is with luggage where we have this kind of like cornerstone cash printing wallet business. We can be if we would like really aggressive with luggage. While the aways and monos and Julys are out like facing higher cogs and their entire business is affected by those higher cogs. We can kind of have the cloud cover of a profitable wallet business and take market share with within travel by remaining the same price or going lower prices or things like that. So there are a couple other examples outside of just luxury where like depending on the economics of your products and the state of your business, you have tools available to, to you to actually be more aggressive. But the last thing that I would say there is in the case of luggage, the market will probably shrink. The amount of people spending $300 on luggage will probably shrink. So we might be getting a, a larger, theoretically a larger slice of what is a smaller piece.

[Cody]

Yeah, no, I think that's a good point. That was one question I was going to ask. Like are you guys leaning into value messaging more? Like we, we, we certainly are. And what I find is like, and we're, we're probably similar to you guys. Like we're not luxury but we're, we're, you know, a little bit above the average. Even when we have like a $90 kit, we are leaning into the savings that you know, you get compared to buying an msrp. And it's a, it's one of those things where like people justify, you know, buy with emotion, justify with logic. Like even though they're still spending 90 bucks because you can anchor it to what it would normally cost. Like we're finding that to work a lot better. People are sorting on collection pages low to high. So like we are in terms of ads and landing pages, like we are going much more into like the Value messaging. Are you guys testing any more of that or leaning into it more than you normally do?

[Connor]

Quick question. You said people on collections pages are sorting low to high. Is that a metric you look at?

[Cody]

We were just doing some heat map research for something else and we noticed it and so it's just one of those, you know, data points. One of those signs.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Cody]

It's like behavior is a little different in this period.

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah, we're totally, we're totally leaning into value messaging as one of the reasons we go on promo on, on a few more items in the month of April where it's like that's what people are looking for right now. That's what we can give them. We can drive a ton of incremental value if we're able to offer those, those savings. That lower price point.

[Cody]

Yeah, makes sense.

[Krista]

We were already headed down that path in terms of like creative production roadmap. I've talked about this plug. We're, we're trying to make more YouTube ads and like making ads for YouTube first and that naturally has a just more high production value, more story arc, more brand forward which I think, you know, it's a lot less doctor, a lot more brand which I think brand generally is more value versus Dr. Which just like value proppy but like not necessarily feeling value versus like explaining value props. I guess kind of a weird way to think about it or like maybe the words are just too similar. But yeah, we were kind of already trending that way.

[Cody]

So you're trying to. Sorry, I should have used a different word. I meant like savings. Almost like we're leaning into the savings that you get where you're almost going the other way and trying to lean into like quality and like value a little bit higher. Which is, which is a little different.

[Krista]

Yeah but I mean dude, our website so savings oriented always has been. Right. Like we are just such a big bundle company. I mean our most popular product by volume order volume is a 12 piece set. And with us being a sets bundles company, we are always positioning our set prices versus our total value price. Right. And that's just evergreen strategy. So. And you'll notice that across like our category and just home goods in general. So we didn't really have to change.

[Connor]

Much there, you know, on the idea of bundling. So the wall of business has historically not been a great category for bundling. We do decent. What's really good is with travel so like carry ons and check ins just get bought together at an extremely high rate and then some of the bags getting attached to that. But like as an example of one, how do we, how do we focus on the savings and then two, how do we do that as cost effectively as possible or like just how are we measuring unit economics? I'll give it a really like in the weeds example of something we did in the month of April to kind of put ourselves in the position to make the most of the state of the business. We were using Shopify bundles to set up our like long haul kits which are the carry on and the check in together. We use intelligence for price testing but intelligence cannot recognize Shopify bundles just because the way that it's built out in Shopify you can't price test Shopify bundles. So we are actually considering that we are going to need to be more cost conscious in travel specifically. We moved all of our Shopify bundle products to kit SKUs. So again this is like super in the weeds specifically so that we can price test bundles and make sure that like what is the difference between it being at 545 versus 595 so that we just have more tools available to us to identify like what is the exact best offer for customers and where we are making the most dollars. So anyway, yeah, I'm with Connor and both you guys, I'm talking about savings. We're actually kind of doubling down there and like resetting up how we build the Shopify store so that we can really make sure we're doing that as effectively as we can.

[Cody]

Makes sense.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And, and I didn't mean to imply that like either either was right or wrong. I think it maybe depends on the brand and I think that's a really interesting test. Like we're leaning a little bit more into the more the saving stuff because we haven't done it as much. But I was thinking about it, I was like, you know, this is not cheap ad. Like would that work in this period? Because maybe it is, it is value. Like maybe you don't have to sell on a discount. It obviously helps. But you just then have to persuade people so much more than normal like why they should part with, with the little money they have for your thing and if it lasts long, like I think you guys both do a really good job of leading into like the durability of your products and like that quality angle.

[Connor]

Did you guys, did either of you guys run any tariff notice ads?

[Krista]

We haven't, we launched them. I don't have the data back on them yet, but we did run some statics, we ran some, some videos as well. And they went live like this week in creative testing.

[Connor]

Cool. Yeah, I think it'll crush. They've been, they've been ripping for us for like probably three and a half weeks now. We had two, we had one. The first one I, I didn't like as much. Tariff notice. Like, you know, everybody's talking about prices. We're on sale right now, we're lowering prices, something like that. It's a very text heavy ad. It looks a lot like this is not cheap sort of, sort of deal. What we rolled out last week was, which I liked a little bit more because the first version of the ad really made it seem as if we were affected by tariffs. The version last week was tariff update, no price hikes. And it's like, hey, you're gonna hear about a bunch of people raising prices. We're lucky not to be affected by tariffs currently. We're, we're lowering prices, something like that. Really, really strong messaging is crushed in static ads. We've been sending plain text emails from the founder. It's just like a, kind of a great message. Particularly the one from last week I think has like a positive, it has positive connotations to it. We're lucky that our business is not affected by tariffs. We're like passing along savings to you is really, really strong. So anyway, it' another thing we've done in the very short term. I don't think we'll run those forever. But what made me think of it is what you're talking about, Cody. Different messaging resonating differently with consumers at different times. Obviously I remember like really learning that lesson at the beginning of COVID where all of a sudden people had way different priorities in terms of why they were buying products. She's like aggressively price test or aggressively message testing what is and isn't working really got us to some early ones with COVID We could probably be doing that better right now. But the best example is some of that tariff messaging.

[Cody]

For sure. No, I think that's a great point. Yeah. I think the, the just like overall zeitgeist consumer behavior has changed so much that like you, you do have to. I think David Herman talks about this a lot. But like if, you know, if you were just running what, running what you're running like a year ago or two years ago, like there's no chance like you've got to be really relevant to like what's going on in people's minds right now.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Krista]

And, and I, I appreciate you bringing up the pricing and specific up in the Context of price testing, Connor, because I'm hearing a lot of people to say, oh, just raise your prices. I'll just raise your prices. I'll just raise your prices. And guys, be careful about just raising your prices. You might raise your prices and be hurting yourself more than you're helping yourself. Because if you're driving a worse revenue per user, you are, you might want to, you might think about lowering your prices. You might want to go from 100 to $75 and because if that RPU goes up then you are more profitable maximizing revenue and that's a better situation for you. So I've just been hearing a lot of like eyes closed. Oh, we'll just raise the prices. Like just test those price, those price increases.

[Connor]

All I ask, we talk about, we talk about measuring incrementality of ad channels all the time. But like measuring the incrementality of price changes is pretty straightforward and awesome to do because yeah, I like your point Connor. Especially with consumer confidence in the gutter. It's like, yeah, that that 5 or $10 price increase might lead to a 30% decrease in conversion rate. You've totally screwed yourself over. So yeah, brands should be hyper conscious.

[Krista]

Dude. I'm looking at these, these tariff statics right now and this one has like not spent that much. I mean $4,500 which is not, you know, not a ton for our account. It has. I don't know what the sentiment is but I'm just looking at the previous ton of comments, thousand comments, 600 likes. I'm like holy people are. I'm about to click in here and see what people are saying because I'm, I don't think it's any good.

[Connor]

Our experience was we didn't feel it was like negative towards tariffs, but it didn't feel negative towards Ridge. It was almost like just discourse was happening in the comments. So we let him run. But yeah, it'll be, it'll be probably be a conversation internally for you guys.

[Krista]

Yeah, this is interesting. There's a lot of like you should bring your materials to America. Interesting.

[E]

So northbeam just released this new attribution model called Clicks and views enhanced and I am really excited about it. I think it is really, really game changing for brands measuring the performance of view heavy channels like TikTok. So I want to explain first what is the difference between this new model of attribution and North Beam's other models of attribution? North theme's other models of attribution are probabilistic and they're probabilistic because they're doing machine learning to make their best guess about where purchases, where revenue is coming from. What's different about this Clicks and enhanced views is that because they're working directly with the platform, it's now deterministic. They're actually able to connect a real impression to a real purchase. Which just means that ultimately this data is, is real data. It's not modeled data that has really serious implications. What it means is that now instead of only getting a 24 hour look on view based attribution, you now get just as long of windows that you're getting on clickspace. So now if you go into, if you go to clicks and views, you'll notice that no matter how long you extend the clickbase window in north beam, that view based always stays at one day. When you now go into the clicks and enhance views, you'll notice that whatever time window you're selecting is for views and clicks. So now in TikTok you can actually measure a conversion 30, 60, 90 days from that impression. Which again is really important for brands that have a lot of top of funnel happening through videos and really important for brands that have longer consideration periods or that conversion often is not going to happen within that first 24 hours of seeing that video. I was just looking at this last night. I was simply selecting the same period of time and clicking back and forth between the 90 day click one day view and the new enhanced clicks and views window that has 90 day click 90 day view. And the amount of attribution in ROAS increase and revenue increase that I saw was, was really, really insightful and I can't emphasize enough how important this is for channels that, that don't garner a click as much as a Facebook or Instagram ad or Google Ad and are.

[Krista]

A lot more video view heavy like TikTok.

[E]

So right now the Clicks and views enhanced only covers TikTok and it's still in beta. But this attribution model is rolling out to other platforms very soon. If you want to check out the incredible results of the TikTok beta and just get more information on it in General, check out NorthBeam's landing page at NorthBeam IO forward slash clicks and views enhanced.

[Cody]

Connor, you mentioned it with like luggage pricing. You made a really good point. Do you guys think about like I think a lot of what we're talking about is on the defensive. Like we're talking about some stuff on the offensive like hey let's continue to spend. We're talking about cutting costs and and, and everything. Are there areas where you're trying to be aggressive and are you thinking about here's how we can gain market share, either of you guys? Are you like, hey, these are things that like we're in a good position to do. We know our competitors are going to be cutting back on expansion and growth things so we know we can like gain market share even if maybe it's going to be investment now and it's not going to pay off. You know, right now we think we'll be coming out of this situation in a better spot because we, we did these.

[Krista]

I. Tell me, tell me what your guys thoughts are on this, this philosophy. I don't know if it's sound or not, but you know, at least our US business, like we're not in this like hockey stick growth stage anymore, which you know is fine. We knew that was not going to be the case. But you know, we're not, we're not like doubling the business every year. And I think that there's other people in our DTC space that they're kind of where we're at, where we were at like in 2023-24, 22 to 23, where maybe they are actually doubling the business because they're just like in that stage of growth. Coming from a little bit of a lower revenue number. I think it's maybe, maybe that's worse to be doing that now with the tariffs than it is to be like it's probably harder to be trying to grow 100% year on year with the increased cost of goods versus starting from a, you know, a higher denominator and trying to grow in just a lower percentage, whatever. 10, 15, 20, 30. I think that this is maybe, it's maybe advantageous that we like we're doing that hockey stick growth before this hit compared to other brands that might be in that like big triple digit or high stick, double digit percent growth.

[Connor]

My, my gut reaction to that is yet 100% better to have done your hockey stick growth with lower tariffs for sure. Yeah. But I think a lot of the brands that are growing super fast right now and you know, you look, it's all over Twitter or whatever. Like you see all the creatine brands, you see grooms crushing it, doing like gummy supplements, things like that. I don't think those categories have the luxury of growing slower. Like if I'm them, I'm like, you almost have to go like scorched earth. I don't think it gets easier over time. Even if costs come down there's going to be 12 new gummy supplements next year that you're going to be competing with. So it's almost better to just, yeah, just blanket meta and acquire customers that way. It reminds me a little bit of how hims launched, if you guys remember. Hims launched incredibly unprofitably. But they talked about like just securing ad channels. They were like, we have saturated meta. Like that is our ad channel now if you need to buy hair loss or ed pills sales, like we have hit you. And they were like checking it off and then they were like moving on to other ad platforms. And I imagine like some of the, the super high growth health stuff we're seeing will want to be approaching it more like that despite, despite the higher cogs and.

[Cody]

Yeah, no, and this is probably the time like Connor said, the CPM's down. You know, who knows what CPAs look like? But it's probably a time because some of those competitors are not going to be in a position to, to do that.

[Connor]

I was gonna, I was gonna say that also just quickly in terms of Cody, you just asked this question. Where are we being aggressive? I mean we haven't pivoted strategies completely to say like, hey, we're taking wedding band market market share, hey, we're going to take luggage market share. If we were to do that, we'd be looking to capitalize on that in the short term. But I could see other brands saying, hey, CPMs are down 30, 40%. We're actually going to take a really long term view here and like we're gonna, we're gonna take this opportunity and maybe this is what some high growth health brand is thinking is like we're going to take advantage of these low CPMs, low consumer sentiment, just to grow brand awareness. And then we're going to look at this on like a 18, 18 month time horizon or whatever.

[Cody]

I am thinking about that at least. Like the two questions about asking myself. Yeah is like how do we want to be positioned when we come out of this? Because we will get out of this at some point. You know, like what can we do to position ourselves to be set up, set up for that. And like, like usually I think with the GC brand like ours, like growth is the goal and growth is success. And like if growth is off the table, if beauty market is flat, like I'm also not going to just sit on my ass for a year. Like what does getting better at our company look like? Usually it's just like so synonymous with growth. But like there are things that we can do to make our company better that even if it means we don't grow. And like, I think that's where I'm trying to figure out is, is, is what is that?

[Krista]

You know, that's, that's the, that's a, that's $10 million question.

[Cody]

Fucking billion dollar question. Yeah. One area where I think, and we're not going crazy with it, but retail like is a really good one or there's a few stores we're looking at and like we're going to potentially take over some leases and so you get a pretty good deal on that and you know, you never know if it's true or not. But the brokers are saying that the brands are moving out because of tariffs. So like that I think that's a perfect example where you know, also because that's a long term term play, it's not like, like CPMs being down today don't really help you that much tomorrow. If we sign a five year lease on you know, a 50 off rent or whatever it is, like, like maybe for two years we're not as profitable in that location but then the next three years we're at like a much cheaper rent. So totally it. Retail is a little bit of a longer one and we're definitely leaning into there more because at first I was like ah, should we, should we cut back? We're not going to be as profitable, we're not going to have, you know, as much to invest in stores. And I'm like no, like this needs to be a longer term focus and like we should probably like pounce a little bit there more.

[Connor]

I agree. And you know, I don't even think that's like it could be a matter of looking at it longer term. It's also just like a less liquid market, right? Like retail. If someone's pulling out, there's only so many brands like looking for retail space. Like there's just the opportunity to find savings there. And linear TV is kind of like that too where it's like I wouldn't be at all surprised. You're gonna see, you're gonna see really large advertisers not have inventory, need to pull budgets, then you're gonna have these fire sales on like cnn, you know, prime time spots or whatever. So like that's another one that's incredibly short term. But it's an example of I think linear TV buying is a less efficient market than something like Meta. Therefore you might have some opportunities available to get like really discounted rates on, on Some premium inventory for sure.

[Cody]

Anything else, Anything else you guys want to say? Chat through ask. What, what do we miss?

[Krista]

I just want more Chat GPT sessions, baby.

[Connor]

More, more.

[Krista]

Let's get, let's get those, I want those Chat GPT. I want that channel to grow.

[Connor]

You know I, I talked to someone recently and they, what they were saying was that this is a little ChatGPT alpha for those who have stuck around for 75 minutes. I haven't done it myself but the incredibly reputable source that Chat GPT recommendations are based off of of articles online and you can see like the cited sources and, and those cited sources are from what I understand quite a bit different than like the top ranking organic articles. Right? So it's like so if you were to try to go to the top ranked article for best men's wallet and say hey can you put Ridge wallet number one? That would cost quite a bit because they know that's super valuable. They're ranking number one on Google for men's wallet or whatever. But ChatGPT doesn't use the highest ranking sources so you can go find those it might be on. They might be the 10th spot or the third page or whatever. Talk to those people and they don't understand how valuable their article is because it's not ranking on Google and they don't know it's getting cited in ChatGPT. So you can kind of game Chat GPT results by finding those like longer tale of articles that it's citing.

[Krista]

Dang. This, this, that's deep.

[Cody]

Dude needs to spin up like a AI. I don't even know what you call it. Well, SEO for aib. He's spin up an agency.

[Connor]

Oh you do? That's a great. Yeah, yeah. There's a great, great services business. 10k a month.

[Krista]

No. Well 75k per month in a tariff environment.

[Connor]

True.

[Krista]

I just looked up I want premium cookware that sears well and cleans up easy. What should I be looking at? First brand that showed up was all clad. Second was demeyere. Third was hexclad.

[Connor]

And then can you see the cited articles?

[Krista]

This one it actually didn't show me the cited articles which I thought was weird. I don't know what, what, what my issue is.

[Cody]

It should, yeah, you might have to dig or like hit expand like there's a ways to expand it but it should a little bit.

[Krista]

What are the cited articles? Come on chat. Oh, interesting. The response I gave is based on aggregated product knowledge and performance reviews from reliable frequently cited cookware sources. But I did cite specific articles directly in the message.

[Connor]

All right, well, it for sure happens sometimes.

[Cody]

Do you think they'll monetize? Like, do you think Chat GBT will move to an affiliate model?

[Krista]

Dude, I hope not. I hope we can just like not dirty something on the Internet with ads. Like, I mean, I want it to from like, I want to leverage it, but just from like a holistic health of the world and the Internet standpoint, I'm like, can we keep one thing pure and just like only information?

[Connor]

No way.

[Krista]

No way.

[Cody]

Way too.

[Danny]

That's a stupid idea.

[Krista]

I'm not going to show up for the next episode. Connor, you're back.

[Cody]

All right, that was a fun one as always. Thanks so much to our sponsors Motion Prescient Rich panel after Cell North Beam, this has been episode 58 all about what to do how to market right now in this environment we're in. If you like this, please share it with a friend. Subscribe on YouTube. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast and share it, please.