E060: Go-To-Market Strategy: How 9-Figure Brands Plan, Execute, and Post-Mortem Product Launches

Summary

Podcast Summary: Marketing Operators Episode: E060: Go-To-Market Strategy: How 9-Figure Brands Plan, Execute, and Post-Mortem Product Launches
Release Date: May 20, 2025
Host/Authors: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker

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Introduction

In Episode 60 of Marketing Operators, hosts Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, and Cody Plofker delve deep into the intricacies of go-to-market (GTM) strategies used by nine-figure brands. The episode explores the planning, execution, and post-launch analysis of product launches, offering listeners valuable insights into effective marketing operations.

Go-To-Market Strategy Defined

The conversation kicks off with a discussion on how different companies define and approach GTM strategies. Cody initiates the dialogue by highlighting the varying terminologies used across organizations.

Cody (05:53):
"At John's Road Beauty, we don't say go to market; we probably just say like product launch strategy, product launch campaign."

Sam adds that their process begins with a product calendar followed by strategic planning, emphasizing the importance of integrating product marketing early in the development process.

Sam (06:15):
"Getting marketing more involved in the product process from earlier stages has a lot of benefits. It can influence your GTM strategy and how you position the product."

The Role of Product Marketing

A significant portion of the episode focuses on the distinction between brand marketing and product marketing. Sam discusses the potential of establishing a dedicated product marketing function to bridge gaps between brand and product teams.

Sam (09:08):
"A product marketing person would have a better awareness of the product and the competitive landscape, something a brand marketer might not fully grasp."

Cody and Sam explore the responsibilities of product marketing, emphasizing the need for clear communication and cohesive messaging across all channels.

Workflow and Processes

The hosts compare their respective companies' workflows, detailing the steps from product inception to launch. Connor shares his company's two-step process involving "Product Prequel" and "Go To Market," which includes granular tasks like packaging design and SKU creation.

Connor (13:50):
"At our company, everything happens at a granular level. If we're launching a new color for a wallet, pen, and knife, the product prequel handles each SKU individually before aggregating them into a collective campaign."

Cody outlines his approach using ClickUp, emphasizing the importance of tiered launches (Tier 1 to Tier 4) based on the scope and commercial viability of each product.

Cody (14:34):
"Tier one campaigns require extensive preparation, with step one being the marketing summary delivered nine weeks before launch."

Project Management Operations (PMO)

Both teams stress the critical role of Project Management Operations (PMO) in ensuring seamless campaign execution. The conversation highlights how centralized PMO teams help manage cross-departmental tasks, maintain deadlines, and allow marketers to focus on strategic initiatives rather than logistical hurdles.

Connor (34:44):
"Having a solid PMO team has been one of the most important things we've done for our cross-functional campaigns. It lets marketers do what they do best without getting bogged down in project management tasks."

Sam echoes this sentiment, detailing how their PMO lead collaborates closely with teams to identify and resolve blockers efficiently.

Sam (44:55):
"Our PMO lead has built a system that streamlines the process, making sure all necessary tasks are accounted for and deadlines are met."

Post-Launch Post-Mortems

The importance of conducting post-launch analyses is another key topic. The hosts discuss how post-mortems help identify successes, areas for improvement, and actionable insights for future campaigns.

Cody (39:05):
"Our postmortems have been invaluable. For instance, after a challenging Q2, we identified underperformance in specific demographics on Meta and adjusted our strategies accordingly."

Sam shares his approach to post-mortems, incorporating both quantitative data and qualitative feedback to glean comprehensive insights.

Sam (40:01):
"We document wins, losses, and opportunities, referencing specific data points and customer feedback to inform our future strategies."

Leveraging Technology and Tools

The episode delves into the use of various tools to enhance GTM strategies. Both teams utilize platforms like ClickUp and Figma to organize their workflows, ensuring all stakeholders have access to up-to-date information.

Cody (48:20):
"Our Go To Market board in ClickUp serves as a single source of truth, linking all necessary documents and assets for any launch."

Sam (58:57):
"Having a centralized design toolkit has drastically improved our brand consistency across all channels, making collaboration with agencies seamless."

The Impact of AI on Marketing Operations

AI's role in automating and streamlining marketing tasks is a recurring theme. The hosts discuss how AI tools facilitate rapid copywriting, asset generation, and efficient campaign management.

Cody (79:05):
"I use AI to transform our marketing summaries into comprehensive copywriting documents in about 40 minutes, eliminating weeks of manual work."

Sam (73:06):
"By inputting our product briefs into AI tools, we can quickly generate detailed creative briefs and strategies, enhancing our efficiency and consistency."

Connor adds that AI not only speeds up processes but also ensures messaging cohesion across different channels.

Connor (72:24):
"With AI, we can generate multiple assets from a single image, maintaining a consistent visual and messaging strategy across all platforms."

Design Toolkits and Systems

Both teams emphasize the significance of design toolkits in maintaining brand consistency. These toolkits include standardized elements like color palettes, typography, and visual styles that designers can easily reference and implement.

Connor (76:24):
"Our design toolkit includes elements like our brand colors, headline lockups, and call-out badges, ensuring everything created aligns with our brand identity."

Sam (80:54):
"Developing a design system has allowed our designers to produce crisper, more on-brand visuals, especially when collaborating with external agencies."

Continuous Improvement and Feedback Loops

The discussion highlights the necessity of continuous improvement through regular feedback loops. By iterating on past campaigns and integrating new learnings, marketers can refine their strategies for better outcomes.

Cody (82:29):
"We need to recreate our executive product summaries periodically to incorporate new insights, ensuring our strategies remain effective and up-to-date."

Connor (83:11):
"We conduct retrospectives to understand what worked and what didn’t, then audit our messaging and tactics to enhance future campaigns."

Future Topics and Closing Remarks

As the episode winds down, the hosts propose exploring topics like performance reporting and the internal information exchange among marketing teams in future episodes. They also emphasize the importance of effective communication and centralized information repositories.

Cody (85:58):
"A good future episode could focus on the information we constantly seek from each other to enhance our GTM strategies."

Sam (86:02):
"Our experience with performance reports has provided valuable insights that could benefit our listeners."

The episode concludes with a light-hearted exchange about outfit coordination and a nod to the importance of Project Management Operations in marketing success.

Notable Quotes

• Cody (05:53):
  "At John's Road Beauty, we don't say go to market; we probably just say like product launch strategy, product launch campaign."

• Sam (09:08):
  "A product marketing person would have a better awareness of the product and the competitive landscape, something a brand marketer might not fully grasp."

• Conflict about Team Structures and Tiers:

  Cody (14:34):
  "Tier one campaigns require extensive preparation, with step one being the marketing summary delivered nine weeks before launch."

  Sam (20:08):
  "We use tiers based on revenue and scope, but determining the exact criteria is still a work in progress."

• On the Importance of PMO:

  Connor (34:44):
  "Having a solid PMO team has been one of the most important things we've done for our cross-functional campaigns."

  Sam (44:55):
  "Our PMO lead has built a system that streamlines the process, making sure all necessary tasks are accounted for and deadlines are met."

• AI in Marketing:

  Cody (79:05):
  "I use AI to transform our marketing summaries into comprehensive copywriting documents in about 40 minutes, eliminating weeks of manual work."

  Connor (72:24):
  "With AI, we can generate multiple assets from a single image, maintaining a consistent visual and messaging strategy across all platforms."

• Design Toolkits:

  Sam (80:54):
  "Developing a design system has allowed our designers to produce crisper, more on-brand visuals, especially when collaborating with external agencies."

Conclusion

Episode 60 of Marketing Operators offers an in-depth exploration of GTM strategies, emphasizing the need for clear communication, robust project management, and the strategic integration of AI tools. Through shared experiences and practical examples, the hosts provide a comprehensive guide for marketers aiming to refine their product launch processes and achieve cohesive, successful campaigns.

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Sponsors Skipped: Motion, Rich Panel, Aftercell, Prescient, and North Beam advertisements were omitted from this summary as per the request.

Transcript

[Cody]

All right, we're back. Episode 60. Connor, you're calling in from someplace new. Where. What are the new digs?

[Connor]

Yeah, so the, the call box is the same, but we got, we're in the new hexcloud office right now. So I don't know if anyone doesn't know the, the evolution of hexcloud we have been fulfilling out of LA in the arts district for a really long time. So like when they got traction back in Covid, they moved in this new warehouse to do so and they kind of like forced their way into this like office space over there as well. No windows in the entire building. So it's all this just like no natural light. Just. It's a warehouse, it is in no way an office. So we, with a lot of pent up demand, finally moved into a new office in downtown la, which is a gorgeous new space. Definitely a space we're gonna be able to like fill up over time. It's the, the third floor of the Spotify building right across from Girl on the Goat and it's a it gorgeous new space. So yeah, morale with, with hexclad LA employees is quite high right now because we got this gorgeous new space to come into every day. So I'll definitely be out here more frequently now that there's, there's space for everyone and space for the remote employees to come visit.

[Cody]

And how much does this increase the chance you move from Denver to Los Angeles?

[Connor]

I still think the, the mountains are too far away, So I think 0% 0. I'd say no impact increases the chance a. A few percentage points, but small incremental lift.

[D]

Small incremental lift.

[Connor]

I also want to shout out like the boys are coordinated today.

[Cody]

Black T shirts for gang. Yeah, we look like we got like a boy band vibe going on.

[Connor]

I love it.

[Sam]

Who's, who's. Whose shirts are you guys wearing this?

[Connor]

Mine's Flint and Tinder from. From my favorite online men's curation brand, Huckberry.

[Cody]

I don't know about mine. I for it's some sort of like kind of trendy brand. I but I got it thrifted so I always forget whatever. I'm not gonna be able to figure it out now.

[Sam]

What are you classic on?

[Cody]

I could tell it was a true classic Tea. It's just like the ads. I'm like, you look buffer this week.

[Sam]

Appreciate that, Sam.

[Connor]

Okay, I just sent my entire team an email about this training that Motion's putting on and you guys are going to block your calendars for this every operator I talk to is thinking about how to build lean teams and become more efficient and AI is an obvious part of this. We talk about it on the marketing operators all the time because it can automate time consuming parts of the creative strategy process. And Motion, our sponsor, they're doing a live virtual event series with five sessions on how to adapt timeless advertising principles to the new era of AI first ad production. This is their legendary virtual event series.

[D]

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[Connor]

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[D]

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[Connor]

Tests using AI agents streaming Super Interested in what she's learned here? Expand on what already works without replacing the human spark that makes it work in the first place. How to test creative like a craftsperson, not a chaos agent. How to build internal creative testing systems for your AI creative, just to name a few. It's going to be really, really good. Highly recommend registering if you want to check it out. Go register for this. It's free and it's five total sessions. You can register at motionapp.com make-ads-that-convert that is motionapp.com forward/make-ads-that-convert.

[Cody]

Before we get into the episode, I'd like to thank our sponsors Motion Rich panel after Cell Prescient and North Beam. All right, sweet. Well guys, let's, let's get into the episode. I've got, I've got a bunch of notes pulled up. This has come up on a couple calls. It came up with Krista from Tokova's a couple weeks ago. We were talking about kind of go to market the process of bringing things to market. Like and, and I'd love to dive pretty deep around that. Like what are the meetings, what are the deliverables? How does that all Come together at the end before you're launching a new product. Cody and I have some examples. Connor's got a bunch to talk about so I kind of wanted to start there. I've got a bunch of stuff to screen share. So for those listening we'll tight, we'll, we'll talk through it. I think this, this will be a palatable enough episode from an audio perspective. But if you want to tune in there will be some visual examples. So I'd love to start like super high level. Cody, how do you guys define go to market at John's Road? Beauty? Is that even the term that you use? Like I'd love to just start there.

[Sam]

We don't say go to market, we probably just say like product launch strategy, product launch campaign. But yeah, it's our, you know, it starts with our product calendar and then our first process which, which I think is getting much more strategic. And we're even toying around with like do we want a product marketing function? Because right now it's really the brand team that does that with some, you know, product development. But it really starts with we have like a deep dive which is kind of like, or we call it kickoff now which is like product marketing team, Copywriter Bobby Marketing operations. Just like kind of brainstorming, understanding, you know, asking questions just about what is this product? Why is it out there? Like just kind of like diving deep on everything from there. We do like a two week meeting after that where usually it's the brand team will pitch kind of like the campaign idea. If that is, you know, goes well and is accepted. They work on that. The next step is we have a, we have a, we call it a pmc. Positioning Me Messaging copy. Actually no, we have the creative briefer. Sorry. So the creative brief is essentially this giant document. Currently it's in a slide. Um, and really that, that is what our brand team briefs to the entire company, the entire team. So it just has everything about the product, all of the details, right. So like prices, what markets is going to be in the launch date. But it also has all of the copy. We've called it, you know, positioning, messaging and copy. So what is the product? What's a copy that we're saying about it or this is what briefs the copywriter. But it's very similar, like what else is on the market? So like you know, what we have on, on the market, how this is different, what we're saying about this, what we're not saying, it's like, it's like an 80 page document. Usually that gets briefed.

[Cody]

So that is the creative brief.

[Sam]

Yeah.

[Cody]

So it's an 80 page document probably.

[Sam]

It depends on the size of the launch. Right.

[Cody]

And five pages and who's putting that together?

[Sam]

Our brand team owns. Our brand team does our product marketing.

[Cody]

Okay. And that is because I was also wondering what you would define as product marketing. Like if you were to build that function out more explicitly, like what type of person or like what would their responsibilities be?

[Sam]

Yeah, and we might, we, we had a board meeting this weekend. We're considering it of like actually hiring a product marketing person that I think it, it is wise and what we're learning is we should have marketing in the product development process as early as possible. There are certain attributes that mark marketers know really well and do really well and there are certain things that product people do well and there's some overlap and there's probably some gaps between them. So a just getting marketing more involved in the product process from earlier stage has a lot of benefits. It can even influence your, your you know, go to market strategy and like what you're going to develop but then also like how you position it, how you talk about it, how it's different. So I just think that's something that is not really like a brand marketer is like expertise or skill set and they probably they have the awareness of the market. They don't necessarily have the awareness of the product and the competitive landscape as much as a product marketing person would.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah, it makes total sense. And then another like I want to like kind of lay it out really broadly and then we can kind of punch in at different pieces. You have this meeting interfacing with the product team. You're getting the download on what the new product is, why it exists. Brand, brand team owns then a creative brief, big document explaining all the key points of the product that you create.

[Sam]

Pretty much everybody in the company. So it goes to marketing, goes to creative, goes to copyright but like our retail team gets it as well.

[Cody]

Got it.

[Sam]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And then from the creative brief assets are created.

[Sam]

We, we have one step in between which is strategy. So we call it like integrated strategy where every channel owner has probably about two weeks to pretty much present their strategy and pitch their strategy and be like, hey, for, for this launch, here's what I'm going to do, here's my creative strategy or here's my media strategy, here's my you know, email strategy, whatever it is. And then that gets reviewed pretty much either by myself or head of brand and one, one of us Will kind of input it and then once we approve align on it, you know, adjust the goals, then people go and do that. Usually we have, we do this all in. We do a lot of it in like a weekly marketing team leads meeting that we have. So after the creative brief, our creative director will share like creative assets. So all of our hero images. We just, we're trying to do everything in Figma now. We stole this from you guys, but just trying to have everything in Figma. We have all of our assets so you know, team knows what we have to work with for what videos we have, what, you know, e comm assets we have like what are our hero things. What's like the creative, you know, kind of like vibe, you know, for this campaign. So they'll share like their inspo and stuff like that. And then yes, people will have a few weeks to kind of put together their assets. Eventually that gets put all into a big figma board or figjam board which is stolen from you. That's kind of what you call the go to market board, I believe. And we review that. I review Async first and then we go over everything in that weekly Thursday meeting. And it's a great time. I'm loving the process because people have more visibility into what other people are working on. And it's just great to just have it all in one place and see the whole campaign together.

[Cody]

100%. Okay, cool. And we've got a couple example of those that we'll walk through. Okay, so you've laid out the high level steps. I'm curious, when does that, when does the kickoff meeting with the product team happen relative to the launch of the product?

[Sam]

Dude, I don't know. I'm so like, like this was like knowing your strengths and knowing your weaknesses. Like I have a great team who handles all of this. I could not tell you when the dates are. It's probably three months out and we're, we're, I feel like we're consistently trying to move it up and we're trying to always play catch up and move it up, but it just doesn't seem like it's always that doable.

[Cody]

But we're trying to move it up 100%. Here, let me, let me share my screen. I could talk through like our key steps. So I'll talk quickly about like how we define. We call this go to market. At Ridge, the full process really happens in two steps. We have something called product prequel, which is like conceptualizing products, getting iterations, approving samples. Like all of that feedback creating SKUs, we put creating packaging as a part of the product prequel. So like at the SKU level all the steps that you have to do to prepare we have like mapped out within notion and that's part of the product prequel guide. And, and importantly that's kind of, that happens at the individual level. You need packaging for each individual product that you're launching. If you're launching. I'll give you an example. If we're launching a new color in a wallet, pen and knife and product prequel will be broken down by those three SKUs and everything that we do is like related to is is done at that granular level. Then we switch to go to market where we are launching those three products together. That might be the basecamp orange, you know, launch is like that new color in these three new styles. Now all of a sudden we're really just talking about that collect that campaign collectively rather than each one individually. So it changes a little bit through the whole process. But that's how we talk about it. What we're looking at here is just the time in between and the steps. So what Cody just laid out I'll talk through as well. It's extremely similar for a, a product launch like a basecamp orange colorway launch. So nine we have different tiers. So we say, and you know what I'll also say here is this is all based off of our go to market review. So we're hoping to review these items at least two weeks before the launch of the product. So that is kind of what we're like backing into from a timeline perspective. And the way that we structured, we have different tiers. So tier one launch, we want to be prepar earlier, something like a Tier 4 launch we can begin preparing later just because it's way simpler and doesn't include nearly as many steps as we otherwise would. So in the case of tier one, we want step number one is we want to write the marketing summary. This is also when we don't always do the product meetings that Cody, you described. We have an executive product summary. We'll get like written details from the team. We'll get these like really large briefs about what the product is, why we created it, who it's for, et cetera, et cetera. That's all done at the executive product summary. So the marketing summary can take that information. We're developing the summary, we're talking about what is a channel strategy, what are our key KPIs, things like that. That happens nine weeks before go to.

[Sam]

Market summary who does that come from?

[Cody]

Great question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So tier one currently comes from me. Some of the other tiers will divvy up with my VP of marketing. Um, and I would.

[Sam]

The way you said it first, I almost got the impression that came from like product or somebody else saying it's like the executive summary.

[Cody]

Executive. Oh, executive product summary. Executive product summary comes from the product team.

[Sam]

Okay, okay. And that is like details, right? That's not like strategy.

[Cody]

It's not strategy. No, it is just details of the product. They'll mention comps. It's like it is the equivalent of your product kickoff that you talked about. It just happens more asynchronously at Ridge, so it includes all the information that we want. So the executive product summary does come from the product team. And that's almost the equivalent, Cody, of your product kickoff meeting. It just happens more asynchronously at Ridge. So just straight details, has comps in there, has specs of the product, all of that stuff. Marketing summary will come from myself or our VP of marketing. That's who handles all those summaries now, which works pretty well. I could see in the future us having more like marketing campaign director or something. We don't have a lot of like generalist positions at Ridge. We have like CMO VP of marketing and then we have a lot of channel directors, so they don't naturally become like marketing summary writers, which I think is a little bit more of a general position. So something we're thinking about. But yeah. So anyway, so tier one campaigns, the most important stuff, we're delivering summaries nine weeks out. Tier four, we're delivering five weeks out. And then you can see the different steps here which like more or less aligned with what you just described. Summary becomes channel briefs, which is the strategy point that you hit on. Then it becomes creative mood board, which I guess is a little bit out of order. That's more the creative brief shot list, shoot, retouching. Then we have basically two weeks to design like channel execution. We're actually designing emails, designing ads, designing social posts, whatever we need to do in that last two weeks before go to market. So that's, that's roughly hours. Even our most, our biggest, most important tier one campaigns, we're starting, you know, whatever, just over two months out from a go to market review, which if you include the buffer we have between go to market and like the true launch of the campaign, I guess gets pretty close to that like three month target.

[Sam]

Yeah, I mean, I mean like no one's gonna have the same exact process. It's actually like very similar. It's actually like pretty, pretty wild how similar it is. Like there's some slight differences based on team structure but like you're hitting the, you know, so many of the same things and again we've stolen from some from you.

[D]

So North Beam 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 model 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 don't garner a click as much as a Facebook or Instagram ad or Google Ad. And are a lot more video view heavy like TikTok. 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 Clicks and Views Enhanced.

[Sam]

How do you come up with the tier? So I'm assuming tier 1 is biggest revenue, you know, for the, for the year, like that's your biggest opportunity. Tier 4 is like a pretty small thing. Is that, is that how it works?

[Cody]

That's a good question. Some of it's kind of gut and feel. We're going to talk about the, our power bank go to market, which we considered Tier one, but that's not necessarily because it was a huge revenue opportunity. It was almost like the comprehensiveness of the campaign required it being a tier one. Yeah. So that's actually an example of like commercially, not necessarily the most important, important launch that we have, but comprehensively it's like it requires most legwork. And then the flip side is like, yeah, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Father's Day, things like that. Those are tier one campaigns. So it's more about some, some weighting of like scope and commercial viability.

[Sam]

And how do you know? Like, because what's the we tier? And we go A, B, C, B minus, stuff like that. One thing we're trying to figure out, like, so ours is essentially based on revenue, but a little bit scope. Like how do you know how big to go? Like is it, is there a templated playbook where like tier one, this is how many ad concepts you create, Tier two, this is how many you create. Or is it more of a conversation? That's something we're, we're running into. Even though we have tiers, like it's not probably as clear as it should be. So like we've got it. You know what for us would be a tier three, but like a B minus launch and we're creating five ad concepts and then we've got an A and we're creating like seven and it really should be like 20 and two probably.

[Cody]

Dude, totally. So here I'll share my screen for this other example too, which is like, kind of answers your question. This is like our tier summary list. So for each of the tiers we have an associated amount of tasks. It doesn't answer the question of how many image ads or video ads to create. Like, that's something more recently we've been discussing in the channel strategies where we say, and again, it's. There's a little bit of gut feel here, but given the tier, given the type of product, given what we know, all the historical information we have about previous launches, we could say like, oh, yeah, we think this will require more video or require more static ads or, you know, something like that. But what I'm sharing my screen here is like, it's almost like this waterfall where tier threes have the fewest amount of tasks. There's 17 tasks here, and you're getting summaries, you're getting an unboxing video, have some amount of hero creative, there's a studio shoot, et cetera. Tier 2 is when we say, okay, now, there are image ads, there are video ads, there are display ads, there's things like that. And then tier three is only when you begin adding in a landing page. Or this is when we start getting into, like, true campaign execution where we need updated email captures, email flows we have. If we're partnering with everyday carry.com we're typically doing partnership ad reads for tier one. So we get the partner ad read Doc. So this is how we've speced it out. So that. And again, it's not perfect, but it's a decent starting place of myself and the VP can go through. We can nail down tiers for all the launches for the rest of the year and then the team can say, oh, hey, based on that, I can like, roughly Prepare that in Q3, there's eight launches that will require video ads. And now I can better prepare for that. And that's how we kind of like connect the deliverables at the channel level to the tiers. And then ultimately that's getting supported by like, well, how much inventory did we buy? How much do we expect to sell? Is kind of informing all of that, for sure.

[Sam]

Very similar.

[Cody]

Yeah. So I'm curious where. How do you guys interface with the product team? If you. I know you guys are launching a lot of new products pretty frequently. So, like, what does that process look like? When does it start?

[Connor]

Yeah, so same as you guys, like the. You know, Cody, I totally resonate with what you said about, like, knowing where your zone of geniuses, like, I am not great at, like saying, hey, here's the launch date and then here's the 50 things we need to do to get to that launch day. And then backing in to, like, the date that all those things need to be. I'm like, I want to be the one coming up with the list of things and like talking about the strategies that we're going to use to sell these things. We have an amazing PMO team that really like organizes and manages the process of all these things. But I'm like looking at one of the new products we launch or planning to launch in the next few weeks. And it all starts with our like product brief and that's led by product marketing that was due like roughly six weeks out. Now this is a, this is what I would consider to be like a, a B launch for us, where we're going to mainly sell it through retention. We might do some acquisition, but very light acquisition, if at all. Like static images probably. We might run like a product hype reel that we're shooting for the website as well. We're not necessarily going to go out and shoot like a bunch of video.

[Sam]

YouTube ads or like build funnels and landers.

[Connor]

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So we're not going to do anything crazy like that. So that's happening about like. Yeah, call it six weeks out. If it's like an A plus launch, that's happening way further out, like three plus months out because it's going to take a lot longer to produce those funnels. That is all led by product marketing. So this is like product name, product fact sheet, you know, description, features. We'll have like key differentiators. We'll have like value prop hierarchy, we'll have messaging, like risks, we'll have like general assets, like content assets that we need. We'll have like a comparison chart. If it's like a variation of a new product, like, here's what the, you know, barbecue pan is. The, the OG product versus this new version of it. Once we have that, then it comes to me and then I'm going through all of our growth marketing channels and saying, all right, we're going to do like a, like our launch campaign strategy on email, sms. We're going to do our sustain strategy. We're going to add it to this automation. We're going to create a block and doing that for every single channel, like very high level. Like how are we going to activate on these channels that then goes to each channel lead to review and either like add to it or say, hey, you said we should do like an email block. I actually don't think we should do it for A, B or C reasons. And then once that happens, we will all circle up as a team to actually like chat through the strategies and make sure that what growth came up with is aligned with what product marketing thinks. And then from there that's when we really said, okay, great, here's the things we're going to do. And that's when it gets pumped into our like project management system. So we actually make sure that all the different things are happening to lead up to that, that that launch date and all the right people are tapped in at all the different phases. And as you guys know, like, you know, launching a new product, even if it's like a B or C launch, can have like, you know, 150 subtasks with you know, 25 different people contributing to them. And like one person blocking it. One subtask blocks another 20 down the line. So that's when it goes into like our PMO system. And they're really good at having like very, very granular subtasks and due dates like to the, to the point where it's like revisions round two. And then there's like three subtasks under that with like Director of Product Marketing, Head of Growth, Director of Design and like same thing if it requires around three and you basically get a notification or a task shows up in your ClickUp when it's your time to come in and contribute to this larger project. So that all kicks off that way. We do call it go to market. So like anything that's like a sale or a new product or like a larger campaign, like sweepstakes, we call it go to market. So all new products start with that, that product brief from our director of product marketing lead. And then anything like sale or, or evergreen campaign or non evergreen campaign that starts with a brief from me. Same thing. It's just like here's all the relevant information, here's the activation we're doing. I'll. I'll provide like specific channel level details. If it's different than what we've done in the past, great. Once we've agreed that that's the thing we're going to do, then it gets kicked over to our, to our ClickUp system.

[Cody]

Totally. Okay, a couple quick questions. Product marketing, what does that person or team roll up into?

[Connor]

Product marketing's under the brand team.

[Cody]

Got it.

[Connor]

Yep.

[Sam]

Yeah, I think more commonly, like that's something I'm kicking around is like if we hire it, is it under branded? Is it, is it under product? I think I've seen it under, under, you know, marketing more often.

[Cody]

But yeah, we hired like we, we've kind of like beaten around the bush of this issue for years. At one point we had someone whose title, their title is now product manager. But they were just called like product communicator or something like, which is like basically, yeah. Who is taking all the decisions that the product team just made are made for very specific reasons. But sometimes those are just made like sitting around a table, you know, discussing it or it's spread out over email threads or whatever. And like who's actually consolidating all that information? Who is like the expert in this like new silhouette that was just designed and actually communicating that out? I mean it's obviously a. And then who's also making it compelling to a consumer at the end of the day? And I feel like that's where product marketing becomes like a little bit more of the lead. But just that like handoff is so key. We've kind of been solving it from both sides.

[Connor]

Well, we had, we had problems with that. Like this has gotten so much more advanced today than it was a year ago. Because what we like, for example, like value prop hierarchy, like that seems very simple. But prior to that it was like, no, here's just like the laundry list of the value props. They're not necessarily in any order. And then you come, you like get into your channel level production and like your emails and your ads like feel very different in terms of the things that they're emphasizing. So it's even little decisions like that or it's like, here's, here's like the thing you should always lead with, no matter whether it's a paid ad or on website or an email, which has just ultimately made everything so much more cohesive. But like you, you figure out those things along the way. Like, wow, our ads and emails are both emphasizing very different messages right now. And like even like key headlines now. Like, well like product marketing will have like three key headlines as a starting point that then are like senior, like, like copywriting lead will then go and like take as a starting point.

[Sam]

Great.

[Connor]

Now you have like consistency across like the, the actual marketing messaging you're using across your stack too. Like all these little things. Like I feel like this product marketing brief just gets iterated on over and over and over and over again, but only through figuring out like, God, we did a terrible job of like message cohesiveness on this product. Like, why is that? Well, it's definitely like up funnel in the process in terms of what was included in that brief. So we're constantly adding new rows to this thing. It's probably double the amount of rows in this like marketing copy table than it was a year and a half ago.

[Cody]

Yeah, 100% we. I've brought up this example a couple times. I brought it up with Krista too. One of our, I wouldn't say worst launches ever, but the launch that didn't perform well, that we learned the most from was watches at the end of 2022. And like that was one of them where it was like we didn't properly. We didn't lay the foundation of the campaign well enough so that like when we actually went to review it before going to market, it was like, oh yeah, the creative doesn't quite highlight the same value props that the email does. And the email doesn't sound like the sms. So it's like a lot of this is like you start with this initial idea and then what are like the processes and the checks and balances. It, like keep that consistent like across multiple teams, across months of work. I think that's kind of like the ideal.

[Sam]

Yeah, you have to like really spell it out. And like, especially because these cre. These briefs are so long and there's so much information like you have to market to marketers. Like really that's what the product marketer's job is, is like to do the marketing to the marketers. And like Bobby talks about this all the time because they had, you know, their wholesale and everything like that and like they would create assets and like videos like to get the sales people at the stores excited and stuff like that. But like it's the same thing internally and it's all about like how clear your you're being. And I think sometimes marketers don't think about that when they're just doing like internal communication. It's almost like it's not as good as it should be versus if they're like writing copy, they're like, this is my hook, this is my headline. But like you need that for clarity's sake, even internally. Like good communication is just good communication. And yeah, I found that like just a list of value props doesn't work. You have to be very clear. Like this is 75% of what I want you to focus on. This is what you absolutely can't say. Like this is primary message, this is. This is secondary messaging.

[Cody]

100%. Yeah, absolutely agree. A couple. One other question I had, Connor, on the workflow that you described, the summary that you delivered to your channel managers and then they kind of like you guys iterate on it from there. Like, how is that done? Is that just like a, like a word document that you're jotting notes into?

[Connor]

Yeah, basically it's A, it's a word document with tables included. So it's like all the, all the product marketing information lives above that and that's what the director of product marketing is running lead on. And then it gets passed off to me and it's like email, SMS is its own row paid and paid social, it's on row affiliates, its own row influencers. So I'm basically making comments across every single channel. And the whole point is to like have done some thinking so when we get into this like final meeting, which is like the final step before it goes into the actual like project management system, that we can have a really constructive conversation about it versus us getting to that call and in our director Potter market and being like, oh, and Connor and Noah, like what do you guys think we should do on email? Say no, no, we've done that work asynchronously. So then we can actually have a very like fun collaborative conversation on like well, what, what does like the sustained strategy look like or whatever it is? So yeah, like it's, it's been an iterative like we used. That's not how it always was. Right? Like it. I had to be there sitting like sitting there being like, wait, it's not efficient for me to like, I didn't know you were going to ask me about this on this call. I haven't thought about it yet. Like this isn't a good way to like think through strategically right now. So even that like a simple thing like that is so important. And then we bake that into our, our PMO system. Right. So it's like I know before that call gets scheduled that like our template now has those steps written out in it. So every time now I know that I'm going to do that thinking before we get into that like final decision making call. And I cannot emphasize how important and valuable having like a really solid PMO team is. Like the amount of time I've had to like, I've been able to not think about just like worrying about if so and so did the thing they needed to do by this date has been amazing. And it like, it really lets your marketers and strategists do what they're best at, which is like be marketers and not, you know, project managers and like knocking on people's doors and saying like, hey, did you write this copy yet? Hey, did you review this asset yet? Like I hate doing that stuff. There's other people that love it and are like, really? They've thrived that way and I having that systematization that you can lean on and like just be confident that the thing's gonna happen is. I mean it's been probably one of the most important things we've done for all of these like very involved, cross functional, cross departmental campaigns is pmo, Project management and organization. Yeah. Yep.

[Cody]

Strong, strong acronym.

[Connor]

Yep.

[Cody]

Awesome. All right, cool. Oh, I had one last question for you, Connor. You do the summary, you talk about it with your team. When does that happen in relation to the creative? Because it sounded like it might be. Are you informing the creative shot or are you typically able to execute on your plan post creative having been shot?

[Connor]

Yeah, good question. No, we are creatives happening after, after the outline strategically. Right. And that like very different create requirements for like an A plus launch versus a C launch or a B launch. So yeah, it's like get the product brief from product marketing, outline the growth tactics and then we go into. I shouldn't say that there is some like creative outline happening during the product brief, but the actual shoot that we're doing in studio is happening once we've outlined all the activations we're doing across all of our channels to make sure that we're not missing anything.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Sam]

You've heard us talk about Prescient AI before. We work with them at Jones Road. But you still might be wondering, what is it? What is this MMM thing? At its core, Prescient really helps brands get more out of every marketing dollar that they're spending by showing them what's working, what's not, and where to spend their money next. The Prescient team knows modern marketing is a sum of many things. Your media spend, seasonality, other marketing campaigns, consumer sentiment and so much more. That's why they don't rely on pixels, bias, platform measurement or old research models to help you make the most confident decisions. They truly built their MMM from the ground up based on models that adapt to your data and evolve over time, not the other way around. If you want to measure the halo effect that your campaigns are having on all of your channels. Yep. Talking about E commerce, Amazon and even retail depression can help you out. You can test new channels, predict future performance of those channels, know how much you should be spending on each of them, and continuously optimize how you spend your budget to make it as efficient as possible, which, listen, we all need right now. You can do this all without sacrificing your upper funnel budget or bottom line. KPI's. Prescient has proven to us how truly incremental and efficient some of our upper funnel Channels like tvr that was very hard to measure prior to it. So if you've been wanting to try Prescient, they just upgraded their model and their vision across measurement and retail is truly next level. They take marketing decision making where it's never been able to go to before. If you want to learn more and gain insights into how you can optimize your entire media, mix in as little as 48 hours, then go to prescientai.com operators and book a demo today. One thing I was going to say and then I have a few questions. I know you like to say naming conventions are the heart and soul of a DDC brand. I think the project managers are really the unsung heroes. They're also pulling as much weight I think as important to a DDC brand. They're like the offensive line doesn't get a lot of credit but they're doing a lot of blocking and tackling and work doesn't happen without them 100%.

[Connor]

Like they and they, they have like this level of nuance and understanding in how things work together more than anyone else in the organization because they see the interplay between everyone. And I am every once in a while like our PMO team will like drop these, these bombs. I'm like, dang, like that was really like a really good idea or like that's a really strategic direction to take this. And it's just the, the amount like if you're a pmo, it's actually kind of a unique, I think would be like a unique early career choice in marketing because there's no probably better way to understand how paid and email and brand and growth and all these things work well together because they are the conduit between all these pieces. So. Cody, I fully, fully agree with that and I think if I ever start my own brand one day like a solid PMO lead is going to be like one of the first people that I would hire.

[Cody]

Maybe potential operator spinoff, fourth installment is project management Operators. That'd be good.

[Connor]

I like that.

[Sam]

Yeah, I love it. Do you guys do, do you guys do any sort of like postmortem after launch?

[Cody]

Good question. We've only done a handful. We've done it for tier ones for the last year and we're just crossing. I think the first one we ever did was last Father's Day. So I to review it just recently and I'm like fantastic. I'm like this is so good to have. So now we're, we're starting to do more and we're just beginning to actually benefit from having done them.

[Sam]

How about you guys?

[Connor]

Yeah, well, it's not super systematized. I will. What I'm doing a better job of now is ahead of launch, I'm actually outlining, like, reports that I want to pull, and then that actually gets baked into our project management system. So, for example, like, we just launched a kitchen tool set and there's some products that are natural products to upsell that on. So I, in the brief before launching, I was like, hey, make sure there's a task for me to pull the upsell take rate like a week after this thing's launched. And then I can be like, all right, great. Here's the take rate. And now we have like, I can go to my CRO lead and be like, hey, you have a new KPI. It's like, get the take rate from this percent to this percentage. But I think something, we should probably do a better job of it just like more of a. Always on. Like, here's the 10 things we. We pull after every product report on these intervals. I think that's something we, we need to work towards.

[Cody]

We do like, we do wins, losses and opportunities. And like, one of the extremely helpful Data points was Q2. I talked about it on one of the podcasts we did in December. I think we had a really difficult Q2, and I was trying to remember the exact details of why, but, I mean, there are a bunch, but. But there's one in particular, and it was on Meta. We saw men disproportionately underperform early in the Father's Day period. We saw women gift giving get pulled back a lot. And it was like, we had the. We had that data laid out really clearly in our postmortem, so it's super easy to reference. And now we're going into this period, like, understanding exactly what. What we want to be looking for by gender across, you know, Meta, our biggest ad channel. It's just like it ended up being extremely valuable. So that was like the exact. It wasn't something that we typically pull. We were mostly just like, jotting down the anecdotal experience that we had so that we could reference it again in the future. And we're going to be slightly more prepared this year because of it.

[Sam]

Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm finding it really helpful. Yeah, same for like, Black Friday. Stuff like that we will do. They're like a slack canvas or something like that where it's just like. Like, what I realize is, like, if I'm tasked and I get like a, you know, a task to like sit down and add things to a postmortem board. I'm like whatever. So I just need to have it available early and like even before launch. And we just have a board. We're now trying to do everything in Figma where we just. I just screenshot anything I see like customer complaint feedback, things like that. Like any random note that just like pops up either before the campaign, during it, you know, customer feedback or obviously when we go formally pull data and we're just like tossing it in there. Yeah, I find it invaluable and I think we started probably like around Black Friday last year, so I'm excited to have those insights. The other thing that we've done that's really helpful, we had Kat Cole, CEO of AG1 do like a lunch and learn with our team and she shared this with me like personally a few times and is made my week difficult. So we just have actually our, our senior manager marketing app. So she runs our, you know, marketing operations which is our project management function. Just, just puts in our like marketing leadership slack channel. What made your week difficult. And any channel owner is just encouraged to go in and really just share any blocker. Right. And as especially as it's related to something that they can help and solve with. And I think both you guys mentioned just like iterating and like how like your briefs or your documents are much longer than they used to be indifferent. Like to me that's why I love this process is because like I'm like never satisfied and there's always something you can do to improve upon it. So I just like have really wanted to have this like feedback culture where people are willing to share like hey, this is my blocker, this is mine. And like I don't know about you guys. Like I do like async one on ones. I do like a status update every week and part of it is people will send me their blockers or they made my week difficult and so many of them were operations things and I would literally just screenshot them or like go talk to our head of marketing ops. So I was just like I'm just going to go and send it to her. Like let me just have the people bring it to her anyways. Like obviously if they're my reports they'll send it to me. But like they know if it's like a marketing operations related thing, like hey, you know, I didn't have these assets in time or I didn't have clarity about this thing, like whatever it is. And our marketing ops team is so great at that. They actually share it on the weekly meeting which like I think takes a lot of courage to be like, hey, this is a feedback that we got this week. And they don't always act on it. Sometimes it's like hey, you know, that was a one time thing. But I just find that like weekly iterative feedback process and cycle like over the long term has, has been so helpful.

[Cody]

So what made my week difficult is, is it shared publicly?

[Sam]

It is shared publicly Amongst like our 10 person marketing interesting leadership team. So got it in the channel and then on the meeting.

[Cody]

Yeah, super cool.

[Connor]

So I, Cody, I really like that you just send it right to your head of marketing operations. Is that person. Like when, when we, when we hired our PMO lead, I don't know, a year ago, a year and a half ago maybe. One of the first things she did, she just sat down with me. She's like, I'm like what? She's like, what do you need help? Pm, project management. The big thing is all these cross departmental things, right? Sales, new products, big campaigns. And I just like word vomited to her and explained like, here's the things that need to happen for us to like launch a sale. Here's all the stakeholders involved, yada, yada yada. And then she just like took that and like went and built out a system using like ClickUp. Is that kind of what I mean? She's head title or their head title, so presumably pretty senior. But is it kind of the same thing? Like you send them these problems and they're like oh cool, now that I know what the problem is, I can build like a system or a process that will avoid that problem in the future. Is that, has that been your experience with this person? Are you actually also helping build the system? Like what's that involvement?

[Sam]

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean she's been here for probably two and a half years and has kind of grown and, and you know, advance in her career. So she's taking on more and she, you know, wants to be director. So I'm definitely no longer saying, hey, this is the, this is the solution I want you to implement. It's more like hey, here's the problem, I'm going to drop it on your lap, come to me with solution.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Sam]

So yeah, like she'll do that. Like one of the things like even that time, like this entire process, like she, she had a big part in creating but we realized stupidly I don't know why we're doing this. We were actually doing the creative brief after some of the creative things had to be shot and done. It was just like the creative like, like our like large scale, like campaign stuff was done ahead of time. So that was a different process. So like we, you know, I was, I was like, hey, this is the problem. This is what it is. Like come to me with suggestions. You know what I mean? So yeah, she'll do that and then I'll obviously just like provide feedback and approve. But yeah, that's, that's to me the job. And it's just like, how can I make everybody else's life easier? How can I make sure they have the info, they have the assets, you know, that they need, like whatever it is.

[Cody]

So there's a, there's a marketing operations person. Is there the equivalent of a product person, like a product project manager?

[Sam]

There used to be, yeah.

[Cody]

Because I'm just curious. We've always had, for it's been a couple years now, marketing operations essentially. And then they basically got absorbed and we like centralized the project management function across product, across marketing, across operations. Like every. But those, all those people kind of roll up into the same. It's our director of remote who oversees project management now, which is interesting because they're like, they're all experts in notion. Right. So it's like they all have similar skill sets. They're just using it to support like different facets of the organization.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Consolidated marketing and creative operations. So we had them separate and we realized like they, it's really one process and they have to really have be on the same cycle and timelines.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

So do you, do you have Connor, is your team basically like, like one, one thing, one piece of inspo we've taken from, from Ridge and from a few other brands is we are in the process of building a more central creative department that reports into brand and then they service different parts of the org. And now instead of like the creative strategist or the email strategist, be having to like dig all the way deep into like the nittiest grittiest of details. They're basically like, here are the problems to solve in this email or this ad. And then it's. It's up to that designer to like create the version of that that fits that, that mold. Right. So. And we're not quite there yet, but like that's where we're headed. We just like I said, hired this design director. So we're gonna have all of like report them to him and have them service different parts of the org. We've done that similar thing with PMO where basically PMO is its own. Its own organization. And then within pmo, they're basically servicing different parts of the org. Like we have a single PMO from the PMO or a single project manager from PMO that does all things web and CRO, a different one that does all things email, sms. Are you basically saying you have like the centralized project management org that does that? They service everything 100% and it's a good.

[Cody]

The creative team's a good analogy, like centralizing the designers. And then you have like dotted lines to email and web and whatever else. Exact same idea, centralized project managers. And then they're like. It's technically like a dotted line. The marketing project manager is a dotted line to me. She's helping me execute on what we need. But ultimately like there's the director of remote is. Is doing her one on ones and stuff.

[Connor]

Yep, yep, got it.

[Cody]

Okay, cool. You guys want to look at a go to market board?

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

All right, here, let me pull up. I'll go through. So like this will be. And I'll talk through. Everybody listening, but just an idea of like everything we just described. Cody mentioned. This is basically getting centralized in what we call our go to market board. For this is a tier one launch. So this is. This was the power banks which I mentioned. You can see the executive product summary up here. Who, what, how, why? We have a silhouette description and then three to five key features and benefits. Connor, you bring up a really good point. Like, I don't think this is a great example of like a great hierarchy or a great. There's not great guidance as to like this is the key message. We ended up like kind of nailing that down in our copywriting document. But it was a really great starting place. It's just brain dump of all the stuff we want. Three to five key features and benefits. Then we have like literally all the features. Features and specifications. We have the packaging. This is all the stuff that comes from the product team. We've got some comps of some other photos from other brands. What I don't have in here actually is like the actual marketing summary doesn't live in the go to market board. The steps in between the product summary and then these images that we're looking at are marketing summary, channel, strategy, informing, mood board, shot list. And then this is what ultimately gets delivered. So there's like, I won't go on a whole spiel here, but like there's a lot of steps in between product summary to images that happen kind of offline and in different documents, all get tracked within notion. But then we get here and we say these are just selects and then you get linked to the full digital asset management folder here. But you get a sense of what the vibe is. We've got the power banks shot. Marques Brownlee played this really key role. And then what is a better example of, and I mentioned this earlier, we go from product summary to marketing summary. We end up generating creative. And then the two weeks before the go to market review, we have the ability to execute on all of the channel deliverables that we need and all those channel. All the channels have separate sections here to talk through what we're doing. So you can see like we have the full homepage mocked up, we have the full landing page built out. As well as pdp, we have custom like below the fold elements. We've got the highlight of Marques here. So that's all kind of a creative and ecom deliverable. We have an ecom op section which is like, hey, this is how we're rolling it out. We've got the landing page, this is how the PDP looks. We have details here on where it's being upsold. So where are we building kits? Whether it's our PDP or cart or post purchase upsell, those notes get added here. So we just understand from an E comm perspective, once the products are built, how is that actually like coming together and being merchandised on the site? Got all of our PDP photography here and then, yeah, I won't run through all of this. We don't need to see it like detail by detail. But email has a section in here. We look at organic social strategy, we look at our paid strategy. So we're looking at new ads. I don't know why we have previous ads here. I think we did two go to market reviews here. So we've got some new options, we've got some older options. We have videos linked in here, so we'll watch some of those. We had a partnership strategy, so that's linked here. Steven Shapiro, MKBHD were timed with the launch of the product and then paid search. Just talking about, just talking through the strategy and we're going through this on a call channel by channel saying, you know, whether there's an opportunity to launch this insert shopping display, YouTube campaigns, things like that. And that is basically what we'll run through. And I think what this helps ensure is visual consistency. Is probably the biggest thing like them. Literally living on this board allows us to understand like does this look like the same visual representation across all these different channels as well as from a messaging standpoint, like are we making this? Are we making the messaging as coherent and cohesive as possible? So we've been doing this for like a year and a half now. It's also gotten bigger and bigger over time and like I said, this is one of our more comprehensive launches, but it's what it looks like for us. It's been a year since we migrated to Rich Panel and I had no idea how impactful the right customer service tool could be. Here's what our customer service team has achieved since making the movement 1. Our order volume continues to rise but our support tickets, if not our self Service portal helps 47% of website visitors help themselves immediately without having to contact our agents. 2. Their AI powered social media moderator is awesome. We continue to spend a ton on meta as a part of our marketing mix and it flags and replies to thousands of comments automatically to help us make the most of our ad spend. Like many of you, I've been cautiously skeptical about certain automation and AI use cases, but our support quality hasn't dipped at all. It's actually gone up. We're at an all time high of 96% customer satisfaction score. All this and it's still 50% cheaper than other platforms. No limits on AI usage or tickets and fair predictable pricing each month. With market and tariff uncertainty, consumer confidence is in the gutter. You cannot afford bad customer experience or overpaying for older software tools. And migration is super simple. They handle your data import, agent training and automation setup. You only need two or three calls and you're live in 14 days. They guarantee a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back. So it's a no brainer. If you want happier customers and a happier finance team, head over to richpanel.comdemo to book a demo today. Cody, you said you have a similar Figma approach?

[Sam]

Yeah, yeah. Can I share?

[Cody]

Yeah, sure. Also any feedback on mine and any yeah, yeah. Well I was going to say you think, you think we're missing anything? Any obvious?

[Sam]

No, I love it that it's in one place because we have a very similar things but it's in many different places.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. We've been like what I say all the time. Any key deliverable should live in either the the Figma go to market board or that go to market board is linked in notion where that's where the marketing summary lives and like basically everything the company ever does as it relates to launching anything should live at the end of the day in one of those two things. Like it just shouldn't be like buried in some drive or shared in Slack or whatever. Like just single source of truth. And frankly, because the go to market board is linked within notion, that is literally the source of truth. You can get to whatever you need from power banks in notion and I've just found that really valuable.

[Sam]

I agree with that. It's so simple. But I think, yeah, having one place where people can look. Otherwise there's like so many Slack back and forth. Wait, what's the price of this product and what's that? It's like just, just go look at the document.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Sam]

All right, so you're seeing this. So this is our creative brief. You seeing us.

[Cody]

Awesome.

[Sam]

So this is it. Right? So it'll have, you know, tier launch date really just starts with you know, table contents, all of the details. So what is the, the product? Why are we excited about it? Some calendar stuff that we'll, we'll lay out. If, because if we're doing like a different teasing strategy, you know, or different announcement strategy, we'll do that. You know, kind of like this was like a big ones. Like what's our. We differentiated our brand marketing strategy from our product marketing strategy was a little bit different. But this is kind of like, hey, this is the focus. 75% of this. We talked about who we're trying to reach with this campaign. You know, this was a little bit like for the creative team going into like the Personas. You know, our creative team will have a bigger kind of inspo visual board elsewhere that they'll use for like their, their creative, but have it a little bit in there. You know, we'll have some assets that we have some models, you know, we'll go and just, you know, timing of the launch and, and, and things like that. And this was like our biggest launch of the year. So this was like our biggest one. We will go into again. Yeah, we call it pillars, but these are essentially our value props. Right. And it's like we try to kind of do the hierarchy. So it's like here's what to focus on for each of them. We'll compare it like if it's similar to another product, here's how to talk about it, you know, and here's how we're comparing it against another product because that's important for us. Here's like the market and how this is different from what's in the market. Here's who we're trying to reach. Again, here's more product differentiation between our other stuff. You know, what we're saying about it. We have to change our other ones.

[Cody]

What's the title of this section?

[Sam]

Product Differentiation.

[Cody]

Got it. OR what's slide 26 here?

[Sam]

Product overview.

[Cody]

Product overview. All right. Yeah, Just deep product stuff. Yeah. Probably the equivalent of like executive product summary for us.

[Sam]

Yeah. Yeah. So this is like, again, it's done by our marketing team. This is probably what like a product marketing team would do, but our brand marketing team is doing it.

[Cody]

Got it.

[Sam]

Messaging copy. So this is essentially what it is, why we love it, how it's different. So we call this, you know, positioning, messaging copy, you know, taglines, how to use just like all. All of the different copy to pull from PDP copy. Usually we just have some quotes in there that people can pull from. But for Bobby, you know, ingredients, pricing, all that stuff. And then, you know, more again, it's. This is.

[Cody]

We're.

[Sam]

We're only on page 45. You know, pricing, availability by region, all this stuff. Additional considerations. You know, this is tier. So we even have a slide where we tear it by channel because, like, for some launches, maybe it's an A for paid social, but for Influencer, it's a B. So we'll even, you know, we'll even do that embargo. So like, hey, this is like our teasing strategy or our announcement strategy. We gave it to Influencer early or press early or something like that. Just so people know, you know, retail will brief them on some stuff. Again, we're on page 53. And then this is where we get to the integrated marketing slide. So I think the creative brief can probably stay in here. I would like to pull these into Figma. These are essentially people will put their strategy, you know, by each one. And then again, this either gets reviewed by me or head of brand, where it's pretty much everything, you know, that we have in here in terms of just look pretty much what you showed in Figma. So we have that all in there. And then we go into. Our creative director will share, you know, so we have this just in Figma, it's a different launch, but like, here's all of our images we have just so everybody can pull. And like we had them in Dropbox before, but just found it's really helpful to have it in one place, you know, so we can just kind of this. These are for some upcoming ones. Just here are all the assets and I've also found this is really helpful to have to send to an agency or something like that. Like what I found is when we have this and we have some like even of like the direction of the campaign, like even sending it to like an agency who's building some statics, like they were able to get things looking much better and more on brand than if we just like sent them a Dropbox folder.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Sam]

So we've got that. And then again, once the slides are done and the integrated strategy is done, you know, people have the two to three weeks and this is very similar to what you have, where we just have things split out. So I'll usually go in there, you know, Async, like the night before the meeting, just kind of leave some comments. Any feedback that I have, we'll go through that live in the meeting. But pretty much same thing, right? You know, you got emails, you got video, any landing pages, homepage emails, social, all that kind of stuff. And then here's like an example what we did for a postmortem. So just had it overall, how do we do against overall forecast? Had our data team, you know, or data person, pull some stats, some retention stats, top emails, bottom emails, link to some motion reports in here, some screenshots, links to them, top ads, motion reports. Like we look at quiz data, just like any data we have. This is a little bit more of like the subjective feedback. What, well, what would be customer feedback? What are they saying? Just like any bits of feedback that we have, any review data. We ran like a lift test on meta, so we have that in there. I just think this can all be in one place. So I think that the three things I shared, like you do a really good job having them all in one place. And we have like different Figma boards, like three different ones. So I, I, I'm gonna steal what you guys have a little bit further.

[Cody]

Yeah. Dude, it is so good. My first question is, was that a top tier launch, A plus plus? Yeah.

[Sam]

That was like one of our biggest of the year. Yeah.

[Cody]

Was that the one that you, that came out in April?

[Sam]

Yeah, that was okay.

[Cody]

Got it. It looks fantastic.

[Sam]

Thank you, I appreciate it.

[Cody]

How has it gone? What's the post mortem?

[Sam]

It's gone. All right. It's gone. It's gone all right. Not, not exactly what we wanted. It's not. We didn't hit the same again. It's just a challenging time in general. We didn't hit the same peak that we wanted like launch week, but we've actually been Catching up and like, beating it in the following weeks. Cool. Which is interesting. Not entirely sure why we're catching up, but, like, we had the postmortem, I think probably a week and a half ago, and, you know, we're trying to think about, like, what's our. What's our strategy going forward and like, what can we learn from it? Where do we need to pivot our messaging, how do we share what's working on email to paid social or E comm. So got some work to do, but got. Got some promising signs.

[Cody]

What you laid out was like, so comprehensive. My first thought is like, how many times can you possibly do that a.

[Sam]

Year for, like that full thing? I mean, that's a. A. So we probably have four A launches a year. Yeah, probably we have.

[Cody]

I mean, that's fantastic.

[Sam]

But yeah, that. That. That's our big one. We're not going that in depth. We'll probably do that. Like, for example, we did getting our results back tomorrow, but like, out of home. Like, we'll probably do that like three, four times a year. So I think that's probably like once a quarter. We. We have the bandwidth to be able to do that.

[Cody]

Yeah, it makes total sense.

[Connor]

Are those results through House, Cody? Is that what you mean by you're getting your results back tomorrow?

[Sam]

Yeah, I can't wait. And. And I am so bad with patience, but Nick slacked me today and he just said, ooh, results looking solid, dude.

[Cody]

I actually Nick's done that to us too. And I'm like, dude, you can't do that. It's even worse when he's not giving the actual data.

[Connor]

That's hilarious.

[Sam]

I'm like, what does solid mean?

[Cody]

Okay, I have one other question. You kind of hit on it. You guys had brand messaging and product messaging. We've gone back and forth around that. Also. We have, like, we write copy at the silhouette level. So, like, if we're launching knives, like, what do we want to say about the knife specifically? And then the brand messaging would be like, what do knives mean for the Ridge brand? Like, you know, if it's a matter of you, like, being prepared, that's a little bit different than like the drop point blade on the knife. So do you guys often distinguish between that? Is that the same copywriter working on that? How does that work?

[Sam]

Same copywriter. We only have one copywriter, but I would say, like, our brand team will write some copy too. No, I think we're trying to do. We're trying to do brand campaigns. What we would consider a Brand campaign. Like around the big launches. I think we realized like, we're not big enough or have the resources to do like separate brand campaigns. But I think big launches that we think get like the full a tier thing, which is like. Like this one, we had net new TV ads. We had out of Home 4. You know, we had a much bigger strategy. Like we had a brand campaign that was how are we. Yeah, well, I guess I don't know how to describe without saying the name, but like, not just here's this product, it's here, but like, you know, the campaign was just enough for. And it was kind of for the different Personas that it fitzen its life. So we wanted to be really clear to our team, like, this is the brand campaign. Here's just like the lifestyle vision. Almost like Jacobus, right? They had a brand campaign with their work. Work boot, you know, where it wasn't just product focus, but it's like, here's a lifestyle we want to get people to buy into.

[Cody]

The lifestyle that you want people to buy into stemming from this new. Just enough product.

[Sam]

Yeah, yeah, but that's very different messaging than the product marketing of 100% differentiated.

[Cody]

100%. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's a really. That's just a distinction we've been trying to make more and more. It's like, when do you want to be speaking literally about. We call it the silhouette of the product. What are the. What are the specifications of the. Just. Just enough tinted moisturizer versus Yeah, I said what do knives mean for the Ridge brand? But it could just as easily be phrased as what is the lifestyle we want someone buying into?

[Sam]

Yeah, but, but like, if we're launching, you know, two new shades of. Right. Like a lip pencil. Right. Which we did later, like earlier in the year. Like, there's not a brand campaign associated with that. Right. Like one social video. So it's, it's. It's almost all product marketing at that point.

[Cody]

100. Yeah, that's a great point. Connor, what do you think?

[Connor]

I mean, that's. Dude, that is so thorough, what you just shared. That is so like, that is like such a good thing to work towards for any brand out there. And that's, you know, that's why I asked you guys to send me this a few weeks back, because that's what I want. We're trying to work towards. And we have everything in a single spot in the sense that like, if you want to go into our mother's day sale board and ClickUp everything you need is going to be in there. Pricing, the brief, the copy, it's all, it's all going to be in there. Like all the information you two just shared will be in there. But what I don't like is that it's not visual at all, right? I mean it's literally clickups. There's literally a list of tasks and subtasks and there's files embedded, which is good because you have like a single source of truth to go to find whatever information you need. And then it's also obviously a project management system so you can see what's done, what's not done, what's being worked on, yada yada yada. But what we're working towards is trying to build some sort of like figma board that's organized by funnel. So you know, like visually speaking at the top, you know, you have your ads, you have your influencer posts, you have your affiliate content publisher articles. And a little bit lower of your emails, you have your, your text, a little bit lower of your, your web experience, your collection page, your homepage, your checkout. So we're going to start organizing like as a final step into launching a sale like that and then come back in at the end and add in some data the same way that you did Cody, where it's like, here's how ads perform this year versus last. Here's total business performance this year versus last. Here's the revenue and RPU on all the emails. So that's what we're working towards is getting it like we already are doing it in the sense that it's all organized in ClickUp. Now we just need to take it out of ClickUp, put it all into a figma file. So it's actually set up in a way that how a funnel is set up and it's visual in that sense. And I think that'll also help us fill in gaps where it's like, oh, actually the web experience isn't cohesive from the emails and ads here. And sometimes you can only get that by seeing them right next to each other versus those two separate ClickUp items where you're never going to be looking at that email with that landing page experience side by side.

[Sam]

Dude, it's crazy because like even having it in Google, you know, presentation Google Docs where like you have E Comm on one and then like the next one is like email people, like just, just one above each other, people don't see them or you don't see it at the same time versus just having them on the same board side by side. It's so simple, but it makes that big of a difference.

[Connor]

Totally. And we finally just got this director of design who is going to own like bringing all these things together. One of the things he did for Mother's Day sale is he created this design toolkit which is, it's, it's basically just like elements that you will see then throughout our, our entire funnel. So like the, the green hex color that you see across like our website and emails, like that's in the toolkit. There's this like, like headline lockup. There's like a call out badge. Just the overall like background with nothing on it is in there. There's a few different treatments of that. There's a few like he actually did make some fleshed out ads that we can then pull and like swap in new products and, and different copy. There's some end screens in here or end cards for, for various assets. So we are starting to do that as a, as a preliminary step to actually building out like the, all the channel level assets. That way there is just a lot of cohesiveness and a lot of consistency across email and ads. And prior to that like that wasn't really happening. There was some disjointedness. So having that toolkit to start and then it goes to the channel level designers and then that makes their lives easier too because they're not designing all these things for trash. They're taking the toolkit and you know, pumping it into their channels and it just makes our whole team more efficient.

[Sam]

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[Cody]

You know, one I. So we've been hitting on that a lot too, which is a little bit different. Like I've been telling my creative team, I honestly think we rely too much on asset production and we should be more creative with like what we would dis. What I would call what you're describing is like graphic treatment. And here I'll share another screen. I've got this super sloppy art and inspo board that I like throw examples on. But I bring this one up all the time. It's from Huckberry. I think Huckberry's the best at this. You probably so you probably realize this, Connor. But like this was their Memorial Day sale last year and I'm like, look, I don't think they shot Memorial Day. I'm sure is a really big period for them. I don't know if they shot one new asset the whole time. Like this probably existed. And then they're just creating like a visual strategy to like tie everything together. You get the orange, you get the font that they're using, you get the highlights. And then these are three emails. And like these are think, I think different parts of emails or ads. I've got another example on here.

[Connor]

Even down to that like that kind of like scratchiness in the orange. Like you have it in a single place. And now that infiltrates the entire marketing stack.

[Cody]

Yeah. 100. That's a good Point. Yeah, totally. And then they do this like their winter sale was like equally. It's like, okay, you've got some colors, you've got some selects. These assets probably existed, these like guys with this Jeep and it's like, oh yeah, you can put together a really compelling, comprehensive, visually cohesive sale without like weeks of prep and spending a bunch of money on creative. And I think, at least, I think we have overlooked that for a long time. And I'm trying to like push my team more in that direction of like let's, let's creative problem solve like much later down the funnel versus trying to figure out what is like the, the sexy new campaign that we need like a three day shoot for or something.

[Sam]

Yeah.

[Connor]

And also how many, how many. If you don't do this like toolkit, this like branding toolkit up front, you likely end up with multiple designers or editors trying to solve the same problem in a silo. Like in like the email designer might be trying to solve a similar problem that your paid ad designer is. And like that's just inefficient. So I, it's like allowed us to, it seems like more work, but in reality it's just a little bit more work up front. That should save way more time as you get into all the channel specific stuff.

[Cody]

So you know what, I'm trying to find the example here. If you guys give me one second.

[Sam]

While you do that, I'll just like piggyback on that. Dude. Totally, totally agree. So for whatever reason, we were idiots and we decided to launch something called the Beach Vacation Kit as part of our holiday collection last year. We always had like a winter summer vibe, so we had like Aspen in Miami one year, sold out. So whatever. So we had 25,000 beach vacation kits left after holiday. So we're gonna like bring them back this summer. But obviously all the stuff we have shot is we shot in November as holiday. And I don't really feel like taking, you know, the time and the money to do a shoot for it. So we did some internal stuff. I don't have like the full vision again because it's. This is a perfect example of having it in different Figma boards or different places. But like we are, our creative team has that, that like toolkit that's like, here's our visual identity for this campaign, but I can at least show you like the emails that turned out from it. So the only new shoots that we did were internal. Just like our internal video and design team with like they got these like chair and props and stuff like that. But, like, this is all the same thing. A lot, A lot of AI in there as well. So, like, this is obviously AI where it's just, like, we had the box totally just gets highlighted and, like, that's all AI that was shot, but, like, that's becoming, like, a hero for it. So just. Just an example to kind of show the point that you're making that, like, it's very possible and, and doable to, like, be scrappy with it 100%.

[Cody]

Okay, so I'm gonna make, like, a super similar point here. We're preparing for our Memorial Day sale. Memorial Day is one where it's, like, it's an important period. It's not tied to any. Any new product specifically. So it's like, we probably, like, I, I, I don't love the idea that we'd have to rely on a ton of work in the studio or hiring models or any of that. This is about our core products being on promo for the first time in a couple months. How do we hit that with the sort of summer type of feel while utilizing, like, we've been shooting assets for 10 years or whatever? So this is, like, we pulled out. This is a very old photo. That's our. This is originally from us. So, like, that's our ridge duffel, and it's just, like, cool. Feels very summery. For those listening, it's this guy jumping off of a dock, and then there's a ridge duffel there with some canoe paddles, like, leaning on top of it. And I was like, this kind of sets the. This theoretically could set the tone for Memorial Day. Like, this feels like a hero shot. And then just with, like, prompting that into chat GPT, I was like, can we just create more complimentary stuff? Like, what. What would it be if we, like, zoomed in on the buoy? What would it be if we removed the dock? What is a shot of the shore? So these are all different assets that we created with AI from that original image. And so, Cody, you just kind of hit this point, but, like, like, we're at this period of time where you need even less of, like, that content seeding to, like, pull it even further across channels. You used to have to get really creative. Like the Huckberry example, it's mostly relying on colors and fonts and, like, styling. But now we're at this point where, like, if you have one image that you like, you can kind of prompt that into at least three or four or five or six assets, and you could very quickly see how that becomes, like, a very compelling, comprehensive campaign across all channels. With, like, I did these shots during standup for, like, 30 minutes. I was just, like, plugging away in chat GPT. And it's like, if you spend more time doing that, I mean, it's. It's. It could get even better.

[Connor]

This is all this in all. All in Chat GPT. No, like, this was not using any other separate tool, just in, like, the core. Really? That's awesome.

[Sam]

I love it. Yeah, one thing, too, that you said that sucked me, I think this was in, like, January. We were talking about icon for the first time. And you're talking about, like, like, somebody in your. Like, your creative strategy is making ads with it, and you're like. Like, it's not excited that it's not that exciting that, like, anyone can make ads. It's, like, exciting that he can do it.

[Cody]

Right?

[Sam]

And, like, that's how I feel with a lot of the AI stuff. Like, it's cool that you can do it and you can just go prompted or I can, or somebody else can.

[Cody]

Yeah, dude, and I would love to go. We'll have to go deeper on a. On an AI episode in the future. You were talking about copywriting today on Twitter, but, like, where I think this relates to go to market is like, we're talking about, like, weeks of work and all these handoffs. And one of you guys made the point really early on that it's so easy to lose, like, dilute the meaning or, like, the original concept or, like, what makes it unique, like, what is the message you want to say? So easy for that to be diluted over time across different copywriters, different channel managers, et cetera, et cetera. I think AIs at this point where, like, we. I, like, I write a lot of the copy with AI, and I'm able to go straight from marketing summary to an incredibly comprehensive copywriting document in, like, 40 minutes or something. I. And I think there's even a scenario where that becomes, like, the e. Common email briefs. And it's like, one person can sit there and take their initial idea and concept and pull it really far down funnel and get what is multiple handoffs and weeks of work done in, like, a sitting. And I think that's kind of crazy.

[Sam]

Oh, dude. I'm like. So I'm trying to help, like, my. My brand team and, like, copy team to. To streamline, because again, you see that beast of the creative brief. And so I'm going to sit them down, like, later, so we can just show, like, how I would use AI to do it, but it's pretty much like taking the fireflies recording or like voice note of the kickoff, where you have like an hour brainstorm talking about the product. You have all the product details. Just Giving that to ChatGPT, say, hey, this is a past creative brief. Use this information about this. You know, you put it in the format of this creative brief and go do it. And I know, I think you said you did something similar. I know you said you, like, take. You record a loom, you upload it to Gemini, do that. You know, I'll do. I'll do a very similar thing. I'll use this app, I think it's called Flow or Whisper, where it's essentially just like a. You click a button on your computer and it's just like you. You speak and then it just transcribes that and put it in. So I'll do that with Chat GPT all the time. So, yeah, I agree. You can just take past work that you've done, give it a little bit more context and then just get a ton of output.

[Cody]

Yeah, 100%.

[Sam]

Can I say one thing about the design toolkit? Because I just want to second Connor's point to that. That's something we are working on as well for our design team. As it scales. We've got more designers, we're trying to do a lot of web testing and I realized especially we've been struggling with some new PDP rebuilds and working with a new UX designer and dev team. And we finally got, like, probably way too far into the process and, like, it just wasn't totally looking right. And we were just like, we just need to take the time. And the dev team even gave us feedback, like, it would help if we had this from your team, you know, if we knew exactly what it was. And so we did it. We essentially had our internal design team, like, redesign the pdp. We kind of fixed our typography because, like, we never loved some of it and kind of like redid the pdp. We're working on that kind of design, the toolkit or system. We're starting with E Comm, but, like, we're going to go into everywhere. Like, here's what we do for email, things like that, because we're really, we're really trying to scale and add more designers and, and move faster. And so far, dude, it's been insanely helpful. Like, the, the UX designer from the agency sent some designs back and, like, they were just like so much crisper. So Much more on brand and things like that. So I, I, I can't, you know, I can't like, stress the importance of that. And like, it's one of those things where it's like too much process sucks. Like, don't add too much process. But, like, sometimes you gotta add enough. And like, it actually helps you move faster when you nail it.

[Cody]

I mean, I liked what you said earlier about looking at the Go to market board and you're like, it's helpful to send to agencies because you've like completely connected the dots for the just enough launch where it's like, these are the Personas. This is what we wanted to look at. You can look at all these things together and you're just gonna get a way better sense of what our, you know, it's like the equivalent of a, did you call it a design playbook?

[Sam]

It's either like a toolkit or like a design system.

[Cody]

Yeah, sure, Design system. It's like the Go to market board for the Just Enough tint moisturizer is basically the equivalent of the design system for that one launch. You could just share that and be like, this is what stuff should look like if it's going to fit into our ecosystem.

[Sam]

Yeah, I've been big on that. We're also working on like a ad creative agency thing where it's like, we just have like, like, because I, I found, I found that we were like, pull, like anytime we brought on a new agency and we brought on a few to test out, like, we were pulling the same stuff over and over. They're all asking, what are your top ads? What are your value props? Where's, where's your research? Give us your reviews, give us your brand fonts, give us your dues and notes. So like, we just been stacking it all together and just like continuing to add it. So then if we have a new employee, new agency, it's just like, boom, here's the thing.

[Cody]

Yeah. You know, okay, so I'll say one thing quickly and then we can put a wrap on this pretty soon. But it's related to Go to market. I'd love your guys's thoughts because what we just talked about, power banks or just enough are great examples of like, hey, we've put together key value props, key messaging that's across all channels. You can ensure that at the initial launch you have that cohesiveness. You'd like to think that nine months from now, 12 months from now, we will have identified new value props. Or there might be a different hierarchy or a Different sort of like visual language that we're finding to work better. So do you guys have any systems in place for like, it's almost the equivalent of, you know, Connor, if you guys were going to relaunch one of the pan sets like that, you would do that and ensure that everything you've learned over the last year, two, three years is like reconsidered and re implemented across all channels. Do you guys do any sort of.

[Connor]

Like refreshes like that and like something where we take all of our learnings and like put it in a single spot so we're not like reinventing the wheel?

[Cody]

Yeah, it's almost like recreating a go to market like event, but given all the new information that you have. We're, we're in the midst of doing it for travel. We've had travel for 18 months now. We had a certain understanding of the product and we rolled it out in a certain way at the end of 2023. But today we've learned so much. But those learnings aren't properly appri applied across all channels. So it's almost like we need to redo the executive product summary, the marketing summary, and then re implement so that we have like what we feel is the best information consistently across all channels.

[Connor]

I wouldn't say we have like a great system for doing it. There's been cases where we've gone back and, and done a retrospect and then created like a new strategy based on that. So for example, last year when we were, when we were thinking about, all right, what, what takes knives to the next level? Like what, what are the things we need to do? Like the first step was just looking, all right, the last 12 months, like, what have we done for knives? Like, what's the performance of knives been? When have they like sold the best? What are the tactics that are performing the best and all the KPIs associated with them and then using that as like a jumping off point to decide, all right, the next 12 months looks like this. So not necessarily a relaunch as much as, hey, how do we continue this growth here? And that involved like doing a retrospect to understand what we have done and what we've learned and what's working and not working. And then that guides the roadmap moving forward. We've done it for. I should. We have done it for Hex Mills. Like when we launched Hex Mills, oh man, I think it was early 2023. Like it was a very underwhelming launch and we all were like this is one of the coolest products we've ever made and we probably just didn't like message this thing the right way or activate on the right channel. So that was a situation where we were going back and doing a retrospect from the perspective of this launch sucked. We know we can be better like so we audited the messaging, we audited the channel level tactics and then we rolled out new new like new tactics to like really enhance growth and it worked really well. So we will do it. But it like that situation was a lot more reactive than it was. Hey, we have always on like information gathering and consolidation process that we just always do for every single thing. But we should.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. I was just curious. It's something I, I frankly I don't think we do really well at all. Our paid social team, which is like that's obviously the channel that is iterating the most. There's like a hundred ads a week going up or whatever. So they always have the freshest stuff. It's. How does that kind of trickle back up or whatever. I don't know which way it's going. Trickling down, trickling up to refreshing the email welcome series for wallets or rings or travel or our landing pages and things like that. Like how are we just making that, that feedback loop as fast and then once we have something significant like as comprehensive as possible. Just things I'm thinking about. Dude, I think, I think this was a super fun episode. The last thing I'll say what I think will make for good episodes and we'll see if this is one of them is what is the information that the three of us are always asking for from one another. We all separately asked like, yeah, hey, I'd love to see what you guys are doing for go to market. There's something else recently we do our performance teams do weekly reports. We just shared that there's my. There's probably good episodes in the future. So depending on what people think of this one, this might be a more common format.

[Sam]

We did KPIs a few months back. I don't know what people thought about that one, but that was, that was another one.

[Cody]

True, true, true. So yeah, so we'll see. Any closing comments from you guys?

[Sam]

I liked it. What color shirt were you wearing next week?

[Connor]

Yeah, go back and forth between the light and dark.

[Cody]

More outfit coordination. I like it. Awesome. Well, that's a wrap on the episode. Thanks guys. All right, thank you again for listening. Hope you found this episode thankful if you did let us know on Twitter in the comments. We'll do more stuff like this where we'll share each other's internal documents and just chat through them. Thank you as always to our sponsors, Motion Rich Panel aftercell Prescient North Beam. As always, share this with your friends, your family, your pets, your colleagues, anyone who you think might be a marketing operator listener, we would appreciate. We'll see you guys next week. Bye.