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- [00:00]
Jason
All right. Welcome to episode 112. It's been a minute, Connor. I don't know if you and I have ever actually done it. I'm sure we've done an individual podcast, but it's been a while. Welcome to episode 112. Connor. How you doing?
- [00:11]
Connor
I'm doing well. I think this is Connor Max, like, second missed operators podcast. I think he has, like a 99.2% hit rate on these, but. But he's not here today, so we're gonna. We're gonna run the show. But I'm doing well. Beautiful day in Denver, Colorado. Can't wait to sit inside and look at it from my window while I'm. While I'm doing ecom all day.
- [00:30]
Jason
Connor, I like. I like the look. I like the hat, the stash, the flow. I feel like you're. You look like you're, like, fresh off, like a hiking trip or a ski trip. What's going on in your world?
- [00:39]
Connor
What is going on in my world? Well, the. The nice fellas at at Huckberry sent me this last Christmas. It's my. One of my new go to hats, dude. Ski season's fully over, but I'm. I'm training for a trail run right now. So that's been my. That's been my non ecom stuff, dude. I've gone fully. I know you're, like, you're a big weightlifter. I've gone fully in on, like, all the. All the zone two, like, how to. How to train zone two, like, threshold climb. Like, I got. I'm like, deep in that rabbit hole right now, and it's been fun because I haven't never like, fully gone on, like, a true plan for, like, aerobic endurance training. So that's been my new. That's kind of been the new thing I've been nerding out on. I got my, like, my clawed personal trainer, nutritionist just fully dialed in right now, giving me weekly plans. And it's been fun. It's. I'm not. I'm not built like a runner, so it's been cool to, like, go down that rabbit hole.
- [01:37]
Jason
I was gonna say. I see, like, the traps right now, like, you're the only guy who can like, not lift and do green juices and. And go run and still have. Still have shoulders and traps like that.
- [01:45]
Connor
I'm jealous, dude. You build the foundation. It was. It was 12 years of. Of heavy weightlifting in high school and. And after that, it's like, it hasn't gone away. So now. Now I'M on the running train and we'll see, see what happens. But yeah, I got a trail run in, in mid July in Aspen, Colorado so that'll be interesting. It's like I'll be like running at 10,000ft elevation. I'm going to go out there and stay with bar from Boost co for the week and acclimate and then hopefully get a decent time. And it's been yeah, you know, it's fun to have something just to like train towards. You know. I typically don't. It's just like lifestyle stuff and I like doing it. But yeah, it's been fun to actually have like this thing that I'm. That I'm working towards and have a plan that builds into it and it's certainly easier to like follow the plan when you know it's contributing towards like some, some moment in time. So it's been cool. How about you? Are you. What's. What's going on in your and your like health, wellness, recreation?
- [02:41]
Jason
Dude, it's good. I started playing golf again. I you know, had a hip surgery like a year ago and had some setbacks. So, so I'm just training. I'm. I go, I go back and forth but I training in the garage. I was going to the gym most mornings and now that it's warm I have like a pretty good setup. I have like trap bar, I have a tonal. I have some, some kettlebells in the garage. So yeah, just training a very, very functional training like getting like a 30 minute lift most mornings I have my computer open. Doing some cloud sessions while, while I'm doing it trying to like trick that out. I might even buy like a, like a TV as a monitor for it. Um, you know you can't ever miss a moment. But yeah, just mo. Mostly lifting. I, I need to get better at, at finding some aerobic stuff that I like even just some like low level zone 2. You know that's the thing I think my heart is. My heart could use a little bit of work and just like helps with overall you know, health, health and, and stress. But it's. But, but it's good trying, trying to do it. You know, 30 minutes a day between whatever, you know, sleepless nights and kid stuff but always got to do it. So for me it's more just like keeping dad bod away.
- [03:40]
Connor
So I'm painting this picture right now. It's like Cody in his. In his home garage gym laptop perked up like prompts Claude. Then after he. That's in between sets then Claude's doing its thing like autonomously. Then Cody goes and does a set and then like two checks in between. Is this what's going on my wife?
- [03:58]
Jason
Because, like, I. Sometimes I'll work out. If, if I can't work out in the morning, I'll get like a 20 minute workout in once I get home, but I'm like, I'll do it. Like, I'll have a few kettlebells and I'll like do it while watching the kids and like trying to get dinner ready while like Claude and I was doing some like, some like continuous kettlebell stuff and I was telling my wife, like, this is perfect. I do five minutes straight of this, two minutes of cloud, five minutes of this.
- [04:19]
Connor
I love that.
- [04:19]
Jason
It's perfect.
- [04:20]
Connor
So awesome. What a, what a, what a sequence.
- [04:22]
Jason
Yeah, dude. Tonal.
- [04:24]
Connor
How is tonal? What's the deal with that?
- [04:26]
Jason
It's pretty sick. It's nice because you get, you, you get like the full. And then, you know, eventually we'll, we'll talk about marketing. But Tonal is actually, I think, a really cool company. Rob Webb was like, you know, used to be head of growth there and I think he's at Magic Mine now, so. So shout out. Shout out to Rob. I don't know if he's a listener or not, but it's awesome. It's like a cable machine. It's got all of the, the technology in it so you can like do classes and stuff like that. I don't do it, so I don't have a live and active, so I really just do like, if you have like the membership that's live, you can do all of their like, classes and workouts, but you can also like pick exercises and it'll like save your volume and all of that stuff. And so you can actually, you know, make sure you're getting progressive overload and stuff. It's really cool because you have like different methods. So you go like eccentric isometric. Like there's a lot of really cool stuff that you can do with it and you can just like push it, you know, pretty heavy. So it's just like a super efficient way where it just goes on the wall. So, yeah, big, big, big fan. I don't. So I don't have any like dumbbells in there. I just do tonal and then I have kettlebells, a trap, trap bar. I have a barbell. So I do a lot of like landmine work, but pretty, pretty, pretty efficient in there.
- [05:33]
Connor
I'm curious how tonal is doing these days. I think they were a Covid company, right? And like, I imagine they popped off during COVID when no one was going to the gym. And I'm curious. I don't. I don't know. I do think home gyms in general have, like, I think Covid. I don't think those. I think those continue to grow. Like, it seem. At least it seems to. To be that way.
- [05:53]
Jason
I know. I was even thinking about Peloton's public so we can look. But I was thinking about it, but,
- [05:57]
Connor
like, yeah, I don't know anything good.
- [05:58]
Jason
I know. And some of those, like, I think I'm a little, like, nostalgic, if that's the right word, to like, some of these, like, you know, 2020 era D2C brands like Comator and stuff like that, they're like, they're probably not doing great as businesses. They're probably really struggled and probably raised too much. But, like, it was like, peak. And like, I just. I did love that era and, like, I do think there were some, like, really cool brands that, you know, came out of it. Like, I think Combat is really cool. It's just like, they're just like hard business models, and they don't really necessarily work that well. Even hellofresh, I feel like, is there a little bit where it's like a great thing, it's a great service, they're a great brand, but, like, I just don't know if the business model is viable.
- [06:38]
Connor
I mean, Peloton stock looks good. In the last month, it's up 34%, but in the last year, it's down 22%. So I still. I still rip my Peloton every. Every now and again. I'm not usually doing the classes anymore. I usually just do, like, the. Just ride, and I'm just, like, taking it easy on some Zone 2 stuff. But, yeah, I think I agree with you. It is a tough space.
- [06:57]
Jason
Here's what I want to talk about today. Creative flywheels, I think I think this will be a fun one. The original question that was posed from. From a, you know, listener was like, what's the flywheel look like? What's the flow look from, like, influencer to paid? And I was like, hey, look, this could be actually just like a really good overall creative Flywheel discussion. So I'd love to hear how you guys do it, how you think about it. And what I said on the stage, what I mean by flywheel is like, you know, how I'm thinking about it at least is like, how are you leveraging content that teams are creating across all different avenues to create leverage and you know, ultimately feed the ad account. Obviously there's, there's a ton of content needs that's outside of the ad account and definitely want to chat about them. But like what does the flow look like to feed them? We've talked about that a lot of like TikTok shop can feed it or whatever. So I know you guys do a lot of like production stuff. I'm very excited to ask about that because we just did some big production stuff. How you budget for content like that? That's kind of the conversation I want to have. So let me, let me start by asking you about it. Like what are your sources of content? What do you make? What percentage of your ad account is like net new just produced for ads for like meta ads? What percent is coming from influencer from partnerships from TikTok? How do you guys kind of like break up your ad account?
- [08:12]
Connor
I would say we probably have. This is, this is totally off the top of my head, so I'll have to QA these numbers. But I would guess that like a third of our ad account is probably creator led stuff. Whether it's, you know, anywhere from Gordon Ramsay to, you know, kind of Jane Smith who has, you know, 5,000 followers but makes great ads that convert. So that's probably a third of it, 25% depending on the time of the year.
- [08:40]
Jason
And is that like partnerships usually or is that kind of split between partnerships and brand handle?
- [08:45]
Connor
Split. But a lot of partnership ads, again I wouldn't, I don't know exactly how much but a lot of it is like you know, chef name with hexclad partnership ad. And then we run a lot of it. Like we run a lot of Gordon stuff from our brand handle as well. So I'd say about a third of it's that, I would say about maybe 20 to 25% is like, or maybe higher is, is Maybe up to 33% is stuff that we are like video that we producing in our studio. So think like more higher production value stuff like product hype, real type assets that, that we're making. Some of it's more like YouTube ads that we're then doing cut downs on. But like really high fidelity stuff that's actually been a bucket of content that we really have been been focusing on beefing up in the last two years. And if you go look at our ad library now, a lot of our content is more higher fidelity stuff. Whereas like two years ago that number on the like lo fi creator led stuff was probably up to like 50%, you know, maybe even 60%. We just wanted to like introduce more hi fi, more premium feeling assets into the account. And then I'd say the other like the last 25 to 30% is just like static ads that, that our designers are going in and doing more like graphic treatments on. So I think those are like, generally the three core buckets that most brands have is like native creator LED stuff, more higher fidelity kind of shot stuff you're shooting or an agency shooting in a studio. And then you have your just like straight up more graphic treated ads. And then obviously within that there's like a massive, you know, if you drill down one light, one level deeper, there's a huge like split of like, what are the angles we're hitting, what are the products we're hitting, what are the creators we're hitting. But I think those are generally the, the three buckets, like the highest level of, of bucket. And you know, we just like, we, we operate. I'm curious what your process is, but like, I want to mention this because I actually think this is something that is, is like the obvious thing to do for most brands, but I think a lot of brands like get so, so in the weeds and like, they're almost like five feet from their ad account and all the creative they're producing at any given time that they don't, they don't lean into this. But like, we create a plan every quarter. So like, we have a, we operate on like quarterly sprints for the entire growth team that's not unique to paid media Creative. But like, every plan, every quarter we run through this process of like, creating a plan that we're going to go and try to produce against. And like, we're very thoughtful and intentional about not trying to like, fill up every creative testing slot in this plan because we also want to have the space to like, react and iterate on things intra quarter. But like, we create a plan every single quarter. We're in the process of doing it right now. It'll probably be finalized in the next week or two. And then like, that's the bible for what we go and produce against. And like, that just allows us to zoom out and kind of say, hey, what's working? Let's go produce more stuff like that. What's. What are we not doing at all that we think has upside? Like, let's go produce more stuff like that. Like, there are certain creator niches right now and certain ad angles that we think creators can bring to life that, like, we just think we need to go and create stronger content pillars against, like, that. That's a huge part of our creative plan. And then we get into the quarter and it's really easy for us to look at and say, hey, we want to. We. We think we're not hitting this angle enough. Like, what are all the ways that we can go and do it? Well, we can go work with these creators. We could do this type of, like, comparison shoot in our studio. We can do these types of, like, graphic treatments. And now we have, like, a very. I think by the end of the quarter, we'll have, like, a very robust grouping of ads that, like, hit on that. On that angle. And, and, like, that's the whole goal with having these, like, roadmaps. But I think not enough brands are, are doing that, at least in my experience. Like, you have too many people that are just thinking, like, one week at a time or two weeks at a time. And like, when you do that, you can't zoom out and think about those bigger. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's your. What's. Yeah. So what's like the jrb? Well, well, let me, Let me actually ask you the first. The question you asked me first. Like, what's your, like, ad account makeup in terms of, like, content types and where you're getting it from? And then, like, yeah, I'm curious what your sort of, like, roadmap plan or process looks like.
- [12:53]
Sponsor
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- [13:46]
Jason
I'm much better at strategy than I am about operations. I'm actually, like, just absolutely awful about operations. So Like, I need to surround myself with people that are. That are good at that. Yeah. Even on the creator stuff you mentioned, like, there's also different, like, even ways to break that down because obviously you have your micros, you have your influencers. Gordon, I know you guys are doing production stuff with which, like, I love pairing those things together. So, yeah, I love that.
- [14:09]
Connor
I'm happy to break into that too. After this. We can talk about, like, how we, how we look at those deals and where that content is coming from.
- [14:15]
Jason
Definitely love that. So, yeah, we have, let's say, creator stuff. So we, we have. We use Superloom as, you know, you know, for influencer. So they do a majority of our partnership ads. We have two different kind of pipelines that we use for that. So I'll call that, like, influencer. It's creator. One of it is purely a UGC play. And so we'll, we'll. It's still, it's still partnership ads and these are still like, people that you want partnership rights to. They might be different sizes. Just all depends on the deal and the negotiations. So some of them are micros, but they're not like, you know, these are not like $300 per video. Like, these are still like, people that have some, some following. So some of them will be pure ugc. People don't post, but they're just contracted for ads. We're doing less and less of that for a few reasons. And so there's a lot of like, you know, paid influencer to organic pipeline. It's just, we find it works better. What's working really well is just that whole, like, yapper thing. It's like, no edits. Like, weekly. We'll be in team meetings. And I'm like, guys, look, this is like, there's no edits on this one. Like, I don't think this is a good ad, and I think that's why it's performing well. And I'm like, I'm trying to throw out all of those, like, conventional practices of like, oh, there's no hook. There's that. Yeah. So I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, trying to be so humble about. Maybe that's why we're. If not, like, because I'll look at stuff. I'm like, I don't. I don't know if that's like, there's no hook, but I'm like. And then we launch something and it's like, great. You know, it's crushes. So that's like our influencer not to digress too much, that's like our influencer pipeline. The thing that works so well about that is, you know, that program Stan, like the influencer program stands itself up pretty well. We like at least break even on that and we don't pay extra for most of that content. Superglim is just really good at doing the deals. And so like it's, it's a really great flywheel, I think. I think a flywheel is something where it's like, it compounds, you know, and like one thing feeds the other. So it's like there's really like almost very little cost of that content if we're breaking even at the very, you know, at least on the influencer side. And so that's allowed us to scale it up pretty quickly and, you know, take some bigger swings. And so that's our like influencer pipeline we have, you know, again, we can go into it. What we'll do is we have some people we work with internally as well. Like somebody crushes. We'll put them on a roster, you know, and be like, hey, we'd love to work with you for three months, six months, give them upcoming launches. So, you know, that is, that is kind of our main influencer one. Then we have, you know, creators. And I think this is where we could get better. Um, we've never really had like pure UGC perform well. And you know, that's like the whole like, hey, I'm going to find a creator on backstage and brief them. I think I have many hypotheses. It never really worked for us. What I've seen more and more of people talking about lately, like, it actually doesn't work as well as it used to. That whole like scripted. Let me give you a brief again. People are just more numb to ads. So that's where that whole yapper thing is. So we are experimenting a lot and we are trying a bunch of new things and like determined to crack it. But I think the more organic it feels like we're going for the whole yapper stuff. We're always testing the brief. So we're using a few different like, tools to find these creators. I don't know, do you guys do any, like, how do you guys find your like, micro creators that are not influencers if you're just looking for content?
- [17:28]
Connor
Yeah, well, first off, to like comment on your point of how you're briefing creators, like, same. We do not give people scripts ever. Like, we just don't. We give them bullet points. We say, hey, we want you to talk about these things, we give them visuals we want them to, to show. But like we do not do that either. And if you go look at our ad account and you're like to organize it or in motion or in meta by the creator led ads and you look at the ones that are scaling like it is stuff that feels more yappery, like it feels authentic. It's. We clearly didn't give them a word by word script. So that's how we approach that. In the past when we've been thinking about like non influencer creators, it's been a super manual process. Like we have a really awesome influencer team and like they handle all things comms or creator right? Just anybody where it's like, hey, we want to go and activate this ad type and here's the type of creators like they're going out and they're sourcing those creators and then they'll pass them back to our paid team and they'll say hey, we like person A, D and E but not these other seven people. Let's go try to sign a deal with them. Which works, but it's just a little slow and it's very intensive on the influencer team. So actually what, what we did this year which is working really well is you know, there's a lot of discourse about hiring creators inhouse, which I think is a great idea. However, I think when you do that you kind of limit yourself to that creator style or that handful of creator styles. So we've actually done a slightly different approach where we're actually working with this woman now who is a freelancer of the she, she's not a full time employee but like we have her on a certain number of hours per week and we might ramp it up or down depending on the time of the year, like our marketing calendar. But this, this woman has like this huge roster of creators. So she's basically become this like broker between us as a brand and this like huge roster of creators. So what's cool now is we go to her and we say, hey Danica, like here's the ad we're trying to make, here's the moment we have the Persona we want to hit the new product we have. And then she's going into her roster of creators and saying I think these are the right people to bring this message into your ad account. And that's been amazing because it allows us to activate with more micro creators, it allows us to move faster. Because now our influencer team doesn't have to go and like start from Scratch every time when it comes to sourcing. And like, this is like all this woman does is like create relationships with creators. So like, when we go to her, she knows who we want to activate with. And then it's the same thing as you just said. Like, once we find someone who works, like, we'll, we'll reactivate with them again and again and again and again. So like now in our ad account, there's like, you know, five to 10 smaller creators that we are activating with over and over again because they performed well. And like that, that's that Flywheel for us. Like, we bring them in through this freelancer we're working with. We test their ads, and then if it works like you said, we'll go and say, hey, we have. We'll just activate them again both on evergreen stuff, new product stuff. Like, hey, if you made a cookware ad that works, we're probably going to activate you for nies. If you made a evergreen ad that works, we probably want to activate you for our summer sale, like whatever it is. And that's like the creator Flywheel.
- [20:34]
Jason
And I think that's like replacing a lot of agencies. That's kind of what we used to use agencies for. We have used agencies who really did a similar thing and now we're kind of building it very similar thing internally combination. We're using like a software that has like a services component that we're testing. Like we're not sure on, but just to kind of make a lot like the finding people easier. So I think however you do it, whether it's an agency, whether it's internal. Yeah, you need some type of like a network of creators. Are these like, what. What kind of creators are they? Because like, what I've seen is like what works well for this stuff is like organic creators who have some type of a following and they're not influencers or more. Maybe more of like a tiktoker, but like they're not like the backstage actor who, you know, is being paid to read a script. Like there's some type of a actual creator. They're just not a huge creator. But they're, they're not charging like for us, we're paying hundreds of dollars per video, not thousands per video.
- [21:29]
Connor
Yep, same here. Yeah, they're not, they're not actors. Like most of them do have some, some social presence, but it's not, it's usually like 10k to 50k. And it seems like what they're doing mainly is making ads and that's where their Deal flow and comp comes in and like I think to like hit on your point like that is like the alpha is in the ability to like source and brief and produce content quickly. So like that's, that's where you need and like that's where I think we've got alpha this year is why is by activating with this freelancer I mentioned and now we're moving so much quicker.
- [22:03]
Jason
Yeah. How quickly can you go from idea to ad launched?
- [22:07]
Connor
Like weeks now where that might have taken, you know, a month or two depending on what we were trying to do with them prior when we're the ones going out.
- [22:15]
Jason
I wanted to get today's. My, my goal is to get today's. I don't know if you've seen people do that but like that to me is the goal and that's again I'm just, we're slow to build out the team in terms of what I need. We're, we're likely going to hire a freelancer as like a big project to build this out internally and have hopefully creators internally starting freelance going to a full time job where it's like hey I, my growth team has this idea when we reviewed content on Monday, I launched that on Wednesday, I launched that on Friday. Something like that is the goal and by the end of the year we will, we will get there. I know that there are teams that are there so obviously weeks is so much better than it used to be. But I feel like for the speed of social that's what's, that's what's needed
- [22:56]
Connor
I think especially once you get like different like as you start to get that process going and you have different creators in different stages. Like you can get to a point where you have like new ad, new creator led ads coming in every single week and now you're just like you have you know, 15 different creators all the way from like just getting brief to producing content and then like that flywheel really starts to show up. But like I think, I think what's really important for brands is you need to think about like what, what are we most qualified to do that an agency will never do better than we can, which is like selecting the creators, selecting the narrative briefing in these creators. Like no one's going to know your brand at an agency better than you do in house. So like that's the part that like we've really internalized and then what's the part that is going to like be a drag on the agency or on the in house team? Well it's like the constant comms and sourcing of of like creators where like our influencer team, yes that's part of their job but they're also managing our brand ambassadors. They're also managing all of our organic social comms. Like they have a lot on their plate. They're managing like new initiatives within influencer. Like hey, we want to go and activate and be more present on YouTube or whatever. Like how do we do that? So we, that's how we've thought about like why outsource that but not the other stuff. Well it's like we just think a freelancer that only thinks about creative relationships and has this like huge roster of relationships that we don't have relationships with those people. Like that's, that's the, the thing that we should outsource and is going to allow us to like kind of create a one plus one equals five situation.
- [24:27]
Jason
Marketing operators I want to challenge how you think about post purchase. You zoom out. Post purchase isn't a tactic, it's a system. It's your cart, your checkout logic, your one click upsells, how you increase AOV revenue procession profit per session. That's your confirmation page. It's all of that system together. The entire flow determines how much incremental revenue that you can make per order. That's why ROKT After Sell isn't just an upsell tool, it's a design system. For the full post purchase experience. ROKT After Sale gives you one unified system. A smart cart and checkout offers. One click post purchase upsells and thank you page monetization with ROKT Thanks. And here's where it becomes very strategic. Beyond the 30% revenue per visitor lift, ROKT After Sale opens a monetization layer that most operators haven't fully priced into their unit economics or with Rock Network products, run the math on your own volume. At 50k orders a month, that's 15 to 25k in pure profit. With rock banks at 100k, it's 30 to 50k. I'm not great at math, but I love those numbers. Straight to the bottom line as well. Every month from a page your customer is already landing on won't affect conversion rate, just free money you can pocket at the end of the month. No inventory, no operational lift, no contracts to lock you in. And this is not just for Shopify native brands anymore. Whatever platform you're on, ROKT After Sales supports it. Operators listeners can activate ROKT thanks and get the full after sales suite for a year or grab an extended 60 day trial to test post purchase performance, go to aftercell.com operators. Build the system once and let it compound. For me, this is head of creator. It's going to oversee social as well. But for me this is like the whole like, you know, my bet is like this is the next head of growth is like it's, it's head of creator where they're almost like a creative director for creators, if that makes sense. So they're not, it's, it's separate from influencer. They're not going to influencer parties and stuff like that. Like they're, you know, they're not skating like influencers. Like there is an overlap but they are any, anything that, where you need content from creators, they are, you know, owning that and it'll be across organic and, and paid. But that's what we're doing. And kind of a very similar thing that you've done with the freelancer. We're just trying to kind of build that internally. We're going to start freelance but do like a freelance to, to full time thing. But I think especially at scale, like you know, smaller brands, it might be your influencer team, it might be your growth team, whatever it is, your social team. But at scale, I think that that's just one of the highest leverage roles. And it's like the way I'm thinking about it is kind of like building an internal agency. Like that's actually like what I'm trying to do. And I know like some larger brands talk about it like that, like Airbnb has their agency like internally it's like it's kind of doing like that. It's like a very different culture. Like you know, they're like for us it would even be across the street in a different office. Office where our studio is. But like yeah, that's, that's the goal is just to have people who are just shipping content full time, you know, and just having. I just want to have like three or four creators running around doing that again. Like and those, those would be like three, four creators who are, whether they're freelancers or full time, like this is the end state. Like they're 40 hours a week shooting ads, you know, shooting content. And then, and then it would also be a lot of people that are either on a roster or we just like know their rates and they're easy to go to and be like, hey, can you shoot this for us? Here's 300, here's 500, you know, and you don't have to like renegotiate you don't have to like give them that much context. So I just think there's so much leverage in that. And then you have. Are you guys doing any TikTok shop content on meta?
- [27:44]
Connor
So that's like the newest flywheel that we're like dipping our toes in. We actually just went and bought rights, unlimited rights from like five or 10 creators that were now like putting into post production. That, that process has been a little bit slow because it's the first time we've done it here. And like we, we reached out to some of these folks and they're like $5,000, like, I'm not paying you $5,000 for. Exactly. But like, then we, so it was just a volume game. Then we found the people that were like, yeah, we'll, we'll sell this content to you for 500 bucks and you can use it in perpetuity forever. And like, they're happy with that because it's just going to get more awareness of them as a creator and an affiliate. And like they're already seeing good affiliate results with TikTok Shop with us. Like, all right, great. This is just gonna like enhance that. So that's the flywheel we're working on right now. We have like, I think five to ten pieces of content in the hopper that we're gonna test with and then depending on how well those perform, we're gonna like try to make that a more robust always on Flywheel. But for now it's just been our like in affiliate lead going in, looking at content, seeing which ones are selling the best, sending that over to our paid creative team and saying, hey, here's the stuff that's working the best. Here's the stuff that I think is the most like Dr. Product focus, what do you want? And then we're going and negotiating with those people. So it's been a little clunky upfront just because it's a new flywheel for us. But that's one that I'm, I'm very excited on and I'm hoping that can fill like, I just think like the yapper style content. Like TikTok shop affiliates are the most good at that because they need to sell product to, to like eat and make money. So I'm excited to see how those perform in our meta account.
- [29:14]
Jason
Let's say we're one step ahead of you, so I'm not going to pretend I have it figured out, but I'll, I'll give you, you know, what I've learned so far because we're we're starting to get some winners. So it's very much of a volume play. We're using Yuka. They're. I guess they're. They have like a beta where they're trying to request rights. So you can either request a flat dollar amount or percentage. We haven't had anyone take. Yeah, Yuka. It's like a TikTok shop software. We haven't had anybody accept the percentage yet. But I really hope that people. People will because then it's like, all right, I'm just going to request on every single piece. Like there's just no harm on like every single piece. It's very much a volume play. These are. Yeah. E U K A. These are, you know, hundreds of dollars per video. Like, this is probably your cheapest per video piece of content that you request. We are figuring out the right amount to request because to. To get like the acceptance rate, you know, whatever. So not a lot of people are accepting right now. But we're trying to go a volume play and because we've gotten some winners, you know, and it's very. It's. It's very cheap. It's like just a volume play. You have. Again, trying to be humble. We. I have no idea what's going to perform on this stuff. Like, I don't think it's easy to go through and be like, oh, it's that one. So it's like, let's just request a lot. Let's get a lot of people accepting. Let's get a lot launched. It's very low cost and. And you know, get a few winners. What we've seen again. Yeah, for that note, it's. It's so organic. These tiktokers are really good at, you know, yapping. It's. It's shot in a way where it's just so not an ad. So it gets a lot of reels delivery that it has improved new reach for us. Again, like not a lot of their head is cut off. It's like it's so imperfect and this is just what I believe consumers want now. And so. So yeah, highly recommend it especially once you get success. Then it's just like. It's just blocking, tackling and scaling it up. So we're in the process of trying to do that and figure out how we get more accepted and how we just get as many bids in as possible. But I believe that's a. That's one of the best flywheels you can have. Obviously Comfort talks about it a lot. I know cuts it's been really successful for cuts as well.
- [31:16]
Connor
I'm gonna send Yuka to our team
- [31:18]
Jason
and yeah, it's a beta, but I can. Let me reach out to them. I just think also, like, even on the whole like super bloom stuff, the influencer stuff we were doing, like when you tell somebody to make an ad, even if you're saying, hey, we want organic inspo, like, yep. Like, I just feel like when they know it's an ad, it's different versus, like if it's an organic piece, it's just like it comes off different. And so I just, I actually really love that, like switching us to organic social again. I don't know if you guys are doing anything. We are finding a ton of success with organic social, especially if it's like a creator led organic social. Like, you know, we just launched this Emily de Janado thing and like two days before launch, I like sent it to my team and like, I wouldn't say they're performing amazing, but they're performing like above average compared to everything else. I was like, here's all the organic stuff that I saw our team working on and that she sent over, like, just launch it all, you know, And I really think everybody should have a campaign and a flywheel for organic social reels because that's where if you pay attention to meta's earnings reports and all that, like, that's where all the growth is of users and engagement. They're now trying to get people actually back on Facebook and they're, they're hopefully it's a little game for some people. They're trying to grow Facebook and they're incentivizing creators to post on Facebook and you know, reels and stuff. But right now it's all been reels. And so if you want new reach and to reach new users and where people are, you have to get reels delivery. And what better way to do that than by getting organic reels? So highly bullish on that. And it's been obviously something that we're working on, like scaling up like creator organic social programs. So we're starting to test, you know, some of that now. That's like stuff that is made for organic social and ads. But even our like creator or like brand organic social that does well. I've been shocked how well it's actually worked.
- [32:58]
Connor
So that's the flywheel. We haven't like, it's on my list to try, but we just, we're trying to TikTok shop affiliate stuff first because it's, it's More in line with like what, what has worked with us.
- [33:09]
Jason
Totally.
- [33:09]
Connor
I do want, I need that we do need to try like even if they require slight recuts because most of our like a lot of our creator LED reels if you go look are they're really engaging but they're just like they're not ads. Right. They're very much like hey, here's this recipe. I'm making stuff like that. So. But I am, I am excited about that just to see what, yeah. See what comes of it. I'm curious, I want to ask you, I want, I want to like move up, up the, the ladder here and talk about like creator LED stuff that's a little bit more higher ticket because I'm curious, I want to ask how you are structuring that because we've totally, totally changed up how we're structuring those deals where historically we might have signed like a 12 year or a 12 month deal that has you know, organic deliverables, paid deliverables, all the white listing stuff, event appearances. You have to come into our studio X days per week. And now we've, we've really shifted and pivoted towards saying hey, let's just do the bare minimum that we know is going to drive performance here over a much shorter period of time and, and like test that out with like a 3 to 6 months usage and then if it works like go into, go into a bigger deal. So like for us for example we work with Outer Signal and like one of the cool things about Outer Signal is like the, the Persona stuff that it gives you. So based on some of the Personas that they, that they gave us which
- [34:36]
Jason
is like their Persona stuff is so good. We use it for everything. It's so good.
- [34:40]
Connor
Yeah, it's amazing. It's super detailed. And so like one of the ones that we found was what is called like the executive epicurean which is this kind of like high achieving person that is like an executive high earner. You know, they're an entrepreneur or a doctor or whatever. Like kind of you know you think of when you think about like like a high alpha person and a high achieving role and they're trying to optimize our.
- [35:03]
Jason
One of us are cut you off. One of our Personas is the high performance execration.
- [35:07]
Connor
One of ours really. Okay, so, so based on that like I've also, I've always thought we should go and like activate some ads with the like the tech entrepreneur who's like I like I, I perform high in every aspect of my life and cookies. No, cooking's no different. So what we're doing is we're actually doing an ad deal with Sahil Bloom and that deal is like we. I think he hits that Persona perfectly. And like he already owns Hexclad. I see it show up a little bit organically in his YouTube content. He is a content creator, right? Did he buy.
- [35:37]
Jason
You saw him in Outer Signal?
- [35:39]
Connor
No, we actually seated him a long time ago. But I think I, I think he had already had some products and he's like, oh, I love it. I'm like, oh, let us send you more. And like, and he's like, oh, this, these are great. So like organically loves our content. Check number one or our products. Check number one. Check number two. He's a creator, so we're not bringing him into the studio. Like he's going to make it super native, super authentic. He's a YouTuber, which is a channel we're trying to show up on more. So he'll create it for YouTube and then we'll do cut downs for paid social and like that's a deal where we're not signing like a 12 month deal with him, we're signing a 3 month deal with him that's part flat fee, part percent of spend with a cap and then we will decide if we want to like expand that deal moving forward. So like that's, that's been the approach with like, that's been a big shift in how we sign these like larger influencer deals. And it just, I think that's the way to do it because it's like the perfect balance. Like you're giving the creator some upside here, but you're also hedging in case it doesn't work that well and you don't, you know, for, for us, like we want to spend, you know, at least not, we don't need to spend half a million on it, but we probably want to spend like 3,250, $300,000 on his ads to feel like we're getting a really nice roi, which I think is possible over the course of three months. And then we can go and expand it if, if it does work. So like that's, that's like the other like moving upstream to like the higher ticket influencer creator flywheel. Like that's been a, a big shift in how we do those things and those deals get signed so much quicker when you don't have event deliverables and shoot day deliverables and organic post deliverables. Like those deals Just get dragged on and on and on because those influencer managers, but like a lot of times they're like nitpicking over all these different things. It's like, no, no, no. Like let's just boil it down to what actually drives an roi, which for us is paid ads with creators and influencers and then we can add in those things later on if we want to. And that's been like a really amazing shift for us as a brand. And we've been able to sign these like larger creator deals quicker because of just the boiled down deliverables. The furthest end is the creators that we are doing like huge bigger activations on. And for those we have just like full like we have a bi weekly production meeting between our content team who does really function as like an internal, you know, agency for the whole org, where like when we're doing these larger activations, like we did a word, we did this deal with this Canadian NHL player and like we shot like a really hi Fi YouTube ad that will do cut downs in metaphor. We're doing a bunch of organic social stuff. I think he had an event. So for those we were just having like you know, pretty fully fleshed out kickoff calls where just to make sure that every single team that has a deliverable related to them knows that they have a deliverable related to them. And we can create a plan to make sure we're getting the most out of that on that shoot day. Because that's when we're like going to, you know, Canada in this case and doing a full on shoot. And I've just seen it too many times where it's like, hey, we're three weeks out, two weeks out from the shoot and like so and so didn't know that we were even doing that. And now we're like rushing to get a paid brief in and you just have to build those. Like you just build out a process to make sure that you're maximizing those shoot days.
- [38:48]
Jason
We talk about incrementality a lot, but how do you actually operationalize it to make your business better? That is one thing that I've been really leaning in with my team recently and House has played a tremendous role. We use it for all of our experiments, all of our geolift testing, but we now use it for our MMM as well. I've been a design partner, I've been one of the early design partners on houses. CMM C stands for causal. So it's one of the only MMMs, if not the only mmm that I've seen that's actually using your causal experiments to build the model. And so that allows me to trust the data so much more. So it's not a black box. So it actually informs our roadmap and has been so crucial for allowing us to operationalize around incrementality. The Houzz team is world class. I can't speak highly enough about them. They've also built a really amazing community with some of the best DTC growth operators out there. They have a few exciting events coming up soon that they call the Houzz Growth Lab. One is in LA on May 19th and the other is in New York on May 21st. I highly recommend checking it out if you're in the area. If you want to check it out, learn a little bit more about cmm, go to house IO operators to start making better data driven decisions today. So we should do like an updated process meeting because like that's the hardest part and I'm like jumping back in a little bit more of like how do you know, how do you get all of this stuff done? Especially like launches and whatever. Like it would be cool to do an updated one but. But yeah, so similar. I mean that's really exciting to hear. Yeah, we never really did the big stuff. Like the only time we do events is like we just did this thing with Emily that was in the deal and in the contract. Normally it's really just more of a standard influencer thing. Again, superbloom handles most of our, especially the bigger ones for those deals we are primarily looking for paid usage. When we underrate the deals, we look at it that way. We don't expect to be profitable or break even on the influencer side. It's just not, not possible with the rates that you get and whatever the value is that. So the way that we look at it, we have a certain content efficiency. You know, we look for, you know, we talk about it but we, we attempt to spend 10 times the amount that we spend on, on the content on the media. So if we spend 10k, we need to spend 100k behind it. It's at least the goal. What we do is most of this content is a Instagram story first and it's just, it's how the deals work. It's usually like the most cost effective way to do it. And so what we'll do is whatever those drive organically, we'll subtract that from the cost of the content. So you know, we had one large creator, she's 30K. Her, her, you know, we had to do a three month deal with her. Like we, we would not do a three month deal unless we had to. The thing that gave us confidence, it was like the biggest deal for us at the time is she was just a known creator who crushed, you know, like have talked to other brands. So she's you know, work really, really well for I've seen, you know a lot was just really good fit. So she was first bet and like crushed like she sold out of actually one of our holiday kits. Like perfect timing that we wouldn't have sold out of. But it was, you know again a three month dealer that was like, that was like a bet and the biggest investment, you know. But so her first Instagram story essentially broke even, drove, drove, you know, broke even, which we were not expecting. So then like her paid media was just like icing on the cake kind of and we were able to spend a few hundred thousand on it, but it was great. Her next one, I don't want to say flop, but let's call it like, you know, made a third of the revenue back. So we just subtract that number from the content cost and so if it was, I'm just making up numbers, was 10k for content she drove 2k. Well now it's at 8 8k. So now we need to spend 80k on it in 30 days. That's primarily how we look at it. And then every creator influencer handles, you know, renewals differently but we usually go 30 days rights. And my growth team, when we come up on the end of it, we'll just forecast and now we have this cool cloud tool that'll do it. But we just forecast what we think the next 30 days content efficiency is. And as long as we're hitting our media KPIs and we forecast that we'll keep it in that range. Then we'll go to our influencer team to do a renewal. But that's primarily it. And we've done, I would say two larger deals. The second one that we did, you and I have talked about has just wrapped up same creator you guys have, have, have worked with and you guys did a pretty large deal with I would say good performance, not excellent. We probably like a 17% content efficiency that's just looking at meta. Like so much of this is the contracts that you're able to get. And we had it on TikTok, we had it on YouTube. Like if the more I think the biggest thing of this entire episode that we're not talking about enough is like the leverage and the efficiency is like, how can you get the most out of your creative? Like, yes, it has to perform, but like, how can you use it across different channels and have like one work stream, you know, really, really funneling other stuff. But if we just look at meta, you know, 17%, not exactly what we wanted, drove super high net new, not amazing like Darth V. I actually think that's a good thing. But that was like a 30 day and we're like, hey, it was a bet. We don't feel like we lost money. Like it was a good thing. We're not going to rush to rebook her right away, but let's do it. But we're like, hey, we're two for two on bigger ones. Let's go take a bigger swing. And so now we're, you know, every, we have a new hero launch coming out. Like we're, you know, trying to take a big swing and continuing to kind of move up. But it's, it's, it's primarily that it's, it's usually some type of an Instagram story, one or two, you know, occasionally a reel. But yeah, like, and I've talked to, you know, other brands about it. It's like, it's very, very hard with these large creators to, you know, be profitable on just, just one timing. So I think you, if you're approaching it for ads, you have to do what we're doing. If you're approaching it on like a more organic side, you have to structure the deal in a way where you're able to leverage a lot out of it. Much more so. And I think you guys do a lot of that where you'll get a lot of deliverables from this one creator.
- [44:18]
Connor
Yeah. Well, let me, let me ask you a question. On the 17%. So are you saying if, if. Let's just say to make the numbers easy, it was a hundred thousand dollar deal. Are you saying you spent 117k on, at, on paid behind the content?
- [44:29]
Jason
Dude, you're gonna put me on the spot for public mouth.
- [44:32]
Connor
Sorry, sorry.
- [44:33]
Jason
So, so if it was a 10k deal, right? 10x content efficiency would be 100k. Yeah, that would have been the target. We spent less than that, so we spent probably 70k on it, behind.
- [44:44]
Connor
I see, I see.
- [44:45]
Jason
So it was, it was not bad, but it just wasn't quite at our numbers. But 17's not bad. You know, it was, it was definitely not bad.
- [44:53]
Connor
I mean, that's, that's, it still seems like you got a huge ROI on it.
- [44:56]
Jason
If Yeah, I mean it's an ambitious target. I don't know that it is targets that it is.
- [45:02]
Connor
Very well honestly like when you told me that you got me thinking about how like we need to measure and what we need to be pushing towards. So like that's been something that I've been talking to the team about in the last month is just like A, reporting on it more regularly but B, pushing harder when we can to make sure we're getting as big of a, big of a multiplier on what we paid them. You know what, what, what I think is, is interesting to think about as well. Like and we've been talking about creator ads and influencer ads that are creators which is like that there's a reason that is such a big part of most brands flywheels because A, there's a lot of social proof baked into those types of ads when you have this well known creator like endorsing your product and your brand. But B, they're creators so like they can make content for you and it's not a big lift on, you know, all you have to do is brief them, source that, source them, brief them and then the balls in their court which you know, depending on who the creator is that can be a good or a bad thing. You know, we've definitely had creators where they've just like signed the deal and they've taken forever to deliver and it's like, you know, now we're sitting here three, six months later, it's like what is going on? And they're not that organized obviously. I think where we've created some alpha is actually being able to create really compelling ads with people that have a lot of like respect and authority in the space but they're not creators. So because we have such a built out production team and system and, and resource now, like we can, we can bring these creators into our studio, make really, really great ads with them because while they're not creators often they're, they're still very good in front of the camera and I think there's so much alpha in that for brands. So I think your ability then to go and say hey, this person's not a creator but like they are an influencer in our space and if we can make a really good ad with them, I think it can perform well. I think that's been one of the areas that, that we've been able to really excel at in the last year or two years is just like creating really good ads with these non creator influencers and we've put tons of money behind them. And, like, I just don't see our competitors doing as much of that. I see it here and there, but I think that's one of our, our strong suits. And, like, that's what happened with this, like, hockey player that we activated with. Like, he's a hockey player, he's not a creator. Like, if we go and brief him and say, hey, make this ad on your iPhone at home, like, he's not going to know what to do. But, like, we went out to Canada, shot with him, produced a really beautiful, well done ad, and I have a lot of confidence that it's going to scale both us and, and in Canada. And, like, we have a bunch of chefs that also fall into that bucket where, you know, they're not creators, but they are really, like, highly respected chefs. And like, we've been able to bring them into our studio, shoot with them, and just get a ton of scale. And I think that's such an important flywheel. Like the ability to, to do production at scale. Like, I think that can take a brand from 50 million to 100 or 100 to 300, because the ability to just shoot ads that your competitors can't, that really separates you. And I think those ads have a ton of upside on scaling versus, like, the creator LED stuff.
- [48:04]
Jason
You know, who did that? Well, you guys do an incredible job of that Turtle box. Remember we had them on the pod and they had that like, ambassador program. Like, I, like, I think that's really cool. I think blending like creators or celebs or athletes with, like, you know, more of a produced style, I think is really cool in an ideal world. Like, I think what we're trying to do is, like, we've had a few people we actually wanted to do larger partnerships with, and, you know, numbers came back and it's like, hey, let's, let's, let's start first paid social. Let's see how it does. And it just didn't land and perform. And I was like, I'm so, like, we just can't kind of justify that. Like, so, like, again, even our big Emily deal, like, we started with just a paid social deal, you know, and it performed well. Like, there was clearly something there. Like, I do think if there is a way and it doesn't always work if those people are in a crater, but I do think that helps to de risk it a little bit. You know, it's still an investment, but it's not. You don't have to go with a giant multi six Figure investment right out the gate. Otherwise it's. It's a bet and it's a test.
- [49:03]
Connor
Yeah, I agree. I think that's the consistent theme I'm taking from this episode that we're both doing is like start small and layer on top and grow it. Don't do it the other way because you're going to end up burning a lot of money if you do it the other way.
- [49:15]
Jason
But I really want to do that. I really want to do that. I'm trying to get better at that. Which maybe will bring us to last point. Is more of a produced flywheel. How you leverage those stuff. I feel like everything we've been talking about has been what I'd say is bottoms up where it's like bunch of different videos, stuff like that volume approach, feel the ad account and you're kind of creating, you know, you're creating kind of more bottom funnel, lower cost things and putting them out account. But one of the things that we, we just did a giant shoot on and talking about production stuff. I know you guys do a really great job with, with you know, produce things is, is kind of a top down approach of these hero assets, these TV commercials, YouTube things. And are you leveraging that across paid social different channels or are those like completely separate?
- [50:02]
Connor
No, that we are. So like I said, every, every quarter we have this production roadmap that our creative strategy lead creates and she more or less like pitches me and I say yep, yep, yep. No, don't like that, don't think we should do that. You missed these things that I think we should do and then that turns into cool. Now we have a finalized plan and then then it turns into which of these concepts are, are most like which of these concepts are going to come to life with us producing like the best with us producing them. Whether that's us like just producing them without talent or us bringing talent into the studio and then that creates this like paid media production roadmap where it's like all right, here's all the productions that we're going to do specifically for paid in this quarter. And then we are just planning those throughout the quarter and it could be. And then some of it is just baked into like our always on stuff like every time we launch a new product now like we do a product hype reel and like product hype reels have become a really high performance main content pillar for us. So not all of it is like one off net new stuff. But that's like for us that top down approach where it Starts with a plan. We map out what stuff needs to get produced. We slot in the production days and then we have these bi weekly production meetings between our, our content production team and our creative strategy team. So we can just make sure that we're continuing to, to move the needle on these. Because a lot of these concepts are not a, a handful of these concepts I should say like take a long time. Like we have a few, a few concepts that are in the final, I'd say like on the five yard line that we've literally been working on for like four months because they're like really high production, new concepts that we really wanted to nail and we think they're going to become like pillars of our YouTube account and ultimately our paid social account. So we're shooting a lot of it like landscape hi fi and then we're doing like making sure that it has like we'll literally have the camera that's like all right, this is shot for YouTube but then we have like the 4 by 5 zones and the 9 by 16 zones on the camera. So we know when we're shooting it that it can get cut down for meta. Because that's everything we do now when we shoot it in studio is like we, we need to this, we need to get as much juice out of this as possible. So we need to shoot it for meta. We need to make sure it works for vertical and all the like app love and meta tick tock. We need to make sure like the four by fives for meta feed are there. So like we are very thoughtful about. We're not getting into post production being like this isn't going to scale to vertical. It's like no, no, we're, we're making sure it scales to vertical video and that's been, oh my God, so many like, I mean in an eight hour shoot day like we can, we're at a point now where our, you know, our content team is so good. Our head of content's amazing and his team is amazing. Like we can shoot a CTV ad. We can shoot you know, six different core paid social concepts and then have like a bunch of different hooks on them to iterate and then also have like the landscape format, the vertical format and the 4 by 5 format. So that you know, ends up often turning into like 30, 40 ads when you get to the end of post production. And it's just like crazy what you can do with, with an eight hour shoot day when you have a good plan going into it.
- [53:09]
Jason
Def. Definitely dude. So we just did, we have like this product that has 30 shades. And so we, we did like our normal just like video photo shoot. And then we were like, oh, we're going to need to do something bigger. So we did an open casting. We like, you know, did this campaign where we invited people. So we brought in you know, probably 30 people for every shade and like some creators and we actually did scope some creators and you know, contracted some creators to get even like you know, behind the scenes content of it, get user rights, but mostly just like customers. People wanted to come and so we brought in like we had our normal photo shoot, our team doing it and then we had, I brought in a production, you know, agency, I think, I think I sent it to you. And they got 30 hours of footage in a one day shoot. So they had like three, four cameras rolling. You know, granted we spent an arm and a leg. But I think the thing is I was like if we're going to do this, it's just you know, a, we need the content but B, we just have to really maximize what we can get out of it. So we'll have social, teaser, hero video, probably eight different social, like organic social, follow up, you know, assets of it, plus obviously all the B roll. We've got eight YouTube ads, all like not even like hooks and like unique YouTube ads. All of that will be cut for you know, meta. Paid social will have meta, you know, brand forward five, six second for each campaigns. We'll have you know, more. It's still like polished stuff but more performance oriented meta stuff. So yeah, same thing. We'll probably get you know, like just for the launch we'll probably get 50 assets out of this. And then not to just mention all of the iterations and variations we're going to do. You know, so we'll have it in, you know, we have TVs in our retail store. Like we'll have it in there. Like it's, it's pretty incredible what the right team can do with you know, experience but also like the right plan going into it.
- [54:55]
Connor
Well and we've been able to go from saying hey you owe us a shoot day per quarter to hey, we only want like two shoot days per year. And that really brings down the cost of the deal. But it's just because we know the playbook now when we go into these shoot days, like we're shooting sometimes like super high fi, like TV stuff. We're always shooting paid social, we're always shooting organic social. And then we're, there's always. And then we have all the formats, and then we have all the different scripts that we want them to hit on and off. The scripts have. Have like hook variations. Like, we just have that playbook down, whereas we didn't have that playbook down. So we did, like, we would get to the end of the shoot day sometimes, like, oh, well, we have one another one, two months. There's no worries. But now we have the playbook down. Now the deals don't cost as much. Now we're getting more out of less shoot days. And like, it's just optimized over time. And it's just. I've been blown away by how much spend we can get behind all those different assets on all those different channels. Like, it's just we're getting huge ROIs on some of these. Some of these deals that, like, candidly, like, costs sometimes 2, $300,000 per year. I mean, these are like big chefs with, like, big followings and huge clout in their space. But like, when you can go and spend a million or more on that, on just on the paid stuff, like, it's like, that's easy. Like, that's not even including all the events they're doing and the organic social stuff they're doing and having hexclad in their restaurants. Like, it's just. It's so easy for us to go and rationalize these deals. And now we have a playbook for it that, you know, I feel confident. Like, I can. When I, like, see someone, it's like, hey, this person came across so and so's desk. Like, it takes me like five to 10 minutes to be like, yeah, I think we can replicate the playbook with this person. And it just gives me a lot of confidence now in spending some of these larger chunks of money up front because we have that playbook dialed.
- [56:40]
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- [57:24]
Jason
You guys are masters at it. We're trying to, we're trying to catch up, but. But definitely. Good. Do you, do you guys call it like an ambassador program? Do you guys have like a page on your site where you're like, this is our ambassadors or not?
- [57:34]
Connor
We call it our Culinary council. So if you go to our website, we have this page that's like our hexcloud partners page. And one of the drop. So it's like the New York Yankees still gin. And then the Culinary council is the one in the middle here. And it, and it outlines like. Yeah, there's basically, I think we have five chefs that are on the culinary council. It's Claire Smith, Nancy Dominique Gordon, and Paul Ainsworth. And again, not, I would say the only. Even Gordon, like, he's not a true. He's not a creator in the sense of like a social, a social media chef. Like anytime Gordon's creating content, right, it's on a pretty big production. Like when he's creating content on its own, it's very much like this, this style, like, Gordon reacts. But none of these people are true creators, which I think again gives us some alpha because we're, we can bring them in and shoot content with them. And, and it's just like pretty crazy what our content team can do in an eight hour shoot day.
- [58:26]
Jason
We're literally wrapping up our two big partnerships for this year. And I'm like telling my team, like, tell me when you're ready to talk next year because, like, this is kind of what I want to do. It's like called an ambassador program. I think actually like one of the more important things for it for, you know, running dtc. And like so much of this is about, yes, you need the right strategy and it's got to perform. But a big part of performance is like, you know, the, the workflow and like getting the most value out of it. And yeah, like not just doing a 300 grand for one shoot, but like, how do you get as much leverage behind that as possible?
- [58:55]
Connor
Yeah. And, and one other thing I'll, I'll add on that what we have found is like what performs well on organic social is often very different than like a paid ad. But when you're. So we've started actually like briefing creators separately where like, let's say we're going to activate with a few creators for a new product drop and we want to do organic, like, you know, collaborative posts with them and we also want to run ads with that. Make ads and run them from their pages. On our pages, we'll go and actually send them two different briefs. But generally, like, if you're paying $5,000 for a deal and you say, hey, we want you to do two different concepts, it doesn't necessarily like scale. Just because you're saying, hey, here's a paid in an organic post. Because they're shooting at the same time in the same setup. Like, it's not. Just because you're doing two different concepts doesn't mean they're actually going to double their rate. Like, yes, the rate will go up, but there's a way to negotiate and be like, hey, we're actually not asking you to do like 80% of what you're doing is going to be the same. It's just like a different script and a few different visuals. So I think you can often get multiple briefs in with a creator and not necessarily have the rate of that creator scale with like, as the concepts are scaling. And that's been a. Something that we've done more recently in the last like six months where it's like most of the time now we are briefing them in separately for organic and separately for paid. And we're just getting more bang for our buck by doing that.
- [60:16]
Jason
Totally. Because they want the number. Right? They're not really, because they're a solo operator, they're not thinking in terms of gross margin and like price for a video. Like, they're just going to anchor it to the number. And so, yeah, what we do is, you know, we'll obviously like, offer a little bit less, whatever. Well, you know, let's. I'm just making it up. Let's say like they want 10k. I'm like, oh, 5, 4k was our budget, but we could do 6 if you could also throw this in. And so your cost per, like, yes, your total cost is more, but your cost per video is actually significantly better. And it's a win win. The creator perceives that a win as win as well. Because it's not that much extra for them to make another video. You know, they're not thinking about the cost of that. They're just thinking about, hey, what did I get? You know, what did I charge this brand and have seen that work incredibly well.
- [60:56]
Connor
Yeah, they just made two more grand. But your cost per video went from four or five to three. Yeah, 100.
- [61:02]
Jason
If you think about it from their side, like, they're not thinking, like, they're not paying somebody. They're not thinking, okay, here's my gross margin. Here's my cost on this. They're just like, oh, yeah, I'll do another video while I'm already doing it. You know, it's really nothing to me,
- [61:12]
Connor
but, I mean, what is it, an extra 30 minutes? 60 minutes for them? Yeah, 100%.