From Growth Sprints to Brand Health Metrics: What's Driving Wins Right Now

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Marketing Operators

Episode: From Growth Sprints to Brand Health Metrics: What's Driving Wins Right Now
Hosts: Connor McDonald, Connor Rolain, Cody Plofker, Preston Rutherford
Date: August 26, 2025

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Episode Overview

This lively episode explores the evolving toolkit of DTC (direct-to-consumer) marketers—covering how to track organic and baseline revenue, full-funnel brand health metrics, the modern “sprint” management method, creator campaigns like Cozy Earth’s Bedrot Challenge, and a thoughtful listener question about coordinating product and marketing strategy. The operators debate tactical measurement tools, share candid lessons from running high-pressure performance campaigns, and swap memorable case studies from brands on the cutting edge.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rethinking Brand Health Metrics and Organic Revenue ([04:15] – [17:00])

• Evolution in Tracking: Preston explains his shift towards building out "full funnel health tracking metrics," focusing more on organic and baseline revenue metrics in a year of leaner advertising spend.
  • “We’ve decided to try to be a lot leaner with our media spend. So for me, I have been tracking some of these softer…‘funnel health’ metrics…” – Preston ([05:00])
• Defining Baseline Revenue: Baseline revenue is revenue not directly attributed to paid channels—organic search, direct traffic, and non-ad attributed Amazon sales.
• Measuring Resilience: An increase in baseline revenue with flat ad spend is seen as a sign of brand resilience and less reliance on paid channels.
  • “If we were just to turn off all our ad channels today, I think we would do more revenue than we did the previous year.” – Preston ([07:22])
• Debating the Metric's Value:
  • Connor McD. pushes back: baseline revenue can be influenced by a lot of other paid activity (e.g., upper funnel TV spend or influencer seeding).
  • “I think it’s impossible. I think it can very quickly become a distraction… You are lacking way too much nuance in [the view that] brand queries lift = good brand marketing efforts.” – Connor McDonald ([14:18], [16:16])
• Supplementary Tools: Share-of-voice (using Marathon), brand lift studies (Tracksuit), and tracking branded queries through Google tools are all referenced.
  • Baseline revenue and these other metrics are interconnected but not definitive: “I don’t even know if we need Tracksuit anymore… Marathon kind of rolled something out that’s more granular and actionable.” – Preston ([12:13])

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2. Attribution, Halo Effects, and the Role of Upper Funnel Marketing ([16:36] – [30:11])

• Media Mix Modeling: Cody plugs Prescient for modeling halo effects from upper funnel spend—essential data when attribution is imperfect (e.g., YouTube or TV spend).
• Practical Application: Baseline revenue and share of voice can give marketers directional confidence to invest in harder-to-measure upper funnel tactics, but must be interpreted with care.
• Sophisticated Brand Marketers: The group notes brand marketers at companies like Peloton use data-rich tracking surveys and integrate performance and brand metrics.
  • “There are some very dialed, very data driven brand marketers out there… it all starts with an insight and data and studies…” – Cody ([18:20])
• Cross-Analyzing Channels: The operators routinely look for correlations between lift in branded search and their upper-funnel campaigns, supplementing MMM and platform attribution.

Notable Quotes:

• “It’s like performance marketing, but for upper funnel KPIs… Methodology is the same, just different KPIs and different place to pull from.” – Preston ([21:17])

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3. Standout DTC Stunt Marketing: Cozy Earth Bedrot Challenge ([32:01] – [45:04])

• Explaining the Campaign: Brands are pursuing more creative, participatory, and social-native campaigns.
  • Cozy Earth’s Bedrot Challenge involves 25 contestants (creators and 'civilians'), all livestreamed as they compete to stay in bed, with voting, challenges, and product integration.
  • “It’s the Mr. Beastification of DTC brands.” – Cody ([38:13])
• Gamified Funnel Integration: Cozy Earth collects voter emails/SMS and pushes product offers as people vote.
• Brand First, Not Just Creator First: Unlike many efforts that tack on brand as a sponsor, Cozy Earth’s campaign is inherently brand-led, with creators serving the overall narrative.
  • “It’s a very authentic and organic way for it to be like brand first… instead of big sponsors of influencer-first campaigns.” – Connor McDonald ([41:27])
• Room for More: Hosts suggest adding capsule collections by influencer could further link the content with shoppable outcomes.
• Low Cost, High Impact: The crew estimates this is a cost-efficient, highly memorable campaign with deep awareness impact.

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4. Sprint-Based Team Management in Marketing ([48:43] – [67:00])

• What’s a Sprint?: Cody describes structuring teams around short bursts (“sprints”) to solve prioritized problems—an approach borrowed from engineering but increasingly vital in growth marketing.
  • “My understanding of a sprint is essentially just a short period of burst on a very specific priority, where you’re going to prioritize that, devote resources to that, align a team—and deprioritize other things.” – Cody ([49:41])
• How It Works: Cody outlines pulling together staff from creative, data, external vendors—clarifying the problem, goals, and assigning a recurring meeting/slack channel for accountability.
  • “It was a cool moment in my leadership journey to see people really energized about it… We’re all working on this together.” – Cody ([51:20])
• Focus and Tradeoffs: Trying to sprint on too many things is a mistake—deprioritize distractions and set milestones and deadlines for team urgency.
  • “You can really only do one [sprint], maybe I can do two… but you have to deprioritize stuff. You cannot focus on everything.” – Cody ([65:16])
• Real Impact: Both Cody and Connor McD. share examples where the discipline of a recurring, targeted “sprint” accelerated learning and results—especially in paid social (Meta, YouTube) and even back office ops.
  • “With YouTube, we had a dedicated Slack [channel], YouTube takeover weekly meeting: Here’s the goal, here’s the team… just chip away at it.” – Connor McDonald ([62:18])
• Accountability: The team stresses recurring meetings—a mix of synchronous brainstorms and progress reporting—is a force multiplier.
  • “Public accountability is just one of the strongest things you can do…people will rush to get things ready in time so as not to look bad.” – Cody ([70:40])
• Drawbacks: Sprints can be hard on team balance and result in less attention on other projects—so pace yourself.

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5. Listener Hotline: Product-Market Collaboration & Catalog Expansion ([72:00] – [82:26])

Question: Should marketing have more say in product development? How to balance catalog expansion with not alienating loyal customers?

• Panel’s Take:
  • Focus on hero products as acquisition engines unless efficiency truly drops.
  • True LTV expansion comes from “net new hero products” that can acquire new customers—not just add-ons for the base.
    • “We’re not focused on selling carry ons to wallet customers; we’re going to go out and be a travel brand to net new people.” – Connor McDonald ([75:14])
  • Product & Marketing must be tightly aligned on economics, positioning, differentiation, and content/support required for new launches.
    • “Biggest lessons have been—how are you building products with the value props and economics to support being an acquisition product in a DTC environment?” – Connor McDonald ([75:38])
  • Leadership must actively blend market insights (marketing) and product vision—neither can run in a silo.
    • “…It’s an org chart problem really…that’s what leadership has to get both sides working together.” – Cody ([76:45])
  • It’s normal and even good to have products that aren’t for everyone—so long as there’s a core brand pillar tying things together.
• Practical Tips:
  • Use post-purchase surveys to guide future hero SKUs.
  • Accept that some products are just for bundle/attachment to existing customers, and should have different launch/support economics.
  • Experiment, measure honestly, and be willing to admit misses and reallocate.

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Most Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• On Baseline Revenue Metrics:
  • “If we were just to turn off all our ad channels today, I think we would do more revenue than we did the previous year.” – Preston ([07:22])
• On Measurement Nuance:
  • “Brand query lift is good brand marketing efforts. And it’s like—oh yeah, you’re lacking way too much nuance in that take.” – Connor McDonald ([16:15])
• On Cozy Earth’s Bedrot Challenge:
  • “It’s the Mr. Beastification of DTC brands.” – Cody ([38:13])
  • “[It’s] a really fun socially native thing…you get to send emails about it, you get to send texts, repost content…it’s very organic. You’re getting impressions, memorability. That seems like good value.” – Connor McDonald ([43:58])
• On Sprint-Based Team Management:
  • “You definitely have to deprioritize stuff—you can’t focus on everything.” – Cody ([53:14])
  • “Public accountability is just one of the strongest things you can do…people will rush to get things ready in time.” – Cody ([70:40])
• On Product-Market Alignment:
  • “Biggest lessons have been—how are you building products with the value props and economics to support being an acquisition product in a DTC environment?” – Connor McDonald ([75:38])
  • “It’s an org chart problem…leadership has to get both sides working together.” – Cody ([76:45])

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Important Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------|-------------| | Opening/Agenda & AI Creative Strategists | 00:00–04:15 | | Full Funnel Health/Baseline Revenue | 04:15–17:00 | | Upper Funnel & Attribution Challenges | 16:36–30:11 | | Cozy Earth Bedrot Challenge Deep Dive | 32:01–45:04 | | Sprint Management & Execution | 48:43–67:00 | | Listener Question: Product-Market Alignment | 72:00–82:26 |

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Tone & Themes

The tone is conversational, candid, and operator-to-operator—grounded in real-world detail, honest about tradeoffs, and underpinned with a spirit of experimentation. Listeners will hear genuine debate and actionable playbooks, all with a throughline of “make it measurable, but don’t get lost in the numbers.”

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode…

• You’ll learn how elite DTC marketers are measuring the unmeasurable (organic revenue, share of voice, brand campaigns), how and why brands are using creator content and stunts for top of funnel, and the specific management techniques (sprints, accountability, team energy) that can unlock breakthrough speed or stall out if misapplied.
• Don’t miss: In-depth tactical tips about evolving attribution, creative campaign examples you can copy, and a nuanced discussion about connecting product launches to both loyalists and new customers.

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Transcript

[Connor McDonald]

We've got an agenda that I'm excited for today. We're going to talk organic revenue. We're going to talk about building teams for Sprints. So we've got a lot to go through and we've got a moderators hotline question at the end.

[Preston Rutherford]

What I've been ultimately getting at and changing a lot more this year is I'm trying to build out like full funnel health tracking metrics.

[Cody]

There are so many creator brands that are absolutely crushing it right now. There's not a ton of brands that have gone media and really started crushing it.

[Connor McDonald]

Our biggest lessons have been like how are you building products with the value props and the economics to support being a acquisition product in a DTC environment? All right, we are back with another episode of Marketing Operators. We've got a an agenda that I'm excited for today. We're going to talk organic revenue. We're going to talk about building teams for Sprints and I've been geeking out on Cozy Earth's live stream of their Bedrot challenge. So we've got a lot to go through and we've got a moderators hotline question at the end. I think we get right into it. But before we begin, I want to thank our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, Prescient after sell and Revo and as always, please like and subscribe foreign. I want to talk to you quickly About Motion's new AI creative strategist. These are AI agents built by Best in Class D2C operators. And what's unique about these is that you are using agents to analyze your creative using real data from your meta ad account. It's like ChatGPT but way more relevant with way more context. So Connor, rolling. I ran some of these this morning. Let me, let me walk you through them. So a couple quick things here. One, these are you can see in the top right of your Motion dashboard you have account wide tasks that you can have these AI agents run. But the first one I want to show you actually is Jess Bachmann's critique. This ads messaging which is at the ad level. So this is our best performing creative last week. You can run this task here. I've got it open here as well. And what we hear from Jess is that one, he loves a concept, instant differentiation. But what I found interesting and kind of painful as always when you realize there's ad creative that you don't absolutely love. We use the headline almost as rare as winning the lottery. These are like one of eight unique designs, signs and just says that is hyperbolic and undermines credibility. And I 100 agree and I took this to my team and we're taking action on it.

[Preston Rutherford]

Yeah, I love it. I think this stuff takes a lot of time to manually do like you could your creative strategist, especially at brands that are at the scale of of ridge. Like your creative strategist could spot, could spend all day, every day just like looking through top performing ads and low performing ads and just trying to come up with reasons why they work or don't work and like what the next steps are. So I don't think that this agent necessarily totally replaces that. But now you're starting at level five instead of level zero. So the amount of time it saves you is, is huge. And it just empowers your team to go and action things instead of sitting there and kind of getting stuck in analysis paralysis all day long.

[Connor McDonald]

The second task I ran was find new customer Personas by Jimmy Slagel and Alex Cooper. They have an agent called Marvis and this one was cool. I got to upload 500 reviews and then it identified people that we might not be speaking to or can better build Persona funnels which we talk about on marketing operators all the time. And I thought this was extremely helpful. Traveler with tech, I mean between our luggage, between our wallets, between our power banks, this is like exactly who we want to speak to. So I felt they nailed identifying some, some new and maybe underserved Personas for us.

[Preston Rutherford]

I feel like this is so important. I talk to marketers and brand operators every now and again and they're like ah, like we're at 10 million, 20 million. We've hit a wall with meta and I ask them some, some kind of pointed questions and they haven't launched new creative in a long time. And I think this right here is like the absolute starting point for brands that have maybe hit a wall or haven't hit a wall, are just looking to continue to scale. Because how do you scale Meta? Well, you reach new people. How do you reach new people? You create ads that speak to those people. And like this is such an amazing starting point for that and it's based on your real reviews. Like what better, more trustworthy place to start?

[Connor McDonald]

100%. That's all to say. Motion is giving teams an AI adoption cheat code, making it accessible to every DTC advertiser. And best yet, you don't need a Motion contract to use this you these agents for free. Test them out in your Motion account today. So try it out@motion app.com. so cool. Conor Rolane, we're teeing it up with you. I've actually seen, I don't know if you have any backstory as to what prompted this tweet, but I've seen a number of conversations. It's been top of mind for me as to how people are measuring like organic revenue or the success of brand marketing. Now you had a tweet this week about, about a baseline revenue and how it's one of your favorite KPIs. Can you tee up maybe why you were thinking about it and, and, and kind of what you were covering in the post.

[Preston Rutherford]

Yeah, yeah. So you know, we've been like the last, the pre. This year is very different since any moment in time that I've been working on Hexcloud because like when, when I started working on Hexcloud and you know, back end of 2021, early 2022, that's when Hexcloud was in this like hyper scaling mode. Like had so much opportunity, like hadn't ran new creative in their ad account in like four months. Like, like that type of opportunity. And like we were just a lot of shots on that. And, and more than that, which leads into my point is just aggressive media spend scaling like year over year over year. So obviously like your traffic's gonna follow suit when you're, you know, doubling the amount that you're spending on ads year over year over year. And that hasn't been the case for us this year. We've, we've decided to try to be a lot leaner with our media spend. So for me, I have been tracking some of these like softer, what I call like funnel health metrics a little bit more closely this year. One being just traffic, like how are sessions unique users, new users, returning users and then all those metrics with drill downs into channel changing over time. Because the big thing that I was worried about is are we going to be even getting enough new people into our funnel to hit, hit our revenue targets this year. So that's one of the, one of the things, and I think I talked about that a few episodes ago, how I've been tracking that more closely. Another one I've been measuring is this like baseline revenue metric. And Preston Rutherford has this tool called Marathon that I use to track it. I think you could probably, there's a few ways you could track it, but I've been using his tool to do it and all it is is it's measuring your revenue from, from Google Analytics, organic Google Search, direct traffic from right from the Google Ads account through your branded search terms. And then they have this metric called Amazon Owned, which is just total Amazon revenue, less all revenue attributed to ads. So they're calling that like baseline revenue. Right? It's not attributed to any marketing channel. It's not like there's no Facebook UTM attached to it. And the reason I like, I like tracking that is, is because I think it's a good, I just think it's a good measure of like, how resilient your brand is, how reliant you are on, on like paid channels to drive revenue. And I think for me, I want to see that growing over time. Now obviously, if you're like tripling your ad spend, I think there is a relationship, right? I'm not, I'm not. It's not like totally independent. It's not. That's only, only attributable to, to brand marketing, whatever you want to call brand marketing. But I think that's, it's just a good, I think it's a good sign for your brand. I think it means you're probably less reliant on ads. I mean, if we were just to turn off all of our ad channels today, I think we would do more revenue than if we were just to turn off all of our ad ad channels yesterday or, excuse me, than the previous year. So I just think that there's like some interesting brand health. I'm not sure how actionable it is. Like, I don't know what I would do if it was like flat to like go and improve it. But I think it does speak to like brand health. And it's giving me some more confidence that our, because our baseline revenue is growing and our ad spend staying flat, it just, it's giving me confidence that we have this organic flywheel happening that is just going to make everything easier, I guess, and not as reliant on paid media spend.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally. Yeah. So I think you saw, you know, in the agenda here, I say I'm willing to take the other side of this one. I think you put in some good caveats. But, but I do think like everybody's kind of grappling with, well, how do we measure, how do you measure like brand value? Yeah, how do you, how do you measure awareness? What is the latent value of that over time? And I do think baseline revenue to your point is like, it's something to look at. Like, it does make sense. It does trend in the way that you'd want. If you're building brand building awareness, you've got more products out in the world. Cody, are you guys thinking about this at all or do you have any metrics that you track that you think of as some sort of like brand health thinking about?

[Cody]

For sure. Can I ask a clarifying question for Connor? Rolling. So it's essentially you're just subtract. It's just stripping out any like direct paid revenue. Right. So it's just like organic, Organic direct stuff that's like non. Non direct. Yeah, I think I, it's funny because when, when you're going through it, I was thinking about it, I'm like, it makes so much sense. I can't argue with that. And so I'm really excited to hear Connor McDonald's argument about it. But no, you know, who do you guys know? The, the head of growth at Huckberry, Jake. I don't know his last name, but was chatting with him just via Slack like last week about some TV stuff. And like, seems like he does the same thing. And like I actually had our, our data analyst start putting together a dashboard. It just like makes so much sense just to be able to like track that and just have a.

[Preston Rutherford]

For a while. I think Jake's been on the baseline revenue train for a while and yeah, I've actually, I had some back and forth with him about it and, and he's constantly referring to baseline revenue and I feel I, I actually need to chat with him because I think he actually might have ways to like you just mentioned linear tv. I think he actually does have some methodology to track. Hey, how is this specific tactic? And linear TV is like the classic one, right? Like that is the classic ad channel that, that should drive up your direct search and your Google Organic branded search and your Google branded ad search. So I'd be curious to hear from him how he's, how he's like doing a direct one to one between those two things.

[Cody]

I know that that's, that's, that's the thing. It's like. And again, I think Jake is pro and I think it totally makes sense and agrees and like, I think we could Nick nitpick certain things where it's like, all right, well you know, your paid, paid social traffic is going to increase your direct, you know, but like you have to have some way to track it. I think it's probably the best possible. So I'm excited to hear, you know, Connor's points, but I think it makes a lot of sense just to have. And the other thing I've been thinking about, and I know like when we had Tyson on a while Back like he talked about tracksuit and like brand. You know, always on brand. Brand studies, awareness, awareness, lift. We haven't done it. I know Hexcloud has. I'm very close to doing it and signing up and, and thinking about, you know, doing that because I think this is a challenge that we are facing right now is like I don't know if we are growing our baseline and our organic demand as well as our paid.

[Connor McDonald]

So Connor, do you guys think about. So you do. Do you use tracksuit for like their brand lift? It's essentially like a brand lift measurement. How many aware and considering you.

[Preston Rutherford]

Yeah, we do.

[Connor McDonald]

And then would you say that that and baseline revenue are like ways of trying to track the same idea of just like awareness, brand value, like latent demand of previous marketing efforts?

[Preston Rutherford]

Yes. And honestly like I'm. Tracksuite's been interesting because like you know, you run a thing like a Super bowl and then you're measuring like a month over month lift and awareness and stuff like that. I don't, I've been toying around whether or not we even need it anymore now because I feel like the, I feel like the baseline revenue and, and the other thing that, that I like to measure in marathon is brand share of voice. So you can actually go and measure year over year and not just for your brand. I know you can do this in other tools like Google search console, like how many people are searching for your brand terms and how's that changing over time. But you also can pull in competitors and see like how much of the. Like if you can plug in your top 10 competitors and see, okay, we've there's a million searches on all the brand terms including ours and our competitors. And then you can actually see like a. What's your own volume growth but then be like how much of that share do you have? That's another really cool part of marathon that I, that I enjoy looking at regularly. Like I don't even know if we need tracksuite anymore. If we have that right now. We do use tracksuit right now. I'm, I'm thinking we might not. I think tracks, it's a cool tool. I just think marathon kind of kind of rolled something out that's a little bit more granular and actionable.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor McDonald]

Okay, so let me, let me my qualms with this and actually it's a little bit different than what you just described, Connor, but I've seen people conflating the increase in branded queries with the success of brand marketing and I heard this from an incredibly smart E comm operator who said yeah, we track, we track brand queries and if those are going up then our brand marketing's working. And I'm like that's not how it works.

[Preston Rutherford]

No. Yeah.

[Connor McDonald]

Or it's just like it is so it's. So it does work to a certain degree, to a very small degree. But it's such a flawed way of thinking. I think it's almost like irrelevant. Like it's like there's just so many different things that impact it. So let me say two quick things because then this becomes a part of like my problems with this like quote unquote baseline revenue. One is we talk about incrementality all the time and we talk about incrementality factors. So if you're like observing a 1x on Facebook ads via North Beam or GA or in Platform or whatever, maybe it's a 7 day click basis within meta anything you1x your incrementality factor is 2x House tells you hey, you're driving twice as much revenue. Half of that revenue is coming from something that is not. Is going to be a direct none. It's going to be an organic and maybe it's email or something like that. But like it just naturally will come from other channels. So as we better identify channels that have higher incrementality factors, it will quote unquote increase your baseline revenue. And TV is the perfect example. Cody, you just brought it up with the, the head of growth at Huckberry. It's like that is all direct none. Like that's, it's all direct none. That's all branded traffic. You're not going to like, you're not going to be able to peel that out in any other way. And that's my like that is my initial qualm with really trying to distill it. And it's almost like a form of like aism almost. I'm like it's totally there. Like it is, it is. You could theoretically piece it apart and track like this more like ethereal brand value idea. But by and large it's so flawed. I think it's impossible. I think it's a, I think it's can very quickly become a distraction. That would be my fear.

[Preston Rutherford]

Yeah. Because what you're saying is anything you do in your marketing should, in the like if you, if you increase the amount that you're putting into Facebook ads and your direct response Facebook ads that should also increase baseline revenue. I, I think it's yes. Yeah. And I fully agree with that, it's not, it's not like siloed or like, I don't know, eyeglass on Brand marketing. It's really, it's really anything. You could say the same about product seating. It's like if all of a sudden you're like, hey, we're gonna, you know, $10,000 worth of products this month and, and like we didn't do that last year, like that should also do the same thing. I think, I think where it becomes helpful is measure. And it's kind of easy for us this year because I, I know like where our spend's at. I think it's helpful to like map out like brand like baseline revenue and like share a voice versus any other number of like marketing activities you're doing. Right. So the easy one is just like, well, how much are we spending on ads? Right. If you are. And that's why I'm so happy about where these things are trending for us. But yes, I fully agree. Like if you, if you increase your spend by 50%, I would, I would hope that at some point your baseline revenue also starts to follow that trend. If it doesn't totally, that's, that's probably a concern. Or you have like the most impulse buy product in the world and like you're driving discovery and conversion like 85% of the time in the same like session. So it's all getting picked up by you know, the, the ad channels utm. But yeah, I think you gotta like find those relationships and, and I do.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally agree that if you're looking at it relative to other things, it becomes way more helpful. Yeah, but, and my big qualm is not with anything you said, but people just directly saying, hey, brand query lift is good, is good brand marketing efforts. And it's like, oh yeah, that is way too, there's, you're lacking way too much nuance in that tape.

[Preston Rutherford]

Totally foreign.

[Cody]

We're about halfway done through the year. H1 is almost over. We're prepping for the second half of the year. We're also prepping for Q4, which is huge for us. And our budgets are going to be the highest then. And when our budgets are the highest, we're going to need the most granularity and the most confidence knowing where we should spend our dollars. And that's why we turned to prescient. Prescient is an mmm. Again, most MMMs, they use 60 year old regression models. They're not really built for DTC prescient. You can get readouts really quickly if Something is changing, which again, DTC is really volatile. So you can't rely on an outdated m them that you're only gonna get one read out a quarter. One thing I love about Prescient so much, you're able to see the halo effect. So upper funnel spend, which again is huge. We love to fill the funnel prior to a peak moment prior to Q4 holiday, something like that. We're really able to see the halo effect that has. Because sometimes you're not gonna see great attribution from YouTube campaign or from TV campaigns. Well, prescient plugs into all them and it can actually tell you your base plus your halo. So it's been really helpful for us to understand and actually have confidence to invest in some of these upper funnel channels that are harder to measure with other ways. So I love Prescient. I can't tell you all the technical stuff behind it, but I can tell you it gives me and my team more confidence. Know where we should put our budget, especially in some of these pesky upper funnel channels that are much harder to measure. And again, don't wait till Q4. It's going to be too late then. We're halfway through the year, but we've really got to all lock in for the rest of the year for Q4. There's a reason we use it. Hexclad, Holo stocks, coterie and 100 more leading brands so highly recommend checking it out. Go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo today. I don't disagree at all. I think, and I don't want to put his business out there too much. But like, when Jake looks at it, he's not necessarily thinking brand. He's more thinking like places in the funnel, right? And he's like, hey, if you're spending a lot on paid social and you know your baseline's not going up as much as you're right, like directly attributed, like, take some and put it in upper funnel. It's almost like a different way to use an mmm. It's just like, hey. And then it's like, hey, let me run upper funnel. Like heavy upper funnel, which you can say that's brand span, whatever you want to call it, like, let me run that heavy. If I was 10% of my media mix on that, let me run 30% on that. Right? How is that, you know, changing over time? Are we now seeing an increase in that, you know, even just like plotting out contribution? So I think, I think it's the best way, but I think it's almost like it's less like brand versus not, I do think. Right. So like, you know, we're starting to launch podcasts and would love to chat about that on here one day. But like, yes, there are ways to measure that. But I also think I'd love to do something for a quarter and also if it's like influencer, because there's really no other great way to track, you know, influencer seating. Like, hey, I'm just going to commit to this and know you because you can't run a holdout for. Right. For influencer seating. I'm just going to go ham on influencer seating for a quarter and like this is the only main variable I'm going to change and like, let me see. And you can look at baseline, you can look at the tracking surveys and you can actually get some holdouts. I, I think we, we are all very dialed like performance marketers here. And I think I used to have the impression that brand marketers were all fluff. There are some very dialed, very data driven brand marketers out there. Like I, I got coffee with a guy who lives in my town who's a brand marketer at Peloton and he was telling me how they run brand campaigns and it's like genius, like speaking our language. Like it all starts with an insight and data and studies and obviously they have teams to do this of like essentially tracksuit stuff where they're like, you know, what's our, what's our awareness, what's our unaided and aided, you know, of this potential sector of the market. Right. That we want to be in. Right. Like let's get a baseline of that. Let's run some studies. Let's put together like a very integrated strategy because then you can't just run a holdout on this stuff, but you're essentially your pre. Is your holdout. Let's go Hamilton Influencer brand campaign, paid, social, like whatever partnerships, you know, to try to increase our concentration and that market, our awareness, our consideration. Let's go that for a quarter. Put a lot of resources behind it. Test again, you know, and I feel like it again, it's one of those things that just makes sense like that's probably the proper way to run brand stuff and that's probably why we will consider tracksuit or something like it and how I think we'll approach it.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, well, it almost feels like what you just described sounds like performance marketing to me.

[Preston Rutherford]

Well, it, it, it isn't, it isn't like a measurement sense. Right. Except that like we like, we started doing it like this is like the first time I really had to think about this was with the Super Bowl. It's like how the, how are we going to measure this? Like yes, we saw an hour over hour lift, but I would say the hour over hour we probably saw like a 200, 000 lift in revenue. Hour over hour. Like and it wasn't, it wasn't, it was a, there was a lift for sure. But that was not. And I wasn't, I was expecting that too. I wasn't expecting us to get like a 3 million dollar revenue hour or anything like that. So I feel like it forced, it forced me to start thinking like I was still thinking like a performance marketer but the KPIs were different. I'm like, all right, well I know I'm going to look into Track suite and see how our awareness changed. I know I'm going to look at trends in our like brand search volume. I know I'm going to look at trends in our baseline revenue over time and like try to map it out that way so it's no different. I feel like. Thank you. Us looking at like revenue or return on ad spend or acquisition costs. It's, it's like the methodology is the same. It's just different. Different KPIs and different place to pull it.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally.

[Cody]

Like a lot of, a lot of people. Right. Like obviously we'll, we'll all run house incrementality, you know, holdouts for like something like YouTube. A lot of people in addition to that sometimes not like they'll, they'll look at search like they'll just look at you know, their organic search brand search as YouTube scales and like just like look for correlations. You can obviously run a search with. It's just slightly moving up funnel and it's almost like akin to like the way that we, we piece together household out results plus like North Beam mta it's almost like. But North Beam MTA is kind of slightly more direct response than house. It's almost like taking holdouts and then just going like one step up funnel from that.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally.

[Cody]

And I think that's just where our business are kind of maturing to that.

[Connor McDonald]

Stage 100% and especially as you get more distribution like what you want to optimize for changes and you might just be in the case of peloton, you just want to optimize for more people being aware or more people considering you or you know, more people being in market for a stationary bike. A couple of Quick things here. One, I do like the idea of what you were plotting baseline revenue against channel. So if you say, hey, baseline revenues down. So we're going to change our channel mix, what that almost is, is like media mix modeling. But rather than modeling revenue, you're modeling interest like so that, that upper funnel event. And I'm all for that and I love that idea. So for what it's worth, at Ridge we watch brand queries really closely. We report basically every day on brand queries and on a weekly basis we're looking at trends for Ridge wallet or Ridge rings or Ridge carry on versus non branded terms as well, which I think is helpful. So you can kind of get an industry benchmark alongside where you're growing. So that's where I think, hey, if we're spending more, we want to see increases there like just directionally to your point, Connor, like we want to look at it relative to our marketing efforts. The other thing that we've started doing, which I think is really cool, is so if you're running a house test, you're targeting certain DMAs, what you can actually do, and we've done this a number of times now is you can take those DMAs if you're running TikTok at 50% of the country, look at the DMAs of that 50% of the country and then just look at your Google branded search campaigns. And we're actually tracking the list of branded queries based on our house tests. So I've got like a couple numbers here. We saw our, our metal a meta quote unquote top of funnel which is where we optimize for view content and drop to landing pages. We saw a 38% lift in branded queries and it's like that makes total sense. That's where we're seeing 5, 6 x incrementality factors. We are creating value there in a way that's not tracked within meta or within North Beam. And it just makes sense that we're seeing this massive increase in queries and that's why I'm like our queries are up year over year but a lot of that just comes down to a more optimized media mix based on all of this testing that we've done.

[Preston Rutherford]

So are you, are you just going into Google like search console and selecting the DMAs that you ran the test in and measuring lifts just in those areas.

[Connor McDonald]

So just Google Ads. So like our ex, like it's, it's gotta be like a handful of like exact match brand campaigns and then you could just Break that down by dma, export it, look over the time periods that you want and you can actually track like that lift in queries.

[Cody]

That's actually like the only. Probably. I don't know if, I don't know if brand search is incremental for you guys, but, like, that's probably the only. The biggest value of brand search is you can do it by there. Otherwise, it's. It's actually really hard because I've looked into this and wanted to do that. I'm like, all right, as we're running, you know, CTV campaign, can we, can we look at search lift? Right? It makes it really hard. And I haven't been able to find a way to do that with Google Analytics. I think you have to be on GA360, but don't quote me on it. So I think that your brand search thing is like a really good hack for that.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just like an additional data point. We, we saw a. We've seen a really large lift in our ring business, those branded queries. And it's like, oh, yeah, it comes down to something with our, Our media mix this year seems to be driving queries in a different way. So we go back and we can. We just ran tests for Snapchat and TikTok and it's like we could see lift there. So that's my, that's my big spiel.

[Preston Rutherford]

I think that's cool. I'm gonna, I'm. I got a product request now for, for Preston, for, For like a DMA filter right in their platform. That'd be sweet. You know, I think, I think what we're. What I was. What I've been ultimately getting at and changing a lot more this year is I'm trying to build out, you know, like, obviously we optimize our business off of. Off of revenue, off of a media spend and off of mer. And ultimately, like, we're plugging in, you know, armor is informed by our bottom line target. Right? If we, if we have a revenue target and we have a pretty good feel, you know, we have a very, A great finance department and like, we know where that. If we spend X dollars in. In alongside every other, you know, line item, like, we're gonna net out at this EBITDA margin. If we had a rep like that, you know, we have this EBITDA margin calculator. I am like. And I'm still optimizing towards those metrics, but I'm just trying to be able to like, in a more turnkey way. And I'm. We're working on getting this built out into our data warehouse. Just build out like full funnel health tracking metrics, starting with like. And like, I want it to be indicative of every stage of the funnel. So it's like, starts with sessions, but then it moves down into unique users, then new users, then returning users, then looking into like product views, then looking into like unique carts. Like, how many of those people actually built a cart all the way down into revenue? And then there's like, things like baseline revenue and like brand search, like, are somewhere in between those. It's just like, that is especially for, for us with our consideration period. Like, I can probably diagnose a future problem if I can diagnose an upper funnel problem. Like, if I can tell that our new users and our like, active cart users are down, I'm gonna. And that's like, let's say that's in October or August or September. Like, I'm gonna start getting worried about revenue in November and December. So I just think, like, having these like full funnels, health dashboards are super helpful and like, it can help you look ahead at maybe some future problems you might have. Because, yeah, like, everyone's like, oh, this, this, let's approve efficiency, let's just spend less. It's like, yes, you could do that, but there's a lot of future implications in your upper funnel. Or there's a lot of things that's going to do to your upper funnel that will have future implications. So it's like, stuff like that. I think having this like, full picture from hey, first touch point to actual point of conversion, like, where are we trending year over year, month over month, period over period. So we're building a lot of those dashboards out right now, which is. That's kind of been like, why I've been tweeting about some of this stuff is this has been very top of mind for me and my team to. To track more. More granularly.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally.

[Preston Rutherford]

Yeah.

[Connor McDonald]

I love it and I'm excited for it to all get more scientific. Feels like it's like we obviously conceptually try to measure that or we don't conceptually try to measure it. We like, try to consider it. But like, there's such a lack of data that I think it's interesting to see how tools like a tracksuit or a marathon or we DMA brand query hacks can like help shed light on some of that stuff.

[Preston Rutherford]

Yeah, I mean, you know, the cool thing about turning in a little bit of a plug for Marathon. But I think it's cool because their whole goal is to, to assign brand value like non direct response tactics. Right? Like they're trying to like be able to say hey, you actually should go invest in like for, for example one of their campaigns that we've set up is, is actually optimizing. We set up a custom event in Meta and we're actually optimizing for a branded Google search and then they've built a model to measure the value of that and we're actually running holdouts on all of their, so they have like their playbook and they have a model to assign like a brand value KPI and you know, you, you need to talk to their data scientists about how the model is set up. I'll, I, I'll butcher it. But then we're also running holdouts on all these tactics to actually see if they are driving incremental orders and at a, at a profitable IRO as. So yeah, stuff like that. I'm super excited about all that tooling. I think it's going to like hopefully be a game changer for performance marketers and allow us to confidently invest into some of these things that are just not like hey, go drive a sale right now. Which is what we all generally do. And I think we, we get away from with like TV and YouTube and CTV, but those are still hard to measure. So I'm curious to see like how our kind of tactic stack switches up based on some of the insights we find from, from their campaigns and their model.

[Connor McDonald]

Perfect. I love it.

[Cody]

If you know me, you know how cheap I am and how much I love saving money. This year is all about cutting costs and staying lean. You've seen me talk about it on Twitter. I cannot stand watching great D2C brands, even mediocre ones, get ripped off by SaaS vendors in 2025. So many of them are charging way too much over promising and under delivering and so I can't stand to see it. So I don't want to see it happen to you. I absolutely won't have it happening to me. You've also seen that I'm all in on AI. And both those reasons are why I love Rich Panel so much. It's about half the price of the beautiful software that we used before and it was built specifically with AI in mind. We made the switch to Rich panel right before Black Friday last year and I almost regret not switching sooner. We had zero downside. The implementation was pretty immediate, which actually shocked me. I was a little worried about it not Going to lie, but it just went off without a hitch. We saved money. We leveled up our CX at the same time. So here's our numbers. We cut our CX team from 18 to 10 agents, not before Black Friday, but since onboarding to Rich Panel, with our order volume staying the same or even going up, our CSAT has stayed rock solid at 4.2 out of 5. I'd like it a little bit better, but that's. That's stuff that we can do. AI is handling 70% of the tickets, which is awesome. So our ticket to order ratio has gone way down from about 40% to 14%. So we have fewer full timers. Our revenue employee has gone up. We don't need as many people to get back to people and able to be a little bit more strategic with where we allocate our resources. So if your current CX software needs more people, is more expensive than you want to pay, and has some janky AI solution, I highly recommend that you check out Rich Panel. Rich panel guarantees a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back again. It's super easy to switch. They take care of data migration, staff training, all that good stuff. So you can go live in under 14 days. So check out richpanel.com and tell them you heard about them from the marketing operators podcast.

[Connor McDonald]

All right, cool. You guys want to talk Cozy Earth live stream challenge?

[Preston Rutherford]

Have you guys.

[Connor McDonald]

Okay, have you seen it?

[Preston Rutherford]

I haven't seen this. Do you guys know Ian?

[Cody]

It's on the Internet. It's on the Internet. Of course he hasn't seen it.

[Preston Rutherford]

Ian Jackson did this, like. Like this, like seven days in a row live stream for this. This brand called. I forget the name of it. I'm gonna butcher it. But yes, this is very top of mind for me right now because he told me about that and now I'm seeing this. And we've also been doing more live streams at Hexclad, trying to like drive TikTok shop revenue. So I'm curious to hear what's going on here with Cozy Earth.

[Connor McDonald]

Okay, cool. Let me. I got a couple things to screen share here because I think, well, one, for a little bit of context, I think this is a fantastic campaign. I already said that. I think it's really cool. We're in the middle of our sweepstakes, which is like super gamified, very engaging. Connor, you guys are preparing for yours in that September, October period. It just feels like brands doing like stunt marketing. Brands have always done stunt marketing. It probably just increases in popularity over time. We'll see further gamification. We're doing a sweepstakes. Cozy's doing this, this Bedrot challenge. So let me, let me pull it up here so we could, we could talk through it a little bit. One, it's all centered around this live stream. So Cozy Earth, they do Utah brand. So shout out, shout out Utah. Here we go. The live stream doesn't look that exciting right now. It's 8:45, so I guess they're still sleeping. But Cozy Earth Bedding brand, they also sell like pajamas now, quickly becoming like a home and lifestyle brand. Very cool stuff. And I came across this because just the way that they've rolled this out I think is really interesting. I've been following a bunch of Utah creators. So I came across someone, he has like 400,000 followers on Instagra Instagram and he was like, hey, I'm participating in the Cozy Earth Bedrot challenge. Like vote for me to join, etc. Etc. So they had this like they have influencers participating. I think there's 25 people and it's been, it's Bedrot. So you're getting in a bed and you're staying there for as long as possible. And they have challenges and they have games and they vote people out. They have like weird mechanics where if someone needs to use the restroom, everybody needs to vote if they can go. So they don't want people taking advantage of. Of going to the restroom too often. So it's just this very fun, engaging thing. And, and the way they rolled it out was great. So they have these influencers involved. There's a handful of people with pretty significant followings participating in it. They've got another influencer. His name's London Lass, who we just worked with for our sweepstakes, hosting it. So it's just like a very like social native campaign. And, and you get this like really long form content you can see here, like this has been going on. I was checking this out at 6am this morning. Lots of comments, lots of engagement people, people super dialed. And then what I'll say to talk through like a little bit more of the funnel. Cause I was like, how are they even promoting this? I went to mil.com I have it pulled up. I'll jump around a little bit more here. So cool. So this is like an example of how they rolled it out to some of their audience. Wait is over. Bedrock Challenge is officially live. They talk about how the winner will win $25,000. You can meet the contestants. The Live stream had started at this point and then this is what they have living on their site. You can see the contestants, you can vote. They have a live timer of how long these people have been in bed. They're at 1 day and 18 hours. I also.

[Preston Rutherford]

Hold on. Can we go back up for a second?

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, yeah.

[Preston Rutherford]

So Garrett Casto is winning.

[Connor McDonald]

Garrett Casto is winning and he's the one whose Instagram I. I saw he's got like 400,000 followers.

[Preston Rutherford]

So he's been in bed the longest and 3,800 fans have answered how. So how is he winning? What's like the mechanics of him, like getting points and stuff?

[Connor McDonald]

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a little unclear. People have bet that he is going to win and then you get to predict how long they'll be in bed. So it's a little bit different. Like, Jaden fam here has 9% of the votes and. And people are predicting he'll last seven days. So it's just predicting how long they'll last. These people are all in a single room and then they're getting eliminated one by one.

[Preston Rutherford]

Okay, got it.

[Connor McDonald]

Grace was voted out last night. So she was, she was. I think she had been winning or like, like she was pretty solid contestant at 11.7% of votes. Also has a pretty big following on social. They voted her out last night. So slowly these people will get eliminated over time.

[Preston Rutherford]

So is it only like, is there like 10 influencers that are competing and then it's just people voting? Is the engagement piece.

[Connor McDonald]

It's. They're not all influencers. Like, there's a number of just people who submitted and are participating. Garrett and Grace, the ones whose who like I recognized a little bit, there's probably a handful of others in here, but like lots of just typical civilians.

[Preston Rutherford]

So there's a lot of people in bed.

[Connor McDonald]

So there's a. Yeah, well, there's 25. There's. You can't really see it in the live stream right now, but they have 25, like single beds just like stacked.

[Preston Rutherford]

Up in this room, all in the same room. Okay. So they brought everyone together. What are they doing? Like, are they talking? Are they like.

[Connor McDonald]

They're talking. They've got challenges, they're voting one another out. They've got this guy London, like hosting the thing and he running around doing funny, engaging stuff. So the last thing I'll hit and then, and then I'd love to hear. I've got a couple questions but like any sort of initial feedback. One thing I really like, because at the end of the day it's like, well, how are you selling product? So you can vote here. You're subscribed to email, you're subscribing to SMS. I went through this flow, just text bedrot to 5290 and you can vote right here via SMS. And they begin pushing you right into a funnel. They're like, hey, we love recommending product. Like, check out our warehouse sale or something like that. So I thought it was a really good example of like social, native, engaging content, multichannel rollout between email. You have SMS in here. I'm sure they featured it on the site, things like that. You obviously have this like home base where you can vote and engage and then it's also becoming like transactional to some degree and what I feel is a very natural way. So one of my favorite examples of, of brand social campaigns I've seen in a long time.

[Cody]

Here's my, here's my reaction. So it's, it's brilliant. So I think I love it. It's the Mr. Beastification of yeah, D2T brands, right? And like for so many years, right, like people have talked about, you know, every DTC CBG company needs to be a media company. And so many have tried, right. And I think there, there's a few different directions people have gone. They've gone the glossier route where like all these DTC 1.0 brands had blogs and stuff like that and trying to publish content. Almost all of them obviously glossier launched from that. But like away had a publication like failed. It's just a fundamentally different business. And also like media has changed a ton and I think we've seen more success with creators going into commerce and vice versa. I'm sure we could kind of think of examples but like you've like, right, like Feastables, if you just look at that is probably. There's so many creator brands that are absolutely crushing it right now. There's not a ton of brands that have gone media and really started crushing it. Which I think just shows you the what's important and how important distribution is. Obviously product is super important, but I, but I think this seems like one of the better ones possible because like people don't want media just about products, you know, they don't like for the most part, some of them, some of them do. And don't get me wrong, like there are a ton of brands that do a good job. Like there's a lot of beauty brands like makeup by Mario and like he's Like a professional makeup artist, Kardashians, makeup artists and like does like makeup master classes all over like the country. And content like there, there was definitely some amount but like you can't really create betting content. Like that's boring as hell. So I think what they did is again just leaning into that Mr. Beastification. It's, it's extremely socially native. It's not like they're producing these again. Like I know you're a Huckberry fandom and I think they're incredible. But like it's not like they're producing these like documentary style videos. Right. They're doing social native. I think streaming seems to really be very hot right now. Maybe I'm just living under a rock, but like even I am more familiar. I don't watch stream, but I'm more familiar with some of the streamers by name than like I ever have been before.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally.

[Cody]

So I think, I think streaming is having a moment. They're obviously doing a great job of, you know, working with creators to get earned distribution as well as content. Again, I haven't seen how they've integrated it. Like I think what they could have and should have done is like built a collection, like a capsule collection and had like different skus by creator and like gamified that. But otherwise it again, I haven't looked into the whole thing. I think it's brilliant and we're doing a negotiating like a decently large media partnership for next year. And I'm now like as we're. I'm like, how can we include something like this? Like how can we kind of gamify it to get the community involved more and have it be not just product focused.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, 100%. I think again this is like what we do at Ridge. Content's important. Embedding yourself in that content is important. We largely just sponsor creators. Like we are like let us insert ourselves into content Sweepstakes is a good example of that. What, what I think is impressive about this is it's. It's a very authentic and organic way for the, for it to be like brand first. Now you have people like Garrett, you have London L. You have the woman Grace. Like you have creators as a part of it. But it's very cozy. Earth first. Instead of like there will just be other examples.

[Preston Rutherford]

Right.

[Connor McDonald]

Like you'll have big sponsors of influencer first campaigns. And I think that's how a lot of brands have done it today. That's how someone like Ridge would do it. And I just think this is a really great Examp. Yeah, I agree with all your points.

[Preston Rutherford]

Do you feel like they. So, so Connor, you said their main like product pushes. So the winner gets a chance to win $2,500.

[Connor McDonald]

Oh, you get you. If you choose the winner, you could win 2500. The winner gets 25,000.

[Preston Rutherford]

Got it. Oh I see. Okay. Do you feel like they have. I mean I'm sure they're getting good distribution from Tik Tok on this. Like that's something we noticed when we've been doing our TikTok talk lives is like we're definitely getting good follower influx and we're reaching a lot of new people. So that's, that's a positive. Then you said that they had that like text that, that SMS funnel to get you into products. But because, because Cody, I fully agree. Like I feel like there's not on the surface like an obvious connection back to trying to get someone to buy and like how is, is there a way they could have gamified this more to do that.

[Cody]

That.

[Preston Rutherford]

Do you. Is there any other like product funnels integrated with this campaign? Are they like plugging the product during it? I'm just curious how they're like the sweepstakes is obvious, right? It's like go go prior and you can, and you can get into the sweepstakes at a, at a higher chance of winning. So. And like you've built yours around that. We've built ours around that. Everyone, all DTC brands doing a sweepstakes have built theirs around that. This is very different, very creative. But what's the. I'm curious if there are any other like weave ins to. To going and buying aside from just the hey text us and now. And now you're in a, a product funnel.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally. Yeah. I mean my experience so far has it's only become really transactional via sms. It doesn't look like there's a lot here. So I, I'd be curious and I know the Cozy Earth team decently and they're. They're frequent listeners of the show so maybe they'll give us some, some inside baseball once this comes out.

[Cody]

Maybe, maybe one of them has stopped using Twitter in the last like eight years. And we'll listen to this and make a Twitter resurfacing, you know.

[Connor McDonald]

Perfect. Yeah.

[Preston Rutherford]

Yeah.

[Connor McDonald]

Who did that?

[Cody]

That was. What was the brand that.

[Preston Rutherford]

That was Fellow Coffee. And I'm. And I'm meeting with their director of E Comm next week to talk about their, their new espresso machine, early access.

[Cody]

I love it and I feel like it was Taylor Holiday's doing. But, but Krista has become. That's, that's her name right? From. Tokovis has become very active on, on Twitter after, you know, he brought her up. So I, I like this trend.

[Connor McDonald]

It's the indoctrination. Yeah. We're, we're growing the community one podcast mentioned at a time. Yeah. Awesome. Like, I would be curious, like just to speculate on how the Cozy team sees this as valuable. Obviously. Like, we're talking about brand building. It's super memorable. Like there's just value in that. You get to send emails about it, you get to send texts. They're reposting a bunch of content on Instagram. They're getting millions of impressions on Tick Tock. I also feel, and I, I could be like totally wrong here. 25, 000 prize. You think all in. This isn't an incredibly expensive campaign. Like I end up thinking if I'm just eyeballing that, I'm like, that seems like good value. All those impressions, the memorability of those impressions you have that doesn't even include like people like Garrett and Grace in London posting on their own stories. It's just like very much just from an awareness and memorability standpoint. I like it. You're getting some amount of people into a funnel and some amount of people will buy immediately. But it doesn't feel nearly as doctor as something like the sweepstakes. Maybe that's a place to improve on in the future. But by and large I could just see this being a fun thing that people can participate in.

[Cody]

So, so I, and I think that's fun. Like I think so many brands will do brand campaigns and it's just like they're, they're very precious about their brand, you know, still. And this is just a really fun socially native thing. So. Yeah, yeah, totally agree with you. On that note, been loving some of the, the Ridge sweepstakes ads. Having great. I hope, I hope they're performing well. Been getting a lot on TikTok. I know that you guys did the pod. What I missed a few weeks back talking about like your team going to shoot stuff. So it was fun to like see that come together and, and yeah, some of that stuff is great. I love how you had like how you're weaving product, doctor and founder stories into like sweepstakes content as well.

[Connor McDonald]

The founder, the founder stuff for sweepstakes is crushing. And that's a really cool story. Like we're still family owned. You have the founder still as an executive in the company. And like the story is basically like, hey, it's really cool that Ridge has come on this way and now we get to like give away. We've given away half a million dollars of cars in cash. So that message totally resonates. What I would love to do is make it more participatory. I think it's entertaining, but it's not participatory and it's memorable. But like something like this in the future where someone could come in and vote for which cars they want to win. Or maybe there's some sort of game. You see, the other thing is no Revo involved in this. Which is probably a place for improvement because Revo's running some really cool stuff. Beloved sponsor of the pod. But like True Classic has people playing Pac man on their site and it's like, oh yeah, in the future I could see us having a little driving game embedded on the site for extra entries and just get people engaged over longer periods of time because the sweepstakes doesn't quite do that right now. Any last points on Cozy Earth Bedrock Challenge?

[Cody]

No. Sweet. I like, I like our recurring segment of Something on the Internet that you're introducing. The Conor R. Yeah, this is another new one.

[Preston Rutherford]

I didn't see any yet.

[Connor McDonald]

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[Cody]

Yeah, for sure. So setting the background, we've talked about this, you know, meta issues, just not getting, you know, it's incremental but not getting the efficiency that we need. So I spent some time just diving into the account, diagnosing it. Right. We diagnosed it as a reach issue and it's, you know, it's not mission critical. It's not like, hey, we're burning money and if we don't fix that, like we're not going to exist. But it's just like, hey, we need to grow and we need to grow new customer acquisition profitably and like, like nothing else really matters in our business, you know. And again, there's other levers, there's product, all that stuff. But like this is one of the most important things that we need to fix, you know, that you fix this. Everything else takes care of itself like 8020. So it's like, all right, let's, let's rally everybody behind anybody we can. And I, you know, I do my best thinking usually on a walk workout or stuff like that. And sometimes I'll just like chat with chat GBT now and I'm like, hey, I've heard of sprints. Like, like people talk about creative sprints, like people talk about sprints and product, but I'm like, like I don't exactly know what it is. Like chat GPT. I did, I did like the voice thing with chat GPT, like talk about it. And I was like, I was just like, hey, this is a problem we're having. Like could this be a good use? And like, like seems perfect, you know. So my understanding of a sprint is essentially like just a, it's a short period of burst on a very specific priority. Where you're going to prioritize that, devote resources to that, align a team to that and deprioritize other things. And so that was what we did. I essentially took and we're a pretty small team, but I took my director of growth and E Comm Senior director, creative strategy, data analyst and external vendors as well. Was just like I used a framework but I think it was essentially and I put this in the tweet was like here's the problem, here's our goal. Right? Hey, our cost per incremental is this. We need it to be this. Like this is how far away we are from our goal. And I think like that can just give a lot of clarity of. All right, cool. Like this is very specific to where what we need to be doing here is why I think it's a problem. And then here's like essentially hypotheses or a roadmap of potential tests. And that was just a starting conversation. So I set up a Slack channel as I went into a lot of the data. Shared that I set up a whatever Figma board, like whatever you, you know, you guys like to. To. To use, but set up a lot of stuff shared some looms on just like going into the account, looking at the data and explaining why it's a potential reach Pro problem and like what we can do and just trying to hypothesize it. So set up a month weekly recurring meeting. And I'm not a meeting guy, so if I'm willing to do a Monday morning meeting for an hour first thing, it's like that's like real priority. So me, director, growth and lead creative strategist, meet about it and just have a bunch of hypotheses of what we want to do and we're just devoting as much resources to that as possible. And yeah, so what I like about it, it got everybody on the same page, very clear. Right. With that framework, this is what leadership cares about, this is what the issue is. Here's why we think it's going to happen and here's what we're going to do. And I just felt it was actually a very cool moment for me in my leadership journey to see people really like these guys really energized about it. And I feel like a lot of times people have their individual goals and things, but we're all working on this together and all aligned on it and bringing ideas together. So it was a very cool moment to energize the troops a little bit. And it's definitely been a Sprint. My director growth. I, you know, was talking to me last night about it. Like. Like, I could tell she's working super hard on this. We're, like, sprinting to get some landers done. I can kind of go into what we're, you know, testing and doing to help with the reach, but definitely as many resources as possible around this. I think those are all the pros. And again, like, pulling resources. And I see my goal. Like, again, I'm gonna go founder mode, so I'm gonna dive in more. Like, I'm building landers. Like, I'm. I'm, you know, doing some research. Like, I'm not, like, above that, but I also think, like, as. As my role, it's like, how do I. How do I devote resources to this? That's the biggest thing I can do. Can I bring on external resources? Can I, you know, put dollars behind it? Can I. Can I pull people in across the org that maybe wouldn't be their main job? You know, can I be like, hey, I need a chief of staff on this. I need, you know, marketing ops to support this, like, whatever it is, and then also giving them the. The freedom to deprioritize things, because I think sometimes that can be challenging. Like, that's how I see my job. And overall, massive, massive pro. I'm super energized about it. I tried to set up another, like, mini sprint parallel to it. Terrible idea. We definitely have other stuff that's going on. I think what I'm learning is, like, you definitely have to deprioritize stuff. You cannot focus on everything. And, like, I have the very entrepreneurial adhd, especially when things are not going well, that I'm like, let's do this, let's do this. And so my teammates even giving feedback, hey, I think that's a good idea. But, like, let's hold off on that for now.

[Connor McDonald]

What was the. What was the mini sprint?

[Cody]

YouTube. We're just trying to impress YouTube performance as well.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah.

[Cody]

You know, I think we can dabble and do some stuff, but we can't devote full resources to multiple things at once.

[Connor McDonald]

Awesome. Okay, so how long has the sprint been, like, technically going on? And do you have expectations for how long it will go?

[Cody]

It will go until we are happy with the performance, and then we'll figure out how to put in, like, maintenance mode mode. Let's see. We just ran our kind of second house test with it, which was two weeks, so it's probably been going on for like, three weeks. A lot of it has been you know, creative development. So, you know, that takes time. We're actually launching a lot of it tomorrow. That has been a big sprint. But, yeah, it'll go. It'll go as long as we need to get it. The performance where we think, you know, it needs to be. And then we'll probably chill for a little bit and then maybe go right into the next sprinkler. Different.

[Connor McDonald]

Okay, and then my other question is, you mentioned. Okay, so you set the goal. You identify a problem. You set the goal. You've got looms. You explain what's going on. You get everyone on the same page. You do a recurring meeting. Like, if you run another sprint, is there anything else that you'd put a part of that playbook as far as, like, management goes? Is there like a dedicated Slack Channel or something?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. So we have dedicated Slack Channel. We have the recurring meeting. I think those are. Those are the main ones. The meeting is, you know, with an agenda. It serves as accountability for everybody that's involved. Like, here's what I did. Here's what I'm working on. Kind of any brainstorming that has to get done. Any, you know, just kind of touching base before going on Slack Channel. I'd probably bring a few more people into it from the beginning. Like, I'd probably have. It's. It's sometimes harder, and I'll have less people in a meeting to not, you know, distract them, and then I'll have to, like, catch them up later. One of the other things I think was really helpful, at least I think it was, is I kind of sent a loom to a few different agencies and was like, this is our problem right now. This is our goal. Here's how I think you can support me. You know, and so maybe it's like our dev agency and they can help build that lander.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally.

[Cody]

Or it's our creative agency. This is, you know, how I need you to support me for this and how I think you guys can help. And I think I've gotten positive feedback on that, just being really clear. I think it's probably the most clear I've been as a leader in terms of what our priorities are and where we're expecting support. So I. I think that's something. Again, it's not a new thing, but I would definitely do that.

[Connor McDonald]

And then it sounds like maybe also some sort of, like, incremental budget that you were willing to, like, invest in this problem.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. I think I could probably be more clear about, like, what that budget is, but I Think it's kind of like let's, let's throw dollars at this, you know, let's put resources behind it. Like a lot of this is we're going to do a lot of partnership ads. I'm like, like team, like, you know, especially because we're like, you know, everybody knows I'm pretty cheap and stuff. It's usually like always watching Budget, but I'm like, no, like, this is our one to two priorities right now. Like, we're not going to dabble. We're going to like push and invest. Totally.

[Preston Rutherford]

Connor.

[Connor McDonald]

Yo.

[Preston Rutherford]

Go ahead, Cody. I'm curious how like, specific the final deliverables are. Like, you have this problem, you did a bunch of brainstorming around the problem and then you ended up with some things you're gonna do, like tactically speaking, to solve this problem. So is it very, very, very hyper specific? Like, we're gonna produce X, do partnerships, ads. Like, why new landing pages. We're gonna do this type of ad account build. Like, how are you pretty? Like, clear and specific about, like, what's the end, like, what's the end deliverable of this Sprint. And then it's just a matter of getting there.

[Cody]

Yeah. So I'll go, I guess I'll just give like specifics of how we did it. So we ran, you know, the meta account, you know, we ran multiple account, wide holdouts with House on Meta. But we are, you know, cost per incremental is higher than we needed to be. We tested with that exclusion, you know, prior. So we fixed that repeat issue, but our cost per incremental was not great. So I'm like, all right, well, we fixed our repeat issue, but still not great. Where we, where is it? Looked into our account. We were just not reaching enough new people. Like, and it was very clear, like, our rolling reach was better in the months we were doing well. It was not good in the months we weren't doing well. And so it's just like, all right, why aren't we reaching new people, whatever. And just came up with probably 10, 15 things that we could do to break out of that. A lot of them very creative specific. But obviously there's account strategies and the creative stuff takes time, of course. So the first thing we did, we ran a mid Funnel test. I know I sent it to you guys, but 20% of our account on mid funnel. So 10% was on quiz complete. 10% was on view content. Don't know how we came up with it, but we did because also, like, we can do that right away. Like we didn't have to produce new creative. We could launch that right away. 26% improvement in cost per incremental. So like pumped about that, you know, definitely separate conversation I don't have with Rich because I don't like trying to figure out, you know, where we go from here for the testing. But, but a lot of it is now creative. And so two main things we focus on partnership ads. We've had a lot of success. So it's just like how do we scale that? We think that's a way to reach new people, people, you know, especially different sizes, macros. And so we're working on that with Influencer team and, and involve. We'll test some like macro partnership creators, like pretty expensive as part of like a, an account wide holdout. And then these like Persona funnel strategies where I think our hypothesis was like, you know, we need creative diversity and we need to speak to people in different Personas, you know, subsectors. And instead of trying to just have like one or two campaigns that we scale vertically, like let's go wider. So I guess we did like our, our, our I guess playbook and hypothesis is like let's test like an ad set around a Persona and have like 12 diverse ads, 12 to 15, whatever diverse ads in that ad set versus having like ABO with like three ads. So if we take this like mom Persona, like let's produce 12 ads that are very different. Some partnership ads, ads, some ugc, some static, whatever it is, let's run those to pages that are very similar to what we're talking about. And so that's kind of, I guess that is the deliverable. And then we will hopefully have a playbook for like if that performs, how do we scale into that? You know, because what we didn't want to do, and we talked about this with, on the Groons episode with Connor is like we don't want to go make all these net new landing pages and, and then like, you know, those ads get no spend. Right. So we're trying to be thoughtful about it, but trying to find that fine line between how much do we need to personalize to actually really vet the strategy but not go overkill with it.

[Connor McDonald]

So I'm curious like how much of or like which of those solutions were included in like the initial kickoff? Like did you go into it and you say hey, here's the problem. What I'd like to prioritize is optim optimization events and then partner ads and then Persona based landing pages and your team's just executing against that, or was it more of, like, an initial brainstorming and then figuring out, like, the list of priorities?

[Cody]

I did the brainstorming, kind of put the list together. After reviewing the data, I was just like, what are. What are all the ways we could reach new people? You know, there's obviously the account stuff, and I think then we prioritized it kind of in terms of what can we do right now so we don't have to wait and what do we think is going to have the biggest impact? But, you know, that'll take longer, so we got to get going on. So I think I had an initial list and talked about it with my team, and we kind of decided on how to action on it. What would be priorities and, like, our. Our roadmap.

[Connor McDonald]

Awesome. Okay, so my other question, and then, Connor, I'd love to hear the same from you. Is what would. Cody, you wrap up this, you're gonna drop cost per incremental acquisition. You know, 40, whatever you need, boom, it's done. You get to build a new Sprint. Are there other parts of the business that you'd be like, oh, we're gonna focus on this section next?

[Cody]

Yeah. So the first thing. Let's say this works. Yeah, I have to. We then have to figure out a way to sustain it. Like, let's say building out these landers. Like, I've got to bring on more people to build. Landers get, like, really efficient processes. So, like, quoting you, like, the aggressive templatization is something we're doing and thinking about because, like, we're trying to whip up a landing page in, like, two hours.

[Connor McDonald]

Right.

[Cody]

You know, so that's like the AI tool plus templatization. But then it's like, all right, can I plug a junior person in who's just going to. Of plug and play, you know, that playbook. So first, if it does work, I feel like we're kind of duct taping some things together right now. We got to figure out how to sustain it so we can scale output because it's the creative supply chain. Right, right. And then, yeah, I think. I think we'll figure out what's the next area. I think for us, YouTube. YouTube has always performed really well, and we just have neglected it, you know, So I think we would just put a lot of resources into that same.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, we just ran a very similar process with YouTube. We had a dedicated Slack YouTube takeover weekly meeting. Hey, this is the goal. We got our Google buyer together with our director of paid social at the time with the performance Creative strategist and it was like let's make this work. So like we just ran a very similar thing and I also found it super helpful and you just from to your point around the accountability, it's like I think if you don't have the meeting on the board and like expect updates in each of those on a weekly or bi weekly basis, just really easy for things to like kind of fall to the wayside so you ensure.

[Cody]

That it, it doesn't anything, anything you did differently that you'd recommend. Like I could still from the biggest thing was.

[Connor McDonald]

The biggest thing honestly is like going to be no surprises. I think it's measurement. It's, it's exactly what you described to Facebook. It's like what are we optimizing for? We tested target cpm. We've talked to a number of. Another interesting part of the process and I'm sure like this played a role for you too is like you just talk to other brands early to help identify the problem and the priorities. So for us it was like, like talk to some brands who have scaled heavily on YouTube who are optimizing for target CPVs, target CPMs, things like that. So you think about optimization strategies, you think about measurement. You got to line that up with House and our testing roadmap. And then the biggest thing is just like better creative. So like looking at more longer form content. I always tell the team is like small things but I'm like we have five non skippable seconds on YouTube in stream. Let's make the most of that. Like don't give me a three second hook on something that's not skippable for five seconds. I'm like the creative. At least those first 10 to 15 seconds has to be significantly different than what we work with on meta. Not necessarily different footage but just from like an editing and storytelling perspective it can be quite different. So just getting people in that headspace for weeks at a time and that's where you mentioned the sweepstakes. YouTube that's working well right now is edited significantly different than anything we ran earlier this year, much less last year. So I think just continuing to chip away at it has been beneficial.

[Cody]

Yeah, talking, talking to other brands is a great idea. We definitely did. Did but that's a, that's a really good point. Did you. How about, how about. And I'll share mine as well of like cons. But did you notice anything drop? Like are there any negatives that you would, you would, you know, caution?

[Connor McDonald]

Dude, there's, there's, well there's just always trade offs. That's my big thing is like and you try to. I've talked about one of our biggest opportunities at Ridge this year has just been reallocating resources. I talk about over indexing on go to market under indexing on like we call it in market optimizations, evergreen content, things like that. So it's like as soon as you focus on YouTube there's a little bit less time being spent on rings, on meta. Right. Or like the, the next go to market item. So just balancing those and trying to make sure that we are properly allocating resources as much as possible I think was the, I mean for what it's worth, our YouTube one was like net net very positive. But I think there are other instances where very important things might, you know, know be negatively impacted by time being spent elsewhere.

[Cody]

For sure. It definitely and, and I think the further you get into a sprint you can see that that's like ah, like I'm, I'm not spending nearly as much time on this part of the business. And yeah I think you, you can really only do one. Maybe I can do two because I'm going to be like less involved specifically. But like I think I put this in the tweet like anything ops related, anything, you know, I'm just like coo like you got this like, like you know just like I, I don't think I've met with our VP retail in a month. I'm like cool you got this like I don't need to spend my time on that right now.

[Connor McDonald]

We just did. I don't know if I'd call it a sprint but we had a focus for most of the last like two months basically. It doesn't fit nicely into a quarter. It. It's so dorky. I geek out on this stuff though and I actually don't think I've spent too much time on it. But we have a master SKU table. We have a master assortment list. We've like massively expanded SKUs. So we spent a lot of time getting planning, product marketing data and ops basically all aligned around how are we using like these central sources of information because we basically had like all these disparate spreadsheets tracking all this different information. It was really, really dumb and redundant. Like it could be redundant which would be bad. But worse is you just had different people reporting on numbers in different ways. It didn't make any sense. So over the last like eight weeks we've consolidated all that down and I kind led that project. I find it very Cathartic to just like squash out like random spreadsheets. But that, that's, that's another example of something that I would consider a sprint. We met Monday mornings every week for the last eight weeks or so.

[Cody]

Oh, that reminds me. One, one more point on this. You have to set. So again, I don't know when the sprint is going to be ended. Right. It's performance tells us that. But at least for the milestones internally, you have to set a deadline. Like we are launching our new creative testing approach with Persona is tomorrow. You know, it's not the goal, but my director of growth was, was, was up last night. You know, build, building out stuff to get ready for that. You do have to do that and just set that kind of urgency and intention of like, guys, this is when we need to launch this buy. And again, it's, it's not. I, I find this process very energizing, but it's also exhausting. Like, we're definitely working not, I want to say around the clock, but like much harder and, and faster pace than normally. And so I think something I'll be mindful of is like, all right, after it's like, let's breathe a little bit. Like, let's let the team kind of chill for a little bit before we dive into a next one. I think they would kill me if I was like, all right guys, this is our next print. We're starting tomorrow. Totally. And I'm not going to lie, I'll need it too.

[Connor McDonald]

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[Preston Rutherford]

How, how important is the. You guys? I one thing I'm noticing is you guys each mentioned like a recurring weekly meeting. How important is that? Like do you feel like that that drives some sort of urgency behind the team members working on it? Because they're like, well I want to have like made some progress and be able to update in that meeting and that. And is that, is that meeting basically just like a check in to be like here's the progress we've made. Here's what, here's the things we've done, here's what I'm working on next week or this week rather. And then like you kind of just re, kind of recycle that process. You kind of go through it until you ultimately have done the thing and it's done and then you're ready to stop that, that short term meeting about that very specific project.

[Connor McDonald]

So for us, for like the YouTube example that I brought up, they would review the data from the YouTube performance and then iterate on it from there. So it's like that has to be a synchronous conversation at some point, right? Like I don't love the idea of making meetings all the time, especially if they're just kind of like, like check ins or whatever these are. Like you're reviewing data, you're ideating, you're planning next steps, things like that. Like that just has to happen in like a normal conversation. So that's how at least we approached it.

[Preston Rutherford]

Got it.

[Cody]

Yeah, I'm with Conor on that. Like I'm not a meeting guy but like there are definitely things that are, are so much more effective. Like I think brainstorming, right. It's like you put good people in a room together and, and hash out ideas and you're going to get, you know, one plus one equals three versus if you try to do that Async, you might not get the same. So definitely value behind that. But in general with meetings, I'm not a fan of public feedback but I think public accountability is just one of the strongest things you can do. And just so people know they have a meeting on a calendar with where they have to present stuff to their boss and their peers, people will like, we do this for our go to market stuff, you know that Connor does. Like people will rush to get Things ready in. In time because they're not going to want to look bad publicly and not have their stuff together.

[Preston Rutherford]

Yeah.

[Cody]

So, yeah, I think it's pivotal. Even if you just want to keep it 30 minutes, 15 minutes. Like, I think Connor, was it you or somebody else has said sometimes they'll do like a daily standup as part of.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, we do a daily standup.

[Cody]

Yeah. Do you do it like for the sprints? Like, were you doing that for YouTube or just weekly?

[Connor McDonald]

What we're doing now, not to get like, too into the weeds here, like the. The master skew table sprint of like, consolidating all the information that is. That is. That is a part of our Monday standup. So, like, we'll break off a chunk of the Monday standup and we've got a couple different groups. So I was leading master skew table 1. We had other people planning for some of the ops of sweepstakes. We had another group working on internal AI efforts. So it's like, okay, yeah, there's like kind of the. The whole. The entire company got broke up into basically four little unique sprints that would check in every Monday. The YouTube one is marketing specifics. That was a much smaller group group that would just meet once a week. It was like four people in total.

[Cody]

Yeah, we have a lot of. We have a lot of jogs going on right now as well. So maybe that's it. It's like you can have one. One sprint going and maybe like a few jogs going.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, 100. Okay, cool. You just want to hit the. The hotline question.

[Preston Rutherford]

Yeah.

[Connor McDonald]

All right, sweet. This comes from woolen prints or wool. And they've got a men's brand and a women's brand. 25 million dollar D2C merino wool apparel brand. I've been on the website. I'm not sure why. Maybe I've met the team in person at some point. But it's a beautiful brand. They make everyday clothing. Their marketing team has elevated creative and styling and they've massive, massively expanded the. The. Their number of pieces, the catalog. So we're all kind of in the same boat there with that growth. They say they see more flops and want better alignment. So they're just. So what they're designing and marketing is to the same customer. They said right now, marketing mostly reacts to product. That's like the general flow. And then the question is, should we flip this dynamic and collaborate more or how do you balance appealing to loyal customers while reaching aspirational nuance without alienating Your base.

[Preston Rutherford]

That's a great question. I guess my first, my first question is like, are they seeing decreased efficiency on their Hero? Like I assume they have like a HERO set of products or a product or a few products that, that are there kind of like core acquisition products. So my first question would be like, well, why are you even trying to launch new products in an acquisition funnel? Like maybe the, maybe the assumption is that they are seeing decreased efficiency. If they're, if they're not, I'd be like, well, I would be scaling the, the, the HERO acquisition product that they initially got their traction with to, you know, to. Until they can't anymore. Until they really start to see efficiency drop drop and then really make their, their new products be LTV drivers for those folks. So I'd be curious to understand that it says new acquisition is harder. So I am assuming they are seeing some, some drop in efficiency.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, I would think so. I, I think that is a good point where it's like before and they're obviously committed to some degree of expanding the catalog, but I think a lot of people think they have to expand the catalog earlier than they do and that there's actually probably many optimizations to make to scale like the current HERO product. I will say I'll quickly state Ridges experience so far because we've massively expanded the catalog for a long time. You have to strike the balance of building products for your existing customers to expand LTV to reactivate people like that, of course makes sense. I think the way larger, the much larger opportunity or where Ridges found the most benefit is is net new hero products that you can acquire new customers on. And I don't think those necessarily have to appeal to your existing customer base. Like we are going to attach a, I mean the goal is for US to attach $100 million travel business to Ridge, $100 million ring business to Ridge over time. We're not focused on selling carry ons to wallet customers. We're going to go out and, and be a travel brand to net new people. So when it comes to that, our biggest lessons have been like how are you building products with the value props and the economics to support being a acquisition product in a DTC environment. So how are you differentiated? Why do customers care? And then I, I say this like kind of facetiously but like you have to price it at a point people will buy it and with margins that you can make a profit on. And it's like that's, that's obviously the game. But like we've messed that up a number of times at Ridge going prices to huge margins. But prices are too high, nobody buys it. And then the flip side is too high of cogs, lower margin, hard to acquire customers while profiting. Like we've, we've landed on, on both sides of that spectrum. And that's probably the biggest thing. And that is a collaboration of product and marketing. Like you have to be thinking acquisition first when you're developing the product all the way from a feature perspective to a cogs perspective. So there has to be a lot of alignment and that also has to be a really big swing. You're going to want to commit to creating new content, new landing pages. You're not going to want to send one email and say is this a success or not? Like you were committing to that as a new category. So highly collaborative, extremely thoughtful, really. You know, you got to give it the old college try when you launch it. That would be my. That. That's our experience so far.

[Cody]

That was such a good answer. And we should do a. Because this is a lot of what we, we're doing right now and thinking about like we should do a whole episode on this. I think it would be great. I think it would be a really great one and helpful but really good answer. I think the only thing I can add is it's an org chart problem really. Like there's a bunch of questions in there. It's like product wants one thing, marketing wants another thing. Like, what does, what does leadership want? Like, how are they sitting? Maybe they're more of a, maybe they're more of a product leader, you know, leadership team or marketing. And like, maybe they don't necessarily know, but like that's what is successful. And I think that's one thing that Ridge does super well is like, is Connor and Sean work so closely together and obviously understand both sides of the business. And you know, just from that answer you can tell Connor's definitely involved in product development from a, from a growth standpoint. And obviously Sean gets marketing and it's why I've gotten more involved in product here. And you know how we're, we are approaching it because it was probably not enough of here's what the market wants and it was more of just here's what the product team wants to create. But you also have to, you know, innovate and, and shouldn't just make stuff people are asking for. Like you also want to, you know, it's like the whole Henry Ford quote. So completely agree with that. But I think ultimately leadership has to get both sides working together. And that's really their job.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally. And I think it comes down, like, again, kind of restating what I said, but just clarity around, like, what the purpose of the product is. Connor and I talked about this where we had a good discussion around, like, where people are wasting time today because we talked about, like, products hit. Product hit and misses. And what I had said in that episode was. Or another, like, distinction that we'll make is we'll develop products that are supposed to benefit from the existing business. So, like a merino will company, I think they sell. Yeah, it's apparel and stuff. It's like, okay, yeah, if you just had a beanie, can you get the beanie attached to all of your sweater and sweatshirt sales? Can you get that in 5% of orders? And it's like, yeah, that at that point is probably worth making. And you never have to worry about. You have to think about, like, well, what is the upsell strategy? But you never have. You never have to worry about running ads for the beanies. And like, that is its place and that is how you're getting distribution for that product. So there is, like a very, very happy medium there to some degree. And for Ridge, that's like key cases, pens, knives. We're not going to go pay to acquire those customers. We are going to get some amount of wallet customers to purchase those items while checking out. And that is just a completely different strategy and therefore requires different price points and margins and features than something like the carry on.

[Cody]

I think that that that last question was like a separate one that you touched on. But it's like, it could be, again, like, part, like a really good discussion for. For another day is like, how do you risk alienating, you know, or do you risk alienating your existing audience? And like, that's something we think about. Like, we're. We're trying to get a younger customer and that's going to be very different products that appeal to them. And like, you know, there is a concern and team members will say, like, well, we don't want to alienate our current ones. But, like, also, does every product have to be for everybody? Like, right. You know, I'm a. I'm a kid fan. I love kids. Like, 90% of their stuff I wouldn't wear. Like, it's way too fashionable for me. But, like, I love and will buy a bunch of their T shirts because I, you know, they're for me. And like, I don't know if I necessarily see that. And I'm like, oh, like, I would not support this brand, I wouldn't buy it. So I think you can have different collections and lions for different, you know, people. I think as long as it feels maybe central to a certain brand pillar or theme, if that makes sense.

[Connor McDonald]

Absolutely. Yeah. So that was the point that I was going to make is like some sort of like underlying common thread, like another thing. And again this was just through the process of, of trying stuff because we launched razors at one point, we launched T shirts, we launched water, all sorts of stuff. And like the things that just naturally performed better shared some sort of like underlying set of attributes. Your customers like you for a certain reason. And I think you'd be surprised how experimental you can get with products that still resonate from like that attribute perspective and like one of the very simple ones and this one's really obvious but like when we sell small metal items you carry every day, it tends to work. Those things are built for life, they're designed well, they've got cool colors and it's like that is rings and pens and knives and key cases and Wallace and all sorts of carabiners etc and, and, but I also think there are similar like attributes around durability and functionality that you can find in our carry ons that like, that brand affinity like ports over to something.

[Cody]

It makes sense why you would launch it if somebody's familiar with the brand.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, but then when you say like I'll tell people, yeah, we sell wedding bands, wallets and carry ons, they're like where the hell do you work? Like it doesn't make sense at face value in the same way that it's like yeah, if we sell T shirts and sweatshirts or whatever like that that naturally aligns in people's minds and we at least have been a little bit more experimental.

[Preston Rutherford]

I think the, the other obvious one I would add is like just survey people like ask people that have, have placed a first time order or what other products they would have bought on their first order. You know I think, I think people are pretty honest with that stuff and I think there'd probably be some, you know, we, we have like an always on post purchase survey. Now that's like what other products would you like to hear from us? And you look at the survey, I was just looking at it yesterday. It, it couldn't be more, more obvious what we should do and like what. And, and those are all people that have bought from the first time. Right. So it's like right when they bought, we're saying what other products would you like to hear from us? Would you like to have from us? They haven't tried our products yet. Right. They haven't gotten it shipped to them. So that's even more reliable in terms of trusting it. Like, I look at those results and I'm like the. Whatever is the highest response rate I'm the most confident in. That is our as like a. As a hero acquisition product and like one of the one that. That answer is exactly what we're developing right now. And I'm very, very, very confident on that as a. As an acquisition product which also because of that data, it also gives me confidence that I'm not going to go spend time, money hours developing like awesome CTV ads and awesome Facebook ads and then. And the product's going to flop and not work in Facebook and. And not be profitable as an acquisition product. So I think that's like just like an easy win to. To ask your customers right when they've bought kind of what else they would like to see and. And let that kind of guide some of the, you know, first party or zero party day data or whatever they're calling it. You know, let that guide the road map a little bit more. Love it.

[Connor McDonald]

All right, cool. You guys want to call that an episode?

[Cody]

Yeah, that was. That was a good one. I think, guys, by episode 100, we're going to be like in our groove. We're going to be.

[Connor McDonald]

Dude, I think at what point does the. Connor, do you get a microphone stand? Episode 100.

[Preston Rutherford]

If. If I. I think about episode 100, I can get that. I can get the. This unstuck. I just need to get this thing unstuck. I try to quarter. Can't get.

[Connor McDonald]

Oh, we lost you again. All right, thank you again for listening to another episode of Marketing Operators Again. If you want your hotline questions answered, submit them. We've got a link in the description. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, Prescient after sell and Revo. Make sure to like and subscribe and we'll see you next week. Thanks. Thank you.