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Marketing Operators
The Lesser-Known BFCM Insights & Strategies Driving Our Planning Right Now
01:16:52
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- [00:00]
A
Black Friday is Black Friday, like Saturday is not going to be bigger than Black Friday.
- [00:03]
B
We're going to talk about the laundry list of things that we are like working on for BCM right now. Yeah. What are the things that you have that you think people aren't generally thinking about and maybe they should be.
- [00:13]
A
You have a really big Black Friday. You're scaling up, you're super excited. You don't pull back enough on Saturday, but you are at such a scale that it's just very easy to mess it up from an emer perspective.
- [00:22]
B
I love talking about, like product ideas. It's one of like my favorite things to chat about with marketers and founders. There's always going to be new products, new trends, new, new problems that people have. Your goal in this like phase one, like scrappy test should be finding product market fit, period. Like that's the key result right there. All right, we're back for another episode of Marketing Operators. Connor, your walls are looking a little bare behind you. Do you have any, do you have any life events going on?
- [00:50]
A
Oh, I talked about it with Cody. So, so it will have been, it will have been announced.
- [00:55]
C
Okay.
- [00:56]
A
But Yeah, I am 48 hours out from moving back to LA, so house is packed up. If it's a little echoey, it's because I'm in a barren office. I was telling Connor before the show. I've just got, you know, the logistic logistics of moving is annoying. All my stuff got packed up and shipped yesterday, so I've just got a plastic folding table and then all, all the like work essentials, laptop monitor and podcasting essentials webcam. I got the mic, I got the mic stand, the whole thing, but it's all mounted on this like $40Amazon table that I plan on just leaving with when I, when I head out.
- [01:29]
B
Nice. It's a one, it's a one use table or a three day table. Are the pets still there? The cats and the dogs, are they still at the house?
- [01:35]
A
The cat and dog is still here. They'll be making the, the drive out with me on Friday.
- [01:40]
B
Nice. How long, how long was your moving pro? How long has it been so far? Like when did you actually like start packing?
- [01:49]
A
Like Friday. Like I'm the worst. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I, I, I didn't secure things with the moving company until Saturday morning and they were like, yeah. Did you have plans fall through? They were like, you're like, you need your stuff picked up Monday? So yeah, no, I'm, I'm a terrible planner, but Then once I get into action, I've gotten an incredible amount done in the last, you know, five days.
- [02:11]
B
Dude, that gives me so much anxiety. I'm like the type that'll start, like, if I. If I know I have to move, I'll, like, start packing stuff up. Like, not that I'll make a ton of progress, but I'll at least start packing stuff up like two months out because I just know until that weekend, it's gonna just give me so much anxiety. It. I just. It's the worst.
- [02:29]
A
Totally, totally.
- [02:30]
B
Yeah.
- [02:30]
A
No, we are very different people in that way.
- [02:32]
B
And you're. You're going. So you're going to la. Are you moving? Like, what's the. What's the setup in la? You're in. You're in the east side of la. Are you moving into a house apartment?
- [02:40]
A
Moving into a house. East la.
- [02:43]
B
Did you buy it? Are you renting it?
- [02:45]
A
Just renting? I'll probably. I'll buy in California at some point, but yeah, I wanted to get back before Q4. Salt Lake's been great, but time to move home and, and just want to lock Things in before Q4, so it would have been a much longer process if I were, you know, purchasing property.
- [03:01]
B
Right. And LA is home. Are you. And I. I know you're from California. About. Did you grow up.
- [03:06]
A
Yeah, I grew up in Long beach, so Southern LA County.
- [03:10]
B
Nice. Well, welcome back home. Good luck with the rest of the move.
- [03:14]
A
Yes, yes, thank you. Yeah, I got. I got one quick thing for you before we hit the sponsor, before we jump into it, because I think this is funny. Going to talk a little bit about BFCM today, and I always joke, and I found this while moving, so a little bit of a tie in here, but check this out. The Q4 Essential Signed Taylor Holiday rookie card.
- [03:32]
B
Dude, can you. Can you put that up a little closer to the camera?
- [03:35]
A
Yeah, for sure. Look at that.
- [03:37]
B
Dude, that is amazing. If that doesn't. If that doesn't bring you good luck in qfr, nothing will.
- [03:44]
A
This is. I. I'd credit most of Ridge's success over the last couple years to me having a sign Taylor Holiday rookie card on my desk at all times.
- [03:52]
B
How did you get that?
- [03:53]
A
It was on ebay.
- [03:55]
B
Shut up. You bought that on ebay? How much. How much do you buy that on ebay for?
- [03:58]
A
Sean bought it. I don't remember how much it was. I mean, look, no offense to Taylor, it wasn't that expensive. They're not that sought after. It's maybe the highest value baseball card amongst the E. Comm community?
- [04:09]
B
Oh, without a doubt. I don't know anyone else that played pro baseball. Did he ever make it to the league? We might have to have Taylor on and ask him about his baseball career.
- [04:17]
A
Yeah, I don't know exactly what his pro career looked like, but I like to think the baseball card is helping my E. Com career.
- [04:23]
B
Is that on your desk at all times?
- [04:26]
A
Well, it was for a while and then it at some point got tucked away in a closet and then I found it while moving and I was like, good, good. Q4 starting. I gotta get this thing out.
- [04:34]
B
I gotta dust it off, dude. Honestly, Taylor's got some decent stats here. He, he was drafted in 604th overall in the 19th round outta UC Irvine.2 60 lifetime batting average, hit only 5 home runs. So not, not a big home run hitter, but like, I don't know, 260 average. Man, that's pretty good. That's. That's pretty dang good.
- [04:53]
A
And those are, those are major league stats.
- [04:55]
B
Those are his minor league stats. It looks like he wasn't in the league. It looks like he played two years and I think he was in single A. And then he decided to launch one of the best e commerce growth marketing agencies the world's ever seen. After that, I guess 100%.
- [05:10]
A
We're lucky to have him. We're. We're lucky you made the jump in corporate life.
- [05:14]
B
I know, I know. All right, so we're having Taylor on later to talk about his baseball career. Great. Well, let's do it. We're talking about BFCM today and some other fun topics. Before we do that, shout out to the sponsors Motion rich panel after cell pressing, AI and house. And if you're liking the show, make sure to like subscribe and share with your marketing friends. So I don't know about you guys, but we are fully locked in on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Holiday sale at hexclad. Motion is, as always, a very big part of this. We do a ton of just iterations on evergreen ads with like Black Friday sale banners. So we're just taking literally our top performing ads for the entire year, slapping a banner on them. And that's at least one part of our content stack for bfcm. So easy just to use motion to look at like last 90, last six months year to date. Which ads are getting us the best efficiency, which ads are getting us the best scale. It's like a really quick and easy way to pull that report in motion and then come up with just a bunch of overlays onto your evergreen ads. That's one way we're using motion as we head into the peak season for us. The other way we're using it is for more like instantaneous feedback. So we're saying, hey, we did that. But we also shot and produced all these seasonal ads, so which ones are performing best? And then we'll iterate on those like during bfcm. So all of this is getting powered by Motion reports. It's just the quickest, the easiest way to see what's working, what's not. Connor, how are you guys using Motion at Ridge to inform your Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday ad decisions?
- [06:48]
A
We're in a similar headspace. We did a, an exercise that I was calling a Bottoms up planning this year where we granularly looked at what worked at what times throughout, you know, late October, November, December last year. That all comes from analyzing our creative. So we got that foundational approach of what are the things we want to be prioritizing and then we can get into the fact of what are the new things that we want to be trying this year. And motion really kind of led point on a lot of that analysis.
- [07:13]
B
Cody, how about you?
- [07:14]
C
Yeah, same thing. Like we'll have everybody propose their strategy and their plan, but like there should be no reason to start from scratch. Like there's no, you know, blank page. I think you got to hit that like 80, 20 of explore and exploit. But I think for, for exploiting like you got to look at what's performed well. And you know, we try to have a lot of warm up points. Like we will have like holiday kits launch soon. We have Labor Day, we have Last Black Friday. So we just build a report of all of them. We just see what traits perform well. Anything that you can filter by naming convention so we don't have to start with a blank screen. And then we're able to just get more pinpointed in, in our strategy, hopefully each launch.
- [07:43]
B
And. And lastly, one thing I really, really appreciate about motion is you don't need to like be this expert in how to use the tool. Like, like they're very good at getting you onboarded, getting your data ingested and connected and then training you on exactly how to use the tool. So if you've been dragging your feet, it's time to get going with motion. Head over to motionapp.com all right, let's get into it. So we're going to talk about kind of like the laundry list of things that we are like working on for BFCM right now. I think in reality we've probably been chipping away at BFCM and Holiday for a while. I know at least we have at hexclad. But you have a few less talked about BFCM tactics and insights that, that you wanted to talk about. So. Yeah, what are the things that you have that you think people aren't generally thinking about and maybe they should be?
- [08:32]
A
Yeah. So we've been having, I had meetings, I had, I had meetings for the first time in a while with our Google and Meta reps last week, which was fun. I felt like my inner media buyer was like satisfied. I was like, oh yeah, I love hearing about the new optimizations on Meta and I just wrote down a couple things that, that came up under. I put them under the bucket of like less talked about BFCM tactics and insights. I've only got a couple here. I would love to know if it sparks any ideas for you. The first one came from our Google reps. We have someone on our account dedicated to international growth. That's been a big focus for us for the last two years. And they made this really interesting point because, and I say this every year. I said it in, you know, we did the motion. No, we did the, we did the operators event where I had like 26 like BFCM tips a couple weeks ago. And one that I always say because it's so easy to mess up is you go, you have a really big Friday, you have a really big Monday. On BFCM weekend. You particularly have a really big Friday. At least from our experience, it is so easy to not pull back, spend enough going into Saturday. I this is like my 8th bfcm with Ridge or something and we probably made this mistake like three times over over the course of my career where you have a really big black Friday, you're scaling up, you're super excited, you don't pull back enough on Saturday. Results drop off in the US because people have purchased on Friday or they're waiting until Monday and there's still really big days. But you are, you are at such a scale that it's just very easy to mess it up from an Emmy, our perspective. So I always say every year make sure you're pulling back enough on Saturday and Sunday. Have an idea of what forecast should be. Maybe be conservative against that. That that would be my advice for the US every single year. I say that all the time. What came up in the Google call, which I thought was really interesting was that in international markets, BFCM is big. All the brands are running their, their sales internationally. So it's still there, but nobody has off on Friday. They're not celebrating Thanksgiving in Europe, so you don't have Friday off. And then everybody works Monday, but nobody has Monday off either. So what they say and what I'll look back at our, our historical results and we'll better adjust kind of projections or we'll better adjust our strategy going into Saturday and Sunday. But they were saying that sales are more concentrated on Saturday and Sunday relative to the US So if you need to be super conservative going to Saturday in America, you might not necessarily have to be as conservative in the EU or the UK or the AU or whatever. So that is a very small optim optimization that I think has not been on my radar for a while that we're hoping to better take advantage of this coming bfcm.
- [11:06]
B
Oh, interesting. Okay, now I'm, I'm very curious to see because I don't know off the top of my head if, if we follow that trend. So I'm gonna go look at our UK store real quick and see what, what we saw last year and see if that, that holds true for us. Let's go Thursday to Monday. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Very different curve than our US store. We actually did do better on Friday, but like, of course.
- [11:31]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and that's going to Black Friday is Black Friday, like Saturday is not going to be bigger than Black Friday. The point is there is a smaller drop off between Friday and Saturday in international markets.
- [11:41]
B
Right.
- [11:41]
A
Because Americans have spent all day Friday shopping. And, and people, people in other parts of the world have not bigger budget.
- [11:48]
B
Pull downs in the US relative to the UK or the EU to like that's, that's the action item here. Right. Is like you're not pulling back down quite as ag as you might want to pull back in the U.S. yes.
- [12:01]
A
That the shopping starts slightly later because people are working that Friday. So that's one.
- [12:04]
B
Right.
- [12:04]
A
Which I thought was cool. Right. That came up on the Google call.
- [12:06]
B
And I'm like, very cool.
- [12:07]
A
Extremely actionable. It's kind of like a mid tail or long tail sort of observation, but I'm like, that's the exact. Loved it from the reps. I was like, this is fantastic information.
- [12:16]
B
That's a great insight. That's a, that's a really great insight. I mean that could save brands like hundreds of thousands. I mean, I mean depending on your scale, like a lot of money.
- [12:24]
A
Yeah. For Hexclad it could save you 10, 20, 30, $40 million.
- [12:28]
B
Right, right, exactly. There you go. I will send your invoice we'll get it paid out net 30.
- [12:34]
A
Yeah, perfect. Okay. The second one that I wrote down here came from the meta conversation. I think a lot of people have been talking about. I don't know exactly what the category is called, but you have like Mark Pipe, there's another one called Socio. But these services or software that manage your catalog for you and we've seen a lot of success with this at Ridge. It's super simple, right? We have the catalog. The images that get fed into the catalog from our website are pretty standard gray backgrounds or just like your generic PDP photo. What Mar, Piper or Socio do is they allow you to like add flares and add designs and kind of add personality. It's a stronger looking ad. You can add more additional information and we've found it to perform better. Now what we haven't done, which came up on our medical, which I'm like, dude, this is a no brainer. We should totally do this is be more consistently updating the messaging in that catalog design tool so that it reflects our, you know, we will always do Black Friday, but updating it to be like, you know, last chance Black Friday or updating it to Cyber Week or post Cyber Week. Like we want to highlight free shipping and things like that and just using that almost in the same way that we would update the homepage on our website or the way that we're updating messaging within emails, we should just pull that all the way through to the product catalog level. And I think that's another one that like just taking a more critical lens to that very specific part of our paid media strategy I think can have percentage points improvements over what we did last year. So yeah, that's, that's number two of my less talked about BFCM tactics and insights.
- [14:05]
B
So you're like flighting different versions of your product feeder and like your DPA is right. That makes sense. Thanksgiving no sale Thanksgiving Black Friday Cyber Monday sale BFCM only Holiday no sale Holiday BFCM Holiday Holiday sale. It's like all these different versions that have different flighting periods but you're talking about it within meta and saying like all right, it's, it's Black Friday. So we're going to have like the copy say Black Friday and then maybe on Sunday we launch a different feed that says Cyber Monday. Then maybe, maybe headed into December we have like another message that's like, hey, you have three days to order to ensure Christmas delivery. Right, Right.
- [14:43]
A
This is last chance messaging.
- [14:45]
B
Yeah.
- [14:45]
A
And, and the n about that because I'll Say two things here. One is it's so easy to update messaging across all your feeds, right? You're just updating it within a MAR Pipe or a Socio and it's like, and it immediately like is proliferated across all the ads that you're running in the, in the meta ad account from your catalog, like your DPAs and things like that.
- [15:06]
B
And we use MAR Pipe too, by the way. Or we've, we've seen good, good performance out of doing those custom DPAs. I, I've, we've definitely validated this.
- [15:13]
A
It's extremely simple, right? Like if you can add more helpful information or drive urgency or CL or whatever, like your ads will perform better. And Mar Pipe allows you to do that and so does Socio. Fantastic, right? It's like a no brainer. Then for us it's just a matter of like, okay, let's almost have like a calendar related to that so we know we're updating it consistently. And then I call out the point around the importance of immediately updating across your ads because we've fallen into the trap before. This was a couple years ago where we had multiple different messaging points. We had early Black Friday, Black Friday, last chance, Black Friday. We might have even done early Cyber Monday, Cyber Monday, Cyber Monday extended. Which after we were like, that was dumb. Like one, you can't update your static ads or your videos that quickly. The winners are going to be winners. Like everybody runs your Black Friday ads through Cyber Week. If they continue to perform, just keep running them. So you're, you have far less incentive to be frequently updating your messaging at the static or video ad creative level. But the catalog can be updated so much quicker. So that is where we're going to spend more time. And then what we've done from a like a marketing planning perspective, we've just simplified all the messaging. It's Black Friday, then it's Cyber Monday, then it's Cyber Monday extended. And that's as, that's as simple as it's going to be for us.
- [16:30]
B
For us, our most, the most breadth we have across our entire product catalog is during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday sales. So it's like literally every category has its own collection of offers. Are you making these updates? The product feed updates from a product category lens too? Or is it mainly just like messaging to the moment and driving urgency? Or are you saying like, hey, we're, we've been running like wallet product feed for the last two weeks and we're starting to see fatigue on it. We should roll out like a rings or, or a luggage feed.
- [17:04]
A
Yeah, no, we, we. So we have different feeds for our different categories, but we're running those all in parallel to one another. So like.
- [17:10]
B
Got it.
- [17:12]
A
What we have like our internal marketing summary or we have something we call the master pricing sheet. Like we'll lay out what are the percentage off call outs we want to make by category. So rings is up to 33% off. Wallets is up to 47% off. Travel, we're doing like a gift with purchase thing. Right. So it's like we have different messaging for the different categories and then that's the sort of thing that we would get reflected in our catalog ads.
- [17:37]
B
Got it, got it. That makes sense. Okay, so first off, number one, check out your international markets relative to you, your US markets and how revenue is distributed and like basically create your advertising spend pacing accordingly. Exactly. You're not seeing as big of a step off from Friday to Saturday internationally while your ad budget should probably follow suit. And on the, on the flip for the U.S. update your product feeds to have the most dialed in like messaging that is speaking to that moment. Anything else? Any other kind of less talked about BFCM tactics or insights?
- [18:09]
A
That's the entirety of my list other than the Taylor Holiday rookie card. If you can get your hands on one of those, I would highly recommend it.
- [18:15]
B
Yeah, get a Taylor Holiday rookie card. Run a, run a convert.comtest on it. I guarantee you see an RPU. Okay, so all right, let's transition then into like, I don't know about you. I'm spending a lot, a ton of my time, really my, my core focus this quarter from a, from a performance standpoint is our, our end of year sales. We have a bunch of new products we're bringing to market in Q4, which I'm excited about and then like 2026 planning. So I'm very focused on, on BSCM and holiday execution as I sure a lot of our listeners are. What are you focused on? Like what are you slash the team working on like right now as it pertains to working towards your, your BFCM holiday sale execution?
- [18:57]
A
Yeah, totally. So let's see like if I put myself in the shoes of a listener, it's like let's call it late October. Where, where do I think brands should be? I mean obviously you want to have your pricing nailed down and for what it's worth, like we shouldn't get into this too much because this is very like a retroactive thing you'd have to do. But we knew what our Black Friday deals were going to be. This is more or less one of the first years where we were able to buy inventory into the deal, which I'm super excited about. Typically, Bridges ran relatively heavy on inventory, so we've never been all that constrained in what we could do, like the week of Black Friday.
- [19:35]
B
Yeah, Sean's. Sean's famous for, for talking about all the inventory. All y' all hold, right?
- [19:40]
A
Well, totally, yeah. And the wallet's perfect for that. We have high margins, we have great payment terms. They're cheap to ship, cheap to store. Just like economically, it is a. It is a pretty good category to run heavy on. And we did that for a long time, especially when we were launching less newness. It was like, yeah, look, we're going to sell these gunmetal wallets forever. We don't have to worry nearly as much on, like, the cash conversion cycle, or at least we have such a favorable one with the margins and payment terms that we have that we could just buy a lot and have it. This is the first year where we said, hey, we looked at previous year's results, we planned what we wanted to do, and it was at least July or early August of this year, we bought into it. So we've got that nailed down. We've got our creative done end of end of October, that should be. Hopefully everybody's got the assets that they need. We're starting our sale 116 this year, so we're going to pull it up a little bit and that's one of the larger changes year over year. And then I'd love to hear about your guys's, like, calendaring a little bit. And if that's any different, we do. Last year we did. This is another example of messaging changing too much and we didn't find it advantageous. Last year, we launched Singles Day in international markets. So you uk, uk, au, Canada, I think all do Singles Day. So that's where we launched it. And that was essentially our Black Friday sale, but a couple days earlier. So we had.
- [20:57]
B
What is. What is Singles Day?
- [20:59]
A
Singles Day is interesting, I believe, if I have the. The origin story correct here. I think Alibaba basically invented it in China. It started as a. As a thing there to celebrate being single and buying gifts for yourself. And it's become this massive, like, shopping.
- [21:16]
B
Moment in different parts of the celebration of self love. We love that. That's great.
- [21:20]
A
Percent so. So it's much more like it's not a thing in the us, but it is a thing in. I believe uk, Canada, au, at least for hours. We've got it on our calendar, it's the biggest in China, but we don't sell there. So it's not, it's not a part of the strategy. So we launched Singles day early, which was essentially our Black Friday sale. And then we were like kind of misaligned in markets. We had the sale live earlier in international. We didn't have it on the US this year we're simplifying it. Black Friday goes live 116 that allows us to take advantage of any singles day shopping people looking for promos and it simplifies it across markets. So at the end of October we'll be doing we're, we're at our sign off point there. We have all of our landing pages created, we've got our offers dialed in, we've got all of our ad creative, our messaging, etc. That's our go live date. So that's basically where we're sitting at now and how it's kind of changed year over year.
- [22:10]
B
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Hexcloud's been using Aftercell for a really long time. I love After Sell. First off, there's no friction with After Sell. It's all happening post purchase. So it plugs in really really well with your existing funnels that your team is spending hours building and optimizing. And it it truly is just incremental revenue on top of orders you're already going to get. Naturally, a subset of people that have already made a purchase for you are going to see this after Sale push. There's going to be an offer that they really like and they're going to add that product on with one click. There is literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of incremental revenue happening on hexclad every single month simply through this post purchase, after sell up and cross sell. And it is very easy to set up. You don't need any custom design, no custom HTML. It plugs in really nicely to your post purchase page and it's just incremental revenue on top of all the conversions that you're already driving. So it's really a no brainer to set up. It's crushing for hexcloud. On average brands using after cell see a 30% lift in and 20 to $30,000 in pure profit per 100,000 orders from rock thanks alone. Don't just sell more, make more from what you're already selling. Head to aftercell.com forward/operators to activate rock thanks and get the full after sales suite free exclusively for marketing operators listeners. So we we've stayed pretty strong on our, on our timelines mainly because we don't see a ton of impulse buying during Black Friday. So for me and our team, the way we think about it is we just need to. You don't want to be on sale for like only a week because chances are that's probably not enough time for people to like shop around and make their purchase. I don't want to necessarily be on sale for like since November 1st because I think that kind of just dilutes the sale overall. But if you go look at our survey results during the actual BFCM moment, it, it still is people that have been sitting there waiting for a pretty long time waiting for our best deals to go live so we don't feel the need to, to pull it forward too much. And, and that's why plus we we're on sale all of December as well. We'll basically take like right two or three days off of sale assuming we're hitting our projections basically like after Cyber Monday until like the first Friday or Thursday of December and then we'll launch our holiday sale. Yeah, I mean funnel production is, is full bore ahead, right? We're not done necessarily but like we are, we have all the, all the strategies outlined and everything that we're going to build and we are just like deep into execution mode right now. We are still buttoning up like our offer is, is dialed in. We're still just buttoning up a few pieces of it. You know we have hundreds of SKUs on sale during this time so there's still like a handful of prices. We need to dial in. You know, another big thing we're working on right now is our pacing. You know, we talked about pacing at the beginning of this episode. That is so important for us. And I think most econ brands, but especially for brands that are just like super concentrated reven, we spend a lot of time like looking at pacing. How should our revenue, our ad spend and our efficiency pace? How does that ladder into our total targets? So we just need to set that expectation on how spend should pace. And you know, luckily we have plenty of historical data to look at, so that's one thing we are doing like right now. So when we hit November 1st, we're going to have absolute clarity on how much we're spending per day. Not just in total, but across every single channel. What the rev expectation is. So we can actually see what we are at against forecast versus like, I hate the like month to date reporting where it's like we're x percent are the way to target. I just don't like that formatting. I think it's very flawed because it doesn't bake in any expectations. Or it's like, oh, we're 10 to forecast. But like, was that where we're supposed to be?
- [26:42]
A
What you're saying there is like, if you just did it, tracking it like linear, linearly percent to target, you might be, I mean, honestly, you could be halfway through the month and at 20% of your target and it's like, oh my God, that sounds like you're underpacing. But in reality 80% of the revenue, it comes in the back half of the month.
- [27:00]
B
Yeah, you could be above target. You could be like, actually we're 10% above forecast. And like that's, that's a good thing. So that was a, that was actually a big struggle of ours. Like my first year at Hexclad, like we, I, we had some sort of pacing, but we actually did a pretty job of distributing it to the rest of the org. So now all of a sudden you have people like, like kind of parachuting in and being like, what is going on? Like our revenue so, so low. I'm like, no, no, this is, this is what the expectation was. So now we're good about getting well ahead of that and distributing it. So, you know, everyone in leadership knows exactly what the expectation is. But I recommend every, every brand has a daily pacer to the channel level. Like it just creates absolute clarity and, and we really care about, we do that every month. But we are especially diligent about it for, for November And December. So can I, can I add a.
- [27:48]
A
Couple points on the, the projection one? Because I think that's good one. I'm excited. Last year it seemed like the entire industry struggled with pacing because Cyber Monday fell so late. Right? Cyber Monday fell on December 2, I believe last year. So you lose Cyber Monday. It had been in November previously. And then Black Friday basically fell an entire week later. And we struggle. We talked every single day about like what are proper projections here? Because we are now, we are now weeks into November, but we're still five days out from Black Friday. So it's like when do people start and stop their shopping?
- [28:21]
B
Right.
- [28:22]
A
Just felt categorically different last year. This year projections should be easier because we're, we've got that behind us now. I think, I think Cyber Monday falls December 1st. It's slightly earlier this year, but by and large it's still way late in the year.
- [28:33]
B
And we just zoom out for that, right? Like we just basically say, all right, let's just look at. This is why day matching is so important. And this is like last year matching was especially important, but we just, we just zoom out, right? We're like, all right, let's just. What is the expectation for November and December as a whole? Because you're kind of getting lost in like the minutia of calendars and like, like not to sound too like esoteric but like it really is made up and as long as if you just zoom out then you're gonna be able to like understand what the expectation is for the, the entire two month clip. I think when you get a little too micro and like, well, November versus December and like, like two days were in November last year that are now in December. Like you kind of just like spin yourself in circles unnecessarily.
- [29:17]
A
Yeah. Just look at like your, your buying period.
- [29:20]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [29:21]
A
Well, so one thing that I saw just on the points of pacing that I thought was really interesting, this came from. I forget which reps I think meta but they were, they were talking about. So I actually I. Because I want to circle back on this too. One of the reasons I'm excited about moving it up to 11-6-1, we've just found we have more impulse buys. We're getting out in front of. Of gift givers. We're sub $100. We're just like, we're, we're a great option for people who are like, I need something for my, my son in law or whatever. And it's like we might be getting in front of someone for the first time and really winning them over. So the longer we can do that at good prices, the better. We're starting November 6th. One thing that we got from our meta reps was that they had a chart plotted out over time of when people start their holiday shopping. They, they'd obviously done some sort of survey and it obviously ticks up. Some people start in mid Oct. October. There's a pretty good uptick in the first week of November. So that's at like November 6th is period. And then the following week it actually drops because you b. What you basically find is that people there are early shoppers who are, they're not necessarily waiting for the Black Friday sale. They're comfortable getting the deals that they're getting in that late October, early November period. But then you're not. There are fewer people starting November 10th because they're like, oh, at this point, at this late in November, I might as well wait for the Black Friday sales to really start. So you see this really interesting behavior as far as when people start to shop. And I think we might capture a little bit more of the shopping season by moving our sale up a little bit. So I do. I also would put that in the bucket of maybe less talked about BFCM strategies.
- [30:53]
B
Right. It's like trying to follow that, that buyer intent, period.
- [30:57]
A
Yeah, like just trying to capture more of that. And at least for us, technically, based on this data from Meta and what we've done historically, we are launching our sale in that off week that's actually a downt week over week of people starting their shopping. So if we move it up a little bit, we might be able to capture more of that demand.
- [31:13]
B
Yeah, right. That makes sense. And in. And so for our strategy, we're still spending from day one, like healthy six figures per day. We're about to launch the sale. We're spending like way more than we started the month with. And if you like, our efficiency is really low on these days. So we actually are, we're starting to ramp up spend for that exact same reason. Because people are on our site, they're building out their carts, they're. They're scheming what they want and we want to get people doing that even before the sale launches. So then by the time we actually launch the sale, our spend's actually pretty ramped up and we, we absolutely ramp it up. More like to capture that demand. We're pretty ramped up by the time the middle of the month rolls around and then we launch the sale and then we, you know, we're just kind of off to the races after that.
- [31:56]
A
Totally. And the, the point, because I've, I heard you first make this point years ago and I was like, that makes total sense. You guys have a. Technically it's not short, but it's a shorter compared to Ridge shorter like BFCM period. And that's because there's such a consideration time for Hexclad. There's less impulse buying. We need, we want to increase the surface area so we can capture that impulse buyer on November 7th. Yeah, there's such a consideration period for Hexclad that you say, hey, as long as we're on sale for like two or three weeks and we can get in front of everybody that we need, that's great. People are, people are considering hexcloud. They are in market. They are waiting for the good deal. You guys have a, basically a higher impact period in a shorter, in a shorter window of time. And I think that's a really interesting way to structure the length of your sale depending on your category.
- [32:42]
B
Yes. Yep. My like blanket, not blanket advice, but my like general advice is the, the lower your first order AOV is, the longer you should probably run your sale. Because to your point, you're if, if you're, if you're a 70 to 100 first order AOV and you're not on sale but your competitor is, are there reaching people for the first time and converting them at an impulse buy sense for us, 80, 85% of people are still telling us they have known about us for multiple months before they made that purchase. So if you're like a, a Hexclad or like you know, a high AOV. Right. 3, 4, $500, I think you can probably get away with running your sale for a shorter period of time. I still think you should have that ramp up period though. I don't think you should go from like, like yeah, I, I don't like 50k to 500k a day. Like that's probably not wise. That's probably gonna be really hard for your ad account to spend efficiently. But on the surf, on the sur. Yeah, exactly. On the surface you're like, oh my God, you guys are so inefficient. Like pull back. But it's like no, that's by design because we're going to be more efficient in the back end of the month and we need to build the funnel as much as we can and get people building their carts and ready to convert. So that's always been our general approach. We've bas we, in the last three years we've either hit or gotten close to hitting our projections, so we haven't found the need to change it. If, if, if at some point in time we like miss big in in November, it's all right, maybe we'll, we will launch it early. But until I see, until we miss, until we miss and until I see the post purchase survey data like start to trend differently, where people are telling me they've known about us for only a week or a day or less than a month, sure, then maybe I will launch it earlier. But like I just think people are in our funnel and they've already made the decision. Like I think even if Made in launches a week earlier, I'm not that worried about them stealing our sales because I think that people have already made the decision that they want hexcloud or Made in or Caraway and like at that point you're probably not going to sway them because they know all of you are going to be on they know all of us are going to be on sale. It's not a, it's not like, oh, I hope I don't know if hex code is going to be on sale. Dusting, I'm going to go with made in right now. Like, I don't really think that's happening that much. So we've decided to go that direction and it's worked out so far lately. Every marketer I talked to says the same thing. The pressure's on. Budgets are tight, goals are higher than ever, and I have to prove what's working, not just report it. That's the new reality of marketing. You can't afford to rely on guesses or platform reported results. You need clear, unbiased, causal proof of what's actually driving growth. And that's exactly where House comes in. Incrementality testing is the scientific way to measure true impact. It is the most unbiased way to understand true impact, to see what's moving the needle and what's just noise. So you can reallocate spend based on fact, not faith. All of the marketing operators use House for their incrementality testing at Hexclad, Jones Road, Beauty and Ridge. And it's becoming a core part of the modern measurement stack. House helps you run real experiments across your channel so you can answer questions that actually matter, like which channels are truly driving incremental revenue and which are just taking credit. How much should I really be spending on Meta, Google and YouTube? What's the Halo effect of ads on Amazon or Retail sales and how should I structure my campaign so every dollar goes towards real, measurable impact. What sets House apart is the combination of unbiased, rigorous science and marketer friendly design. The math under the hood is very complex, but the platform itself is very, very simple. You choose your question, you launch your test in minutes and you get clear actual results you can actually use. Plus, every customer, every brand gets a dedicated measurement strategist. And I will tell you what, the House measurement strategist team is very dialed in. They are very strategic, helping you set these tests up in a way where you're going to get statistically significant results that are actionable and ultimately they're someone who has lived in the world of growth and they know how to translate data into strategy, interpret the results and build a repeatable culture of experimentation across your team. In a world where every marketing dollar is under a microscope, you need to know what's real, measure what matters with House by going to House IO operators, that's H A U S IO operators and start allocating your budget with confidence.
- [36:46]
A
Okay, I've got two points here. I've brought these up before but like in, in like weird, you know, online events and stuff, but one, your points around scaling beforehand. I think a really good way to look at this right now, I looked at it years ago for, for the first time in the meta ads platform and now you can't look at 28 day click in meta so you can't get that data. But you can do the exact same thing in North Beam, which is how we do it now. But you can look at the difference between like your one day or your seven day and your 30 day click and, and how that changes at different times of the year. And basically what you'll find our data is more or less results will improve 40% from one day to 30 day. That's what we see on a click basis most of the year. That basically doubles in late October and early November. And that's to your point where you can be scaling, scaling, spend and you're going to capture that value in a different way because there's a little bit more latent demand because people are waiting for that sale. So you can, in your case, you guys can be spending a lot on November 10th because you know that a lot of these people, a lot of these clicks that you're driving in early in mid November are going to convert the week after or two weeks after and you can even see that for any brand looking in your historical data. So I'd say that as one maybe piece of advice or piece of data to look into.
- [38:01]
B
Wait, so that's a, that's a great point. So you're basically saying go look from like October 1st through basically the day before you're going to run your sale. Select the ROAS lift metric from North Beam, which is basically just telling you from which whichever attribution window you have set to ltv. I think what's the growth? If you see like a marginally higher ROAS lift during that time period relative to other times of the year, that's a good signal that you can and probably should spend up, even if it's a little less efficient during that, that window of time because you know that it's gonna, it's gonna, the value is gonna be realized in the next 30 or 45 days.
- [38:39]
A
Right?
- [38:40]
B
That's the action item, right?
- [38:41]
A
Yeah. 100. And maybe, maybe you can maintain efficiency in late October and November and just scale those results, knowing that you'll have even more value as people convert in later November. But the other way to think about it is you can essentially lower your targets in, in late October and November because you're just going to capture that value in a different way.
- [39:00]
B
And that's how we do 100 and like.
- [39:03]
A
And if you have a couple years of historical data, you can begin to see this trend. And then I think this is what you were saying, like, we've just, we've just leaned into that trend more and more over time. Knowing how low our MER can be on November 10th and knowing kind of roughly where we'll land at the end of the month, or to your point earlier, really at the end of Cyber Monday. Right. The month is kind of dumb, especially when Cyber Monday is moving in and out of Novemb. The second thing I was going to say, and I'd love your take on this because I. This is another thing that we have examples of making missteps on in the past. But the. It's actually very similar to my point earlier. It's really easy to spend too much on the Saturday after Black Friday. You just had such a big day. You just spent so much money, your day is going to be whatever it is, 40, 50, 60% small. It's still going to be a massive Saturday. But like, if you don't pull back dramatically, you could totally screw up your MER and like, like really screw up the whole weekend. And it's. And it's easy to miss that mark. One of the things that we've done to hedge against that on like more of an hourly basis. And I heard this, I always plug this. It's Ben from True Classic on Nick Sharma's podcast. I think at just out in 20 late 2023. So you have to dig this one out the archives, limited supply. Great pod. Ben's awesome. But he talks about setting an expectation where you say hey, it is Black Friday. We are above target. We're going to scale spend another 30% right now. Now you should have an expectation for what your revenue should do from there. Because it's so easy to say hey, we're above target, we're going to spend more. And that spending doesn't actually increase your revenue over where you were trending. And now all of a sudden you're just blending down your results. And because it's very, it's extremely easy to, to spend non incremental dollars on the day of Black Friday. So just from a marketer's perspective, you have to be extremely clear about what your expectations are for any increase in spend and then be monitoring for that.
- [40:51]
B
That Right. You're worth, you're thinking in terms of incremental revenue at this point and you can always assume, always there's probably no scenario or this isn't the case that if you have a blended MER of 4 and let's say your target's a 3, 5 and you're saying hey, should we spend more? You need to make an assumption about what that incremental revenue is going to be Iro as it's not going to be a 4, it's going to be a 2 or a 15 or 2 5. Hopefully it's, it's as high as it can be. But, but that's, that's the thinking you should have when you're, when you're trying to decide or you should just be like, hey, we're happy being above rev target at the spend we planned and let's not spend into less profitability.
- [41:29]
A
Yeah. And then you just eliminate the risk that you are, that you are misspending on the day of.
- [41:35]
B
Right. Yep. So for us like, so when, when, when you look at like our Thursday, Friday, Saturday clip from like, like Thursday's Thanksgiving, then Black Friday, then Small Business Saturday. Like we, we scale way back from Black Friday to Small Business Saturday like most brands do. But it's still our third highest spending day of the month. Like totally. Still.
- [41:57]
A
Totally. Yeah, but it's, but it's much smaller than Friday.
- [42:01]
B
Much smaller. Yeah, totally.
- [42:03]
A
And it's just, it's really easy to not make it that a big enough step Down.
- [42:07]
B
Yep. And, and when I think about spending in these months too, I'm also thinking about. Because again, we don't always realize that, like, if I could, you could argue that you should spend like a third of what we spend on, on Friday or, or a fourth. But I always am lobbying for keeping spend up because that's an investment into December's performance. Q1's always big for us. I think a reason it's big for us is because we commit to our higher spend levels and that just all that volume carries into Q1. So we have so many people that are, that are new to the brand, new to the file. So you're trying to strike that balance, right? Like, we want to maximize profitability here in this moment, but we also don't want to put ourselves in a tough position where like, oh, we actually spent $2 million less than our plan because we were super efficient and we wanted to optimize for efficiency. But now we just missed our December revenue for sure because that $2 million wasn't working for us and we maybe missed out on, who knows, 8, 10, $12 million of revenue. So we're trying to, we're always kind of strike that balance. Like, we're pretty good at like, like we have our budget set and we are going to spend to them. We're not, we're pretty good at. Now, it's not like blind. Of course we're checking in and making decisions, but like, we're generally spending to these budgets because we know it's an investment in the future. And like we, we have aggressive growth targets.
- [43:24]
A
Totally. Yeah. So I, I think that is extremely valid logic. I have concerns. Look, and there's a balance, right? Like, you guys aren't spending a ton on Saturday and your MER is super low and you're saying, hey, well this is going, we're going to capture all this in December. I, I personally think this is really just intuition. There is a different mindset the week of Black Friday where I think prospecting is just less valuable. And here's actually the other way to. This is the other way to look at it. And, and maybe you guys have done this. I said earlier your spend in late October, early November, even early in your like Black Friday sale, it will have larger latent demand because Black Friday is, is later. There's always going to be people who are clicking on your ads on November 12th and then converting at the very end of the month on November 27th or whatever. So, so you understand that there's this, there's this Larger value. And you can see that in something like a north beam, it reverses. After Black Friday, you no longer have that big moment. So all of a sudden, instead of going from. All right, sorry, my audio just cut out to finish that point. You see this increase in the difference between one day and 30 day before Black Friday. 40%. Sorry, it's 40% year round for us. Black Friday, it's 80%, let's say. So generally that is correct. Post Black Friday, we see it drop significantly. It becomes 25, 30%. And that just means that, that those people that you're prospecting are purchasing then. So you can't nearly as much count on that future revenue because like the big shopping moment is passed. They're worried about the shipping cutoff. Right. They're worried about just getting the gifts that they need before Christmas.
- [45:01]
B
This.
- [45:01]
A
So we actually really pull back aggressively. And then even like that, that Saturday, Sunday, Monday, we're still aggressive in spending, but we don't actually start scaling back up until a couple days after Cyber Week. And then we see like a really big days up until like December 12th, 13th, 14th, something like that. So that's like our general trend. But again, we are such different with such a small consideration period.
- [45:26]
B
Yeah. So you're, you're going to. This kind of goes back to what, what we talked about looking at that row as lift metric over a longer period of time headed into the launch of your sale. But you could even do it on a, on a more granular basis. You could literally look like what is the ROAS lift on Saturday after Black Friday, Sunday, Monday to like literally through that week. And that should also inform. Right? Because if your ROAS lift, if is a lot lower on, let's say Saturday through Sunday than it is on like that, that post Cyber Monday, Tuesday through Saturday. That's a really good signal. Right? What does that tell you? It says actually be more aggressive on, on those days that the ROAS lift is lower because you're, you're realizing most of that spend in, in revenue on those days. And then ramp it back up when that ROAS lift number comes back up because then that tells you you're. You're generating demand or driving traffic at least that is maturing better totally over time. So you're using that to even inform like how aggressive you do or don't pull back on Saturday, Sunday, and then how aggressively you ramp back up on like, I don't know, call it Tuesday through Friday of the following week.
- [46:30]
A
Exactly. Yeah. 100. That is our general trend. And how we understand the value that we're generating from the ads, how it changes over time.
- [46:38]
B
Got it. Well, I, I know I have. I got a list of notes here at the bottom of our, of our content plan. I'm gonna go do like a whole roas lift report on different periods of time and, and probably use that to inform some of our budget pacing this more. So I think that's a very, a very fun and actionable thing to do and how you inform your budgets.
- [46:57]
A
Totally. Okay, I've got one more like really nerdy ad buying.
- [47:01]
B
I can't wait.
- [47:03]
A
But just, just to call out the differences in the tools that everybody uses and how that might affect the way you make decisions. You know, leading into and on the day of Black Friday and post Black Friday is like meta ads use click based conversion and they changed this a long time ago. You used to be able to toggle between date of exposure and date of conversion and when you wanted to attribute the conversion. The equivalent of this in Northbeam is the difference between cash and accrual. So that means if I click an ad on Tuesday and convert on Friday, if I'm looking on a cash basis, the conversion will be attributed on Friday to my ads. If I'm on an accrual basis, that conversion will go back to Tuesday. Right. So my, my results from Tuesday will have improved instead of being attributed to the spend on on Friday. In meta you only get the Friday example. So a lot like, and I think this is such, such an important distinction that like a lot of people don't understand is that obviously your ads are going to look incredible. If you're just looking at the day of Black Friday, your rose is going to be fantastic because all of the conversions attributed that are, that are converting on that day of Black Friday from your email and your sms and because it's dead that everybody's buying, your results will look better. So that's why you should just be conservative. You should understand that like you are not driving an incremental 6x on the day of Black Friday. It's actually quite a bit less than that. And what you're doing is you're, you're seeing the value that you generated earlier in the period.
- [48:27]
B
Right. So it's better to actually, if you're looking historically, you actually want to be going and looking back at an accrual basis because you want to be ramping up the spend on the day the action was taken. Exactly. That led to the purchase. Right. So if, if you know the generally it was the Wednesday before Black Friday and people clicking on ads that day. Well you actually probably want to ramp up more aggressively on, on Wednesday than you might even want to on Thursday or Friday.
- [48:53]
A
1,000%. And that's why we exclusively look at things on an accrual basis. Looking at things on a conversion time basis or a cash basis is, is like never valuable to a media buyer. I'm trying to think of an example of when it would be like like not really. It's important if you want to say how much money did we make today and how much money did we spend today? You want that on basis but like attribution on a cash basis or on the, the date of conversion I think just kind of convolutes the experience and it makes it so again it's going back to making it so easy to overspend because your results might look inflated.
- [49:27]
B
Yes. So we'll look at I think where when cash and like or like when either cash snapshot or like ltv like time window on accrual makes sense is when you're trying to get in like a net read of the channel, right. Like, like what's the most net accurate representation of what meta is driving for us? It's not helpful on like a day to day media buying decision basis, but it is. And, and even that's never going to give you like the full true readout of meta because you know tracking and pixel based measurement is imperfect. But that's when we'll look at it like if I'm going back and I'm looking at all right, like how did meta perform for us as a whole in, in Q3 I'll set like the entire window in north beam for the entire quarter and then I'll look accrual with lifetime value because I want to see how that, how all the clicks we got and the impressions matured. Or I'll look at cash snapshot because that's like all of the conversion data you could possibly get in meta and I think that's a, that's probably a more it's like more accurate to report on. Like how is this channel as a whole reporting on that level of, of methodology versus like a one day click which is more helpful for the actual like media buying.
- [50:32]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that, that, that's super, super fair. So anyway, nerd alert on that last one. But like that is like the deep like and people sometimes over discuss the like different settings and optimizations. But like when it comes to spending a couple million dollars over a couple days it's like extremely Important to know exactly what you're looking at and why.
- [50:50]
B
Right. But I think I, you know, it's a, it's a good refresher because I think a lot of times and even me myself, like, if I don't think about cash versus accrual for a long time, I have to like re. Re. Remember the differences. But like, like cash is going to always. It's the, it's the day of the conversion, right. So like if someone clicks in three weeks ago, but they convert today, cash snapshot's going to pick that up. If I have this today's window selected, if I'm accrual and I have this week selected, it's not going to include that conversion because it's going to, it's going to give it to that the time the ad was clicked however many weeks ago. Yeah, all right, what else, what else on bscm?
- [51:28]
A
Dude, I think that's pretty, I think that's pretty good on bfcm.
- [51:30]
B
M. Yeah, I agree. So if you are a brand spending, you know, eight figures on media, you have a very diverse channel mix, you definitely do not want to be going into Q4 without pressing Prussian. AI is going to help you beat all your goals in this critical quarter. It's going to put you out of the competition. You know, BSM is coming fast and there's still a lot to do to finalize the Q4 strategy. There's a bunch of questions I find marketers asking themselves headed into Q4 and, and I, I think pre can actually help solve and answer a lot of these questions. So I just wanted to run through a few of those. Question number one. If you're wondering should you increase, decrease or reallocate spend for the shopping season, Prussian shows you the optimal media mix to drive the strongest Q4 performance, whether your budget grows or shrinks. I think that's one of my favorite parts about Prussian. You can actually say, hey, I'm currently at spend levels X, but I'm going to bring my spend to, to Y in the next X number of days. Where should I put this budget impression is going to actually deliver recommendations based on your current BFCM dynamics, your vertical and your optimal spend allocation. And then the next question becomes, can I adjust this in real time? You know, hexclad moves budgets around a lot in Q4 and we really need to know, hey, where should we put that budget? So being able to do that, that spend, forecasting exercise and letting pressure know how much you're going to increase your budget and then they're giving you an optimal media mix just makes it really easy and straightforward to allocate your ad dollars efficiently. You might also be wondering and thinking I don't have time to onboard a new tool mid season. Like how can I get mmm level of visibility? That's one of the best parts about Preschen is it is super easy to onboard. They connect to your data sources in days and has your Shopify brand live in about 10 days. So you're getting granular actionable results really fast. So Q4 it's make or break for Shopify brands. And Prescient helps you make more than you're going to break. It give you full funnel visibility and campaign level insights. Not just showing where clicks convert but all channels influence each other across Shopify, Amazon and retail. It is the only media mix modeling tool revealing halo effects on Amazon sales. So again gives you the super holistic look at your total distribution. And finally Prescient helps marketing leaders make smarter decisions in real time with full funnel visibility and actual insights for the strongest Q4 you can possibly have. So if you're interested in checking out Prescient, go to prescient AI.com forward slash operators. All right, so I wanted to. This is a little bit of a switch up because I think we are, you know, you, me and Cody and our guests were always talking about like what we're doing in the businesses we operate in, which is fantastic. But, but I don't know about you. I'm always talking to you know, young or old, scrappy, interesting, creative like founders, entrepreneurs and I love talking about like product ideas. It's, it's one of like the, my favorite things to chat about with, with marketers and founders and there's just like that's kind of the beautiful thing about our space is there's always going to be new products, new trends, new problems that people have that they need something to solve. Like there's. Even if E Comm is, is becoming like more expensive because the there's more competitors, the CPMs are going up. E Comm is still like a relatively very small chunk of retail as a whole. Right? I don't know what it is but it's like what less than 15% of all of all revenue like E Comm is growing. There's always going to be an opportunity for innovative products that solve old and new solutions. So I'm sure you have ideas for products. I definitely do. I know I love talking to people about ideas for products. I think one of the things I think about with new products is when you Have a new product idea that you have a lot of conviction around you. The first thing you should be thinking about is how do I test this in market? Because like any idea, no matter how much conviction you have, like, unless you test it in market, I don't really think you should go balls to the walls on it. I don't think anyone should invest in you if you haven't validated it. It. So like the question becomes like, what do you do? Like how do you, how do you lean in and test an idea you have without going and, and raising half a million dollars and, and really swinging all the way to like I'm gonna really do this thing, at least for me, I'm thinking how do I validate this in the market in a low cost way while still taking a good enough swing, right? Like I don't wanna take a shitty swing. And then I didn't really validate it because the funnel was bad. But like, I wanna, I would like to do that if I were to do this before I really thought about scaling it. So, so like, what are your thoughts on that? Like what are the, what are the strategies, what are the channels you're using? What are the funnels you're building to test this idea? Like, do you have any thoughts on how you would, if you had a brand new product that you thought was white space, like how would you think about testing that market? Testing it in the market with actual consumers?
- [56:16]
A
Totally. Okay, so one I'll caveat this with. I've never launched a brand and I've been working on the same brand for about nine years. So like I am this is not, not necessarily my wheelhouse, my perspective is that the most important thing to validating is like, who are you speaking to, how are you speaking to them? You know, what's the product and what's the offer? That is like, that is the crux of the business, right? Like, like that has to work to some degree. I don't think you, you need a path to, for the economics to make sense, right? But like the first thing you do is not to say like, well how much can I get this manufactured for? The underlying economics can change over time and it's you, you need a, a path to getting the economics to work. But like really validating an idea comes down to, yeah, who you're speaking to, how you're speaking to them, what's the product, what's the offer, and that over some period of time you could get that to work from an economic perspective. That's like a little Bit more conceptual. I think theoretically you could do that without ever ordering the product. Right. I remember getting, I remember hearing this advice all the time and I don't know where you stand on it and I don. Where I stand on it either, frankly. But like, if I had an idea for, you know, a new type of shoes for pregnant women and you know, I'm gonna, and it's gonna be, you know, I don't know, I have to figure out some way to speak to them. That sounds like it would be great from like founderlet, right? Like I find some woman who had an issue while she was pregnant with her shoes. Just like a kissic coded concept here. I would be tempted to build that out entirely. Maybe I get a sample. Maybe it's AI generated. You can build a landing page. You can build ads.
- [58:00]
B
Ads.
- [58:01]
A
You can build a pdp. You can set the price, you can collect orders just to figure out like, hey, are people clicking on this ad? Are they converting like what's interesting? That is probably the absolute leanest way that you could like validate an idea now. Not a great experience. And do you want to run that from your like name brand page? Because you got to refund the first, you know, 200 orders that you get. Maybe not. But I heard that advice for a while and I think that order of operations makes sense. And you know, if you feel it's right for you, that might be, that might be the, the absolute, you know, that's like the skeleton crew way to do it.
- [58:35]
B
Yeah. The mvp.
- [58:36]
A
The m. The, the, the, the. Yeah. Minimum viable product. It is like the absolute minimalist viable product is like they're not being a product at all. It is just what is the business. At the end of the day, it's ads, landing pages. It's a message that you're targeting at an audience. Are people converting? You could validate that without ever having a physical. Good.
- [58:53]
B
100%. I fully agree. That's actually what. That's. How do you know who Justin Mares is? No, Justin Mars. He founded Kettle and Fire. He now has. He founded True Med now, which is like allowing you to use like your hsa, FSA to buy like health related physical products. He's one of my favorite founders. He's also like deep into the health space, which I am very interested in. That's exactly how he, he, that he validated Kettle and Fire. He. He was like doing CrossFit. He kind of realized this is a product people wanted. He was part of the market, I think most importantly. And like he wanted it and that's what he did. He just built a, a quick and dirty funnel. I think he was using Google Ads because it was like a very niche like demand capture. But I, I, I fully agree. It's like build a funnel and see if you can get people to take an action. It doesn't have to be a purchase, although I do think the idea of like just acting like your product is ready to ship is a good idea. And then you can just follow up and say, hey, we actually ran out of stock. Like we'll let you know when we restock and here's a discount code for your next order. I think you could also just do a lead gen, like funnel as well and just see if like, hey, are people, am I able to get like a cost per lead at a, at a good amount or, or a good cost? That would, that would make sense.
- [60:09]
A
And is the sentiment positive? Yeah, that, that's a great point. That other than conversion, there are a lot of like upper funnel events and like metrics that you could be looking for.
- [60:17]
B
Y. Yeah, 100%. So yeah. What's, what's up on click through it. What's time on site? So really at the end of the day then you just need a batch of ads. Like probably the more the better. So you have a little diversity. You probably just need a, a, you could build a little like a single page, landing page, right? Just take all the best parts like the homepage and the product page and like landing pages, put them on a single page and just like have some sticky CTA to make it easy to shop. 1. One thing I've heard people say that I think is interesting is, is almost having some level of like intentional friction. Like let's say, for example, you actually are able to make some product not at scale but like, let's say it's like a food product that you have an idea about and you're actually able to make it in your kitchen. You could, you could create like, let's say you're doing a lead gen funnel and let's say you get 5,000, 5,000 leads. You could even reach out to like a hundred of those leads and just see if they'll pay you for the product if you're able to make it at small scale. Because the idea is that that would be full of friction, right? You're like saying, hey, I'm going to manually have you pay me through like Venmo. I'm going to like ship this to you myself every month. I'm going to actually check in with you personally to get feedback. Like not your typical CRO like classic experience. So the idea is that if people are willing to pay for it with all that friction, well, think of what will happen when you actually have like a true seamless checkout flow. And I think that was another. I've heard people say this to me, which I think is a very interesting next step is you're totally right. Sometimes you just won't be able to make the product right. And if that's the case, like, you need to figure out how to just get content of it and act like you have it so you can, you can attract the right people. I think another very interesting idea is to actually run fulfillment at small scale. Like if you have a food product that you want people to subscribe to, like see if you can actually get people to say subs, stay subscribed to that product, even if it's just you like making it and shipping it out personally. And like if you can get 20 people to stay subscribed to your product because they like it and it's not that much friction, that's a great, great way to validate that this thing might have scale potential. And then after, if you can do that, well, sure, then go. Maybe then you do go raise money and you actually really go in on, on like trying to do it at scale. But I thought that was another. I hadn't heard that piece before. All what I, what you generally hear is like, build a funnel, see if you can generate leads at a good cost per lead or see if you can actually get orders at a good cost per order. But I thought the idea of actually then reaching out to some of those people and being like, hey, we're, we're going to have you in our pilot program. Are you interested in seeing if you can like, have good retention rates? Because you can get 20 to 50 people to say subscribed and, and retained with your product. Chances are you can, you can probably have pretty good lifetime value and stickiness once you actually make that the experience more seamless.
- [63:02]
A
Yeah, so, so I, so I like that point a lot. Especially if you need to validate that people will stick around. I also really like the point around just an extremely scrappy supply chain. It reminds me of Moise Ali, who created Native Deodorant. There's a bunch of good podcasts he sold it to. I just looked it up. He sold it to PNG in 2017. So this is when I was like first starting an e comm for a hundred million dollars and he was creating a ton of content at the time. And he talked about, I think the initial way that he would fulfill goods was someone would order, order, and then he would go. And then he had someone who would make it on Etsy. Like, he found a native deodorant manufacturer. It was like, probably someone just making it at her house. And that's how he would do the initial orders. And then at some point, you realize, oh, hey, this thing can really scale. Let me get a real manufacturer. Let me, you know, reformulate the deodorant, things like that. But, like, from a dude, Moyes had a fantastic approach. He says this all the time. He was like, look, I. I copied Casper's branding, and I got manufacturing from Ed Etsy. And it's like, it was like, absolute bare bones. Bare bones way to validate. Can I acquire people via Facebook ads for native deodorant? And he did that extremely quickly. And then it had a fantastic exit. And Native has, from what I understand, has been a fantastic acquisition for P and G as well. So that's another interesting example.
- [64:15]
B
Yeah. And I'm a. I'm a huge. My lifetime value of Native is huge. I use all their deodorant now. I'm onto their shampoo and conditioner. I saw they have toothpaste now, which I'm sure totally at some point. Point. I also like the. The idea of not stopping at just getting the order or getting the lead and actually trying to do, like, product fulfillment on a small scale. That also gives you a really great opportunity to survey people that have actually tried your product. And now when you are ready to go to market in a more scaled way, you actually will hopefully have, like, a V. Whatever of your product that's actually based on real feedback. Oh, I didn't. It was like, two this or that, and then you can adjust it. And I think having that, like, core focus group that you can really give a lot of attention to, even if it's just 10 people. Like, that's so, so much more valuable than just being like, all right, like, we got a bunch of orders out of CAC that we think is. Is tolerable, and we think it'll get better over time. But we haven't actually shipped the product. You only get one chance to go to market, like, fully. Right. So I think having that, like, that cohort of people to survey is just really, really important. I'd be curious what Moyes did early on with some of his, like, early deodorant buyers and how much the product changed from him, like, doing it through Etsy to when he was actually like, you know, manufacturing at scale. I'm sure, I'm sure there's a lot of product iterations going on because I.
- [65:30]
A
Guess what we're saying is the underlying issue is that if you want to manufacture whatever good you want to make, whatever the idea is with like a legit manufacturer, the MOQ could very well be thousands of units.
- [65:43]
B
Yeah, easily.
- [65:45]
A
And even those are like, probably expensive units. You're not. And that's why I said you need a path to your business being, like, penciling out economically. But it's very unlikely that your first order with a manufacturer will be at the, you know, price per unit that you'll be able to get, you know, a year out or whatever. So what I guess what we're saying is how do you validate, like, who you're speaking to and how you're speaking to them, and what rate can you convert them at? How can you validate that and even improve that and then also be improving the product at the same time before the commitment of, hey, I need to order 5,000 units now, it's going to cost me, me 50,000, a hundred thousand, $150,000 or whatever. Like, that's the crux of the problem. And I like all the examples we have Moyes, the guy from Kettle and Fire, some of the other ideas where it's just like, how do you bridge that gra. That, that gap in. As cost effective and, you know, efficient of a way as possible.
- [66:39]
B
Yeah. And, and so, so then basically what you're talking about is you have, you have some, probably static ads, maybe some videos. If you're able to make the product yourself and like shoot some videos, is you have a landing page design with like, and development. You have like product development happening and fulfillment happening at small scale. Like, you could probably. I mean, it depends on the product, of course, but like, you're probably talking like between 5 to $20,000 to develop these things, depending on how scrappy you want to be. Like, maybe you're a designer yourself and you could do some of it. I'm not. I would have to work with designers and editors and developers. But, like, you could probably get an idea validated for 5 to 20 grand. That might take you like 2, 3, $400,000 to get it off the ground, like in a more scalable way. Like, that's, that's stomachable. Right? Like, that's a, that's a. That's like something that you could do. Maybe you have to borrow Money from family or friends. But, like, that's not a ton of money to borrow, even if you do have to borrow. And it's. It's like a good enough swing to validate the idea without going into being like, I'm going to empty my personal bank account on this idea.
- [67:44]
A
Right.
- [67:44]
B
And it might, may or may not get product market fit.
- [67:47]
A
Totally. Yeah. There's. And. And then it also is a nice in between of, like, you mentioned earlier, you know, really like half the, like, validation. And then you've actually never properly tested the idea.
- [67:59]
B
Yep. Yeah. Because your goal, your goal in this, like, phase one, like, scrappy test should be finding product market fit, period. Like, that's the key result right there. Like, do, do we have it or do we not? If we do, great, let's scale it, let's put more money into it, let's raise whatever if we don't. All right, on to. Onto the next thing. If, if there is a next thing.
- [68:20]
C
So I remember, like, right around Christmas time, when most people should probably normal people were like, off taking that, taking their time, chilling with family. I was like, looking through our P and L, our budget for next year and I was like, how are we going to save money? And one of the things I did is I leaned on a lot of our partners and I remember slacking a meet from Rich Panel and I was like, what can you do? How can you help us? We had just switched to Rich Panel a few months before, went really well. And I, I told him jokingly, by the way, I want to throw it out there jokingly, that if he could help cut about 500k from our customer service costs, I'd get a Rich Panel tattoo. Well, we did that. You've probably seen a tweet. He did some AI thing of me with a neck, neck tattoo. I'm not going to do it. Sorry, Amit, but I will talk about how much I love Rich Panel, how much Amit has helped us. So we had 18 support agents before. It was a lot and it just was not scalable. We had so many people. We had this, like, old legacy software. It was slow, it was broken, it was expensive, and it just took too many people to operate. So we not only made the support, but Amit and his team really helped us. Now we have eight people and we have a much better CSAT score. Our numbers are way better, our response times are way quicker. We're leveraging a lot of automation, a lot of AI, but again, it has not hurt customer experience. We track and I get a Weekly report of our csat, of all of our stuff, of our nps. And it's going up because we're actually able to get back to people, give people better answers. The, the automation learns from our best agents. So it just continually is getting better. If we switch to Rich Panel about two weeks before Black Friday might be a crazy thing to do, but it was super easy. We came out of Black Friday for the first time in three years with no ticket backlog. The software and support has blown us away. I highly recommend you switch. If you do it and they save you a lot of money, you should probably get a tattoo. But it's not something my wife would let me get away with. But yeah, if you're running an E commerce brand, I highly recommend you switch to Rich Panel. You'll be able to leverage their software, save money on software costs, which is great, while saving a significant amount of money on personal costs. So if you want to go into Q4 with a leaner, smarter support setup and come out of there without this crazy tech backlog and just make your CX team happier, go to richpanel.com demo, tell them Cody from our credit operator has sent you and tell me you're ready to get a tattoo.
- [70:14]
A
Okay, I've got, I've got one question for you. You are the director of growth. What are the three hires you make? And, and I, because I, I think what I'm looking for is more specificity in the role, like an expertise. It's like what are the, the functions of the marketing department that you're going to prioritize if you only get three hires?
- [70:30]
B
I'm starting off with an, an awesome designer because I need that person to design our ads. I need them to design our landing pages. They probably need to design our emails. So that person's basically going to design the entire funnel. Yeah, I, in my role, I could buy the ads early on. I could set up the Klaviyo account early on. I could also do like the, the creative strategy early on. So I would probably not go that way. Cool. You said three hires.
- [70:55]
A
Three hires.
- [70:56]
B
Okay. So then I'm probably going within a video editor. Okay. As well. For the same reason. Right. They're going to do all of our ad video, they're going to do all of our videos on site. And then maybe this is the same person, but probably not. I'm probably going with a content producer. Yeah. So all my three hires would be content. It'd be content, content, content. Because that's what I need early on to Build up the funnel. I need a static designer, a video editor and then I need someone that can actually like shoot the raw assets that those two editors that the editors and designers will use. And then I would just buy the ads at first. I would set up the klaviyo account. I would do all the analytics. I would, would be doing a lot of strategy with the, with the creatives that I would hire. So it'd all be like design and, and editing ICs.
- [71:40]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good answer. So you and Cody both deprioritize retention early on I had that as a, as a first hire. And the difference between you and I is you said, you said designer, editor, performance, creative person. I said performance creative, designer, retention. But the designer designer might be the editor too. But like yeah, I, I like your answer a lot and I think that's a good way to put it. Like it is, it is. Ultimately the designer is able to do the, the landing pages that you need. They're able to make those edits. They're going to design all your static ads. Zack Suck was on, you know, he's episode like 20 or whatever but had a fantastic like order of operations for how to scale a brand. And it really just started with like static assets like test messaging, test audience, figure out what you need. The designer is going to carry a lot of weight weight. And then you guys both, we're all in alignment that you can obviously deprioritize media buying but that's relatively simple at this point. Winning in media buying is great content so you want to prioritize that. And you guys both deprioritize retention which I think is interesting. But I'm getting bought in.
- [72:41]
B
Well it depends on the. I guess it depends on the product because I wouldn't necessarily like if I had a food product that I think would be sticky and high lifetime value. I wouldn't deprioritize retention. I would just the. Because that, that static designer. I would just be the retention strategist at this moment in the business. Right. Like I'd be saying hey here's the automations we want to build out. Here's the, here's the number of emails per. Here are the like messaging angles for each. I would even probably write the copy myself. So I would just have that static person be. Do like the static designer doing their retent the email designs or the. Or like MMS designs. And then I would just be the one kind of acting in that retention strategist role. I think you could just like, I think the director of growth could act as like the media buyer, the acquisition strategist, the retention strategist and then just work really closely with the designers until you validated the concept. And then you could come in and hire like retention lead, acquisition lead to add like a layer of insulation between you as like the founder or director of growth. Totally.
- [73:41]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I totally hear that. And it is a great point that like the 8020 of both, both like tactical media buying and retention right now are relatively low lift. I think like if you do your, your welcome series, your post purchase, your abandoned carts, etc, it's like okay, yeah, that is, that is a lot of the value of your, your retention and email program. You set up a couple meta campaigns, you have a structure for how you're loading in new content, testing that, moving it to winning campaigns, etc, however you want to do it like that is that those don't require necessarily full time roles early on. So. All right, I like your answer.
- [74:15]
B
Yeah, maybe a copywriter. Maybe that's the one I, I should have. Maybe the designer can be an editor too. And I would then do A designer editor is one person, a content producer that can shoot raw footage, statics and video.
- [74:28]
A
They could potentially be a good copywriter, the content producer. I think a lot of the, the best, the best content, the best content strategies are often just good with the written word. So maybe they're plugging in a little bit there.
- [74:38]
B
I agree with that. Yeah. Because a lot, I think a lot of being a great content producer is being a great briefer. Yep. And I think you have to be a great writer to brief people really well. Like our, our head of content at hexclad who's an amazing multimedia content producer or his, he was like a dramatic writing major at, at NYU so that I got an N of one case study supporting that.
- [74:59]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. And I, I guess that's just what's. It's interesting to talk through as a question because you, there's obviously a lot to do when you're starting a brand and that's why I asked the question. I think it's a good kind of segue from like testing an idea. What are the bare bones? What are your, your skills as a marketer and then therefore what skills do you want to prioritize in your first couple hires? And I think we're all hitting around the same stuff, right?
- [75:24]
B
Yeah. If you're a, like if you. Because I know a lot of, I know a lot of founders that are like brand forward founders with, with like hands on keyboard design skills. If that's the case. Well, you're probably not hiring a designer. You're probably hiring someone like you or me that's like a growth strategist that knows how to get distribution and meta and in Klaviyo and in postscript and in affiliate. So I think it, yeah, I think it totally depends on what your skill set is and what you'll be able to contribute as an IC early on. So you just got to know what like where your skill set begins and ends so you can inform those, those initial people. And if you're a listener and you're launching a brand and a product that's fun, let me and Connor know because we want to invest.
- [76:05]
A
Taking pitches.
- [76:06]
B
Yeah, we are taking pitches. We are definitely taking pitches. Cool. All right, let's wrap it. Beautiful. All right, that's a wrap. On this episode of the Marketing Operators had a really awesome episode. Chatted about Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday planning and tactics and what we're doing right now to get prepared for what is the biggest moment of the year for most e commerce brands. We talked about what Connor and I would do if we had a product or brand idea and we wanted to validate it in the market. Super fun, super tactical episode. Thank you to the sponsors Motion Rich panel after cell pressing AI and how House and as always, if you're liking the show, make sure to follow, subscribe, like comment and share with your marketing friends. Thanks.