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- [00:00]
Brian Kano
One of the hard lessons I got early in my career was that growth can actually kill a business that's not prepared for it.
- [00:07]
Host 1
He helped scale nude from $100,000 a month to $8 million a month. And now he's leading marketing at True Classic.
- [00:12]
Brian Kano
I'm four weeks away from launching the first brand. That's how fast things are moving.
- [00:15]
Host 2
I think there's probably a very small subset of marketers that would think to set up a measurement model that way.
- [00:22]
Host 1
All right, we are back with another episode of Marketing Operators. I'm excited for a very special guest. Everybody's heard about True Classic. They do roughly a quarter billion dollars a year in revenue. They have raised at an $850 million valuation. Who we don't often hear from and why I'm excited to have him here today is Brian Kano. He's a founder of a DTC agency. He helped scale nude from $100,000 a month to $8 million a month. And now he's leading marketing at True Classic. He knows a lot about growth. Brian, thanks for joining today, man.
- [00:50]
Brian Kano
I'm excited to be here. Love to have it.
- [00:52]
Host 1
And we got Connor rolling here as well.
- [00:53]
Brian Kano
How are you? I'm doing well.
- [00:55]
Host 2
Got my. Got my drinks, got my gum and banana and everything else. I'm ready to roll, ready to learn from Brian.
- [01:01]
Host 1
Fantastic. Fantastic. All right, cool. I want to jump in straight into some tactical knowledge that you've dropped over the years, Brian, and I'd love to kind of rehash here on the show. You've described your approach to scaling as the stair stepping method. What are the steps, what are the stairs of that method? And which one do you think most people get wrong?
- [01:19]
Brian Kano
Yeah, I think this was when I was scaling nude and it was describing the way in which we were able to grow the business and not kill it. One of the hard lessons I got early in my career was that growth can actually kill a business that's not prepared for it. There is a brand out of Australia that I was hoping bring into the US market. And the growth was. Was too good. And unfortunately, the business ended up having to. Basically we just. We ran out of product faster. The business had to invest heavily into production manufacturing. That increased the cogs as that increased the cogs with rush delivery and rush manufacturing ended up basically eroding the margin that we had forecasted and planned for in this business. Customer service was not prepared. So they, like, rush hired some. Some people and all of these, like, things that you don't think about behind the scenes. Beyond like the, you know, dashboards and north beam or triple whale and the spend on your platforms, those, those items started to surface up. So that was a very early lesson in my career and I remember going through that pain. And so with nood, it was really like this, forcing, forcing a discussion between finance and operations and making sure that our forecasting projections were really tight, that the man planning was buttoned up. We were meeting weekly, on a weekly basis and just having, you know, testing our assumptions, really debating them and almost getting into like yelling matches amongst us three of like, I don't believe you're going to hit that. No, I am. Look, I've got this stuff and like trying to really stress test what our beliefs were in business. So step one was starting with like planning and forecasting, making sure that we were all on the same page. Step two was having constraints when it came to our, to our scaling. So you know, when we set those targets and we said, hey, we need to have this roas and this contribution margin, it was really all sort of, it was all built for having cash flow for the business because at that point the business was starting to take debt to, you know, and establish lines of credit to have the manufacturing knowing that we were gonna, that we were growing and we were growing aggressively. And if we missed the target on the cash flow planning, then you know, that that has even more consequences with interest and with, you know, late payments and all these things. So making sure that we were only scaling when performance was strong was step two. And then I think this is the most important one was holding flat. So anytime we, we would, and this is why I call it stair stepping because we would scale up and then we would have about a week or two of just like maintaining and can we sustain and maintain that scale. And this was kind of like a checkbox to confirm for us that okay, this wasn't like luck, this wasn't like meta giving us a good week and then like next week's bad. And it also was enough time to surface all of those back end operational issues with customer service tickets with returns, potentially with fraud. And so that, that hold phase was kind of like that, that flat step. And that's really what gives us the confidence to go back to our forecast with finance and operations and say, okay, wait a second, I think we, we need to, we need to tailor this because we can be more confident or ooh, we're not actually as confident. We're starting to see a decline as after we scaled up. And it seems slow, right? It seems like A process that it's like, well, why don't you just go vertically up? That doesn't make any sense. But honestly, it what, it's what allowed us to create resilient growth at nude. And it's something that I think if you're going from like 10 million or even, even if you're, you know, less than that and you're trying to scale to 50, 80, 100 million, this is, that's that chasm that you've got across where if you do it well and you're prepared and you have the right planning, you can do it in the least painful way. I think there's a lot of pain for businesses and brands that go from 50 million or even 30 million to 80 or 100 million because you get all these quote, we call it growing pains, but really it's just bad planning. And I think it just comes from not having that experience. Right. Like once you go through that once you're like, I'll never do that again. And you, you tighten up the communication between your finance operations and your marketing teams.
- [05:53]
Host 1
Love to hear it. So I want to jump around a
- [05:55]
Brian Kano
little bit and then we'll, we'll get
- [05:56]
Host 1
into the more sequential parts of your career. I want to jump back to maybe what taught you most about marketing. You've got a very unique background. One, you worked as an assistant manager at Banana Republic or two, moving your way up through the ranks in property management. Not, not the, not the typical background of a marketer. So where do you feel like you cut your teeth the most and applied that to more of what you're doing today?
- [06:19]
Brian Kano
That, yeah, man, you guys went deep on this loing there. So it's funny, the banana, the Banana Republic job. I was, I was 17 when I became a, an assistant manager at Banana Republic. And it's such a customer service facing job. I remember it's like a job I got when I was 16 years old and I was really good at it and I ended up managing the store at 17. And I mean the thing that it taught me was just customer service is just so important. It is the thing that matters the most in the business, especially a retail store. I remember doing merchandising. So like I understood very early on the concept of shelf shelfing and digital shelf space and like, you know, even like Google Search, for example. I remember I would look at Google and the shopping feed as like a shelf and it's like, okay, how do I, you know, make sure that my products show up on the shelf space in the right Placement. Same with Amazon, Amazon listings. So I remember those concepts coming back and then property management. So Banana Republic taught me the customer about the customer and a little bit of selling psychology and how to be a great salesman and then the property management. That was a job that I got. I didn't start off as a property manager. I was one of those front desk people at your college apartment complex. And then I worked up from front desk person to a leasing agent to a leasing manager to the assistant manager of the property to then like I became the manager of, of a portfolio. And that, that taught me a ton more about, like, about operations and managing a team. And I remember having to, you know, I was like what, 21, 22. And I remember having to gained the trust of people that were twice as old as I was working there longer. And so that taught me a lot about leadership and just being able to get a team to rally around you and managing a business that is very complex between your maintenance, your investors and the owners of the property. Having those meetings, talking about the financials of the, of the business, dealing with debt, dealing with leasing, making sure that your, your lease ups and that your. The occupancy of the Property was at 99% or higher. And then also marketing. Right. I needed to have the coolest, best property in College Station. This was in at Texas A and M so that college students would want to live there and be like, oh, that's the property to go to. So you know, I would host events and I would have people like celebrities come into the property just because that, that's what created buzz and, and sort of like discussion and you know, people telling stories about their time at Z Islander. And so I think that's where it came full circle for me. So I, I would, I would credit both, but definitely the property management just because it was more 360.
- [09:21]
Host 1
Yeah, yeah, more holistic. I totally hear you so have some very interesting background there. And then your first actual introduction into digital marketing was selling on, on Amazon, I believe. So what was that like?
- [09:34]
Brian Kano
Yeah, man. So I, this was, this was when I was into property management as well. I was a, I became a mentor at a SEAT accelerator in, in College Station and I became a mentor because of my experience in operations and managing a business from, from the property management side. And I got connected through this guy, Kevin Delaly who was the executive vice president of growth at Cellucor and I think he went on to become the COO or the CEO at AT Cost Protein as well. And Kevin was running on the Side. He was like, yeah, I've got this, like, Amazon thing set up. You know, like, you buy these products. I've got this gardening hose, and, like, you know, just make the gardening hose better. And you do different positioning and, like, you just add a feature and you source it from. From. From am, From Alibaba and you sell it. And my, like, mind was just blown. I was like, what? You people can do that? And so I partnered with the buddy and we pulled some money together, and we ended up starting a pool float. And so we sourced this giant flamingo, and I used my property, because I was the manager at. At this property, and we used the property to shoot photo shoots to create content. I remember having them at the pool. So then, like, people, when I was throwing these parties, people would be like, whoa, what is that? And I'm like, oh, that's. That's a King Flamingo. You know, it's like, oh, yeah, King flamingo dot com. And I remember just like, bridging the two worlds. And.
- [11:08]
Host 2
But.
- [11:09]
Brian Kano
But it was. It was a way for. For me to, like, pay my way through school. Ended up what it was. It was like a $10,000 investment that we pulled together, sourced a product from Alibaba, changed, you know, components of it, and. And then we did it through fba. So we actually ended up sending it off to Amazon. I ran marketing through events and then through Facebook ads, and, dude, we sold out in, like, two months. And then we're like, we need to do this again. And then we. We sold out in two months again. And then I remember we were constantly starting to sort of re up and starting to grow this thing, and we didn't know what we were doing. Like, I. I had no Facebook ads experience. Like, the Facebook ads experience that I had was running, like, link click campaigns, right? And. But it was. It was just like, really cool moment in my life where I started to really see the power of Internet money and digital marketing. And it's. I mean, it's definitely something that shaped. I think that's where I was going to school for civil engineering at first. And this is where, like, I decided, hold on a second. There's a different path for me. This is a lot more fun. I get it. And I think that this is something that I'm. I'm really good at. And so, you know, just kind of just. Just ended up moving that direction. I didn't.
- [12:33]
Host 2
If.
- [12:33]
Brian Kano
If I could go back in time. I wish I could. I. I wish I would have stayed with that. I ended up putting, like, sunsetting that business to go join one of the startups that I was mentoring. Um, and like my, you know, my life went a different direction. I ended up moving to la. But this was before. This was when what was their name? Pool Boy is the business. They were, they weren't around. They, they came after me and then they just stuck with it and they went D2C and they, they rode that wave. I mean this was 2016, like 2016, 2017. And so I wish if I could go back in time, I wish I would have stayed with it and I probably, I would have had something way bigger, you know. So that's the one regret I've got in life. But, but no, I mean my path went into this VP of operations role, moved to California, met some great people there and then, you know, just kind of followed, follow the rest of my career from there.
- [13:34]
Host 1
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- [14:57]
Brian Kano
Yeah, no, they were smart. They did it really well. I remember they were like se. They were doing influencer seating before it was a thing. You know, they had Kylie Jenner was. Was po. The Kardashians were posting about, you know, the, the pool boy. And I remember I would see those things and I'd be like, oh, man, did I like make a mistake sunsetting this?
- [15:16]
Host 1
You know? You know what's funny is they're probably thinking, man, we were so easy. Early to product seating. We should have done it something. We should have done it with something other than pool floats. They're probably like, we could have been. We could have been colourpop. We could have been Seed Beauty. We're like trying to shill. I'm a customer. I just bought some. Yeah, yeah. Every summer we're selling a bunch of fancy pool floats. Okay, so you go from this unique Amazon experience very early to pool floats.
- [15:40]
Brian Kano
Then you go to. Let me make sure I get this timeline right. Okay.
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Host 2
Can I ask, can I ask a question about the pool floats real quick?
- [15:50]
Brian Kano
Yeah.
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Host 2
Brian, how big did that business get before you decided to move on? Like, what was your. What kind of top line revenue levels did you guys hit?
- [15:57]
Brian Kano
We were doing about 80,000amonth in top line. Yeah. And you were like 20.
- [16:02]
Host 2
So this is like what, your junior, senior year? College. Are you like 21?
- [16:06]
Brian Kano
22. I was 22, yeah.
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Host 2
And that was all via Amazon.
- [16:11]
Brian Kano
All via Amazon.
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Host 2
Our.
- [16:12]
Brian Kano
Our EBITDA was like, this is before I even knew what EBITDA was, dude. I was just looking at the bank. Bank account. I'm like, yep, we got money. Buy more inventory. Our e. But our EBITA margins, I mean, what, like probably 35 to 40%? It was, it was just. There was no overhead. It was like me ordering stuff, talking to people in, in China, my supplier being like, hey, change the eyeballs so it's cuter. You know, like, those were, those were the problems I was solving.
- [16:40]
Host 2
Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy.
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Brian Kano
Wow.
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Host 1
And you.
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Brian Kano
And you said you were, what were
- [16:44]
Host 2
your growth levers for that business? So you're selling through Amazon. Did you say you were running. You said you're doing events and then you said you were running Facebook ads. So you were you running Facebook ads to Amazon?
- [16:54]
Brian Kano
I was running Facebook ads to Amazon. I had a landing page. It was a landing page that was serving as a lead magnet. And then as soon as you entered your email, it would redirect to Amazon. And so then the people that didn't actually buy and Convert. I would email them.
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Host 2
Oh, smart. Okay, so you were not going right to Amazon. Got it.
- [17:10]
Brian Kano
And I used a lot of. I, I leveraged the property as a way of filming and shooting content and making it really cool. And that's, I think, what garnered a lot of early social proof. And I man, again, like, as I'm saying this and I'm reflecting on, was really cool to be. To see how all of that worked, you know, and, and together. But I wish I, I didn't know what I was doing right. Like in retrospect, like that's all the, that's the playbook now. That's the 2026 playbook, is you do events, you do in person, you get the, the sampling, the seating, you find the arbitrage and Halo effect from Facebook to Amazon, you know, so it's like, it's. It was very early, but, but it was, it was definitely an opportunity that I think like helped me start to start to see big picture what's possible with digital marketing.
- [17:58]
Host 1
Fantastic funnel. So it was, it was that experience that then I'm sure propelled you into founding your own agency. So you did Lead Fuel, then you also jumped to ad stitcher. And I think that's a very unique sort of order of operations. You go from solo operator to founding agency to platform side. I'm curious to hear you talk about that. And also if there's anything about that kind of trifecta that you think makes for a strong brand operator.
- [18:24]
Host 2
Yeah.
- [18:25]
Brian Kano
So I was in like Los Angeles and that's when, that's when Lead Fuel was started. And it was, it came out of desperation. So that startup that I quit, I. I said sunset in my Amazon FBA business for. We got a $50 million valuation. There was some issues amongst investment team. The business went insolvent, insolvent. So we went from like an overnight near exit at 50 million to like in debt. I remember taking out a loan to pay my staff writers and my team. So then I'm, I'm now in debt. I'm like in debt. 50 grand, you know, so I could give one last paycheck to my team who I, you know, like just moved out to la. And so I was like, crap, I need to do something. I ended up. One of the board members was incredible and he's like, hey, you're really good at this marketing thing. I've got some people that you could help. And so he connected me to the corporate team at Irvine and so I actually did the. My first client ever as at Leadfield was Irvine Spectrum center and Irvine Fashion Fashion island in Irvine, California. And I did the ads for those two properties and then I started to pick up other, other clients and I was like, okay, cool. Like I've, I've got this agency and this is fine. But dude, what I discovered early on is that I struggled to like do the execution, but also like create a sales magnet to bring in more clients. And I just couldn't get this agency, like scaled. It was, it was so time intensive, I had to do everything. And so I ended up moving from Los Angeles to back to, back home to Dallas and then I did a short stint there and I, I then I moved, relocated to Austin and I was struggling with the same thing. I was just like, I can't, like, I was starting to get more clients, I was starting to get more brands, but like, I couldn't get it to a place where I felt I was working in the business, not on the business. And so I was like, I've just gotta, I've gotta create leverage here. I gotta like, take a break on this. And so I ended up sunsetting the agency. I kept, you know, some of my early, early brands and clients and then I ended up joining Stitcher Ads and I became a account. Sorry, I became an account manager for, for that. Org. Some of the early brands that I worked with were Bed Bath and Beyond, Calvin Klein. I helped a little bit on the William Sonoma Wayfair site. So this, this agency was supporting a lot of, you know, Fortune 500s retail map, huge big box retailers. And it's funny that that agency was more actually an ad tech platform. And so they were one of the first, like right now we're hearing all about Sean's and it was a, it was a, an agency, but it was enabled through, through proprietary software that allowed us to manage these catalogs that were hundreds of thousands in size. And so I got a lot of experience there. I quickly moved up, up the ranks there and I became the director of media strategy. So I was the person that you would talk to and escalate to if the account wasn't performing, if the customer, the client was upset or something. Like I was the guy to like to help put out that fire. And so got really involved with media strategy, media planning, measurement. We ended up getting acquired and then I became the director of media efficacy at Cargo. Cargo is a bigger organization. Know they worked with, with like Amazon and they do political and it's open web, so they do everything. And then that's where I got it to start to get more involved with, with measurement a bit more as well.
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Host 1
Let me actually double click on something. Director of Media efficacy is a title you don't hear a lot. You said it was related to measurement. What did, what did that role entail?
- [22:25]
Brian Kano
Yeah, so I ran the measurement department. It was a six person team and, and we would do all sorts of studies that's, that's really what we would do is, is constant studies across performance marketing. So you've got your natural conversion lift studies. I would like partner with different mmm MTA providers. I talked to New Star, I would talk to Rockerbox, I talked to the Triple Whales and then we would also do upper funnel stuff. So we would work with teams like Upwave for example to do brand awareness ad recall. So like let's say you're Amazon and Amazon is going to be announcing a new movie. Well, they want to know which trailer is going to be the best to drive intent to watch that movie. And so Amazon, before they deploy the media would say hey, we want to run a study. We basically pre test it with these different tools and partners and then the one that gets the best results, the best attention rate, the best recall intent, that's the, that's the trailer. Those are the trailers that they show in through the, through the platform, through cargo. And so we did a lot of that stuff. And I mean I used the movie trailer example but it was for like you know, movie for, for music videos, for political ads, for you know, your standard direct response like commerce, commerce advertising as well. We did it all. And so it was really cool because I was in a position where I could see all these studies and I could syndicate all that data or synthesize it so I could understand, you know, what were the attributes that made an ad really memorable and what were the ones that made it drive more intent and convert and then also like what channels were actually performant because I had access to all this data across our book of business and be able to see kind of which channels were, were able to the job of each channel across the funnel. And so that was, that was I think a big unlock. I one point started to share those insights in the industry and I think that's kind of what got me a little bit of a Twitter following. When I first started out I wasn't, it wasn't my experience in E commerce necessarily, it was me being a source of data and insights as I was anonymously synthesizing all this data of what's happening in the industry across, across the digital landscape.
- [24:53]
Host 1
Totally. And that's that actually kind of goes back to my original question, which is you have a very unique set of experiences between like being the scrappy operator at the Flamingo Pool Float brand to being the agency owner, to being on the platform side, the ad stitcher, the, you know, tech enabled agency. What do you think it is about? Like, that experience that I think I see with other operators, I speak to the more holistic background you get, I think the stronger brand operator you can be today. What is it about having that experience that you think lends itself so well to then scaling a DDC brand? Because we're, we're going to soon jump into your success of both Nude and true Classic.
- [25:30]
Brian Kano
Yeah, I, I, it's you, you go through different problems and each of those problems just give you a perspective, a unique perspective to how you can solve different challenges. So like, one thing, for example, when I started off the Amazon business, it was my money. So like, I learned very early on that when you spend money on Facebook, it, it costs something. It is not an imaginary arbitrary number. It is hitting someone's bank account. And so that lend itself to me being very financially disciplined. Like, I, you know, if you talk to anyone on my team or that I've worked with, they're going to tell you like, I'm the type of person that goes deep and I speak fine, I speak CFO. Like I can go down to a CFO's level and they love that and they appreciate that because we can speak the same language. And so that's like one thing that it wasn't a direct takeaway in knowledge. However, it was kind of a giant foundational stepping stone to me, seeing, oh wait, what I do on Facebook ads has consequences to the business and I should probably understand what those consequences are. Then you've got, you know, the media strategy where I was more full funnel direct response, seeing how, you know, like spending a million dollars a day was, was normal. I could blink at that. Like it was like, oh, a million dollars a day. Yeah, that's possible. Oh, two million a day. Yeah, Meta, Meta can do it. Where I think a lot of early founders, the constant question that I get from them is like, what's the ceiling? You know, they see success and they're seeing the momentum and then they're like, okay, but when does it end? When's this? What's the ceiling? And so for me I could see like, wait, no, you can scale. And they're like, what is the magnitude of scale that you can get out of Facebook ads, for example? And Then I think with media efficacy, it was me not thinking full funnel. It is. Okay, what are beyond ROAS? What are the other KPIs and attributes and measurables that drive an objective? So I can, I'm, I can. I kind of got a dynamic perspective where I can think beyond just driving revenue. I can think about, okay, this won't drive any revenue today, but it's going to be kind of a thread that the customer will continue to be able to pull on and that shapes perception and the change of perception drives intent and an intent drives sales. And so I can make those connections. And you know, not every business that I've worked with has had the patience to be able to do that, but it's something that I have that I think has been, that's been helpful, especially for a brand like True Classic, for example.
- [28:03]
Host 2
Yes. I wanted to ask you about the, like, your media efficacy role because what I'm hearing is you basically would have all these different types of brands with different objectives coming to you and saying, hey, we're trying to learn this thing. And then it's your job to basically decide, like, what's the, how are we going to set this test up? What's the tooling stack that we're going to like, extract this learning from? Which is exciting because I think in D2C, especially in the last year or two years, we're starting to hear a lot more about things outside of Meta's purchase conversion campaign.
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Brian Kano
Right?
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Host 2
Like people running View Content optimized stuff and Reach optimized stuff and using holdout tests to like, measure how, how efficient and incremental those, those objectives can be. But I want to just like one example that you brought up was the Amazon movie thing. Like, like, how are you. Like, what does that test structure look like? And like, what's the tooling that you're using to deliver that insight? Because it sounds like it's, it's probably custom, depending on the brand and the use case and very different than like an E Comm test that we would set up and like trying to sell a physical product.
- [29:02]
Brian Kano
Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, it's, it's all custom. And that's kind of, that was one of my jobs, was to be always. I would constantly solicit different measurement partners and just get pricing. And then like, we would have preferred partners, people that would say, okay, we have these many clients, we're probably going to run these many tests. So like, this is the price that we're looking for. And so the brand, the account manager the account director would come to me in my team and be like, hey, you know, we've got this customer. They want to do a million dollar I.O. with a purchase order. But before they do, they really want to make sure that the creative is going to resonate. And so, you know, we'd fill out a form and say, okay, well what's the objective? Like, what are they ultimately, like, why are they spending those million dollars? Is it because they want votes for something? Is it because they want to drive awareness about a new insurance program? Are they releasing a new line? Or are they just trying to drive general awareness about, you know, the fact that they sell outdoor furniture? And based on that, that's how we would, you know, pick the right partner. A lot of this stuff was through partners. So like the Amazon example, we would use a, a partner called Upwave and, and then there's another partner named Disco as well. D I S Q O. And all of these partners would basically run surveying. So they would have their panels and they would take the content, they would take the media, and they would panel and survey, you know, their audiences as if it were, as if it were live ads. So basically, like, we would connect them to our, like our auction, and we could specifically target those users in the panel and serve the ad to them as if it was like live already, but it wasn't. And then they would get a survey and be like, hey, do you recall that ad when you were reading about this article on Vogue? And they would respond to that. So it was kind of this closed environment sandbox. So imagine a world where you could run brand lift studies on Facebook ads without actually spending your money. You could, like pretest it. That's effectively what it was. And it was, it was, it was very. I mean, it was fascinating at first. I didn't know, like this, this kind of opened up my world to all these different types of measurement. But yeah, it was panels and surveys and we would. It's something that you could replicate as a brand, though. Like if I'm listening to this and like, well, I don't, I don't know who these people are. I, like, I don't know who. I don't have a TV series that I'm launching. You could do something similar though. You can take your customer list or you can go to Survey Monkey and you can do a survey to the general population. Let's say you have two ads or you have a new message, right, that you want to get in front of customers. You could kind of pre test it, I think like nude, for example, we took big swings with like 50,000 to $100,000 per video production. Video commercials. True Classic is the same. Everybody has seen the Jimson ads, right? Similar playbook. Those commercials cost a lot of money. You want to be dang sure that that thing is going to work, that the script that you're getting in front of, that you're approving is going to work. And so I think you can take these two worlds, take those scripts for those ads and do do a survey. And especially with AI, you could probably do a storyboard and then getting in front of a couple of people, survey them and say, hey, which one resonates the most to you? That. That'll give you some confidence. That's effectively what we were doing at Cargo. That makes sense. Yeah.
- [32:42]
Host 2
I mean, it's a, it's that very obviously lends itself really, really well to, to your experience selling physical products online. I mean, you probably came into those roles with like 10x the amount of measurement experience than the average marketer has. That's just reliant on like MTAs and holdouts and MMMs, which are all great, but all very different than, than what you're talking about right now.
- [33:06]
Host 1
Well, because also what year are we talking about? Brian, you're 10x is conservative. Yeah, right.
- [33:12]
Brian Kano
Yeah, this was, this was 2020. 2021. Yeah. Like, I knew, I knew about incrementality holdout testing. I remember talking to Olivia at House before they were big on D2C. Like I, I reached out to House on. Because again, my job as the director of FC was to like, I needed to keep a good finger on the pulse of who are all the measurement partners and providers and how can I strike a good deal with them so I could give those to my clients. And so I remember reaching out to House. I was like, oh, this is interesting. And we, we chatted and we almost, we almost struck up a partnership. Same with Rockerbox. With. Before Rockerbox really blew up. Triple Whale too, I remember with. For everyone was talking about Triple Whale. I had reached out to the, to the team to partnerships team to figure out how we could strike up a partnership. Because one of the problems that we faced in at Cargo, the open web, is that there's no pixel. It's, it's. There's no, there's no identity. It's not the walled garden. It's you going to. It's you going to a website. And it's not a. It doesn't have a login. Right. These are open web Websites. And so, you know, something like a triple. Well, with a pixel was really interesting to me because it was a way to start tracking, you know, who are we sending the ad to through our ad servers. And then are they actually getting into the website and then creating kind of like what was a. Almost server to server connection. Right. And establishing what is capi, but in the open Internet, we didn't end up solving that problem. I ended up leaving the organization before we could solve that. But yeah, it was, this was, this was early on and I think that I always kept that a little bit close to my chest selfishly, because I think strong measurement in that time, in that era was a massive, massive superpower. It was a bit of a moat because you could, you could test things that gave you a ton of arbitrage that others didn't know how to measure and were afraid to, to. To test and lean into.
- [35:13]
Host 1
Awesome. So I want to, I want to. Let's fast forward a little bit. You hit the agency work, you go platform side. Uh, you end up as VP of marketing at Nude, which went from a hundred thousand dollars a month and trailing 12 month revenue to $8 million a month in less than a year. So I'm curious, how'd you get involved in like, what tipped the scales for you to go from someplace like an ad stitcher or cargo to then brand side?
- [35:38]
Brian Kano
Yeah, so I, I was working at Cargo and I had established it to a place like my team was well established. We had a good process, good system. I had some extra time and I'm always like, I'm always fidgeting. I'm always looking for like, like my weekends aren't. Let me hang out and like go for a walk and watch a movie. My weekends are like, okay, like, what can I do? And I had a friend, a good friend, Peter. He, him and I had worked together that, that business example about that business that I nearly killed come making it come to the US Because I scaled it too quickly. Him and I were working on that and so he's seen me, he's seen my work, and he was, he was in Cancun with a buddy and the buddy was like talking about, oh, I've got this business, I don't know what I'm doing. Da, da, da. Long story short, I grab a beer with this guy and I hit it off and he's like, look, I just need some help with Facebook. I don't really know what I'm doing. And so I was like, you know what, let me. Yeah, I'll Coach you. So I'm, I'm coaching him and I walk in, walking him through stuff. You know, he's making the changes, but not quite exactly how I want it. So we're like, okay, dude, you know what? Let me just, Let me just cook here. Let me just get on the account. Let me just take care of this. And so I started doing the media buying for him. And, you know, the first thing I noticed is like, he's not spending enough, right? Like, keep in mind, I'm coming from a background where, like, I'm very much used to spending a million dollars, you know, a month or a day. It's like very, like, I'm almost desensitized to the number, which is a bad thing. But I was like, you're not spending enough. Your. Your ads aren't getting out of learning phase. You've got everything split out. You've got all these ad sets. You're like, $25 ad sets aren't gonna, like, do anything for your business. And so I consolidate everything. I like, shrink everything down one campaign. I've got like three ad sets and I've got like five ads. And like, these are like the, the worst, ugliest ads you've ever seen. And I'm like, you know, making some ads on Figma. Like, you got a graphic designer? He's like, no, okay, great. So I'm like, you know, I create a Figma account. I'm like, creating my ads, writing my own copy, and it just, it just started to drive conversions. And I'm like, you know, I'm like scaling it 30% every other day. And I'm day trading the account. And as I'm day trading the account, I'm able to scale it faster and faster. And so it gets to a place where he's like, I want you to do this full. Like, I want you to come join me full time. And so I got the offer. And I don't know, it was kind of this like, yeah, this is, this is what gives me energy. Like, don't get me wrong, working at a big corporate New York agency is cool, but I'm, I'm. I like have this like, builder mentality. And so it's like I felt like I was building something here with Nude. And so I ended up leaving Cargo and then I joined Nude full time and joined as the VP of marketing. And it was like Sam and myself and two other people. My marketing team was zero. You know, it was mostly product and operations led. And so, you know, was a marketing team of One for a long time hired a director of partnerships and then I hired a director of lifecycle marketing and then it was us three. And I was at us three. Basically grew the business and got it to 60 million in two years.
- [38:54]
Host 2
This episode of Marketing Operators is brought to you by Applovin. It's our highest spending new channel at Hexclad since the start of last year. We're talking mid seven figures and growing. We ran a GEO holdout test to prove that it's driving incremental orders and that it's a profitable cost per incremental order. And we also measure it regularly through our MTA to prove out that it's a primarily driving new customers and that it's still maintaining efficiency. In fact it's actually more efficient than our top spending channel Meta. Ready to get started? We have a step by step playbook that you can get if you go to 9operators.com applovin you're going to get the guide to channel expansion that we wrote. Access to the event where we're presenting and all the recordings and decks between us, our friends and 25 of the best leaders in Ecom. Plus $1,000 in free ad credit day one and another $5,000 in credit when you spend $5,000. That's nine operators.com applovin let's get back to the show.
- [39:49]
Host 1
Yeah, it's fantastic. So like what were some of the tent pole strategies and tactics that really get you from being essentially, I mean $100,000 in trailing twelve month revenue is like a non existent business that's like a blip on the radar to then $60 million. What were the, what were the tactics that got you there?
- [40:05]
Brian Kano
Yeah, a lot of it was like and this is before we started calling it this now nowadays but Persona testing I truly was always looking for. Okay, so it's a hair removal product for those who don't know nude. What it sells a, an IPL hair removal device. Basically it flash flashes light against your skin and the light is absorbed by the hair follicle, killing the hair follicle. So it's like at home laser now there's different types of people that like that, that market is huge. Right. Like hair removal is, is a big market but there's different types of like people and symptoms. And when you think about hair removal you think mostly women for example. And so I started to test, you know, among men and I started to test you know like calling out different, different stages of life that someone was in, you know and, and even like things that they were dealing with like pcos, hair growth is, is a real thing. And so we, we started to really diversify the funnel number one, and figuring out, okay, how can we educate people that this is one safe, two, that it can work for them and three, that it's not inconvenient. The thing that I think a lot of brands struggle with is specifically in a, you know, kind of an industry like nude or supplements and health, I don't think any of us here deal with this, but compliance comp, like customer compliance and like following the protocol is ridiculously difficult and it's the number one killer because when you don't have a customer that's following your protocol and you acquire them, they're not going to see the results and then there's, they're going to churn and it's like you just acquire that customer for nothing. So making sure that people understood that hey, like yeah, this isn't a magic wand, but it's not totally inconvenient that you can't buy. That was, that was huge. That was like something that was game changing for the business because the biggest objection of people is like, oh, is this, how long is this going to take? Is this actually going to work? And so thinking about all those objections and creating, spinning up different funnels for them was, was massive. Another thing that was kind of groundbreaking was being, being a technology, kind of a piece of device, right. I wanted to create this onboarding experience. Like you were onboarding on a, on a, at a SaaS company, right? I remember that from my Stitcher ads days where we had this white glove onboarding experience. And so thinking how do I bring that into a consumer brand? And so we redid, you know, the post purchase flows. We did the whole experience so that when you purchased, you made this investment, you felt like you, you were confident in your investment in what you just bought and you felt like you had someone there to hold your hand and guide you through, through the process. So those were, those were big things. And then I think in like channel diversification, we were very strategic about not diversifying too quickly. Does that make sense? We like, we stayed on Meta in Google and we rode that wave for as long as possible. And then at one point, and I can't remember exactly what triggered this, but at one point we're like, hey, you know what, let's, let's do, let's do TikTok ads. And I remember launching TikTok ads that, that like saved one of our Q4s because it just reached an Insanely new audience. We already had all these funnels and we already had all these like kind of Personas built out. And so we just like took a bet on, okay, which two, three Personas do we really believe in? Let's apply those into TikTok and not have to reinvent the wheel. And yeah, it scaled, it worked tremendously for us. We got to a place where with TikTok we were spending, I mean we were, we were at zero and then we started to spend about you know, 600 to 800,000amonth, which is, which in like 60 days is rather quickly for the platform, especially a platform like TikTok. And so I would say those were like the three main levers of success. It was, you know, the building out, thinking about the customer post purchase, making sure that the customer like was confident in the purchase to reduce return rates, not diversifying our spend too quickly with, with TikTok, with, sorry, with Meta, and then thinking about Personas and angles early on in the process and finding different ways of adjusting your key message, your winning message for different audiences.
- [44:40]
Host 1
Fantastic. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's great. It's also funny hearing you speak about this, you know, five years after the
- [44:46]
Brian Kano
fact that and how it is kind
- [44:48]
Host 1
of best practice today, particularly with the Persona targeting. I'm curious, are there any like specific unlocks you guys had about selling specifically this like hair removal device that like unlocked growth and like maybe even helped inform how you approached growth at something like a true classic.
- [45:08]
Brian Kano
Yeah, it's funny, all of the, I would say like the big unlocks, if I were to give them a grade, if I put all of our unlocks on like a whiteboard I like went through and I put a score, car score on each of them. The majority of the unlocks were actually on the operation side in that finding ways of decreasing, of increasing our gross margin, finding ways of decreasing our cogs, decreasing shipping fees, decreasing like extending lines of credit to improve the cash flow of the business and the, the quick working capital. Those were the unlocks that helped us because it gave me more headroom to scale into on the acquisition side. And I think that is a massively underrated thing. If I look at the progression of like your digital CMO, you know, in the early days, 2018 to 2020, very growth oriented growth at all costs. Right. A lot of money pouring in. 2021, maybe to 2024, you had this sort of like the evolution of the finance cmo, right? The CMO that could speak to a financial level. And is. Is no longer growth at all cost, but now it is, you know, profitable growth. I think what we're going to see in 2026, I could be wrong, but I think we're going to see people like the operations cmo, the CMO that understands the supply chain and is going to be sitting in with the ops team and the product team to like, push back and say, hey, these cogs are unacceptable. Here's what I know I can get us. Here's the roas. I think I can get us. You have to land this product at a 76, 80% gross margin and go, go find a way to. To. To cut costs. Like, just go. Give me that. That's my protocol. And I don't know that we've. We're having, like, I know there are some people and you guys might be doing this too. I think McCoy. McCoy is known to be very good at this. Where he will. He's kind of got like a. A product hat on where he's thinking about white space and product, and he's thinking, okay, here's the cac. I think I can get us. Here's the price point that I think we could sell it. Sell. Sell this, that. And then the team goes and like, brings that product to life. And I think we're going to see way more of that because those destinies are all connected. Like, if I get a good product that I believe in, that I think I can sell at a certain price with this gross margins that I'm after, oh, my goodness, I'm set up for success. I can just, you know, throw ads at Facebook. And if my assumptions are correct, we're going to print a lot of money. So I think that's. That's a huge lesson that I got out of nude. And I don't know, I wish I would have applied it more at True Classic. We were. When I joined True Classic, my focus was very much in, like, rebuilding. And so I. It wasn't until later on that I started to sit down a bit more and understand, okay, how can I push and like, be an advocate for better margin that allows us to be successful in these other platforms.
- [48:17]
Host 1
Awesome. So I do want to talk about True Classic.
- [48:19]
Brian Kano
So that's a good segue.
- [48:20]
Host 1
So we're in 2024 now. You're joining True Classic. They're already doing $200 million per year. You said when you came on board, you were kind of mandated with. You were mandated with a rebuilding. What does that mean?
- [48:32]
Brian Kano
Yeah, so I joined the organization. I. I Actually had joined early, like June, June. And it was a bit of a part time, right? It was to start to meet the team and understand like, okay, where, where are all the skeletons? What needs to be changed and like, what are the fires? I'm sure prioritization. The organization was going through a rebuild phase on the marketing side where we had a lot of people that had exited the organization. And with that lack of leadership, things kind of like fell apart, right? Like a lot of the gaps started to get wider. There was minimal accountability in some aspects. The team was kind of big too. It was a bit, you know, bloated. And so my focus, my media focus was basically, okay, reimagining this marketing org and building it in a way that is scrappy, that gives people more autonomy to fully own processes versus having this constant, like, I only own from this step to this step. And then it's going to hand off to this person that, you know, and like this sequential sort of process which broke often because there was lack of follow through sometimes. So it's like kind of like, okay, how do I consolidate all this down to like one single driver and owner where they own the inputs and the outputs? And so that, that was, that was like the. Oh my goodness. That was. I started full time in October, right? And it was like, okay, we're here, Black Friday, let's go. So I tried to like stand that up, you know, as. As in like two months, which is very difficult to do. And then as I'm setting that up, it was basically like, okay, we got to go back and rebuild SOPs. We got to build frameworks, we got to build dashboards and KPIs and accountabilities and kind of retrain this new marketing org in how to like work together in this machine? And what that was effectively what I was trying to build is a. A machine of people that knew what their inputs were so that the business could continue to grow.
- [50:46]
Host 1
And. And what. So 1. This feels like just a categorically different experience than anything else we just talked about, right? Nude was from like zero to one, essentially. We talk about the agency, we talk about the flamingo pool floats. Jumping onto a $200 million brand and have to. Having to like rebuild the org to a certain degree is different. So I'm curious, like, what were some of the. I don't know if you were working with mentors at the time or, you know, reading materials, like, what, what are you doing personally to get in the headspace so that you can make an impact on such a Different type of organization.
- [51:23]
Brian Kano
Yeah, I, I was, I, I was very active on mentor pass and I was meaning to meeting with a couple of. Of guys there that were more like executive coach. I also had went through, I had done this at Stitcher Ads, but I went through executive coaching training and I reached out to a few of the coaches and I was just like, okay, look like, you know, I've got this org is, is, is the fast path here to do a full rebuild and like just rip the band aid is another path to like find the advocates within the org. I ended up settling with the middle, right. There were some very obvious roles that were duplicative. They weren't really in it anymore. And there were other people that were just like, oh my gosh, their eyes lit up and they were like, oh, like I want to be here so bad. And like, how can I like be a part of this? And they just saw the vision. And so I was able to identify those people really quickly. And as I had people exit the org, I was able to like pull these, these, these advocates up and you know, like one of them, Jordan, she took, she took the place of the VP of customer experience and she took on this role with so much grace and just like being able to fill in the gaps. There was no disruption like someone like Jordan. The Jordans in the organization allowed me to focus in other parts of the business because I could fully trust that they had it. They, they, they had it. And we would do our one on ones, we would do our check ins and like, they knew to like, reach out to me if there was a fire, but they just had full like ownership where the only time that something was flagged to me was if it was like a financial decision, whether you needed to make, you know, a financial decision. If they were struggling with getting that like buy in or that partnership from an external partner and they needed, you know, they needed the title to come in, which is, I think it's ridiculous, but you know, they needed me to like, come in and nudge them or if she just was truly stuck and she's like, hey, I just want your opinion on this. Here's how I think I'm, I'm gonna handle this. And so for me, I like as much as I give credit to the external mentors that I had, I, I truly give credit to the people that were able to stand up for the call and just own, own their, their swim lanes and give me the ability to focus on other parts of the business.
- [53:47]
Host 1
Awesome. Okay, so then aside from sort of the organizational changes that were required at True Classic, from a growth perspective, what have the focus has been
- [53:56]
Brian Kano
from a growth perspective? Yeah, so we did a lot of. We went really deep on partnerships, and like, we did stuff with the ufc, we did stuff with the Clippers, the Rams, and it was like, it was a lot of testing and figuring out how to make this stuff work. Ryan was a big lead in this, and, you know, we would. We knew off the bat that we didn't want to just, like, put a logo in the board, but we wanted to integrate the brand somehow. And so we started to use post purchase surveys to understand, like, you know, like, does it move the needle? And, you know, you're. You get the most unimpressive results. You're like, you just spent how much? And you're like, this is the result. But then it starts to compound actually legitimately, with each week that you're involved. We, you know, you start to. You start to see the post purchase survey tick up. One of the things that we did was our. Our True Classic moments, right? And we kind of. We did this with the UFC at first, where we're like, hey, we want. Like, I grew up watching the ufc. Like, I, I remember on Spike TV watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship with, like, you know, the competition. Like, I'm, I'm a UFC fan. And I remember I was like, man, like, how can we bring back, like, let's lean into the brand name and how can we bring back some of these great moments with, like, Forest Griffin and some of these other guys and show these replays and let's call them True classic, The. The True classic moment, because that's what they are. They're. You know, if you're a fan of the sport, you. You remember these, These, these moments. And so the UFC was very gra. Gracious and, like, gave us the spot. They call it the True Classic moment. And yeah, like, weekly they will post a replay of these, like, huge, like, holy moments. And what's really cool about them is that they get shared. If you're a fan of the sport, people are like, oh, my gosh, I remember that fight. You know, and they, they hit that, that retweet or that share button or they send it to the group chat. And what do you see? You see a big True Classic logo right there. And so those were some. Some things where we're like, oh, wait, this is an unlock. How do we. How do we now start to use this, use these sports partnerships for digital distribution and create more of these moments? And then how do we create more content that's shareable that people are going to want to share to drive more awareness? So that was a big, a big activity. And then the other thing too, beyond just like the, the basics. This is going to sound crazy. We went through this period of kind of rebuilding the account and constantly going back to like foundation. I think that at a, at this size and when you start to drive, have, have distribution outside of digital and you have wholesale and you have your own stores, you start to see that there is this massive sort of halo effect that's happening on your digital business as well. And so we needed to basically understand what our halo effect was like if, if we shut off ads, like what does the organic, what does the word of mouth, what does our repurchase cost like repeat customer base? What does it look like? And what's the new baseline where we don't have, we don't have any ads and then start starting from zero, rebuild the spend back up and sort of like find the right marketing mix as the business grows. And I think this is something that I'm taking away from true classic. It's. As your business grows, there's different moments where you almost need to have a reset because what got you from 0 to 50 is, or 0 to 100 isn't what's going to get you from 200 to 500. And so a lot of brands I think make that mistake where like wait, we've always done Facebook ads, we should always keep doing Facebook ads and they keep spending. And the other, the last thing that was really cool is just like our ability to just test so quickly. We were one of the early brands on applovin and within 60 days we went from zero to a hundred thousand dollars per day and spent. And it was like it was right before Q4 and man, that was, that was like an incredible feat. The measurement was horrible. We had to use post purchase survey, you know, to, to really like feel confident in it. And we could see it in the mirror. Like, you know, you, you spend an extra hundred thousand dollars, you're going to feel it in the P and L. And so we used the business reporting the mer to feel confident in that decision. And you know, we were always testing, constantly testing new, new stuff. And I think Applovin was like the channel that had the biggest success for us.
- [58:39]
Host 2
Can I ask about the, the partnerships? Because I think you guys have crushed the partnerships. I was at, we're a partner at the LA Kings and I was at the game a month ago and I saw Your guys activation in the arena and it was an awesome experience. Really stood out. You mentioned, you talked about distribution of those partnerships. So you talked about the organic distribution, like people wanting to share the content that you guys are, are sponsoring.
- [59:04]
Brian Kano
Did you, did you figure out how
- [59:05]
Host 2
to effectively leverage those in paid too? Like did you figure out how to leverage the UFC in paid and like any other sports partnerships in paid or, or not really. Was that where those kind of like, did it never really translate over there?
- [59:18]
Brian Kano
Not, not from a direct response perspective. You won't be able to drive a paid like ad, right? And say like here is you know, an ad. Go by what you're gonna. What we did find though is taking that content that did so well organically and then boosting it and just like look, it works. It's got insane amount of engagement. It's going, it's having a viral moment. Let it have its viral moment. And after about a week come in with paid and amplify it. And you won't be able to. I actually have a method for this, but you won't be able to like look at Ads manager and say hey, this is driving this row as keep spending on it. And then like, you know, think of it as your traditional creative that you would keep spending on, but you will see it in other metrics. And I think one of the, one of the solutions that I have is we, we classified all of our creative by content pillars. So we established content pillars like direct response, comedy, sports, you know, give back social impact, feel good moments and, and then each creative was named with that. And then in our post purchase when you select how did you hear about us or brought you back to the site, you select Facebook or Instagram. It then asks you what was the content that you saw. And it's like those four pillars, but it puts it in a natural language for the customer where they're not like social impact. What does that mean? But if it's like, oh, you saw an ad of someone getting free, free product or like a free experience, you know, and they start to select that. And so what we then started to do is we would basically take the survey responses by the content pillar extrapolated across the revenue for Facebook to then understand kind of extrapolated revenue by pillar by content and then you divide it by the spend and you can track that week over week to then get your content pillar post purchase roas. So if you're like, hey, we want to boost all of this UFC or this, the, the clipper stuff, you can then go from zero spend to you know spend 50,000 a week and you'll see it in the post purchase results where like and and now you have a benchmarks to measure against where like what is it? It don't look at it like the row as number as face value but rather okay, we do a lot of direct response. We know direct response works. What is that in the post purchase row as survey row as is it a 2.5 and then is sport a 3x or a 4x? You know and if it's a 3x and a 4x then like maybe double the budget next week and then see if it holds and then maybe triple the budget next week and then see if it holds and then like once you get to a point of scale where you've got enough spend volume, look at the business and see how the business is trending as well. And that's incredible.
- [62:26]
Host 2
I'm starting to see the, the you know the, the media efficacy role playing into like I think there's probably a very small subset of marketers that would think to set up a measurement model that way. That's a, that's a. It's very smart. It makes a lot of sense but it's, and it's, it's using a lot of tools that, that most D2C marketers use. But it's just a very creative way of stacking them and creating a model. So I love, I love to hear that. That's, that's really cool.
- [62:51]
Brian Kano
And if you're really my advice would be to one it's practical like everybody go do this and to set like if you're like if you're trying to figure out a way to reach new reach, right? And you're like hey man, like I want to do this view content thing. Cody talks about it I think Connor, you, you guys both have talked about it too, right? And you're like ah, I just don't know. Okay, well think about like what are you trying to do with view content? You're, you're not trying to drive a sale. You're trying to get people to remember your brand, assign a content pillar to that and only drive that content pillar in that objective and launch it and do this post purchase survey content roas method and then see if you're seeing view content shoot up and with tools like no commerce and fairing and all these other post purchase survey providers you're able to get it down at the order level in zip code. So you might be able to even understand kind of like at a zip code level. If you're doing sports, for example, you know, are you seeing higher, you know, affinity in a certain region? And then can you do that with tying your wholesale and your distribution there with like, okay, are you in Target? Are you in Costco? You know, and then you start to bring it full circle. But phase one obviously is like national and then, but you can then start to get really sophisticated with it as you, as you go along and it brings you back to this world of CPM arbitrage. Because now I'm not competing for like a ROAS and a 30 or 20 cpm with you guys. I'm sitting in a, I'm having fun in my 3 to $5 CPM auction, which like is great for me, you know, so.
- [64:30]
Host 1
Okay, sweet. So Brian, jumping around a little bit more. You touched on Applovin being a big win at True Classic. Being able to scare from 00 to $100,000 in just a couple days. Cody not here with us. Today predicted for 2026 that Applov was going to crack prospecting and really begin eating away at meta's like dominant share of budget for most DTC brands. Do you agree? Do you disagree?
- [64:52]
Brian Kano
What's your take, man? Eating into a large share, that's tough for me. I don't know about eating into it. I know that they're going to crack prospecting. In fact, they've already cracked it. I, I was testing some stuff that the new discovery objective and man, I can't believe I'm saying this. Last time I told people about Applovin, everybody's told about Applovin and then like the, there was like more competition and my, my, my CPMs definitely took a hit.
- [65:16]
Host 1
But you've just to, you've, you have complained to me directly that we on this podcast called it out early. You said next time there's a great ad platform, you gotta, you gotta wait a couple more weeks, hide it.
- [65:26]
Brian Kano
Yeah, I, I, I, yes, that's right. Because man, I was like, I was printing, I was, it was incredible. And then you guys released the episode and I was like my CPMs continue to increase as this video gets, gets more views. There's something here. No, but look, Discovery on Applovin, that objective is really good. It is shockingly good. And it like I'm looking at it from a obviously like first click NC ROAS or your new visitor percentage. In fact, they were so kind enough for all of us to add new visitor percentage as a metric and NC ROAS is a metric in AppLovin and it's near one to one. So if you don't have some of these other tools, you can just look at the. In platform reporting. But I think, I think they're. They're going to crack. I would. Sorry, they're not going to. They already have. They've cracked prospecting eating into a large percentage. I don't know if they'll eat into a large percentage. I think that they will eat a. A bit. But I think a lot of that's honestly going to come from other channels. I think we're going to see share taken from Google. I think we're going to see share taken from other media like your TV and your podcast potentially streaming. Reason being is because yes, it is a mobile form factor. However, if I'm looking at a new channel, I want like the reason why we do TV ads for the Super bowl is because you have 100% attention on screen.
- [67:03]
Host 1
Right.
- [67:04]
Brian Kano
And that's why the, the CPM and the price, the value of the, that placement is so high is because you have a very focused audience. Audience at scale. I think Applovin brings elements of that because of the fact that they're having to watch the entire thing. And so with Meta, we're going to continue to see Meta like drive direct response and you know, Applovin might be able to even drive more audiences into meta from a sort of consideration phase. And so I don't know that I would shift money away from meta. Not too much, maybe some. But I think that share is going to come from other, other channels that were meant their job to be done was to do what Applovin is doing for Meta.
- [67:43]
Host 1
Totally.
- [67:44]
Brian Kano
Okay. Yeah, I like it.
- [67:45]
Host 1
Cody's wrong.
- [67:46]
Brian Kano
We'll tell him. Just saying that. So I have a little bit more, couple more weeks of arbitrage. Yeah, totally. Totally.
- [67:53]
Host 1
So Brian, what's.
- [67:54]
Brian Kano
What's next in the cards for you, man? So I, I'm fascinated by this AI world. I have been geeking out about Claude Open Claw. I've got my Mac Mini here and I just got my, my new MacBook Pro and I want to, so I'm continuing to, to lean to AI and I'm starting to see what's possible with it. And I think that like my strength is in being super lean, having a lean team and being able to do a lot of things. And I think this AI world is perfect in a perfect environment for someone like me to, to thrive in because I, I just, I tend to, I tend to be able to do more with less and so I'm working on building a consolidator of brands and this AI First World. And I, I, my goal is to bring like to start up four to five brands, get a market cap of 500 million and do it with the smallest team possible. What I hope to do and what I've started to do already is building tools that operationalize a lot of the work. Like for example creating a customer service platform in AI, setting up a email and SMS planning agent that uses a calendar. Using an agent to develop the calendar, I've effectively built kind of this executive AI team and they have, they're all managed by a chief of staff that reports into me and I delegate to the chief of staff and I'm just constantly building. Right now I've built this social listening tool that is monitoring Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Amazon, Trustpilot and it's synthesizing all this data to understand problems, white space in the market, what is working, what's not working. And I'm using all that data to then go into a manufacturing agent that's then getting quotes and it's starting to come full circle for me. So I think what I'm looking to do is take all of my experience and build. I've always had this natural tendency to be a builder and so yeah, it's, you guys are the first to hear it. I haven't even like updated my LinkedIn yet.
- [70:18]
Host 1
Is there a name for it?
- [70:19]
Brian Kano
Like not yet. I'm four weeks away from my first product though and so my first brand I should say. And so I'm excited about that and I think about that I left True Classic as a full time employee. I'm still an advisor for the role, for the brand and I'm helping the team there. But I left the team not even two weeks ago, barely two weeks ago. And I'm four weeks away from launching the first brand. Like that's how fast things are moving. And I think, you know, I heard Sean, you know, Sean's like, I'm an unknown now. I'm going to get disrupted by a 14 year old kid, you know, overseas developing a DVC brand. And I'm like, man, that is so cool. I want to be that 14 year old kid. So I, so I'm like, you know, I'm very fortunate and privileged to be in a position where I can, I can give this a crack and see if, see if, see if we can bring this, you know, these AI first brands to life under this consolidator. But yeah, it'll be fun and I'LL I'll try to build in public as well with this and, you know, show, show off how, how all of these years of experience, from dating back to the days of Banana Republic, to the pool floats, to the agencies, how it all can come full circle for. For me to finally build my own. My own own brand. Not just one, but many actually.
- [71:38]
Host 1
Love to hear it. Super exciting. You'll have to come back on the show, tell us all about it as you roll out more and more brands over time. All right, we've got a standardized set of questions. We're going to jam through them. Number one, you get a desert island dashboard to manage your business. What three metrics do you take with you?
- [71:52]
Brian Kano
Ooh, good question. All right, Contribution margin. Of course, I got to know if you're profitable. Spend, because spend drives contribution margin. And with the two, you can extrapolate roas. And then you gotta know if that money is staying, staying or leaving. Retention rate, customer retention rate. Love it.
- [72:11]
Host 1
Those are fantastic answers. Totally agree. You also get to take a book or resource, but it can't be a business book or a business resource. What are you taking?
- [72:19]
Brian Kano
Wait, it can't be a business? Okay, well, could I, could I take my Mac Mini with me? Is that, is that fair?
- [72:24]
Host 1
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have more constraints here.
- [72:27]
Brian Kano
It's got, let's say it's got to
- [72:28]
Host 1
be a book or, or, you know, some sort of like, static resource. It can't be access to the Internet. Yeah.
- [72:35]
Brian Kano
It can't be Mac Mini.
- [72:36]
Host 1
It can't be like Mac. Can't be game open claw with access to the web.
- [72:40]
Brian Kano
No. Yeah, let's see. I would say Creative Thinking. It's a book that I think allow has. I'm so in the weeds that I often lose sight of this sort of creative perspective. And so Creative Thinking is a great book. It reminds you to slow down and pay attention when you go for a walk. Like, listen to the leaves, watch the texture on the ground. And it just starts to get you more in tune with kind of this creative flow state. Love it.
- [73:10]
Host 1
All right, question three here. What's your one contrarian belief about business that other marketing executives think you're crazy for?
- [73:22]
Brian Kano
I think most marketing teams are, you know, three times too big and two times two, three times too slow. When I think about where I've had the most success is scaling small teams. Even at true classic, we like really got it down to a team of just operators with full agency and ownership. And I think that the best marketing org of 2026 is going to be two to three people with an AI stack.
- [73:50]
Host 1
All right, what is the single most important word in leadership?
- [73:54]
Brian Kano
Clarity. Clarity. And I think we see that with AI as well. If you're not clear with what you're looking for and asking for, you're going to get, you know, nonsense back. And even with people, you got to be clear as a leader, you've got to paint the picture and really make sure that people understand what success looks like, or else they'll have their own version of success and they're going to think they're doing amazing, when in reality it's not aligned to the business goals.
- [74:18]
Host 1
Totally. Okay, small variation, similar question. What is the single most important word in business?
- [74:25]
Brian Kano
Leverage. You got to have leverage. Whether it's cash, resources, people. You know my example of Jordan stepping up to drive and own customer experience for the organization when I was onboarding during Black Friday ahead of Black Friday, like, you gotta have leverage. And it. Whether that leverage can come from AI and it can also come from people.
- [74:47]
Host 1
Okay, what's the best meal of the day and why?
- [74:51]
Brian Kano
Oh, dude, breakfast. All day long. You got it. Like breakfast. Breakfast is the one meal that you can enjoy without the world ruining it. Like dinner, lunch. You're reactive. Are you guys even having lunch? Probably not. Dinner. You're like, you're, you're reacting to dinner. Right?
- [75:09]
Host 1
But.
- [75:10]
Brian Kano
But breakfast, that's yours. That is like your space to really plan and have a great morning.
- [75:16]
Host 1
That's fantastic. All right, what is the most overrated growth tactic?
- [75:20]
Brian Kano
Oh, dude. Influencer marketing. I think I. Here's the thing. This, this notion of influencer marketing, as, as I'm describing it, it is like just giving away a bunch of free product paying influencers $20,000. I can't tell you how many checks I had to sign off on for 20,000 plus 10,000 plus influencers with millions of followers and not a thing to show for it. I think it's the most un overrated tactic. It is nonsense. It doesn't do anything. It is transaction. It is not something that is going to drive a consumer to think differently about your business. Now there's a time and place for it, right? Like if you're trying to change your perception and you need to be in the zeitgeist that you need people, audiences, consumers to think differently about your. Your brand, you can strategically deploy a few influencers to help educate and drive that awareness. But I think at scale, for the majority of brands, it's a giant waste of money.
- [76:23]
Host 1
Okay, all Right.
- [76:24]
Brian Kano
Love it.
- [76:25]
Host 1
What do you think is the most underrated tactic?
- [76:28]
Brian Kano
And here's where there's the nuance. Affiliates. So now affiliates, affiliates. I mean you've seen what Hudson can do man with at comfort with affiliates. I think that in a affiliate network, a creator network is where I think influence, like it's the evolution of influencer marketing. I think we're going to see influencer marketing die but we're going to see this rise of creator networks, affiliate networks where it is not a transaction but rather we win together. Like I want to. I had someone at True Classic. This guy quit his job because we were able to spend into his videos and get him to drive a lot of sales and he was earning so much commission that he quit his job, you know, to do this full time. What a story like that is life changing for this guy. You know how he gets to like spend more time with his family.
- [77:21]
Host 1
Family.
- [77:21]
Brian Kano
He's not beating up his body and, and, and in construction and for the business. The business is, is, is benefiting from it greatly and so it's a win, win all around. And he is more involved with the brand where I like, I text them still, you know, to this day and, and we're chatting and you don't, you don't get that from an influencer. Right. Like this is someone that now deeply cares about the brand and is going to, and we, we care about him and we're going to continue to lean in and have that mutual partnership. So I think these creator networks and like these affiliates, in fact there might, there should probably be a new word for affiliate because I think affiliate has this terminology of like being trans sort of a transaction. And like you think about affiliate marketing, you think about like the gray hat guys that do it well. But I think we need a better term for these, this sort of like one to one relationship creators and creator network that build with your brand and you can invest in them.
- [78:18]
Host 1
All right. Love it. Personally I think that's the best I've heard. So thanks for coming on Brian. Awesome show. We'll have to have you back. Best of luck with everything you got coming up.
- [78:28]
Brian Kano
Thank you. Thank you. I, I look forward to, to being back guys. Hopefully when I'm back I'll, I'll have more, more wins and losses I can share. There we go.
- [78:37]
Host 1
Wonderful.
- [78:37]
Brian Kano
Thank you.