← Sweat Equity
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- [00:00]
A
All right, guys, welcome back to sweat equity. We're at Casa Garcia Ranch Garcia, a smooth 22 miles out from downtown Austin. But it's a beautiful.
- [00:10]
B
Is it 22 miles for you?
- [00:11]
A
It was 22 miles, yeah. A couple of fun facts that I given on my trip out here. I passed three mega churches and I think Alex is going for number one rural marketer in the usa. I think that's why you did it, because he wanted to be the only guy.
- [00:25]
B
Positioning baby.
- [00:26]
A
Yeah, he's got a Popeyes Chick Fil a combo right around the corner.
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B
Look, Panda Express. Yeah, yeah, Panda Express is here.
- [00:34]
A
Everything you see in a mall.
- [00:35]
B
Didn't say any of that when we walked in. He's looking at his notes app right now.
- [00:41]
A
We do have that on our notes app because I had so many good chirps while I was driving over here. I want to make sure I got them up. But pumped about this episode. So going to talk about modern content engines. So the sourcing of ad creative is something that really exploded the price. And nowadays I think we are entering a new world where because of this, everyone's a creator right now. Like the nano influencer thing, like everyone's making content because they see this as a path to side income. I think that's kind of changed the whole UGC sourcing mechanisms. And we get a lot of questions on our comments about people asking, okay, I don't have this huge budget, you know, like, how do I spin up the amount of creative? How do I get all this content that you're asking for? So that's what I'm going to walk through. This will be a two parter. So we're going to speed run through this content engine piece and then Alex, you're going to rip on.
- [01:34]
B
The main thing I'm going to be talking about is, you know, everybody sees the. This is day one of doing xyz. And it's weird because like there's conversations of either a. It's played out and you shouldn't be doing it, but the data says otherwise. Like if you actually look at the data, it is how the some of like the. Some creators and some brands are growing the fastest is by doing that series.
- [01:56]
A
Sure.
- [01:56]
B
I'm talking about like there's this guy, Yannick. Have you seen him? The guy that's rebuilding a bowling alley?
- [02:00]
A
Yes.
- [02:01]
B
I think I talked about him to roughly a month ago. When I talked about him a month ago, he's at like 600, 500,000 followers. He's now nearly 900,000 followers off like 30 posts, dude.
- [02:12]
A
And there's just code for momentum, right? Yeah, it's just.
- [02:15]
B
It shouldn't be your whole thing but if you nail it, it could be something that gets you 50,000 100,000 followers. Like this. You know we have fans of the Pod Bad omis. We've talked about them before. Like they're almost at 100,000 followers off of which is crazy. Like 15, 20 posts. That's like hey, this is day one of I. I think it was like quitting my job to start a. A frozen bean being burrito company or something like that. Like there's, there's way to ways to do it. What I'm going to be talking about is the different ways you can position that series because you do have to make it interesting, right? Like you can't just say like this is day one of me doing X, stay one of me doing X as or this is day one of doing X because of Y. And like that, like that's that positioning is key for this.
- [02:59]
A
Yes, I'll have some stuff there because one thing I've been looking at is turning failures into constant opportunities. And so that'll definitely well with that. But at the end of this episode what you'll have is two or two parter episode. What you'll have is just the ability to scale up your content engine for not a lot of dollars. Right. I mean your. Most of your costs will be seeding these creators and you know, obviously your own labor. You have to create a brief etc. And then Alex is going to obviously give you the playbook to how to get momentum, you know, by world building. But the world is just you as the founder's world. Right. It doesn't have to be this curated crazy ass. You don't got to go to Lake Como, rent a boat, you know, it helps. Yeah, that helps if you got that budget. But if you don't, you know, everyday world can be really strong. So the first thing you're going to do if you want to source a critical mass of content is you are going to identify your target audience. Now that sounds very basic but I want to talk about a guy who is on the Pod Squid Packter. He has done what I think is starting to become, you know, the modern playbook which is his original thesis was I'm going to send my product to all these young dudes that work out and I'm going to make them make TikTok shop content. Then I'm going to pay him a percentage of ad spend right now. The first question as a brand owner, you're asking is like, how am I going to find those people? Right? And I don't recommend any of these UGC sourcing things. I think you can use Billio. I've seen guys making $100 million a year using Billio as their main creative sourcing. So that's one place, you know, Soral, obviously, friend of the pod, some of these different ones. But my, my personal recommendation would be Yuka E U K AI and that's unsponsored. Not like, you know, they're just someone that I use very effectively. And the reason I am so bullish on what they're doing is because they're building the first AI creator search tool that integrates with TikTok shop content. And so what that means is, you know, we have a, we have a brand that is a baby brand, right? And so they have a breastfeeding product. And is it the snot, one new one? And what's interesting is in the past, right, you could search based on demographic, you could search based on age, you could search based on gender, right? So I want a mom that's around, you know, 25 to 35 and, you know, maybe specify some more things, but you couldn't specify an action, right? You couldn't say a mom that makes content about motherhood or makes content about the like, issues that you have with motherhood or child, you know, specifically, maybe breastfeeding, if it's a breastfeeding product, whatever. So, like, what they have done is added the ability to filter people by the content that they're making. So how does this apply to a workout referral brand? You're able to find, you know, men.
- [05:54]
B
How are they filtering? Is it like, is it.
- [05:57]
A
Able to. Because of the TikTok shop categorization? Like TikTok shop, like Instagram doesn't do this, for example. So if you wanted to do this on ig, then you would have to build some sort of video analysis tool that scrapes all the videos of any creator after already assigning them demographics.
- [06:13]
B
I kind of show you. I don't want to derail the conversation, but I got to show you. We've. Because I want you to use it. I told you, we've been building like a, like a Pinterest for ig. Yeah, yeah, you can search like by keywords and it'll pull specific topics. And it's actually been pretty interesting on like the way that you can filter through, but go ahead either way.
- [06:35]
A
So, you know, whatever tool you're using like if you're building a workout apparel brand, if you're building Wood Grain Golf, that guy that we talked about on the last episode, which we'll get back to those episodes one day. But you know, if you would search for, you know, men 18 to 45 that make golf content, right at that point, like, okay, you've identified your list, right? How are you going to reach out to them? Well, number one, you can scrape all their emails. It's a bunch of different tools that will try and scrape an IG email. But if you, again, this is the leverage you have on TikTok shop and you're using Yuka, you can send them a DM and just say, hey, we want to send you, you know, some free product. Like this is your micro influencer flow, right? You identify who they are. You then send them a message saying, hey, we want to send you some free product. All you got to do is make a couple videos. We're going to send you what you want us to, what we want you to create. And then once we receive that, we're going to, obviously you post them on your page. And we just want whitelisting capabilities. So what is whitelisting? Whitelisting is where you run an ad from the creator's handle, not yours. And this to me is the modern content engine because in the past maybe you get like 30 UGC videos for, you know, 400, $500 pop. It's like 10 racks for stuff that might not work, right? If you identify this list of 4,000 people, which is typically when I, when I'll kind of, you know, go into this and create a filtered search, I'll get like 4 to 6k folks. And it would be 4 to 6k. Like golf creators, you know, like micro influencer golf creators making like 15 bands a month on TikTok shop and GMB. It's probably like 3k of extra income, right? So these people aren't going to be super expensive when you send them the product. They're going to be happy about it. They're going to try and make a video to earn Commission on TikTok shop. But more importantly, you're going to say, we also want to get usage rights. You know, if your video drives sales on TikTok shop, we want usage rights to be able to run that on other platforms. And if you do that up front, you mitigate against, you know, the video popping off, going viral and you know, the creator going back and be like, yo, 10 bands for the video, right? You just say, hey, we're going to pay you flat fee, 500 bucks for the usage rights of that video and we'll pay you a percentage of ad spend, maybe 1% of every ad we put behind it. On meta people are very receptive to this. We're starting to build this out for a couple of brands and it's really working. Now you're sending product to 400 people. They're incentivized to create content that drives sales. Yeah, they make five videos. Right. You have 2,000 videos now to choose from. If your hit rate on that is, let's just call it, you know, 10% of them make revenue. You have 200 videos that are probably going to perform decently well in your meta ad account that you've already pre negotiated usage rights for. Yeah, if you use all 200, yeah. Maybe you know you have to pay quite a bit of usage rights for them but like at that point you're just up against the wall of like do you have inventory to support that investment? Because this is going to move units. We see pretty much a one to one correlation. Like the top performer in some of our ad accounts we're spending around $3 million a month is almost always like a whitelisted UGC ad from a TikTok shop creator that went viral. So this is kind of your hack. It's like it's less upfront capital expenditure because if you're going to work with UGC agency it's probably 10k a month for like 3 months minimum. Yep. You get 9 videos or you can invest that same sampling dollar figure which again is kind of like a sun pause. You have the product in your warehouse somewhere and you're sending that to people. It doesn't have to be 4,000 people. If you have a list of a thousand people, you send it to a hundred. You're still going to get a better outcome here than if you are going through the traditional UTC route. And this is something where like we're starting the sunset just our paid ads division in favor of building this content engine for people because it's so much more scalable. You need so much creative volume in a meta ad account to win. Like you have to be introducing new ads every single day. Like not every single day but like maybe on a five days cadence. And this is such a good way to test and scale those different angles, different people. If you take it a step further when you brief the creator who is now you have a direct line of communication with them. You can message them in the TikTok Seller center or you can take it off platform, build a discord community, whatever it is. You create a brief in Canva and like I'll actually link in the show notes, one of our example briefs because I think it's really helpful for people to understand how to scope this out. But like if you're a creator and you know, you get these sponsored posts, right? Like, you know, if I have to come up with something myself, I'm a hit one, you know. But if they, if they say, hey, we have these four, we just want to make you, we just want you to make these four. Here's like, yeah, you know, borderline like plug this concept into GPT, rip a script. But that obviously lowers the threshold of difficulty for the creator because again, this is a people business, right? People are, have time commitments, whatever. So you want to lower this threshold of difficulty for them to make a bunch of content. So when we send a brief, we say, here's a testimonial format, here's a problem solution format, here's a one shot, you know, trending audio format. Like you give them five examples and when it's in Canva, you can actually just click play on the, you know, PDF style. And that has allowed us to see our average videos that we're getting per creator go from like around like 1.3 to 2.6.
- [12:01]
B
Because that, that barrier of friction is the, the thing that cripples just about any creator or even myself. Like I hate to say I've had brands that will send me stuff. I'm like, yeah, I'll make you a video if you send me all that stuff. Like, that's super cool. But then it's like, I get it, I'm excited. And then I sit at my computer for like a little bit, I'm like, what should I make?
- [12:20]
A
And then you.
- [12:22]
B
And then I don't make the video. And like that right there is like the typical issue that a lot of, a lot of people run into versus what you're saying is like on the brief side, if you give them five examples that are, hey there, here's a very easy video to make, here's a harder video to make, here's a one shot video to make, here's a little 10 shot video to make. You make it so much easier to get their juices flowing and say, hey, like this is okay. I can just take this and put this little spin on it.
- [12:46]
A
Yeah. And the right creators understand that what you're doing is a mutually beneficial situation. You are trying to give them concepts and ideas that will make a banger that will make them more money. Right? Not only are you sending them free product, because what's insane is when you talk to big brands and you realize that like, their PR agency is just having them ship product to, you know, all of these different, like, random people, right? Like they're sending out, like, they're just scraping IG or going off some list and like sending like a PR box to a girl and she posted on their story one time for like 300 and you're like, wait, what? Like, this is like happening at scale, like. And so that's why I truly believe, like, you know, a lot of people are haters on, you know, maybe the TikTok shop, like profit in platform, but in actuality, when you look at as a line item on your overall marketing P and L. Right, right. Which is what people should be doing. This is not just necessarily everyone's addicted to the roas, right? But like, at the end of the day, you want to build a healthy business. Like ROAS is just one metric in these different channels. If you're so obsessed with it, you're probably not going to succeed in the next five years because it's only going to get more expensive. But this is how you kind of mitigate some of that stuff is you get a lot of organic grassroots people talking about you. The TikTok algorithm is such that, you know, when I accidentally click on one of those hoss videos, one of Squids videos, like, you know, I'm getting four more in the next three days, bro.
- [14:10]
B
Nobody talks about how good TikTok's algo is. Well, they do, but I'm saying the fact that like yesterday it happened, I consumed a. Oh, what trend was it? It was like a towel trend where like, dads were do it, like whipping their kids with the towel. You know what I'm saying? Like, where they wet the. The tip of the towel. I consumed one video and like, I watched it three or four times because it was hilarious. I'm not lying. As I continue to scroll, I was getting hit with so like, it. It analyzed the fact that I consumed that, watched it three times through. Then all of a sudden, probably within three to four minutes, I was getting way more of the towel. Like the towel trend in my. In my feed. It was kind of crazy. But no, I'm there with you on like the, the modern content engine, especially on the. The UGC side and the influencer side, where like, it shifted from this, this pay for Pay to post one post $3,000. I'm gonna hold my, you know, my drink like this. I'm just gonna smile or make like a simple video like to. Now this content engine is essentially this content flywheel. If you have a creator army.
- [15:13]
A
Yeah, right.
- [15:14]
B
You have a creator army always making content for you. And then you continue continuously build that flywheel by doing what you said, where you continuously have the filters, you have the, the you continue to search and you continue to add people to those army like always going to be a percentage that, that create content. They get into your army. And then I think that part that's interesting as well is like the fact that you can find the outliers, right. And those outliers are then the people that you're going to want to put on retainers. Right. Like you, you can find the 5 to 10 that are the absolute hitters, every piece of content they made.
- [15:47]
A
And that's the next phase. Yeah, right. Is once you find hitters, you have to bring their land, incentivize them to participate in your upside. Yeah. Make it make sense with you. But if you're paying 5% of ad spend to a hitter, like that's worth its weight in gold. Obviously if they're converting for you. And so I, you know, again that's kind of the move. Right. Is like you and let's just talk numbers on this because say you do this and you have a, you know, four dollar cost of goods on your, you know, supplement product. Or maybe it's a, maybe it's an apparel brand and you have a high cost of goods. Maybe it's like 15 bucks. Right. Like all right, well you just sent out $7,500 worth of product and you send 500 samples. Like yeah, that is going to be such a better investment than paying a UDC agency for 25 videos. Because now you have a direct line with these creators, you're probably going to get like 25 to 50 great videos.
- [16:40]
B
Y.
- [16:40]
A
But not only that, once they do well for you, they're going to continue to like, you don't need to resample them. Right. Like you, the, the, the business arrangement changes so it's more long lasting, takes longer. Because a lot of people wanted to source UTC from an agency and then put it in the ad account.
- [16:55]
B
Cause you're gonna probably. Are you switching your whole offer to this?
- [17:01]
A
Yeah.
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B
Without like getting too much maybe into it.
- [17:03]
A
Yeah.
- [17:04]
B
Okay, you're getting, you're switching the whole offer to this. That 30 day is that first month. Are you actually getting to that like process in 30 days or is it taking probably like 45.
- [17:15]
A
So I'm kicking off today with a brand and my timeline for them is going to be we're going to identify the list, begin outreach. Yeah, I think sourcing, like getting the actual, you know, we'll have a list of 4,000. Getting the first thousand people to say yes will probably take about three weeks. We'll begin sampling the first 300 of that thousand in like i2 or 3 and they'll receive the brief and they have two weeks to create the content. So that'll be six weeks to value. Yep. So it's six weeks between like initiating the process and you know, then receiving your first wave of content and then obviously.
- [17:52]
B
And then it goes 30 days after that.
- [17:53]
A
Yeah, and then it's going. But regardless of my agency offer, I'm more so saying for like the, the Bootstrap brand, it's like you should expect this to take about six to eight weeks. So if you want to push for a October product launch, then you want to start in like late August.
- [18:08]
B
I think it would be valuable if you explain now. You know, you're working with a lot of eight and nine figure brands, right. So you're able to seed 300 people. You're able to see maybe 500 people.
- [18:18]
A
Right. Or they see like 5,000.
- [18:22]
B
Okay, yeah, whatever. You're the brand that going your first.
- [18:25]
A
Zero to first million, I think you need to, I, I think that is a space where you need to get comfortable with this investment. Right. Because ultimately in business you're, you're always going to be risk reverse and you don't want to like unload the clip and stuff, but as long as you take the intermediary steps between sample and receiving content, which to me is communicating with that creator and like bringing them into your orbit. Like if I'm a founder and I'm hungry about this business, you're, you're, if you are someone serious about making it work. Right. You want to go 0 to 1. Well, yeah, I news for you, it's going to take like 70 hours a week. You know, that's number one. Number two is I would recruit them and then yeah, I'm jumping on a call with every creator. Yeah, every single one. And I'm pitching the vision. I'm going to tell them how, what sells this product? If you have no sales whatsoever, that's on you. Then I think that's more of a part two where it's like you have to sell your product before someone else can sell it. But I'm, I'm meeting with every single creator. I'm pitching them on the vision, building that discord. If Your discord is 30 creators strong, they create content for you all the time and they have the proper incentives that's more than doable to get to your hundred thousand dollars in sales. And you know a lady I've been talk, I've. I talked to recently, she has a teeth whitening product and she's done this exact thing right. Like she has gone the TikTok shop first route and she is grinded. It's like you know it started like 20k a month, 50k a month. Like when she came to me she was at 100k. Now she just had a 300k a month. And it's because these creators that she's talking to believe in her because she is an oral care product. Big oral care brands don't give a shit about the creator but she is one where they're talking to the founder and like they believe in the mission and so it's just like there's so high leverage once you are able to do that. But I mean that's the move, right. You just have to get your hands dirty. But this is the most important thing you could do, right. I mean what else matters if you're a digitally native brand other than your content volume? That's it. Yeah. Like you should have a good website for sure and your product should work and do at least like 80% of what you claim it does.
- [20:34]
B
But like, but content should literally be like the nucleus of your entire brand.
- [20:38]
A
Totally.
- [20:39]
B
And that's such a shift other YouTube video that I'm. That I'm building on the back or that I'm filming this week that's just like it's funny how, how much content has shifted what marketing actually is. And that's what you and I, I think we talked about this a few weeks ago. We're like content is the new marketing. Right. We where before everything would be driven by just performance or you would look at content as the last pillar within your entire marketing org and it has shifted to content being the biggest focus and everything should be built on the back end. Email, sms. Your getting more your ads. Yes.
- [21:15]
A
Is like the overall market and departments.
- [21:17]
B
Initiative and then like not even just how you're getting good content but like how are we extracting all the data from our content to make better decisions everywhere else.
- [21:24]
A
Totally. It should shape your landing page copy. If you have a banger. Yes. Like what this, what this insight from her brand was is you know, it's teeth whitening. It's oil pulling. Like it's Guru Nanda. Right. It's the same thing. It's shout out shows. Does it work? I don't know. Yeah. But like the thing is it, you wouldn't expect the winning angle to be, this is why you have bad morning breath for a teeth whitening product.
- [21:52]
B
Yeah.
- [21:53]
A
Right. But that's kind of, you know, they found this other angle which was every single person I've ever gone on a date with always said the same thing about me. My, my teeth are the whitest they've ever seen and then they smile. And when you see this and then you see it freaking 20 times across these different creators, you realize it's a system. Yeah. And that is the leverage of data. Viral video that worked. They said, hey, other 25 creators that are in this discord because they were not at scale. Like this was a brand that was doing under six figures a month in revenue. I said, hey, other 25 creators that are working with us, like this, this, this popped off like, go make it right. And they didn't have to pay those creators to make the video, they're just commissioned. So they wanted to go make money. So it's a completely new ecosystem to pull from. And I think where a lot of D2C brands are failing or even bigger enterprise brands don't even know this is going on. But like they're not understanding that the spillover effect is not necessarily, oh, I'm just going to seed all these people and then I'm also going to pay for ugc. It's like this can replace your UGC line item expense and actually drive value on two platforms. And I think that's just like an unbelievable leg up. But that's it for part one. If you have any questions about the content engine, just hit us up IG comments, whatever. And then also we'll include that resource for you in the comments. So. And guys, go ahead. No, stay tuned for part two next week.
- [23:19]
B
Yeah. And guys, we're about to fit. I know we're filming in all these different locations. We're about to get our, our shit squared away. We're both doing these crazy legs of travel right now, so give us a few more weeks. He's going to be in Europe for a bit. I have some last like kind of productions I have to do this summer and then we're going to be in a new office space, get the pod up and running in a studio again. But yeah, we'll hit part two in just a second.
- [23:43]
A
Cool.