How Martyn Cook Scaled a Brand That Fortified 250M Meals

0:00Olly:And it was a very bold, bold, spicy tweet. The hook was, nobody gives a fuck if you donate to charity, which is as bold as you can get.

0:13Olly:Welcome back to another episode of DTC Diaries, episode 49. Yeah, you almost got the 50. Oh, almost. Should we pause here? Yeah, we had grand plans for the 50th episode, which may have ended up being pushed back slightly. but that's another topic anyway. Martin, great to have you here. We've got Martin from Newbrew on. Going to dive into Journey, a few unique topics that we've not spoken about on previous episodes that you've got some really interesting insights. So yeah, thank you for coming on. I'm really excited to jump into it, I think. Thanks for having me. I mean, it's nice to be on the other side of the lens.

0:55I'm an avid watcher of your show. it's top level it's high quality

1:00Loukas:so it's great to be on we've been talking about getting you on for a while now haven't we I remember we had that dinner probably like what six to eight months ago yeah that's right and spent most of the dinner just trying to get you onto the podcast

1:12Olly:here we are here we are living the dream originally met in Barcelona I think we were just saying and then went on a bit of an interesting yacht trip together when we first started working together I think after that yeah that yacht trip sick you need to top that somehow yeah skate and sailing sailing around Croatia, which was interesting. It's funny, I've heard a lot about this yacht trip, but never any specifics.

1:37Loukas:Can't speak by it. Yeah, yeah, can't be spoken about. What happens on the yacht stays on the yacht. Yeah, it's felt like that. Being a founder of an e-commerce business is a constant grind, as a lot of our listeners will know. You're the marketer, you're the accountant, you're juggling many, many things. And one of the biggest problems that we see in most e-com brands is cash flow. So let's say you've got an ad campaign that's absolutely crushing, but you don't have the capital to be able to pour more money into it. Or let's say you're about to run out your best-selling product and you needed to restock like yesterday.

2:08Olly:We know so many founders that have tried the traditional route. They've gone to banks and been told to come back in a couple of years when they've got more history. Or they go to traditional investors and they spend more time pitching than actually running the business. They thought there was no other option and that funding always meant giving up control.

2:24Loukas:That's where Wayfly come in. They understand the speed and unique needs of e-commerce. They give you the funding you need based on your business's performance, not endless paperwork. And it's non-dilutive financing, which means you don't have to sell a single share of your company. No one wants to give away their equity and you get to keep all of it, which is something you've worked so hard for. Plus to give you more than just cash.

2:45Olly:They give you access to insights and analytics so you know how to best spend your newfound capital to drive growth.

2:51Loukas:I think I can speak on behalf of Ollie and I here. so many of the brands we have worked with have used Wayflyer at inflection points within their business to help them scale to multiple eight or even nine figures in revenue. It's not just alone, it's a partner in growth.

3:06Olly:So if you're a founder looking to scale up without giving away equity, it's time to check out wayflyer.com in the description below. Yeah, excited to dive into, I guess, new brew and your own mission. I think some really interesting things to talk about today. I really want to dive into a bit about the brand and product journey, the mission, the charitable mission that underpins a lot of what you do and that's something we've not covered and then dive into the nitty-gritty of funnels, advertorials, affiliates and upsell cross-sells for everybody who's watching. So yeah really excited to dive into that but I I guess to start, it would be really great to give the audience just a top-level overview of Nubru, the journey, a bit about the brand's background, if that's cool.

3:57Yeah, absolutely. So I would say I'm a bit of a serial entrepreneur. So Nubru is not like my first e-commerce brand. It's probably like my fourth e-commerce brand, but some of them were like in the early days were sort of dropshipping. the common theme with the earlier ones was that whilst they were successful in creating money that I wasn't necessarily passionate about them so the the most recent e-commerce brand before Newbrew was a brand called YouStatement which was literally like print-on-demand leggings like I'd done a lot selling like print-on-demand t-shirts and so on I was like right okay I'm going to move into leggings it's a less crowded space and you know I worked with some great suppliers and so on and it did really well but the thing for me was like I don't really understand why people wear their their feelings on their leg I don't wear leggings myself not even at the weekend you know I just and and like it wasn't really you know I didn't feel like it was like serving any higher purpose or any greater mission and so I sold that in 2018 and and basically bought myself the luxury of time to really think about like what do I want to do next that is actually impactful.

5:03So from that point, I had this floor to ceiling whiteboards in the sort of bedroom slash office where I was working out at the time. And I was just adding my thoughts to it. I didn't know what I wanted to build. But I was sort of thinking about the components of what I wanted to build. So I was like, right, I want it to be consumable. Okay, so it goes up on the board, but consumable. I want it to be delicious or like an experience. Okay, fine. All right, write it on the board kind of thing um and this board gradually began to fill up and um you know i had things like who do i want to serve well i want my customers to be um in the segments that i'm from so i'm an entrepreneur i want them to be an audience but i'm also a cricketer okay i want to be able to serve them as well like and gradually like over time it began to take shape it's like wow okay i'm looking at you know i'm looking at something that looks like a nootropic company um okay let's delve into that and um this was in sort of 2019 at this point and there wasn't a lot of nootropic companies out there and the ones that were were pill-based and i don't know about you guys i don't particularly enjoy taking pills um and i did research and they're not super efficient like only about half of what you consume in pill form actually sort of gets absorbed because of the way like it doesn't break down so it's much lower in your digestive tract there's no experience element to it so I thought right okay I'm somewhere around that so fast forward um uh Newbury began to sort of take shape on that whiteboard but the biggest thing for me was right what's the what's the higher purpose right what what's the thing that will get me out of bed on those those cold dark you know scary days where shit's hitting the fan everything's going badly um and that's where I was like right it's it's all about mission and so one of the strands on this whiteboard was all about like purpose and mission what's the thing that um will help the world as a result of my brand being successful in said world right and I started looking at really really big world problems and malnutrition was was one that that sort of hit me it was two billion person problem so about a quarter of the world it's like wow that's really really high um and um yeah so started looking at that and i know we're going to get into that later on so i won't uh touch too heavily but the other things on the board which were really important to me and for new brew was i wanted it to be um i didn't want to leave like footprints as a result of being successful so what i mean by that is like um say everything was wrapped in plastic well the more sachets we sell the more plastic we're putting out into the world so i didn't want that so we're an eco-friendly uh packaged brand i've got one here so it's like you know it's like paper-based packaging and so on the same on the inside yeah um you know and so a load of things like that but it all started with this whiteboard and doing it the opposite way not going i want to do this company what does that look like it was like i want my company to be these things what company is that a lot more introspective

8:05Olly:than i think a lot of people probably are when they're trying to i feel like a lot of people enter d2c through the lens of like where's the opportunity where's the market to enter rather than doing that introspective work i just think that's a really interesting and probably more purpose-led way of of thinking about things yeah it's it's like that ica guy isn't it like really

8:24Loukas:finding what you want to do what the world needs and that's what brings the longevity to to that mission because you know similarly with the leggings brand when you if it's not something you're truly passionate about like when you hit those first hurdles you just be like fuck this so it's yeah it really helps kind of drive that yeah longevity of the brand and the mission similar to you and club neuro really yeah exactly yeah i've like started brands in the past and just i'm just not the target consumer it's nothing i'm truly interested in and as a result like you just you just don't have that like real drive and fire within from to continue driving it forward I think so one of the challenging questions which I think any entrepreneur thinking about starting a brand should answer is what what could I build that would keep my interest for a minimum of five years.

9:20Now for me, I hadn't done anything for five years, right? And I think any business had kept my attention for five years. We're all entrepreneurs, shiny object syndrome is super real. And so that was like one of the challenging questions. but also based off of my experience with the previous brands, I was fully aware of like the diminishing returns of just money. Like say you chase money when you launch a company. Well, it may be the first 50 grand a year that you make. It's like that's super important. That's your food on the table. That's your shelter. The next 50 grand might be like a slightly better version of that, you know, slightly nicer food, slightly nicer shelter and so on.

10:02the next 50 grand might be shiny objects you know like gadgets and fun fun shit toys but after that it's kind of like diminishing diminishing diminishing right and so a lot of people sort of chase the money and then they're like actually i have plenty of money and this isn't fulfilling me whereas if you then go up like the next step okay what's my higher purpose what's my what's my mission philanthropy giving back legacy when you start sort of answering and and looking at those kind of questions um that's where like for me at least it took me down this charitable um road and i know we'll get into it but like for us it was malnourished children and um and tackling that

10:41Olly:yeah i think it's a perfect segue to to dive into this like concept of like units of good that underpins um obviously your your business through through that lens of that charitable mission i i obviously shared this with you prior to the episode but i actually saw a hot take on twitter from Dylan Ander, who's founder of Heatmap. I've had him on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. And it was a very bold, bold, spicy tweet. The hook was, nobody gives a fuck if you donate to charity, which is, I guess, as bold as you can get. And he kind of dived into, like, just talked about the concept of, like, consumers becoming more savvy online and that like it's not as easy to leverage a charity or a mission as an angle for acquisition or an angle to improve results or an angle to drive growth for businesses and it's more about like product and story of founder for example.

11:42Olly:I thought it was very interesting to use that as a springboard for this discussion and get your thoughts on that as a take. Yeah I mean I think I think it's all about the lens that you see it through, right? So if you see charity through the lens of how can I leverage charity for me? How can I use charity to make my stuff better? That's one lens. That's not the lens I see it through. I wanted to literally build the company so that a percentage of revenue, not even profit, revenue from day one was going to a greater cause. and if that as a result of um the the charitable impact has a positive effect on on the brand great but it was really about this this bigger impact and so um as i said global malnutrition was was the area that i was um i i felt compelled to tackle but then i wanted to get into like the the chat like okay so which charity am i going to support well there's loads of charities out there and some of the charities are really good at making money, but they aren't necessarily great at getting that money to the front lines, as it were.

12:55And then there's other charities that are really good at tackling the problem, but they're not so good at raising the money. And then there's other charities that really the problem they're trying to solve actually isn't that big a problem. Repairing flip-flops of Californian feet on the beaches or something like that. I'm sure that's really useful, but like it's not necessarily a big impactful thing so that took me down like a journey and i ended up um using there's a there's a website called i think it's like i think it's givewell.org or something but it's uh it ranks charities so it's like an independent like auditing thing that ranks charities and that surfaced um project healthy children who are now called sanku that led me to reaching out to the founder and interviewing the founder felix to see you know about the the impact of what they're doing and that cemented for me that that that's where we want to go and so we could have stopped there and we could have said right you know we percentage of revenue percentage of profit goes to the charity and after that and i think that's that's where a lot of brands kind of i think that's a mistake i think i think you haven't you're one step away from making that really really good but you haven't got to the point where you um have got clear on what your unit of good is and so what i mean by unit of good say um to like the people listening to the show say there's something you're passionate about um let's for example it's um removing plastic from the ocean so you could say right i'm giving a percentage of my profit to removing plastic from the ocean great um you could go one step further and you could um interview whoever is doing the the plastic removal maybe i think these companies there's like people they employ who spend their time like removing plastic um from like beaches and stuff often okay great how much do you pay those people okay i'll pay them 10 bucks an hour okay great on average how much plastic do they remove in in per hour okay if they remove say a kilogram of plastic or five kilograms of plastic whatever that is okay great so now you can begin to get to to a maths where for for my for every dollar that i give to the charity it equals this many kilograms or you could go one down grams so that sounds like like more and you You could be like, okay, cool.

15:05So now you've got, you know, you can work out how much your money is, you know, converted into units of good. And in this case, it'd be grams of plastic, say. So now you can communicate to your customers, when you buy this, it removes, you know, 500 grams of plastic from the ocean. You can communicate to your staff, like, hey, yesterday we removed, you know, 100 kilograms of plastic from the ocean. You can communicate to stakeholders, potential partners. What we did was we were very public. We said, right, we want to fortify. So ours is fortifying meals for malnourished children. So our unit of good is meals fortified.

15:47We fortified now over 250 million meals for malnourished children. our target's a billion but we we've had that target so in 2020 we were like our mission is to fortify one billion meals for malnourished children right so now we've got you know we've got a ticker on the website like a like a counter that's going up um we talk in terms of that we've even worked with um celebrities for example randy couture we worked with him a couple of years ago and i'm not sure we would have got that deal had it not been for an element of part of a part of the deal in addition to the money and the whatever else, we pledged to fortify 10 million meals for malnourished children in his name.

16:28And that was part of the press release. So he feels good, rightfully so, as being a part of that mission. And so going back to the tweet, if you're just looking in terms of like, oh yeah, I'm just going to slap on my website, like, you know, donating money to charity and expect all of the numbers we want to go up. I agree with him. I when you communicate to the customer, here's the mission, here's why it's important. Here's what your, what impact your purchase is going to make today. Here's what we've done so far. You start seeing, uh, your AOV, like the halo effect is your halo, your AOV goes up because they buy more.

17:08Um, if you make mistakes, your customers are probably a bit more forgiving because they know that you're trying to do your best. And so that, you know, they know you're, you're basically good. um they're they talk about you they they might choose you over your competitors um and you're more likely to be able to create partnerships because you can talk about kind of the charitable elements and so on but go into it just thinking about how can i do good and how can i do just align it with my business so that it doesn't negatively impact my business like it's too much of a cash drain and just make it so that the more successful you are the more successful the good

17:46Loukas:that you create is yes it's like what's clear is you have built that within the bowels of the organization like deep within rather than just putting something on a website and i think the opposite to this is like you know people might leverage charity to drive sales but it sounds like you've flipped to that where you're leveraging the business to drive the mission yeah yeah exactly so uh new brew could go under tonight but um you know no one can take away the fact that we fortified more than 250 million meals for malnourished children and and you know i'm really really proud of that and you know yes we've got delicious product yes we have raving customers and essay length reviews come in every single day about how much our product has changed the lives of of that person how much it's helped them but for me the thing i'm most proud of is is that impact that we've had on this this huge world problem of malnutrition yeah i think i think it's like

18:39Olly:not just seeing it as a marketing angle right it's like done with intention it's an exercise in execution as well like actually committing to doing it properly committing to to really going to going to the depths that you have rather than just like like just putting putting a charity scheme on a site all all the replies which i agree with is like you also just don't do everything for results right not everything not everything has to be there to drive some metric it's like it just feels good to do things yeah i mean for the right reason at times and there's plenty of things in the business that you do right like you might have like a staff retreat and take everybody you can't necessarily like tangibly see the roi of like you know taking everybody off to the philippines for a staff retreat or whatever but you know that like actually that's a good thing and that's probably it's going to have an effect on morale it's going to have an effect on productivity um people are going to feel happier you know working for you but yeah you don't just go out into that going what's my my roi on on you know in this case charity yeah do you see that

19:41Loukas:being you know life mission so even after new brew like will will that continue living living through into your next venture well i hope that wherever new brew goes whether i'm at the helm or not i hope that that um mission stays with new brew um in terms of units of good i will find the next one that i care about um for for the next thing after new bro i think makes sense i wanted

20:06Olly:to switch gears to more tactical marketing which obviously uh i'm sure we can we can extract some real key learnings for for everybody watching i think what's been most noticeable to to me throughout like our conversations um since meeting is is i guess like your like focus um and and the amount of time and resource you've put into sort of incremental wins throughout your customer journey and the kind of care and attention that goes into everything post-click i think it's just it's it's something that's very unique so i'd love to hear a bit about like how have you sort of thought about that process um for like optimizing customer journeys absolutely for acquisition so um going back so i've actually written a book called one percent secret and this is this is a you know a few years back and if anybody watching wants one just like ping me and i'll send you a digital copy um but this wasn't for any reason other than it was like in my brain and i wanted to get it out into the world and the premise of one percent secret is that big wins don't necessarily come from like big swings like i doubled this good result or i halved this bad result.

21:23Those things absolutely happened. But actually a lot of positive results come from the compounding effect of like incremental changes. And so at the beginning of the book, I show how like on a customer journey, by improving each step of that customer journey by just 1 % actually results in a 400 % increase in like ROAS or like positive return. And so the premise of the book, there's 50 chapters and each chapter work focuses on one area of your life or business and shows examples and ways that you can improve it by actually far more than 1%. So actually, if you focused on 50 areas, like one per week for a year of your business in your life and improve them by just 1%, the compounding effect of 1 % times 1 % times 1 % across all of that is absolutely huge, absolutely game changing.

22:14And I think a lot of the time in business um sort of not really knowing what to focus on is the problem so you have a funnel and you might sort of look a little bit at cro a little bit ads a little bit at aov or um you know upsells or whatever conversion rate and because you're just scraping the surface you don't really have the impact whereas if you literally map out um like we have a google sheet again i I can share it to anybody that wants it where you just put in your numbers. Okay, so here's the CPC that I'm getting. Here's the advertorial click-through rate. Here's the product page conversion rate.

22:51Here's the AOV. Here's the upsell take rate. Here's, say, the repeat purchase or so on. And then you can go, right, what happens if I improve this area by, say, 10 % in this case or something? How does that affect my funnels? Okay, what about if it was this area? What about if it was this area? And what you end up finding is like the weak link in your funnel, like the one thing where actually if you improve that, that has a much higher impact on your overall ROAS or whatever than the other areas, right? If you're already getting, say,£1 CPCs or 50p CPCs, it's hard to get to half that, right? Whereas if your conversion rate's at, say, half a percent or 1%, I feel like getting one extra person out of 100 to buy your product is a much easier thing, and yet that will double your results.

23:40And so by mapping that out, you can then go, okay, my problem is a, say, it's an AOV problem. Okay, great. It's an AOV problem. So now you can hyper-focus just on AOV. You can focus down in customer messaging in terms of the quantities they should buy. You can focus down on your upsell flow. We also have like post-purchase, like chat upsell flows as well. But you can go right AOV. You can study up on AOV and that's all you live and breathe for like a week to a month or something. It's just AOV, AOV, AOV. Because you've done that work in advance and you know that that's the area. That's the 1%.

24:15you know that's the thing that you want to you know the the improve yeah it's like the that

24:22Loukas:philosophy is the same as david brellsford the olympic um cycling coach who came in when the british uh olympic cycling team were just not competing not competitive and his philosophy was improve everything by one percent whether that's the pillows everyone sleeps on um you know all of these small tiny subtle changes that actually when compound make the biggest difference and then went on to be you know the most successful cycling team of all time yeah absolutely and i think a lot of the times people are chasing you know double this you know you you get disappointed because you start a diet and you haven't like lost you know half your fat overnight whereas if you if if you think about it sort of longer term, nobody got fat by eating a burger, right?

25:12But you get fat by eating a burger a day or a week, right? Over a longer period of time, right? And the reverse is true as well. And it's just these incremental things. And so you start thinking longer term. And if you can just sort of bake that into your processes and be like, right, I want to lose weight. Okay, so I'm going to figure out how I can just have a calorie deficit of like 100 calories a day that's it i'm just going to be you know a deficit of 100 and i know now over like three months i'm actually going to be in way better shape or i'm going to have lost a lot of weight compared to now rather than trying to think how can i half my weight by tomorrow

25:45Olly:kind of thing which is unrealistic i think mapping out that like we call it a 30 000 foot view of the business through a data lens is really important as well like it's it's kind of an exercise in just increasing throughput and to increase throughput you just need to you need to focus on the biggest bottleneck to achieve that outcome and it's like do you think it's important to often um i think a good example of this is which we always mention is that that lens of like people just continue to make more and more creative without stepping back and looking at the fact that they're not getting in front of any new audiences and like the data is the guide that to where you want to spend time optimizing i think is a really like simple but under like people don't do it enough even though it's like a simple view to take 100 and you know you're the guy or you guys are the guys right like creative and creative data like yeah you know there's there's a reason so many people work with you guys on the on the funnels piece um we've we've we've spoken about it a few times in previous episodes but whitelisting is is a huge huge area of focus right now for a lot of brands um i think advertorials is something that you have always done very well and at a large volume how how have you approached advertorials as a as a as a method of acquisition yeah so yeah we've done advertorials for for quite a long time so an advertorial um i remember before i get into that so i remember someone um saying i i don't know i don't know the source of this but essentially the art of selling is disguising the fact that you're selling for as long as possible right so the second someone knows that they're being sold to a barrier goes up or like the brain starts working differently and it's like, ah, I'm being sold to, I'm in a sales process.

27:29And so, um, you know, a VSL is a, uh, an educational video, but it's a sales letter disguising, disguises that same with podcast VSLs and advertorial kind of looks like an article, but actually it's, it's more of a, more of a sales letter, shall we say. Now advertorials have their place. If I was selling something like a Rolex or, or, you know, a beautiful diamond ring, I probably, you could definitely use advertorials but i probably wouldn't i'd probably be i'd sell them visually right you can see visually how nice they look and i would like lean into that but there's like consumables in particular it's very very difficult to demonstrate like what uh the difference is between your brain working as it should or even slightly better than it should which is what nootropics can bring you when done right which is obviously the space we're in with Nubru, it's difficult to kind of show that visually, but it's much easier to tell a story about, you know, a person or some of the people that you have helped and telling their story.

28:33And so therefore you need a medium where you can tell a story. And so advertorials, VSLs are both great places to tell that story. So, so that's what an advertorial is. in terms of like why we use it we found that like taking taking someone say from a facebook ad and and let's be clear most people are consuming your facebook ads whilst kind of zombified on a sofa or sitting on a toilet or like you know taking a bus somewhere or killing time in some way right they're in a sort of there isn't any emotion going on they're just kind of like you know browsing through their phone for some kind of stimulation doom scrolling yeah doom scrolling and so if you're if you get that click and then they're on your straight on your product page i think a lot of the time that's kind of that's quite a jump you're you know you're taking them from that kind of place to a place where they're going to get their credit card out and whatever and emotion drives motion and there isn't any emotion yet and so by adding in like an advertorial It works as like a transition between that sort of low emotional laying on the sofa state and a fuck yeah, I need this kind of state.

29:49And so, I mean, that's the art of it. in terms of why it works, I think telling that story. And if you've done your advertorial right, and you've, and you're, and you're targeting spot on, you're going to be describing the story of someone who's very, very similar to that person who has seen the ad. Right. And so it's like, Oh damn, you know, that sounds like me. That's kind of what, what they want from the advertorial. And so when they read that story that, okay, that sounds like me, I have that challenge. I have that problem. And then, you know, and then it begins to present and reveal the um the solution and then you can then put it into the into the product page and are you how how how much are you dialing in that process in regards to like

30:33Loukas:splitting off personas per advertorial the traffic that you're sending to each of those individually what does that look like yeah so we've we've got a number of so we've got um it took us a long time to get to a kind of level of advertorial, like format of advertorial that we were happy with. So we came, I think we came up with a metric called advertorial click-through rate. And so advertorial click-through rate is the number of people who leave via one of your call to actions on your advertorial divided by the total number of visitors that came into your advertorial. There's a caveat here. If you just had an advertorial, which was just a giant button that just said next, you'll have a very high click-through rate but your advertorials hasn't had a chance to do its job so you want to balance that your call to actions are much lower down the the advertorial and so they've actually you know consumed some of the content and they're actually warmed up before they see and therefore can click on a call to action to take them to the next next page so with that in mind we we did a lot of optimization around getting to a click-through rate that we were happy with and so for us that's around about 40 percent and so if you do your ads right you can you can again you can map out the metrics so say you're getting um i don't know one pound one pound clicks um and you've got to keep my maths easy because it's early in the morning a 50 click-through rate on your advertorial um you know that you've it's a pound you're losing half the people but your cost to product page for you is about two pounds per visitor right so you're getting them to the product page for two pounds but they've also been warmed up and they're and they're more likely to be in that emotional state where they're they're primed and ready to actually listen and consume what you you presented and so it's just a numbers game so once you've got that in mind you can then branch out into like different avatars and so um you know the product that you're selling um you know say say it's a fragrance that i imagine how you would speak to um you know um i imagine how you would speak to um a a guy looking to be more attractive perhaps to the the opposite sex versus someone who's looking to um keep hold of their favorite favorite fragrance but like is really tired of the massive price tag that comes with that you know burberry perfume or whatever how you would talk talk to each of those people and what their appeals to them is very different and so crafting your story around that um is really important so um it's an alignment so if you're if you're running a funnel to the um to the the first example there everything needs to be aligned the ad needs to be talking to that person the advertorial is telling that story and then ideally the product page is also aligned to that and it's highlighting you know the attractive qualities that the the reviews and that you're highlighting on your product page you're talking about other customers that you know as a result of um buying your amazing fragrance you know they've had so much luck with the you know in the dating market or so on.