What Does It Actually Take to Win BFCM? (Live from Q4 Summit, with Cody Plofker)

0:00Nik:Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nick.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

0:34Nik:If you're using AI to plan your ad spend, Triple Whale's Mobi can make the budget changes for you in your connected ad accounts with your approval. Brands like Kitsch use Triple Whale. Book a demo at triplewhale.com slash limited supply. That's T-R-I-P-L-E-W-H-A-L-E dot com slash limited supply. Welcome back to the first episode of the new limited supply season. We're on season 18 now, which is crazy to say it's been 17 full seasons already, but we're starting season 18. We're starting it with a bang. Okay. One of my best friends in this industry, his name is Cody Plofker. You know the name, you've heard it before.

1:11Nik:He's been on the pod a couple of times, but he's one person that I probably talk to on a daily basis and just really enjoy nerding out with, catching up, talking about what he's up to, sharing what I'm up to, and just really trading Alpha. So, you know, I've talked about the Q4 Summit multiple times on this podcast. And some of actually a lot of you guys have come to it, which is awesome. It's always fun meeting you guys in person. But I got Cody to come and share basically everything he's thinking about with Q4. So, you know, he's just started Winx, which is a new sleep supplement brand. He was just the CEO of Jones Road Beauty where, you know, he led it from basically nothing to multi hundred million in revenue per year.

1:50Nik:And so I basically extracted everything on both sides. What is he doing as a new brand? What is he thinking about? How is he structuring creative and email and all these other things? But then also with a whole team at Jones Road Beauty and, you know, with much larger scale, also, what are you doing for Q4? What didn't work last year? What did work? And what are you doing this year that's going to be different. So take a listen to this episode. It's a really fun one. And if you've got any questions, feel free to hit myself or Cody on Twitter. We're both pretty responsive and love just chatting with you.

2:21Nik:Enjoy the episode. And yeah, I can't wait to hear what you think. Welcome back to Limited Supply. Welcome to the Q4 Summit, guys. I'm excited to bring Cody here. Cody is one of my longtime good friends in the industry. We've traded notes over the years and excited to have you here. So thanks for being here, Cody. Always happy to. So before we get started, Cody, can you give just a quick background on yourself? Obviously, everybody knows about Jones Road, the success you've had there, but I think you recently left. You want to give everybody a quick update before we get started? Yeah, so until recently, until probably like three months ago, was CEO of Jones Road.

3:00Family company, I've been there for the beginning, just done kind of various roles, all leading marketing, leading growth, leading marketing. and then was CEO for the last few years. I'm on the board now, so still involved, but not in the day-to-day. Doing a bunch of just other things now, a lot of consulting and podcasting and launching a new brand. Wanted to kind of just get back in the weeds again, but had a really good run and excited to share some of the... I know you said I've seen a lot of mistakes. I've made a lot of mistakes as well. So hopefully I can share some of those and what not to do.

3:29Nik:Yeah, Cody went from running a nine-figure brand to trying to figure out how to get his first$500 a day and spend with the new company. So very humble. huh? Cody, can you walk us through a little bit about just before we talk tactics, like mentality going into Black Friday, you know, is your goal that this is I always call Black Friday, like you're flushing the toilet at the end of the year, you're getting everybody who's been built up with demand and getting them through the funnel. But what's your mindset going into Black Friday? And how do you think about approaching it? For sure? Yeah, like, I don't know what the recent stats are.

3:58But you guys have probably seen it like very few people that are going to buy from you on Black Friday, or you know, that period are seeing you for the first time. And so you're really trying to do everything to extract all of the value that you've created, but haven't really captured yet. And so hopefully you've done a lot of things throughout the year. And you know, all this stuff is cliche, but it's very true that like success on Black Friday really comes from everything you've done prior to that. And all of the, you know, the demand that you've created, all of the different things that you've done throughout the year.

4:23And so definitely thinking about that and not just thinking about what is our offer. Obviously, that's an extremely important part of it, though.

4:30Nik:And when you're thinking about Black Friday, I'm curious how you think about the offers. So, you know, Jones Road for the last, I think maybe two or three years had one of the top selling Shopify products on Black Friday, full stop. You know, how are you testing something like that? Because you came out with a unique skew going into Black Friday. I don't believe it's sold normally on the site. So how do you think about that before you get to that? Yeah, there are a few moments throughout the year where I think you can test and they're kind of like a warm up games for it. So yeah, my claim to fame, my probably like top moment at Jones Road, We had like a$6 million day, one Black Friday.

5:04Harley, the president of Shopify, like shouted us out on all these different like TV networks. We were the top selling SKU on Shopify and not anything I think I'll be able to top in my career ever. So that was really cool. But we didn't want to discount for years. And so we had, you know, our best selling product was this thing called Miracle Bomb was full size. And there was a lot of demand for minis. And so we only did them twice a year. So it's a little bit of like a drop model. We did it on Memorial Day and we did it on Black Friday. And so for us, Memorial Day was really our tune up where it's maybe it was, you know, 40 percent lower than Black Friday, but it at least allowed us to iron out a lot of the kinks.

5:38You know, we would build a specific lander, bundle builder for it. We would test offers, messaging, obviously tons of creative. And so we never had to start scratch. So that's what I would say. Unless this is like your first promo that you've done as a brand or your first Black Friday, like nothing you should be doing should be from scratch. You should be obviously taking all of your learnings throughout the year, as well as, you know, from your evergreen periods, as well as any promos that you've done, what worked, what didn't, you know, on literally just every discipline. Hopefully you have just like a document that you just have rolling during these promos.

6:09Hey, I think we produced this much creative, you know, look at our motion reports. This was our best angle during this period. You know, this was our top lander, like all of that stuff. So you don't have to just start from the beginning.

6:19Nik:And is there anything you do in the Prime Day right before Black Friday to test or prep or do any final checks? Just like what you're checking and getting ready? Yeah, just like, you know, I think Prime Day is coming up here in a couple of weeks. I know some brands use it as like a final, you know, let's check one more thing before Black Friday traffic hits. We weren't on Amazon, so we didn't. So we had different periods throughout it. And I do think it's good to have a few offers leading up to it because a lot of people will wait. And so your efficiency is going to look really poor if you have nothing until like end of November.

6:51Obviously, most brands are starting their Black Friday, like beginning of November now. And it's, you know, that period. But we always had like holiday kits and different anniversary kits earlier. And so those were kind of our tune ups and then allowed us that we actually pushed spend more aggressively during those and accepted a little worse efficiency because we knew we would capture that. And I can talk through like some of the data and how to see that. But for us, it was that it was, you know, Labor Day is like a smaller one. So Memorial Day is like big one. Labor Day is a smaller one. And then we really start that like ramp up call like playoffs going into like October.

7:21So yeah, if you have a period, highly recommend it, but save your best offer for November.

7:25Nik:And the way you're talking about it seems like this is really treated like a season, right? Like you got the playoffs going into basically Black Friday. And then do you try to extend this up until New Year's? Or how do you think about the promo calendar? Yeah, I remember and you guys probably don't, but I remember in like high school going to the mall on, you know, probably Thanksgiving night or whatever to like get a pair of shoes and stuff like I don't think people do that anymore. Right. It's way less. So there's no like, cyber Monday, there's no like one day Black Friday. And so you have to think about it's your q4.

7:55And just, you know, for most brands, you're doing, you know, 40 % of your revenue q4. And so you just have to figure out how you're going to do that. And for you know, really, it's like starting in September, like in beauty, at least like summers are very slow. So, you know, that's Q3. September, slow, average month, you start ramping up. We would do an anniversary kit in October. That was like our big moment for there. We'd put like some exclusive in there. So that was a pretty big offer. In late October, we'd have like holiday collections. So that's like another big one as well. Again, those are all discounted as part of it.

8:27But for us, we wanted to have a premium offer where we had like, it was more of like a drop model. And we would have kits with like stuff we haven't launched yet. And then, you know, getting into November, again, it just depends on the brand. And do you want to run one offer throughout the whole period? Do you want to have a few different ones? How long do you want to run your promo for? But you have to look at the whole thing. And then, you know, extending that into December. Obviously, December is like peak gift giving. And so you have to be thinking about that. Are you extending the same offer?

8:53Are you going into a different offer? Some people will have the same offer and just call it something different just for some, you know, freshness. But yeah, really through, I mean, shipping cutoffs are usually mid-December. and then you know especially if you have any retail component you're pushing to those and then there's even a little blip of like uh didn't get what you want like we would see a little bit of like a spike after christmas a little bit um our messaging and our hypothesis was always like all right like the woman were then mad they didn't get what they wanted so then they buy it for themselves so yeah i think you just need the whole calendar and know like how what's your offer going to be and then what's your messaging going to be um relative to like that moment and where people are in their journeys.

9:33Nik:Now, what's a Q4 mistake you've made in the past that you'd advise people not to make in the future? I've overbought and I've underbought, and both of them suck. As a marketer, underbuying inventory sucks. You feel like, you know, you're like a cage lion. You feel like you have stuff left in the tank. But obviously, that's a much better scenario. And, you know, you're not going to go out of business underbuying inventory. Overbuying can suck, especially if you're doing something seasonal you know if you are going to be more aggressive with buying inventory and and want to set up for a great Q4 a make sure you have the cash position to be able to do that and it's a lot easier to do if it's evergreen inventory and you're just and you could just sell that in Q1 or whatever but you know we've we've finished the periods with like 100 ,000 extra holiday kits we just kind of didn't have the demand that we expected behind some of them and you know that sucks so that's definitely something to be really really cautious about obviously under buying you know, it's nothing you can do about it.

10:28But you just got to be careful that and then on the marketing side, you know, you never really get the spend quite right. Sometimes you overspend, sometimes you underspend. I would say the biggest mistake is like not it's like, you can't expect to win early on, you have to be okay with being a little bit more aggressive. I think when I've made mistakes, it's looking for efficiency earlier and kind of getting spooked It's like early Q4 that things aren't looking good. It's not very efficient. And then that efficiency comes later. There's this big like surge of demand. And a lot of the spend that you've had in October, early November, you can actually capture a lot of the value during peak period.

11:07And so you have to put your foot on the gas a little bit harder, be prepared for lower efficiency. But hopefully in your forecast and in your model, you have that, especially if you have prior years and periods. like you should be able to look at your daily efficiencies and hopefully you can forecast that a little bit.

11:24Nik:And like, I know you do kind of a bootcamp like day of or week of during Black Friday and holidays, but you do these daily check-ins with your team. I'm curious, like, as you said, early on these numbers look like they're too high or acquisition costs are climbing. What are you doing in those days to adjust? Are you changing a bunch of stuff? Do you just rely on what you have in the account and trust that it's gonna work out? Are you coming up with new offers on the fly? Which period is this like week of? Yeah. Yeah. So we'll look at forecast. I mean, we do it daily, like normally where we'll have literally a daily forecast for like every main metric, like revenue, spend, efficiency, MER, AMER, CAC, all of those things.

12:08And so we'll have a target for where we should be. And if we're not on target, yeah, like we have to understand why, you know, is there less demand? We'll look at like, try to look at the whole funnel. like sometimes what we'll do is look for signs to kind of like allow ourselves to spend into some of the inefficiency. And so if we're looking and maybe our CPA is higher than we want or ROAS is lower than we want, but we're finding a lot of add to carts, it's like, okay, people are starting to build their basket. And that's like a conversation that I feel like we have every year. It's like, we should probably learn, but at a certain point, it's like, you know, every year we see it where like things are just not efficient or able to spend, but there's just like people aren't buying.

12:45But if we can find signs that it's high quality traffic and high intent traffic, we'll look at like time on site bounce rate, like as long as those things look good and people are building the cards, like I've kind of always tried to give, you know, the team the permission to keep spending into that. If it's really bad and there's just like a complete mismatch, then it's like, oh, crap, what can we do? This is not landing. We need to change this offer. And if you have time to be able to pivot, like it can do it. But you have to you have to decide because you can't get spooked. Sometimes it's, you probably shouldn't make any changes and you should just keep going with the plan and knowing how the seasonality will change.

13:21Because maybe it's just people aren't ready yet. That's usually what it is, as long as you've planned your offer properly. Amazing.

13:28Nik:Now, I know this year, well, first of all, we've been Facebook boys for years, right? Facebook buyers and always relying on Facebook to get that next feedback loop or understand that next learning. But you've been spending a lot on TV. And I'm curious, like, one, when do you think a brand is ready to spend on TV? And two, like, what's your philosophy going into TV, knowing that, you know, Facebook has got very direct reporting and attribution and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, I'm a huge TV fan. And when we originally launched TV, we were, we're probably like, I think we're like$100 million run rate, I forget, maybe, maybe I think it was like the year we did 100 million.

14:06So we were actually late to it. Like one of my regrets and mistakes is I, I thought you had to be like a huge brand to do TV. I didn't realize how like simple it was. You do have to invest, you have to have the right creative. And so, you know, we probably did like a$50 ,000 shoot, we like own our own studio and, you know, don't need like hair and makeup. So we're able to do it for less. But, you know, I thought you had to spend like 200k in a shoot. And then I thought like, I thought you had to be a much bigger brand. I just like didn't know about it. I didn't realize how easy it was. Obviously, we launched with Tatari.

14:35And you know, they've been a great partner since but there's definitely things that you can do on creative. And there's a lot of resources now, like there's like ScreenBridge or other ones like that, where you can take like more of a social asset and kind of like recut that for TV. And you have to make sure you're doing enough where it is like a minimum viable product and you're not like throwing something that's not gonna be relevant on TV, like creative wise. But you can definitely adapt some stuff and test a lot cheaper than having to do a giant production. So that's something that's been really helpful.

15:10And then, you know, we gave it like a month. I think we were probably spending 150K first month because also our total budgets were pretty high. We were spending a lot on meta and other channels. I think one benefit to launching earlier is, you know, we could launch with a little less budget and still see an impact. I think the biggest challenge is just understanding the measurement. And that was the biggest, you know, learning because you're not going to get any in platform attribution. And Tatari has a really great attribution model that can be like very directionally helpful, but it's very different than looking in a, you know, meta account or something like that.

15:42But we saw it in total business performance. We kind of just took off and had some insane growth because we just were capped by, you know, reaching the same people over and over on digital channels.

15:52Nik:And today, how does your media mix look as a percentage between some of the main platforms? We, so meta is probably 50, 60%. Again, it'll change throughout the year. And we'll talk about that for Q4. You know, YouTube, Google are probably like make up 10 % total. Apple ovens, you know, small amount, TikTok small amount, especially with shop. And then TV is probably 10 % on average. We've had it at times, you know, 20%. And it's usually split between linear and streaming. We'll kind of fluctuate them back and forth. But I think 10 % is where we normally are. So I think 5 % to 10 % for us is a sweet spot.

16:29we run it evergreen, but some brands will run it very, you know, seasonally. I think it's also a channel. It's like, I don't like to say it's like a brand versus performance channel. I'll call it like a top of funnel channel, which means that even when performance doesn't look great, like it's more of like a farming approach where to me, I just want it to be always on. I think there's some level and, you know, awareness. We always track performance, but I'm able to weather those storms through like the summer and stuff like that, because I know our consideration cycle is often several months and it is a great channel that has like great impacts with with with other places but um you know leading into q4 we'll we'll ramp budgets and we'll go you know up to 20 25 percent um and just have it be kind of our top of funnel that feeds all of our other channels

17:14Nik:and you mentioned streaming and linear is there an advantage to both versus just one or the other yeah i i definitely like being on both we launched on linear because it can be like very cheap. You can get kind of like really good inventory, very cheap with those CPMs, but there's a lot of advantages of streaming. And I think just having, you know, what usually plateaus a business is just lack of reach, right? And having more places, more inventory where you can kind of put the same creative and the same offer is super beneficial. And then being able to fluctuate between both of them, you know, you really want people seeing you everywhere.

17:46And so, you know, you want to be as many places as you can be. So yeah, I think there's a lot of benefits of like working with one partner that can put you on both linear and streaming.

17:55Nik:Now, I know you're also cheap, and you also took the bait of the free offer to test another TV platform. Guilty, yep. You mentioned 10 % of media is kind of where you started in terms of meta to, or sorry, total budget to TV. What do you think of those free credit offers from other vendors? Like, it seems like it derailed your testing plan for a bit versus kind of helped you figure out what you're trying to do. They can definitely be enticing. You know, people will talk about credits. I think last Q4, we got a lot of credits from different partners and providers. Listen, the channels that were doing really well for us and knew they were doing well, they weren't offering credits because they didn't have to.

18:30So there's some level of like, you know, networks and channels are offering credits because they know they kind of need to to gain your business. You know, I saw recently like Snapchat was offering some huge credits like, yeah, they have to or like X has to as well, right? Like Meta and Google are, you know, they're not doing a ton of that. So yeah, we definitely did. There were definitely some some convincing value props. But you know, what I've told my team as well is like, even they've looked at fees and things like that is like, it's really the net performance at the end of the day that matters.

18:58And, you know, if unless you think like the credits are only going to make like 1 % of the actual cost of that channel, right, or any fees. And like, unless you think that the performance between those channels or networks is like that little, then great, take it. But like, you can't tolerate worse performance just because you're getting free credits. Like, I think that's like a little bit short-sighted and I definitely made that mistake. So it's just evaluating all the factors and making sure you're with the right channel and the right network. That's kind of like have everything that you need for your business.

19:28Nik:And when you buy, last question on this, when you buy, are you buying more programmatically or saying I'm going after this audience or are you saying I want to align Jones Road with these networks and these sports games and these, you know, kind of tentpole moments? Depends on if you're, you know, streaming or linear. So linear is obviously you're going by network. You can go network and, you know, sometimes shows as well. But you're like, hey, I want to be on NBC. I want to be on, you know, this one, I want to be on ESPN. And then streaming is a little bit more, it's a little bit more programmatic where you're, you know, able to do it by like demo because people are logged into a, you know, whatever it is like a Netflix or Hulu or anything like that.