Amazon $8M platform risk, If you are going to use AI to write content you can’t forget about DRIVE, The ROI of 150M shortform views, We are at peak giftcard

0:00All right. So did you know here, let's start with this one company.

0:07They were doing$8 million on Amazon and the whole thing went up in flames. And so I'm going to share my screen with you real quick. This is shared by my friend Matt Paulson, who, by the way, will be at the Leveling Up Founders event. That's the mastermind I do for founders once a year, levelingup.com slash founders if you want to learn more about it. But he's got a$30 to$40 million newsletter business. And his tweet here says this. This is what I've been saying for more than a decade. Don't build a business that relies on one big company, big tech companies whims. So basically, this company went from$8 million per year to zero.

0:42It took this man's whole business away, poof. Amazon is for sure the final boss of e-com. So it's a text message here. And it says in this text message, we did$8 million in Amazon last year. We are closing our business because of the new fees and because of Amazon's 1P. So 3P, I know, is that first-party fulfillment, 1P? I have no idea. I don't sell on Amazon. I know we've optimized their listings. but I've never. I think that's something to do with fulfillment. So we have had exclusivity on 100 products of blanked out corporation to sell on Amazon. Blanked out corporation just terminated our contract because Amazon 1P told them they would pay them more for the products we sell and we'll sell them for less because they do not have to worry about the 3P fees, right?

1:30So I'm watching my inventory run out and then we'll get hit with low inventory fees because I cannot replenish my inventory from blank company because Amazon negotiated us out of the picture. We have sold$40 million in the last six years and spent over$2 million in advertising on Amazon. I would love for someone at Amazon to acknowledge or care that they put us out of business. Scott. Wow. It's a dog-eat-dog world. It's business. It's sad, but it's true. Yeah. As I was reading this, I feel bad for the guy, but also it's like props to Amazon for negotiating because that's within their interest.

2:07I think the mistake that the business owner made in this situation was betting all their eggs, putting all their eggs in one basket. Once you max a channel out, it's in your best interest to diversify into other areas. So if one leg gets cut out, you can still sit on other two. But if you only have one leg, then the whole thing crumbles, right? And so I think this is a lesson. This is just another lesson that there's always platform risk. And just like, for example, even though Neil and I have an SEO background, Google's great, but we've diversified. Like this, we have our YouTube channel. Like, by the way, I showed YouTube the stats or Neil the stats the other day, 167 ,000 views in the last three days.

2:45Pretty good. Still growing, right? How do we build, how do we diversify away from just Google? Because that's the world we're going into anyway. So anything else you want to add to this before we move on? No, but funny enough, I had one topic that I want to talk about. You and I have seen this. So I did something on Twitter. It was just an experiment. And it did really well. And it ended up, you know, the hook, I won't read the whole thing, is if you're going to use AI to write content, you can't forget about Drive. And I capitalized Drive, D-R-I-V-E. And I'll let you share my screen. And then I'll get to the point and what people can end up learning from this.

3:24So if you can see here on the screen, I capitalized Drive. I pretty much say that Drive stands for data, review, insights, visuals, energy. spelling out drive in essence and i break down what each of those things are that posted quite well as you can see here in the analytics it had 359 hearts or likes whatever you want to call them 482 bookmarks 36 comments and 60 reposts but what's entertaining is is you know i i ended up creating this not because i wanted to share drive i already knew the concepts on what you really need in AI written content for it to do well. But it was funny because, you know, I was watching some videos online because I look at what's popular and what's trending for other people.

4:12And I see that people are using different things like, you know, skyscraper technique or they have different acronyms for stuff. And people are making up, you know, their own terminology like growth hacking. When you start doing some of those things, some of those terms take off. Some of them don't. It's okay whether they take off or not. But one commonality that I saw is if you start coining terms or acronyms, that social content typically does better than your other posts. Whether or not it catches on fire and everyone uses it going forward, but it's a really good way to create hits. Because a lot of people focus on hits by like, oh, here are 10 hook formulas that work?

4:52Well, instead of just copying formulas, try to create your own acronyms or try to create your own words or phrases that people could be using within industry. In other words, you're coining terminology. And we found that to do extremely well for social media content. And by the way, like when you coin these terms, it's almost like posting reels too. You just don't know what's going to hit. Some of them will hit and some people remember like the skyscraper technique. It's still stuck to this day. I think it's, it's gotta be over 10 years now, right? Right. Even Google coming up with double EAT, like people still like people repeating that over and over.

5:25And so with this acronym like drive, it might stick. It might not stick. Right. But the fact of the matter is, at least it's easy for you to remember. And if people catch on to it, then at the end of the day, you can say, oh, I coined that term. Yes. It's so funny because it's like if you end up doing it, one, it helps you with like speaking fees and things like that. Like if you look at Sean Ellis in growth acting. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He cleaned up on that one. this message is brought to you by leveling up founders and leveling up founders is an invite only event for founders happens once a year usually during august and past attendees include people such as ali abdahl cody sanchez neil patel vanessa lao and the list goes on and on and ultimately it comes down to the quality of the group of the people we try to keep the group high caliber that's why it's invite only so if you are a founder at the top of your game you can go to leveling up dot com slash founders to learn more about it.

6:17And then you can apply and we'll see you on the other side. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketing school dot io slash agency. Once again, it's marketing school dot io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. By the way, you know, I got a report back on remember, I was talking about the this one company that's paying like, you know, 45, 50 grand a month or so. And they're getting like 150 million views from this, you know, using different agencies. So basically I checked in, let me give you, I'm going to give you, here's the clip of a moment.

6:54So here's the ROI of getting 150 million short form views per month. So I checked back in with the company that's paying agencies to do so. And maybe two, three months ago, when I checked in with the CMO, I said, okay, you're paying this amount and it's a good amount of money and you're getting 5 ,000 pieces a month and they got you 60, 70 million views. Now it's like 100 million plus, right? And I said, okay. I said, what's the ROI of it? At the time, she's like, I'm not sure. We just started. Check back with me a couple months later. It has now been a couple months later. And I said, okay, just check it in again.

7:28What's the ROI? But she's like, honestly, we can't measure it. We have no sense of what the ROI is. And this is almost impossible to track unless you have a unique funnel that drives this traffic into that funnel. But we think it's moving us in the right direction. And funny enough, as we're doing this podcast today, I actually got a text message from Alex Lieberman, who is one of the co-founders of Morning Brew. And then my other friend, Steve Katina from Prey.com texted me too. He's like, dude, my friends are sending me, forwarding me your Instagram reels like you're blowing up right now or whatever.

7:58And so it kind of reinforces that. There's no direct ROI to this stuff. Like we did well in the last 28 days, 10 million views or so, and it's going to continue to go up. But it's like it's hard to measure. You got 10 million views in the last 28 days. Which channel or all combined? All combined to 2.8 million on Instagram and then 4.1 on YouTube. And then another like four, another four million or so on TikTok. is it the still the the rich uh bf it's uh it's diversified now for you yeah so it's like there there is an roi but it's hard to track like this is very much a dark social thing and you know if you want to put time and resources into it great i think we can keep compounding ours i think you could certainly compound yours too because at the end of the day what i've learned from all this is forget about the overproduced videos um i'm just like just tell decent stories and you'll get good views.

8:57Yes, it really is good stories. The other thing that helps quite a bit too that I've seen is if you can just go out there and you can create content that is somewhat new. And what I mean somewhat new is I'm not talking about just leveraging news and trends like that. I'm talking about if you end up talking about stuff that others aren't talking about, you'll do well. If it's regurgitated information, I don't care what subject it is. It just doesn't do as well. That's actually an important point, Neil. So for this podcast, the way we do it now is we used to be, we used to try to get a month ahead.

9:32Now we're usually like two weeks ahead, which is riskier for us because Neil and I travel quite a bit. But you still travel a lot. I've reduced mine. That's besides the point. But so what we do now is if a video or a topic we're talking about is trending, I'm going to highlight that topic in red. And so when my editing team jumps on it, they're going to move that topic up. That topic moves ahead of everything else. And so we're jumping on that topic because if we're talking about something that's trending today and the episode doesn't come out for two to three weeks, by that time, it's already gone down.

10:02We're not going to get as many views. And so it's really important to trend jack when you can. For sure. The trend jacking is huge. If you look at the All In podcast, what makes them do well is they're just covering current events. Yeah. And it's once a week. So it's actually risky for them, too. It's like, I mean, by the way, the fact that it's four people and they all travel out, they're all busy, means that no matter what we do, we should be able to do once per week too. But I think we're a little risk adverse to it. Yeah, but also on their end, what they also do is if someone can't make it, they bring in another guest.

10:35Yeah, which we can do too, which we do do sometimes too. I wanted to bring up this other topic over here. This is from our, or this is from my friend. Maybe, I think you met Eamon too. So Eamon Brand, he was the CEO of AppSumo for a while. And this is interesting because I've talked to a couple of my founder friends. It's like, oh, dude, they're like, you know what works really well? Gift cards. So when you send gift card requests to people on LinkedIn, it's like, hey, I'll give you $125 Amazon gift card or$100 gift card for 30 minutes of your time. And so Eamon says this. So he's like, I'm about to use Shepard, support Shepard, which is like a VA or it's like a, you could hire VAs there.

11:16So we're about to use Shepard to hire a doppelganger to sit in on all of these pitches. I'll pay$4 an hour to get$100 back, quick alpha. And so my point of this is saying, hey, we might be at peak gift card right now because everyone's starting to utilize this tactic. And when all marketers start to utilize the same tactic, that's when it starts to just not work anymore. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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14:14I'm basically just using that into like factoring into my meeting, how much I'm willing to pay to book a meeting. Got it. And so instead of running ads, they're just pretty much giving away free gift cards. Correct. And they're finding the conversion and all that to be still as effective. Yeah. I'm assuming they're targeting very specific people, account-based marketing. They're only giving the gift cards to people they know that would be their idea. That's correct. And by the way, imagine if you did this with your email list, for example, and you identified who's on your email list. They're probably even more likely to convert.

14:50Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. But what I'm saying is if Eamon's showing two in a row over there, that means more and more marketers are doing it. So if you're going to try doing this, start doing it right now. Because in a year or so, two years or so, when everyone's doing it, that's when your converge rates tank. have you seen the frame current method where he just gives you 10 grand cash no no explain explain like literally guy shows up to your door a quick phone call 10 grand for what what's the offer any offer that you're pitching he's like if you want to get really well networked with the the right people he's like just have someone show up with a thousand dollars five thousand ten and he's like here's the cash right now quick call like what the heck oh someone so someone's gonna ring your doorbell and i'll give you cash yeah oh okay that that's even crazier because there's like human effort that's going into it and it's cold hard cash and you're hoping that someone doesn't run away with your cash yeah yeah what's the incentive there like i just steal the 10 grand but i thought it was really cool because he's like yeah you know um you want to do whale hunting and get calls with the right people because they have people show up at their door with the cash.

16:00I was like, no, I never thought about that. That is a pretty sick idea. Yeah. Hey, let me know when you do it. You can do it first. I'm okay. But what's, you know, I was on the phone with, I was on a podcast interview with, what's that agency? They're DTC agency out of Canada. Dude, I don't know why I can't remember the agency. Either way, they're a decent size and scale. One thing that they've been doing to get customers instead of giving away stuff for free, is they just do a podcast, which my teams talk to me about a lot. Like, Neil, you should do a podcast just interviewing CMOs. And some of my team actually does this in different countries.

16:36We'll interview like the head marketing person at Procter & Gamble in Brazil or wherever it may be. And it ends up generating quite a bit of revenue for them because now you have your ideal customer on a phone call with you. So by the way, the Growth Everywhere podcast now called leveling up like that's that's what i used to do um it worked well like interviewing i i used to mostly just focus on sass people or marketers um i think 20 minute vc 20 vc by harry stebbings that worked out really well i think he started that podcast when he was 19 years old and he wasn't even a vc yet right and he just interviewed a lot of vcs and then now he interviews a lot of founders and it's gotten bigger and bigger and that's let the deal flow for him and it's worked out well um but you know i like the formats and he has a fund because of that podcast He didn't have a forehand, right?

17:23Yeah. The kick after. Yeah. And so everything worked at like getting the funding. Like what? How are you going to get funding? Well, people have to know who you are, right? That's how he got the funding. How do you get deal flow? Well, people have to know who you are. And so it worked out for him. It's a good business model. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, rate, subscribe. And if you want to join the Agency Owners Association, it's kind of like YP or EO, but for agencies, that's the group that Neil and I put together. You can go to marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more.

17:51There's an online community and there's a live community as well. And we look forward to seeing you inside. So goodbye.