Nick Shackelford - The new formula to run Meta ads in 2025

22:58He can attest to it. We have a backup drive, bro. I don't even know how much we've spent on the backup drive. It's years and years and years of videos. All we're doing right now is cleaning it and then putting it all there. Oh my God, that's dirty. Yeah, the TikTok stuff is they mostly probably want them to have the product. This is like, they don't even have to have the product and you can absolutely sprint. I think that is just further cementing the fact that your follower count means absolutely fucking nothing. Absolutely nothing. And this further accentuates the fact that, again, we mentioned off camera, Rookie on YouTube, we're just starting to learn.

23:34It's actually so much fun. YouTube, as well as other platforms, they are prioritizing the smaller creator. so yeah i think wop and obviously tons like what their business model is there's nothing proprietary i mean there's nothing i'm sure there's a little piece of a proprietary but everybody is going to be doing that and then what's going to happen is you know who could do the best offer i think it's going to be interesting because there is going to be billionaires in saudi arabia that are going to be as famous as they want to be and they are going to i think they're going to drive up the cpms because they're going to be able to they're going to be able to just pay so much money to get as many views as they want not only them the only fans are going to go crazy think about it even on a crazier level right because they don't have a way of getting top of funnel people in oh it's gonna get crazy imagine when like the people in like politics catch up to this oh yeah would you would you go as far as saying the podcast this was a year of the podcast do you think the year of the the wop clipping is the next one I think that's a safe bet I think this also tells me that like unequivocally in 2042 Mr.

24:40Beast is going to be president any of these people, the huge distribution and the ability to push even harder through WAP I mean they're going to be able to hit anybody and everybody they have all the leverage because they already have the distribution so they can leverage that against the WAP you got to do a whole one on this one yeah that's crazy I have to have Steven on this 100%. That's crazy. That's my point. I actually did not want to talk about it, but we just talked about it. We're keeping this on there. I want to tie a bow in the customer acquisition because that's obviously like your wheelhouse.

25:14Do you think first-time founders in the beginning should manage ads and or be in the ad account and know and understand how to use the ad account? Really good question. Unequivocally, yes. It'll allow you to ask better questions to the person who will eventually be managing it. Second, say you're only spending$5 ,000 to$10 ,000 a month,$3 ,000 a month. You're going to have to pay this person or somebody else to manage those ads. That could be thousands of dollars more in testing. So why wouldn't you just eat it yourself? And I think now the tools are sophisticated enough where you don't need a lot of outside support.

25:47And if you do, you can go find someone, do a quick consult, look over your shoulder, and then continue on. But I do think at the beginning, say up until$10 ,000,$20 ,000,$30 ,000 in spend, that the The founder or somebody on the leadership team should invest in this because this is where your new customers are coming from. Yes. It's so funny you mentioned that second bucket of having somebody outside and check it. When we were transitioning our head of e-com to take over as MediaBar, I'm like, I should probably hedge my bet and have somebody from the outside. Good point. He ran ads for HexGuy, a bunch of huge brands.

26:17I was like, hey, man, can I pay you X? I'm not going to say the number to just talk to my guy, tell him everything. Go and check one time a week. and that was like an amazing learning lesson, you know, for my guy. And now, you know, I think he's up to par based on all these other media buyers. And now it's really down to A, effort and staying on top of it. And then B, just being on top of the creative and making sure that you're really cranking more creative. On the creative side and on the ad side, is it safe to just say that like more is better, period? Because for me, I am voraciously hounding my team.

26:56More creative, more creative, more creative. What's your thoughts on that? Before I went through the documents of Andromeda, I was volume over anything. As much as I possibly could. We measured on our weekly calls internally, we measured the amount of new assets launched and the amount of assets that hit what we called success metric, which is just dollars spent on it. Because if it's hitting our metrics, we're spending dollars on it. So we said, if we can come up with, on a weekly basis, 10 concepts, two ads of those concepts, 20 total, good job. That's a successful week. And now that number might have changed depending on new product drops or Q3, Q4 coming in or summer versus Q1.

27:35That might change depending on the season of spend and our target of profitability, for sure. And that allows you to staff properly against those. Like, hey, if I need X amount of ads, I probably know how long those take. Like I'm, let's just say during busy season, if that doubles, then you don't need to hire against it. 100%. And that comes into play of like, we can't, maybe there's some SKUs that we can't sell or something that's backordered so we don't make assets for that one. So like the communication of, should we be investing time, effort and money into selling these products? If we're not going to have them, we shouldn't.

28:07So generally speaking, I think more is better than less because if you don't have anything working, you're going to need more anyways. And as soon as something starts to work, all it's going to do is inform what more you need to make. Once you start advertising, you can't really stop because it's the lifeline of new customers coming in, B, the expression and the always-on-ness of what we do digitally. What are those, you said that if it hits X amount of spend, then you know it's a success and you can look back to those micrometrics. What are those micrometrics for you to define success on an ad set or a campaign level?

28:43Is it just CAC? I would say the easiest thing is CAC. cost to acquire a customer for everyone listening. And I would say the easiest thing is CAC. The second thing, because of that we're spending on so many channels that sometimes an ad will continue to run past the point of profitability because we see cheaper cost per cart, cheaper people hitting our carts. And I know I have a good email flow that can back it up, right? That's a little bit of a different thought process. That's very interesting. So basically, so you're saying if they get the cart, then you get the email. So you're saying you value not getting the sale, like getting the sales ideal, That's the CAC.

29:17Of course. And then secondly would be getting them to a point where you can get their email and then you rely on your backend. Correct. And I think that we can do that at our scale and our spend. And this is also my plea to anybody starting out. Build out your flows and we'll get into the retention side of things. But this is where I feel confident enough in knowing we have a 20 % take rate on someone choosing to be a subscriber. Awesome. Let's just get them to the site. And if we don't, our ability to get those non-customers to new customers is better than most in the market. So that's like where my brain is going, what justifies the ads guys to continue to run ads that are quote unquote, not profitable from the dashboard or even from a tool reporting.

29:57And at that point, you probably have such a granular understanding of how and what you're doing on a per platform perspective where you could say, hey, maybe app loving isn't the CAC winner, but it's the collect the email winner. And then you just kind of blend everything in a pot together. And then ultimately as a company in all of the channels, are we hitting our goal? Are we hitting our goal? Dude, you're absolutely spot on. Then that's the conversation me, Brandon and James are going to have going, what is my bull case? What is my bear case? And like, what is our daily pace? And then that should just change us dynamically.

30:28Brandon might be like, I'm going to pull back spend. I know you have three emails going out tomorrow. Okay. Yeah. Like we'll make it look a lot better. We have a drop coming very soon. I'm going to go heavy on my side and I'm going to tell Brandon, pull back because why are we going to overspend when these customers are going to buy anyways? That's a sick video game here, guys. This is a sick video game. Is there a third peg in there as far as a KPI that you're looking? I love CAC and then get the email under the assumption that you're going to win on the back end. Is there a third one or is it those two of the big ones?

30:56I would say the CPM, because you talked about AppLevin. That's not the highest quality of traffic for us, but man, we get reached there. And man, like when we were running on Twitter, we had tons of views and tons of engagement. So I do think there's something to say that. Now, if I'm just starting out, I'm probably not letting that be a decision maker for me because I'm not making money. I can't afford to blow cash. But for the larger you get, there is a thing of we have to fill the funnel. They're at least knowing who we are and it might not be ready for them to make the purchase. There is times of someone seeing something, oh, that's cool, but I don't really need anything right now.

31:29That's where those multi-attribution models are very, very important for people listening. I think another huge thing just to come out of that, to really hammer down to people listening, You guys are obviously on a whole other cycle level every single day, every single hour, tracking every single thing. But understanding and knowing I have a big drop coming, I have emails coming, maybe pull back spend if the efficiencies are not there, knowing that you have a crutch to land on to get the sale. And even deeper, you don't have to be on this level. It's like, Dan, our CEO, come to me and go, I have this much dollars in discounts that I can give you.

32:02And what does that mean? That sentence means if we aren't spending this on ads, knowing that we're going to lose dollars on trying to acquire. And if Brandon is pulling back an ad, that means I have the ability to run promos or that means I have the ability to hit more discounts for the specific period for these two days that we are not running ads. So if he goes, I have discounted revenue dollars I can give you to play with, that might mean I can tee up some more campaigns. I love that. That is the reason why I fucking love this podcast because I guess I'm meeting amazing people like you. I'm learning so much and I'm bringing this stuff back to my company.

32:36Literally, we track zillions of fucking metrics. One of the four key metrics now that we're tracking, because it's orders over$1 ,000 on a per day perspective, spend, mer, and then the number four is what you just said, which is discount as a percent of sales. We understand and know our sweet spot. And now that's a new lever that we could pull in conjunction with an email or a new product or something to help us kind of even things out. For people just starting e-com or maybe smaller companies, is just understanding and knowing what's your daily burn rate. And then the percent of discount is...

33:13Your sales could be going up, but if your percent of discount is going up as well too, maybe you might not outpace burn. So interesting. I love that. I love the looking at email or text capture as a true secondary KPI. It has to, dude. Those are coming into your ecosphere. They're interested enough to give you something. Well, we don't have Nick Schackel for doing our cuddling of our email list and our retention to really fucking draw that out. Tell me about top, middle, and bottom of the funnel and just give me your playbook on how you sit. We probably should have talked about this when you were talking about how ads change over time because I had a very different, I talked about where I used to be and where I believe in it now.

33:53Where it used to be, that to me was so segmented. I used to have top of funnel or what we call prospecting specific campaigns where it was like, oh, this is all new customers. This is the first touch point for the brand. that's seen our ads before won't see these types of ads. That's how it used to be. And then I'd have a middle of funnel that was less branded, more value prop driven, very addy, if you will, of like, buy this today, here's your reward tomorrow. And then at the bottom was just, hey, don't forget about us. Here's a discount code if you need to get over it. That's how it used to be, like a three-tiered, legitimate funnel.

34:27Now... Just so you know, the title and thumbnail of this video is going to be 2025 e-commerce masterclass with Nick Shackelford. So 2025, What is the strategy right now? Unfortunately, it is a lot more mumbled together. It is a lot less structured and segmented than I used to want it to be. And that's okay. And here's why. Before, we couldn't trust Meta to serve the ad that we wanted to for a new customer. So we had to force it through audience segmentation and we had to force it through specific ads that we were showing them. We had to force it. Now, meta would be, this is the trust us era. We're in the trust us meta era.

35:06Trust the algorithm era. Trust the AI era. I believe that we are going to move into an era, and we're already in this era, of I am organizing the ad account based upon the assets, creative, and angles and stories that I'm telling. So when I log into my ad account, it might look like, feel better tomorrow. but everything underneath it is just a consistent story from the landing page all the way to the actual ad that we've been creating video image etc so that all will live together it's almost like a folder so it could be the product product value pop a of that product into all the assets you to create for it and i think this is the way it's going to go because this is the trust us method that meta wants us to go which is fine because we rather spend our time and effort on telling convincing stories or making convincing offers.

35:56That's the area that I think nobody is talking about because now to build a landing page, it used to take a very long time and a lot of people didn't do it. You can deploy any of the tools. I won't drop them on this, but any of the tools that you can build a page by yourself in a day or rip somebody else's page and make yourself with any of the AI shit that's coming out. Now, if I can create a bunch of landing pages relatively quickly, now it shows up to me to understanding what can I offer them. That's where we're at. That's the phase we're in currently. Can we structure enough offers to convince a consumer to try us for the first time?

36:27And then how do we keep them? I won't talk about that just yet. Let's just say you're spending, you know, you have$1 ,000 to budget and you want to test 1 ,000 creatives. Like at what point is it diminishing returns? Like how much do you need allocated to get statistical significance on the creative? You want me to say a number. You want me to be like, you need 5%. No, I want you to prove to me that I'm not a psycho, that I'm telling my team, more creative, more creative, more creative. So here's two arguments. I'm going to choose one at the end. I need as much creative as humanly possible. Please get it loaded in the ad account.

37:04Okay, boss. We're incredibly unprofitable. We need to make sure we run just the best performing ads. Those two things happen all the time. You can be telling a team, I need you to launch a lot more. And he can be back and be like, dude, we are so unprofitable. I do not want to launch anything new. I'm going to kill everything that's not hitting target. And that's a function of X percent is working and then X percent is testing to find the next thing that works. And you're just saying less testing, more double down on what's working. Correct. Because if you were like, what makes a really good media buyer?

37:35I go like, they know how to spend money. And you're like, what the fuck does that mean? They've spent enough money to understand when they shouldn't be spending money. And they have a feeling of like, dude, I can't launch any more campaign. The account's not spending it are that Meta's choosing to allocate the spend to an ad that's not highly converting. I'm going to have to turn that off, which means the account won't spend anymore. So there's this movement that happens, like dance that happens within these ad accounts that you, depending on how profitable you are on that specific day, will be justified on how much you should launch new ads in there.

38:08Because if you all of a sudden have only two or three really good ads that have worked for you historically, whatever that is, and you just introduce into the ad account, 5, 10, 15 new ads. and all of a sudden, the majority of your spend's coming in. None of these are hitting. None of these are working. The whole account's lopsided. The whole account's lopsided. And now all of a sudden, guess who's going to freak out? The media buyer and the ads team going like, guys, we shouldn't let this run. Even though we know we need to spend to get more assets to hopefully make new ads that will work. So this dance is like super dynamic.

38:38And there might be days that our team will go, we can't spend. Nothing is taking our budget or nothing is proving profitable. So from a media buyer perspective, you're just pushing and pulling the budgets. It's always good to have a ton of assets and content in the cooker, but ultimately you could build thousands of assets off what's working now. And then, you know, you spend a couple hundred, a couple hundred of them and now something's completely different. You're gonna have to redo all those assets. You only, you should probably have runway for, you know, probably like a 30 day window. I love that.

39:07I do. I think you can plan in a monthly basis and then it's the road to, because again, you probably have drops, you probably have holidays, you probably have other things that you can implement some of these messages on and you have your evergreen running. They're like, yo, we know these angles usually do well for us. How do we keep making more of that? And then we keep launching those as well. But it is a very dynamic movement of this overall. You do know you need to introduce new ads, but not at the detriment of ruining the ad account. A general rule of thumb. If right now the company is doing good, what percent should be to winners and what percent should you allocate budget to testing new and what's next?

39:39What's healthy and what we're trying to strive for is a 70-30. We're trying to have 70 % of the dollars going towards what we have conviction and what's working, 30 % going towards things that we are not totally sure. And when the macro of the company is a bit in the dumper, what does that go to? 90-10? Yeah, I would say 90-10 or even go 100-0 because you have this cyclical performance that happens on various weekends. We know for a fact our product gets a lot more energy, love, and support Friday through Sunday. The opposite of my situation. If I don't know that my weekend is going to be heavier performing, I might unintelligently blow budget Monday through Thursday that I probably could have kept till Friday to the weekend.

40:18Guys, that's amazing advice at any scale, knowing that 70-30 is ideal, but it could go up to 100-0 and then understand and know where you get the sales, where you get the customers, and then just make sure you're doing the testing when new people are coming in to see what's working. I love that. Amazing practical advice. Let's talk about from a content perspective, just paid versus organic. How do you look at that? We've evaluated this so many times. The activity of you posting and sharing organically has a direct benefit towards improvement of ad account. When we're not contributing or uploading any sort of assets to any of our social channels, it has a negative impact on our ad account.

40:56Wow. Those are usually some of your best performing ads because you're not really selling. You're creating for an aesthetic, which you're hoping that your customers really resonate with. And if you find it organically, there's like this trust factor of like, oh, I wasn't served an ad and I wasn't convinced to do something. And I think that is a very good place to start, especially as you're just getting going. The hardest part is getting the system of creating organic at all. I mean, that thesis just leans more and more towards this company WAP blowing up because you're getting it and it's not an ad.

41:25Yeah. People don't want to be served ads. They just want to consume to consume. Yeah, I completely agree with everything you're saying. For anybody out there listening, you want to start and be scrappy. under the notion that Nick just said that posting on organic directly affects his ad account. Let's just say you even don't even have an ad account. You should be just going and posting on every single platform, best practices, two times a day. What would you say is the most underrated creative format for an ad in 2025? Green screen, small mic in hand, speaking to camera. So this is - The most cringe shit ever.

42:01I know. That is crazy. The amount of times I've seen a good walkthrough or breakdown of the small person in the corner dragging their head around, it's just like an absolute reinvention of a VSL, a video sales slander. It is the social version of a video sales line where I'm actually convincing you, when you do a breakdown of ingredients in your product, a breakdown of how your product is made, when you're doing a breakdown of why people are loving or experiencing or running through customer reviews. That shit feels so organic, but you can sell very well through that. And it goes back to the methodology of if you are speaking to them on the platform that they're used to consuming in the most native possible way, it's likely you're going to have a connection.

42:44It's likely that they're going to want to continue down this conversion path with you. So I think that's a place that no one's talking about. Well, I love you. We're doing zero of that. And you know why it's so funny? Because I look at that and I just started posting more personally. I was literally posting twice a year, and now I've posted probably 50 times this year. I see it, and it's cringe. And there's a couple of swaggy dudes that do it that make it work. I don't know him personally. This guy, Alex Garcia, we follow each other. I like his stuff, and it's tasteful. And JT Barnett's a friend.

43:14I think he does it as tasteful and as cool as you can do it. But for people out there listening, probably do it. Because Nick said so, and he probably spent a fuck ton of money to make it work. Constant creative is this agency that you have that's helping create these high-performing ads, what's the biggest learning lesson that's come out of that company? Volume. So we went into... So Constant came out of a COVID need. A service like this on-demand ads existed, but they didn't have a performance angle to it. They didn't know how to make ads. Still, even today, it's hard to find an editor that understands performance marketing.

43:47So true. What ended up happening was you just bastardized a designer and be like, yo, add these badges or add these things. Oh, quicker or sparkly. You just give them things that they would add into it and then they just give it back to you and it's a mumble jumble of stuff. So we had access to a ton of these people. We were heavy on the media buyers. We were heavy on the designers because we were servicing our own people. Then there was downtime. Then there was, oh wait, you're not actually creating all the time because maybe our process or the ads weren't working as well. So we had a bunch of international designers.

44:16Now we're heavily in Canada and Latin America for time zone specific. And we just started realizing, dude, there's a lot of incredible talent editors that actually deserve to work with high level brands. but brand owners or non-creative people don't know how to communicate or brief. People don't know what they want until they see something. So a lot of times everything's a second revision or third revision. So if you've never worked with a designer editor before, but you know you have an idea of what you want, you actually have a better idea once you receive something. You're a creative person, so you probably have a better way of communicating and you've worked with your team for a long time.

44:47They kind of get what you want. If you have a brand new editor or designer and you are not the most creative individual, how do you tell someone you want something? You show them an example of something. But then what an untrained editor or designer does is they do it word for word, pixel by pixel, and they just replicate with what your brand or assets or value props are. That's not what you need. You need someone that can be like, this is an example of what you want. Here's the brand. Here's what they stand for. And here's how, as a designer, I think I can change it or think I can make it better.

45:18That's what people don't get. So we had to do that and find it ourselves because we needed it. It's funny you say that. I love just the marriage between two agencies and Breeze. Again, this is the same thing with me with podcasts and brands. Let's go to conversion optimization. What would you say are the most common conversion killers that you immediately fix when you're working with someone new? What's the lowest hanger that almost everybody's doing wrong? I'll go homepage and then I'll go to product page. When I'm landing on the website, and depending if you're a low-skew store or high-skew store, if you're a low-skew store, I want this...

45:54Pages that I'm landing on almost look like a landing page, but have a little bit more brand story. So if I'm landing on it, I got one product to sell. They don't need to click other buttons to add that to their cart or get to conversion as fast as possible. The lower the SKUs, the more that one landing page is going to be optimized towards putting it to cart or putting it to checkout. I think you just need to highlight the product specifically and don't overcomplicate how many pages need to go into it, especially at the start. The more SKUs you have, I think True Classic is probably one of the goats at the amount of testing the volumes that they do.

46:22you land on True Classic, their website, and they have so many different packs and bundles. As you start to scroll, first off, at the header image, it's what is their current offer or what is they currently trying to promote or have the most amount of visibility into. Awesome. Right beneath that, what is their highest AOV and what is all their bundles and their packs? Because they know that as they start to scroll, we want to make sure that we're showcasing the highest AOV, see if we can get most money out of the customer. That's everyone's goal. No matter whether you're saying it or not, that's everyone's goal.

46:52And then as I started going down there, now I want categories. Now I want to be able to shop if there's a lot of SKUs or I want more insights or feedback on the specific single SKU that I could potentially buy. That's what I want on the homepage. Product page, this shit kills me so much. You land on a product page and the first thing you see is like just the product and like it's just white behind it. Product on white and then landing. I'm like, really? This could have been a lifestyle image. This could have been a great looking person. this could have been the product in use or some sort of dynamicness of it.

47:24And it's just nothing. It's just a product of whatever it is just sitting there. And I think that's such a waste of imagery, especially because what you're going to put right next to it is a weak description of why you think someone's going to buy the product rather than filling it with incredible headlines. So that's an important split test is that first image on a PDP page. Do you know where you look to understand what's happening there? Amazon. These guys have the ultimate product page. Amazon branded pages with the amount of images they have there, that is the closest thing to the most optimized website in the entire world because of how much traffic they have.

47:58You think these guys don't test the product pages or their buy button? Nobody can touch that volume. We, as a product that wants multiple purchases or a product that has multiple SKUs or a product that has different packs, kind of like you guys where you can add on different frames, etc. The ability to clearly lay out the most frequently bought together or frequently bundled together products is something I think people spend a lot less time on than anything else. So the single image on a PDB page, increasing AOV through others bought with it, really, really highlighting on that front homepage, like what is the big offer that you have now and be strategic from a placement perspective on this is maybe my highest margin or something that I'm trying to drive through the inventory on and put that in the front.

48:46A big thing that you talk about that you've mentioned is just offers. I'd love to just give you the floor on just the importance of offers and just your thought process. Because we understand the acquisition side and because we know we need more levers, different entry points into the brand, the only way that you can do that convincingly is two ways. Reorganization and consistent creation of content that's new for consumers and different ways that your product can be sold or grouped or bundled together. The issue right now on platforms, average CPMs with the data set that I have across our brands, $35 to$45.

49:19Expensive, dude. Before when we used to sell, it was like$10, maybe$15 if it went crazy in a very expensive season. That's that golden age, pre-2020. That was a good time. That was when we should have all sold and moved to Barcelona. We may or may not have said that off camera. Allegedly, allegedly. So now it's like, anytime I look into it, I go, I need to increase AOB as humanly possible. And this is ignoring that we have subscription. When I'm looking at it, the offer structure has to do two things. It has to give them something clearly more valuable than if they were to just land on my website.

49:56I need to position something that I know for a fact will be the best they can't find anywhere else. And they will allow them to come back and buy from us again. And we'll be able to position more things for it, specifically speaking. If I'm selling a face cream specifically, I know that this will congruently give me a towel or a scrunchie or something on the back end that I can allow to bundle or boost up the AOV. So that first product you have, you need to think about the secondary and tertiary products so that I can add it into, convince them to buy. People that do really good at this, AG1, Everyday Dose, Grooms, where they can say, this is this acquisition, new customer offer.

50:37Okay, what is that going to be? you have a blender or you have a cup, you have a mug, things that have higher-ish perceived values, but don't actually cost us the brand that much. It's an irresistible offer to start. What is the single product or SKU that we know if someone buys first drives the most amount of LTV? I'll go your furlough. What allows them to buy the next thing the fastest? The second step of that is like, cool, I know they take product A, they're most likely going to get product A again and maybe add product B. But if I give them product B, they're going to get to product C even quicker.

51:12We know that our entry point is a six pack, but if they actually buy the 12 pack, that means that they're going to buy it again because they're going to consume it more because they have more. What? We should have been selling the 12 pack the whole time if we didn't know that because we didn't have the information of what is the speed of increasing repeat purchase rate. We are just now starting to understand because the volume we have, it might take brands years to get to that information because they haven't collected enough customer data. We're year two and we're able to go like, look, this might be our entry offer, but it's now on Nick's team on the retention to increase that six pack to a 12 pack as fast as possible because that means they're going to stay with me for another three fucking months.

51:50And if you understand your unit economics, you ultimately are willing to basically at any cost almost lose in the front if you know what that customer lifetime, the predictability of that customer lifetime is going to be. And I will gladly spend that. And that's what we're having to do now. We'll have another product launched. And we're like, dude, it's small enough. I might just give it for free into all the subscribers. That was the next question I was going to ask was GWP. Absolutely GWP because a gift with purchase could be more cost-effective than a discount or another incentive. It could be.

52:22It might not be. It could be, though. For people listening, if the MSRP, let's just say the MSRP, I'm just going to make up random numbers here, is 500, but the COG is 100. But I'm giving away that piece for$100, if it reduces my CAC by anything more than$100, then it's worth it. Especially if you went on the back end with good LTV. So people on a GWP side, high perceived value, low cogs. And if you just arbitrage, for me, I have to arbitrage my CAC by the cost of goods on the GWP. But for you, if you're like, hey, this just gets them stickier and happier to drive my LTV, you could just say, fuck it.

53:01I'm just going to bake that into my front and I'm just going to win on the back. How are you systematically looking at the process of how you create offers? Is there like a system that you guys do or is it all just based on analyzing the data? We have four offers currently running right now and I'm looking at it in a very unique way. Here's where I need us to get to. First, traffic source. If we're running an app, Google, Meta, Twitter, direct mail. that customer is worth a certain type of dollar for me because I know how much they're going to spend or stay with us. We're collecting that data right now.

53:35We have the ability to go channel, offer, multiple offers under that channel. The more products you have to offer, the more creativity you have in types of offers that you can start formulating. It is two things I'm trying to accomplish at any times. It's either they're going to spend more with me or I'm going to increase the amount of people that are going to spend with me. And then within that initial bucket of those two areas, then I go into like, where's my margins? Can I afford to do either of these things? I think that's the easiest framework I start with. Wow. So the offer is like a huge part of your company.

54:08The offer is the most important. This year, this quarter specifically, because now we have the team to do it. I have a KPI of 15 unique offers that have to go live in Q2. 15. Insane. I'd love for you to walk us through whatever you're comfortable with sharing. What's your CRO stack? What are the apps, the tools, the platforms? What are the big things that you need? We have Nostra. Nostra is site speed and it is soon to be first-party data. We're currently in trial with customers.ai to increase user identification so that my email campaigns could be more impactful. We use heatmap.com, which is customer experience tracking.

54:50And we were on Repla. we were building pages on Replo. I think that's the initial stack. I love it. To tie a bow on this conversion optimization, how should people just look at mobile versus desktop? Should you be creating ads specific for each? Should you look at one first? I mean, for us, we always looked at like desktop and then we're like, fuck, like 75 % of our traffic's mobile. I think your thesis is our thesis. It's always mobile first. You have to bring into consideration dark mode on email. So knowing that people will, and I'm always in dark mode, meaning your screen's always dark or your emails are always dark or your viewing is always usually black.

55:27We want the experience to be both optimized as much as possible, but we know that we are designing mold first. All right, let's go to the fun part, retention and lifecycle marketing, which I know you're an absolute ninja at. Let's just start with what retention metrics do founders be obsessed over? Revenue per recipient. That's how much they're spending for each person you have on your list. So our list is... Thank you. 323 ,000 people on this list, but I'm going to segment it specifically and I'm going to send with them first. Whereas some that might not have any sort of past purchase with me, their revenue per recipient might be significantly lower.

56:16The revenue per recipient is completely different based on the cohort, obviously. 100%. And I think that to me is like, that's where it starts. That's the first one. And on those cohorts, you're doing by, let's just say, frequency, how often, monetary, how much they vote over time, all different types of things you're doing. Correct. All different types of segments you have, I would imagine. Correct. Because we have subscribers, repeat buyers. We have repeat buyers, non-subscription. We have one-time buyers and we have non-buyers. That's like the biggest buckets I can tell you on. Outside of that, you have about a six-pack or a 12-pack or I got multi-pack or a bundle.

56:47And the revenue per recipient, you can look on a campaign level or you can look on an actual per customer level to understand and know how valuable they are in conjunction with the sense. That's a little bit more difficult. You'd have to basically export customer info from shop and then be like, how much does this person spend with me over how many periods of how much time? How far back do you want to go? Do we have 300 ,000 buyers, bro. Like you have 10 years of running. Like how deep are you really going to go? That's the stuff where like, that is where AI I think can be very helpful. Mass export.

57:18Tell me what people are worth. And then it's just like, you know, you know, they've been with you for six years that they only triggered a buy during these type of campaigns. Then you could save money on your text and email. You're going to be sending way less because you know you only need to send it to these people and their past history. Those people and their past history. And you might be like, I'm never hitting the people that are only buying on the discount or I'm only hitting the people that are buying the discount, right? Then you should lapse those people, get rid of them. Something I'm very curious on is for people that you understand and know their buying behavior, if you know they're going to churn, if you say, hey, after six months, they're going to churn, what do you guys have set in place to say?

57:58Are you guys saying at five and a half months, here's a Hail Mary? Like what are your churn avoidance tactics? So we actually look on like a month to month basis. So we have, on a healthy subscription basis, you have like three major peaks. You have a day one peak, you have a 28-day peak, and then you have a weird window of like 31 to 45. So first, let me clarify. Churn for subscription or churn for like non-repeat buyers? I don't know. I'll take you both ways. We'll go subscription. So subscription, you have a major peak day one, as I just said. You have customers that buy it because they want the discount.

58:31And then they're very privy to it, so they immediately cancel. Those people, they're never going to be with you anyways. They're going to be gone. But that spike is the largest spike and that pulls down overall churn numbers heavily. How do we convince those day ones to never get rid of us? Well, you got to keep them on to tell them that there's actually a real gift that's coming to you month two. All right, maybe I'll stick around. Maybe I'll like the product. Then that's on the product to keep them for the recipient months. The second spike is right around day 28. That's where they get the billing reminder of like, yo, you're about to get charged.

59:02This is coming. Okay. And outside of that, then they should already have the product and then they should be thinking about if they liked it or not. There might be a normal natural churn here. The first like seven days is extremely important of communication, of letting them know this is exactly what you can look forward to, the feeling, effect, and the quality of the product that you're about to receive. So it's a lot of hype, a lot of communication. And probably like use cases on how you should consume it and stuff, just education. And how you should implement what you should expect, how good everybody else is feeling, customer reviews.

59:34That, it's really difficult to influence those people to stick around because they probably already taking it because it was a price reduction. And so what actually was passed this year was you, you can't force someone to do a subscription and keep them there for extended periods of time. You have to give them the way to get off as fast as they got on. That was something where you can say you're signing up for an automatic rebill. You can't cancel for three months. You actually can't do that anymore. That's not legal anymore, right? No. The churn reduction is around education around the product and the gifts that they potentially get on for the back half of the months.

1:00:03So some specific things that we've done that have increased it that actually didn't cost us any money. We do subscriber giveaways and say like, hey, if you were subscribed past the 27th, you have been entered into win five free cases. Give more of the product that they're already subscribing to get. At the end of the day, that's what they want. They want more. First thing, that was like the easiest implementation we changed. Our churn from Q4 was 24%. It's terrible, bro. 24 % is like, quit. You should never be doing anything. And so as we started to focus on it from Q4 to Q1, we went down to 17%.

1:00:38My goal by end of this year is to get the best in the market, which is sub 5 % aggregate churn. That's like, I'm like an AG1 category. These guys are like the goats of keeping people for long periods of time. Only way we do this is more products. So it's not actually like a tactic thing. It's I get to give them more products. I got to give them more frequency of when they can receive this product. I got to make it more cost effective. and if they are going to just leave, they usually give four reasons. I can't afford this. I have too much. The effect is not what I want. I found another brand. Those are the four reasons that they tell us when they leave us.

1:01:13Ross, tell me. Give me those rebuttals. Yeah, so you have too much. No problem. You should be able to recommend this. You should give this to one of your friends or here's how you should make it into mocktails so you can save it for later. Education on how they can actually use that product at different times. Or you might have too much. Okay, so if you're a 12-pack, let's go down to a six-pack. Or if you're at a six-pack, let's go down to a 7.5 short cans. Less milligrams, less cans, or a smaller size. Oh, you actually don't want that? Well, you should take our spirit where you can self-dose yourself and then you'll be able to actually make this into whatever drink you want.

1:01:45So that's something that we're trying to solve. I really do believe it's just we're too expensive. And so if we give them discounts or if we try and incentivize them that way, that's the best way. What would you say is the biggest retention mistake founders make? I think not communicating enough to them in a variety of ways. So you have plain text from founder, plain text from customer support. You have plain text from product development. These are just emails that are just straight written that are no graphics, no nothing that go to the consumer. Those are all three things that can be communicated on a monthly basis.

1:02:21Just popping in, hope you're enjoying the product or here's why I made it. Here's what people are saying. And ironically, I bet those perform really well. We have an email that goes, message from Corbin, Corbin from Breeze. It's like, yo, I just asked the team. We just got this offer. It's about to drop. We did a tease today. He's like, yo, you guys aren't going to believe what I have coming for you guys. Pay attention. We're doing a live stream on YouTube. Come join us on 420. Like that was an email and that was a non-revenue. You can't even buy anything other than the bottom. That was like a$40 ,000 email.

1:02:51Bringing them down the funnel. For founders that are listening, I think especially when you're the underdog and you're in the beginning, people want to support you. Hit them on that founder text-only email and let them know you're a small business that's looking to build and you appreciate their business. It doesn't hit as well at scale, but I think when you're smaller, people want to support that. It does way better. I'm seeing a lot of those text-only emails on the tariff situation right now. People getting creative and navigating, being playful around it, saying, hey, we might raise our prices.

1:03:19We're not now. You should buy now. I bet you they're squeezing out some revenue. So that's the first thing. Second thing is like product explanation. Like you have to walk them through almost like a step-by-step tutorial, taking the time to explain to them, here's exactly how you should use it and when you should use it for most maximum output. I think that's a place that we undereducate on. Wow. And as far as that goes, again, getting granular. Once you understand and know your customer who you're talking to, then you can speak more natively to that person. We did Mocktail Madness for March Madness.

1:03:51And we did, we basically, we needed to improve our spam rate. It was like, well, we need mass responses to us. Like we need them responding to our email. And the only way to do that is if we prompt them to do something, right? For us to do that, we're like, hey, March Madness is here. So we created a mocktail madness. And so we did for an entire month, send us in your favorite mocktails and we'll score them and the team will rate it. And then each month we started communicating like so-and-so sent and recommended this. This is what we are also able to make. and that improved response rate. So if you can do something to evoke an image of the product that they just bought or how they're formatting their kitchen or whatever you're trying to sell, try to get them to submit or give something, oh, it's huge.

1:04:35That's a good segue into, I'm sure we would agree that your best marketers are probably your loyal customers. What type of strategy are you using to initiate your loyal customers to be marketers for you? Let me give you a couple of mine too to get your going. One, we have a huge following on Iconic and we weren't leveraging it enough. And I've found like specifically from an influencer perspective, we're getting more leverage and better deals with the influencers because we're doing co-branded posts with an account that has 700 plus thousand followers. So just leveraging the distribution that we spent 10 years to build to provide more value to those people.

1:05:10Another huge thing that we do is understanding and knowing the cohort of the very valuable customers. Some of them that I even talked to, I used to call all the customers, the big customers on Fridays. Sounds so stupid. Don't ask for two. Don't ask for three. Tell a customer to tell just one person. It sounds so silly, but I've been doing this thing for like six, seven years. Okay. Say, don't tell five people. I don't want you to tell one person. That's achievable. It's doable. And they're going to tell one person. Obviously, if you're talking to them, they're going to have a good experience. So I would say those are the two things that are getting people to kind of market for us as we're getting more distribution through influencers and then better word of mouth through.

1:05:49Yeah, that's, that's, I don't think there's any way we can do better than that. We, and your product has a nice ALB to play with. So like that one intro and you not having to spend to acquire that person that was recommended is game changing. Anytime a product is damaged or anytime anything is, one can is crushed, we ship back a six pack and it was like, look, keep the, keep the cans, give it to somebody else. And so we, we want at any time to give them more, to give away more of like a, a delight and surprise budget that we have. So we have the discount budget and we have the surprise and delight budget.

1:06:23The CX team gets to use at their discretion. We call that the wow budget. And True Classic does that as well too. It's huge. I think it's massive. I think it's so important, dude, because they know the value of the product. We know the cost of our product. It's the best thing. They came to you for a reason. They wanted the thing that you're selling. I've said it a couple of times on the podcast. I have to say it again. And it's going to be the whole thesis on the next thing that I'm going to do is use common sense. if somebody is upset, a can is nicked, like you wow them and over deliver. If you look at net net, the six pack that you give, your true cost of goods, if you gave that to a hundred people, do you think that that X amount of money you're going to make, forget revenue, forget LTV, probably an EBITDA on just first sale, you're going to make way more than that.

1:07:08And all it takes is one of those people to do a big order and then you're in the green. We used to do that so much, we stopped doing it. We're doing it a lot more. Ironically, we probably filmed like two months ago with True Classic. I was doing research on them like months before because I really, really, really respect what they're doing. He got me to hire a head of customer engagement that her only job is literally, she's got a wow budget and then she's doing posting, but then she's talking. She has to answer every single comment, every single DM across seven different channels, every day, all day.

1:07:41And some other things too. But yeah, I completely agree with you. You got to just wow them. You have to have a wow budget, guys. especially when you have a product that's going to be showcased in their house or they're going to be proud of it or it's an expression of their personality, you want them to feel justified in the dollars and stuff that they spent for it. And so no better way to be like, oh, where'd you get that? I got it from this place. You want them to be stoked on any of those goods. All right. I want to move on. I want to go to product strategy. What kind of fundamental product strategy lessons did you learn through...

1:08:10I mean, it was a long time ago, the hoverboards losing a bag of money, fidgets, which was kind of a quick thought, go make a couple million dollars versus now. What are your big kind of rules from a product perspective? I've sold a lot of things. And this is the first product that fundamentally changes a behavior that has a real feeling and effect and a personal experience. We are able to facilitate individual unique experiences for every single person on a one-to-one basis. and a product that can do that is extremely important and has to have some sort of like repeat purchase ability in it. Hydration packets, electrolyte packets.

1:08:52Why do you think this popped up everywhere? Because I'm going to buy it, I'm going to consume it, it's going to taste a certain way and I'm going to feel like I'm getting more hydration in this. Okay, why do you think cologne or like unbranded cologne has been popping up? Well, I can, I spray it, I smell it and a certain reaction starts coming from me from the opposite sex or I like the way it smells or feels. Didn't know that was a category popping, is it? Yeah, non-branded cologne. It's like one of the things where you can mimic another cologne, but how do you know if it's Giorgio Armani or not?

1:09:20So evoke an emotion. Yes, but I would not have done this if I didn't have the conviction in Aaron and the team. I want it to be shipped in a parcel. It's got to be small. It's got to be something that I can put in a sleeve or somehow like fulfill at volume. Hands is not the way. Large frames and pictures is not the way. Don't go that route. Literally talked off camera about this. this is such an underrated I forgot what I was listening to oh you know what it was native deodorant and early on in the process he brought on a some sort of specialist on like a UPS packaging and stuff and he wanted to make sure that he designed it to get into a smaller parcel and dude and bro it's like you save like like you don't think about it but you save like$1.50 and then like at scale that's like dollars in EBITDA and the multiple on the exit and it's just like this UPS consultant just made me$10 million I just finished the call before we got here and I had our ops manager talking about, we're about to save 17 cents per pack tech because we're moving to a four pack, which will equate to$8 million in the year.

1:10:26And she's like, she's like the cents per fucking four pack. And I was like, I was like, can you wait, what? Nick needs a raise. That's just because of our velocity and our volume, these scents make a lot of sense to figure out and fix. Not to mention what's going to happen with any sort of tariff situation and plastics and cardboard and aluminum. And to the point where we're changing the can because we found too much of our older ones we're crushing. And so we will spend a little bit more, but we'll actually save more because we won't have as much broken cans. I like having this in every single one of the podcasts because you add something to the list.

1:11:02Yeah. Growing a good CAGR, compound annual growth rate, Big Tam, LTV or subscription ability.

1:11:13Be able to package it to be efficient there. Any other thoughts? It's got to be a For Me, For You product. Perfect example. Baby products. I have a baby, so I just went through this. So when you're developing a product that could be a For You, For Me. By the way, your kid's name is Kingsley. He's a beautiful kid. Gangster. I don't even see what the kid looks like, but the name is Gangster. I saw it in the blanket. Continue. He's a homie. Yeah, he's a good dude. One years old. For me, for you. It's a product that I myself or my wife would buy for us or somebody in our family would buy for us. So you have two markets and two reasons to buy this.

1:11:56Baby products. Hexclad is a good one. Perfect one. That's literally on my list. My girl's like, we need non-toxic. Like, you're like, yo, but somebody might get that for me. That goes on the list to my parents to get for the holidays. That's the thing. We're on the same page here, baby. Good to go to the next question then. From a product expansion strategy specific to Breeze. How do you guys look at that? So I actually, I learned this. I got schooled on this. So you have Aaron, who's like, I know I need to continue to expand. I got to keep creating products that anybody can have access to or anybody can enjoy.

1:12:32Travis, which is our formulator, that dude lives literally in a lab and is a human guinea pig of compounds. Then I have Brian Dewey, which is like an OG retail vet. I think our win is we have to compete with these guys that have tons of flavors, similar effect. We were two effects, no flavors. That's it. We had one with infused and not, but still kind of the same flavor, different effects. So you look at, you go to any retail spot and you look on the shelf, It sits usually in threes. Look at Red Bull. It goes OG Red Bull, sugar-free Red Bull, a flavor. Yeah. Watermelon. What an exercise for people to do if you're going into a category to go into retail and then analyze just how it's merchandised on the shelf to understand how the products marry each other.

1:13:22That's fucking real smart. We literally walked into Trader Joe's and a couple other areas that we know we were being sold in. And Brian's just like, this is how this is. This is how this is structured. Here's how many cans you can put on a shelf. It was a masterclass. So for product expansion for us, we know there's multiple effects that people like to do. We talked a little bit off camera too. Like some people will take, if they want to get lifted or they want to get some sort of feeling, they usually take, the easy thing is to get a gummy, right? So there's different ways of people want to experience being lifted.

1:13:55I want to be lifted. I want to be energetic. I want to be lifted. I want to go to bed. That's people consume it at different times. Same thing if you want to go out. You want to, for our product specifically, you want to feel like you're locked in and you're in the energy or maybe you're just chilling with your buddies and you're just hanging out. Those different areas are fundamentally we are trying to match the experience to the effect. And I think that's what Aaron and Travis are on, this new shit that they're able to acknowledge. We're thinking about new stuff and the effect that we have to do.

1:14:26How do you structure product feedback loops from your customers and then using that to educate your product if you do that. We need first-time purchasers, repeat purchasers, and then no purchasers. Everyone's got an experience that they have with the brand, especially digitally. We have a post-purchase survey. Essentially, it's like, I bought this product and I'm expecting, you have the questions, which is, how did you hear about us? What do you expect from this product? And where do you think you're going to use this product the most? So like areas that matter to me. How did you hear about us?

1:15:00I wanted to see if I can get some sort of attribution that's anecdotal. Because they might not know what they first saw us, but they might see what they touched last. That's important. Which that should be, and we talk about this in the True Classic, that's the final buck. They're literally telling you, forget the multi-touch attribution or some bullshit. They're telling you where they fucking got it from. That should be law. Yeah, it should be. So we need that information. So that will be piped into Slack. That's just a straight Zapier integration. Then we have, we do customer reviews, automated emails.

1:15:31When the product arrives, we're requesting them to give us a review. So that comes in immediately. And so if I know that they've left a positive review and they've bought multiple times, and they probably should be given an offer to subscribe for a better discount. So that logic of information coming through makes sense. So if I'm buying this in large quantities, can I get that to my social snowball team to be like, is this person worth talking to because they're going to bring it to a large gathering. Because sometimes we'll have people that don't have a wholesale relationship with us or an event, and they'll come in and get 48 plus or 64 cases.

1:16:03And we're like, why are you buying this? Is there an event going on? We should hit them up. Sometimes they're stocking up for themselves, or maybe they're just stocking up for a large event upcoming, and maybe we need to activate better with them. All right. We're going to get into a funny conversation that we had off camera that we wanted to bring in in-camera. Brand building. The pluses and minuses of building in public. I actually didn't print out this sheet, but I remember vaguely, you can correct me if I'm wrong, you fucking psychos put out basically your P &L. I mean, I could tell you, I know how much revenue you did.

1:16:34You put it out. 12.9 million Q1, Febreze. And it was like 10 million on Shopify. And then you brought out every single... You guys go granular. It's not like Meta, Google, and YouTube. I saw like... What was it? DoorDash. DoorDash, the Puff app. Go Puff, yeah. Let's just start with, what are the pluses and minuses to building in public? My very, very first post online was in a forum, Facebook Ad Buyers in 2017. And the only reason why I know that is because I'm talking deeply about this more often because I believe we have a responsibility. So you have brand building from a personal standpoint, you have brand building from a brand standpoint.

1:17:13You're wearing Represent, right? So they have cadence, okay? That's a quality product. That's a quality drink. represents a quality shirt, quality product. Those two founders are building a certain type of way, right? Marcus from Minton, New York. That dude's building a certain type of way. They're not going granular on P &L. They're not going granular on numbers. They're going granular on product development and bringing you along with the brand. That is their way of telling their story, okay? I don't know. You guys are a whole other different level. You guys are sharing numbers. Yeah, yeah. That's like, for me, I think what they're doing is, fairly safe in nature.

1:17:51I don't know how granular they're getting from like a trade secrets perspective. I don't think they are. When we were early, when we were doing our web series, just to give my thesis and then obviously I want to bounce back to you, is I think that there's, and I mean, that's, you know me, like from back in the day type shit because we did, we were early on the web series, 2017, 18. Someone followed me fucking every day, all day for 18 months and then we did the podcast. I think you get disproportionate value while you're doing it. Do welcome more competition, which you know about that. That's a funny conversation for another day.

1:18:26But, and people are like, oh, bring the competition. It's going to create a larger pie and more awareness. Oliver actually said on the Mad Rabbit episode, I think competition is for losers. I think you don't want competition. So that was a huge thing. And then if you do it, you may or may not get disproportionate advantage from building in public. I think you do. you welcome more competitors, but there's a disproportionate loss when you stop doing it. Because then your CAC is lowering, your cost of our customer is lowering while you're doing it. But then if, let's just say, you want to take a break or COVID happens, happened for us.

1:18:59We did a podcast after. So I think it could be huge, but then if you stop, it could go down. And then on another level, I know from even what we're doing. Key man risk is a huge thing. And if George from Represent stops posting or he goes from 8 % body fat to 17 % body fat, I think that brand is going to go down a bit. I think that's a fucking hot take, but I truly do fucking believe that. I think that he is subtly in the minds of a lot of different humans. And it's a business. It's an aspirational business that let's call it space. People want to be him. people are building businesses and they're trying to fucking copy that playbook.

1:19:45I don't know the Cadence guy. I just started on Twitter, so I'm following what he's doing. His is very like going visuals and then super macro. Yeah. So I actually think what he's doing is sustainable and it's good. I think that my thesis, and then I want to hear yours, I'm talking a lot, is if you're going to do it, make it feasible to do long-term, make sure you can fiend off it. So when you go and sell the company, if you want to sell the company, you're not going to get dinged for key man risk. But you have to have some sort of like real fucking moat. I intimately believe. You believe what I just said.

1:20:22I do believe what you just said. I do believe it. And I actually don't have a disagreement on this. I have a question of commitment. You have to do it if you actually like this. You can't be sharing and then all of a sudden stop. This is outside of just breeze. is this is like 14, 15 years of how I've been. And it takes a certain type of person to willingly put themselves out there religiously, consistently, all the time. And the key man issue is a problem. But what makes a really good movie? Incredible character development. How many more people can you get bought in to continue to talk about the story?

1:21:03How many people on your team can you have them share and talk about it? Now, I'll talk about the risks in doing that and sharing the spotlight with the greater team. Before Aaron and I got on with Breeze together, I was Nick of all the other businesses and it was a major traffic driver. Millions of impressions a month is what I put up right now across every platform and just pure creation of whether it's numbers or podcasts or videos. This is you just talking your shit. This is me just on my shit. This is personal brand too, but yeah. Correct. When we got in with Breeze, I was such a huge advocate of like, do we have to share as much as we're humanly possible willing to share because we're fundamentally changing a human behavior of consumption which is a huge thing to do and like we're not the first ones to do this but we are the biggest to do this currently while us sharing our numbers it is doing three things one it's sending a signal to the market that we are you need to watch us.

1:22:01VCs, you need to watch us. PEs, you need to watch us. Alcohol, you need to watch us. People that are incredible in their other space or maybe working for a competitor that might not have a good time, but they see somebody else doing incredible. So it's a flag to the market going like, we got it. We're here. You guys need to pay attention to us. This brings employees, this brings retail partners, and this brings incredible opportunities and leverage from a tech standpoint. Employees, retail, I would love for you to talk in a tech standpoint. From a tech standpoint, they know that if I'm going to put up impressions in the hundreds of thousands on a consistent basis, and we are using the things that we're talking about, 100%, I'm not going to make you pay for anything.

1:22:42Or you're going to get a hell of a deal ongoing, and I know you need my tech. So if I'm putting up impressions and not - And or they'll allow you to invest in their company at a good valuation. Absolutely. It'll get you in the back door for a lot of things that, should I have been on the table with Triple Whale or Northbeam or no? or you look at any of the things on my list? No. But because of the reach and the volume and the consistency and the actual proven ability to be in the game for this long and be reinventing ourselves. Your ability to influence. It is. And it's the ability to be in the right place at the right time and have the right relationships and not fucking anybody.

1:23:17But just would the juice be worth the squeeze if the barriers to entry for your business is very high? You have to understand and know. Aaron, you guys have a bunch of weapons, but his weapon and understanding of this, let's just call it gray area landscape and how to market within it. I mean, from what I saw, it seems like he's like literally goaded, like literally like - The guy, the guy. The guy. So I think that allows you to go deeper. You can argue that the barriers of entry are higher, thus that the only competitors that will come in will be big boys. And then my firm belief, and I have a weird inkling that you agree with me, is he who can spend the most wins.

1:23:52So I'm just saying with that. What I do think though, is I think all the other things you said tech, the retail, the sales, the lowering of the CAC, I think it's worth it. So yeah, I just think it's a double-edged sword and it's dangerous. What I was hoping you would ask is like, would you do this all again? If I had to do it again, I would not be as loud as I am. I'd still yap because it's fun to yap, but I don't think I would go this deep. Great Twitter follow, epic yapper. Oh, good one. Something that you said to me, you're like, hey, like, are you more of like a brand guy or an agency guy and I'm more of a brand guy to start?

1:24:29I now think, when I think agency, I think like marketing and metrics. I think it's very interesting what you're doing. Like, I just don't see how you guys don't win because you guys are just a bunch of marketers and Swiss Army generalist marketers right now is like, this is, that's where you want to be. So like, what's your thesis on like, should more people that have been in the agency game for two, three, four years, like, I think they should be starting a product right now. What do you think? I got three really close dudes that were all agency first and now they're going product and they have a little bit of both.

1:24:59They're like, they're in between. So they were agency and then now they're like part agency. Now they're just pure product or product sets. I got a collection of products. What Thrasio and all these roll-up shops should have been were just incredible agency people that know how to run growth, not really good numbers, people that can like manufacture a backend or cut costs. They should have just been, And I'm going to fund all the people that can build from a performance standpoint. We have to get context for people with what Thrasio is and these other, these were like conglomerates. They were basically consolidating resources and then trying to use back office.

1:25:34I think that that was the biggest mistake from the start. You know why? Is because they would have, they would be like, let's just say, I don't know the inner workings, but in some context, it has to be right with what I'm saying is if they had 20 brands and they had a CMO, maybe they had one CMO that did all 20 brands or two that one to 10, one to 10. The CMO of represent can't be the CMO of a company that's feeding the middle-aged mom, a 46-year-old woman in Alabama. So that's what it was doing from the start. I knew it was doing from the - There was no thesis. There was no focus. There was no thesis.

1:26:03It was just, we're going to cut costs across the board. Yeah, we're going to optimize Amazon-specific brands. I can't believe that those guys raised a huge bag of money. I don't get that. That's a crazy story to look into. Crazy story. So yeah, so your boys that were agency guys are now starting. because so the the hardest part is like i see a lot of products and there's some products i'm like that's i just see it i'm like that's gonna hit the level of hit is different but i'm like oh that'll work that'll be successful to have the understanding and being able to learn and spend a bunch of money that isn't necessarily yours so your romanticism around the dollars being spent is not there goes back to why i think media what is a good media buyer they know how to spend money They are not emotionally tied to money being spent.

1:26:48When you were the founder and spending your own money, you were like, that is my money. I feel very some type of way about it. Correct. If you can get all this money being spent over all these years, you're building up this skill that will never leave you to understand and deploy it and be able to articulate and explain to everybody why we have to do this and what we're expecting to happen. You're a brand founder coming in to, you're a very good product person, coming in to me like, well, how do I make sales or how do I generate this? And you have to rely on everybody telling you something. How helpless is that?

1:27:21How like, I don't know, I can't move forward unless I have XYZ person to help me to do that. That sucks. Yeah. And like, you have to be somewhat in the weeds and understand to know what a good marketer looks like. Yeah. I think everything right now is just, it's really just about content distribution and understanding digital marketing. Like those are like, those are the three things right now that as if you're a marketer out there and you understand those. Find a product. Fucking lethal. All right. I want to round the corner here and finish up. I just want to touch on a couple more things on the personal brand side.

1:27:54I can say you tweet a lot and these are not tweets that are AI driven and or they're thoughtful tweets. Like they're good. I try. Some gems and they're lengthy in nature, some of them. How do you balance your time between personal brand, two agencies, Breeze? Yeah, think about this intimately. More than most people do. So we have, I have a team of four visual two copywriters and then Sean which is my assistant who helps me organize all this slash Kiana and this is for you for your personal this is Nick this is for Nick this is just Nick Monday Monday or Tuesday I'll debrief on a full hour to two hour call around topics that I believe that are important to me or I believe that are relevant to what's happening right now and I'll go vocal brain dump on both of them.

1:28:44So it's one that we're talking about most frequently is like my son became one. I'm a first time dad. I also have a lot of things going on. I want to express myself more on how it feels to be a father, a founder, et cetera. Love that. So that was a topic that's important to me. I think that my audience has grown up with me. And so I think that they would resonate, I hope. And I'll start off with the themes. I'll debrief how I want this to be done. I will receive my content back to me in the structure that I would want it to be written at, make my edits, plan and schedule it on a weekly basis. And how much of this is AI driven versus them understanding and knowing a back-end Bible and prompt and then speaking in your voice?

1:29:23Zero AI. There's no AI. The prompt, the only AI that would be used in it would be an analysis of best performing past posts I've done organically. And then they'd be like, yeah, I need you to redo this one. This one did really well. for instance i have a subscription one that talked about i was like benefits of reducing churn um here's 10 things that i would do and then that was an image then that would go into a tweet and then that would go into a graphic and even even on the pillars i speak about is like i can speak through breeze and that's one pillar then you have like agency where it goes here's the people that we serve here's what we've been learning on paid media or email or sms or creative and then And the final thing is like, I have life and family, what I'm intimately talking about today.

1:30:04And so I update this constantly with a, I link a Google doc that I update on a frequently basis, like every couple of weeks. I've like, here's the things I'm interested in. Here's the things I'm working on. Here's the things that if you find interesting, you should yak to me about. For someone that has, I mean, you have a team of four. For someone that has less budget, what is the advice you'd give to someone that's just starting out? Oh, easily. So you go get either TweetHunter or TypeFlee. Yeah. So TypeFlee is where I'm scheduling, writing, and deploying, and then analyzing my own. TweetHunter will pull popular trending tweets based on who you search or the things that you're interested in.

1:30:41And then you can find inspiration on the back of this. Go get Justin Welsh, his course. Bro, that's the first course that I paid money for, a$79 LinkedIn course. Go to LinkedIn. I think I've slanged a bunch of courses for this guy. Yeah, you should, dude. He's a shout out to No Relationship. That is epic right now that you shout out. Who is this guy, Justin Welsh? He's like... He's a solopreneur that believes in building individual companies and sells a low ticket course. Guys, go check my LinkedIn. Tell me if you think it's good. That is so fucking funny. What's the chances, dude? It's because it's where we need to begin.

1:31:16I think that's the best place to start. And then I think that is what will give you the idea of what you need to create about. unfortunately, you got to have some shit to talk about. If you aren't doing anything, that's why you keep it on a weekly basis. It's a projection reflection life. That's why I believe in a week. You project what you should be doing. So you're going to talk about it as if you already did it. That's things that you're going to do. Hopefully you get it done. And then when it happens, you talk about what you did. We had product launches. So I was like, hey, we have these things upcoming.

1:31:45I usually talk about that the week it's happening. And then I go, So, hey, we launched Spirit. Here's how it did. Here's how it did. And so there's learnings that come from it. All right, next question. What is your favorite productivity hack that sounds crazy but works? Normally, people just go right to, like they wake up, first thing they grab a coffee. Like we've all seen the videos. I'm not dunking my face in any fucking water. I would say, can you delay the caffeine? Like if, can you not eat breakfast and you can delay caffeine? I think that's what's been working for me like nonstop. Two is I don't touch emails in the morning.

1:32:19Shauna has that on lock. And so - Shout out Shauna. Shout out Shauna. Appreciate you. So she'll kind of tee it up of like, hey, these are the things that you have to reply to and everything else, like I'll talk to you at noon. All right, next. What business tool would you pay 10 times more than what you're currently paying because it is so valuable? You're giving someone a shout out here. 10X. And since you're getting the shout out, do not overcharge him on this. I would say Stored. Stored is the fulfillment partner that we're trying to work with or about to work with. And the fact that they have like full dashboard for customer experience, that's going to save me hundreds of thousands, probably millions over our lifetime, just because it's like we have clarity into customers.

1:32:59So I don't think we could pay enough and like get a dashboard that lets the customer not have to talk to my CS team. So it's like a 3PL with just additive layers. On steroids, yes. I feel like 3PL is probably an industry that has not been revolutionized. That's why we're here. Much I like that. Final three questions. Favorite book or podcast and why? Favorite podcast I'm on right now is the brand. They're called Brand Fathers. But it's Oren, it's Ash, and it is one of the guys. But it's basically all dudes that are like way more brand versus performance. They talk about like high-end brand activations.

1:33:35And it's something that I lack. I'm a much more performance dude. Nice. And then what about your favorite book? I don't read, but I'm listening. I like to take it in audio because I do a lot of walking. Monetizing Innovation. That's the current one I'm on. And this is like optimizing towards, so as AI is coming, like it talks about like, how do you price it accordingly? How do you think about what products to launch and why? And so it's a lot of like the methodology of like, how do I research and understand what products to launch? I don't know if it directly applies to the brand side or if it's like maybe me trying to learn about how people position products for everything else.

1:34:08Touches on AI, a book that I'm reading again, called The Coming Wave. If you've ever read the book Sapiens, which explains, yeah, about like humankind. It's this book for AI. So from a macro perspective with a guy that's been in this space for a long time, it'll fuck you up, bro. Everybody should read that book. I recommended it. All right. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? I'll say the team at Grooms. So I think that I've seen him operate before in this product and it's basically the gummy AG1. and I think the opportunity that he has for him and his team, I think that's the one.

1:34:48I think they're going to do it. That's that green gummy company. Yep. I think from the offer, from the email to the structure, they got it right. The team is on point too. I'm in the funnel. That's good. We're going to end with one big thoughtful question. How big can Breeze be? This is a generational run. I think this is the new wave and a handful of people are really going to win here. Billions, dude. Big B, I like that. You have to say B. I mean, your growth is crazy. It's wild. You were talking before about product brand or SaaS agency. The multiple on this should be absolutely crazy. The numbers.

1:35:28Hard to even fathom, dude. Have you guys not grown any month over month? Or have you grown every month, month over month? Every single month. There's never been a month we haven't. It's why it's so difficult to understand forecasting and understanding what do we do with this. but alcohol is in the trillions. That's a world. You can't even fathom that. No CPG brand sinking of that size because you just literally can't. I mean, CPG is just a hot space right now. We had Bill from Athletic Brewing on, even that, the non-alcoholic. Oh, dude. Starting to go absolutely crazy. We're at an amazing time.

1:36:02I'm glad that we only spoke for a little bit off camera. We brought it all on camera. We definitely just talked a bunch of shit. But where can they find you on all social and then just shout out all your companies? Twitter. So I'm heavy on the Twitter. So I am Shackleford on Twitter. I'm Nick Shackleford everywhere else. And then, yeah, it's Breeze and Structure. Those are the two that mean the most to me right now. Amazing. Appreciate you, brother. Thanks, bro. If you guys got this far, I assume you guys enjoyed this interview. If that's the case, I think you guys would enjoy the other episodes.

1:36:31Make sure you guys go check them out. I want to keep growing this thing bigger and better. All I ask from you guys, give it a like, give it a subscribe. and share with a friend. Appreciate it. See you guys soon.