8 Practical Money-Making Tips for 2026 (Part 2)

25:38So Taylor, I saw that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Taylor Holliday is basically saying that people get off of meta too early, right? He's like, you're better off just focusing on meta for almost all businesses. That can also be true at the same time, Sean. For sure. Right. But here's my argument that you should get off of meta sooner rather than later. Because eventually a business reaches a scale where they will get off of meta, right? Like Walmart spends places everywhere. So if you get as big as Walmart, you're going to spend money everywhere. And look, we're not the size of Walmart. But if you go down that chain, eventually you hit a point where you will get off of meta.

26:18And would you rather get off meta sooner and suck at new platforms and have to learn them and be challenged or get off meta too late? And then the tradeoff there is meta cax are high. And you end up giving a bunch of contribution profit because you're trying to scale something that can't scale anymore. right and the reason why i'm in favor of getting off earlier and just sucking at those channels is because even if you get off meta too late you're gonna suck at the channels anyway it's just like just because you spend an extra two years only spending on meta doesn't make you good at tiktok so it's like when you get off when you try when you diversify your marketing mix you are going to have all the problems that you're always going to face if you're doing it at a million dollars in revenue or 10 million or 100 million or a billion in revenue you're gonna suck at it regardless.

27:03And if you wait too long, you just will inflate your own cash over time. So Jason, I, can I add to that? Cause I think number one, Jason, I agree. I think people like us who are native social, like we spend a lot of time online, don't realize how many people don't spend as much time online. Right. And I see this when you just walk around through life, especially I think it's true. If you cater to a wealthier percentage of the population, they are actively being told to put down their devices from their social networks for health and wellness reasons and people are doing it so i think that's like number one there's a lot of value in offline or like non-social media uh number two i think sean on your get off meta earlier i think the nuance and what that conversation needs is i don't think it's scale of revenue i I think it's a quantity of customers acquired relative to your market that you're in, your category.

28:00So if you have acquired millions of customers on Meta over a long period of time, you might not be a massive business yet, but you may be hitting the local maxima limits of what Meta can do efficiently for you. So you could be, to Jason's point, a$20 million,$30 million,$40 million,$50 million a year business, primarily spending money on Meta. but you're in a category where like you've acquired four or five million customers the next incremental customers is really hard to get on meta and that i would argue that you should be spending more time off meta to your point sean and jason earlier in some of those in a lot of categories actually yeah and it's tuition right you have to learn what those platforms work and how they behave i'm not necessarily uh arguing in favor of going uh out of home first or immediately i'm also saying i directionally you should get off of meta and i think jason's like hey diversify the media mix so mike mike what say you so i've got two takes here one is i i have just did a really deep dive on amazon's ad system and my my big takeaway from doing it is that these online systems the bottom of funnel stuff it is so oriented towards retargeting it is so difficult to kind of get them off of retargeting behavior, even if they want to.

29:21And that it is just very difficult for them to be as incremental as you want them to be. And I'm increasingly just feeling like, gosh, I have got to move money up funnel. That just is a general thing. And that's kind of what you're saying, Jason, is like when you're talking about media mix, I think money's got to move up funnel. I mean, I was listening to our part one of this, Sean, and you were kind of making the point that AI could be disruptive in a way where like live sports goes from 3 % of GDP to 20 % of GDP. And you were kind of like, you know, I think exaggerating intentionally, but it's like, if we really think that AI might be disruptive in a way where it makes, you know, like real life experiences or things like that, events, things like that more valuable than what we're really saying is that you better get ready to move up funnel.

30:07You better get ready to move from online to offline with some of your spend. And so certainly at our company, like I'm just increasingly feeling like the push up the funnel. And then I think that your ability to reach people in unique ways with up funnel is, is hard to match with digital. Like we do things in football stadiums and stuff like that. That's very, very difficult to match the effect. It's just, it's, it's a type of advertising, but it's a very different type of advertising that I think we've seen success with. And I'll give a simple kind of, I'd say, rubric, which is that if you're looking for alpha, the alpha is directly proportional to how difficult it is for competitors to get scaled up on whatever advertising situation you're spending money on.

30:53And this is the thing with meta is it's this kind of frictionless marketplace where literally anybody in the world can sign up. And so it is just so difficult to have any alpha because you're competing against like billions of people. whereas like at University of Oklahoma football games that's a very illiquid market and there's a lot of room for relationships there's a lot of room for mispricing there's a lot of rooms to turn that into alpha with how we spend money there and so you know billboards might be this way there's there's a bunch of there's a bunch of other places you can spend money where I think there's more opportunity to get alpha and that's so I think you're right Jason I think that when you start spending your kind of capacity trying to move money up funnel and move money into different places.

31:36I don't know. It kind of depends on your life cycle as a company. But I think everybody, this is going to be something that everybody's going to be thinking more about as meta just gets more and more competitive. As a kind of a final note here, like one of the things I tell my team all the time, because meta is a very frustrating experience for us. We can't really hit the metrics that we want to very often because of how our business is structured and a bunch of other stuff but it's like i'm like well what do you expect we're competing against ridge and hex clad like and and pila and you know hex clad selling 500 sets of you know pots and pans so what they can pay for a conversion and what we can pay for a conversion is so disparate and we're in the same marketplace competing for the same eyeballs we're going to have to go to different places so anyway great point jason i agree i moved pila case to rich panel and i want to share some numbers.

32:26So the first is CSAT. We're well over 90 % since moving. We used to actually struggle with Trustpilot. RichPanel turned on their integration so that a lot of our customer reviews were now going over to Trustpilot, not just all the fake that was there. So that's a win. Other thing is our customer self-service rate is over 50%. That helps our team out so much with workloads. So if you're looking to improve your customer support stats, get higher ratings on Trustpilot or Google, and you want to save some money while doing it all, I highly recommend you book a demo with RichPanel. They're awesome.

32:53Head over to richpanel.com slash demo. Also, Please tell them you came from the operator's pod. Promise it will help you. I got two responses. And then Matt, you're coming up quick, right? Yeah. And mine flows after this. So go ahead. On the point of, Mike, you can't get Meta to work. Listen to the episode we did with Jordan from Instant Hydration, if you haven't, because he has this idea of natural CACs. Yeah, it's so good. The reality is that Meta has a goal that it wants to achieve for itself. And you are fighting against gravity, trying to get it to hit your goal. you need to change your business to you to have your goals aligned with what meta wants right and yeah and what i've learned sean is that i just need to launch other businesses because the simple modern business is so good at what it is i can't turn it into what meta needs it to be and so like i just need to do other businesses if i want to do that i'm making plenty of money with simple modern it's a great business but i can't pigeonhole it into what meta wants it to be i'm convinced like if you need customer acquisition less than 30 like i just don't think meta is going to allow you to do that consistently yeah it's not it's not the natural cac that meta wants to serve okay and the second point on the relationship business you guys do you guys all know what kill tony is yeah okay so it's like it's it's it's incredibly popular right now and if you want to buy a ad spot on kill tony it's like it's a podcast for comedians And I think they're quoting 30 to 50 grand per ad spot on that show.

34:22In 2018, me and my brother really liked going to Kill Tony because it was hilarious. And we ended up buying ads on it. And no joke, I think it was$500 in ad spot. So the audience has gotten really big. But we bought ads on Kill Tony for four years from 2018 to 2022. And I think we paid an average of$2 ,000. So started at$500, we went to$1 ,000, probably paid$2 ,000 at the end. And now the ad spots are going for like 40 grand. And that's just like, you know, the alpha is in the relationships. It's like, yeah, if I was just going there, I'm like, I got to sponsor this show. It's hilarious. Right.

34:59And so anyway, just being early in places, finding your natural interest and then building the relationships. That's where there's a lot of marketing alpha. But which is a perfect example, Sean, of what you just said, because it's a podcast, there is a relational vector. There's no relational vector with meta, right? It's not like, oh, I know somebody and we go way back and I've spent money and I'm getting special consideration. It's like, no, it's just some freaking algorithm that's looking at your bid, your click-through rate, whatever, and it's comparing it to everybody else. That's the tough thing in these digital, completely liquid marketplaces is some of these alpha vectors just don't exist.

35:36They're too efficient. All right, Matt, what's your tip, brother? Well, on the going further up final comment, Mike, I think everybody who is producing a lot of ad creative should work in this idea of stage thesis. So like the idea being that when you make an ad, your team should have a strong hypothesis on which stage of awareness that ad is for. right and i think this is important because uh we we are living in an algorithmic time right so we just upload creative and we let meta or google or whoever choose where they want to serve that ad to i have found that the more that we think about the actual piece of creative and which stage of awareness it's for the more efficient and the more reach and the better our marketing machine gets which means we just make more money i also think this helps with the refinement of your creative muscle as an organization.

36:33So if you have a thesis, let's say it's like, I'm making this video and I think it's built for people who are completely unaware of my brand. I would like to test that thesis against real world data and then have that be a feedback loop for my team. So they can say like, hey, we were wrong. Why do we think we were wrong? Or we were right. Why do we think we were right? And that further just makes you a better creative team, regardless of where you're sticking the piece of creative. So like you can use a meta or a YouTube to give you pretty instant feedback. But if now you've got ads that are like genuinely proving out as like much more top of funnel, that creative might be how you move into remnant television buys or whatever, airport TVs, urinal TVs, whatever, whatever Jason's sticking Xglad on next.

37:19I just think this is a very, very important muscle for every brand to build. Okay. And can you unpack it a little bit more? So, so what it sounds like is you're, you're just better synthesizing and understanding what the creative is achieving. Yeah. And it's also like, and simple as this, it's literally name it in your ad, like in your ad naming conventions. So like put the thesis state, like your stage of awareness thesis in the ad name so that you can easily report on it. So like when you pull your data out of meta and you see an ad that was tagged as like unaware, did it actually go and get you incremental like new reach like was it what you're saying is that that drives the metrics that you're using to evaluate its efficacy yeah like you're not wanting to evaluate that ad based on row as for example you're wanting to like you're looking at you know like how long people looked at it awareness changes things like that yes yes it's adding a bit of science to the like to the creative process okay beth that is a that is a that is a interesting tip uh i'm going to shoot this over to the marketing operators, Connor, my CMO, and make sure he's thinking about who we actually reach.

38:28But I know he loves his name in conventions. We're trying to deliver practical tips that'll make you more money immediately. This is a tip I've said about a billion times. I'm going to say it again. Send more plain text emails. So you're getting high level shit from Matt. You're going to get some low level shit from me. It's so true though. I put in here, sign up for Cuts emails. So Steven from Cuts, friend of the pod. He's been on here a couple of times. He does a great job. I told him this in Q4 and he just embraced the hell out of it. And he sends a great update. So he sends like, hey, we have a new collection coming out.

39:04Hey, here's what's happening with me and my brand right now. He treats it basically like a newsletter. And he has great, beautiful designed emails in there. He has emails driving to apps. He has deal emails. but he hits these plain text emails probably once a week. And it's like, that's where the money's being made. So they should come from the founder. They should come from the CX team. You know, at Ridge, we're co-owned by MKBHD. So we make Marquez send plain text emails to people. We're like, yeah. And, you know, I'm sure Jason has Gordon do the same thing. It's like an email from Gordon goes a long way to your list.

39:37Like explaining, you know, the why, the how, maybe giving a recipe out there. But for the holidays, we're like, hey, Marquez is like, hey, I have to buy gifts for my dad and my best friend and my brother-in-law. So I'm going to buy these three things from Ridge.com and here's why I buy these things. And money just pours in, guys. Cold emails. I love this, Sean. Sean, you know why I love this? Because here's the reason why it works. You read it. People read it. When I get Steve's emails, I'm like, wait, did Steve just send me an email? But really, when it's something that's in plain text, it just catches you.

40:13because you're not sure it's a marketing email. So it's like, oh, wait, I actually didn't just ignore it. So people are just less likely to ignore it. Yeah, it's great. And it's a higher chance it's going to land in the normal inbox, not the promotional inbox. But just imagine, hey, a note from Norton or a quick message from Gordon, right? Or like any of that type of stuff. People would eat that up. They'd be like, oh, so Gordon Ramsey's trying to talk to me. I got to open this email. So if you want to make more money right now, just A, B text it. Send a couple of plain text emails. Money's going to pour in.

40:48Well, and let me ask this question to clarify. Is what makes these work that it seems like it's coming from a person more than the company? They're like, oh, Gordon sent me an email or Stephen at Cut sent me an email or whatever. Well, here's what works. It has higher deliverability. It shows up in people's inboxes. Yeah, it doesn't get spam filtered or put in marketing or whatever. Yeah. So it has higher deliverability. Also, it has higher open rates. And then people just, it's very easy to tune out a bunch of images. So they do actually read the text. They're like, oh, what is this guy trying to say to me right now?

41:24It just, it has that personal touch. We're all founder-owned businesses. It's like, don't send emails like Walmart. I think that's a good tip for everybody. Walmart's worth 50 or$500 billion or whatever. like maybe send emails more like you're a small business because that's what you are. So that's what I like. That's a money tip. That's a great tip. It's so easy too. It's so easy to do that. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Northbeam. Northbeam just dropped something game-changing called clicks plus deterministic views. Traditional one-day click attribution is completely skewed towards bottom of funnel campaigns.

42:00Your TikTok and CTV ads are building awareness, driving engagement, lifting overall revenue, but your dashboard says they're doing nothing. Clicks plus deterministic views actually shows you which ad impressions drove conversions. Not guesses. You'll know which channels are really moving the needle and which ones are just taking the credit. And yeah, the biggest brands are already using it. Go to northbeam.io slash demo to book a demo and tell them that we sent you. Here's a principle. The principle is simple. The technology tools are so good at this point that the thing that most needs to change is you have to rewire the software in your team's brains more than you need better software and better tools that you have access to.

42:45The tools are already so much better than you. You're the barrier. You're the bottleneck. And so you need to, right now, be doing things to actively rewire the way that you think about work and the way that your team thinks about work. and it will almost immediately translate into making more money, but you have to be a forcing function here. You can't just let, you just can't tell people like, Hey, it's important that we really know what's going on because they're just going to keep thinking the way that they've always thought the way that our brains work more or less. I'm convinced for smart people is that smart people like say, okay, here's a problem and here are all my constraints.

43:24And now I'm going to creatively kind of find goal seek what I can do to create a good outcome with this problem and these set of constraints. And the really big problem that a bunch of smart people are running into right now is that you've grown up in a world where you've developed a bunch of dogma around constraints. It's just no longer true. A lot of the constraints that you thought existed in the world and that you had to kind of work around with how you ran your business. They're just not constraints anymore. You just haven't reconsidered them. And this is where forcing yourself, forcing your team to sit down and just play with the technology and to dream is actually the key step.

44:04I'm starting to become convinced. You know, like I hear cloud code is out. I'm like, I don't know that I can really do anything with cloud code. When I force myself to sit down, I start to be like, well, maybe I could start on this path. And then, oh, well, actually, now that I can do that, I could do this thing over here. And then all of a sudden, like there was a moment was like, whoa, okay, wait a second. The world opened up. So really simple example. If you're running a business, you want to know what your competitors are doing. So if you think about the way that we keep track of our competitors in most businesses, it's actually a fairly ad hoc and imperfect system, right?

44:37It's like, well, maybe somebody in the Slack posts, hey, so-and-so dropped this new design. And maybe somebody else says, hey, I saw so-and-so on, you know, in cap at Walmart and they post a picture, but it's very imperfect, very ad hoc, not systemic, not, not summarize. None of that stuff. Imagine this with cloud code. What can you do? I can set up an email address. I can sign up to every single one of my competitors emails where it gets every email from them and it clicks on every email. And then I can devise a little agent that goes and every single day summarizes all of those emails and boom, pushes it to Slack.

45:10And everybody in my team knows exactly the most important things that happened in all my competitors' emails yesterday. It takes me 30, 45 minutes to design that and now I have perfect knowledge about that. Okay, so take that kernel of an idea and just multiply it times a thousand. Every vector of information that you could ever want in running your business, you can now get at one one thousandth of the cost and effort. And you can disseminate it across your organization almost immediately. And so like I can literally, if I invest myself in the technology, I can literally know everything my competitors are doing when they're doing it and have a system that filters through all that and make sure that I know the stuff that matters exactly when I need to know it and that everybody on my team knows it.

45:56And that's just like an example. Before I couldn't do that. That like wasn't resource efficient. That wasn't really reasonable to say that we were going to have that level of omniscience about what's going on with our competitors. And you can do that with everything. You can do that with pricing the market, what's going on with, you know, whatever. So, but what you have to do is you really have to kind of force yourself and your team to play with these tools. And then you have to sit down like, and you have to define problems really well, which is what I've learned. So I have to kind of sit down and say like, well, what are all the pieces of information I look at?

46:31What are all the decisions I make in a week? What are all the things I do? And then I have to kind of start to say like, well, how could some of these things map to technology in ways that I haven't thought of before? and my experience personally is that it's been pretty mind-bidding because i'm realizing like i'm the bottleneck now like i'm just i'm trying to do so many things the way that the world used to work and it doesn't work that way anymore my advice to everybody is uh we are going to be instituting an afternoon where everybody just has to be using ai we have built an internal ai app builder uh marketplace where people can do it and we have a leaderboard and they can and we can see how many hours your apps are being used and there will be rewards and things like that.

47:14So I think the really tangible thing is you really just have to start setting aside time where you're just forcing people to interact with it. And as you do, you're going to see that they're going to start to get quite a bit better a lot quicker. And then personally, from like a personal management level, you need to really define all the things you do in a day and you need to think critically about how many of those can be programmatically improved. And what you'll come to pretty quickly is just about all of them. A lot of information in there on where the world's going. I'll just add one thing.

47:43I made a presentation yesterday, last night, that I didn't touch the computer for, right? So just speaking into Claude, explaining what I wanted to do, explaining all the different goals, things we're trying to achieve in this internal meeting. And what it put out was an amazing, beautiful Word doc presentation with everything structured perfectly and no errors. And that is just crazy with the world's going. So I had the exact same experience, Sean. I had been doing this work on some Amazon ad stuff with Trevi. I was driving back from dropping my kids off at school. I pulled up chat GPT and I put it in the audio interaction mode.

48:19And I just said, Hey, I want to draft a memo. I want you to help me with it. I'm going to talk for three or four minutes. And then I want you to ask questions. I want you to turn it into a memo. I spent, it probably took me 10 minutes, you know, while I'm driving. And I literally just talked and answered some questions and then it drafted a great memo and then boom copy paste drop it in slack and a bunch of and a bunch of channels and now i've communicated not only do i have more clarity of thought than i would have had if i typed it out but i've communicated that idea across the entire team and i did it you know during a period that usually i would have just been doing nothing listening to a podcast and you guys said we weren't doing ai today look at this By the way, you know what ChatGPG did for me?

48:57It created the entire lighting plan for my home renovation in Carmel Valley. I am now learning about how to build property. Yeah, we just bought a lot next to our house, and that's exactly the thought that I had, Jason, is that I'll use AI to design this thing from the ground up. You should see how much my construction schedule, like every room, what I need, it's all being done. So I'm able to talk to my contractor intelligently and move things along. I'm project managing this thing. It's so much fun. You want me to go, Sean? Yeah, dude. You're on third base. All right. I love it. I love it. So last one was marketing related.

49:40This one will be more operations related. I'm really proud of what we've done operationally over the last few years. We've really built a world-class operations team. And a lot of that is thanks to two of our sponsors, actually, Fulfill and Saris Analytics. And it's true. I was thinking about where did we make money or save money this year. And just our overall distribution strategy, having distribution centers in the right places and having inventory in the right distribution centers at the right time has been a massive unlock, like millions in profit this year. And we use Fulfill to manage our inventory.

50:31And then we use Sarah's Analytics to pull data and make decisions. We actually use Fulfill to pull data and make decisions too because they have some good AI in there. I was just talking to my head of ops and it's like the numbers are pretty incredible. Just by really focusing and dialing in on that operational component where is all your inventory going to be? Having it in the right place at the right time And we were really bad at this years ago. I remember, you know, we probably 2021, a couple million dollars like that we wasted by having to move stuff around and not having it in the right spot.

51:11So really investing in this area for the long term, to me, is a tip. If you're building a sustainable business, and file this under the category of know your numbers, which I talk about all the time. But I think this is a level of operational excellence that we've achieved by investing in the areas that we need to invest and really focusing on it. Totally. Really. I mean, to add some more to that, look, a lot of brands have one node, one warehouse to ship out of because it's easier, right? The problem is where are you going to put that node? Typically, you put it in your backyard. And unless you are based in Missouri, there's just not a very good one node location in America, right?

51:57Kentucky's pretty okay. People say Pennsylvania's pretty okay. Some people say Salt Lake City. But like all of them will have trade-offs where you end up going – the package goes too far to reach current customers. It's going to take a long time. It's going to cost you a couple extra dollars. So then people go multi-node, right? And you can save a lot of money multi-node, but then the worst thing to ever happen is split shipments. You lose so much money if you have to ship one thing from node A and one thing from node B, because there's no way to get around that. It's going to cost you an extra$8.

52:26And if split shipments take up more than 2 % of all your orders, you've just lost all the efficiencies of being multi-node, right? Right. The second worst thing that can happen is if you have to have someone touch a package twice. So you ship it into node A to receive it. And then, oh, it actually should be at node B. You then break it in half and you ship it over to node B. You've just done the most expensive thing ever, which is pay human labor to touch a package that didn't need to be touched. And what Jason's saying is by being on top of your data, you can avoid all of that. Eventually, everyone goes multi-node.

52:58You have to. And then never split ship. Fulfill service analytics. Understand where your inventory is going to be can help you get ahead of that. Jason, am I summarizing that correct for your audience? I love it. Yeah, thank you for making it better. That's what I do here on the Operators Podcast, making it better for everybody every day. SMS is our number one revenue driver and PostScript is the reason why. PostScript gets it. They help brands like ours turn SMS into high margin, high ROI machines. PostScript dialed in our automations and subscriber LTV tracking. They brought us more subscribers and more subscribers equals more cash.

53:32List growth isn't about getting numbers up, it's about getting buyers in. They have AI-powered SMS, instant conversions. PostScript auto-optimizes for profit, is building for the modern industry to take into account all these ever-changing laws. Brands are winning at SMS via PostScript. So if you want to try SMS like the pros, like Rich, check out PostScript today. Thank you guys for being here. All right, Matt, you have, take us home. What is the second tip to make more money right now? Inevitably, if you're a DTC brand, most of your traffic or sales are coming from Meta, Google, whatever. Eventually, you're going to turn on other markets.

54:13You're going to turn Canada on. You're going to turn Australia on. You're going to turn the UK on probably first because those are English. Then you're going to go into the rest. My God, have we got wins from just pricing new markets for the market. So like we are used to a certain margin percentage profile, gross margin percentage profile in the USA. I make a less, less gross margin percentage in other markets by pricing those markets appropriately, but more total profit by doing that. And we have tested this. I love this. Matt, I love this. This is so true. Yep. It's like, and I had to learn this the hard way.

54:50in the same market too, Matt. It's just like a principle of like, the more you try and make one thing spread across a bunch of things, it will not be optimized for anything. Yeah. It's just, it's much harder, Mike, to price channels in one market because of conflict. Whereas other markets, like I don't have any channel conflict in most of my European markets with carriers or retailers, right? So we used a tool to run like pricing tests in these markets and just measure straight up profit. We made some pretty dramatic price changes in these markets too. And the total - Was it usually up or down, Matt?

55:31Down, down. Yeah. Like, especially like going from the USA as a predominant or USA Canada is our like two big ones. And then moving into UK or EU, we just can't price the same there. Yeah, it makes sense. We're the richest market. Of course. Like people can't afford these prices. Like we have twice the spending power. Right. So like you have half the spending power in the EU. And then we looked at like competition and what are people used to spending. And then we just said like, okay, let's do like dramatic things. Let's price. Like I think one of the tests we ran was like, let's literally price at half of what we sell in the US.

56:01Same offer, but like price half. More profit. Like actually more profit. Hit the bottom line. So I just think that we get a little sort of focused on our own backyard. and if you are going to expand markets, you should think about the consumer in those markets and that they are not American. Fantastic tip, Matt. We've seen a similar thing. You just look at your competitors. If you have European-based competitors, they will have a lower price in Europe than they do in the US and that lower European price will include that. It'll include 20 % VAT. What it comes from is they just have less money.

56:37You can love Europe. You can love all the stuff going on over there. the disposable income is lower in every market besides america like america is the richest country on earth 100 um we love we love buying so i think that's a great tip and actually mike taught me this usually there's certain price points out there where a 20 decrease leads to 40 more volume right i think what uh mike was talking about you know 35 versus 29 or something and it's like look if you hit 29 you're getting 40 more volume out of that thing than if it's at 35 or there's some natural price points out there. Mike, I don't know if you want to show that.

57:13Well, the thing that we've really learned is that, you know, it's kind of interesting, Sean, because you taught me like an inverse principle, but they're based on the same basic understanding, which is the price that you can charge is highly contextualized to the other thing that the customer will see at the moment that they're looking at that offer, right? So if they're on ridge.com, like their nominal dollars that they're being asked to pay matters to some extent, but it's blunted a little bit by the fact that they don't have a frame of reference for like what other kind of comparable products might charge.

57:47And so you have more pricing power, but if you're on a shelf at target and it's literally like, here's our black Tumblr and right beside it is somebody else's black Tumblr. And right under that is somebody else's black Tumblr. Then they're going to be incredibly observant of price points. And so like we've seen in situations like that it's like hey if you're at like let's say we're sitting on a shelf and we're at$29.99 and but there's another similar looking tumblr at$24.99 right next to us it literally might be the difference between$29.99 and$24.99 is 3x in volume because you literally just like there's just some kind of like competitive function where it's like well I guess I can't consider that because I see these alternatives right here whereas we could sell it just fine on Amazon at that price.

58:34So this is the reason why each channel, markets and channels have optimal price points because the competitive dynamics are always different in them. And I think the way that I would expound on Matt's advice, which I think is great advice, is that to the extent that you're able to customize your pricing for the particular selling situation that you're in, the more effective you're going to be. Sometimes like in the U S we have to make concessions because it's like, Hey, this product's really popular. Everybody wants it. We're selling it in an Amazon target, Walmart, and we just got to kind of find the best mixture, the best price that hits, hits the three channels, the best.

59:15Uh, but we're increasingly like, man, when we can sell different products and different channels, we want to do that. And then when you get to different markets, I think it's just compounded. Jason, any response to the pricing tip? I just love what you're saying. I'm actually going to go deep on... I was just texting someone on my team about international because we've been just like... This is an area of extreme focus for us this year. And it's just pricing in general. I always meet people that say that, oh, I would love to buy your stuff, but it's just so expensive. And I'm always thinking about how do we do that?

59:50Of course, we've got to convince people the reality that this is an investment. Buying a hex pad is an investment, and it lasts a lifetime, and that's why we have a lifetime warranty and all those things. But there's just always people that can't afford it. I don't know how to solve that problem, but it's something that I've been thinking about. And we do have to... There has got to be some solutions out there, some kind of way to do it. But I think that's... Dude, this is a great episode. I learned a lot today. Dude, totally a great episode. On the price framing piece, before we wrap it up, go to the...

1:00:20So look, if you're into cars, you know these things inherently. but go to people in your life who aren't into cars and ask them what's more expensive, like a Porsche, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, a Bugatti, a Koenigsegg. You name these things out there. And a Koenigsegg is$2 million minimum to get into one, right? Bugattis are like the cheapest one you probably could buy is 800 grand. And then, you know, you can get a Porsche like$85 ,000. And what this is, is that like, there's all of these different price buckets throughout there but like they're like oh those are luxury cars and inside those luxury cars there could be a world of difference and that's just because people don't actually have a frame of reference pricing where treat your website sort of like people don't have a frame of reference of pricing and when you get to channels like amazon or target or walmart they will have a ton of frame of reference of pricing because all the prices are in front of them sean we talked about this by the way you were like yo just just price them different but you just price your website different than than amazon and and costco and and anywhere else right like that because there's very little there's very little there's much less price comparison shopping than than we probably think there is do you still have that opinion your website's your playground you can do whatever you want um but once you go to somebody else's playground it just gets way more competitive and it's like the example is you know if you're on the koan exit website they're going to convince you that it's worth two million dollars right they're like look at this beautiful experience you're going to get or whatever.

1:01:46But if you're on cars and bids or cars auction website, you're going to see it right next to a Toyota for 14 grand. And it's like, it's very hard to have all of the prestige of a$2 million car when it's been sold next to a$14 ,000 car. So that is the Walmarts of the world. That's the Amazon. That's the target. Your website's your playground. You should price it however you want and you should make it as special as you want. All right. This was an amazing episode of the Operators Podcast, episode 149. We'd like to thank our sponsors. We'll go in reverse order. Revo, Rich Panel, Saris Analytics, Northbeam, Fulfill, Postscript.

1:02:22Those are the sponsors of this podcast. Thank you for being here. What you've noticed in this episode is shorter ads. So we're bringing you less ads, but you should still have the sponsors the same. Go sign up for our newsletter. Go join eCommerce Fuel and talk to people over there because it's a great eCommerce community. You can follow us on Twitter. You can like this. You could subscribe this. You could comment to make sure that we're not doing this podcast for nobody out there. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being a part of it. Thank you, Mike, Jason, Matt. Part two is in the books.

1:02:49Goodbye. Later, boys.