In short
OPERATORS Podcast Episode Notes
Episode Title
E145: From Affiliate Hustler to Hydration Empire: Inside Instant Hydration’s Growth Engine
Episode Overview In this episode, host Sean interviews Jordan Menard, a former media buyer turned founder of Instant Hydration. The discussion centers around Jordan's transition from affiliate marketing to building a thriving CPG (consumer packaged goods) brand that scaled from eight to nine figures using innovative marketing strategies.
Key Themes
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): Emphasizing the importance of understanding LTV over just acquisition costs in running a sustainable business.
- Red Ocean vs Blue Ocean Strategy: How competition in saturated markets can indicate demand.
- Growth Engine Development: The need for a solid growth engine that includes subscriptions, email/SMS marketing, and effective ad spend.
Important Quotes
- “You make your money on the customer, not the acquisition.”
- “Red oceans indicate demand. The number one reason businesses fail is a lack of demand.”
Episode Breakdown
0:00 - Cold Open
- Introduction of the key theme: valuing the customer over just acquisition costs.
2:40 - Jordan’s Background
- Jordan shares his journey from aspiring lawyer to affiliate marketer.
- Discovery of Facebook affiliate marketing as a turning point in his career.
15:30 - Scaling Brands with Meta Ads
- Insights into how Jordan scaled multiple 8-figure CPG brands to 9-figures using Meta ads.
- Importance of understanding cost-per-acquisition and payback periods.
28:10 - Why Consumables Win
- Discussion on the advantages of consumable products over “one-and-done” products.
- Emphasis on the lifetime value of consumables.
41:45 - The Instant Hydration Origin Story
- Jordan recounts the trademark and IP battle that influenced the creation of Instant Hydration.
- The evolution of the brand name from "Salts" to "Instant Hydration."
55:20 - Building a Growth Engine
- Comprehensive breakdown of Instant Hydration's marketing strategy, including subscriptions, and email/SMS marketing.
Key Concepts
The Importance of Customer Focus
- Companies should focus on long-term customer relationships rather than just initial acquisition.
- The importance of LTV and reducing time to second purchase.
Navigating Competition
- Insights into how competitive markets can signal demand and opportunity.
- Jordan emphasizes the need to offer better products and marketing strategies than competitors.
Marketing Strategies
- Offer Structure: The importance of crafting appealing offers that resonate with customers.
- Subscription Models: Building recurring revenue channels to stabilize cash flow and drive growth.
- Adaptation and Testing: Continuous testing and adaptation of marketing strategies to optimize performance.
Mistakes Made
- Over-researching product formulas which led to initial product missteps.
- Importance of trademark research to avoid costly legal battles.
- The necessity to structure revenue share agreements carefully to avoid financial pitfalls.
Final Tips for Marketers
- Hierarchy of Influence: Focus on product and brand before tweaking offers.
- Recurring Revenue: Consider introducing membership or subscription services to create stable income.
- Customer Feedback: Always validate changes against customer preferences to avoid miscalculations.
Conclusion Jordan emphasizes the need for adaptability and resilience in the fast-paced world of eCommerce. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to explore Instant Hydration's offerings.
Sponsors
- Fulfil.io
- Northbeam
- Richpanel
- PostScript
- Saras Analytics
- Revo
Note: The episode is filled with practical insights and actionable strategies for entrepreneurs looking to grow their brands in competitive environments.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00You make your money on the customer, not the acquisition. That is such a powerful line. Like, I don't think people do realize that. We have a special episode today. It's just me, your favorite operator, and Jordan, my favorite operator. You might know Jordan from the internet. You might know him from his agency days. You might know him from, he's just a helpful guy, but he also has a killer brand. Instant Hydration is on top of the world. Turned a eight-figure brand into a nine-figure brand with Facebook ads. And at that moment, I was like, all right, this is all I'm doing. Affiliates are known for running on very thin margins.
0:32everything blows up all the time. You have to be good at a lot of stuff. You got to be able to copyright. You got to be able to make creative, even if it's hacky. You got to be able to make funnels. I would be more into selling sunglasses online if people ate their sunglasses. If you build a growth engine, the flywheel spins enough. You really do unlock unbelievable scale. Welcome to the Operators Podcast. Before we get started with today's episode, I want to thank the six sponsors that make this podcast possible. Fulfill, Northbeam, Sarah's Postscript, Revo, and Rich panel. Could not do the show without you.
1:06Here we go.
1:16Jones Road Beauty, Cody, this ad read is just for you. I use Fulfill, Grun's use Fulfill, Cutts uses Fulfill, HexCloud uses Fulfill. Why did we all choose Fulfill? Fulfill will help you move off in a matter of weeks. There's no expensive middleware. there's no third-party developers there's no consultants of upwork you got to hire fulfill will do everything you can be live in a couple of weeks for order management inventory management accounting edi purchasing and manufacturing all of those that's the the full soup to nuts uh modules that they offer pick one choose one do all of them whatever fulfill is here to make stuff work for you there's a reason why cuts left nuts week there's a reason why grooms the greatest e-commerce brand of the past five years.
1:58I was looking at all of them and they chose Fulfill. Have you seen my eight sleep scores? I'm getting 80s, 90s every single night and that's because Fulfill. I'm sleeping soundly because I know Fulfill is working seamlessly behind the scenes to deal with all of my order volume. If I do 1 ,000 orders or 10 ,000 orders, Fulfill does not care. It pipes its orders directly to my 3PL and takes care of everybody. They are the number one ERP for this podcast for a reason. They're our number one sponsor. I use them. Kutz uses them. HexCloud uses them. Groons uses them. Everybody uses them. Mention The Operator's Podcast, and you can use them too.
2:32Thank you so much. Be the number one sponsor. Thank you, listener, for listening, and I'll talk to you later. Goodbye. Welcome to The Operator's Podcast. We have a special episode today. It's just me, your favorite operator, and Jordan, my favorite operator. You might know Jordan from the internet. You might know him from his agency days. You might know him from, he's just a helpful guy, but he also has a killer brand. Instant Hydration is on top of the world. They are a huge player, very fast growing. We're not going to get into too much of those details, but you'll hear the story, how we built it and his tips.
3:06Jordan, how are you doing, man? I'm great, man. It's so cool to be here. I love this podcast. So it's rad to be on it. Little surreal that I'm just talking to you, but the good news is like we have a pretty good way of communicating. And you've helped me a lot in my career, actually. And that's something interesting about you, dude. You help a lot of people, it looks like. Well, dude, I'm sorry the other guys couldn't show up. It seems like they have real jobs or something, but... I don't get it. They're also the least favorite of the operators. So me and you, I think that's... Exactly. I only got one, but it's like only the cream of the crop, you know?
3:44Yeah, the other guys hold me back. That's what I always say. Aches, dude. Anchors. Yeah, yeah. You should go on your own. You should break free. I'm trying, dude. I'm trying. But okay. Thank you for saying I help a lot of people. There's 20 ,000 business owners listening to this. We want to give them actual practical tips. And we're going to get to that. So if you're sticking around for this podcast, you're going to hear actual stuff you can do in Q4 2025 to grow your business, in 2026 to grow your business, all that. But first, who are you, Jordan? I give you a little bit of an intro, We want to hear from you.
4:20Who are you? Yeah. So my name is Jordan Menard. I'm a Christian. I'm a husband and a father. And I sell salt on the Internet. A lot of it. I started off as a media buyer. So I was supposed to go be a lawyer, had a four ride scholarship to Southern Illinois to go be a lawyer and, you know, go do that whole thing. and in community college. And that summer I found affiliate marketing. And I had this like light bulb moment in like my little dingy apartment of like, I haven't left my house today, but I got like 300 customers, you know, for brands. And I just thought this is the future. Like this is the future.
5:04I had also interned at a law firm that summer and realized that like that work sucks. Like I do not want to do that. And so, yeah, I dropped out. I'll never forget this. Like I called Todd Graham at, at SIU and told him that I was like dropping out. And he goes, so I was standing outside of seven 11 and he goes, um, so I'm having a hard time understanding this. You are dropping out cause you're going to do what? And like, I told him, you know, like I'm going to be an affiliate marketer on Facebook. I found this way to get customers, you know, and I can, I think it's like the future. And he goes, so I just want to make sure I got this.
5:45You are throwing away the best opportunity of your entire life. Cause you think you're going to sit on Facebook all day and make money. And I was like, yeah, honestly, like, actually that's exactly what I'm doing. Um, and so it was like so controversial at first and, uh, but I just like really believed in it and I loved Facebook ads. I don't know what it was about it. It was just like straight dopamine, like, and that feeling of launching a campaign and going to bed and risking your own money, just arbitraging the payout as an affiliate and waking up and seeing if you are rich or if you are broke is awesome.
6:23Like, it's just such a crazy way to live and like start your entrepreneurial journey where you only eat what you kill literally. And then from there, I wanted to figure out like, how do I grow like really big brands, right? And I was working with a company and teaching them how to run Facebook ads for their franchises, creating a Facebook ads product. And one of their sales reps tagged me in this Facebook post. And it was like a quiz and I filled it out. And two weeks later, I got a call. It turns out it was a job application in disguise from consulting.com where I became the director of user acquisition moved to new york and uh that was the first time i spent like you know 60k 70k a day by myself on meta and kind of like opened my eyes like what i could do so then i started my own um agency working with personal brands long form creative um and we were like a boutique but very powerful like small little agency you know working with agora financial and we worked at golden hippo So, you know, Robert Kiyosaki, Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, like huge personal brands.
7:33And those people are crazy. And so I got really tired of dealing with those people, that model and selling air, as Jason Adekif calls it. And so I wanted to move into e-com. And then the first product I got, first client I got was Diff Eyewear, actually. Shout out to Chad. And my now co-founder, Zach, worked there. He co-founded Diff, but I never met him the whole time I was working there as an agency. And then I got Rise Superfoods as a client. And we had always specialized in scaling accounts. And that was the first time I ran growth for a CPG brand that was at like$1 million a month when I took it over.
8:13And we took Facebook spend from$10K a day to like$160K a day in like a year. right one of the fastest growing brands i've ever seen turned a eight-figure brand into a nine-figure brand with facebook ads and at that moment i was like all right this is all i'm doing like cpg like i know my i know my lane i found it i'm good at this i'm doing nothing but this and so i thought with rise like you know we were going to scale it into a billion dollar brand and then the founder decided to try to steal all my employees, which was super cool of him. And so I, you know, wanted to figure out like at first I, you know, had all these like insane thoughts.
8:53And then I was like, all right, well, like I say, I'm a Christian, so I can't like get revenge proper, you know? So like, what can I do here? And I was like, well, let me just get as big as a competitor, right? And I found Everyday Ghosts online, hit their CEO up and started running growth for them. And it was ads creative amazon email sms like all digital growth um did the same thing so million a month and turned them into a nine-figure brand in like 13 months and um then my co-founder approached me and he was just like hey man are you tired of creating hundreds of millions of dollars of enterprise value for uh other founders who steal your employees and send you a t-shirt and i was like, yes, I am.
9:37And he's like, you should start this brand with me. And originally it went through a bunch of different iterations. We knew like the model in general, but we didn't know exactly what we were going to do. And when we decided on electrolytes, my co-founder goes on a date one night and calls me and he's like, bro, I got it. I got it. We're starting an electrolyte brand and we're calling it Salts. I guess the chick's last name was Salts. If by some weird chance, Miss Saltz, you are listening to it. We forgot your first name and we would like to send you a check. So reach out to us. And so we get hyped, right?
10:12And we start like coming up with concepts and, you know, boxes and packaging. We're about to press like a 60K packaging order. Me and him, you know, it's just us running the business, you know, friends and family. And we go to our lawyer and we want to trademark Saltz. And he's like, are you guys high like you can't trademark salts that's like a sunglass brand trademarking sunglasses like what are we doing here and i was like yeah good point i didn't even think of that and so at first we're like all right let's just like get the the common law mark you know like let's just like run it for five years blow it up and then the you know the uspto to prevent confusion um will give us a name that is was descriptive otherwise right we saw this happen with like vitamin water and some of those bigger brands.
10:56And then like two days after that, we see a brand pop up called Salty, an electrolyte brand. And I just realized I was going to be playing brand recognition whack-a-mole for the rest of my life if I went with this. And my co-founder's on the phone with me and he goes, do we got to change it? I go, no. He's like, what do we change it to? I love salt. And I'm on GoDaddy. And I just type in instanthydration.com and press enter. And to my surprise it's available for a thousand dollars so i go what about instant hydration he goes instant hydration that's dope but there's no way we can get that url i was like it's in my cart right now and he's like buy it so we buy it we go to our attorney i'm expecting him to be like do you guys need to go to a program like you come with salts one day i tell you it's too generic you come back the next day with hydration.
11:47But to our surprise, our attorney says he thinks we're going to get this trademark. So my co-founder and I, it's meant to be, this is amazing. And that started like the longest IP battle that I've ever been in. I can't believe like the lengths that we went to get to fight over these two words. But now we're here and it's a pretty exciting time. We're growing really fast. When I first started this brand, everyone told me I was crazy because the space is so competitive. It's such a red ocean. And there's so many people that come in. And the incumbents have infinite money and we have none. And I've always been the type to look for red oceans.
12:37Red oceans indicate demand. They indicate that there's a lot of demand there. And I learned a long time ago, and I remember being like mind blown by this when I first learned it, that like the number one reason businesses fail is a lack of demand. And I'm like, so you're telling me people leverage their entire lives, their livelihood, their future, everything on something no one wants, like blew me away. And so I always looked at it as like a signal of like, there's a ton of demand there. You just have to be either a better product, a better marketer, ideally both or just even different right if you're truly different um you can stand out and so yeah now it's funny too because like a lot of those same people are coming to me being like i knew you would crush this i knew you didn't a year ago but thank you
13:30okay i gotta take a break and tell you a quick story from a few weeks ago we were at e-commerce fuel live this is andrew's live event that he does once a year it's like 200 brands. They do a great job. And this story is just too good not to share. So like, bear with me while I tell it. And I'm at the opening night party. I'm talking with Amit, CEO of Rich Panel, one of the great sponsors of this podcast. And Amit and I are having a good chat. And beside me walks in Katie to say hi to Amit. And Amit looks up and I swear to God, this is true. He goes, Hey, Matt, is this your EA? And before I could react, Katie absolutely dares him a new one and says, I am not Matt's EAI.
14:10Matt is my EA. So if you ever wanted a lesson in how to stick your foot firmly in your own mouth, this is it. Ahmet could not catch a break the rest of this event, deservedly so, right? And by the end of it, I think she actually said, I will never switch to RichPanel unless you give me a 100 % discount. Now, I know this is a strange sponsor read, but I just needed to tell the story because I think it's kind of funny. So I don't think Katie's going to get a 100 % discount, but honestly, I don't think you need it. Switching to Rich Panel is going to pay for itself anyway. They are genuinely one of the best teams to work with.
14:43I mean that. We work with them at our brands. They have more than paid for themselves in their software. So if you want to reduce tickets by like 30 % or more, save on your SaaS bill, go into Black Friday without any chaos, give Rich Panel a shot. Just go to richpanel.com slash demo. And Amit, if you're listening, dude, that's just a terrible, terrible example of what you say to somebody when you meet them the first time. Oh, and Amit promised me there's actually a super special promo code. If you use SorryKaty, SorryKaty, you'll get 20 % off your subscription. Give it a shot. Jordan, that is so much history.
15:24That's a very tight 10 minutes about how you got here we're gonna break all of that down so if that sounded interesting to the audience we're gonna break all of that down and then we're gonna dive into the future of instant hydration but i actually want to talk about the affiliate days so yeah what year was that when you were doing affiliate offers that was like 2015. okay for some reason some of the best performance marketers all come from the affiliate space so like it's not some reason right it's like the we you know in the brand world, right? Your MER goes down 10%, whatever. You still get email pop-ups.
15:59You still get add to cards. The ecosystem still grows, right? You can make that back the next day with a good email blast. Affiliate, that's out the window. You are making your, it is pure cash in, cash out. You are arbitraging a CPA, i.e. you put up your own money. And let's say the brand is paying out, you know,$40 per sale and you get them at 30, that 10 is your profit, right? So affiliates are known for running on very thin margins. Everything blows up all the time. And there's something that happens when you actually start to make affiliate marketing work, where it's like, you have to hack, right?
16:39You have to hack. You have to build stuff fast. You have to be good at a lot of stuff. You got to be able to copyright. You got to be able to make creative, even if it's hacky, you got to be able to make funnels. Like when I was first running funnels, like I taught, you know, I was learning JavaScript and HTML on like a very Neanderthal level just to make my websites work because there was no one else, right? Like it was like, I found this thing. I made a little bit of money at first. I thought I was just going to print. And then I started this like really hard road of like building up, losing everything, building up, losing everything.
17:13And I think like when you do that three times or four times, like, and you get back up, you kind of realize that you're like invincible, you know, it's like, dude, I could lose it all just, you know, it's like Jay-Z, like, I am the business, right? Like, I'm not a businessman. I'm a businessman. Like, I am the business, right? And so that's why affiliates are so some of the best marketers started there. It's truly like, and I would say they're still there, right like some of the best marketers i know are still affiliates because they never started an agency because when you start an agency you have like a hundred bosses right how many clients you have that's how many bosses you have an affiliate you don't even talk to the brand right they just the network just wires you money based off your performance um and so do you think affiliate i mean because 2015 is probably the end of the golden age right and then there was like a there was like a drought for a while and now it's it's coming back with tiktok shops and everything else Do you still think affiliate is a good place to learn marketing fundamentals?
18:14Like, or has it changed too much? It's too hard, right? Like the biggest difference is the cost inflation, right? Like when I started, like you could reliably get like a two ROAS, right? Like I remember those days where it was normal. You got a four ROAS, right? Like it was a thing, right? And so in those days, like it worked. Now, if I was, and this just happened to me, right? Like my 11 year old nephew wants to learn what I do because he sees my life and he's like, that looks dope. You know, he just has a MacBook everywhere he goes, but it doesn't seem like he ever goes to work. Right. And so it's really cool to see him come to me and be like, hey, how do I do this?
18:58And me being like, hey, dude, like graduate high school, I'll hire you. Right. And so number one would be if you have an in at like a high growth brand, do that. if not learn in an agency best thing you can do by far agencies have tons of brands tons of different business models um something i learned in an agency that's like a little bit more senior but i'm really glad i went through it is i got to i made all these dudes super rich right so i got to see what happened when they were you know pushing the brand to make it work doing everything they could to now you know they just closed a fat round with a big secondary payment and they think they are someone like they really, they drink their own Kool-Aid, you know?
19:40And so I think agency life is so good for so many things. You learn the skills, you learn the models, you learn how to think, but you also see like examples of the type of person you want to be. And so, yeah, I would definitely, I'm very, I think there's right now, I just had a VC asked me, where is the most untapped talent? He was basically trying to say like, how do I find another you? And I was like, I guarantee there's another me running a boutique agency with five clients, four clients. All of those clients are spending over 50K a day. And, you know, they're out there. They're just small.
20:13They're boutique. They're not well known. I think it's where a lot of the best talent is currently. Dude, that's how I learned. You know, very similar that I was at an agency. You were at consulting.com. You looked around. You realized you could do it better. I'm sure that's what happened, right? Yeah. So people started coming to me, asking me, I went to Tim Bird's Mastermind. And I showed Tim Bird this thing I was doing with Facebook ads. And he was like, dude, you got to come teach you my next one. I was like, are you kidding me? That would be the coolest thing in the world. So after that, I started getting side clients.
20:4590 days later, my side business is making way more than my main hustle. And my wife was visiting me in New York. And she was working in television, like casting. and she had been sitting next to me all day grinding just I'm right here she's right next to me I'm in a basement apartment in Bushwick and she's living in LA we're doing the the cross coast thing and she's visiting me and like eight hours into the workday I'm like dude she hasn't even gone up to go to the bathroom like this girl works like I work like this is the most attractive thing I've ever seen and so like the you know I finish everything and like I want to go my my buddy hit me up to go play pool at a bar down the street so i'm like trying to get her to go and she's like hold on like let me call my boss and i'm like okay and she calls her boss and her boss was just talking crazy to her over the phone right and i'm hearing it and i you know asking her if she's working how do we know you're working i'm like i was sitting next to her all day working and so she hangs up and i go how much do they pay you she tells me i go quit your job work for me started an agency.
21:51And she'd been there seven years. It was her first job out of college. And she just goes, okay. And quit her job the next day. And it happened so organically. And then I've been running. It went from that agency, e-com agency, to brand. And if I could recommend any path, that's the best one. It's the best one. Affiliate, agency, and then brand. I would skip affiliate today and go straight to agency if I was just starting out. But you just learn so much. You see so many different things. Yeah, look, so you're at an agency, you learn how the game works, then you start an agency. So it sounds like you're the guy responsible for all the goddamn mushroom coffee brands that are flooding the feeds.
22:32Yeah, I mean, partly. You know, I ran growth, right? So like when those brands work, like it's so much more than just growth. Now, growth is a big part of it, right? And I learned that when I was running an agency, I always thought there was this like ethereal business knowledge that I didn't know yet because I was just an agency owner. And I'm just focused on sales and marketing. And then I get into a brand, I'm like, oh, wow, that's like a massive part of the business. But there's a ton of other stuff too. Operations is super important. Running finances is everything. If you don't run your finances right, you're not going to be able to afford your ads.
23:14And so customer service is huge, right? And it factors into your values for as an advertiser. So there really is a whole ecosystem. But yeah, for growth wise, if you guys see Rise and Dose ads everywhere, you are welcome. And both those brands are still doing very well now that I'm not there. So it's not just me. But yeah, definitely had a pretty big impact on the amount of mushroom coffee ads you guys see. Enjoy. Hey, you know what's important to your business? Understanding it. That's where Sarah Sinalatus comes in. Jason, what if I told you that our margins yesterday were about 30 %? But there's a big difference between saying you're about 30 % and saying you're 27.4%, right?
24:00That level of precision can only happen if your data is rock solid and in one place where you can actually pull it from. That's where Sarah Sinalatus comes in for rich. So every single day I'm going in there, I'm looking at my contribution margin, I'm looking at my sales breakdown, my sales by product type, and it really just starts shining a light into like the black holes of your business. Jason, what have you gotten out of Saris Analytics? Honestly, everything is at my fingertips. Our dashboards pull in from everywhere, from Shopify, from Amazon, from our ERP, from Costco, every single channel.
24:32And we go to Saris Pulse and we get our daily contribution margin reporting. We get all of our marketing metrics by channel, by category, even down to the skew. Everything is pulled in automatically. I get an email report in the morning. I go check things during the day. My entire team lives in this thing. Yeah. And everyone knows the revenue yesterday. If you ask any brand, they'll tell you what the revenue was. Maybe 20 % of brands can tell you their contribution margin and about 0 % of brands can tell you their profit for yesterday. And if you're not watching your profit on a daily or at least weekly basis, it can just get out from under you.
25:05You know, to the Saris' team's credit, we have a daily growth dashboard sheet from probably 2018, and they're able to import all of that data. And the reason to do that is eventually Sheets just breaks. Like, we ended up having three or four full-time people, like, maintaining this giant sheet. And Saris Analytics, by putting it into an actual database with actual data connectors and pipelines, it just makes it more future-proof. I'm going to give you guys a real-world use case. So I just had to set 2026 financial budgets. Serious Analytics made that data available in four clicks compared to 40 hours.
25:40It used to take me probably literally a week or two to like figure out what my projections for the next year could be. With Serious Analytics, I got it done in an afternoon. So it's like AI for your business knowledge. And if you want to check out Serious Analytics, that is S-A-R-A-S and see how daily precise data can transform your profitability. So, you know, Diff is one of your first customers. And I like chat as well. I think Defiware is a fantastic brand. I think they're killing it. And then you eventually end up with Rise as a customer. And maybe just talk through the different economics of those businesses and why you didn't get into sunglasses, right?
26:20Like, why did it make sense to get into consumables? You saw both firsthand. I did, yeah. I mean, you know, I would be more into selling sunglasses online if people ate their sunglasses, right? But they do not. And so, you know, I think everyone kind of realizes if you're running ads today that the model is clearly moving everyone towards you make your money on the customer, not the acquisition. Right. That is such a powerful line like that. Like, I don't think people do realize that. It's like they think they're acquiring customers. I just think we should restate that like a million times for everybody.
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27:02People think the acquisition is the customer and that's how they're going to make their money. But what you just said is the clearest form, but that is wrong. Yeah, so the entire model that Meta has already realized that they can force you to play whether you like it or not because you need them for growth, very similar to Bezos saying your margin is my opportunity, is Meta's model now is they know that the best brands can make it work when they don't make money on the acquisition, they make money on the customer, i.e. the time from first purchase to second purchase and the lifetime value of that customer over a year.
27:39Why I liked Rise so much and the consumable model is that we were only optimizing for the customer, right? In the sense that we were looking at payback periods on CAC, meaning the entire CAC target had nothing to do with like front-end cash loss. It was more about in 90 days on average, what does that customer spit out and ship margin? The cash loss question then becomes how much cash in the bank do we have? And can we float that loss on the first customer till they pay us back? Because if they pay us back. And so once I found that model, I just geeked out on it, right? I started figuring out like, oh, MER is actually really useful here to understand the entire health of the business.
28:26Oh, acquisition MER is very useful for me understanding how much I'm losing when I compare that to my AOV and everything like my new customer AOV and everything like that. And so I started building out these models. And as I started building them out, I started seeing like, oh, dude, we can scale like so hard. I'll never forget going to Rashad and telling him when I went through this all. And my plan was to take the spend from 10K a day to 30K a day by the end of the month. and i tell him this and he's like bro no way he's like there's no way there's no way you guys can do that the cac is right here it can't go any higher if it goes any higher like and he was so like that and i was like all right bro look if it goes any higher like fire me i don't want to tell you like you know i i need to scale this anyway to make money so you know either let me try or fire me or whatever and so we did it it only took like two weeks right and this is where it led to this like This is the first time I saw a concept that people talk about or they connect with now on my Twitter, which is like natural cap, right?
29:31Andrew Ferris calls this marketplace cap. I found that when there was a certain number that Meta wanted to charge me for a cost per result, that cost per result was not what I wanted to pay. But I found that if I paid it, they would give me near infinite customers and the inflation on the CAC would be so far outpaced by the spend inflation that by the time that the pain of that CAC inflation was felt, I'd have so many more subscribers. It wouldn't matter. And I was like, oh, my gosh, like this. I see it. It's right there. And I thought I was right. Turns out I was. Right. And then the rise thing happened.
30:15and you know he tried to steal my employees that everything you know blew up the the main thought i had was like if i can do this one more time then i figured out something that is a feature it's how it works and it's not even me i'm just exploiting something that is real and i'm playing the game how it's supposed to be played so i this is very much affiliate brain like i think the reason why you you clicked in so much with the agency and with subscription brands is like that same sort of thinking only comes from someone who's been trained to work with affiliate marketing it's being like like you're seeing the code of the matrix being like oh this is how this is the game they want me to play right um and even now like that that's something that people don't understand what i do right like i one of our uh potential investment partner was like help me understand this you guys just run ads doesn't everyone run ads and i was like yeah but not Not everyone builds growth engines.
31:15They're like a totally different thing, right? Running ads is just one facet of the growth engine, right? But if you build a growth engine, the flywheel spins enough and you set up your numbers right, you really do unlock this unbelievable scale. And so that's what I became obsessed with, right? Like literally obsessed with that model. I'm figuring it out like, okay, so if I acquire a bunch of subs and my cat goes up$5, but I send these emails and I get the percentage of sales to go up just a little bit from SMS and email that that should offset the cat because the lists are so big. And then it works and you're like, okay, so now we have to.
31:57And it's just like I fell in love with that, that, that tinkering, that building, that, that the engine of it. and then there's this moment where all systems go and i call my media buyer and i say the same thing every single time i don't know if you guys have seen that like um that absolute hero of a man the just send it guy on the snowmobile no i haven't seen this okay well if you can cut it and show this it's perfect because but then i just send him that meme right i see all systems go i send him the meme i'm like let's send it bro and then you know those are the days where you know will spend over 150 ,000 on ads, right?
32:35And so creating those moments, those like explosive growth moments, like comes from building that engine, right? And I think you're absolutely right. That concept of affiliate marketing, of like trying to hack things, that model of thinking was forged like really early to where I don't even like think about it. Okay, so let's, I mean, this is all gold. The audience is gonna love all this. I hope you guys are listening and subscribing and commenting. But let's talk about, you brought this up a couple of times, RISE trying to steal your employees. Obviously, that was, it feels like a dagger in the back.
33:11How should they have handled that? Like, what was the breakdown that made this happen? Sorry, the breakdown to make what happen? Like, they're scaling. They're a customer. You're paying them. They're happy, right? What made them think, oh, we have to steal all of Jordan's employees? And would there be a better way to handle this? Yeah, great, great question. So I had a percent of spend deal. So when they first signed, I'm making like 15K a month. And then a year later, I'm making 85K a month. And I learned very quickly, there's something that happens when a CFO sees a over 50K line item for a vendor where you become public enemy number one.
34:00And so I think what he wanted to do was like he wanted to figure out how do I keep this gravy train moving? But how do I stop this guy's gravy train at the same time? And so, yeah, I think like that's what happened. And it's weird because at the time I thought it was like I couldn't believe it. I was so mad. But now I'm like so grateful, you know, because like if that didn't happen, I wouldn't have gone to dose. If I didn't go to dose, I wouldn't have gone to instant. Like, you know, it's all when you look back, you connect all the dots. Yeah. I mean, look, I think Rise is still doing well. So like, you know, yeah.
34:34I mean, congrats to them. But it's a classic example where like you're cutting off your nose to spite your face. I'm sure that was like a hard six month. And I'm sure that they're sweated a bunch about it. They should have just paid you the 85 grand every month. It's like if things were working. Right. And I've actually had founders who, cause this, this would happen, this happened like not to that degree, but something like it. Um, not where they like blatantly like did that, but like where, you know, the, the fee becomes too much and they don't think that, um, I'm providing the same value that I once was when really they just don't like paying the bill of the contract that they signed.
35:10um and yeah i've had multiple founders like reach back out and say like hey dude i messed up i'm sorry like i made wrong decisions after you left over and over and over um and yeah so much of like so much of marketing now is your team picking the right people it's everything it's everything right like you know are the right so if you want to win today on meta you have to whitelist right like this i don't think that's controversial i think everyone's kind of accepted this well dude i mean i think the best performers have right i think you know that we're doing a ton of partnership ads but i still think probably 80 of spenders haven't tried one yet right so like whitelisting or the new they now call it partnership ads it is well run them as far well run them as partnership ads but try them as straight up just from their profile they'll probably work better yeah yeah or like you know single handle is anything they rolled out right for sure it's like that is that is where everything's going so you and I agree on this but sorry for interrupting you no no that's good yeah I do this thing where like I assume that everyone agrees with me and then I find out that's like not true it's funny so yeah everyone you know whitelist whitelisting is a fascinating thing I'm sure you know this and can attest to it it's like you'll pay someone 26 grand for one video because they're huge and that video will do like$700 in sales.
36:35And you're like, what am I doing? And then you'll pay another person 26 grand for a video. And that video will do 3 million in sales, right? It's very, you know, very hit and miss. It's a numbers game. You just have to think of a lot of it. That's the thing that blows me away is we have this kid that, um, you went, you know, he went to my church, I knew him and he went to film school. My wife went to film school. So I'm like, I saw the talent that came from that. Like she's made so many different videos that have done a million in ad spend alone. And so we hired him to be to make ads, right? Fast forward, you know, his first three months, like, I have to have a combo of like, hey, bro, you got to get it together.
37:17Like, we're about to cut the line. He goes, I get it. Like, I'll get it together. Fast forward two months later, he has his first banger. Fast forward to today, that dude who, you know, he's been working for me for a year, regularly makes videos on his salary that outperform 26k whitelisters regularly right and it's like the team dude it's just the power of a really really well-structured a well-built team that can unlock insane growth right but without really good people the game is just too hard there's too many elements and moving pieces that you have to nail dude i i agree completely um you know we've We've had a very core team at Reg that has been around for a long time, like probably average employee tenure of three years at this point.
38:06And it's a big part of our success. All right, folks, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Northbeam, the marketing attribution platform that every smart performance team should be using. Northbeam just dropped something game changing. It's called Clicks Plus Deterministic Views, the world's first deterministic view through attribution model. Well, why does that matter? Well, because traditional one-day click attribution is completely skewed towards bottom-of-funnel campaigns. It's like giving all the credit to the player who makes the last shot and ignoring everyone who passed the ball to get there.
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40:04And yeah, the biggest brands are already using it. Manscaped, Dollar Shave Cloak, Hexclad, Grunz, and many more. So if you wanna see what real deterministic view attribution looks like, go to northbeam.io slash demo to book a demo and tell them that we sent you. Because if you're still flying blind on clicks only, you're missing the full picture. So they try to steal your team at Rise. You then do what I think is hilarious and you just find a competitor and you're like, we're going to go all in on you, baby. We're going to make this thing scale. Jack from Everyday Dose, also a really cool guy.
40:42And then that business is doing huge numbers. Sorry. Yeah. And that's when you click where you're like, okay, I understand Cactus Subscriber. I understand how this is working and we're going to take this thing to the moon, right? How long into that journey did you say, oh, fuck, we got to do this ourselves? Like, we got to, we have to do this exact same thing. Was it six months, a year? So, I mean, when I first got into e-com, right, like I would, I would rant and rave at night to like my poor wife about how one day we were going to have our own brand and one day this and this and this and this.
41:17And I was saying that for years, right? So I think it's like really important to like set your course and then like never question your fate. You know, I think a lot of people will have like a great opportunity and they'll think like, oh, it shouldn't go to me or it shouldn't, you know, I'm not right. And it's just like, never question your fate. Right. It's if fate dealt you the hand, play it like your own. And so I've always kind of lived like that and thought like that. And then, you know, I really believe that like you can make things happen. Right. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the double slit experiment.
41:54Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, scientists found that the photons behave differently, like waves or particles, depending on if they were being observed or not. They cast a different pattern onto the wall where they would pass through this cardboard with two slits in it. And this is where the observer theory comes from. And basically what they found was that the mere observation of a person watching this experiment changed the way that the photons moved. It's like, what is that? How do you explain that? Right. And then you hear people talk about the simulation, right? Because like things seem almost like programmed or like there's sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.
42:38It's too surreal. How could it happen? And I think like a big part of it, right, is like you have to believe that you can do these things before you do them. You have to know that you can do it before you go do it. I heard a quote one time. It was like, you can do everything you think you can, but nothing more. And so like I was always training my brain to like think like this. But I probably worked for other people for like three years while saying this like to my wife all the time. And so when it was time with instant, I just think I found the right or really the right co-founder found me. Right.
43:15Like my co-founder is Zach. Like shout out to that dude. He's just awesome. Like perfect co-founder for me. Our skill sets complement each other in like the most amazing ways. And we took my entire agency team and made them instant hydration. Right. So it's like the same people I've been working with for like seven years. Now we're just doing this. and I think when you live that way and you like cast a vision for your life and like you go for it and then you tell other people who are working for you, hey, like this is where we're going. One day we're going to get there and then you get there, like there's a whole new level of like loyalty and buy-in that comes from that, right?
43:51People try to steal my Amazon guy all the time and they should. He's awesome. But he gets offers and he just like comes to me and I remember one time he got this like nice one. They're actually offering him more money that I was paying him. And, but he had equity. And I go, wow, good offer, dude. Are you going to take it? He got so offended. So offended. Like, like I had to apologize. And so I think like when you live like that and like you really see it, then like you bring things into the world that otherwise wouldn't exist. And like even those thoughts, like I really do think there's some type of like double slit theory phenomenon of like, I don't want to say manifesting because that has like a very new age, weird connotation.
44:35But I really do think that like the universe is more malleable than we believe it would be. Bro, I've manifested my whole life. So I'm all about that lifestyle, dude. Okay, so you find a co-founder, Instant Hydration launches. This next part of the podcast, next 20 minutes, we're just going to talk about all things Instant Hydration. So you brought up it being a red ocean. Everyone on earth would have told you that, oh, you know, there's Element and there's Liquid IV and there's all these things. Like, there's no way you can build a nine-figure fast-growing brand in this space right now. You've done it.
45:10You've done it after all of them. And you brought up that like more companies die of starvation, right, than competition. It's like if there's not enough customers out there, you can't acquire anybody. What really made instant hydration stand out? Like, was it the marketing in the back end? Or is it just, it's a huge TAM and anybody can win? Well, I mean, it's not a huge TAM. It's a huge TAM. Not anyone can win, right? Like, electrolyte brands are always rising and falling in America, right? Like, it's, like, always happening. And there's a big thing in the space that I didn't know about until I got there, but the 50 million number, right?
45:49For some reason, electrolyte brands can get to around the 30 to 50 million number. And then it's very hard to get beyond that. And then they become very undesirable. And then they have a hard time winning market share. And there's this kind of like spiral that happens. I think for us, like, you know, my co-founder and I are very, we're down for the scrap, you know, like, I'm not really like afraid of like challenging a big incumbent if I actually think I can win. Right. And that's the only thing. Like, do I actually believe I can win? And so when he first gave me that idea, I'm, you know, I'm just like a nerd by trade and by mind, you know, I just ripped the literature base apart and start finding every piece of clinical literature that supports these products.
46:40Right. All of the literature really centers around what's called oral rehydration solution, which was used by who and a few other, you know, in areas where there was really gnarly famine and people were dehydrated like severely. they found that they would give them this oral rehydration solution which was an electrolyte drink and they would recover like very fast and so it was like that was really interesting to me because i saw that like the science was real and then i started doing more research and i noticed that um 60 to 80 percent of america is deficient in potassium and magnesium and most of them don't know that and then i looked at all the electrolyte brands on the shelves and no one had a lot of potassium.
47:22No one had a lot of magnesium. It was all sodium. And I was like, why, why would you not put that in there? Right? So when I came up with the first formula, it was like, by the time I was done with it, and I really learned the last thing that set me off is when I understood the difference between mineral salt and table salt, right? All salt is mineral salt naturally. But when you when we manufacture it, we process it like rigorously to strip it from every single trace mineral. those trace minerals think of hydration like a key and lock right hydration is not water going into your body it's water going into your cells so think of hydration as a key and lock the big teeth on the key are your sodium your potassium your magnesium your your big minerals that will let the key go into the lock but it won't turn the little teeth are the trace minerals which are actually more bioavailable than the big electrolytes themselves if you look at a lot of like liquid id reviews.
48:20Some people say, why does this make me more thirsty? Well, it's because you just dumped 500 grams of table salt into your stomach directly. That's why. And so I had this moment of like, oh my gosh, like these big brands that everyone thinks is amazing are low key slipping. We can make a better product. And then I was like, but instant hydration is a better brand. So wait, I have a better brand and a better product and I can market better. And like from that moment, once that once those three clicked it was like i'm gonna kill liquid iv like that's it like i can do this um and at first like again everyone said it was insane and i remember people asking me why are you so excited about this market like what's you're not doing anything new and i was like i know but it's better right and then on this on the road there were so many times we had a co-man hey call me hey we'll save you a bunch of money i'm like how he's let's get on a call we get on a call he's like you guys use magnesium is glycinate chelate.
49:20We can swap this for a magnesium citrate malate. No problem. You guys will save a lot of money. And I go, oh, OK. Yeah, we know we're good, though. And he goes, you don't want to save money. I go, no, I do. But magnesium is glycinate chelate is better for a few different reasons. And he goes, dude, no one knows what that is. No one's even going to care. They're just going to see magnesium. And I was like, yeah, you're right, probably. But there's real data that says that it's more bioavailable. It's more absorbable. And if someone has a magnesium deficiency and they get that and it actually absorbs, it will feel like magic.
49:53So we're going to bet on the product. And, you know, the answer to why it succeeded is like all of those things. Better brand, better product. And then the kicker was savage marketing on the back end. And I think all things combined are why we won. Okay, but I want to actually break down the percentage. Like, how important do you think marketing is versus brand? like it's 100 % pie, right? Do you think it's a third, a third, a third? Because you guys have great brand, great product and great marketing. But if you had a stack rank, which one are you taking? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a, it depends on which part of the business you're talking about, right?
50:30Like a cool brand name will get someone to try a product for sure, right? Cool brand name, great marketing, that'll get someone to try it. That's not where we make our money is people trying it. We make our money on our customers, people that stick with us. so it has to be a good product right it'd be hard for me to break it down in this and i'll say it like this i think like the term brand is widely misunderstood right a lot of people think because they have a logo and they have a design set that they have a brand but really they have an e-com business with a logo and design set right a brand is people know you they remember you it's the trust currency that the general public has with your brand with your company right that's when it becomes a brand.
51:12And so I think a lot of people will make this like weird, false dilemma of like, oh, this ad is not on brand. Right? It's like, what does that even mean? What does that even mean? Does it acquire a customer? Is that customer profitable? Does that customer have good LTV? I always say good LTV customers are on brand. I don't care what the ad like. And so I think there's like a line of like, you can have it both ways. Where it's like, everyone thinks it's direct response or brand but i think if you combine them you get the best of both worlds if i had to split it up it'd be really hard to but deep in my heart i do know that like the fact that it's called instant hydration is there's something there like there's a reason that um it's it's appealing right it's out it's it's exactly what it is and it sounds appealing and so you know i definitely think that's a part of it dude for sure i mean look uh it has to be i think you have the trifecta We have all three things going.
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55:13This year, we'll probably double again,$100 million in SMS probably because of PostScript. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast. Thank you, guys. Talk to you later. Let's talk about some mistakes you've made in building instant hydration. So, I mean, you've had a long, storied career. I think affiliate is a great place to learn this stuff. I think having an agency that's actually cashflow and profitable and scale two brands, that's awesome. But like you still were launching an e-com for the first time. So what are some mistakes? Ooh, got a bunch. Number one, this one probably cost me at least a million bucks.
55:51I went too far down the research rabbit hole. and I made a formula like purely based off like what I thought would be best based off the math and it was way too salty and eventually we lowered the salt level to where it is now and everything went way better and I felt just so dumb, like so insanely dumb. That was a big one, right? And that one taught me that like at the end of the day, like what what makes your customer happy it outweighs like everything like yeah i thought that and i had some customers hit me up why'd you take out the salt like that's you need that and i was like i know but you know more more people wanted less so i recommend just like pouring half a packet and you'll get more potassium and magnesium too um and so that was a weird moment of like where i thought I was making the right decision because everything was clinically backed and we can, you know, that, that trickles down of the claims you can make in your ads and on your packaging.
56:56And, um, and I was so wrong. I was so, so wrong. And so that was like a really good lesson for me. Another one, which I'm now noticing a theme here. Um, I went super into like LTV modeling and I made a change based off what I thought would bring our blended LTV up 18%. And that worked. It did come up like 20%. The only problem was Cat came up like 55%. And so I felt like I blew up the whole growth engine, had to rebuild and get it working again. And yeah, I think those are two of the biggest ones I personally made. We as a company, few others. When you pick a brand name, do your trademark research beforehand.
57:48Like start early, make sure that you can get the trademark before you go build a brand around two words that you love and are really cool. Because I ended up spending, I don't want to say the exact number, but let's just say multiple seven figures after it's all said and done to own our brand, right? And that's just cash that could be in my bank had I not, like had I picked something a little bit less contended for, we shall say. And then last thing I'll say is be very mindful of your rev share agreements with your partners. They can get out of, they can spiral out of pocket quickly. and you can find yourself in a weird spot where your best-selling product with the best hack has a royalty that makes it very hard to understand how that is this profitable or not and so structure your agreements well because that also cost us a lot of money.
58:48All great tips. We're launching a new brand over at Ridge. I won't tell you what it is but a name we tried to get was Format and you can't get the name Format. It's like, it's the same sort of problem. It's like, oh, it's a descriptive. There's a million people out there doing it. So we've had to pivot the name. Jordan, I think you're a marketing genius. I think you're killing it. There's a lot of people who would love to have some of that success as we end 2025 and in 2026. What do you think the best marketing tips are? Where should people start? If you had to breathe life into a business and you want to restart that growth engine, is there a couple of places you'd start looking to diagnose any problems?
59:29Yeah. So I have, I have like an internal framework. Um, I call like the hierarchy of influence. And it's like, if you imagine a pyramid, right? Um, different elements of the marketing funnel or process will have different effects on the profitability of acquisition, right? At the top is probably the product, why people buy it, right? So let's assume that one's fixed. Number two, I would say would be brand, right? Being a part of something. Let's assume that one's also fixed. Number three is the offer. If you are having a serious hard time growing, right? I think the first thing I would say is you've got to keep it real.
1:00:08I've seen so many people try to convince themselves that their model was not bad when it was. I've seen so many people try to convince themselves that they can make creative out of an offer problem. You can't do that, right? The same creative to a good offer will work that you're running to your bad offer. So I always start with the offer, right? At Everyday Dose, the biggest change that I made came two months in when I changed the offer. That change changed everything, right? Literally, the whole thing. To this day, it's still ripping. And so I would start with the offer, first and foremost, right?
1:00:43It's also malleable. You can change the offer every six hours if you want to, right? It's hard to change the brand, hard to change the product, but the offer can change rapidly until you find success. Exactly. And that is the first thing I would do. right change the offer until i'm looking at meta and meta is telling me raise your budgets dude like it's working you know um get that first right when like when we test like a good whitelister a good piece of creative like the initial results will be outrageous right the cac's like 15 or something right when we pay way more 20 30 and that tells us we got a potential scaler here right But if it doesn't start that low at low budgets, then why do you think it's going to work?
1:01:29It's not going to, right? And so I think that model element is so huge. It's like pick the right model, build the right ship and build the right size vehicle, right? Like for the environment you want to win in. And then, yeah, augment the offer, right? There's gold there. I promise you. I promise you. And then the second thing I would say is like before you do the classics like media buying, creative, like those are that's tape sticks right always check those things but let's just presume that those things are like okay right it's very easy to tell someone go make better creative go get better webisters like um if i was hypothetically right let's say that like you weren't god of meta and uh ridge was struggling right um i would look at like okay how can we get some type of recurring low cog revenue into the business with the amount of customers that you have right so some type of $9.99 per year loyalty group that gets a bigger Black Friday discount, bigger everything, early product drops, Discord group, some type of community, and see if I could build some type of revenue kicker that just pads our MER a little bit.
1:02:40And then the other thing I would start looking at is like, okay, what's the gap from first to second purchase? How do I shorten that? Right. There's a lot of data that makes it like pretty clear that the customers that have the highest LTV also have the shortest gap between first and second purchase. So I would start thinking looking right there. Right. Like I just did a test on our confirmation email. Right. That's not something that people think like, oh, you can you can have a big lift there. Right. But just by restructuring things, same function, right? But just by restructuring things, making an offer instead of just telling people there's a lift, right?
1:03:22Like there's a lift. And so I think that's what I'm really glad about like info marketing is that it taught me how to like build entrepreneur flows. And like, because with info marketing, lots of times you'll have like a, let's say like a self-liquidating offer, an SLO on the front end of like 20 bucks. you pay 40 for the sale because in a week they're worth 120 from all your email and sms flows right so i think if you're really struggling to grow it's like offer and then start augmenting that first to second purchase so you can pay back that cac sooner and start to spin that flywheel for your growth engine yeah look an affiliate is a game of inches right it's like finding one percent wins wherever you can finding whatever you can to actually make that those margins work um dude it's a classic thing the world's best bit like if you have a great business it can be run really poorly right like saudi aramco is ran horrible and it's because it's the world's best business it's like they can hire 8 000 second cousins to be vps all making a million dollars a year right that's really how saudi aramco's ran and when you have a horrible business you have to run it incredibly well and that's affiliate marketing right and those skills translate to something better, right?
1:04:33You have that innately in you now. But it's like, if you can take those skills and then go into the hire your alcoholic uncle as VP model, then you really crush, right? Because you take that skill set into the business model, which is super forgiving and you can really send it, right? And I think that's why the model is so important, right? Like pick something that like will cover your mistakes, not expose them. Dude, totally. And that's why I've never talked to Zach from from DefiWear, but I imagine just IWear is probably a lot like wallets. He's probably beating his head against the wall trying to make this thing work.
1:05:10Right. And he's like, oh, I should sell something that's easier. And bam, he unlocked it. Yeah, exactly. Right. I was just talking to him about this two days ago. Right. Because we were just remarking, like, it's pretty crazy that he wanted to go into CPG and then just by chance found me as a co-founder, right? Like, that's wild. Like, what happened there? He said the same thing, by the way. He's like, dude, I manifested it. I manifested it. Like, I, you know. But yeah, that's where the eat your sunglasses line comes from, right? It's from him. Because he says that. He's like, look, if people get your sunglasses, the brand, you know, but the model's just too brutal.
1:05:47And yeah, that's what I mean on, like, you can see the change coming and stand your ground, or you can see change coming and ride the wave. And whatever you do on that is going to, that's who you become, right? If you're going to be the stand your ground guy in the face of change, like you're going to be tweeting about how meta sucks all the time, right? If you're going to be the guy that's trying to ride the wave, you won't tweet about your numbers because you don't want folks to know, you know? So it's like, I mean, it's that model and that thinking is a lot more impactful than people realize.
1:06:21Dude, I just want to go back to one tiny tip you had, which is find easy, reoccurring revenue, right? It's like, it doesn't ever feel natural for a durable brand to do that, right? If you're Mike from Simple Modern, how are we going to get people to give you three bucks a month every month automatically charging their credit card? But like, your life will be so much easier if you're not starting every single day from$0, right? If you can actually have some sort of billing subscription, find a way to cram that in. Some people want to give you money for it, I guarantee. Correct, and like, don't sleep on things like loyalty programs and paid membership programs like Jason from Doe Lashes, like so much money to the bottom line came from that program that he started.
1:07:01He never thought it would be like that. And then those people become your best customers. Right. And so it's like just thinking about how to build those MRR models into your business. Like even if it feels foreign at first, there is a more natural fit than you realize. There are people who actually want something like that. You just got to craft it well dude jordan all right i'm gonna give you the last word what do you want people to know say hear one line one sentence how how should we end this podcast um instant hydration is made with the best salts on earth and uh we're running an incredible early black friday sale for 50 off um so you can hydrate rehydrate with the best salts on earth so go quench your thirst instantly at instantidration.com.
1:07:45Dude, instantidration.com slash Sean. You'll get to get a free box. You get a bunch of huge offer. It's going to be unbelievable, but it's subscribe only. You have to subscribe to the Sean offer, man. All right. We'll make that if you're serious. So if you want to be an affiliate, man, we got good payout models. Dude, I'm always looking for new ways to monetize. Thank you to our awesome sponsors, Northbeam, Rich Panel, Saras Analytics, PostScript, Fulfill, Revo, everybody. But seriously, Jordan, thank you for being here. I really appreciate it, man. You're on top of the world. You're a good friend.
1:08:17You're an ally, and I'm glad you're winning. We'll end the pod there. Thank you. Thanks for all you do, man, and thanks for all the help you've given me.
From the publisher
“You make your money on the customer, not the acquisition.” In this episode, Sean sits down with Jordan, the media-buyer-turned-founder behind Instant Hydration, to unpack how he went from affiliate marketer—only eating what he killed—to helping scale multiple 8‑figure CPG brands into 9‑figure powerhouses using Meta ads, tight payback models, and a true growth engine mindset. They talk about why red‑ocean markets like electrolytes are actually a signal of demand, how to think about LTV, subscriptions and time-to-second-purchase, what really happens when a founder tries to steal your team, and the wild IP and trademark journey that led to the Instant Hydration brand.Chapters:00:00 – Cold open: “You make your money on the customer, not the acquisition”02:40 – Jordan’s story: from almost-lawyer to Facebook affiliate marketer15:30 – Scaling 8‑figure CPG brands to 9‑figures with Meta ads28:10 – Why consumables, LTV and payback periods win over “one-and-done” products41:45 – The Instant Hydration origin story and trademark/IP battle55:20 – Building a true growth engine: subscriptions, email/SMS, and sending it on ad spendPowered By:Fulfil.io.https://bit.ly/3pAp2vuThe Only Cloud ERP Designed to Efficiently Scale 8 and 9-Figure Brands. Northbeam.https://www.northbeam.io/Richpanel.https://www.richpanel.com/?utm_source=9O&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ytdescSaras.https://bit.ly/9OP-YtdescRivo.https://www.rivo.io/operatorsSubscribe to The Marketing Operators Podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/@MarketingOperatorsSubscribe to The Finance Operators here: https://www.youtube.com/@FinanceOperatorsFOPS Sign up to the 9 Operators newsletter here: https://9operators.com/

