How to Create Buying Moments: Give People a Reason to Buy All Year

21:04Sean Frank:Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for D2C and e-commerce brands. Inventory, purchasing, warehousing, financials, all in one system built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet, not one, that has more direct 3PL integrations than Fulfill. They integrate with over 400 3PL locations globally, and most of you listening to this right now are either running your own 3PL relationship or you're about to. and the second your 3PL and your ERP are talking to each other in real time, you're flying blind. You don't know your true lander costs. You don't know your real margin.

21:34Sean Frank:You're reconciling spreadsheets at 11 p.m. trying to figure out where$40 ,000 went. I know because I am on Fulfill. The visibility we have now versus what we had before, it's not a marginal improvement. It's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up for DTC and it's not some vibe-coded piece of crap. Believe me, those exist. Fulfill isn't one of them. Go check out Fulfill. tell them Sean's saying. Sean, high level, how has sweepstakes done this year for Ridge? Oh, it was fantastic. I mean, July, multi-eight figure month. August, multi-eight figure month.

22:10Sean Frank:Growth averaged across both those months over 50%. Those are our two sweepstakes months and they are delivering outsized returns and outsized results. We're super happy with it.

22:19Matt Bertulli:It's like brands who literally take over like Black Friday, like Cards Against Humanity when And they became a potato chip company. Like they just every year, on Black Friday, they're like, we're going to sell this year. Like they just always do something that I think is hilarious just to hijack it. That might be an interesting one for us to go after. I don't know. Those are my two ideas. Okay. The other thought that I had is, and I don't know if this fits with what we're talking about it because it's less scheduled. but using your brand to take advantage of kind of one-time opportunities that bubble up to run something promotional because of an intersection with the social trend or the news or whatever.

23:01Obviously, Sean, you guys have done a great job at this at Ridge. Matt, do you see any other brands that you really admire how they've done this?

23:08Matt Bertulli:I want to give people a local example. So it's not like a big national thing because I think that there's lots of like sean's playing at a very large like national u.s scale so i had a friend years ago he ran a chain of baby stores baby retailers right i think they had nine locations they had a pretty big e-commerce business he created this day every year he worked with like local fire departments in every city that he was in and he created like national car seat safety day right like we just made it up one day and he'd have the police and the fire departments come out and he told people, if you're a new parent, we're going to have all of these pros come by and show you how to install your car seat.

23:48Matt Bertulli:Turns out he also sold a lot of car seats from this event. But it created an entire movement and moment for his company and it crushed. And he just made it up. That was a completely fabricated event. I think it's such a good point that obviously the people listening to this podcast have a variety of different size businesses and you don't have to have Tony Hawk to do this really well. You don't have to be giving away a Lamborghini. I mean, another big brand example, Chick-fil-A had a dress like a cow promotion day. And I don't remember if you got a free sandwich or free ice cream. The only reason I really remember it so vividly is Brian has one of those inflatable cow costumes that has like these really like obscene udders on it and worn around the office all day.

24:35But it's just a good example of like, whatever your brand is, there is some surface area to create some uniqueness, to create some draw. And I think memorability is really what the game is all about. Like you said, Sean, we're trying to stay front of mind with people and it's an attention economy. This is another way to capture people's attention.

24:55Matt Bertulli:Yeah. I think Gymshark also does the, I don't know if they do it anymore, but I remember the Gymshark 66 thing. We're like for the first 66 days of the year, it's like a UGC campaign. I don't know if you guys have done this, Sean, but like the whole idea is document your new habits. And then I guess they choose a winner and the winners get like a whole year supply of free Gymshark stuff, right? So it's like, it's kind of meet the moment of new year, new you, but then create like a longer running campaign that serves a purpose. Like they're very creator heavy as a brand. So like you just got a ton of content.

25:28Matt Bertulli:I think that's a good example. All the big guys do it. Starbucks does Red Cup Day. like there's lots of lots of companies who like create non-promotional moments if the thesis of

25:41Sean Frank:the episode is like find time on the calendar that you can own in a special way because q4 is too noisy right father's day mother's day there's a lot of competition there just find something that your brand can can go out there and do the reason why we chose sweeps over a day is i think it's really hard to make a day work, right? Like there's like a lot of pressure on that. It's by nature, it's anniversary. So like you can only do it once a year. Where sweeps, it's like, look, we could buy ourselves 45 or 60 days. If we've come up in the beginning, gives us a lot of time to course correct. So that's why we chose this like more of like a whole time period.

26:17Sean Frank:I would really like, you know, I think of it as Nordstrom's private sale or whatever, right? Like if you're a credit card shopper at Nordstrom's, you get like this access to this event before everybody else. That's why we chose this for sweeps or McDonald's Monopoly. It runs for a month or two months or whatever. But those are all great examples. You should strive to have some time period on the calendar that is yours that you can go out there and defend.

26:41Matt Bertulli:Sean, can you expand on the comment on the day? So you said it's better to have a 45-day period because you've got lots of room to move and change and add stuff, take things away. But if you try to hijack just a key moment in the year, So like a Mother's Day campaign or a Black Friday, like why do you, I understand why you do it, but like, are there any brands that do a good job of taking like a Black Friday and turning it into their own?

27:08Sean Frank:dude, it's flashlight versus a supernova. You're never going to make a big impact on Black Friday. Why is Prime Day in July and how come they just didn't turn Black Friday into Prime Day? It's because even Amazon that has half of all GMB cannot compare to just the cultural significance that we grew up going to places on Black Friday and shopping, right? I don't think you should try to own anything in the back half of the year. It is too difficult.

27:36Matt Bertulli:I actually think it's even hard to repeat that, Sean. Like, even if you could, let's say you like do your Patagonia one year. Remember the Don't Buy This Jacket campaign? Like, crazy viral. Dude, they didn't repeat that the next year. Like, you just, it's so hard to like pull off something like that year after year. What you're talking about is like, no, we have a system. There's a playbook. It's repeatable. It's clear space. Like, it's just more scalable, I think.

28:01Sean Frank:Yeah. And dude, the internet is not designed for single points in time anymore. It takes multiple days, multiple times along the internet, multiple ads being served for people to even understand what the hell you're talking about. So trying to do it all in one day, I think is just too difficult. Even a week is too hard, right? Like our sweeps is a minimum of 45 days because that gives us time to get ads on TV. It gives us time to launch a bunch of different creative and an A, B test what's working, what's not working. So, you know, hats off to those people who've been able to carve out a day on the calendar, right?

28:34Sean Frank:There's still probably some days left. You know, I don't think anybody's doing Earth Day. I think you probably own that if you were Patagonia or whatever. But if you're a new brand trying this, you got to make it more of a full campaign event for a month. But you mentioned it, Sean. There's different consideration windows. but it's very rare that you can get a very large number of people to make a decision like right now about a thing no matter what it is i mean one of the things we've even i think we're in a very impulse category in drinkware but even with us we have seen the behavior of putting things in cart and letting them sit there for a week or two before they purchase go up and up and up year after year that people are almost using like their carts like a bookmark system more and more and so like the longer your period.

29:21Also, I can't even count how many times there have been these one-day events where I'm like, oh, I really want to go to that thing or I really want to do that. And I don't because I end up having something that comes up and it's like, oh, I missed that. So when you have a longer period, I think you're obviously going to get more participation. One of the things that I think you guys have seen, Sean, is as your product catalog has grown, that's obviously benefited sweeps. Can you talk about why having a large product catalog and having multiple different things you can sell really helps when it comes to filling your calendar with special events?

29:57Sean Frank:Yeah. So everything has a unique peak, right? Like, yes, Q4 is a big peak for everything, but wedding rings have a peak in the summer. Luggage has a peak in the summer. Wallets have a peak in Q4, right? You know, we talked about TechTember. Tech products have a peak in September and October. The actual demand for phone cases is higher in September than it is in Black Friday because people are getting their phones now and they need to buy phone cases now. So the more product categories you offer that are different, the more peaks you naturally set yourself up for throughout the year. If you're selling roses or chocolate, your peak is not Q4.

30:38Sean Frank:Your peak is going to be February. So there's inherent peaks to product categories. The more broader categories, just the more service area success. You're going to be able to sell things more often throughout the entire year. And if your business is naturally very peaky, right? My Q4, if I did nothing, would be 80 % of my revenue. Your goal is to normalize that out. My perfect business is every month is doing a little bit less than 10 % of my revenue. Because then I can plan. My life is so much easier. I can plan cash. I can plan inventory or whatever. But like we are not, you know, subscription Netflix, right?

31:16Sean Frank:Like our revenue is going to be peaky and it's your job to fight that natural forces of nature. So one of the things that we've learned in this area is that smart operators have higher margins during their sales than you would expect. And the reason that they're able to achieve this is because they only put a targeted portion of their product portfolio on sale. And it turns out that sales drive a lot of foot traffic, but they don't necessarily always buy the thing that's on sale. Often, they buy some of your best stuff that's not on sale. So one of the ways that you can be on discount more often while still keeping your margin profile high is by being really intelligent about what you put on sale, promote the sale, but then also have some of your best stuff at full price.

32:00The larger your product catalog, the easier that is to do.

32:04Matt Bertulli:Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming. are you ready? Not in the normal marketing calendar offers prep sense. I'm talking measurement and attribution. Are you even going to know what winning and losing looks like when the big Q4 season hits? Reality is the businesses that win set up their measurement solution when the times are slow, not the night before the big weekend. There's a reason for this. You see, with NorthBeam, you're getting a totally independent, completely new set of ad performance numbers with infinite look back windows. That means that the longer that the data grows, the more valuable it becomes.

32:36Matt Bertulli:So when CPMs are spiking in November, you will know precisely where every dollar is coming from while your competitors are guessing. This is important. Black Friday is one in the summer, not the day before. Book a demo with North Beam today. The link is in the description. Go check it out. So Sean, where do you go from here? You're like, Like Lamborghinis and Tony Hawk, are we going to the moon? Like what is the way to take this to another level? He's actually going to give away a seat on a space flight. That's going to happen. I think we're right now in real time figuring this out.

33:14Sean Frank:Yeah. We have a campaign idea that I'm not going to leak. You know, I have to get a lot of buy-in, right? We have a creative director. We have to get celebrities bought in. It's a whole thing. one other way we ratcheted it up throughout the year is adding more geographies so this is the first year we've added australia and the eu and there's probably no more geographies for us to add but there's probably ways to do those geographies better right so going back to the sean frank classic principles three ways to increase revenue you can sell more products to more people more places so you can either expand what you're selling the target demographic or the geographical regions you're going to sell into.

33:52Sean Frank:And with sweeps, we've been able to create new products that work well for sweeps. We've been able to kind of nail this car guy demographic, but are there other people we should be going after? But then we have done a great job going to all these different countries. So Canada, the EU, AU, and the UK were available in all those markets. So I think you'll just see us try some different stuff. I think there's probably room for a female-focused sweeps at some point, right? We could probably give away a wedding or something. So we'll let you guys know how it goes. And you mentioned this earlier, Sean, that you've seen some brands that are more female focused maybe struggle with this.

34:25Obviously, the male demographic, things like fast cars and giveaways, that's going to draw eyeballs, draw attention. Do you think that there are some demographics where this is not going to be effective or where you would take a different approach if you were going after that demographic?

34:42Sean Frank:I think higher-end consumers would not like this. I think they'd be turned off by it or confused by it. But like sweeps appeals to people who like McDonald's Monopoly. And I like McDonald's Monopoly. So it appeals to me, right? That is me. Guys, I literally like, I literally at one point when I went into McDonald's when I was a kid, they had a huge cardboard box because you could go in and you could ask for free pieces. And they pulled it out and they took a couple of things out of there. And I literally like thought about how could I steal the box? How could I get all of the pieces in the box?

35:17Matt Bertulli:It might be... I am not this person. Yeah, like some people, you know, kind of scheme about how to rob a bank. I just wanted to steal all the Monopoly pieces.

35:27Sean Frank:Yeah, dude, look, I'm right there with you. So anyway, like if you're Mike, you like sweeps, right? I think there's a lot of customers who don't. I do think it's really hard with a female demographic because people see what we've done. They're like, oh, we should do it for cars. Guys, I hate to break it to you. Women don't like cars that much. You know what I mean? Like, so you're going to have to find a unique angle for it. I think there's a way for us to actually crack it next year and maybe we can end up doing it, but you should just know your customer. And if you don't know your customer, do a test.

35:57Sean Frank:Like try to give away something worth$5 ,000,$10 ,000, right? I think that's how Jason and Hacksclad have started getting into sweeps. It's like they just did a small one and they've worked their way up to this big golden ticket campaign. So Sean, the biggest pushback you'll get from people is, oh, this is terrible for my brand. If I'm constantly running promotions, sweepstakes, like sales, this is killing my brand equity. What would you say to those people? Well, the first one is nobody cares about your brand that much, right? Like you be honest about what perceived value you really have, right?

36:28Sean Frank:And I talked to a brand, I think he was on, you know, maybe it's a future help and operators episode, but we were talking about, it's a multi-thousand dollar product. And he's like, yeah, I can't run discounts or like people are never going to buy it at full price. And I'm like, people are never going to buy this again. You know what I mean? Like you have to, like if you're a single time purchase, incentivize the hell out of that first purchase, right? Like, you know, my Eight Sleep. I think Eight Sleep's a great product. I think it's four or$5 ,000. They sell a hell of a lot more if they just did flash sales all the time at 2 ,500 or 2 ,900 bucks, right?

36:59Sean Frank:I think they're shooting themselves in the foot trying to defend this brand equity piece when you really just need to get people over the finish line, right? So my first piece of advice is nobody cares about your brand that much, okay? My second piece of advice is, yeah, look, there's always something discounted on Ridge.com. We have a sales section. If you are a discount-focused shopper, you can go there and make a purchase. To Mike's point, it is less than 15 % of our sales are coming from the stuff that's discounted. Most people want what they want. They want the coolest color or they want whatever speaks to them.

37:33Sean Frank:Everyone knows this is who they are in their own life. You go to a website. Are you going to buy the shirt that doesn't fit because it's cheaper or are you going to buy the shirt that fits because that's the one you want. That's just the way people are going to work. Now, there are 20 % of consumers who are discount only and have the discount stuff on the website for them, right? For the most part, you can get a lot of sales being full price. And what Sweeps does, it's just one of 10 different discounting options, right? Or promo focused options. Rotate through all 10 of them throughout the year, right?

38:03Sean Frank:So yes, have your straight percentage off site-wide sales. Those are totally fine. Then do a gift with purchase. We do a lot of those, right? Right now you can get a free USB cable on Ridge.com. That's a great gift for purchase. It doesn't matter if you're a discount focused or not. People like getting a nice little free thing. You can do bundling. If people want to save, have them buy more, right? Three power banks at Ridge.com. It's like the cheapest way to buy a power bank. And I'm happy because I'm selling three of them instead of selling one. You should do something like sweeps, like a big special event.

38:33Sean Frank:You should do VIP offers. You should do, here's a great one. I don't think we do enough of this. go to Vans during back to school. Right now is a great time. Go to Vans, make a purchase. They're going to give you a gift card that you have to come back in Q4 to spend, okay? It is like that future savings, future reward that like built in loyalty. Vans has built their entire business off of that. So look, there's way more than just discount promos. You can do a bunch of different stuff and we'll have a full list available over at nineoperators.com. If I had to start over and scale to nine figures today, Sarah's IQ would be non-negotiable.

39:07That's the only AI that I trust with accuracy. If you want to just pull data out of wherever and drop it in Claude, you are really gambling your business. I get reports every day and I know the data is certified. And that's just me. My entire team is so deep in the weeds in Ceres. We have every single data source in our business linked into Ceres. Therefore, we can go and grab whatever we want. That way, we have so many different avenues of accessing our data and you're just flying blind without this. Big brands already trust it. Growing brands now have access to the exact same foundation at under$2 ,000 a month.

39:43Live in a matter of days. Go to sarisanalytics.com and book your walkthrough today. I love what you're saying, Sean. I think with the generative AI and the ability to canvas the market, to brainstorm ideas, there's a whole universe of ways that you can make your brand more relevant and compelling to people. and it's up to you to test your way into what works. But I think what you said that I would really double click on for everybody listening to this is that you just, you have to test, you have to experiment, you have to iterate. This isn't about making a decision and then going big or charging ahead.

40:21It's a lot of micro tests. And then when you find something that works, it's upping the investment in it, upping the investment in it. As you continue to understand it, you scale it. This is what the smart operators are doing. small experiments done over a lot of different areas, and then doubling and tripling down on the things that work. We've used this analogy before, but it's the bullets, then cannonballs. In the 1700s, there's a period where naval warfare is a big thing, and when these ships would engage in battle, the problem that they would run into is you had a limited number of cannonballs because they were very heavy.

40:59But you've got to have cannonballs to sink the other ship. The problem is these cannons that were shooting the cannonballs weren't even particularly accurate. So how do you make the most of the cannonballs you have? What they would do is they would lay a gun on top of the cannon when it was aimed. It would shoot at the other ship. If they hit the ship, then you load the cannon, then you shoot the cannonball. So bullets and cannonballs is what I'm hearing you say, Sean. And everybody listening to this, there are ways that you could start experimenting next week that will help you to move towards finding a way to implement this in your business.

41:32Matt Bertulli:Can I give a pro tip for people if you want to talk about creating moments? Every brand should have a playbook, repeatable system for hijacking viral cultural moments. So like when something is going off, you guys remember this year, like there was the flag thing on top of the empire, whatever that building was in New York. Like you should have a set of rules and guidelines. And then what do we do when something comes up that we want to hijack so that your marketing team can just say, all right, run the playbook. this is relevant for us, go.

42:04Sean Frank:Yeah, we do a very bad job at that. So that is a great tip that I should actually take to heart and learn. You know, every day, the average man thinks about the Roman Empire. We have not done anything with that. And that was such a good being that we got to lean in on.

42:19Matt Bertulli:That would be so good. Yeah, like Caesar for a day. It's our Caesar for a day sweepstakes. The question is, what would come with that if you were Caesar for a day? All right. Let's talk a little bit about the marketing tactics. I'll transition us to there now. Okay, Sean, I want you to get in the weeds and help us understand the marketing tactics. You're a great marketer. Connor's a great marketer. Ridge is one of the best at demand generation. So obviously part of this is having a compelling event and structure. But tactically, what are some of the things that you've done that have made the actual media buying, getting eyes on this, getting people to the site really work well that is the whole point of tony hawk right it's like

43:01Sean Frank:you put a celebrity in your ads and like it just gets a higher retention rate better click-through rate like all that stuff just ends up being way better so that is why we splurged and got tony hawk in the ads um that lets you spend new types of creative more places so partnership ads off of tony's account on instagram uh or that creative goes farther on the youtubes of the world so that That is the creative way we're solving that. And then the biggest tactic is all the win backs on the website. It's gamified to hell, dude. It's down now so people can't experience it. Maybe I could find a screen recording, but we have mystery crates.

43:43Sean Frank:In your cart, you'll get bonus offers. If you're going to spend$100 on rigid.com, you get 100 entries. It could be a bonus period so you can get 1 ,000 entries. and then there's a mystery crate that'll give you another 500 entries, right? So really gamifying people to go through the checkout flow. And then using Revo, people can log in and see exactly what they have. We can put bonus offers in there, right? So we've really tried to make it an account sign-in experience and an e-commerce upsell. We really go full-blown. We take all the best lessons from the black hat, gray hat guys and apply it to a white hat website.

44:18Sean Frank:So I love all the random little conversion alteration stuff we're doing. But better ads that let us run more ad creative, more spend behind it, and then put those on more places and then drive them to a hell optimized website. That is like the beauty of sweeps. So, Sean, one of my favorite parts of being in text groups with you is that we get adorable pictures of your son.

44:41Matt Bertulli:It is like Sean baby pics all the time now. I love it. And how's the dad thing going, Sean?

44:49Sean Frank:I look I think everyone thinks they have a cute kid but I just want to point out I think I have an especially cute kid you got a cute kid man I'll give you that yeah I think he's like top tier top one percent cute kid I love this little guy dude I mean being being a dad's great it does make you I'm so worried all the time he's gonna get hurt like I'm like oh my god I have to protect this guy with my life uh I'm like I love him too much the second thing is I had a dude I you know a bunch of work trips, right? I was in China for a week. I was traveling around Asia for a bit, doing a bunch of work stuff.

45:24Sean Frank:We have this thing coming up in New York. Being away from him sucks. He's only five months old. So I'm going to be gone for, call it a month of his life. He's going to forget who I am, dude. Well, it's really crazy during that period. It's like when they're four or five months old, if you're gone for a week, it's like you've literally missed 6 % of their life and you'll come back and they're like doing totally new things. And it's a very very like, it's like, wait a minute, what the heck? Like, he's so much bigger. Or like, when did he start crawling or what? You know, so I remember that completely from when we had newborns.

45:55Matt Bertulli:I can't wait for Sean. I cannot wait for you to have a toddler. If you think you're worried now, wait until the kid is trying to commit suicide every minute of every day. Because that's all they do. It's like, where's the scissors? I'm going to put them in my mouth and run into the door. Like, it's just what they do, man. Okay, just a pause here. If you have young toddlers, don't leave scissors laying around. So many things that Sean's about to experience. They didn't get that memo about sharp objects, but you don't want to do that. Matt, what about you? You've been living in Winx world. How are you feeling?

46:30Matt Bertulli:I mean, CPMs are down. I'm so happy. I saw Cody post. I guess it's all relative, right? They're down from hundreds of dollars per CPM, so that's great. Yeah, they started off at like, what,$150? They went up to$800. And now we've got them down to like what I would call a reasonable CPM. I actually, I sent the screenshot to Cody. I'm like, this is a mistake, right? Like that was my first comment. So I don't know. I'm feeling optimistic at the moment. I'm always optimistic. I think I'm irrationally optimistic though. How many subscribers do we have? Are we sharing that? We're not yet. No, I got it.

47:07Matt Bertulli:We got, we can't, we got to, can't, we got to bury the lead, man.

47:10Sean Frank:Okay. Stay tuned, guys. you'll see if we're making any money yet.

47:14Matt Bertulli:More than one, less than a million. We're not making money. Sorry, we can say we're not making money right now. You're telling me that the$800 CPMs aren't first order profitable. No, yeah, yeah. Turns out that math doesn't work. I'm looking forward to being in New York with you guys. We're going to be doing a lot of in-person recording for our Titan series, which has been great. We've gotten great feedback on that. And I think there's going to be some really tremendous content. We are going to be doing a mastermind in NYC. And then I think we're actually doing a live pod at Beanstalk. So that'll be a lot of fun.

47:50If you're listening to this, that may have already happened. But that's what we've got coming up. We're excited about it.

47:56Matt Bertulli:Most AI tools and software don't give you direct ROI every month, but PostScript does. I run two PostScript AI products at Ridge. Both show up on our P &L. Infinity Testing runs continuous A-B tests on our SMS automations completely in the background. It's driven$446 ,000 in incremental revenue, not just attributed, incremental. That's a 32x incremental ROAS with click-through rates up 43%. Then there's Shopper, an AI sales agent that answers every inbound text in under 40 seconds. We're running 23x ROI on messaging costs alone. If you want SMS software that gives a proven ROI, go to postscript.io and book a free demo.

48:34I think the last week was the first time where the AI stuff went from just extremely exciting to a little bit concerning, maybe a lot concerning. I'm like, okay, I'm so AI-pilled. And I think for a long time, it was like, you're trying to convince people how good this is and how much you can do and how powerful it is. And this is real. And now I think it's like, okay, but is Terminator really going to happen? Like, is Judgment Day coming? We'll see, but Astra is absolutely amazing. Like, as a side note, so I had four Codex resets. So when you buy a pro account, you get, I think what they're saying is like a$200 pro account with OpenAI is like$15 ,000 worth of compute.

49:21It's like just this unbelievable deal. And then they've been giving out some free resets and they gave out a bunch of free resets when they released Astra because they had some technical difficulties rolling it out. So I had the equivalent of like five pro accounts worth of usage and I used it all in three days. So I think I used$75 ,000 worth of compute over the weekend alone. And it was unbelievable watching what we were able to do with that.

49:52Sean Frank:What'd you build, Mark? $75 ,000 just like a widget? Yeah, I built, I don't have anything clever to say. I built a operating system for the new companies that we're building that basically approaches the business from the perspective that the role of humans is qualitative decisions, positioning strategy, and that 100 % of the execution is machine driven, because I think that's where we're going. And I've literally stood up a piece of software. I don't even know, probably would have taken a team of engineers a year to build it or multiple years and stood it up in a weekend. And I think that I'm starting the main kind of idea, I would say, Sean, without getting too much in the weeds, is that we hear a lot about how the AI is getting a lot better because they're starting to build these recursive loops.

50:50I think you can build recursive loops in your business where you have a bunch of systems and they talk to each other. And as they talk to each other, they all get smarter and that they do all of the executing. And I think there's a good chance five or 10 years from now, the way that we do e-commerce or we do business today is going to seem so weird and so quaint. It's like, wait, you just like stared at a screen a bunch. Like, here's another thing that I'm doing a ton of. I'm doing a ton. Almost all my coding is done on my phone with codecs on remote via voice. Yeah.

51:21Matt Bertulli:Astra's voice control and like the dude. Oh, unbelievable. Yeah. This was, this was definitely one of those weeks that things were like, oh wow. I mean, there's been lots of Yeah. You kind of got a picture of where it's going, right? Like it's not even like, yeah, we're kind of there, but like, I mean, last night, OpenAI released a proof for this just crazy math problem. But they were showing a comparison of Astra, which is, you know, the flagship frontier model right now compared to this internal model that destroyed this math proof. And this internal model on low reasoning just destroys Astra at extra hide.

51:57And it's just a reminder that like whatever they've got behind closed doors right now makes this stuff look like toys. And this stuff is insanely powerful. So yeah, so you're not going to be doing any clicking, you know, anything digital that people do in your business. That's going to be machine driven in the future. And I just want to be at the front end of transition.

52:17Matt Bertulli:Can I ask you guys both this question? Am I the only one who struggles with the optimism, doomerism seesaw right now? I get so excited. I'm like, I want to throw up in my mouth

52:29Sean Frank:with everything that's happening. I have no doom. There's no doom in my entire body, bro. It's all going to work out. That's so good. Yeah, look, I mean, Mike, I'm totally with you. What's funny is I have Claude, and then ChatGPT is a co-work model, and then I have GrokBot, and like all of them are just running all of the time and my job is just going back between all of them and just talking to them. I'm like, okay, now you do this. Okay, now you do this.

52:52Matt Bertulli:Did you like the little bird thing on the Simpsons that just pushed the key with Homer? Yes. It's trying to prevent, it prevents a meltdown and then the little bird.

53:04Sean Frank:I'll send you guys a screenshot of what I sent my team last night, but I built like a really amazing piece of software and I sent it over to my leadership group and I'm like, hey, if you don't know how to do this, I did it in five prompts, you're not gonna work here anymore. So I'll send that over in the group chat. But yeah, we're taking it very serious over here too, guys. All right, guys, thank you for joining us for this episode of Operators. Hey, create demand, create events that grab people's attention when they're not already looking for you. Be like Ridge, take some of Sean's advice, put it into action, run experiments, start small, build something significant for your business.

53:42Thanks for joining us. We will see you guys next time.