487: Why Ambassadors are Better Than Ads with Brittany Stewart of BURST Oral Care

0:00Right now is literally the best time to start an e-commerce business and here's why. In 2018, we created something that was a first of its kind, a comprehensive online course to start and launch your e-commerce business from scratch, and we called it Start and Scale. Now, five years later, this course has helped 25 ,000 founders in 65 different countries kickstart their business ideas, including thousands who have achieved six and seven figure results. Founders like Laurieann Trinh, who use Start and Scale to create a kids apparel brand that celebrates heritage. Or Samantha Brett, who used Start and Scale to build Naked Sundays into Australia's number one SPF skincare brand.

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3:06Thanks so much for joining us on this summit. The first question that I ask everyone that comes on is, how did you get your job? Okay. How'd you find yourself doing the work you're doing today? So I was actually introduced to my co-founder Hamish through a VC in Los Angeles. I had been successful with another e-commerce business before and I was looking for my next thing. And so Ed introduced us. He was surfing every day with Hamish, my business partner. And he said, I think the two of you would hit it off and you should do a business together. And turns out he was right. And what was that business?

3:44When did you start it? Where's it at now? Can we talk about size because bird is massive but yeah yeah so my uh the first business e-commerce was this that i was a part of building uh was called finditparts.com they are currently the largest distributor of heavy-duty truck tractor trailer parts of the world um it is a thriving business it has uh taken on um i want to say majority private equity ownership now it's it's either majority or like right at the majority line. It is probably just shy of a hundred million in revenue. It's a real business. It's nice. And the team there is amazing. We're great friends still to this day.

4:28And so I really kind of gained my chops being part of that business from very early days. Yep. Got you. And then when did you start Burst Oral Care? 2017 and how big is it now could you what what could you share that you feel comfortable sharing we are here's what i could share burst of just to give everyone some background i've taken on significant amount of venture capital so i have a little bit more privacy things that i am obligated to. We are in 2000 Walmarts. We are launching in CVS in October. We are double digit millions on amazon.com. We're an international retail. We have just shy of, you know, we're just grazing below 800 ,000 subscribers on our digitally native business.

5:29We are pretty big. Yep. Okay. So you've got, you've got very decent scale in this category, right? Yes. And so how did the business come about? So Hamish and I went for, so Hamish has only ever worked in oral care. So he has worked on different types of products, prototypes. So he was very well versed in oral care. And we thought we needed something different, unique and special about us. And we said product was going to be number one, we have to make the best of everything that we make. But then go to market strategy. So we spent six months just getting together, having a cup of tea or whiskey, and talking through what could be a special way.

6:19And we came up with the Burst Ambassador Program. And so the Burst Ambassador Program is our R &D. It's our acquisition channel. We have 40 ,000 ambassadors who identify as, you know, Burst people, whether it's they're helping us make the products or they're recommending or they're stocking in their offices. And so I think the conversations about how do you build community and how do you build an authentic professional channel really bonded us together. And we wanted that to be the narrative of birth. And we've never strayed from that to this day, even as we've gone into big box retailers, the ambassadors are still our number one.

6:57Yeah. Got you. And so when you launched, what did that look like? Did you launch with this ambassador program? I did. So we launched a dental convention. So we were really bootstrapped in the early days. So we couldn't even afford our own booth. We split a booth with somebody else because it was like$3 ,000 for a booth and we had$1 ,500. And we went to a dental convention. We had an iOS version of our ambassador app that we had been developing. And we were like, we're going to meet these dentists and hygienists. We're going to show them our products. We're going to get them signed up and excited.

7:36And that's really how we began. We just registered for a Dental Convention in Chicago in August of 2017. Yeah, wow. And when did you start to tap into online? So we really began the scale of our advertising in like March of 2018, I would say. So we focused just on our professional channel from August of 17 till March of 18, I would say is like roughly the window of completely ambassador signup focused. We began advertising in March because we had been paying attention to what these hygienists were doing and their social media. And we took some of their content and turned them into ads. And those ads like went banana pants.

8:16So like, I feel comfortable kind of giving you this order of magnitude. I think that in the month before ads went live, like maybe we had done 50 or$75 ,000 in revenue. and I think like pretty swiftly that ad set we were pushing half a million in revenue per month within like 60 days. Yeah wow okay and then obviously it's gone astronomical since so what advice would you give to founders that want to build an ambassador program because it sounds like that's been just like monumental for your go-to-market and and to drive growth over time You have 40 ,000 ambassadors. That's a lot. It is. I think it works for us because it's authentic.

9:02So if your criteria for an ambassador program would be any person who will recommend my product, it's not great criteria because then no one feels like they're part of anything that means anything. So for us, you have to have a credential as a dentist or a hygienist. And those people have license numbers and we check them. so you you maybe if you sign up you slip through for like a day my compliance team is going to catch you so i think one identifying what makes someone an ambassador of your product and the answer to that should be what qualifies them to be the person who recommends this so you know the the scope of products out there if someone was making something athletic does this person what is their relationship with athleticism if this is wellness what is their relationship with wellness, I think you have to define a criteria that makes you credible as an ambassador.

9:54And then the second step would be, what am I asking of you? And then what are you giving me in return? We've been very clear about those boundaries since the beginning of our company. And again, you can't build yourself up on these people and then abandon them at some point in time, because then you're going to have a different brand issue. They're the backbone in our North Star and they will always be. And so I think if you begin, if you think you should start with it, just know that you can never give it up. So it's got to be core to who you are.

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11:06Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the to get started. All right. Now let's jump back into the show. What did it look like for you guys? So when you launched in 2017, you said you had a booth. So you obviously had the prototype of the product. And how did you convince people to become ambassadors? Like what was in it for them? Why was it a no brainer? Why would they go out and sell products? You know what I mean? Like in what? Yeah. I think what worked was a very honest dialogue. We took the time. So Hamish and I were there in the booth talking to people as they came in. And so the value proposition, as we presented it at the time, because at the time, all we had was a toothbrush and two colors.

11:52We didn't have any other SKUs. We've really expanded since then. We said, we want to affiliate ourselves with the people who spend all of their time taking care of people's mouths. What we are offering you is the ability to give us feedback about the products you want to see made, feedback on pricing. And if you are a part of this, you're going to be able to offer people a unique pricing on all of our products. You get a discount, like a professional discount. Like think how like interior designers can buy furniture at a discount if they're designing your home. And then every time we're earning money, you're earning alongside of us.

12:28So a profit share. We also took a really strong look at the things that we didn't like. We didn't like the idea of someone buying inventory or having down lines. Like we didn't want to be an MLM, not that there's anything wrong with MLMs. We just, we, that wasn't core to what we wanted to do. And so we very clearly defined what made this an ambassador program instead of like a MLM program. And we were really clear about that. And so for, for these people, the commitment was like pretty low, which is just try our toothbrush. And if you'll like it, then let's talk more. But if you don't like it, I'll never bother you again.

13:03Yeah, got you. So then, so people did buy stock or you give it on consignment or how does that work? So no, there's no stock purchasing. I sell everything out of my warehouse. So like, let's say you've gone to go visit your hygienist, right? She will say to you, this has been a great time cleaning your teeth here and assessing your mouth. But I do think based on the level of plaque that you have in your mouth, you could do with an electric toothbrush. If you go to burstoralcare.com and you use discount code Brittany, you'll save$30. And I suggest that you buy this. And I'm shipping it from my own website.

13:40And every time someone uses her discount code Brittany, she's earning alongside of me. And that's it. So no one's buying stock. I'm fulfilling from the Burst Warehouse. Yes. So it's effectively like an army of affiliates. Yes. Yes. Bingo. Yeah. Got you. And how do you measure the success of an ambassador? So I think there's many measures of success. So there's brand and there's financial, and I don't think they're quite the same thing. And I'll give you an example. So financial really is just how many customers, how many customers do I have because of this particular ambassador? And you can track that to their particular coupon code.

14:24and what we were then able to then key in on is okay what is the amount to be spending to acquire ambassadors which is for us the cost of that is like going to a show paying for a booth signing people up and um that that became really clear to us based on okay if one ambassador like a high-performing ambassador it's like very great like there's a gradation right like your top 10 10 % are probably, you know, there's a huge gap between them and the next 10%. There's just people who are like, so avid and so natural to them to be mentioning this and almost being a salesperson. So for us financial is that like, if they just even recommend one customer, that was like a good use of our time.

15:11Um, the, the, the average metric that we sort of put ourselves together is we really love for these people to have the chance to make$10 ,000 a year off of recommending our product. So that was like what we were trying to back into is how many people would that be? And so that's been our North Star. So we would say that like, you know, that's the goal that we have for everybody who gets involved with this so that it's real meaningful income for them. And then on the brand side, I think it's a little priceless because, you know, maybe someone lives in a quieter or more rural area where their access to patients is much smaller, they're not going to give you a ton of customers.

15:54But those people, a lot of times create amazing social media. And we can use that social media, like here's a YouTube video about how well our product works, or here's an Instagram post. So there's like these intangibles of having really authentic super fans of your product turns into content, which you normally have to spend quite a bit of money on. And we don't have to do that to that degree because we're using the content from these ambassadors with their permission, of course. Yeah, no, it's quite an interesting and unique approach. You do hear like there's another company in the e-com space that I think have done incredible with their ambassador program is Gymshark.

16:36Oh my gosh. They're like, I mean, bow down, bow down to them. Yes. They're very good at what they do. Yeah. But what they have done is they've looked at creators that are extremely influential in the health and fitness space and they effectively sponsor them. So it's a little different. They effectively sponsor athletes. Exactly. Yeah. Do you guys do anything like that? Do you find kind of thought leaders in the oral care space and partner with them at some capacity so you have that brand alignment or it's purely more just affiliate kind of based? We will do that from time to time. So for example, we had expanded into the Irish market.

17:23We had identified some dentists, hygienists, and doctors who we thought were really influential. And we did a six-month sponsorship with them, talking about your oral health, your total biome, those things are great top of the funnel. It's a little harder to track whether or not that's an effective use of dollars. So we have done that in the past. We have as well, we have a stable of hygienists, we call our senior ambassadors, who we essentially sponsor and they commit to a persistent amount of content and education about oral care. And I think that that number of those, there's about 30 people who we are in a consistent dialogue.

18:06We consider them to be representative of our brand values and great influencers in the dental community. Okay. So for somebody that's first starting out, like, cause you guys have over 40 ,000 ambassadors, that's a lot. How do you onboard that meaning? Like, and you're not using any sort of technology or anything you could recommend any Shopify plugins or apps or what? Yeah. So we built our own custom system, but I think it's more about systematization of your team. So I actually have what we call the A squad. And so there are some systemization of, you can sign up on my app and the signup flow is very clear and you can follow that.

18:45And then it gets into a queue for approval or disapproval from my team. So they know to look for correct information, no scammers, and then they approve. And then we have automated systems that prompt you through our activation, which is there is some asynchronous content that we put on Teachable, which teaches you about, you know, everything we think you need to know about Burst in order to be a good Burst ambassador. And then we do onboarding Zooms where you can sign up and learn. And then we do like a bootcamp, which is the ability, you know, everyone who signed up in the month of September, you can learn everything you need to know about being successful as a burst ambassador.

19:26And I have bootcamp leaders. And so I have a great team and a great process for onboarding because ultimately if someone signs up and then they're not directed where to go, this thing I work in. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton. As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it. However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like they're building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success.

20:06you should come and check out our new podcast from zero to founder hosted by our community manager molly flynn these are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs people just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business these are the founders of tomorrow you can find the from zero to founder podcast on all platforms. And remember it's founder without the E. All right, now let's jump in the show. For anybody that's listening to this, that wants to start an ambassador program, I think it's a brilliant way to drive people to your website, to drive customer growth, to drive word of mouth, to drive brand growth, especially with the rising costs in paid advertising or just being able to get somebody to your website is more expensive than ever now.

20:58That is correct. I think that across the category, you're seeing a seismic shift of how people are allocating their dollars because the efficacy of advertising is just not what it was. And so for people who are getting started, what worked for people five years ago or even three years ago, it will not be the same for you. So because of that, I highly recommend an ambassador program because it will be an effective, authentic, low cost way not only to acquire customers, but to get feedback about what you're doing well and doing poorly. So for people who are looking to be early stage, the list of things I wish I would have known that I now know, it would have saved me a lot of heartache.

21:41Um, firstly, the quality of your ambassador or affiliate is more important than the quantity. The, the people who I was able to engage with one-on-one early on remain some of the most productive people for my brand. And it's because I had the chance or the time and the opportunity before this thing exploded to spend real time with them. So you've got to think of these early people as real opportunities for you to have someone you can count on through the life cycle of your business as well as help you grow it. And then secondly, be thoughtful about the tech that drives it. Do not get yourself into a situation where you're paying tons of money for all of this technology that you do not need.

22:30You need to figure out what is the value proposition for an affiliate program that works. Focus on that first. Do not focus on like, well, it'll work if I create some sort of like, you know, Rolls Royce technology to drive it. The world is very advanced in its technology platforms. If you're not a tech company, you should be on Shopify. So don't go on anything else. Don't build your own custom code because then you have to build everything custom for the rest of your life. Be on Shopify. If you want to know products or services to create an affiliate program or technology around it. There's a lot of outside the box tools.

23:09One that a lot of people use for affiliate programs to track and manage is impact radius, for example. That's a great low lift one if you just want to know, is this going to work? And then once it works, if you want to customize something on top of that, do that once you've proven the concept. So I think that that's what happens. It's sort of like people over engineer something and they're And as soon as the engineering is good, then this is going to work. Ultimately, if the offering and the ambassador are authentic, it's going to work. And no bit of technology is going to make that work for you.

23:43It's got that product market fit, value proposition, offer to your affiliate, offer to your customer. If that's all clicking, the tech is like secondary. And I made early on mistakes that have been very expensive for me. And if I could just save anyone else that heartache, this is my gift to you. So I'd love to switch gears. Obviously, we've talked a lot about ambassador programs and how it's been the bedrock of the growth of Burst. I'd love to talk about AI. How are you guys using AI right now to grow the company? What do you talk us through? What's working? What's not working? Yeah, you know, I think it's really interesting.

24:21So first of all, I think that there's this conversation that you need to have with your team, which is that AI is not taking your job. Because unless you have that conversation, you're going to have some problems with your staff or your colleagues, because the point in our opinion of AI is that it's taking an A player and making them A+. So for example, we can use AI or ChatGPT or BARD to help us do research on what are the types of things that people are researching about oral health. Help give us some prompts, help us plan out our media calendar. For people who work in creative marketing and social media, the constant need to come up with things all the time is very daunting.

25:09So using AI to help them sift through trends and plan the calendar and maybe even help them spiff up some copy is amazing. And I think it's made all of their lives and jobs better. Another area in which we are exploring AI right now, and we think will be successful is there's a lot of replicable tasks that happen at the warehouse level. So what can we use AI to help us, you know, for example, batch and automate order cues so that our fulfillment is as streamlined as possible. So that's another area that we are really looking into things. I would say on the realm of AI, we're still early stage.

25:54And I think there's a lot more that we could do. We're growing it in a way that feels authentic to our growth story instead of trying to just ram AI. Another area where we think that there's a lot of opportunity is that I have like the world's best customer service team. And I do think there are things that they answer over and over and over again that are just right there on the website and giving them tools where I would in like in my perfect world my customer experience team can focus on having experiences with my customers and then the things that are really basic like what's your warranty protocols or do you ship to Australia these things these things are I think a robot should answer that and I shouldn't trouble a team member with it.

26:46And then I want my customer service team to answer questions like, Hey, I've been thinking about switching to an electric toothbrush. Do you think someone could talk to me about that? That I want, I want my, my CX team to be able to spend the time needed to create an amazing customer experience on that interaction. And I want to use AI to help these things that are a little rote and basic because they aren't part of a customer experience. They're like a simple Q and A. All right. Are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey? Founder Plus has you covered. With proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results, a supportive community of over 30 ,000 like-minded entrepreneurs and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success.

27:29Try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence. You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. So when it comes to tools and AI, what tools are you using? What has been game changes for your team or even anything that you are using as a founder and CEO? There are a few things. On the advertising side of things, there is Black Crow AI you can use to do a lot with your advertisements and efficacy of like what is causing people to stop, thumb stop. and you can use it to really analyze what's effective in your advertising.