How to Grow to 250k Followers in Under 3 Years with Bart Szaniewski, Founder of Dad Gang | Ep. 384

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Market Millennials Podcast. Today we have got Bart from Dad Gang on the podcast. We recorded this one last year and it's still relevant today. Bart and two friends made a hundred hats in a text thread, sold them in 36 hours, and now they've sold half a million hats. Yes, half a million. No fancy strategy, no million dollar budget, just iPhone content and a free Shopify theme. Here's what stuck with me. He spent money growing followers before chasing conversions. Everyone told him that was wrong. He had 245k followers on Instagram and 11k person Facebook group instead.

0:48The community came first. The sales followed. We talk about boosting posts, broadcast channels, why perfectly curated graphics are dead, how he specs out launches across eight channels without annoying people, and his rapid fire at the end is pure gold. Let's get into this episode. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. What is up Bart? Welcome to the podcast. Thanks.

1:39I want to get this started and you give a quick background on how you thought of DadGang. Why did you start this brand? And we can go down that rabbit hole first.

1:54Bart Szaniewski:Awesome. Well, yeah, awesome to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm Bart. I'm one of the co-founders of DadGang. It's myself and two of my best friends, EJ and Grant. We, you know, we've all known each other for a super long time, have been in the same tech thread forever. and we're all dads. And we kind of noticed after becoming dads and having kids that the internet was kind of just filled and social media was just filled with like really funny, goofy stuff for dads, especially when it came to apparel. It was just kind of like dad bod jokes and mowing the lawn and just kind of like jokey stuff all over the place.

2:38Bart Szaniewski:And we were in our text thread all the time, kind of like venting about our days, the good things, the bad things, the struggles of being new dads. And we'd always leave the text thread with like, hey, man, it's all good. Dad game. Let's, you know, let's have each other's backs. Let's support each other. But, you know, you've got us, you've got your wife and your family, you know, dad game, just stick together. And so after saying that for a while, we're like, hey, let's make a hat. And I've worked in direct-to-consumer and e-commerce for a good 13 years and knew some good hat manufacturers and just tried making a black-and-white trucker hat that's a dad gang on it, just as simple as possible, with no intention of building a company whatsoever.

3:26Bart Szaniewski:It was just kind of like, let's make some hats. The minimum's 100, so we've got to make 100 of them, and then let's see if our friends and family want some. and let's put them up on a Shopify website with a free theme. And it was just that. At first it was just like, yeah, we're sick and tired of like seeing funny stuff. Let's make a cool hat we don't want to wear. And so we made those hats. When we got them, we decided to just kind of announce on our own personal social media pages on our Instagrams with very little followings that we made some hats. And if you're a dad and want one, here's the link.

4:07Bart Szaniewski:And to our surprise, we sold out of those hundred hats in less than 36 hours. And it was kind of like it was cool. But at the same time, you're like, OK, it's all friends and family. We appreciate their support. It's kind of like when you're a little kid doing fundraisers and your your mom and dad and uncle and aunt buy your chocolate bars. Right. But after that happened, we're like, OK, let's try again. Let's order some more and see if more people want them. And so I think we ordered 100 again and then 300 the third time. And they kept selling out. It was kind of like, okay, there are dads out there that want to celebrate fatherhood for everything that it is, not just the funny stuff.

4:50Bart Szaniewski:And they want to get behind this community of dads supporting each other. And so from there, we just took all the profits from making that initial batch and made more hats. and then put them up on the website. And it wasn't like, we didn't have any advertising strategy, although we've worked in that for a long time. We didn't seed influencers or anything like that. We just kept selling hats on the site and talking about it on the Instagram page. And then after a while, it got to a point where like, okay, this could be something. Let's try and run some paid ads behind it and with that organic kind of powerhouse behind it.

5:30Bart Szaniewski:And yeah, we just kept making hats and selling out and telling fatherhood stories and sharing other dad stories. And yeah, we're almost three years into building this brand. May 11th, I believe, or sometime in May will be our official three years. And from that initial moment, we've sold almost half a million hats in our time since we've been around. So little, I don't know, almost 500 ,000 hats sold as we speak today. and yeah it's it's been awesome like just building with your friends building something people actually want and then building a massive community behind it at the same time well congrats first of all that's awesome yeah thank you you said um you started posting on the instagram so what did that look like what type of content were you posting um how did you start building that initial following on instagram yeah for the most part initially i just posted what I had.

6:29Bart Szaniewski:So we just had a black and white trucker hat. I would take like cinematic videos or portrait mode photos of the hat in different settings. So whether it was like myself wearing it, Grant wearing it, EJ, those are my two other partners. Um, just taking photos out and about with the kids. Um, I would, I would be like in the yard working on something and like have myself in the background with the hat as the main focal point. Just kind of like pictures of the hats for the most part while re-explaining why the brand started. I think the caption and the copy of the content was super important. And just like reiterating that story of like, we started this brand because there's nothing like it for dads on social media at the moment.

7:17Bart Szaniewski:And we really want to empower dads, stick together and just highlight all the aspects of being a new dad, a dad with teens, a dad with kids in college, and really highlight all of it. So the copy and the captions on those posts was really important. And now, I mean, the Count Dad Gang has over 245K followers, so in less than three years. So what do you attribute the biggest driver for organic reaches? Yeah. One of the first things I did when we finally had enough profit to advertise a little bit was I would just go in and I know the ins and outs of Ads Manager and Meta. I've just been in it so much for the past 13 years.

8:07Bart Szaniewski:But the thing I did was I would just boost our best performing organic posts just by hitting that boost button on Instagram. And say I had a really good post that had a lot of comments and likes and some shares. I would just take that post and boost it for like$10 to$20 a day for audience growth. Not for because you can select when you boost whether you want it to be like website visits or profile visits. So I would just boost it for profile visits. And if I looked at the budget, say I spent$10 a day, but I was getting 20 followers a day, then we would just keep that going. And then a lot of the time when we go through these periods where hats were sold out and we were waiting for new hats to come in, that audience kept building while we wait for new hats.

9:00Bart Szaniewski:And then we would drop new hats and that audience would already be there waiting for the hat to restock. So it was kind of that rhythm of boosting posts for profile visits, being sold out of hats unintentionally, and then dropping hats and kind of developing this FOMO. So if you follow us, you'll be ready to purchase a hat when it drops. And if you don't, then you might miss the next restock. That strategy, I mean, a lot of people probably in marketing and D2C would probably go against because it's not directly tied to a sale. It's growing on a channel that is rented. So what would you tell the people why that strategy matters from what you've learned?

9:50Yeah, what I've learned is if you want to build a brand that is community driven, you have to build the community first.

9:57Bart Szaniewski:It's exactly what we did. We didn't. The thing is, we had full time jobs while building this company and never had the intention of like scaling massively or anything like that. We're like, let's build this thing at a slow and steady pace. And let's make sure if we're going to build a community that's behind this brand, let's build that community first. So that's why I would spend dollars on profile visits or audience growth before I would jump in and obsess over conversions. And that's still the thought to this day. Like we have, you know, multiple campaigns running in meta at this point, but I still boost posts for profile visits.

10:39Bart Szaniewski:I still want to run certain traffic campaigns to get people to discover us because I feel like if you are, and I probably sound like a broken record, but if you do want to build an audience, you do have to build the audience. And so allocating some funds for people to actually come and check you out is, is important. Um, and, but I totally understand the opposite side of that is like, oh my gosh, you're not running ads for conversions. Like what is wrong with you? Um, because I I've done that on the agency side of things multiple times and I get it, but I want this brand to mean much more than just a click or a conversion.

11:17Bart Szaniewski:And that's why I was all about instilling, uh, building people first over, um, obsessing over clicks and conversion rates. it also i mean people underestimate like the power of like a follower account and even though it's like the landing page of your business half the time when you run an ad so if you're running an ad to instagram and you see that instagram has a 200k followers it automatically gives it kind of like the legitimacy of hey this right people care about this brand like why is it 245k If you have an account that you're not growing followers and has 5K followers, you might not trust the brand as much.

12:00So like when I looked at that, I'm like, oh, wow, there must be a lot of dads that care about these hats because there's 245K followers.

12:10Bart Szaniewski:Yeah. And that's our main channel. Like we do a little bit on TikTok, a little bit on Google and YouTube. but meta and or Facebook, Instagram, the whole meta verse, um, is just kind of like our spot. Um, and yeah, I, exactly how you said it. Like if I treat the website as kind of like the final destination and that's why our website is so simple too. It's like, you saw all this great content on social media about the hats, about the dads that wear them, about the fatherhood stories they share if you if your next thought is okay i want one of those hats just simply go to the website and buy one and don't make it don't add a lot more story to the website just because the the ad or the organic content has already kind of converted that thought into okay i want a hat so we really try and try and tell our story on there as much as possible and i mean you have I feel like a simplified story too with saying like designed by dads.

13:12Like I think that's like a simplified story that, okay, these hats have a story of something like dads made this hat. It come from something. So the story is there, but in a very simplified way. And if you want to dig deeper, there's places to dig, but it makes sense that like the tagline tells the story. Yeah, exactly. I know you have two avenues also that I want to talk about. One, I know you have a VIP group on Facebook. So could you tell me how you utilize the VIP group on Facebook? And then the other side of it also I want to talk about is like, what do you do with like broadcast channels and how you utilize that for Instagram?

13:56Bart Szaniewski:Yeah, this is a great question. I keep obsessing over the stuff like more and more as the brand grows. One time somebody asked me, like, you have a lot of followers, good customer base, all these people like dad gang, they wear it, but where are they? And I couldn't really answer that question because you would normally just say like, oh, they're here on Instagram. They're on Facebook. They're on X. They're on LinkedIn. But that's not like where they all exist. So somebody asked me, like, if you were to talk to all of your followers, what where's the one place you would like speak to them? If you were to like, you know, throw a concert or a conference or something like where would you put them?

14:39Bart Szaniewski:And I didn't have an answer for that. And then I was like, well, a Facebook group kind of is private and it puts everybody into one place and you can communicate with everyone rather than depending on the algorithm to feed whatever you're posting to the right people. Like, sure, we have over 200 ,000 followers on Instagram, but I don't know the percentage of people that actually see our posts when we post something. So or announce, you know, something's coming or something's back in stock. So I just made a private Facebook group and told dads and customers and wives that buy hats for dads. It's like, if you want more of a behind the scenes look, you want some exclusive discounts, you want to get early access to certain launches, come join this group.

15:25Bart Szaniewski:And you'll know things a lot quicker than the rest of everybody that's following us. and through that like our following is 250 000 on instagram but we have 11 000 dads in this private group that when i post something they all see it rather than um than trying to get the algorithm to feed it um and through that just been able to like not only share news to everybody but form new relationships um allow them to share their content gather feedback on what we should and shouldn't make. We've even developed hats through there that like we have an idea on and we put it up, put a rough draft in there and then ask them what they think of it rather than just being like, Oh no, we know best.

16:13Bart Szaniewski:We're going to put out a hat without our customer input. And so when we have dad gang designed by dads underneath our logo, it's, it is really designed by a bunch of dads because we're getting a ton of feedback on what to make. And, uh, and, and they love seeing that we're actually listening to them. So, um, yeah. And the same with broadcast channels, like our broadcast channel, Instagram is a little smaller. It's like 3000 members in there. But if I take an organic post and put it in there and say like, Hey guys, uh, just posted this, let us know like feedback or drop a comment it really drives up organic reach so i'm all about these little pockets of of private groups one other thing also that you do that's pretty cool i know you talked about boosting your highest performing organic reach post but you also if you see a dad using a hat or something you ask to like collaborate with them and then you also could boost those posts too because you go a little bit into like that strategy and how that worked for you yeah we just recently started uh being a bit more bullish on the collaboration feature of instagram so you know we we've worked with big professional athletes like mookie bats on the dodgers and we do collaborative posts with him and other athletes we've worked with but our brand isn't necessarily about like only working with massive influencers or celebrities or highlighting those guys because although they're great and like a great look for the brand and we love working with them, we really want to take the common dad and share their stories a lot more too.

17:58Bart Szaniewski:Um, and just through working with brands that like utilize celebrities a ton, I feel like there's almost a little shift happening where like not everybody can go and relate to a, to a huge celebrity, but they can relate to these just like your everyday dad posting content. And so if we see content, that's great. You know, we still try and collaborate with people that are at least making good content. So shooting in good lighting or, you know, at least portrait mode or have a cool video out there, then we'll just shoot them, you know, a message and say, Hey, we love this post. Thank you for tagging us.

18:36Bart Szaniewski:If you send us a collab request, we'll accept it. And so we've been doing a lot more of that. And not only is it great to be able to feature other dads and tell their stories. But it's also a great way to keep the regular posting going on our page. We try to post at least once a day. And sometimes I'll go in there and be like, man, I don't know what to post today. Let me see what these other dads are creating. And if I do a collab post, then it goes on our feed too. I know we talked about like IG, Facebook, but you also have like part of your launch strategy includes SMS includes, like when you launch a new hat, what, what channels is driving the most amount of revenue for you and what, which ones are you prefer over email, SMS, app notifications, those types of things.

19:27Yeah.

19:28Bart Szaniewski:So we recently got an app, I don't know, a month and a half ago. We use this company called Fuego and they make it super easy to, to build your own app. Um, and we were loving using that. Like I'm big on SMS and, and email. Um, and we use attentive for that. And SMS is still like a huge, huge driver for us. Not only when we send campaigns, but you know, the, just the journeys or flows that are always going in the background. Um, so I, I'm, I've always been a huge fan of, of SMS. I mean, you're looking at 98 % open rates when you, when you send a campaign. Um, and we enjoy using it. It's spendier to, to send a text cause you get charged, uh, you know, the carrier fees and stuff, but, um, email and SMS still love, but apps is like where I'm really putting a lot of my effort into, into growing the subscriber base on, or our signups or downloads on, on our app just because you can do, um, you know, push notifications and be able to, um, just, just send kind of like exclusive drops or early access directly to somebody's phone is great.

20:41Bart Szaniewski:So anything mobile like SMS or, uh, or, um, or app notifications are great. So I'm trying to really grow that, but I'm still super bullish on, on all SMS and email too. Um, could you go, go over like what is the launch plan when you like from open to a hat like what channels are using how do you go through it um how do you think about it yeah i really love spacing out a day when it comes to to a launch um we don't necessarily have like internal goals of okay we must sell out of this hat within 24 hours um a lot of the time we do when the when the hat is kind of like hot enough. Um, and there's demand there, but, um, I like to, like, I kind of can't control myself when a new sample comes in.

21:33Bart Szaniewski:So I'll just go on organic social or Instagram and make a video and tweet about the hat. And it just came in because I really want to be just so real with our audience. I want them to live through the experience of this hat coming out. And so, um, Like yesterday, we got like 12 samples of hats that are unreleased. And I just made a cute little video with my son going through the sample. He's two years old, just like naming off the colors of the samples. But I want to authentically show our customers and followers like, hey, here's what just came in. We don't know when it's going to come out, but like here it is.

22:11Bart Szaniewski:Get some real-time feedback and then kind of tease the potential of that hat coming out. And then as it gets closer and maybe we, okay, this sample got really good feedback. Let's make it. Once it gets closer to that launch date, say like seven days out, I'll, I'll probably announce a launch date. Like, Hey, this hat is coming. Um, I'm doing it right now. We have a hat coming out on Friday and I'm doing a lot of content around it. I'm actually at a studio right now, just shooting it. But like, Oh, now it's a launch date. And then on that launch date, um, the private Facebook group will get notified first.

22:45Bart Szaniewski:like, Hey, this is out, go grab it. Then I'll do usually start with an email in the morning, an email campaign to our engaged user segments. I don't like to like blast everybody on our email list. Cause your open rates go down, your, your, your spam filters go up. Like I really like to just send to people that are actually showing interest in the brand. And that'll be like at 9am pacific that i send an email then at the same time an email goes out probably like 15 minutes later do a push notification on the app and then around noon to you know noon to two pst if the hat's still in stock i'll send a text and then at the same time around nine i'm doing um organic social across everything.

23:38Bart Szaniewski:So Facebook, Instagram, Tik TOK X, um, sometimes LinkedIn, sometimes we'll have a video that companies it on YouTube. Um, and then I do story mode about the hat on Instagram all day. Um, until pretty much until it's sold out. So I'll, I'll just pre-make, I always use Canva. So I'm just making like videos and graphics in Canva, um, at least like 20 of them to have ready to post throughout the day. And that way you are extending the full, like say it's 12 hours that you have. So if I go like 8am to launching a hat, a text at 12, and then organic social posts throughout the day, story mode throughout the day, like I can go from 8am to 6pm consistently posting without looking annoying as a brand.

24:28Bart Szaniewski:Like if I were to send you five emails instead, you'd probably unsubscribe or you'd get annoyed. Whereas if I'm using all of these different channels, broadcast channels too, then I'm spacing out the day without being intrusive into like our customers. So yeah, that's kind of the whole launch. Yeah, I mean, the omnipresent type thing works. Not everybody's on Facebook at one time. And also Instagram kind of likes it when you post a lot of stories because that's where a lot of conversations happen. They want you to post three to ten stories a day. So the more you post, they actually like it. The one thing I wanted to go into is you're really good at figuring out, I wouldn't call them hacks, but ways to grow your audience.

25:22A lot of the things you've done are pretty scrappy ways, like boosting posts and the broadcast channel. what are some other things you're looking at and testing right now we haven't dabbled with it too

25:33Bart Szaniewski:much but we've been doing product giveaways or collaborative giveaways so like working with certain uh other brands or other people to like co-give away a product um and using like um using sms in tandem with giveaways so like if you i'll do a giveaway that's like hey i'm giving away this hat comment and emoji a certain specific emoji in the comments for a chance to win and if you comment that emoji you get a dm that says hey thanks for entering uh sign up for our email list and you're officially in the contest no need to purchase or anything to enter um that has shown a lot of growth lately just doing little giveaways it could be as little as like we did a custom boom box with um with bump box the other day and that did really well um or we could give away a hat And people love just the ability to, to get a free hat.

26:28Bart Szaniewski:Um, so a lot of giveaways and then, um, like, like the stuff I mentioned before, like reposting other dads, uh, literal stories on IG when they tag us, um, collaborating with dads, they, they love being able to like get featured with us and, um, just, just interacting. Like I'll go into ad comments myself and just talk to people instead of instead of like leaving those ad comments alone. Just if somebody tags a friend in our ad, I'll say thank you for the tag. Appreciate you coming by. I think it just goes back to like conversational common sense. If somebody takes the time to appreciate your brand or your product, you should take the time back to interact with them and just be a real human being.

27:16Bart Szaniewski:I think that goes a long way and it's kind of ignored in our, in our industry. Like you see people just run ads and not interact with any of them. And it's like, these people are going to either spend money with you or take the time to leave a comment. You might as well say something nice back to them. So a lot of that has helped with audience growth too. Well, I think also what I'm getting into this, I mean, the underlying thing of you is like, you're a dad, you're, you're passionate about being a dad. you're also passionate building building community with other dads so it's like no-brainer for you to just say like this is another dad or this is someone with that has a kid um right like why not like um interact but also it's social media i mean it's created for a two-way conversation that's why people can comment and can dm and all that stuff so you should right if you're on social community you should be building like if you want to build community it happens through the dms and comments it doesn't happen through posting yeah exactly you get it lastly i want to do like a little um rapid fire with you yeah let's do it cool um the first question i have for you is what platform are brands sleeping on i think brands are are everywhere all the time and i I don't think brands are necessarily sleeping on Instagram, but sleeping on the, on the, like, like we just mentioned kind of on the interaction tools of Instagram broadcast channels, getting people into private groups, all that kind of stuff.

28:57Bart Szaniewski:Like if you're going to build a community, just build it within Instagram or meta. It's a little tougher on Tik TOK, I would say. And then, yeah, Facebook groups. Maybe I would say more brands need private Facebook groups to put all their people in. What is one of the best pieces of marketing advice you've ever received? I think making content is a lot easier than we think. There's a lot of thought that goes into posting and what looks perfect. And I think it's more important to just make and post rather than over-worry about perfection. it. It's allowed us to be a lot more free and building our brand and gives us a better cadence of posting daily.

29:39Bart Szaniewski:So it's usually fear and ego that, that stopped people from just posting all the time because they overthink the posts. So don't think so much and just, just make the content. What is one thing that you wish you did that you found out later? Probably the Facebook group. Once again, would have made it a lot earlier. What is one thing on social that brands need to stop doing? Perfectly curated graphics. I think nobody really resonates with something that looks like an ad. So make stuff that's a lot more realistic. Make stuff that your customers would make. Because that perfect, perfect graphics and copy all the time just kind of like takes the life out of your content.