The New Way to Run Meta Ads in 2025

Have you guys not grown any month over month, or have you grown every month? Every single month. There's never been a month we haven't.

Today, we have on Nick Shackleford, former professional soccer player turned marketing powerhouse who's managed over $200 million in ad spend. He's the founder of Structured Agency, Constant Creative, and head of retention and partner of Breeze, one of the fastest-growing beverage brands, hitting $50 million in just 2 years.

What would you say is the most underrated creative format for an ad in 2025? Green screen, small mic in hand, speaking to camera.

This conversation is a deep dive on marketing in 2025, and we gatekeep nothing. The narratives and stories being told within your ad account are more important than the audiences in which you're choosing to tell this to. Oh my god, [ __ ] it. Let's just talk about the sauce. This is the [ __ ] sauce. And it's like the little secret. It's like the Andrew Tate, the Aman Godzi. People like Drake are doing it like for music. I think this also tells me that like in 2042, Mr. Beast is going to be [Applause]. I really, really want to focus on now. What is going on now in 2025? So I'd love to just know like, what is your, your thought process for just customer acquisition period?

I'll use us as an example, right? Um, our our goal CAC is $85 to $90. I'm trying to acquire a customer, a new customer for $85 to $90. That's best-in-class right now because we know how long they stay with us. I'm okay spending up to $120. If I can spend $120, $130 if it's a really bad month. I know that with this style of product, people will come back and buy. You can't say that for a Ruggable. You can't say that for a t-shirt. You can't say that those numbers are us understanding the LTV and how long someone's going to stay with us. A lot of brands cannot survive unless they are first product purchase profitable. Correct. And so for for a lot of the guys that that aren't thinking about building a business or thinking about building a product that allows more repeat purchasability or like expansion of other products, I think it's going to be really [ __ ] tough. Just hard stop.

So let's talk about zero to one on that because obviously you need an ample amount of data to be able to look back and say, "Hey, here's my CAC to LTV ratio." What was the beginning like for Breeze that you, like, how long did it take you to figure this out? Because at the beginning, I assumed that it was, you know, it cost us X, we sell it for X, and we want to be first order profitable. What was the beginning like to figure that out?

So our first month, I think just about $25 to $50,000 in spend. Second month, I think we doubled, and the third month we doubled again. So we consistently were doubling month over month. And upon launch, we were not incredibly profitable because we're a brand new product. We had to educate the market. So we knew that the investment that dollars that we had to spend was more educating of the market. B, is this legal? Can we even do this? And then C, we believe that because of our ability to buy media and retain these customers, it was okay to spend into a either a break-even or a loss on first customer acquisition. This turned to be the right bet as where we are now. Two years later, our birthday in two days, 4/20. This I think this is why you see a lot of these agency guys or guys that know paid media or any sort of like digital background are feeling much more comfortable on how to spend. Cuz a founder that is not a marketer, a founder that is not very numbers-oriented, more product person, they're not going to be able to have the stomach or just like the understanding of like, I need to continue to spend to learn what's going to work because honestly, the half of this stuff is thinking about like tranches of cash. I have $10,000 to spend. What am I trying to learn or uncover with this $10,000? Is which channel is most efficient, which product is going to work, what is my messaging? And that can go, you can go super tactical on that [ __ ]. If no one knows you exist, you have to spend money on any of these platforms. That's the only way that you're going to find out if it's going to work. We had to spend to get the education or understanding.

So, if I'm if I'm thinking about my first quarter, no, Breeze was, we knew that we were going to spend anywhere between $75,000 and $100,000. And that was our bet. We had to make it work. And thankfully, like we were able to make this work from a subscription standpoint and first purchase profitability.

For people that don't have $75,000 or $100,000, how much do you think is an ample amount of money to test?

So I I get this question often. It's like, well, I just don't have that bankroll that you guys had. The only difference between someone that's spending a significant amount of money and not is we're learning quicker. You're you're going to learn the same [ __ ] as me. It's still the same tranche of dollars, but it's just going to take you longer. That's the only problem. So the the if you're thinking about in your tranche, my tranche might be a $10,000 of learning. Yours might be a $1,000 or $500 of learning.

If I am launching a brand new product, what am I trying to uncover first? Is my price point correct? Is someone willing to pay this amount of dollars? Do they think the value exchange is is correct? If you have cost-effective first metrics, meaning my clicks were cost-effective, my CPMs were cost-effective, and that's different for each niche. It could be a $15 CPM. It could be a $30 CPM. If you're going after the the middle American mommies, good luck. That shit's expensive, right? They're getting hit from everybody else. But if you're going after a different demo or more niche demo, your CPM might be a little bit lower. That baseline will over equal out over your first couple of dollars being spent. So if my CPM, if my CPC, my cost per click or cost per impression is in line, and they get to my cart, and they are everyone's abandoning it, it's too expensive. You have to change the price. And that playfulness of price point or product is going to be the first thing I got to figure out. That's where I'm starting.

Yeah. Let's keep pinning up all of these kind of big subtopics in relation to spending that $10,000. I think first and foremost, uh, is price and learn and understand all those kind of micro metrics in the front. Are people clicking through your ads? Are they clicking through the PDP? Are they getting to the end? Ultimately, if they buy in with good unit economics, then you're in a good place. Yeah, if they get that far along and they don't buy, then you probably need to do split testing uh on the price side. But let's take it back a bit. If you're spending $10,000, what are those things that you need to do in the front in conjunction with price? Whether it be creative, um, whether it be how you set up ads, like I want to go through all of those things that you have this money, how do we make it go far to learn the most with $10,000?

I call it a smoke test. I need to know what's working. So, if I'm selling a widget, something something very simple. Why for everybody listening, you just sold what? What did you sell? A couple million dollars of widgets in like 167. Yeah, we did. We did. Look, I still play with this thing. We sold a lot of fidget spinners. If I have $10,000, I need to do a smoke test. I need to understand what is the reason why someone's going to even click on this thing. Reduce anxiety, uh, increase focus, uh, calm you down. Right? So, those are my three angles.

So, those are your value props. Those, correct? Those are my value props. What's the easiest thing for any person to create and get live in any ad account right now? An image. Correct. I would say I start with an image product on white call out, which is just basically a white bar, bold text call out with the image of the product that you have. That is the easiest thing to get live and it's my smoke test because if I can go, same image, same image, same image. The only difference is this white bar of text or copy or or caption that says, "Reduce anxiety, increase focus, uh, stress release." Cool. If I'm seeing some sort of like clicks or some sort of engagement to those that initial one campaign setup, that tells me, okay, I'm getting a lot more interest on the stress reduction. What's the next thing that I need to improve or change? Probably need to make a video. I'm probably going to make this a little bit more longer and explain why this is going to reduce the stress. Perfect. So now I have smoke test of image one started to work. I'm going to expand on this one specifically. I'm making a video. I'm having someone else make a video for me. Two things are important to that. Am I having a man in this? Am I having a woman in this? Why is that important? This could be controversial to most people. At the beginning, people are trying to see themselves as the person using that tool. Most of the time, it's you're either a man or woman taking this, and you're going to try and see yourself in some of these tests. I do my best to not always include faces because I think there's a a judgment that we like as humans subconsciously do is like, "Oh, that's not me. I don't look like that." But if you just see the color of the hands or the arms or the body type, that's another way of getting someone to feel like as if I can actually be using this product. I think it's a subconscious thing that most people don't think about. It is important on the initial testing phase. I believe I just did an image test. Now I'm going to make a video. Men and women, those are the two things I'm running. This is more explanatory towards that initial angle. Step one. Step two, this is going to go live. What happens after this is now off of the click metrics. Now it's all the landing page. This is all creative testing that regardless of what happens on the conversion side, you just want to test from an ad perspective, let's just say even in platform, how are these performing to know image or video, this value prop or that value prop? Should there be a man? Should there be a woman? Should there be a man and a woman? It's just creating almost like a tree of like a route tree of all different types of value props and ways that you can create your ads. The thing is that system of um having the images first, then going to video, then expanding in deeper, that system just keeps repeating itself cuz now you have a couple things working and we need more. If anything, it's just going to get more intricate cuz now you have creators or colors or regions that come into it. It's just that, but you're just getting more granular. Like you mentioned, people in New York buy this more than people in Arizona. So we should be targeting New York. We do partnerships in New York, like just down to different demographics and psychographics. The moment someone lands on our on our website, if they've never bought before, we're communicating to them the SKUs that they should be trying first because that's we know based on of history and based on repeatability that they should touch these products first. Then the customer comes back, they've already bought before. We've already identified that they shouldn't be seeing the same thing that they got the first time they landed. So then we have a brand new message to them saying, "Welcome back. Thanks for experiencing us. Here's what you should try next based on what you've tried before." And then someone spending us four or five times, I if someone's spending, which they do, over $500 with us in their life in their lifetime, they better be treated much different than someone's never even seen us before. And so that that like depth of customer experience and journey is so needed.

Blatant question: like, is creative the new targeting? Yes. And I had that, I have like a specific thinker about this. The more we have creative of people in Florida running that look like they've lived in Florida, the better the ads do. The more we have people that are are looking like they are from New York experiencing our product and we run those in New York, the better the ads do. If you think about it in like a brick of content, you have the hook, you have the value prop, you have the benefits, you have the problem, you have the solution. The more you can rearrange these Lego bricks of things you're trying to call out for why your product works or why who your product works for, this turns into like just a pure equation. This is like a, I know if I show them these three girls saying these three things about the effects that they're having before I get to the fourth or fifth second, the the length of them sticking with that ad is going to be infinite, infinitely longer than me showing Nick, Aaron, or Corbin on it. Like that, that's the granularity of research and insights that you need to do when you're spending a million five a month on ads. So it's facts. Creative is a strategy. There's no other way around it because now you don't have buttons to pull or targeting that you want to play with.

There's an engineering article we can probably link at at the back of this that literally said the narratives and stories being told within your ad account is more important than the audiences in which you're choosing to tell this to. When did this come out? Uh, weeks ago. Wow. Weeks ago. Um, there's an article on FB Engineering. It's like literally like, here's our new algorithm and we're. So is that just saying just go broad and or just let Meta figure it out? They've been saying that with the Power Five movement that they've been pushing for a very, very long time, but this is them doubling down on like better storytelling, better better investment in a creative, and now they're saying we need more authenticity. We need more diversification storytelling. I mean, that's from the beast that drives majority of our ad spend.

So is it the death of the traditional media buyer? I hate, dude, I don't even like hearing this because I'm so like sensitive to it because I know that's where I came from. But I I think this is the death of media buyers that believe that they have strong control over what happens in the ad account and what their performance is going to be. You're basically saying they need to be emotionless in nature. No more targeting. And now it's more about these media buyers ultimately need to be, let's just call it like creative strategists. Yes. Because you used to have like pods. You have a creative strategist, you have an account manager, you have a media buyer, maybe you have a junior media buyer, you have a designer. You have like four or five people. It actually should just be your media buyer who is your creative strategist who maybe has a a designer that supports what they need or a creator that creates the content that they have. That's our structure. I've I've mentioned in past episodes, our head of e-commerce had never done an ad before, like never clicked the button. He had never done an ad before. He's now our media buyer and obviously he has got a creative team underneath him. So he went super creative. Not even not even super creative. We just think that putting the ads up and making like we don't think that there's a job for that. We don't think there's a job for that. Agree. Agree. So now he's just directly in contact on Slack with Jeff, my business partner, who's the creative strategist, and the whole entire team of creatives that are feeding him all these different iterations. Is it photo? Is it video? We're going to test this value prop, this value prop, this this hook. Um, I was scared to do it. But I mean, if you're for people out there listening, if you're, you know, a medium-sized company and if you're in, you know, the $5 million to $20 million range and you're paying a percent of spend, you know, we talked about it off camera, you can be get, you could be paying 10 to 40k a month and someone that gives a [ __ ] and is just rigorously testing can do the job. I mean, he literally taught himself. I gave him four weeks to teach himself and then just talk to a bunch of smart people and now he's doing it. Now, if you are a media buyer, if if you are like a freelance marketer at any high level, you low-key need a team around you. You need the designers, the editors, you can't just be the person that's pushing the button. I do think it's important that this person needs to have a bigger impact and insight into like the actual P&L that the company is running.

Literally was just going to say that and it's because our he's managing the P&L with me, so he's seeing how it directly affects where forecast. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, they have to. And that's that's the weird part is like you, this person used to be very good about just like sitting in the numbers and understanding like there's like always this balance between art and science like, "Oh, I need to let it run a little bit longer. I know it's unprofitable finance team, but it's going to catch up. Just wait." And now it's Brandon and our media buying sitting with Dan and James, our finance, going, "All right, this is a daily forecast, and we're going to update this in real time." We do that every single hour from our team. Every hour, what did we spend on AppLovin? What did we spend on this? What was the return? What does Enc that's just in the channel every day, Monday through Sunday, bro? So, we know at every moment where the spend is going because there's no chance if this goes off in any way. I'm getting a call going like, "All right, well, subscription retention needs to go do a couple things. What do we have planned?"

How are you guys doing that? Is that like Replet or Bolt or something with AI that's triggering in? Is there like No, no. I don't want. So, the difference between not Zapier. No, literally. Um, it's we have a team of three. So you you asked this question because you're like, well, why it would be more efficient to have an AI or tool pull this? What's what I don't want is someone to not check the numbers and go. These conversations are the exact conversations. It's the conversation I just had with the guy Drew from Iris about like, do you want everything? Yes, we do it daily. So it's like, do you want everything to automatically come in or do I want Chris to take his 15 minutes every morning to look through everything and then see what's going on? And again, this is stuff that Taylor talks about all the time. Like those guys that are going like you your marketing has to marry finance as well as forecasting. Like I I agree that's all needs to be in. But going back to the media buying side, if you're just doing customer acquisition, if you're just like I'm your media buyer and I'm reporting on ROAS, that doesn't exist.

I want to go back into you mentioned uh that five-step process you talked about the hook and the value prop. The big main thing is within 3 seconds, like there's got to be an insane hook to get people to stop because everybody has ad scrolling. Uh, walk me through that process that you have for the perfect ad.

Let's call it close to yours. I won't change the five steps you have. The only difference I would change is the placement of the captions, the way that it needs to be displayed on mobile specifically. A lot of people, they will just do like, I'm going to make a one by one, a square ad or a tall ad. You need to be designing for the 4x5 and the what is that, 9x16. I am talking more about Meta right now, but that's the only real platform that we're getting a lot of this discovery on and making sure that the captions and the actual like focus of the creative is seen instantly.

I got to stop you for a second because this is so mind-blowing. Transitioning from an outside media buyer to internal, our head of e-commerce. The biggest thing we found was they weren't inserting in the correct creative native to that placement, that 4x5, that 9x16. So, we'd be getting Instagram Story ads and I'd screenshot my media buyer. I'm like, why is this why is this a square with a bunch of words and a bunch of dots? Like, make it look pretty for that. And they said it's a lot more work, but they've gotten super anal on the placement. Huge difference in performance. People aren't taking the time to do this. And I understand it's a lot of extra [ __ ]. If you're just starting out, you're probably not going to obsess on the level that you are trying to do, but we're also trying to spend as much money as humanly possible that you spend a lot more money than I am. Let that clear for everybody listening. But but still like the the thought process is still on a level like I need my team to know why this is working. For every concept, it has to be accompanied with the image for the placement and then a video for the placement. And that's a lot more work to think about. Is think about including your influencer guy or girl that's running the department. Now when they get their content back from the creators, they're like, "Oh, you were too close." Or, "Oh, the product was cut off on the right side." Now they're having to fix all that stuff. So the detail on the upfront investment of time from the briefing standpoint gets way more intricate because we know we have to make our money back on the ad side.

All right. And are you working with internal uh content creators or is it external? Both. How you guys do those briefs for creatives? Starts with the product in which we're giving them. So we have two two core products. One is infused, one is not. But we know we're telling this is where the placement is going to be. So this is for specifically uh Meta Reels. So we want them to know that this is going to be in a 9x16 or it's going to be in a 4x5 format. We are big on sunlight. So everything that we do is has to be sunlit. These are like the basics that we have to include. Just have context. Are you putting this in like a Google Doc that has like correct full traditional brief? I don't think we have anything unique other than other people outside of this is what you're having to say. This is how long it has to be. Here's the framing and then here's the examples of others that that really good at this. What I think a lot of brands get wrong is they don't give examples of winning things that are working as well as, "Hey, don't do these things because this doesn't work." That to me, I think, is enough to tell the creator, "Still do you, keep your keep your vibe. We know you know your audience better, but these are the things that didn't work." So I would suggest not doing these things. I don't think enough people do that. Yeah. Ken from Neuro Gum, absolutely unreal episode. They have a whole entire army in a Slack group where all of these um, they're influencers/creators/affiliates that are sharing what's working and what's not. And it's this flywheel that's going so fast that they're just sharing what's winning because everybody's incentivized to to pump everything. Um, yeah, I feel like on on the creative brief side, it's just about iterating and sharing with the people making it just like in real time what's working really, really fast.

Well, I want to take you in on this. This is what we're I hope we get done. I don't know if it'll be a Q2 thing. You you know about the clipping culture, the [ __ ] culture, the WP culture. Oh my god. You want want to hear something crazy? Yeah, please. Stephen Schwarz, NYU, the CEO. He did my personal website in 2019, 2020 for free. This [ __ ]. And he was a crazy hustler. He wouldn't leave me the [ __ ] alone. 15 at this time. No, he was like 18 or 19. He's he's he's not like 21. He's like he's like 23 or 24. And I remember he did and I remember going to Jeff. I'm like, "Yo, this guy, this guy could tell like he's he's on some shit." And um, yeah, we've been speaking to them for a couple weeks and their team is [ __ ] on top of you. Um, [ __ ] it. Let's just talk about the sauce. I'm starting to see people talk about it now. And I feel like by the time this gets out, it's kind of going to be out there. Um, for everybody listening, we're really [ __ ] giving you the sauce on this. Okay, this is the [ __ ] sauce. Okay, so you have your CPMs, guys. And you could go on this website, [ __ ] and they have, let's just call it, a whole entire marketplace of different quote unquote clippers. They could be 16-year-olds, 19-year-olds. They could be in India, Africa, wherever that are making a [ __ ] ton of money. You have your offer, and you could say, "Hey, I'm willing to spend $5,000. My target CPM is 85 cents, a dollar." And then you can even give them the creative brief that you're talking about. And let's just say it's $5,000. They just go [ __ ] ham and they create all this stuff. They post it. You don't pay until you approve it. That's first off. And secondly, it goes till it gets to $5,000. But let's just say someone posted and you're at $5,000, but then it goes viral. And it would technically be if you back into the CPM, $20,000. Doesn't matter. You only pay $5,000. So, it's capped. And people like Drake are doing it like for music. And I saw Drew's doing it. Um, yeah. I think that that is going to radically buck up the whole entire space and the whole entire market. Um, by the time this gets out, we'll be doing it in a big big way. Um, and it's like the little secret. It's like the Andrew Tate, the Aman Godzi. Um, these guys aren't as famous as you think they are. They're behind. They were doing what [ __ ] is doing, but they had their own isolated army probably on Discord or Slack and they had their own cost structure. But dude, I think that [ __ ] is going to go crazy. I think all these other marketplaces, bro, they're the only ones doing it. The the the amount of energy you're bringing to this, I match so aggressively. Dude, you're so focused on your product and you're so focused on like making ads. And that's that's like not even where we're trying to go. I don't care about the followers because all I want is the impressions because it's a bunch of random people making random pages that are just driving back to your website. So all of a sudden you have an army of people that don't care about what you're doing, but you just need to continue to feed them the system of ads or briefs that you want and assets. Like that's the game. Like you create as much as you can, you give it to the army and then they make all the assets and it scales infinitely, infinitely and it doesn't matter. Always on, always working, never stops. What TikTok Shop did to empower everyone to be affiliates and sell real digital or real physical products is this on a wild scale cuz now you don't have to just speak English. You just have to create. It gets very dangerous for a company like like ours that have 10 years. He can attest to it. We have a backup drive, bro, of I don't even know how much we've spent on the backup drive. It's years and years and years of videos. All we're doing like right now is cleaning it and then putting it all there. God, it's dirty. Yeah. The TikTok stuff is they mostly you probably want them to have the product. This is like they don't even have to have the product and you can absolutely sprint. I think that is just further cementing the fact that your follower count means absolutely [ __ ] nothing. Absolutely nothing. Um, and this further essentiates the fact that, again, we mentioned off camera, um, rookie on YouTube, we're just starting to learn. It's it's actually so much fun. YouTube as well as other platforms, they are prioritizing the smaller creator. So, yeah, I think [ __ ] and obviously tons like what their business model is. is there's nothing proprietary. I mean, there's nothing I'm sure there's little piece of it proprietary, but everybody is going to be doing that. And then what's going to happen is, you know, who could do the best offer. I think it's going to be interesting because there is going to be billionaires in Saudi Arabia that are going to be as famous as they want to be and they are going to I think they're going to drive up the CPMs because they're going to be able to do they're going to be able to just pay so much money to get as many views as they want. Not only them, the OnlyFans are going to go crazy. Think about it even on a crazier level, right? Cuz they don't have a way of getting top off of funnel people in going to get crazy. Imagine when like the people who are like in like politics catch up to this. Oh yeah. Would you would you go as far as saying the podcast this was a year of the podcast. Do you think the year of the the [ __ ] clipping is the next one? I think that's a safe bet. Crazy. I think this also tells me that like unequivocally in 2042 Mr. Beast is going to be president. Any of these people with huge distribution and the ability to push even harder through [ __ ] Um, I mean, they're going to be able to hit anybody and everybody. They have all the leverage because they have they already have the distribution so they can leverage that wild alpha against against the [ __ ] Um, you got to do a whole one on this one. Yeah, that's crazy. I have to have Stephen on this. Um, that's crazy. That that's mind. It's I actually did not want to talk about it, but [ __ ] it. We just talked about it. We're keeping we're keeping this on there.

Um, I want to tie a bow in the customer acquisition because that's obviously like your wheelhouse. Um, do you think first-time founders in the beginning should manage ads and or be in the ad account and know and understand how to use the ad account?

Really good question. Unequivocally, yes. It'll allow you to ask better questions to to the person who will eventually be managing it. Second, say you're only spending $5 to $10,000 a month, $3,000 a month. You're going to have to pay this person or somebody else to manage those ads. That could be thousands of dollars more in testing. So why wouldn't you just eat it yourself? And I think now the tools are sophisticated enough where you don't need a lot of outside support. And if you do, bro, you can go find someone, do a quick consult, look over your shoulder, and then continue on. But I do think at the beginning, say up until $10, $20, $30,000 and spend that the the founder or the somebody on the leadership team should invest in this because this is where your new customers are coming from.

Yes. So funny you mentioned that second bucket of having somebody outside and check it. When we were transitioning, our head of e-commerce to take over as media buyer, I'm like, I should probably hedge my bet and have somebody from the outside. He ran ads uh for Hex Guide, a bunch of a bunch of huge brands. I was like, "Hey man, can I pay you X? I'm not going to say the number to just talk to my guy, tell him everything, you know, go go and check one time a week." Um, and that was like an amazing learning lesson, you know, for my guy. And now, you know, I think he's up to par based on all these other media buyers. Now it's really down to a effort and and staying on top of it and then b just being on top of the creative and making sure that you're really cranking more creative.

Um, on the creative side and on the ad side, is it safe to just say that like more is better period because for me, I am voraciously hounding my team, more creative, more creative, more creative. What's your thoughts on that?

But before I went through the documents of Andromeda, I was volume over anything as much as I possibly could. We we measured on our weekly calls with internally, we measured the amount of new assets launched and the amount of assets that hit what we called uh success metric, which is just dollars spent on it. Cuz if it's hitting our metrics, we're spending dollars on it. So we said if we can come up with on a weekly basis, 10 concepts, two ads of those concepts, 20 total, good job. That's a successful week. And now that number might have changed depending on new product drops or Q3, Q4 coming in or summer versus Q1. Like that might change depending on the season of spend and our target of profitability for sure. And that and that allows you to staff properly against those like, hey, if I need X amount of ads, I probably know how long those take. Time, let's just say during busy season. If that doubles, then you know you need to hire against it. 100%. And and that comes into play of like we can't maybe there's some SKUs that we can't sell or something that's backordered so we can't don't make assets for that one. So like the communication of should we be investing time, effort, and money into selling these products? If we're not going to have them, we shouldn't. So I So generally speaking, I think more is better than less because if you don't have anything working, you're going to need more anyways. And as soon as something starts to work, all it's going to do is inform what more you need to make. Once you start advertising, if you can't really stop because it's a the lifeline of new customers coming in, b the the expression and the always onness of what we do digitally.

What are those? You know, you said that if it hits um, you know, X amount of spend, then you know it's a success and you can look back to kind of those micro metrics. What are those micro metrics for you to define success on like an ad set or a campaign level? Is it just CAC?

I would say the easiest thing is CAC. Um, plus to acquire a customer for everyone listening. And I would say the easiest thing is CAC. The second thing because of so we're spending on so many channels that sometimes an ad will continue to run past the point of profitability because we see cheaper cost per cart, cheaper people hitting our carts and I know I have a good email float that can back it up. Right. That's a little bit of a different thought process. That's very interesting. So basically, so you're saying if they get to cart, then you get the email? So you're saying you value not getting the sale, like getting the sale is ideal. That's the catch, of course. And then secondly would be getting them to a point where you can get their email and then you rely on your back end. Correct. And I think that we can do that at our scale and our spend. And this is also my my plea to anybody starting out like build out your your flows. And we'll get into the the retention side of things, but this is where I feel confident enough in knowing we have a 20% take rate in someone choosing to be a subscriber. Awesome. Just let's just get them to the site. And if we don't, our our ability to get those non-customer customers to new customers is better than most in the market. So that that's like where my brain is going.

What justifies the ads guys to continue to run ads that are quote unquote not profitable from the dashboard or or even from a a tool reporting?

And at that point, you probably have such, you know, a granular understanding of how and what you're doing on a per platform perspective where you could say, "Hey, maybe AppLovin isn't the CAC winner, but it's the collect the email winner." Yes. And then you just kind of blend everything in a pot together. And then ultimately, as a company, in all of the channels, are we hitting our goal CAC? Are we hitting our goal? Dude, you're you're absolutely spot on. Then then that that's the conversation me, Brandon, and James have going, what is my bull case? What is my bare case? And like, what is our daily pace? And then that should just change dynamically. Brandon might be like, I'm going to pull back spend. I know you have three emails going out tomorrow. Okay. Yeah. Like, we'll make it look a lot better. We have a drop coming very soon. I'm gonna go heavy on my side and I'm going to tell Brandon pull back because why are we going to overspend when these customers are going to buy anyways? That that's a sick video game here, guys. This is a sick video game.

Um, is there a third peg in there as far as a KPI that you're looking? I love CAC and then get the email under the assumption that you're going to win in the back end. Is there a third one or those two are the big ones?

I would say that the the CPM because you talked about AppLovin that's not the highest quality of traffic for us, but man, we get reach there and man, like when we were running on Twitter, we had tons of views and tons of engagement. So I do think there's something to say that now if I'm just starting out, I'm probably not letting that be a decision maker for me because not I'm not making money. I can't afford to blow cash. But for the larger you get, there is a thing of we have to fill the funnel. They're at least knowing who we are and they might not be it might not be ready for them to make the purchase. Like there is times of someone seeing something, "Oh, that's cool," but I don't really need anything right now. That's where those like multi-attribution models are very, very important for people listening. I think another huge thing just to to to come out of that to really hammer down to people listening. Uh, you guys are obviously on a whole other cycle level, you know, every single day, every single hour, tracking every single thing. But understanding and knowing I have a big drop coming, I have emails coming. Maybe pull back spend if the efficiencies are not there. Knowing that you have a crutch to land on to get the sale. And and even deeper is like you don't have to be on this level. It's like Dan, our our CEO will come to it and go, I have this much dollars and discounts that I can give you. And like, what does that mean? That sentence means if we aren't spending this on ads knowing that we're going to lose dollars on trying to acquire and if Brandon is pulling back an ad, that means I have the ability to run promos or that means I have the ability to hit more discounts for this specific period for these two days that we are not running ads. So, if he goes, "I have discounted revenue dollars I can give you to play with." That might mean I can tee up some more campaigns. I love that. That is the reason why I [ __ ] love this podcast. Um, because I guess I'm I'm meeting amazing people like you. I'm learning so much and it's I'm bringing this stuff back to my company. Literally, we track zillions of [ __ ] metrics. A one of the four key metrics now that we're tracking because it's orders over $1,000 on a per day perspective, bends, myrrh, and then the number four is what you just said, which is discount as a percent of sales. We understand and know our sweet spot. And now that's a new lever that we could pull in conjunction with an email or a new product or something to help us kind of even things out for people just starting e-commerce or maybe smaller companies is just understanding and knowing like what's your daily burn rate and then the percent of discount is like your sales could be going up but if your percent discount is going up as well too maybe you might not outpace burn. So interesting. I love that. I love the looking at email or text capture as like a true secondary KPI. It has to, dude. Those are those are they're coming into your ecosystem. Like there's no they're they're interested enough to give you something. Well, we don't have Nick Shaker doing our uh our cuddling of our email list and our retention to really [ __ ] draw that out.

Tell me about top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Um, and just give me your playbook on how you see it. We probably should have talked about this when you were talking about the ex how has like ads changed over time because I had a very different or talked about where I used to be and where I believe in it now where it used to be it that to me was so segmented. I used to have top of funnel or what we call prospecting specific campaigns where it was like, oh, this is all new customers. This is the first touch point for the brand that's seen our ads before won't see these types of ads. That's how it used to be. And then I'd have a middle of funnel that was less branded, more value prop driven, very "attiy" if you will, of like, buy this today, here's your reward tomorrow. And then at the bottom was just, hey, don't forget about us. Here's a discount code if you need to get over. That's how it used to be like a three-tiered legitimate funnel.

Now, just so you know, the title and thumbnail of this video is going to be "2025 E-commerce Masterclass with Nick Shakford." So 2025, what is the strategy right now? Unfortunately, it is a lot more mumbled together. It is a lot less structured and segmented that I used to want it to be. And that's okay. And here's why. Before, we couldn't trust Meta to serve the ad that we wanted to for a new customer. So, we had to force it through audience segmentation and we had to force it through uh specific ads that we were showing them. We had to force it. Now, Meta would be this is the "trust us" era. We're in the "trust the algorithm" era, "trust the AI" era. I believe that we are going to move into an era and we're already in this era of I am organizing the ad account based upon the assets, creative, and angles and stories that I'm telling. So when I log into my ad account, it might look like "Feel Better Tomorrow," but everything underneath it is just a a consistent story from the landing page all the way to the actual ad that we've been creating. Video, image, etc. So that all will live together. It's almost like a folder. So it could be the product, product value prop, A of that product into all the assets you create for it. And I think this is the way it's going to go because this is the "trust us" method that Meta wants us to go, which is fine because we rather spend our time and effort on telling convincing stories or or making convincing offers. That's the area that I think nobody is talking about because now to build a landing page, it used to take a very long time and a lot of people didn't do it. You can now you can deploy any of the tools. I won't drop him on this, but any of the tools that you can build a page by yourself in a day or rip somebody else's page and make yourself with any of the AI [ __ ] that's coming out. Now, if I can create a bunch of landing pages fairly relatively quickly, now it's just up to me to understanding what can I offer them. That's

What we're at. That's the phase we're in currently. Can we structure enough offers to convince a consumer to try us for the first time? And then how do we keep them? I won't talk about that just yet.

Let's just say you're spending, you know, you have $1,000 to budget and you want to test a thousand creatives. Like at what point is it diminishing returns? Like how much do you need allocated to get statistical significance on the creative? You want me to say a number? You want me to be like, "You need 5%?" No, I want you to prove to me that I'm not a psycho. That I'm telling my team, "More creative, more creative, more, more creative."

So, here's two arguments. I'm going to choose one at the end. I need as much creative as humanly possible. Please get it loaded in the ad account.

"Okay, boss. Um, we're incredibly unprofitable. We need to make sure we run just the best performing ads."

Those two things happen all the time. You could be telling a team, "I need you to launch a lot more," and they can come back and be like, "Dude, we are so unprofitable. Well, I do not want to launch anything new. I'm going to kill everything that's not hitting target." And that's a function of X% is working, and then X% is testing to find the next thing that works. And you're just saying, "Less testing, more double down on what's working."

"Correct. Because if you're like, 'What makes a really good media buyer?' I go like, 'They know how to spend money.' And you're like, '[ __ ] I mean, they spent enough money to understand when they shouldn't be spending money and they have a feeling of like, 'I dude, I can't launch any more campaigns. The account's not spending it,' or 'That's Meta's choosing to allocate the spend to an ad that's not highly converting. I'm going to have to turn that off,' which means the account won't spend anymore."

So, there's this, there's this like movement that happens, like a dance that happens within these ad accounts that you, depending on how profitable you are on that specific day, will be justified on how much you should launch new ads in there. Because if you all of a sudden have only two or three really good ads that have worked for you historically, whatever that is, and you just introduce into the ad account, 5, 10, 15 new ads, and all of a sudden, majority of your spend comes from these. None of these are hitting, none of these are working, the whole account's lopsided. The whole account's lopsided. And now all of a sudden, guess who's going to freak out? The media buyer and the ads team going like, "Guys, we we shouldn't let this run even though we know we need to spend to get more assets to hopefully make new ads that will work."

So this dance is like super dynamic, and we might, there might be days that our team will go, "Though, we we can't spend. Nothing is taking our budget, or nothing is proving profitable." From a media buyer perspective, you're just pushing and pulling the budgets. It's always good to have a ton of assets and content in the cooker, but ultimately, you could build thousands of assets off what's working now, and then, you know, you spend a couple hundred, a couple hundred of them, and now something's completely different. You're going to have to redo all those assets. You only, you should probably have runway for, you know, probably like a 30-day window.

I love that. I do. I think you can plan on a monthly basis, and then it's the rotating because again, you probably have drops, you probably have holidays, you probably have other things that you can implement some of these messages on, and you have your evergreen running. You're like, "Yo, these, we know these angles usually do well for us. How do we keep making more of that?" And then we keep launching those as well. But it is a very dynamic movement of this overall. You do know you need to introduce new ads, but not at the detriment of ruining the ad account.

A general rule of thumb, if right now the company is doing good, what percent should be to winners and what percent should you allocate budget to testing new and what's next? What's healthy and what we're trying to strive for is a 70/30. We're trying to have 70% of the dollars going towards what we have conviction in, what's working. 30% going towards things that we are not too totally sure. And when the macro of the company is a bit in the dumper, what does that go to?

90/10. Yeah, I would say 90/10, or even go 100/0 because I, you have like this cyclical performance that happens on on various weekends. We know for a fact our product gets a lot more energy, love, and support Friday through Sunday. Opposite of my situation. If I don't know that my weekend's going to be heavier performing, I might, I might unintelligently blow budget Monday through Thursday that I probably could have kept till Friday to the weekend.

Guys, that's amazing advice at any scale. Knowing that 70/30 is ideal, but it could go up to 100/0, and then understand and know where you get the sales, where you get the customers, and then just make sure you're doing the testing when new people are coming in to see what's working. I love that. Amazing practical advice.

Let's talk about from a content perspective, just paid versus organic. How do how do you look at that? We we've evaluated this so many times. The activity of you posting and sharing organically has a direct benefit towards improvement of ad account. When we're not contributing or uploading any sort of assets to any of our social channels, it has a negative impact on our ad account. Wow.

And those are usually some of your best performing ads because you're not really selling. You're creating for an aesthetic which you're hoping that your customers really resonate with. And then if you find it organically, there's like this trust factor of like, "Oh, I wasn't served an ad and I wasn't convinced to do something." And I think that is a very good place to start, especially as you're just getting going. The hardest part is getting the system of creating organic at all.

Yeah. I mean, that thesis just leans more and more towards this company WP blowing up because you're getting it and it's not an ad. Yeah. People don't want to be served ads, they just want to consume to consume. Um, yeah, I completely agree with with everything you're saying. For anybody out there listening, you want to start and be scrappy under the notion that Nick just said that posting on organic directly affects his ad account. Let's just say you even don't even have an ad account. You should be just going and posting on every single platform. Best practices, two times a day.

What would you say is the most underrated creative format for an ad in 2025? Uh, green screen, small mic in hand, speaking to camera. So, this is the most cringe [ __ ] ever. That is that is crazy. Uh, the amount of times I've seen like a a good like walk-through or breakdown of the small person in the corner dragging their head around, it's just like an absolute re reinvention of a VSSL, a video sales lander. It is the social version of a video sales lander where I'm actually convincing you. But when you do a breakdown of ingredients in your product, a breakdown of like how your product is made. When you're doing a breakdown of why people are loving your experience or running through customer reviews, like that [ __ ] feels so organic, but you can sell very well through that. And it's, it goes back to the methodology of if you are speaking to them on the platform that you're they're used to consuming in the most native possible way. It's likely that you're going to have a connection. It's likely that they're going to want to uh continue down this conversion path with you. So, I think that's a place that no one's talking about.

Well, I love you. We're doing zero of that. And you know why it's so funny? Because I look at that and like I just started posting more like personally. I was like literally like posting like twice a year and now I posted probably 50 times this year. Oh yeah. I see it and it's cringe. And there's like a couple swaggy dudes that do it that make it work. Like uh I don't know him personally. This guy Alex Garcia. We follow each other. I like his stuff and it's tasteful. And JT Barnett's a friend. I think he does it as tasteful and as cool as you can do it. Yeah. But for people out there listening, probably do it because Nick said so. He probably spent a [ __ ] ton of money to make it work.

Constant Creative is this agency that you have that's helping, you know, create these high performing ads. What's the biggest learning lesson that's come out of that company? Volume. So we we went into so Constant came out of uh a co-need, a service like this. On-demand ads existed, but they didn't have a a performance angle to it. Like they didn't know how to make ads. Still, even today, it's hard to find an editor that understands performance marketing. So true.

What ended up happening was like, you just bastardized a designer, be like, "Yo, like, add these badges or like, add these things." Oh, quicker, quicker, or sparkly. Like, you just give them things that they would add into it, and then they just give it back to you, and it's a mumble jumble of stuff. So we had access to a ton of these people. We were heavy on the media buyers, we were heavy on the designers because we were servicing our own people. Then there was downtime. Then there was, "Oh wait, you're not actually creating all the time because maybe we, our process, or the ads weren't working as well." So we had a bunch of international designers. Now, we're heavily in like Canada and Latin America for time zone specific. And we just started realizing, "Dude, there's a lot of incredible talent editors that actually deserve to work with high-level brands, but brand owners or non-creative people don't know how to communicate or brief." People don't know what they want until they see something. So, a lot of times, everything's a second revision or third revision.

So, if you've never worked with a designer, editor before, but you know, you have an idea of what you want. You actually have a better idea once you receive something. You're a creative person, so you probably have a better way of communicating, and you've worked with your team for a long time. They kind of get what you want. If you have a brand new editor or designer, and you are not the most creative individual, how do you tell someone you want something? You show them an example of something. But then what they, what the, what an untrained editor designer does is they do it word uh word for word, uh pixel by pixel, and they just replicate with what your brand or assets or value props are. That's not what you need. You need someone that can be like, "This is an example of what you want. Here's the brand. Here's what they stand for, and here's how, as a designer, I think I can change it or think it can make it better." That's what people don't get. So we had to do that and find it ourselves because we needed it.

It's funny you say that. I love just the marriage between agency, two agencies, and and Breeze. It's again, this is the same thing with me with podcasts and brands.

Let's go to conversion optimization. What would you say are the most common conversion killers that you immediately fix when you're working with someone new? What's like the lowest hanging fruit that almost everybody's doing wrong?

I'll go, I'll go homepage, and then I'll go product page when I'm landing on uh the website. And depending if you're a low SKU store, high SKU store. If you're a low SKU store, I want this page that I'm landing on almost look like a landing page, but have a little bit more brand story. So, if I'm landing on it, I got one product to sell. They don't need to click other buttons to add that to their cart or get to conversion as fast as possible. The lower the SKUs, the more that one landing page is going to be optimized towards putting it to cart or putting it to checkout. I think you just need to highlight the product specifically and don't overcomplicate how many pages need to go into it, especially at the start.

The more SKUs you have. I think True Classic is probably one of the goats at the amount of testing and the volumes that they do. You land on True Classic uh their website, and they have so many different packs and bundles. As you start to scroll, first off, at the head, uh, at the header image, it's what, what is their current offer or what is they currently trying to promote or have the most amount of visibility into. Awesome. Right beneath that, what is their highest AOV and what is the, all their bundles and their packs because they know that as they start to scroll, we want to make sure that we're showcasing the highest AOV. See if we can get most money out of the customer. That's everyone's goal. No matter whether you're saying it or not, that's everyone's goal. And then as I start going down there, now I want categories. Now, I want to be able to shop if there's a lot of SKUs, or I want more insights or feedback on the specific single SKU that I could potentially buy. That's what I want on the homepage product page.

This [ __ ] kills me so much. You land on a product page and the first thing you see is like, just a product and like it's just white behind it. Product on white, and it landed. I'm like, "Really? This could have been a lifestyle image. This could have been a great-looking person. This could have been the product in use or some sort of dynamicness of it, and it's just nothing. It's just a a product of whatever it is, just sitting there." And I think that's such a waste of imagery, especially because what you're going to put right next to it is a a weak description of why you think someone's going to buy the product, rather than filling it with incredible headlines. So that's an important split test is is that first image on a PDP. Edge. You know where you look to understand what's happening there? Amazon. These guys have the ultimate product page. Amazon branded pages with the amount of images they have there. That is the closest thing to the most optimized website in the entire world because of how much traffic they have. You think these guys don't test their product pages or their buy button? Nobody can touch that volume.

We, as a product that wants multiple purchases or a product that has multiple SKUs or a product that has different packs, kind of like you guys, where you can add on different frames, etc., the ability to clearly lay out uh the the most frequently bought together or frequently bundled together products is something I think people spend a lot less time on than anything else. So the single image on a PDP page, increasing AOV through others bought with it, really, really highlighting on that front homepage, like, "What is the big offer that you have now?" And be strategic from a placement perspective on, "This is maybe my highest margin or something that I'm trying to drive through the inventory on and put that in the front."

A big thing that you talk about that you've mentioned is just offers. I'd love to just give you the floor on just the importance of offers and just your thought process because we understand the acquisition side, and because we know we need more levers, different entry points into the brand. The only way that you can do that convincingly is two ways: reorganization and consistent creation of content that's new for consumers and different ways that your product can be sold or grouped or bundled together.

The issue right now on platforms, average CPMs, and with the the data set that I have across our brands, $35 to $45 expensive, dude. Before, when we used to sell, it was like 10, maybe 15 if it went crazy in a very expensive season. That was the golden age. Pre-2020. That was a good time. That was when we should have all sold and moved to Barcelona. We may we may or may not have said that off camera. Allegedly. Allegedly.

Um, so now it's like anytime I look into it, I go, "I need to increase AOV as humanly possible." And this is ignoring that we have subscription. When I'm looking at it, the offer structure has to do two things. It has to give them something uh clearly more valuable than if they were to just land on my website. I need to position something that I know for a fact will be the best they can't find anywhere else, and they will allow them to come back and buy from us again, and we'll be able to position more things for it. Specifically speaking, if I'm selling a a face cream specifically, I know that this will congruently give me a towel or a scrunchie or something on the back end that I can allow to bundle or put boost up the AOV. So that first product you have, you need to think about the secondary and tertiary products so that I can add it into convince them to buy. People that do really good at this: AG1, Everyday Dose, uh Goon's, where they can say, "This is this acquisition, new customer offer." Okay, what is that going to be? You have a blender or you have a cup, you have a mug, things that have higher perceived values, but don't actually cost us the the brand that much. It's an irresistible offer to start.

What is the single product or SKU that we know if someone buys first drives the most amount of LTV? I'll go even further. What what allows them to buy the next thing the fastest? The second step of that is like, "Cool, I know if they take product A, they're most likely going to get product A again and maybe add product B. But if I give them product B, they're going to get to product C even quicker." We know that our entry point is a six-pack. But if they actually buy the 12-pack, that means that they're going to buy it again because they're going to consume it more because they have more. What? Like, we should have been selling the 12 the whole time. Well, we, if we didn't know that because we didn't have the information of like, "What is the speed of increasing repeat purchase rate?" [ __ ] like that is like we don't, we are just now starting to understand because the volume we have. It might take brands years to get to that information because they haven't collected enough customer data. We're year two, and we're able to go like, "Look, this might be our entry offer, but it's now on Nick's team on the retention to increase that six-pack to a 12-pack as fast as possible because that means they're going to stay with me for another three [ __ ] months." And if you understand your your unit economics, you ultimately are willing to basically at any cost almost lose in the front if you know what that customer lifetime, the predictability of that customer lifetime is going to be. And I will gladly spend that. And that's what we're having to do now. We'll have uh another product launched, and we're we're like, "Dude, it's small enough. I might just give it for free into all the subscribers."

The next question I was going to ask was GWP. Absolutely. GWP because a gift with purchase could be more cost-effective than a discount or a another incentive. It could be. It might not be. It could be though. For people listening, if the MSRP, let's just say the MSRP, I'm just going to make up random numbers here, is $500, but the COGS is $100, but I'm giving away that piece for $100. If it reduces my CAC by anything more than $100, then it's worth it, especially if you went on the back end with good LTV. So people on a GWP side, high perceived value, low COGS, and if you just arbitrage, for me, I have to arbitrage my CAC by the cost of goods on the GWP. But for you, if you're like, "Hey, this just gets them stickier and happier to drive my LTV," you could just say, "Fuck it. I'm just going to bake that into my front and I'm just going to win on the back."

How are you systematically looking at the process of how you create offers? Is there like a system that you guys do, or is it all just based on analyzing the data? We have four offers currently running right now, and I'm I'm looking at it in a very unique way. Here's where, here's where I need us to get to. First, traffic source. If we're running an app, Google, Meta, Twitter, direct mail, that customer is worth a certain type of dollar for me because I know how much they're going to stay spend or stay with us. We're collecting that data right now. We have the ability to go channel offer multiple offers under that channel. The more products you have to offer, the more creativity you have and types of uh offers that you can start formulating. It is two things I'm trying to accomplish at any times. It's either they're going to spend more with me, or I'm going to increase the amount of people that are going to spend with me. And then within that initial bucket of those two, those two areas, then I go into like, "Where's my margins? Can I afford to do it either of these things?" I think that's the easiest framework I start with.

Wow. So, the offer is like a huge part of your company. The offer is the most important. Like you, this year, this quarter specifically, because now we have the team to do it. I have a KPI of 15 unique offers that have to go live in Q2. 15. Insane.

Um, I'd love for you to walk us through, whatever you're comfortable with sharing, like what's your CRO stack? What are what are the apps, the tools, the platforms? What, what are the big things that you need? We have Nostra. Nostra is site speed and it is uh soon to be first-party data. We're currently in trial with Customers.ai to increase user identification so that my email campaigns could be more impactful. We use heatmap.com, which is customer experience tracking, and we were on Replo. We were building pages on Replo. Um, I think that's the initial stack.

I love it. Um, to tie a bow in this conversion optimization, how should people just look at mobile versus desktop? Should you be creating ads specific for each? Should you look at one first? I mean, for us, we always looked at like desktop and then we're like, "[ __ ] like 75% of our traffic is mobile." I think your your thesis is our thesis is like, we mo it's always mobile first. Um, you have to bring into consideration dark mode on email. So knowing that people will, and I, I'm always in dark mode, meaning your screen's always dark, or your emails are always dark, or your your viewing is always in usually black. We want the experience to be both optimized as much as possible, but we know that we are designing mobile first.

All right, let's go to the the fun part, retention and uh lifecycle marketing, which I know you're an absolute ninja at. Let's just start with uh what retention metrics should founders be obsessed over? Uh, revenue per recipient. That's how much they're spending for each person you have on your list. So, our list is 323,000 people on this list, but I'm going to segment it specifically and I'm going to send to my subscribers. I know that I can count on the average revenue per recipient to be $8. I know that that email, that structure, those people that I'm communicating to are extremely valuable to us. And so, when I do any reporting, we know that we have to think with them first. Whereas someone that might not have any sort of past purchase with me, their revenue per recipient might be significantly lower.

The revenue per recipient is completely different based on the cohort, obviously. 100%. And I think that that to me is like, that's where it starts. That's the first one. And on those cohorts, you're doing by, let's just say frequency, how often, monetary, how much they bought over time. All different types of things you're doing. All different types of segments you have. I would imagine you would have, correct? Because you, we have subscribers, repeat buyers, we have repeat buyers, non-subscription, we have one-time buyers, and we have non-buyers. That's like the biggest buckets I can tell you on. Outside of that, you have, "I bought a six-pack or a 12-pack, or I got multi-pack or a bundle." And the revenue per recipient, you can look on a campaign level, or you can look on an actual per customer level to understand to know like how valuable they are, like in conjunction with the sense. That's a little bit more difficult. You'd have to basically export customer info from Shopify and then be like, "How much has this person spent with me over how many periods of how much time? How far back do you want to go? Do we have 300,000 buyers, bro? Like you have 10 years of running. Like how deep are you really going to go?" That's that's the stuff where like that is where AI I think could be very helpful. Mass export, tell me what people are worth. And then it's just like, you know, you know they've been with you for six years, that they only trigger to buy during these type of campaigns. Then you could save money. Yes. On your text and email. You're you're going to be sending way less because you know you only need to send it to these people and their past history.

Those people and their past history. Correct. And you might be like, "I'm never hitting the people that are only buying on the discount, or I'm only hitting the people that are buying on the discount." Right? Then you should elapse those people. Get rid of them.

Something I'm very curious on is for people that you understand and know their buying behavior. If you know they're going to churn, if you say, "Hey, after six months they're going to churn." What do you guys have set in place to say, "Are you guys saying at five and a half months, here's a Hail Mary?" Like, what are your current avoidance tactics? So, we actually look on like a month-to-month basis. So, we have on on a on a healthy subscription basis, you have like three major peaks. You have a day one peak, you have a 28-day peak, and then you have a um like a weird window of like 31 to 45. So, first, let me clarify. Churn for subscription or churn for like non-repeat buyers? I'll take you both of those. We'll go subscription.

So subscription, you have a major peak day one, as I just said. You have you have customers that buy it because they want the discount, and then they're very privy to it. So they immediately cancel. Those people, they were never going to be with you anyways. They're going to be gone. But that spike is the largest spike, and that pulls down overall churn numbers heavily. How do we convince those day ones to never get rid of us? Well, you got to keep them on to tell them that there's actually a real gift that's coming to you month two. All right, maybe I'll stick around. Maybe I'll like the product. Then that's on the product to keep them for the recipient months. The second spike is right around day 28. That's where they get the billing reminder of like, "Yo, you're about to get charged. This is coming." Okay. And the outside of that, then they should already have the product, and then they should be thinking about if they liked it or not. There might be a normal natural churn here. The first like seven, seven days is extremely important of communication of letting them know, "This is exactly what you can look forward to, the feeling, effect, and the quality of the product that you're about to receive." So, it's a lot of hype, a lot of communication, and probably like use cases on how you should consume it and stuff. Just education and how you should implement, what, what, what you should expect, how good everybody else is feeling, customer reviews. It's really difficult to influence those people to stick around because they probably already took it because it was a price reduction. And so, what actually was passed this year was, you, you can't force them into a subscription and keep them there for extended periods of time. You have to give them the way to get off as fast as they got on. That was something where you can say, "You're signing up for an automatic rebuild. You can't cancel for three months." You actually can't do that anymore. That's not legal anymore, right? No.

The churn reduction is around education around the product and the gifts that they potentially get for the back half of the month. So, some specific things that we've done that have increased it that actually didn't cost us any money. We do subscriber giveaways, uh, and say like, "Hey, if you were subscribed past the 27th, you have been entered into to win five free cases." Give more of the product that they're already subscribing to get. At the end of the day, that's what they want. They want more.

First thing, that was like the easiest implementation. We changed our churn from Q4. It was 24%. It's terrible, bro. 24% is like, quit. You should never be doing anything. And so, as we started to focus on from Q4 to Q1, we went down to 17%. My goal by end of this year is to get the best in the market, which is sub 5% aggregate churn. That's like, I'm like in AG1 category. These guys are like the goats of keeping people for long periods of time. Only way we do this is more products. So it's not actually like a tactic thing. It's, I got to give them more products. I got to give them more frequency of when they can receive this product. I got to make it more cost-effective. And if they are going to just leave, they're usually give four reasons: "I can't afford this. I have too much. It, uh, the effect is not what I want. I found another brand." Those are the four reasons that they tell us when they leave us.

Cross-sell me. Give me, give me those rebuttals. Yeah. So you have too much. No problem. You should be able to recommend this. You should give this to one of your friends, or here's how you should make it into mocktails so you can save it for later. Education on how they can actually use that product at different times, or you might have too much. Okay, so let's, if you're a 12-pack, let's go down to a six-pack. Or if you're at a six-pack, let's go down to a 7.5 short cans, less milligrams, less cans, or a smaller size. Oh. Oh, you actually don't want that? Well, you should take our spirit where you can self-dose yourself, and then you'll be able to actually make this into whatever drink you want. So, that's something that we're trying to solve. I really do believe it's just we're too expensive. And so, if we give them discounts, or if we try and incentivize them that way, that's the best way.

Uh, what would you say is the biggest retention mistake founders make? I think not communicating enough to them in a in a in a variety of ways. So you have plain text from founder, plain text from uh customer support, you have plain text from product development. These are just emails that are like just straight written that are no graphics, no nothing that go to the consumer. Those are all three things that can be communicated on a monthly basis. Like just popping in, "Hope you're enjoying the product," or "Here's why I made it." Uh, "Here's what people are saying." And ironically, I bet those perform really well. And we have an email that goes, uh, message from Corbin. Corbin from Breeze. He's like, "Yo, I just asked the team. We just got this offer. It's about to drop. We have a, we did a tease today." He's like, "Yo, you guys aren't going to believe what I have coming for you guys. Pay attention. We're doing a live stream on YouTube. Come join us on 4/20." Like, that's that was an email, and that was a non-revenue. You can't even buy anything other than the bottom. That was like a $40,000 email bringing them down the funnel.

For for founders that are listening, I think especially when you're the underdog and and you're in the beginning, people want to support you. Hit them with that founder text-only email and let them know you're a small business that's looking to build and you appreciate their business. It doesn't hit as well at scale. Um, but I think when you're smaller, people want to support that. It does way better. Oh yeah. And yeah, I'm seeing a lot of those text emails, text-only emails on the tariff situation right now. Um, people getting creative and navigating being playful around saying, "Hey, we might raise our prices. We're not now. You should buy now." And I bet you they're squeezing out some revenue. Um, so that's the first thing. Second thing is like product explanation. Like you have to walk them through almost like a step-by-step tutorial, taking the time to explain to them, "Here's exactly how you should use it and when you should use it for most maximum output." I think that's a place that we undereducate on. Wow.

And as far as that goes, again, getting granular once you understand and know your customer, who you're talking to, then you can speak more natively to that person. We did um Mocktail Madness for March Madness, and we did, we basically, we needed to improve our uh spam rate. It was like, "Well, we need mass responses to us. Like, we need them responding to our email," and the only way to do that is if we prompt them to do something. Right? For us to do that, we're like, "Hey, March Madness is here." So we created a Mocktail Madness, and so we we did for an entire month, "Send us in your favorite mocktails, and we'll score them, and the team will rate it." And then each month, we started communicating, "So-and-so sent and recommended this. This is what we are also able to make." And that improved response rate. So if you can do something to evoke an image of your of the product that they just bought, or how they're formatting their kitchen, or where, whatever you're trying to sell, try to get them to to submit or some give something. Oh, it's huge.

That's a good segue into, I'm sure we would agree that your best marketers are probably your loyal customers. What type of strategy are you using to initiate your loyal customers to be marketers for you? Um, let me give you a couple of mine too to to get your going. One, we have a huge following on Iconic, and we weren't leveraging it enough. And I found like specifically from an influencer perspective, we're getting more leverage and better deals with the influencers because we're doing co-branded posts with an account that has 700-plus thousand followers. So, just leveraging the distribution that we spent 10 years to build to provide more value to those people. Um, another huge thing that we do is understanding and knowing the cohort of the very valuable customers. Some of them that I even talked to, I used to call all the customers, the big customers on Fridays. Sounds so stupid. Don't ask for two. Don't ask for three. Tell a customer to tell just one person. It sounds so silly, but I've been doing this thing for like six, seven years. Okay? Say, "Don't tell five people. I don't want you to tell one person." That's achievable. It's doable. And they're going to tell one person. And obviously, if you're talking to them, they're going to have a good experience. So I'd say those are the two things that are uh getting people to kind of market for us is we're getting more distribution through influencers and then better word of mouth through.

Yeah, that's that's I don't think there's any way we can do better than that. We And your product has a nice AOV to play with. So like that one intro and you not having to spend to acquire that person that was recommended is game-changing. Anytime a product is damaged, or anytime anything is uh one can is crushed, we ship back a six-pack. And it was like, "Look, keep the cans, give it to somebody else." And so we we want at any time to give them more to give away more of like a a delight and surprise budget that we have. So we have the discount budget and we have the surprise and delight budget. The CX team gets to use at their discretion. We call that the wow budget, and uh True Classic does that as well, too. It's huge. I think it's mass. I think it's so important, dude, because they know the value of the product. We know the the cost of our product. It's the best thing. They they came to you for a reason. They wanted the thing that you're selling. I've said it a couple times on the podcast. I have to say it again. Um, and it's going to be the whole thesis on the next thing that I'm going to do is use common sense. If somebody is upset, a can is nicked, like you wow them and over-deliver. If you look at net net, the six-pack that you give, your true cost of goods, if you gave that to a 100 people, do you think that that X amount of money, you're going to make, forget revenue, forget LTV, probably an inbidon, just first sale, you're going to make way more than that. And all it takes is one of those people to do a big order, and then you're you're in the green. We used to do that so much, we stopped doing it. We're doing it a lot more, ironically. Um, we probably filmed like two months ago with True Classic. I was doing research on them like months before because I really, really, really respect what they're doing. He got me to hire a head of customer engagement that her only job is literally she's got a wow budget, and then she's doing posting, but then she's talking, she has to answer every single comment, every single DM across seven different channels, every day, all day, and some other things too. Um, but yeah, I completely agree with you. You got to just wow them. You have to have a wow budget cut. Especially when you have a product that's going to like be showcased in their house, or like they're going to be proud of it, or they, that's an expression of their personality. You want them to feel justified in the dollars and stuff that they spend for it. And so no better way to be like, "Oh, where'd you get that?" "I got it from this place." You wanted them to be stoked on any of those kids.

So, um, all right, I want to move on. I want to go to to product strategy. What kind of fundamental product strategy lessons did you learn through, I mean, it was a long time ago, the hoverboards losing a bag of money, um, fidgets, which was kind of a quick thought, "Go make a couple million dollars," versus now, what are your big kind of rules from a product perspective? I've sold a lot of things. Um, and like this is this is the first product that it like fundamentally changes a behavior that has a real feeling and effect and a personal experience that this, like we are able to facilitate individual unique experiences for every single person on a onetoone basis. And a product that can do that is extremely important and has to have some sort of like repeat purchasability in it. Hydration packets, electrolyte packets. Why do you think this popped up everywhere? Because I'm going to buy it. I'm going to consume it. It's going to taste a certain way, and I'm going to feel like I'm getting more hydration in this. Okay. Why did do you think cologne or like unbranded cologne has been popping up? Well, I can I spray it, I smell it, and a certain reaction starts coming from me from the opposite sex, or I like the way it smells or feels. Didn't know that was a category popping. Is it? Yeah. Non-non-branded uh cologne. It's like one of the things where you can mimic another cologne, but how do you know if it's George Armani or not? So, evoke an emotion. It has. Yes. But I would not have done this if I didn't have the conviction in Aaron and the team. I want it to be shipped in a parcel. It's got to be small. It's got to be something that I can put in a sleeve or somehow like fulfill at at volume. Cans is not the way. Large frames and pictures is not the way. Don't go that route.

Literally talked off camera about this. This is such an underrated. I forgot what I was listening to. Oh, you know what? It was Native Deodorant. And early on in the process, he brought on a uh some sort of uh specialist on like a UPS packaging and stuff, and he wanted to make sure that he designed it to get into a smaller parcel. And dude, and bro, it's like you save like a, like you don't think about it, but you save like $150, and then at scale, that's like dollars in EBITDA, and the multiple on the exit. And it's just like, this UPS consultant just made me $10 million. I just finished the call before we got here, and I had our ops manager talking about, "We are about to save 17 cents per hack tech because we're moving to a four-pack," which will equate to $8 million in the year. And she's like, she's like, "The cents per [ __ ] four-pack," and I was like, I was like, "Can you wait, what?" Like, "Nick needs a raise." That she just, because of her velocity and her volume, these cents make a lot of sense to to fake figure out and fix. Not to mention like what's going to happen with any sort of tariff situation on plastics and cardboard and aluminum, and to the point where like, we're changing the can because we found too much of our old ones were crushing, and so we will spend a little bit more, but we'll actually save more because we won't have as much broken cans.

I I like having this in every single one of the podcasts because you add something to the list. Growing a a good CAGR, compound annual growth rate, big TAM, LTV, or subscription ability, uh, able to package it to be efficient there. Any other thoughts? Oh, it's got to be a, for me, for you product. Perfect example, baby products. I have a baby. So I just went through this. Um, so when you're developing a product that could be a for you, for me, which by the way, your kid's name is Kingsley. He's a beautiful kid. Gangster. I didn't even, I don't even see what the kid looks like, but the name is Gangster. I saw, saw in the blanket. Continue. He's a homie. Yeah, he's a good dude. One year old. Um, for me, for you, it's a product that I myself, or my wife, would buy for us, or somebody in our family would buy for us. Oo. So, you have two markets and two reasons to buy this. Baby products. Hexclad is a good one. Perfect one. That's literally on my list. Like my girl's like, "We need non-toxic." Like, you're like, "Yo, but somebody might get that for me." That goes on the list to my parents to get for the holidays. We're on the same page here, baby. Good, good to uh to go to the next question then.

From a product expansion strategy specific to Breeze, how do you guys look at that? So, I actually, I learned this. I got I got schooled on this. So, you have uh Aaron, who's like, "I know I need to continue to expand. I got to keep creating products that uh anybody can have access to or anybody can enjoy." Travis, which is our formulator. That dude is like, lives, lives literally in a lab and is a human guinea pig of of compounds. Then I have uh Brian Dwey, which is like an OG retail vet. I think our win is we have to compete with these guys that have like tons of flavors, similar effect. We were two effects, no flavors. That's it. Like we had one with infuse and not, but still kind of the same flavor, different effects. Interesting. So you look at, you go to any retail spot and you look on the shelf, shit's usually in threes. Look at Red Bull, it goes OG Red Bull, sugar-free Red Bull, a flavor, watermelon. What an exercise for people to do if you're going into a category to go into retail and then analyze just a how it's it's merchandised on the shelf to understand how the

Products marry each other. That's [ __ ] real smart. We literally walked into Trader Joe's and a couple other like areas that we know we were being sold in and Brian's just like, "Hey, this is how this is. This is how this is structured. Here's how many cans you can put on a shelf." It was a masterclass.

So for product expansion for us, we know there's multiple effects that people like to do. We talked a little bit off camera too. Like some people will take if they want to get lifted or they want to get some sort of feeling. They usually take like the easiest thing is get a gummy, right? So So there's different ways of people want to experience being lifted. I want to be lifted. I want to be energetic. I want to be lifted. I want to go to bed. That's a that's people consume it at different times. Same thing if you want to go out. You want to for our product specifically, you want to feel like you're locked in and you're like in you're in the the the energy or maybe you're just like chilling with your your buddies and you're just like hanging out, right? It's like those different way areas are fundamentally we are trying to match the experience to the effect and I think that's what like Aaron and Travis are on this like new [ __ ] that they're able to like not like we're thinking about new stuff and the effect that we have to do.

How do you structure uh product feedback loops uh from your customers and then using that to educate your product? If you do that, we need first- time purchasers, repeat purchasers, and then uh no purchasers, right? Everyone's got an experience that they have with the brand, especially digitally. We have a post-purchase survey. Essentially, it's like I bought this product and I'm expecting you have the questions which how did you hear about us? What do you expect from this product? Uh, and uh, where do you think you're going to use this product the most? Those are like areas that matter to me. Why? How did you hear about us? I want to see if I can get some sort of like attribution that's like anidotal because they might not know what they first saw, but they might see what they touched last, right? That's important. Which that should be, and we talk about this in the true classic, that's the final buck. Like they're literally telling you like, forget the multi-touch attribution or some [ __ ] like they're telling you where they [ __ ] got it from. Like that should be law. Yeah, it should be. Right.

So, that that will be piped into Slack. That's just a straight Zap year integration. Then, we have we do uh customer reviews, automated emails when the product arrives. We're requesting them to give us a review. So, that comes in immediately. And so, if I know that they've left a positive review and they've bought multiple times and they probably should be given an offer to subscribe for a better discount. So, like that logic of information coming through makes sense. So, if I'm buying this in like large quantities, can I get that to my social snowball team to be like, "Yo, is this person worth talking to because they're going to bring it to a large gathering?" Because sometimes we'll have people that don't have a wholesale relationship with us or an event and they'll come in and get 48 plus or 64 cases and we're like, "Why? Why are you buying this? Is there an event going on? We should hit them up." Sometimes they're stocking up for themselves or maybe they're just stocking up for a large event upcoming and maybe we need to activate better with them.

All right, we're going to get into a uh funny conversation that we had off camera that we wanted to bring it in camera. Brand building, the pluses and minuses of building in public. Um, I actually didn't print out this sheet, but I remember vaguely. You can correct me if I'm wrong. You [ __ ] psychos put out basically your P&L Q. I mean, I could tell you, I know how much revenue you did. put it out. Uh 12.9 million Q1 for Breeze and it was like 10 million on Shopify and then you brought out every single you guys are granular like it's not like Meta, Google and YouTube. I saw like what was it? Door Dash. Door Dash. Uh the Puff app. Go Puff. Yeah. Let's just start with what are the pluses and minuses to building in public. My very very first post online was in a forum uh Facebook ad buyers in 2017. And only reason why I know that is because I'm talking deeply about this more often because I believe we have a responsibility.

So you have brand building from a personal standpoint. You have brand building from a brand standpoint. You're wearing represent, right? So they have cadence. Okay. That's a quality product. That's a quality drink. Um represents a quality shirt, quality quality product. Those two founders are building a certain type of way, right? Marcus from Minted, New York. that dude's building a certain type of way. They're not going granular on P&L. They're not going granular on numbers. They're going granular on product development and bring you along with the brand. That is their way of telling their story. Okay. Um I don't know like you guys are a whole other different level. You guys are like sharing numbers. That's like for me I think what they're doing is fairly safe in nature. I don't know how granular they're getting from like a trade secrets perspective. They are. when we were early when we were doing our web series just to give my thesis and then obviously I want to bounce back to you is I think that there's and I mean that's you know me like from back in the day type type [ __ ] because we did we were early on the web series 2017 18 someone following me [ __ ] every day all day for 18 months and then we did the podcast I think you get disproportionate value while you're doing it do welcome more competition which you know about that that's a funny conversation for another But and people are like, "Oh, bring the competition. It's going to create a larger pie and more awareness." Oliver actually said that in the Mad Rabbit episode, I think competition is for losers. I think you don't want competition. So, that was a huge thing. And then if you do it, you may or may not get disproportionate advantage from building in public. I think you do. We welcome more competitors but there's a disproportionate loss when you stop doing it because then your CAC is lowering your cost of car customer is lowering while you're doing it but then if let's just say you want to take a break or co happens happened for us we did a podcast after so I think it could be huge but then if you stop it could go down and then on another level I know from even with what we're doing man risk is a huge thing um and like if you're Like if George from Represent stops posting or he goes from 8% body fat to 17% body fat, I think that brand is going to go down a bit. I think that's a [ __ ] hot take. But I I truly do [ __ ] believe that. I think that he is subtly in the minds of a lot of different humans and it's a business. It's a aspirational business that let's call it Space B. Like people want to be him. People are building businesses and they're trying to [ __ ] copy that playbook. Um, I don't know the cadence guy. I just started on Twitter, so I'm following what he's doing. His is very like going visuals and then super macro. So, I actually think what he's doing sustainable is sustainable and it's good. I think that my thesis and then I want to hear yours. I'm talking a lot is if you're going to do it, make it feasible to do long term. Make sure you can fe off it. So when you go and sell the company, if you want to sell the company, you're not going to get dinged for key man risk, but you have to have some sort of like real [ __ ] moat. I intimately believe.

Do you believe what I just said, folks? I do believe I do believe what you just said. I do believe it. And I actually don't have a disagreement on this. I have a question of commitment is this is you have to do it. If you actually like this, you can't be sharing and then all of a sudden stop. This is outside of just breathe. This is like 14, 15 years of how I've been. And like you, you takes a certain type of person to willingly put themselves out there religiously, consistently all the time. And keyman keyman issue is a problem, but what makes a really good movie? Incredible character development. How many more people can you get bought in to continue to talk about the story? How many people on your team can you have them share and talk about it? Now, I'll I'll talk about the risks in doing that in sharing the spotlight with the greater team. Before Aaron and I got on with Breeze together, I was Nick of all the other businesses and it was a major traffic driver. Millions of impressions a month is what I put up right now across every platform and just pure creation of whether it's uh numbers or or podcast or or videos. This is you just talking your [ __ ] This is me just on my [ __ ] This is personal brand, too. But yeah, correct. When we got in with Breeze, like I I was such a huge advocate of like, do we have to share as much as we're humanly possible willing to share because we're fundamentally changing a a human behavior of consumption, which is a huge thing to do. And like we're not the first ones to do this, but we are the biggest to do this currently. By us sharing our numbers, it is doing three things. one, it's sending a signal to the market that we are, you need to watch us, VCs, you need to watch us, pees, you need to watch us. Uh, alcohol, you need to watch us. Uh, people that are incredible in their in their other space or maybe working for a a competitor that might not have a good time, but they see somebody else doing incredible. So, it's a flag to the market going like, "We got it. We're here. You guys need to pay attention to us." This brings employees. This brings retail partners and this brings uh incredible opportunities and leverage from a tech standpoint. Employees, retail, I would love for you to talk on a tech standpoint. So from a tech standpoint, they know that if I'm going to put up impressions in the in the hundreds of thousands on a consistent basis and we are using the things that we're talking about, 100% I'm not going to make you pay for anything or you're going to get a hell of a deal ongoing and I know you need my tech. So if I'm putting up impressions and not and or they'll allow you to invest in their company at a good valuation. Absolutely. They'll get you in you'll get you in the back door for a lot of things that I should should I have been on the table at Triple Whale or Northbeam or no? Or you look at any of the things on on uh on my list? No. But because of the reach and the volume and the consistency and the actual proven ability to be in the game for this long and be reinventing ourselves, your ability to influence it. It is and it's the ability to be in the right place at the right time and have the right relationships and not [ __ ] anybody.

But would the juice be worth the squeeze if the ent the like the barriers to entry for your business is very high? Like you have to understand and know like Aaron you guys have a bunch of weapons but his weapon and understanding of this let's just call gray area landscape and how to market within it. I mean from what I saw it seems like he's like literally goatated like literally like the guy the guy. So I think that allows you to to to go deeper. You can argue that the barriers of entry are higher, thus that the only competitors that will come in will be big boys. And then my firm belief, and I have a weird inkling that you agree with me, is he who can spend the most wins. So I'm just saying with that, what I do think though is I think all the other things you said, tech, the retail, the sales, the lowering of the CAC, I think it's worth it. So yeah, I just think it's a it's a double-edged sword and it's it's it's dangerous. So, I think if I what I was hoping you would ask is like, "Would you do this all again?" If I had to do it again, I would not be as loud as I am. Um, I'd still yap because it's fun to yap, but I don't think I would go this deep. Great Twitter follow. Epic yapper. Oh, good one.

Um, something that you said to me, you're like, "Hey, like are you more of like a brand guy or an agency guy?" And I'm more of a brand guy to start. I now think when I think agency, I think like marketing and metrics. I think it's very interesting what you're doing. Like I just don't see how you guys don't win because you guys are just a bunch of marketers and Swiss Army generalist marketers right now is like this is that's where you want to be. So like what's your thesis on like should more people that have been in the agency game for 2, three, four years. Like I think they should be starting a product right now. What do you think? I got three or I got three really close dudes that were all agency first and now they're going product and they have a little bit of both. They're like they're in between. So they we're agency and then now they're like part agency now they're just pure product or product sets like a collection of products. What Thrasio and all these rollup shops should have been were just incredible agency people that know how to run growth not really good numbers people that can like manufacture backend or or cut costs. They should have just been I'm going to fund the people that can build from a performance standpoint for people with what Thorasio is and these other these were like conglomerates. They were basically consolidating resources and then trying to use back office. I think that that was the biggest mistake from the start. You know why is because they would have they would be like let's just say I don't know the inner workings but in some context it has to be right with what I'm saying is if they had 20 brands and they had a CMO maybe they had one CMO that did all 20 brands or two that one did 10. The CMO of Represent can't be the CMO of a company that's feeding the middle-aged mom, a 46-y old woman in Alabama. No. So, that's what it was doing from the start. I knew it was thesis. There was no focus. It was just we're going to cut costs across the board. Yeah. We're going to optimize Amazon specific brands. I can't believe that those guys raised huge bag of money. I don't I don't get that. But you should That's a crazy story to look into. Crazy story.

Um, so yes, so your boys that were agency guys are now starting because so the the hardest part is like I see a lot of products and there's some products I'm like that's I I just see it I'm like that's going to hit the level of hit is different but I'm like oh that that'll work that'll be successful to have the understanding and being able to learn and spend a bunch of money that isn't necessarily yours. So your romanticism around the dollars being spent is not there. Goes back to why I think media what is a good media buyer. They know how to spend money. They are not emotionally tied to money being spent. When you were the founder and spending your own money, you were like that that is my money. I feel very some type of way about it. Correct. If you can get all this money being spent over all these years, you are building up this skill that will never leave you to understand how to deploy it and be able to articulate and explain to everybody like why we have to do this and what we're expecting to happen. You're a brand founder coming in to you're a very good product person coming in to me like well how do I make sales or how do I generate this and you have to rely on everybody telling you something. What how helpless is that? how like I don't know, I can't move forward unless I have XYZ person to help me to do that. That sucks. Yeah. And like you have to be somewhat in the weeds and understand to know what a good marketer looks like. Yeah. I think everything right now is just it's really just about content distribution and understanding digital marketing. Like those are like those are the three things right now that as if you're a marketer out there and you understand those find a product [ __ ] lethal.

Um, all right. I want to round the corner here and finish up. I just want to touch on a couple more things on the personal brand side. Um, I can say you tweet a lot and these are not tweets that are AIdriven and or they're thoughtful tweets like they're good some gems and they're and and they're lengthy in nature some of them. Uh, how do you balance your time between personal brand two agencies breeze? Yeah. Think about this intimately more than more than most people do. So, we have I have a team of four in visual, two copywriters, and then um Shauna, which is my assistant who helps me organize all this Kiana. And this is for you for your personal. This is Nick. This is this is for Nick. This is just Nick. Um Monday, Monday or Tuesday, I'll debrief on a full hour to two hour call around topics that I believe that are important to me or I believe that are relevant to what's happening right now. and I'll go vocal uh brain dump on on both of them. So, it's uh one that we're talking about most frequently is like my son became one. I'm a first-time dad. I also have a lot of things going on. I want to express myself more on how it feels to be a father, a founder, etc. Love that. So, that was a topic that's important to me. I think that my audience has grown up with me and so I think that they would resonate. I hope. And I'll start off with the themes. I'll debrief how I want this to be done. I will receive my content back to me in the structure that I would want it to be written at, make my edits, plan and schedule it on a weekly basis. And how much of this is AI driven versus them understanding and knowing a backend bible and prompt and then speaking in your voice? Zero AI. There's no AI. The prompt, the only AI that they would be using it would be an analysis of best performing past posts I've done organically. And then they'd be like, "Yeah, can I need you to redo this one? This one did really well." For instance, I have a subscription one that talked about was like benefits of reducing churn. Um, here's 10 things that I would do. And then that was an image. Then that would go into a tweet and then that would go into a graphic. And even even on the pillars I speak about is like I can speak through breeze and that's one pillar. Then you have like agency where it goes here's the people that we serve. Here's what we've been learning on paid media or email or SMS or creative. And then the final thing is like I have life and family what I'm I'm intimately talking about today. And so I I update this constantly with the I link a Google doc that I update on a frequently basis like every couple weeks of like here's the things I'm interested in, here's the things I'm working on, here's the things that if you find interesting you should yap to me about for someone that has I mean you have a team uh for for someone that has uh less budget. What is the advice you'd give to someone that's just starting out? Oh, easily. So you go get either uh Tweet Hunter or Typefully. Yeah. So Tfully is where I'm um scheduling, writing, and deploying and then analyzing my own. Tweet Hunter will pull popular popular trending tweets based on who you search or things that you're interested in. And then you can like find inspiration on the back of this. Go get Justin Welsh his course. Uh bro, that's the first course that I paid money for. A $79 LinkedIn course. Go. He's a goat. You go to LinkedIn. I think I've slained a bunch of courses for this guy. Yeah, you should, dude. He's a shout out to no no no no no no relationship with his dude right now that you shout out. Who is this guy Justin Welsh? He's like soloreneur that believes in building individual companies and sells a low ticket. Go check my LinkedIn. Tell me if you think it's good. That is so [ __ ] funny. What's the chances, dude? Because this is where we need to begin. I think it's the best place to start. Uh and then I think that that is what'll give you the idea of what you need to create about. Unfortunately, you got to have some [ __ ] to talk about. Like if you if you aren't doing anything. So that's why you keep it on a weekly basis. Uh it's a it's a projection reflection life. That's what I believe in. In a week, you project what you should be doing. So you're going to talk about it as if you already did it. That's things that you're going to do. Hopefully you get it done. And then when it happens, you talk about what you did. We had product launches. So I was like, "Hey, we have these things upcoming." I usually talk about that the week it's happening. And then I go, "Hey, we launched Spirit. Here's how it did. Here's how it did. And so there's learnings that come from it.

All right, next question. Um, what is your favorite productivity hack? That sounds crazy, but works. Uh, normally people just go right to like they wake up first thing they they grab a coffee. Like we've all seen the videos. I'm not dunking my face in any [ __ ] water. Um, I would say can you delay the caffeine? Like if can you can you not eat breakfast and you can delay caffeine? I think that's what's been working for me like non-stop. Two is I don't touch emails in the morning. Uh uh Shauna has that unlock and so shout out Shauna. Shout out Shauna. Appreciate you. So she'll she'll kind of tee it up of like, hey, these are the things that you have to reply to and everything else like I'll talk to you at noon.

All right, next. Um what business tool would you pay 10 times more than what you're currently paying because it is so valuable? You're giving someone a shout out here. 10x. And since you're getting the shout out, do not overcharge him on this. I would say stored. stored is uh the fulfillment partner that we're trying to work with or about to work with. And the fact that they have like full dashboard for customer experience that's going to save me hundreds of thousands probably millions over our lifetime just because it's like we have clarity into customers. So I don't think we could pay enough and like get a dashboard that lets the customer not have to talk to my CS team. So it's like a 3PL would just add add of layers on steroids. Yes. I feel like 3PL is probably an industry that has not been revolutionized. That's why we're here much. I like that.

Final three questions. Uh favorite book or podcast and why? Favorite podcast I'm on right now is uh the uh brand they call brand fathers uh but it's Orin, it's uh Ash, and it is one other guy, but it's basically all dudes that are like way more brand versus performance. They talk about like high-end brand activations, and it's something that I lack. I'm I'm a much more performance dude. Nice. And then what about your favorite book? I don't read but I'm listening to I like to take it in audio because I do a lot of walking monetizing innovation. That's the current one I'm on. And this is like optimizing towards so as AI is coming like it talks about like how do you how do you price it accordingly? How do you think about what products to launch and why? And so it's a lot of like the methodology of like how do I research and understand what products to launch. I don't know if it directly applies to the brand side or if it's like maybe me trying to learn about how people position products for everything else. touches on AI, a book that I'm reading again called The Coming Wave. If you've ever read the book Sapiens, which explains Yeah. about like humankind, it's this book for AI. So, from a macro perspective with a guy that's been in the space for a long time, it'll [ __ ] you up, bro. Everybody should read that book. I recommended it.

Um, all right. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? I'll say the the team at Grunes. So, um I think that the I've seen him operate before seen this product and it's basically the gummy AG1 and I think the opportunity that he has uh for him and his team. I think that's the one. I think they're going to do it. That's that green uh green gummy company. Yep. I think from the offer, from the email to the structure, like they got right. The team is on point, too. I'm in the funnel. That's good.

Um, we're gonna end with one big thoughtful question. How big can Breeze be? This is a generational run. Like I think this is the new wave and a handful of people are really going to win here. Billions, dude. Big B. I like that. It has to. You have to say B. Your growth is crazy and like it's wild. We were talking before, you know, about product, brand, or SAS agency. Like the multiple on this should be absolutely crazy. The numbers it just hard to even fathom, dude. cuz like we don't there's Have you guys not grown any month over month or have you grown every month month over month? Every single month. There's never been a month we haven't. That's why it's so difficult to understand like forecasting and understanding what do we do with this? But like you alcohol is in like the trillions that you can't even like that's world like you can't even fathom that like no no CPG brand sinking of that size because you just literally can't. I mean CPG is just a hot space right now. We had uh Bill from Athletic bring on even that the non-alcoholic dude start starting to go absolutely crazy.

Um bro, I had an amazing time. I'm glad that we uh we only spoke for a little bit off camera. We brought it all on camera. We definitely just talked a bunch of [ __ ] Um where can they find you on uh all social and then just shout out all your companies? Twitter. So I'm heavy on the Twitter. So I am Shackle Ford on Twitter. I'm Nick Shakart everywhere else. And then yeah, and it's Breeze and Structure. Those are the two that mean the most to me right now. Amazing. Appreciate you, brother. Thanks, bro.

If you guys got this far, I assume you guys enjoyed this interview. Uh, if that's the case, I think you guys would enjoy the other episodes. Make sure you guys go check them out. I want to keep growing this thing bigger and better. All I ask from you guys, give it a like, give it a subscribe, and share with a friend. Appreciate it. See you guys soon. [Music]