Ep #018: Scaling to a nine-figure business using influencer marketing (with Sean Frank)

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Influencer Marketing Blueprint, where we teach e-commerce brands the three step formulas that drives revenue, not just likes. I'm Cody Woodick, and I'm Taylor Lagasay, and we're here to guide you to Influencer Marketing Success. Let's get started. What's up everybody? We are back with another episode of the Influencer Marketing Blueprint. I have a guest here that I'm excited to chat about, all things Influencer, and you'll notice that my co-CEO and partner is not here as well. He had apparently other more important things to do. So Sean, I don't think you ever met him, but speaking of the devil, Sean Frank, thanks for joining us. Introduce yourself to the listeners. Yeah, Sean, CEO, Ridge.com, active Influencer sponsor, happy to chat with you right here. (laughing) The next Yeti, but better. That's what you say, right? Yeah, that's very distinct. People can really understand that. I think Yeti's the best success story. We're trying to do that, but better. We'll see how that goes. All right, well, I said you in the pre-show, there's plenty of other podcast episodes where you could talk about other facets of your business, you know, all the inventory management, your origin story, but for context, get the listeners like who you are and what ridges. Yeah, ridges a premium accessories company. We used to be the largest wallet company. We're not selling just wallets anymore. I. Now we sell with key organizer that's the best selling one on Earth. We sell rings now, knives, watches, and we're gonna launch more stuff. So, premium and accessory brand, I like to say we're the American mom block, mom block owns a category with pens, but they also make the revenue of the bags, whatever else. We're doing the same thing with wallets, where a large GC player did over $100 million, two years running and bootstrapped, never raised any money. So, there you go. I love us on the cat table hanging out. I love it. Give the listeners context for like size of your business and growth trajectory. So you mentioned like previously, I think talking to you joined Ridge when it was like a father son combo or something like that, right? Yeah, father son best friend found the company. There was three of them. They were doing a couple million dollars a year of the Indian agency. I was young, the 21 years old, me and my CMO Connor started an agency business. Ridge was our first client. We went on to get about eight or nine other clients, but Ridge paid most of the money to us by 50% of our revenue for the 82s coming from Ridge. And I just kept charging on more and more and it just made sense. There you go. So that was like five years ago or more, we merged. Run of the thing is a CEO, Connor came on a CMO and we grew every single year since then. Like, okay, awesome. I think this is interesting. You've spoken a lot about agency brand dynamics and I've seen you tweet about like, hey, if you're recommending people in college or something like that, hey, go start an agency first. Can you speak a little bit about that? I just think that's an interesting topic 'cause now you're running a very large brand, $100 million plus revenue brand and you talk a lot about, you should start an agency first. And that's, it goes back to your story, but maybe you can go into like, taking yourself out of it, what, speaking to the agency brand dichotomy. Right, so there's a very funny joke I heard once and it was about like Taylor Swift's like, just follow your dreams, like it worked for me, right? And that's like a lot of winter being like, just by a lot of tickets to me, it works every time. So it's very hard to separate personal experience from advice, right? But what I will say is, and this is my best thing, I think it sums it up the most. Learning marketing is just like learning day trading. Like, there's not a lot of great day traders, there's not a lot of great marketers. You have to spend a lot of money to learn how to do that, right? And like, it's a skill and you have to learn like the platform and like the way things react and timing and all these types of things. And it's just way better to do that with somebody else's money. And that's what an agency is, right? If you're 18 years old, do not go start an agency, don't just be one of these assholes on Twitter, who's just, I do copywriting. It's like, no, no, no, go join a well respected agency. Just go in there and be like, I'll fucking do whatever. Just go in there and be like, I have no skills, but I work really hard and I know the internet and learn media buying or creative or maybe learn copywriting or email or something. And then from there, spend a year or two years and then get the skills to go actually be a freelancer or starting out to you. The most respected people in the space have done that, right? Like, you know, the lover or hate of Mick Shackleford, he was a media buyer, a commithered collective, he put it in his work and then he goes out there and starts his own thing. Social Savannah, exact same thing, right? It's like people who will put in the effort to actually learn the skill, to actually go out there and sell it. Go ahead. - Well, I was just gonna say, you've gone the route of starting a brand off the back of that. Well, I guess you kind of jumped into it, but it's funny because as I listened to you talk, my own personal story was starting at a brand at a startup at Kelo and being able to do a lot of different things and I learned a lot of the chops of marketing. So it's just interesting like how you're kind of speaking to the opposite route of learning agency, learn with other people's money, but it's also out into that too. Just learning at any startup where you can get on the ground and be able to learn different chops before starting your own thing, I think is a huge huge benefit. - I think agencies are a better place to learn. Obviously you learn great, right? You can reach good outcomes either way, but I think you learn better outcomes than an agency because you're forced to touch more brands and you're forced to do more shit with less, right? The worst thing much of it in a brand is they're like, this is the way it's done and they only can do some one philosophy to you and what if it's wrong? You know what I mean? Most brands don't reach scale, right? But if you're an agency, you'll see it, oh, how does Kuehla do it or how does this people do it? And you can formulate your own opinion on it 'cause you just see more data entry, right? Just don't go out there and start a brand. I think a lot of people try that. It's so fucking hard. Why do most physical products on Kickstarter fail? And it's because it's really hard to make a physical product. People think it's so fucking easy. It's like I'm gonna make a widget. It's like, bro, you're gonna learn all these different types of things and you haven't even got to marketing yet, right? So just-- - Yeah. Do you guys work with agencies at Ridge? - Most things across the board are internal but there are select agency partners we bring in. And I think we're seeing the future of the agency business looks a lot like the agency business 20 years ago, right? Where paid media was an agency explosion. Everyone jumped in there doing Facebook ads, Google ads, whatever. But the platform has an incentive to make it so simple anyone can spend on it. And I think agencies will go away and not pay media space. And agencies are thriving in the creative space like they did 20 years ago when you're doing TV ads because it's creative, it can be a freelance engagement or a one-off engagement or like, you know, a world-of-roading engagement. And it's good to have a bunch of different creative output, right? 'Cause it is like a subjective thing. So we use raindrops for videos. We've used narrative for videos. We have a ton of different, just random freelancer agency people to shoot content creative for us. When it comes to like performance paid work or email, those are things we do in the house. Our influencer program's done in house. We use an agency dev shop to complement our own internal dev stuff. So I'm not an anti-agency. It's just we're very selective in what they're delivering it. And if it's something we should own in house or not. - Right. So let's get into one of those things, which is, I mean, the title of the show is influencer marketing blueprint. So let's get into the influencer stuff. So, I mean, let's just use even numbers. $100 million brand. Approximately, what's your marketing budget on that side? Is it 20, 25%, 15? - More. Yeah, yeah. So I think a realistic outlook is you should spend at least 33% of your money on marketing. So a 3XMER if you're in a growth phase. If you're in a difficult environment and you're trying to grow more or force growth or whatever, that number flexes up. A brain should be able to survive at a 50% of revenue going to marketing and like things not break. So you have to have the unit economics for that. And maybe if you're taking your foot off the gas and you're cool with things coasting, a revenue going down, maybe you go to a 4XMER. But the biggest mistake I see people always want to be like, oh, how do I get $200 million in revenue, right? You're just more than that now. But people always ask, how do I get $200 million in revenue? I'm like, I gotta spend more. I'm like, yes, I'm more money. I'm like, they don't want to do that. It's very hard for people to understand that like, your EBITDA percentage will go down, but your EBITDA dollars will go up. Those things are not the same where it's like, there's a point in the curve where you maximize EBITDA dollars, right? And you just have to find that point in the curve and you have to build your business around that. Or you have to do really difficult things to your business, like lowering cogs, lowering overhead, doing should to can actually be flexible to scale. And nobody ever wants to like change their business. They're like, no, what I'm doing is good. But then they still want different outcomes. So that's just for the brand owners. I try to keep everybody honest. And yes, your fault. If you want a $200 million spend more, that's the way it works. Yeah. So if you're at a hundred million and you're spending 33%, you're spending 33 million, let's just use RIDG as a hypothetical example. That's 33 million on marketing. What percentage of that are you guys spending on the influencer? Yeah. So we've gone as high as 20%. past and we've gone as low as 10%, but it's the switch percent of your marketing budget. Yeah, yeah. So like, if it's $30 million, it's $6 million on marketing, right? So I'm just using these are all hypothetical numbers because we're just going to weigh more than this. But if it's the $30 million on marketing budget, it would be between three and six million. Somewhere between 10 and 20%, I think it's perfect. I know a lot of brands who spend more or like their entire marketing budget on influencer and I think that's a difficult way to scale. That's like signing up for fucking a boxing match every day. Mm-hmm. So two to six million in that range, let's just use $3 million on influencer. How are you guys spending that money on influencer? The vast majority of it will go to YouTube. Are you asking for channel or like actually physically how are we getting the money to influencers? Yeah, open ended, however you wanted to answer that. So I guess we'll first talk about like how we actually spend the money, right? How does the money leave our bank account? So yeah, we source a bunch of influencers. So, you know, we've used tools, we've never used GRIN but we used something called Creator IQ and that kind of saw it. We're getting us some AI tools to help us find influencers. It will work with management companies or we'll have like a team of virtual assistants in Pakistan or the Philippines or whatever. Just gather data. Just be like, get us every influencer you possibly can find, right? And there's a qualified data in there. You want to know like what their channel is, what their subscribers are, what their last views are, whatever. And we put all of that into a master spreadsheet, right? And you know, we'll say we'll have 10,000 people in there. We'll get their email too. That's the big thing is that getting someone to contact these people. We don't want to do shouldn't DMs like we just want to like have a streamlined process. So we'll have, you know, 10,000 emails and we'll shoot an email and we'll be like, hey, we're rich. Here's who we've worked with. We want to work with you. What does that look like? It'll start those conversations and you have a really low hit rate because you're cool to emailing people, right? You know, this 10,000 may be got 100 responses. Maybe you get 500 who knows, right? And then we just negotiate that that's why we have an in-house team of. Yeah, this, I think that's an important to kind of go the insights of your team dynamics. Two to six million on, on influencer. You got to resource that, right? So what is that team dynamics? Right. So the reason why I don't think brands should spend more of their marketing budget on influencer is because of how expensive influencer is to run, right? Like, I could spend $6 million on Facebook tomorrow, maybe not in one day, but next month, I could spend $6 million on Facebook with one person. I could just be like, spend $6 million. I click the button and start spending, right? So spend $6 million on influencer. It takes a year and it takes a director who makes a lot of money. Five or six full-time US employees who also make a lot of money. I mean, $100,000 each benefits time off the whole fucking thing. A team of virtual assistants. And so, you know, you're in. Let's just call it a million dollars in fixed cost to spend $3 million. You're going to spend $4 million. It's incredibly fucking expensive, right? The other thing people don't understand is like half the deal's lose money. Like influencers, the hardest fucking thing to do. You're individually negotiating, using judgment calls, you're learning like it's this whole fucking thing. Like, as influencers want as much money as possible for as long as possible, right? And we want to pay them basically as little as possible for as long as possible. And there's some sort of a balance there that we reach, right? Like hopefully, their video is put to the algorithm. Hopefully, you know, their audience relax the product. There's all these things that have to go down, right? So anyway, yeah, I feel like you're super fucking expensive. It's hard to run. Yeah, it's funny. I saw a tweet you put out in what researching for this podcast. And it was like, influencer isn't Facebook. Ridge has a full time staff of five running influencer press plus 15 contractors. You might get negative PR. Half of the deals lose money, which is what you just said. It is my favorite channel, but it isn't for the faint of heart. So why is it your favorite channel? I think it's the only form of marketing that can build brand affinity. Like no one wants to see your Facebook ads. No one wants to fucking see your TikTok ads where you trip people into watching on because it's white listed. It's a nuisance, right? Like advertising in the way it's time is a nuisance. But when you're sponsoring a small creator, you're the first sponsor. They're audience is stoked that they're actually getting a fucking deal. It's the only form of digital advertising that can build some sort of good well with an audience. And yet, like the reason we do influencer, like we've been doing it since 2016, it's because I watch a lot of YouTube. Like I don't watch TV, right? It's like I fucking five different YouTube tabs open. I'm going back and forth all day. It's just a native form of content for me. And I like sponsoring and supporting those creators. So that's what I like it. But dude, I stand by everything I fucking said in there. Like so many people are like, they think it's going to replace Facebook. And it's like, no, like my paid social staff is smaller than my influencer staff. Out of that $30 million budget Facebook will get half of it. It'll spend 10 times with the influencer team spends. Yeah. The fact that I'm pretty influenced with team spends. So a lot of times like I've heard I'll talk to people because obviously I'm living and breathing in the space and talking to brand owners all day long. And they might even mention you. You know, XYZ brand is doing pay for posts. It's working for them. And my response to that always is that you have no idea the backend processes that go into the scale of what you just described, you know, of the amount of deals that you guys are negotiating in the backend systems of everything that you went into to achieve that. So I think it's important for people to hear exactly what you are describing where it's like, I want to be the $100 million brand. Well, it's not paying one influencer at Kardashian to explode your brand overnight. And that's not happening today. Like the fact that you're spending so much. The 10,000 emails just to acquire those emails, then the negotiators that are getting 100 case salary each. And then all the follow up and all these different things. You guys aren't even putting a deal on the table on that first initial message. Was that look like like there's a lot of back and forth. The other thing is like, yeah, like brand approach me. Oh, how do I do that? I would do what you're doing. And it's like, dude, you don't have any cloud. I'm not going to pick on anybody, right? But like name any brand. It's like we could be friends with her whatever. And it's like, dude, if influencers don't know you, you're not going to get a deal done. It's like the reason why Rich can get so many deals done is because there's an inherent trust working with us, right? We're not going to fuck them over. We're not going to get canceled for working with us. Like we're going to pay them. Like we have like all of this cloud and relate, like reputation built up. But like when I email an emerging creator, they're like, oh, yeah, my favorite creator has worked with you guys for two years. So it's like, okay, I know I'm safe to work with you guys. And I can respond to these emails. I get called emails and link the messages from creators all the time who are like, hey, can reach sponsor me, right? And it's like, yeah, they're not going out to some dropshipping bread to do that because their inbox is flooded with people like, hello, sir. Can I please sponsor you? It just doesn't work. Yeah. So let's get into the differences in our methodologies. And so context for everybody listening to is like Sean and I have had several conversations on influencer marketing differences, maybe an execution of it. So we've had a lot of healthy back and forth on the differences on our methodology. So for people that have listened to this, know that I'm a big proponent and we're a big proponent of seating, product seating, no request, just get the product into their hands, let the cream rise to the top. Sean is doing a bunch of pay for posts, pick seating apart. Yeah, I'll just see you up in that way. You said yourself getting a post from the Kardashians won't change your brain. And meaningfully overnight, super fucking true. Okay. Just like the inundation of social content and like if you go on Instagram, like there's ads and then there's like all of these sponsored posts and everything. And it feels like that makes up 70% of the viewing experience on Instagram. It's like over saturated to the point that it's sickening is what it feels like, right? So just throwing more noise into that just doesn't seem to do anything, right? The other thing we have an expensive overhead cost. So just spending that time and energy just to do pay for posts with no guarantee of anything would just be futile for us, right? You mean just just doing seating like without a guarantee of a poster? Oh, yeah, sorry. Without a guarantee of a post that I don't know if we're just seating stuff or whatever. I'm going to spend 300,000 dollars a year in salaries to whatever and just to have people hopefully get stuff posted up, right? And just send all of this free product. I think it's something we're going to experiment with. But I think demographic and platform specific, right? When you're doing pay for posts, I'm going to guess Instagram gets 80% of the attention, TikTok gets the other 20% of the attention and it's really hard to get anything on YouTube, right? You mentioned seating, right? Yeah. You keep saying pay for posts, but. Oh, sorry, man. You're saying guessing 80% Instagram, 20% TikTok, there's nothing on YouTube. Like when you're sending out free product and expecting, you know, 30% post rates from those platforms. That's why you're. And you're right. We don't do anything on YouTube because of that reason and we can we can talk about that specifically. So Instagram and TikTok are easier to post. Exactly. So like, yeah, to summarize, I'm going to stop saying, seeing I'm going to stop saying pay for posts, I'm going to say, whatever you guys do, whatever code you just seem to do and it's super focused on platforms that we essentially ignore, right? Our method on Instagram, we've done our method on TikTok. But the real driver of us is YouTube, right? It's 30 second integrated posts, part of the content with the link. It's all trackable, right? That you can spend $2 behind. we can basically build a formula and like, okay, what's the audience, what's the other content? Yeah, we think we know what we'll get us a return there, right, and we could do negotiations from a place of just knowledge. You know, they'll be like, hey, look, here's other people we sponsored, here's how much we paid them, here's what the sales looked like. We just have a big database now doing that. And when we've gone to TikTok, I tried to do the same thing. It's just more challenging, right? Because views are so all over the place, click attribution sucks. And I think Instagram is the lowest here place to get posts, the lowest here place to get Instagram stories. So it's just we value it so much less. And the other thing is everyone thinks influencer and Instagram go hand in hand. So like we'll get Instagram story rates that are just insane. Like the $50 CPMs or whatever, which I'm like, oh, PewDiePie's cheaper. I can get a video on PewDiePie's channel, see by millions of people, where he's talking how much he loves the product. And it's cheaper than working with a mid-tier female Instagram celebrity. The other thing we just benefit from is, I think Instagram is true 50/50 gender breakdowns. Our products, like majority of our customers are men, YouTube's just a more male focus platform. And because of the type of content, it kind of auto selects into male focus. Like we know if we work with a car channel, like don't have media, it's 90% male watch rates, right? We're like, it's very hard to get that on any sort of Instagram account that dramatic of a split. So, to summarize my argument about why we don't do your method, more, I think part of this just platform, and then part of it is just like, our resources are better spent on a more ROI focus channel. - I wish someone could just look under the hood of your business and tell you what's working, but also what's quietly holding you back. And that's exactly what we do on our free consultation calls. We've helped generate over 300 million in revenue, audit at 200 plus PNLs and generate hundreds of thousands of ad creatives at this point. And we do it all by delivering a proven system, build to generate results across every stage of your D to C business, making sure that it's generating a financially beneficial return. So, if you're ready to scale with authority and confidence, book a free call now at kinship.co/contact-us. That's K-Y-N-S-H-I-P. co/contact-us. We'll show you exactly how to unlock your next stage of growth. Now, let's get back to the show. - I think I've told you this before too, is like, if I have the resources of what you guys have put in place, then I'm doing more pay for posts, not as much, but if I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it on YouTube. And I've talked about that. I've sent out tweets on that before and talked about that at length of just, YouTube is not a channel where people just throw up a story and maybe it changes differently with shorts. But still, they view their platform as a TV network. They're not just gonna throw up a post, "Hey, thanks for sending this over rich on a 15-second video on our TV network, right?" Like it just doesn't work like that. And for a brand to expect that through seating is just like you're saying, the platform differences there. But I think what a lot of the differences that we've discussed is just the resources that you guys have and you've earned the right to get to that point based on revenue trajectory, whereas a lot of brands start out they're less than $1 million a brand and they're doing all these pay for posts. I'm like, "What are you doing?" You're wasting so much money. - Yeah, yeah. (laughs) That's the other thing. It's like, "Hey, half of the half of the goes lose money." Even if you do our method, even if you have the cloud and the relationships and you spend all this fucking money and you can navigate YouTube as a platform, half of our deals lose money. It's like, you're not just gonna jump into it and you're gonna get a fucking money. And I very rarely see pay for posts work on Instagram. It is so hard to make that work as a platform. We're like, "Yeah, like if you want to be on Instagram, you're probably just better off fucking seating a bunch of stuff." And just seeing what you get in your posts 'cause it's so hard to make that work. - Yeah, which is exactly why a lot of our strategies trying to get ad creative at scale to repurposes off those platforms, right? Like, so getting the content posted one, but then repurposed so that you're not just losing on that ad creative. - Yeah, yeah. Original UGC, user generated content, getting more users to generate content for you. It's unfair to call what we both do influencer, right? It's like, yeah, I guess technically, right? But it's like calling like paid media, Google search versus Facebook, you know what I mean? Yeah, they're both paid media. They're entirely different methodologies, right? And I think that's what people don't understand. And I don't think influencers just through respect there that it's like, no, what you're doing is a totally valid and real strategy. It's different than what I do, right? And I think some so often people are like, conflate the things or they think one person can do all of it. And it's like, what influencer hire on their team? They're like, yeah, it makes $65,000 a year. Like, can you teach them how to do your thing? And I'm like, no, you have no fucking idea what you're talking about, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, it's not a one person job. And then you're saying they hire one person. Most brands are doing it fractionally. They give it to their social person. They give it to their email person. It's like, hey, can you do run our organic social and reach out to a few influencers a week? And it's like, okay, you're not doing influencer at that scale. - Right, like, oh, I was the last analogy. I'm a huge analogy guy. The iPhone was designed by a team. Cars were designed by a team. Both of them are designed, both of them are engineering. They're totally fucking different, you know what I mean? And like, I think there's that much refractual divide inside of when we talk about influencer. Our paid YouTube strategy, our paid social strategy versus your gifting strategy. It's that fucking different. - And brands are just super naive, right? Like, they have a rosy idea of what influencer was in 2012. They're like, okay, how do we get, you know, a Kardashian to post? And it's like, well, it's $135,000 or like, do you know 'em? Like, I don't know, it's totally no. - So when you say half the deals lose money, am I correct in saying that you still view those deals as a win and a worthy investment because of the brand equity and affinity that you're building? Is that fair? Or is that kind of just like, shit, we lost 50% of our investment? How do you look at that? Like, I mean, you put that out. It's like half the deals lose money. How do you sit with that? - The idea is that the half that make money will make enough money to offset the half the lose money. It's not like, okay, I have two posts. They both cost $100. One gets $1.1 back, one gets zero. Now, it doesn't really work like that, right? Like, one might get 1.1, and then we might get 0.9. It's still losing money, but it blends out to be, you know, even or whatever. And the other thing is like, our internal goal, like our mission statement for our partnership program is to be everyone's first sponsor. So like, we want everyone to have a good experience where they work with us, where we explain how sponsorships should work, teach them how to get paid, like get them on a payment system, like, like walk them through that whole thing, right? So it would be everybody's first sponsor. And that's just doing good for the community, I think, like, to have people have positive first experiences so you don't get f*cking scammed. So yeah, I'll say, like, we don't pay the most. I mean, I know a lot of other brands that pay way more for the same influence than we do, but like, our whole thing is like, "Look, we would be your first sponsor." And if your audience likes our shit, and we can work with you for three years, we'll make up for it in the long run, right? - How many creators ballpark have you worked with? - Let's say in the last year, how many? - 10,000. - 10,000. And how many of those are started as a one-off post and turned into something long-term, like three months or more? They're working with you consistently over time. - So we've had, yeah, at least 10,000 creators we've worked with in the past, you know, five years or whatever, right? Last year alone, we probably worked with 3,000 creators or something. And every single one of them starts with a one, three, or five video deal, right? So like our video or post, like, you know, we work with TikTok and whatever. We'll be like, "Hey, can we buy three? Can we buy five or whatever?" And probably 20 to 30% of those, we resign for another three, five or 10 video deal, right? And we have a very small group of creators we've worked with for three plus years. It's probably 10 people, maybe 20, maybe 20 people, that we've really sponsored a video every single month for three or years or whatever, right? Like, line is tech tips. We work with line is tech tips. Every month there's gonna be at least two videos and that's five years we've been doing that or whatever, right? So anyway, there's a small group of people, Anthony Fantano, I've sponsored it for five years. You get to monthly retainer for most every single month. And like, the top of your creators love that because like, they have guaranteed income, you know what I mean? Like, he knows he could hire somebody now because we're just gonna pay him $9,000 every month. - So when you guys are, you started expanding outside of wallets. Did you guys do anything with that, you know, community, I guess you would say like your ambassador roster. Like, did you send it out to all the new, all your creators that are kind of on your roster at that time? Or do you guys do anything unique? Now that you've expanded into different product categories or different product launches with community of people? - Yeah, we're getting better at it. That's the big focus this year. The whole goal of signing the five video deal is like the first video is about the wallets. The second video is about the kits. The third video is about the rings. The fourth video is about wallets again. The fifth video is about some other new product we have coming on. It keeps the talking points fresh. So it's not just like, yeah, Ridge Wallet, talking about wallets again. All right, right? There's something actually new and exciting. And then engaging what we call VIP partners. So there's probably 500 partners that like, we plan on sponsoring four times this year, right? Like we sponsored them four times last year. We're sponsoring four times this year. They're more expensive or they perform on call, or I don't know, they're part of our VIP program. those people. everything we have a new product launch to like, you know, we'll see those people be like, "Hey, next video I'll talk about this new thing we have coming out." So we're working towards that, but like we have to build that internally. Yeah. So when I don't know if brands ever talked to you or mentioned the word "community," what do you think they mean by that? What do you think that entails? Dude, I don't think anybody knows what they mean by that. Like, I have a friend's brand. He has a really awesome Facebook group. We're like, he's got product feedback and like, testing and like, he'll get out samples there or whatever. That's the closest thing I think I've seen to a community. I bought everydaycarry.com. That has a community attached to a big Facebook group, Discord, and like, that's people who have a passion coming together to talk about stuff. 99% of brands shouldn't try to do this. Like, I just don't think they're going to get any sort of ROI out of it. I don't think they don't have to run a community correctly. I mean, I think we both spoke at an ECF event. That is a niche, specific community based around industry and it's hardest to run. I think Andrew has an amazing job over there. But he has two or three full-time staff. They have to throw events. That's a community. Is your hair dryer company going to have a fucking community in the same way? Are you going to put the effort into it? Are you going to throw events? It's so hard to actually do a community. I think just most brands have no idea what they're talking about when they say that. It's a buzzword that sounds good. What they mean is we want passionate, returning customers. It's like, cool. I totally understand that. That's your goal. Everybody's goal. I don't know if a Facebook group's going to get that for you. I think a lot of times too, a lot of people are thinking influencer can't be that. They want consistent influencers to work with over time. But the means by which they go about doing that is oftentimes very opposite of building a community where they actually care about people. I think care about the people that they're engaging with. It's really hard to have a community with people you pay. It's like being friends with your employees. It's difficult. And influencer isn't a sub for a community. Do the other thing. This is just something I've realized like being around like the more people you meet, like the more people with clout you meet or whatever, like you could really love someone's work and like love the content they put out. It actually hate them as a person. Like not like them, not going along with them as a person. And somebody who you despise their work could actually be your best friend. It's like the the creative output somebody puts out and who they are as a person. They're not the same thing. They're totally separate. People might want to work with a creator that they idolize and like love their content and love that they're putting out. And then like want to build a friendship and like maybe like you know get them on their team and like all this sort of stuff. And then realize they're just they're not a personality match. Like oh like we don't actually like each other. Like that's where I think people fuck up the most when trying to work with creators. Yeah. Well I'm even reflecting back on my days at Kalo where I had a roster of probably 50 people that we would send new products out to every single month. They're kind of part of our seeding roster. There's only a handful that I actually like text it with. And like there were a huge huge fans of the product and brand. But throughout is even that. I mean I think we did a great job of creating community. But that was just me just trying to invest in deeper ways. You know trying to think about their birthdays or anniversaries or all these different things. And our product was a marriage and family brand. So it was a little bit easier in that side of things. But yeah community gets thrown around. I want to bring this up as well because we're in this world that a lot of times in like direct response world. You know I talked to brand-a-owners and they want two dollars back for every one dollar that they spend. With influencer though I think that's very very difficult. But what would you say to that when it comes to like I mean you've already mentioned some of these things but to people that are wanting to get started an influencer and they're very concerned about ROI. But be your response to that. Yeah it's just not the channel for you. It's not as metric and science focused. Like I mean I'm just trying to be fucking honest with these people. They're like well what's the row-ass of your influencer. Okay, but it's like man like it's way more holistic. You know what I mean like every month like 400,000 people search rich wallet. Right. Like they type it in and they search it in our customer surveys. Where do people hear about us the most for the first time? It's influencers right. So it's like it has huge lasting effects and that's just like an aggregate because videos live forever and people are watching the posts and sharing them or whatever. So you guys got to commit because you like to do it. Yeah I mean and I'm like look at me in my CMO. I have fights about this where I'm like that's not like he's like you know we should really spend less on influencer because other channels do it better. I'm like nah I like influencer we're gonna spend money there and that's just like a gut feeling. If I can tie it to the community thing for a second. It's very hard to be ROI focused and community focused. Are you gonna kick a member out of your community because their career starts going out or that their videos start taking or their audiences like your shit. The few creators you texted with are you gonna break up with them if they're post-stop doing well like think about what it means to be community. Think about what it means to be you know creator-facel. Well it's also not taking into consideration like the long tail effect and the organic flywheel of word amount that happens. Like that is not trackable whoever invents that tool is gonna be a billionaire, a cajillionaire. But to be able to track word-a-mouth that's what people are trying to speak to but it's like the hundreds of thousands of creators that are out there and the tens of thousands that you've worked with over the past five years. Like the amount of people that have actually seen that video maybe didn't buy directly using that discount code but went on Amazon search you or google you and then ended up buying like you don't get credit for that or that influencer doesn't get credit for that but that's still happening like and the fact that that's not being acknowledged that's happening is just naive. So that's also the power of it. And if I could take what you just said and magnify it. So word of mouth yes it's true for the audience right like people watching consuming content. It's also true inside of the creator community. Dude Diplo posts our wallet probably every single month and just like talks about how we likes it. Never sponsored Diplo. We sponsored Diplo's friends and then Diplo got a wallet somehow and talked about how much he loves it right so it's like this word of mouth flywheel. It's not just audience facing not just sales facing it's also community facing that's what I say cloud and reputation. Well Joe Rogan talks about us never fucking spots with Joe Rogan. I sponsored everyone around Joe Rogan and it's something we got a wall on me loves it right so that's funny you mentioned him because that actually happened with one of our brands you ended up buying the thing that because he was following an influencer that we see the product too. Yeah and it's very hard to tile those connections together like like you said like it's you know it's certainly the ether of how people react but the thing is everybody's human everybody's shops everyone likes shit. People talk about things that they love. So one of my last few questions here is have you considered working with like macro talent or celebrity type talent would be like a big big face I call them flag bears like they would stick the flag in the ground say hey I represent Ridge think like body armor with their athletes or hex cloud with Gordon Ramsay like that type of thing like have you guys considered that because I would say I want to even entertain a huge huge name unless you've earned that right which I would say you guys have so right have you guys thought about them so maybe we'll do some of that this year there's less of a natural fit right like Gordon Ramsay and hex cloud I mean there's nothing more of a bullseye you know what I mean right who who's the accessory guy we should go after right like it's very hard for us to figure that out you know I would say we spot the PewDiePie a couple different times like he's a list to a lot of fucking kids you know I mean a lot of 28 he's a list right and then also it's like what do those relationships look like there's a lot of ways to structure them like so if I could just kind of break that apart we've gotten ad rates to sponsor the guy who's the winter soldier in those Marvel movies and it's cheaper than it is to spot the PewDiePie right and like but do we want him to come out and do a shoot or we're gonna shoot like a fucking two-minute video that we're gonna run commercials for it like Larry David and FTX like will we ever do that if there's a perfect fit maybe the other thing I'll say is it's a lot cheaper than you think it is you know what I mean at the end of the day there's not that many brands like this spend $500,000 so like when you say $500,000 you could basically get any a list for a four hour shoot that you want you know what I mean Robert Down Jr only only got you know a million dollars or two million dollars for the first Iron Man movie you know what I mean now he said it's made fucking $55 million to the other ones but like you can negotiate these things it's very hard to say no to $500,000 so well I was just gonna say like we sponsored or we worked with the Elrond Hard Junior for a whole year for 200,000 at K-Lo and so kind of like an American on a type guy and we had a photo shoot we had several social posts he had his own product line like that type of thing so he was already a fan of the brand which reduced the price probably by half as opposed to like you're just going to Gordon Ramsay cold and they've never heard of you that's gonna be significantly higher mark yeah yeah also like you know I think there's more and more appetite for equity deals right like doing some sort of you know structure especially like they're gonna be a big driver for it I've seen a lot of people get fucked through in those deals like just you know wrong fit whatever if the right person came along and it made a lot of sense we had a lot of this conversation internally everyone's trying to get the rock we don't think the rock's a good fit maybe it's over saturated whatever you guys are entertaining that yeah we're probably at the stage of our brand where like it makes sense to do one or two of those I have the guy I've been trying to push the entire time and I was just trying to get everyone on board there you go all right the mystery man so what's last question advice for brands starting out with influencer marketing today this is difficult let's just say 10 million dollar brand five to 10 million dollar range what would you say that's probably when you can start I think any smaller than that really do it even and I've been trying to explain this to more and more brands it's like you know you can get to 30 million dollars just on Facebook, like one channel. I've seen brands do $100 million just off of Facebook. It's like diversify when you really want to, when you're passionate about it, right? Like you're ready for it. So if you're telling me not to brand, yeah, maybe you can start dabbling into it. I give the same advice to everybody who always asks me for it. I'm like, fine 10 creators you personally like and reach out to them and try to structure a deal. And I'm like, you're gonna lose money on all of those. Like do one, then do five, then do 10. And you have to learn the economics of it. You have to learn. See them your product first. Yeah, there you go. You can start that. But I'm like, look, I'm like, if you're the CEO of a 10 million dollar brand, you're not above going on YouTube on Creator You Like and commenting, hey, I love your videos. And then trying to find an email, DM in them, pursuing them, be like, hey, look, I'm actually a fan. And that's the best place to start. You'll get the most excited about it. And then if the person you're most excited about bombs, that's a great fucking lesson. You have no idea who's gonna work and who's not gonna work. And that's the thing is, you personally liking them is not a translator to them being a good fit. Do the work. Yeah, do the work. I love that. It's a running theme throughout this episode. It's the most human channel by far in a way. It is not a Facebook or a Clavio dashboard or account. You can't just click a few buttons and make things work. But it's very human. Whether it be human resources or it's also you're dealing with human beings at the end of the day in terms of negotiation, getting the product, identifying them, all these different things, all the ins and outs of Info-Insert. Yeah, look dude. And you know, going right to the tweet I said, yeah, you get bad PR. But we sponsored a guy who decided to crash an airplane. And like, my fucking DMs were full with people who are very mad at me. And I'm like, I don't know who's gonna do that. I'm like, we sponsored a guy who made a video just fucking talking mad shit on somebody else. And like, my DMs are full of people who are mad at me. I don't fucking know. Like, you're gonna be put into the public conversation. Think a lot of brands think they want that. But like, no man, like, maybe you don't. I've had enough. I've had enough. Inherent risk with all marketing, right? There's always risk. Yeah, more so with Info-Insert marketing. So anyway, it's like, when you said it's the most human form of marketing, 100%. Because at the end of every email, there's somebody has to accept it. You have to work with them. They're putting their own personal stamp on it. Like, you have to just be willing to roll with the punches. And most people are. Like, literally, if brands listen to this, 90% of them cannot do what we do 'cause they'll freak out the first time they get a mean email. Awesome, man. Well, fascinating episode. I loved going back and forth, discussing Info-Insert, especially for the tier of brand that you guys are and everybody's wanting to get to. I think that's what 100% of founders listening to this would say. And if they're gonna follow your Info-Insert blueprint, that there's many steps to getting to that point and all the resources that you have involved. But yeah, you've done an amazing job building Ridge. Working people find you. You have an awesome Twitter that's sarcastic and also puts out good content. So, working people find you. - Yeah, I'm an Info-Insert myself. Like on my Twitter, I got a sub-stack where I just talked about whatever. All of it is sponsored. I'm rich enough where you don't eat sponsors. So there you go. - So don't reach out to Sean Frank to ask the sponsor room. If he's one of your 10 favorite creators. - That'd be super funny, man. - That would be. - That would be. - Yeah. All right, well Sean, thank you so much for the time. Appreciate it. - Joe May, thanks for having me. (upbeat music) - All right, that's all for today. If you'd like some help developing your Info-Insert marketing campaign, go ahead and DM us on Twitter. Links are in the description. Or you can head to kinship.co to learn more and you can book a call there. That's KYNSHIP.co. At kinship.co, you also find tools, templates, and resources all designed to help you grow an Info-Insert campaign that drives visibility and sales, not just likes. Thanks for tuning in, as always, and we'll see you next week. (upbeat music)