How A 7-Figure Subscription Brand Built Its Team Offshore

You're going to really enjoy this episode, especially if you're like a 7-figure e-com operator, businesses growing, there's a lot to do, you're not exactly sure what's going on. I've got Charlie McDonnell from Dip among other brands, who is a 7-figure UK-based laundry sheet brand, and we really got into the nitty-gritty in this episode of a lot of the different elements of growing an e-commerce business in the 7-figure range, including sort of the expansion of your team, how they sort of incubate a different product to find a product that was really working for them in their market. And then we got into a bunch of stuff related to their supply chain, inventory forecasting, and actually new formula development and formula ownership. So if you're in CPG or anything like that, this will be interesting to you. That part of the conversation happened in part because this episode is sponsored by Move Supply Chain. This is a sponsored episode, but really we just talked about exactly how Charlie scaled up his supply chain inventory forecasting formulation team over the last couple of years working with Move Supply Chain. So it is a sponsored episode, I do have to tell you that, but that's really the way it comes out in the conversation. If you want to hear how Charlie went from a one-man team to a one-man show or a very small operation to actually expanding his team, you're going to like this episode. At the end, stick around. If you're running subscription businesses to hear Charlie reflect a little bit on how offers are the actual drivers of churn and retention in subscription-based businesses. He is a subscription business and how AOV bundling has helped them a lot with retention value. I really got into a lot of an integrated here. This ended up being a great conversation and you're going to like it. Charlie Macdonnell from Dip, let's get into it right now. Hey Charlie, thanks for taking the time to do this. Super excited about this episode. This is going to be fun. I'm glad to talk to you. Thanks for having me, Andrew, of listen to your podcast for a while and it's exciting to be on. Yeah, good. I hope it's been helpful to you. So tell people, give some people some background on Dip, tell people how you got here, like what do you sell, what's the bulk of your business, give people some context for size. I said bid seven figure in the intro, give you some sense of the business just so they know kind of what stage of business you're in. I care about that more than sort of like every business has unique stages, right? So give people a sense of kind of how you got to where you got to and what you guys are doing. So Dip is a health and sustainability focused home and cleaning brand, focusing on laundry detergent sheets, dishwasher sheets and multi-suffers cleaning sheets currently, but not necessarily only that format. We are looking at other options as well. We are, yes, currently pretty much exactly, mid-seven figures, but still growing and looking to take it a lot further, UK only currently. So the laundry detergent sheets are the hero product. If you're in the US, you may have seen a number of these sort of DDC laundry detergent sheets popping up. You didn't start with laundry detergent sheets, though, did you? No. So originally, so six years ago was the first sort of attempt at building a business and started with reusable coffee capsules, so there's sort of stainless steel nispresso pods that you can fill up with your own local coffee and re-use as many times as you want. That ran fairly well for two years and made a bit of money, but was basically paying the bills and wasn't going to go any further than that for a variety of reasons. One being that they last basically forever. So you don't get repeat purchase, which makes business very difficult. And they were very niche and kind of in a sort of monopolized market when it comes to nispresso basically only the whole thing with a few other very big conglomerates who could change their machines and then your product doesn't work in them. And then so it can make a very difficult, which then led us to looking at other options, kind of in a product agnostic way, but looking to do something good. And that's where we came across laundry sheets sort of starting to pop up in North America and thought we'd try them out in the UK. So yeah. What was the appeal of laundry sheets besides that popping up sound like you said, like you said, starting to do something good, trying to do something good, talk about that a little bit. Yeah. So basically, we didn't want to have a product that just wasn't good for people, wasn't good for the world, you know, it just wasn't, that was never part of the plan and was never going to be part of the plan. We wanted to do something that was going to enhance a category for the right reasons. And when we saw laundry detergent sheets pop up, it was like originally, like I started watching kind of dropshipping videos on YouTube and the sort of wow factor and different format and understanding how, how to know if a product's going to do well. And that's kind of how when I came across the reusable coffee getters, when I saw the laundry detergent sheet, so I looked at the form factor and how it was totally different, the marketing angles for that lightweight, easy for subscription through the letterbox. It just kind of ticked all the boxes that we were looking for. And we had a bit of money kind of from the reusable coffee capsule business. So we just found a variety of suppliers tested it and then did a sort of small pilot batch in the UK to try and see whether the market would like it and they did. So that was kind of how it went. And you've got some tailwinds on it, like right away, were you able to sort of see growth happen pretty fast? Yeah, pretty, pretty early on, it started selling pretty well. We started with, interestingly started with one time and subscription, with trying to push subscriptions, but cash was tight at that point. And conversion rates on subscriptions on meta at that time anyway was significantly lower. So we actually shifted to one time only and then subscription after to begin with just because we could just get way better return on our spend on the first order and push bundles and things like that and then shifted back to subscriptions gradually as we understood the LTV of the product and had more cash in the bank to work with basically. Yeah, yeah, makes perfect sense. Yeah, that is the challenge was something like that. It's like with subscription business, you have to be able to build up cash. Okay, and then what point did you get to where you started like really saying like, okay, this is, this London church thing or the London church sheet business is working and like it's time to sort of put some more money in and team and effort and focus. Because like one of the great challenges with the sort of model you're describing, right, is that you've got a couple of business ideas, one of them's going okay, but it still requires some time and attention, you know, you're sort of incubating a new idea and then maybe you got a couple other ideas as well, you know, clearly you're willing to work across categories between coffee pods and detergent sheets and some of that. So how did you, you know, how did you start to decide, okay, we're going to actually focus on on sheets and push in. Yeah, so there were, I mean, there were a couple of factors. One was the, the coffee pod business was kind of stagnating and it was just like, it was just more difficult every month having to sell to new customers all the time. So that was a big factor in trying, in thinking that we needed to make the change because otherwise we would have just ground to a whole over time anyway. And then fairly quickly after probably three or four months, the laundry detergent sheets probably got got to sort of, that's still fairly small numbers, but probably 30, 40, 50 K a month, right, pounds, right. And then, and then we did like a very sort of small family and friends investment round just to basically deal with having to pay for stock quite fine advance because we were new to suppliers and things like that and, and not having the, the sort of return recurring revenue stream, bringing cash into the bank at that point. So we, we raised, so a couple hundred grand to get through that period initially. And then never really look back from there, we've, we've used a variety of lenders over time to kind of deal with certain period, but now we don't, we don't have any and we're able to self fund growth. At the pace that we're going at, and we're looking at how we can basically increase that at the moment, at the moment. Yeah, amazing. Okay, so then at what point did, did you start creating having complexity? I mean, you go to the point where 50 K a month, 50 K pounds a month or whatever app had, you know, that's like enough, enough to see a real business there. I see exactly what you mean, like that you got so a lot of laundry sheets of self 50,000 pounds of a month, you know, it's not a high OV product, like so, I mean, that means you see, like you can see, like, okay, people want this, it's like getting somewhere. Okay, so then, so then you start pushing forward, is there a, is there a point at which you start running into to, like, okay, we're pushing, we're pushing all of our effort towards this for a little bit. And if so, like, what are the challenges that you're running into as you're scaling, particularly operationally, this is, this is where I want to talk a little bit about sort of scaling your supply chain. And the thing is, I have I watch a lot of businesses do this. You get to a couple million in revenue, or something like that. And people will come to us sometimes. They'll say, hey, we want to bring on a media buying agency. And there's the same thing a lot of times, which is like, it's becoming too much work for us and we have too many other things to do. And so we want to bring on an agency. And that's fine. The problem is like, if you're sub 50,000 a month and spend like an agency just doesn't really work very well. It's too expensive to get a good agency. Like, and so you just can't really do that. And so what I end up telling people is, no, you need to keep running it yourself, keep creating content yourself. But that ends up being difficult advice because they're going like, well, I got all these other things to do. So it sounds like you guys have kept your spend maybe in-house, is that right? Yes, we've tried a few times. And we've tried expanding out to different channels. And we've tried also shifting meta to agencies. We just haven't found, I think it's exactly what you say is that it's just at our scale. It doesn't make, at the moment, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense for you and for the agency. This is the thing everybody had to raise. It's like the agency can't actually give you a very good service if the cost is too low to them, depending on what service you're buying. And so, and just like what is, so yeah. So there's a zone between like 50K and 150K and spend is really tough. That maybe you can go on an agency or something like that. But 150K, it's really, really hard to do. And so you actually, it sounds like went a different route in terms of how you ended up getting team help and actually got additional help on the supply chain side. And that is actually where I would push more brands to go early, like keep maintaining your spend in-house early on and start actually getting help in other parts of the business instead where you probably have less expertise anyway. And also like there's really affordable help that can be really good. So just tell me about that part of the story a little bit about sort of, as you guys have gone from 50K per month, UK, you know, or bridge pounds in, in, in, in spend, excuse me, in revenue up to where you are now where you're mid seven figures. Yeah. Sort of how you've scaled team along that and all that. Yeah, so I mean, I think the other thing is just to add to what you said is, you can't spend more if your operations are all over the place. Like, and logistically your supply chain just can't handle it. And we kind of tried, but it ended up being me as the founder just running everything and trying to manage our supply chain manage manufacturers make sure that, you know, stocks coming in on time and trying to do everything myself, which is like, it's okay for a while, but once you want to start, you know, venturing into new products and you've got, you've got, so you've got so much going on and you can't, especially with the subscribe brand, you can't afford to get it wrong when it comes to stock. Not because if you go out then you lose subscribers and that's just a real headache. Yeah. So at that point was actually, I think I was probably on a train listening to your podcast and heard you talk about move supply chain and so reached out to Lara and we had a conversation and yeah, she's great. She's just been in the UK actually and visited some people we're working with there as well. Awesome. But so spoke to her and then we started small and focused on just taking inventory management off my hands. Yeah, that came in, came in basically a team of two where one was managing the inbound orders and ordering from manufacturers and making sure everything was done on time and another was analyzing the inventory forecast and data and just making sure that we weren't going to run out. And we have been, we've had one swap of, like a one role of personnel in that way. Yeah, but not for any reason other than they wanted to go and do something else, but yeah, but so and that was on the sort of inventory management rather than the data forecasting side. That was probably probably six months maybe a go and seamlessly move helped us recruit someone else and our nice thought into the team really, really quickly and haven't really haven't had any any issues. But so we've been working with them on that for probably two and a half years and it's just freed up my time. Oh, you mean move for two and a half years? Yeah. Oh, okay, not six months ago you had a team change up. So as you've scaled up over the last couple of years, move has been a part of that whole story. Huge, yeah, yeah, huge part. Amazing. And make up probably probably close to half of our team now. Wow, we're probably 15 to 20 total and yeah, that's on the supply chain side and product development and new product sourcing, I'm actually sourcing it. So let's break all that down. This is actually this is really interesting. Let's get into details on this a little bit. So you bring them on first for inventory management. They probably I assume do the things that they do. I've watched like I've talked a lot about this and everything, just like start figuring out how much, you know, you're looking at sales velocity, you're looking at return customer rate, all those things in subscription business, you're thinking about sort of cash position, how much safety stock you want to have on hand, you know, managing cash in a business like this is hard, even with subscription and all that, especially if you are in fact, the more successful you start getting on meta ads, the harder it gets in some ways, because you're probably acquiring customers at like a break even or even a loss on first purchase. - A loss. - Yeah, a loss. Yeah, right. So right, okay, make sense. So that means the more successful you are, the harder your cash gets, yeah, at least in the short term. And then, okay. And so then you bring them in and so they probably right away just like sort of analyze the velocity and start thinking differently about it. How much of an overall wasn't to what you were doing? Was it like they just kind of took it over or did they bring a kind of intelligence to it where you were like, oh, I was not thinking about this well? - It was a pretty big overhaul. I basically had a manual spreadsheet that I would go into every week and just guesstimate what we needed based off some very simple, you know, calculator maths. And it kind of worked for a while at that sort of scale, but when they came in, they just basically overhauled everything and built a forecast tool in Google Sheets with data pools from Shopify and Shiporb and various different places to make sure everything was properly done. And that's what I was asking for as well. And then we worked together for a while. It's definitely not like, I've never experienced where it's just like a, you know, you click a button and someone can do everything. - Of course. - That's what you've been doing. - Of course. - So we worked together for a while to kind of nail it down. But no, no, I don't even have to think about it. I'd literally just look at what they're suggesting and say, yep, approve the order or whatever's next. And we've started to implement AI in the process for analysis with Moves as well. So it's just getting better. And I literally haven't had to think about it for well over a year now, at all, yeah. - Yeah, that's amazing. - Man, the gift of not thinking about something in your business is the greatest thing. And there will be people who will be tempted to do something like this with cloud or something, right? They'll say like, oh, we'll handle this problem. But I think what's underrated in having AI handle this kind of thing for you is that you're still like, you still, it sort of, it takes up the brain space still in a lot of ways, you know? And so like, it's one of those things where I've basically become convinced that the real place where AI is going to keep helping a lot of these businesses including my business, like, and everything is like, really smart and talented people, enabled with AI as opposed to a eye replacing people. Like it just, because that brain space just matters. And so like, the idea that somebody else would have that for you just is a really big deal. - Yeah, definitely, yeah. - And, okay, so they start with the inventory forecasting, demand planning side, that's something that almost everybody gets wrong at your stage of business. It's not surprising to me at all. I've gotten it wrong, like I understand. It's because there is real methodology to it and like nobody ever teaches you that really. So it's like, so having somebody do that. Secondly, you said new product development. So talked about what you've done with them for that. You know, you have traditionally it's a formula-based business. Like, are they developing formulas for you? Do you own your formulas when you didn't before? Like, how does that all play out? - Yeah, so we're basically, we've been working on it for probably a year, where we've gotten extra people to work on formula and sourcing of boring raw materials and sort of end manufacturers. We're also looking at moving our UK manufacturing into the UK, currently it's in China. We're looking at the potential of moving it into the UK. Mae'r i'n gweithio'r i'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'r i'n gweithio'r i'n gweithio'r i'n gweithio'r i'n gweithio'r i'n gweithio'r i Mae'r yw'r yw'r ddym yn ymwyr ddym yn ymwyr ddym yn ymwyr ddym yn ymwyr ddym yn ymwyr ddym yn ymwyr yng Nghymru'n gwybod gweithio i'n gweithio bod yng Nghymru'n gweithio. Yng Nghymru'n gweithio bod yng Nghymru'n gweithio bod yng Nghymru'n gweithio bod yng Nghymru'n gweithio bod yng Nghymru'n gweithio. Yng Nghymru'n gweithio bod yng Nghymru'n gweithio bod yng Nghymru'n gweithio bod yng Nghymru'n gweithio. We have finally decided and we are just kind of lining up packaging and things like that and we are going to bring some different products that are again unique in their own ways to the market in the same space. It's been a amazing experience over the past year and completely different to the way we've done it before and we've kind of decided at the start we were going to stabilize, make profit this year and we've made profit every month of this year. And build the foundations to be able to scale into different markets and do so with products that we think are unique enough to break into certain markets. It's really tough spot and there's like mix consumer sentiment about the category and it's a hard game so I don't know what it's like in the UK but in the US I have some firsthand experience here like I know it's hard. It's very fascinating to hear what you're saying about sort of the development of the service that you got because what you're describing is really a big deal. Taking inventory forecasting off your hand is very helpful and it's worth paying money for and it's worth having in your business. It's why I do the ad read to them right it's like I have worked with this this company for a long time I understand what the value is so like it makes sense to me but going to this next level of like not just like negotiating with vendors but actually setting up like a formulation lab in the Philippines and helping you to develop products. I mean like I am just convinced right now that a lot of brands fail because they actually don't have anything unique to say it's not really their advertising strategy it's not really the tactics or anything like that so if you're talking about a. Offshore supply chain team that goes from okay people I think people will get into working with a company like that because they're going to go. It's nice to take some things off my hands and that's actually a great starting place right but. But to have them actually pushing you forward to have a real product development function with own formulations in your business to at a reasonable price is like actually an insane value like it could be could be a gigantic unlock and so. I actually you're teaching me something here right now about what's happening Laura has briefly mentioned to me this idea of like them doing more of their own formulating and I know I've heard her sort of almost like speak with some frustration about like these dumb manufacturers are like white labeling these formulations and it's annoying and like I know how this works it's an easy you know like she just is so in this world but. But that's just like it's like potentially revolutionary thing in your business especially for somebody like you who's willing to work across categories incubate different categories along the way to have a partner who's like formulating formulating product for you it's crazy you know yeah yeah it's. It's it's it's exactly what we need to be able to get to the next level because like you say it. You know laundry sheet our laundry sheet formula is not the same as lots of other laundry sheet formulas sure but the US obviously we want we want to crack the US market at some point because it's the biggest it's the biggest and has the most money and is the place where people can scale if we did done relative yeah what we've done in the UK and the US then we'd be a lot bigger than we currently are yeah but but if we were to try and go in with our laundry sheets now it's it's really hard really out yeah it's probably probably durable but and and you can make your product unique through packaging design and things and areas other things and certain ingredients and whatever it might be but for us to be able to create completely new products and do things that no one else has done and and add also things that you at the moment you literally can't get out of laundry sheets such as for the fragrance strength of other formats and things like that is it's a like it could obviously we haven't actually got to the final final step yet we're getting there but it could be kind of the thing that takes us from being a mid-7 to mid-8 and I don't think that's wrong at all and I think it's the exact right kind of bet I actually had a telling clients all the time like and I just become more convinced of this endlessly that like if you can actually have something good and unique and stronger to say about your product that can as a firestone says and he said on my podcast once a while back he said the best product doesn't win in the marketplace the best promise does but it's a and that's definitely true the product the thing is so if you're a 95th percentile marketer you can probably come up with the best promise about an average product but man it is a lot easier to make a great promise if your product is actually differentiated and being able to supply that also if you just like don't want to lie you know so so being able to bring in something like that is just it's just crazy yeah that's a that's a very compelling thing to have that function in your business that your scale is is really awesome yeah talk about that relative to I'm curious if there's any learnings along the way you're talking about working with an agency style business you're talking about working with people overseas there's time zones yeah English speaking is normally actually not really an issue in the Philippines basically everybody goes up speaking English to this point yeah there's actually a sad thing here which is that Tagalog is kind of us to hear some of my Filipino friends say it's a slowly slowly dying language because just like English it's the lingua franca and so in the Philippines if you want to be a business you learn English growing up so yeah but so that that's probably not an issue but talk about sort of managing overseas teams any challenges there anything you have learned along the way about sort of maximizing that relationship etc so we've before even before me we were sort of hiring contractors and and kind of full time people overseas for things like customer service and some video editing web development things like that so we were like we had done it for a while but there has definitely been like big learning curves and and understanding that it like it's just not the same each time whereas I think the difference we've found with move is that it's yes agency kind of but it's actually almost more recruitment and management of your team yeah so it's not the set is like it's not the same at least to another agency that I worked with and it feels they really feel like part of the team and it really feels like they're full time now they're not full time we have we have a you know contract that we work to that gets reviewed every three months and we decide the hours that we need of different parts of the business but we've been working with these people like the same people pretty much for two and a half years like exactly the same team yeah and then we've just added to it and they know each other as well generally and as part of bringing in people from the team we also have a guy who is the these sort of department manager has that that area right and so the whole thing is end-to-end recruitment and on the right. it's not agency if that makes sense or it doesn't feel like agency, and you know we've been over to the Philippines and been out there seeing the other men used to do it again and it was great fun and but it really does for us to go apart. We literally were just in Manila for we were in there for three days there was actually a big sort of typhoon and we ended up having to spend less time there but we we will be back probably amazingly early next year or the fall but I went last year you can just just do just do yourself a favor and make it to like Manila is a crazy city and as fast as in a lot of ways but you got to make it out to some of the like to Palawan or somewhere like that where you can go sit on a beach for a day or two because it's like tropical paradise and it's unbelievable so yeah that's what they were they were all telling us today do it it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in the world is Corone yeah Corone and the Philippines there's Lara point of me too in the first place so yeah awesome we'll definitely do that um yeah it's awesome uh yeah okay tell me let's let's let's just talk a little about the future so you guys you have this team in place you've got these tailwinds you like I said you're willing to work across categories can you say anything about what's next you talked a little bit about the end of going into the US you talk a little bit about the idea of going into um maybe some other categories and products and things like that is there anything you can say about where where dip or the conglomerate of companies here the holds dip uh is headed so we we're definitely going to be expanding out of the UK um I think probably Europe first um we're actually also talking to move about uh a like expanding into Asia and them helping us with that which will be an interesting uh an interesting sort of project to try and I I'm quite excited about that uh because they just know the uh the market better than us sure but um well yeah we'll be doing we'll be definitely expanding into Europe uh because it's just it's close to the UK and we can we can do it from the UK initially and and test the waters um and when when it comes to the sort of new products it there won't just be sheets I can tell you that um and we are owning our formulas is a massive part of what we're trying to do because that will just massively help us scale globally it will allow us to domestic if we want to domestically manufacture in most places globally or or at least close to the region um and sort of having run this brand for a period of time there are certain um like financial um exactly you know cash flow uh yes the time payment terms that are required to get to the next stage and owning our formulas enables all of those things so that's really the next step for us and then looking further into the future we definitely want to have a go at the US probably with new products and we will the idea is to do the whole home so the vision would be to have dip products for everything that people want to use in their home and yeah have products that people actually want to show on the site rather than put in a cupboard under the sink um amazing yeah yeah that's that's where we're going I would say amazing all right that's awesome I think that's an exciting future um Charlie thanks for your time very much is there anything that I didn't ask you that you think is an important part of the story that of where you guys have been so far whether it's supply chain or or or move related or whatever or not that uh I just always want to leave a little space because you know you're business better than I do so yeah so what what if anything that I not ask you about that would be helpful for people to hear um I think I think one thing that I thought of earlier that we didn't talk about when we were talking about the best promise versus the best product um your promise can be great but then what's your LTV looking like yeah it's the big question because it's unbelievable how much difference you can make to retention in your offer oh it's yes yes and people miss that people always work after the offer but actually probably the most important part of retention is what are you saying in your in your offer what is there the you could say specifically about what you've seen there um so we've seen well one if you offer a one time and they choose subscription then those subscribers retain much better um there are ways of offering one time more subtly or making the subscription offer better so that they retake in so that you get more subscribers like we we have one time available on our website and we get 90% subscription selection um and we've also tested 100% subscription and probably weren't as transparent as we could have been in the offer that it was a subscription it was I mean Shopify do say on the checkout that you're subscribing and things like that but we we weren't as transparent and the drop off from order one to two was massive pretty big um and then long to our retention wasn't as good so this is actually something that we're constantly thinking about is how do you how do you test um how do you how do you test retention um and how do you measure it as well in a in a smallish brand where you haven't got you don't ideally you don't want to be waiting months and months to work it out yeah so yeah I'd say that's the that's the probably biggest area we're working on at the moment along alongside the products uh obviously product makes a massive difference to retention as well it but is is offer framing around retention and offer framing around volume as well because I think there's a lot of chat about adding AOV yeah but in a subscription brand you don't necessarily need that AOV to be first order it could be before 30 days yes and and if someone if you're spending a hundred grand a month and you're getting a 10 pound cack then you're getting a lot more people through the door and if you're getting a 50 pound cack so um and then you can work with those people to increase their uh 30 day value and 90 day value and and I think that that's something that perhaps because of the brands like I I guess I am eight and a g one and people like that who are very high order value on the first order um I think it doesn't work for every category and actually for the long term for subscription like volume is everything like volume just makes as long as you've got good LTV and your product is liked then you need to get subscribers in basically you know I think I think you've hit two things there that I've come to with with these subscription businesses that I think are critical and one of them is is to really think hard about the offer and to follow up on it the actual person I've seen really mastered that's the most that I've been closest to is uh is somebody maybe you know in the UK uh is Jack Rubin from Pretty and Fig um I have watched Jack like change offers a lot and then just like religiously measure the three to six month cohorts of those customers one of the implications of that of course is that it takes a long time to get the information because like three to six months is a long time to wait um but so you have to so you have to be disciplined about it and you have to sort of think a little bit long term but I've just worked watched him pay very close attention to that there is no one size fits all I answer here there's some people who I think do think that it's like really definitely best to get more subscribers at a low AOV and I think in some businesses that's right I think there's other businesses were actually there's sneaky value in driving the AOV up and bundling a little bit more in first purchase um and that you can actually get more volume that way and and and you hit it there's there's this tradeoff between subscriber percentage and volume and first purchase like CAC or AMER and all of these three things impact each other a lot and you and so you just have to play this game of finding in your business which one works and I wish I could tell you which one is going to work every time the right way but I just don't I just don't know if it works that way the other thing that you're hitting that I think is totally right is that the post the after that first purchase the way to maximize your value is with is with adding AOV more than it is reducing chair and the chair introduction happens at the level of the offer uh that's exactly like you said but then the follow on is is once you have a customer who likes the product the best way to generate more value is not to try to like squeeze out a little less churn from niger book customers or whatever it's to it's to get them to add more over time um and and by providing some additional value that requires product expansion sometimes or whatever but um but that ends up being the actual way to do it it's it's uh and it's really underrated everybody kind of focuses so much on the retention metric they look at retention percentage that they can less sort of lose sight of how much value there is to be added by just adding AOV yeah I mean almost all almost all chair and happens for more to 1 to 2 that's right yeah and that's and if they get through order 2 then your churn just lasts a while dramatically so yeah um what that's one of the things that we've a big push is is product to touch right just attaching more more of our products early because we just see payback dropped dramatically and LTV increase a lot through doing that yep yep so yeah the other thing weird a'r gweithio'r gweithio. 'Meta' basically matches are selected basket. So the hack on 'Meta' will just match whatever we select as the offer for people on the basket. So if we pre-select something, then 'Meta''s hack for us it's not directly proportional, but it's very closely proportionate to matching what we've selected. No matter what the creatives are and how we frame it, which might be because we're in an essential grocery-style shopping niche. But it's something that we've seen, and more so recently, weirdly. Really interesting. Yeah, so we're thinking about how do we lower the initial pre-selected basket. But still get them to select more and keep the hack the same. It's the challenge we're working on at the moment. And we're getting somewhere, but it's hard to do. Yeah, it's hard to do. Charlie, should people follow up with you anywhere? Is there anything that you want to say publicly? Are you making content or anything like that? Or should they go buy some dip? They can go buy some dip. Okay, I've got Instagram with people to ask me any questions or anything. All right, great. Where should people go for that? It's at Charlie Macdonnell. Okay, great. And then Charlie, thanks so much for your time. Like I said, I appreciate it very much. This is a very helpful conversation. Yeah, thanks. Thank you for having me on the show. All right. Cheers. All right, if you enjoyed this conversation, if you think Move Supply Chain could help, you go to movesupplychain.com and get on a call with Laura or somebody from her team. And talk about whether or not they might be a fit for your business. If you've got a CPG business, I just think that formulation lab and all that kind of stuff is really fascinating. I always remember a conversation I had with Laura a while back at my house, actually, in LA, where I showed Laura a product and was asking her what did she think of? Whether or not this would be an easy product to manufacture. And she flipped over the package right away, looked at being gradients, and could immediately tell me, like, oh yeah, yeah. These ingredients, these raw materials, these are no problem to source. This would be easy. Yeah, we could definitely do this, or I could find somebody who could do this for you. This is a few years ago now. It's just when you talk to her about this kind of stuff, you can feel the expertise coming through. You just know she spent a lot of time on this kind of thing, and you feel it. Just like anytime you talk to somebody who has real expertise, you can really feel it. So get on a call with Move, see if they can help you as well. Everything from inventory, forecasting to everything else. They're very reasonably priced, great service. I frankly don't know why I have more seven-figure e-commerce businesses. And even really eight-figure e-commerce businesses, people who need supply chain help, and beyond, like, I aren't at least taking a call with them and seeing if it's the right solution. I just have a whole bunch of expertise. There's a whole bunch of value in Move. Go to Movesupplyaching.com. Like I said, do that. Big thanks to Charlie for taking the time. And if you want to work with me and my agency on your business, go to agfgrowth.com. Tell me a little bit about your business. Fill at the intake form there. And I'll get back to you, and we'll see if a good conversation started. Or just email me, [email protected]. It's a place to do that. Thanks so much for watching. For listening, I'll see you next time.