How He Helped 50+ Brands Reach $100K a Day

Speaker 1 What does it actually take to build an e-commerce brand doing $100,000 a day? And which things you're working on right now will actually get you there? Shawn Ng has helped 54 brand owners reach that milestone. In this episode, we breakdown what separates the ones who scale from the ones who stay stuck. From finding winning ads to building a team to knowing what you should focus on at each stage of your business. Whether you're chasing your first sale or your next million, this conversation will make you rethink your next move. Let's jump into it. Speaker 2 Bro, super happy to have you here in the studio. Welcome to Hong Kong. Nice to be here. So let's start with it's just all about you, what you've been up to. I know you do many things. I know that members in the studio are part of your community. Evolve. People on our team use ecom talent. I see those credit card bills come in. It's not cheap. Bro. Tell me like what is the infrastructure of Sean right now? What are you working on? Speaker 3 Yeah. So right now we will be trying to focus on building a whole ecosystem around everything. ECOM, for example, on our side, we have our own agency restarted. Everything, everything single thing we test right now, we showed other people all came from learnings from the agency, agency transfers on the brand side, OK, what we're working right now was to evolve. Evolve is where we teach brand owners. At the same time also the brand owners need talent. We also teach the talent then from there as well, OK, we can connect the brand owners to the talent to the talent, create ads for us as well, whether that's brand talent, deal flow, learnings, kind of build the whole ecosystem around that. Speaker 2 So let's go piece by piece. Let's start with Evolve. What is Evolve? Speaker 3 Yeah, so we run this consulting community called Evolve. It started kind of randomly one day because I was just posting on like my own social media, like here's what we did for the six figure days. People started asking me for help from like, how do we get there? And by chance, we already built this system for our own internal team, creative strategy, whatnot, to train our team. So I just kind of put it together and it started out as a community. So it's, it's more so community for brand owners when you're doing 79 figures. Our own internal playbooks are on site. Speaker 2 How do you actually vet the people that are involved that they are actually doing 7 to 9 figures? Speaker 3 So the hard part is since it's like so public, there's no exact way for me to vet it. It's more so just through my messaging, right? You're if you're beginner, it's not for you. You won't get much value out of this because we don't talk too much about beginner stuff, right? It's more actual playbooks that I'm using at my current scale. Whether you join it, if I tell you you shouldn't join it, yeah, that's up to you. Speaker 2 Yeah, because it's not cheap, bro. Isn't it like 1800 a month and you have 800 members and it's all happening in a discord? Yep. OK, cool. So that's evolve. Yep, that's sort of like an internal, almost like a Slack, yeah, comms channel between e-commerce founders and everyone talks about, you know, all the different playbooks that are happening. What's E Comm talent? Speaker 3 Right. So on the talent side of things, E Comm talent was started by my partner Carlo, because we have a big issue of sales where we couldn't find good talent for video editors. So OK, in that case, we've got to train up everyone, which then we just started a new community to train up, whether it's your existing editor, how do you actually evolve to become, whether it's a creative strategies or direct response video editor. So we train you up and then we can also give you opportunity to get jobs because we are the brand side of things that's become talent. Speaker 2 Do you take any editor? Speaker 3 So we don't have a limit on what type of editor you are because it's more for beginners, right? Whether you're not even getting started in E com right now, you can still learn how to become editor and there's basic skills behind direct response. Speaker 2 OK. What else? What are the other parts of the infrastructure? You said deal flow? Speaker 3 Yeah, so on the brand side, another community called Origins as well stuck if you're really, really a beginner. We didn't used to have this. It's just people kept asking. Initially it was free that I realized, OK, there were too many scammers. People were paying attention, so we kind of had to get them to pay to pay attention. Something from Origins to Evolve that after Evolve, OK, now you're at, you know, 100K days doing sound figures in mind. Realistically, you're not going to be able to scale to 8 figures in mind unless you figure out team operation systems, which the next step is Apex, where we help them get there. That's for the whole brand set of things and for the talent set of things. The first community we have right now is Ecom Talent for Editors. But we are also building out another one called Ecom University. It's our more big picture play. We've done it successfully for video editors now where we can have like infinite trained editors. Why not? We just have infinite talent across different roles, media buying, creative strategies, landing pages. So these two will work together. The form of ecosystem, whether I do placements or I have editors make ads for me as well based on like a performance basis. We have a system, we call it like econ bounty. Carlo got this idea from from clipping basically where OK, great if you learn the skill as a talent, but you're not able to practice it. There's no point. So I can charge people, OK, let's say I have 700 editors. I can make ads for you on a performance basis, which is a win win for the brand, for the talent as well. They get to practice. I basically have 700 editors to make ads for any brand. Let's say if you already have existing creative team is really good for volume and diversity as well. Speaker 2 What is the master plan from all this? Is it for like for you to build this infrastructure for yourself or do you actually enjoy more like the advisory, mentoring, consulting part of it? Speaker 3 I would say it's both because we do really enjoy helping people, whether that's helping people make their first money online, the 1st 100K day, we do both things. It's very fulfilling because even before like building all of these like businesses out, we've already doing a lot of help in other communities as well. So it's fulfilling for us, but also big picture play is about when we have more of our own brands. We have talents, whether that is you want to pioneer people and evolve, we can do both sides. Speaker 2 Can you explain to me how it sort of comes off as being easy to scale brands 200K days. That's like, I mean, like I told you I was really deep in your all your work this morning. The way you kind of talk about, oh, you can scale to 100K days, 7 figure days, 8 figure months. It almost comes off as like casual. Can you explain to me like is it really that casual in your opinion? And do you think you could do that playbook over and over again? And like what are you seeing right now in e-commerce across all of your members of all these different communities? Speaker 3 Yeah. Like for me, when I say it sounds casual because we've done it quite a few times, even in Evolve, we've helped like I think 54 brand owners get to that 100K days, 7 figure days, a few of them as well. It's why I've been so fortunate to have so much data to see like what actual playbooks work across each level of scale. So I understand at each scale what constraint comes and how do we fix it. It sounds easy, but the execution always is going to be the hardest part. Speaker 2 So you've helped 54 four people scale from zero to 100 K days. Speaker 3 Usually they're like not like 0 completely, maybe they're like 6 figure months to 6 figure days. Speaker 2 So can we start going through the playbook effectively? I want to go through Sean's 2026 Evolve ecom Talent ecom University playbook of how you go from zero to 100 K across 54 different clients. And typically like, what's that time span? Granted, I know you're saying they're not from zero, but from the moment you get involved to that scale, is that a quick process or how long does it typically take? Speaker 3 It always depends on the person because it's not like I'm hounding them down every single day like used to put involved once when because it's more of a meet one person to many as well. Some people get there in a few months, some people take over a year, but the playbook's always the same. Speaker 2 Let's go to the playbook. So how do you start? Like how do you look here for the brands that you want to work with? Are they product? Is it category? Speaker 3 We assuming they're already at scale or are they from 0 completely? Speaker 2 Let's say they've established themselves with like some minimal viable product market fit. Let's say they're doing $1000 a day. Speaker 3 Sweet. So if you're $1000 a day, the first step for you at six figure a month or whatever it is, is most people don't understand what actually got them there in the 1st place. Like I start the brand, I make some creatives, I do research, whatever it is, but like do you really understand their product? What makes your creatives work? Chances are most people don't really understand it. Does the research, they tested it, we got lucky so we have to teach them as well. Most advice you hear online is OK, you are this right now, you just need to do more, whether that's more creatives, more testing, whatever it is. But if you're just doing more without understanding what you're doing end up with a lot of junk volume. I think it's a trap a lot of them fall into. So teaching them to understand actually, OK, here's what you need to be looking for. So at that stage, most of the time you're looking at just creative strategy alone, right? At six figure each months, it's mostly just creative strategy. So you're teaching the marketing fundamentals, right? Whether that's market awareness, sophistication, how to adapt your messaging to that, how to do the research. Because most of them don't also understand that. After you understand that already, let's look what you're currently doing with your creatives. Do you really understand like, OK, who were you targeting? What was your avatar? What was your desire in the 1st place? Because if you really understood your avatar and desires who you were targeting, that means that you could also then create another ad that you know, takes your ran off. But most people don't get there because they don't understand that. So it's really just correcting their lens of what they need to look for in a marketing first at that very stage. Speaker 2 What does it mean to understand? Like how do you quantify that? Speaker 3 It's a good question. We break it down. This is for AD right? The basics ones is who is the avatar? What's the desire targeting? Most times the definitions of it are too broad for people. Let's say I ask them who are you exactly targeting and they give you like a very broad demographic woman 54 plus great. That's like everyone other brand, especially most likely you're not going to be starting like a completely new like product I've never seen before. So all your competitors are targeting the same amount of people. If you're so your messaging is so broad, it's not really going to resonate to a bunch of people, right? You need to be more specific unless you like, it's crazy, insane product. We need to be more specific with our messaging. Obviously, the goal is to be able to understand our customers better than they understand themselves. So when we write our ads, it's a direct reflection of how the customers psyche, what they are thinking. How are you able to be relatable to them so that they don't trust your brand and buy from you? That's what I meant by that. Speaker 2 And how does that reflect is that in the metrics, is that hook rate, is that CPM? Like how do you know that the messaging is acting obviously other than maybe sales itself is the most obvious metric. And by the way, I like just for context, you know, we at Elevator, we're working on multiple different brands right now, some of which are like very early at that $1000 a day mark. So I'm like, I'm actually getting it from a very specific lens, but like trying to understand, let's say you quote UN quote, understand your customer, how does that actually inflecting the data Good, OK. Speaker 3 So in terms of like soft metrics on ad account, we don't take a look at it too much. Things like CCR, CP/M, SI don't care about it too much. So the way we are testing it is every single ad creative test needs to be written out, whether that it's in a spreadsheet or Notion. We need to 1st plan out what are we doing, why are we doing this? Like who are we targeting the avatar design like strong memo process of why we actually want to test it, the stronger reasoning you have or breaking down like who exactly you want to target and what when you actually write it out, one you actually understand. Like sometimes when you write ads, the first ad, like it's congruent in the second ad, it's like not so in line with what you were trying to say initially. It goes over the place when execute it. It becomes better when we do the learning process, right? Feedback loops, let's say my hypothesis for each ad, it's always a hypothesis. My hypothesis is that this ad, we're testing this angle, this reason for whatever, that it didn't work. Let's go ahead and deduce it. We tested it. Let's say the sales were not good. We need to understand some reasons why you're never going to be able to understand 100% all of the time what exactly caused it to be good or not, but we need to deduce it from there. I think it didn't do well because the hook was not clear enough to the audience. I don't think it did well because I didn't build enough belief. OK, great, from one ad concept right now, the two hypothesis. Now you can iterate on that. I'm going to make one version that adds A clearer hook. I want another version that builds more belief. From there, which one does better? Is it going to be better than my previous one? If yes, then you know that. OK, this reason is why it better. I'm going to do more of that already. That's the whole process. Speaker 2 What you're describing is very modular, like you breakdown a creative in like essentially like categories, each part as a category. Is that like a fixed system you have? Is there a template that you use or is it really like subjective and kind of like based on gut feeling? Speaker 3 It's going to be a mix of everything. We do have everything tracked for us to use. Spreadsheet right now, local spreadsheet. Some people like to do it on Notion. So same thing even when we're studying copywriting, right? Let's say a quick tip, when you guys like studying copywriting from like what do copywriters, whether that's Spencer Benga, Eugene Schwartz, whatever, when you analyze their copy, you should also as a good practice, you can highlight what each part of their copy consists of. This is the hope, this is the authority. This is where they build belief. They say when you actually write out your ads so you can categorize it like which section is what? Is there something that you need to understand when you're writing your ad? Speaker 2 I have been noticing recently, because what you're talking about is broadly creative strategy, right? I've been noticing from personal experience right now that the cost of good creative strategists are just going up and up and up and up. I've seen double, triple, quadruple, you know, creative strategists that are taking home 51020K us a month just as like a base. Yep. No, not even performance at this stage. Is that sort of the norm that you're seeing right now? Speaker 3 Yeah, I think it's only gonna get worse, especially like if you can find a really good creative strategies and you're like a huge ban already. Let's say even if you pay them 20 KA month, 30 KA month, they're gonna make you like 6-7 figures a month. So for them to be able a bigger brand to porch strategies is they can pay the big bucks. Like it's the move right now. Although paying them big bucks alone does not guarantee that you actually can hire someone. There's more elements that go to it. For example, having good vision, being able to sell your vision to the creative strategist opportunities that exist. All of these play into a factor as well. A lot of people, even though like they pay a lot, they still struggle to find a creative strategist because I think they miss this sectors as well. Of course, you find a lot of mercenaries, creative strategies who will just wait for the cash, but how can you actually get people bought into your overall vision? So an example of this, one of our students like this, this is crazy story. This kid is 17. When he came to us like last year, this guy was doing a Miller mine already. It's kind of like got there by luck. He just didn't know what he was doing. So what he did is truly come talent. He found one of the editors there and the editor actually worked for us, but he didn't do like insanely well also because we didn't really know how to manage him. And when he's poached this like editor, he was just telling him, Hey, I don't just want you to be an editor or creative strategies for me. I want you to be a partner for my brand. Eventually we can a lot of equity to be my CMO. So although that same guy was like not crushing it for us because he was able to pitch him the vision that creative strategist now is CMO role helped them skill to now almost 30 million a month within a year. Let's get 17. Speaker 1 Hey, I'm Manish and I just want to quickly give you more context on the world of elevator. Elevator Goods is where we build our brands from the ground up, owning the product, operations and growth. Elevator Capital is where we invest in brands worth betting on, backing founders with capital, mentorship and connections. Elevator Talks is where we document it all, sitting down with operators who've actually done it, going deep on their frameworks, their numbers and the decisions they made to move the needle. Elevator Creators is where we help creators build brands, leveraging their audience and turning them into a real business. The studio is our private members club, its first location in Hong Kong. Build for founders and operators who want to be around people building at the same level. If you're building a brand and you want the systems and the playbooks to do so, you're in the right place. Check the link in bio to learn more. So last but not least, thank you so much. Please subscribe because that will help us a ton in getting you better guess and more wisdom and more. Speaker 2 Value, we really appreciate it. And back to the show. So would you say that creative strategy is like one of your core skill sets effectively like when you look at again, Deshawn playbook, take a step back, you insert yourself into a brand creative strategy seems like sounds like the first thing that you look at. Speaker 3 Yep, especially I meant at six figure stage, it's going to be very heavy for the strategy. Speaker 2 And is your strategy typically to focus on one avatar early on or is it to build out several? Speaker 3 It really depends on the product, but for most cases it's one core avatar. Of course, there may be some avatars beneath that, but it's really just one core avatar that they focus on because a lot of people also they get too granular with it or I have too many avatars. But honestly, if you just focus on one big avatar finding different ways to for your messaging to speak to them, that's a lot better. Speaker 2 I've also noticed that Facebook really punishes AI creative in terms of CPM like four or five times the price. Is that the same thing you're seeing? Speaker 3 Yeah, like, OK, if they are, you do see of course there's an issue of compliance, but like I don't think it will do as well for in our experience as well compared to if you really get a really, really good creator as well. So it's either like real people or like people know definitely. Yeah, like AI animations, not in between. Speaker 2 So can you talk to me about how you source creative? Like paying actors, seeding products, scripts, non scripts? How narrow is your scope when you look for creative? Are you sort of like snipering it? This is exactly what I want. Or is it kind of open-ended? Speaker 3 Got it. So our process is more so with product seeding. I think this works more successfully for everyone now. Initially we're doing everything through in the sense some people do it through TikTok shop. Big one right now, of course is Tribe. Everyone wants to use trap and source content as well. Initially we were just getting multiple UC creators for each brand and whatnot, but the most successful case we have right now is whatever is your best creator higher than full time. Although you want to have that work on multiple different brands or avatars, hire the best creator. That for us has been the best experience. So we don't give them like exactly specific scripts. We give them briefs because we want them to be customers of your productivity. You should see them, you know, given the product, let them try it out so they understand it themselves. They can put it into their own words and experiences. We give them the brief of roughly what we want, who we want to target, then we just let them go off. Speaker 2 And when you scale, are you just scaling the number of creators that you work with? Speaker 3 For content site, yes. Yes, we're scaling the number of creators as well, of course on the editing side as well. How can we turn this one message doing this one like whatever is working into multiple different formats as well? Speaker 2 But haven't you noticed with because everything you just said we, we, we do all of the above, Tribe included. We had Lucas on earlier as well. I've noticed with tribe the level of creative is sometimes very low quality, especially in the beginning with new creators that haven't been really trained and the volume is insanely high also. So unless you have a structure really can be a lot of noise. How do you filter that? Speaker 3 So one big thing that we track is not just volume, but hit rate, whether that's creator side or your internal team side. This volume alone without actual hit rate doesn't matter, right? You do 100 times or 100 thousands, but hit rate is like 0.01%. It's unlikely you're going to find a winner. So on that side of things, that's the KPI we look at for internal team or creators as well. Especially with like, let's say you get a ton of creators in, right? A lot of them will just trade, OK, just recreate this, recreate that or just do final ads. That's the issue you're going to have once you do a lot of seeding. So it's also going to take a lot of of training internally as well with something we got really good at as well. Once we find the creators who can actually execute the briefs instead of just like copying random stuff. That's why we bring that in more internally as well. Same thing that Hudson from Comfort would do. We have training calls with them. I'm showing them what's good, what's not as well. If they're really good then you can hire them full time to develop them further. Speaker 2 I guess at like a high level, when you upload ad creative into your account, what are you looking at? Like, you know, you said it doesn't really reflect in the metrics sometimes, but at the end of the day, what are like the top three things that you yourself are looking at or judging as sort of like the first layer, you know, second layer, third layer? Speaker 3 Me personally honestly, is it spending? What's the returns of CPA? That is the main things I'm looking at after I figure. Speaker 2 Out. OK, it's working. So that's layer one. Yeah. Is it spending and what's the CPA? Yep. OK, agreed. What's layer 2 only? Speaker 3 If it's a winner, we take a look at the soft metrics. The reason we do this is because you can have an ad that is not spending, but it shows the soft metrics really good. It's a high frequency, so great, it looks really good, but soft spending, it's not doing much. So in that case, the soft metrics aren't really accurate. But if it's working, I know that this soft metrics can sustain at scale. So then I look at it, OK, It's mainly just like Ctr., hook rate, whole rate, Those are the main things. Speaker 2 I saw somewhere you you tweeted that anyone in their grandma can get a 70% Ctr. right? Yep. So that doesn't convert into sales. Yep. Then what? That's. Speaker 3 Why? The context is very important whether it's spending or not because let's say if it is spending a lot and it's a very high hook rate, but it's not converting with take a look at OK, there's a high chance that who you are targeting in your creative isn't who you actually want. Yes. An example of this we, we're renting ads for this one sock brand and like we couldn't crack, OK, We thought we needed like higher Ctr. If you see there, you hit up this one ad which we're spending a lot and like CTMCCC, everything is done a lot. Then we couldn't figure out what it wasn't converting until we saw the comments and people were wondering, OK, actually people were clicking on it not because they wanted to buy the sock, they were just interested in the shoe. So it's completely unrelated to who I actually wanted. Most cases like dude if I just run like some random click bait style hook, I will get people to click but it's not going to be the right people. So when look at the hook again, it's like am I really calling out targeting my right apps are? Speaker 2 But again, just to come back to the question, how do you determine who the customer is? Let's say, let's go back to the sock brand. Who were the sock brands customers? You don't have to maybe make up a hypothetical center if you want, but how do you determine who the sock brand customer is? Speaker 3 So great was a time on go to research. We will deduce an okay from overall research. What is the positioning of my brand, which means obviously there's a lot of stock brands out there already, but what makes my stock brand unique, whether it's more tied to my product, It's like certain age groups can be one as well, or what type of identities do I want to attach to my soft brand? I can't remember exactly what that soft brands ever soft brands ever time was because it was some time ago. So I probably can't give you an example of the stock brand specifically. But let's say from a broad perspective, right brand side, how do we actually figure out what we want to target? You can do this either way, right? Let's say if you have a brand, it's already working, you have the product. OK, you know this product has certain mechanisms. What problems does it solve? O From there you can go through a bunch of variants, go through a bunch of forum to see what actual people have this same issue. You can start with them further if you want right. Let's say if you go on Facebook groups and you find a lot of people talking about it. OK, great. The Facebook profiles are there. Let's take a look like what do they actually look like? What kind of other groups are they in as well from there OK, you have a rough understanding. Now you have the rough demographic demographics alone don't determine your avatar. It just gives you a rough understanding of like where to look for first yeah exactly. Then from there as well OK, you go more specific. What problems are they facing? What are the day-to-day scenarios that they mentioned, whether that they mentioned it through like like social media or TikTok, There's a lot of like different, different forums around it. Let's say you search whatever the TikTok term is, right? Can't think of anyone right now. What type of content do they create organically? What type of phrases do they use exactly what type of things do they comment? Maybe like some things they comment is like things you would have never thought of, but suddenly it's like scenarios that they go through a lot day-to-day. You go through Reddit, then you ask, is everyone else like wake up at 3:00 AM from cold sweats? The common scenario that they face. So you know that that's the common scenario that they face from there. So you want to figure out for the avatar as well, what is their desires? What does their day-to-day scenarios look like? What problems do they have? Obviously, what have they tried to solve it? From there you can kind of piece your messaging together already. You know who you want, what they, what they wants, what they have tried, what do the day-to-day scenarios look like? Then your messaging will be tailored towards that. Is that the same sense? Speaker 2 Perfectly, yeah. So I guess like, let's say you're talking to a brand owner right now and there are a lot of them listening to this. So you insert your self into the creative deep analysis on exactly what we've just spoken about for the last 10 minutes or so. And then how do you go about editing that? Is it just hey, seek out editors or a course from E com talent? Like how do you structure creative teams in 2026? Speaker 3 For in general or just like for the specific scenario? Speaker 2 Internally, there's a specific scenario. Speaker 3 OK, got it. So for are you think it's a bit conflicted whether you should learn some of it yourself first or you should just go seek out an editor? I think it is helpful for you to understand a bit of how to piece it together, right? Just to understand, like Kate, you just edit the you go source this, go make this. But like what actually is possible, you can figure out just doing a bit of it yourself for your base understanding first. But let's say if you already been doing like, you know, 6 figures of mine to get an editor is like few thousand a month only. Like it's no brainer basically. Yeah. So the issue with getting editors, the most common issue that people have is to get the editor they can edit, but your editor doesn't understand how to edit winning ad because they don't understand direct response, they don't understand what a winning ad looks like. So the most common issue is that when they source clips, it's not what you want, it's not aligned with the brief. So to solve that, of course we have like the E com talent training as well. Whether you want to hire someone from there, you want to put them through that training so they understand like more direct response. What's very helpful is when you do like we do the learnings that we talk about, right? We look at the ad, deducing it, what's working, what's not. Do it together with your creative team, whether that's your editor, your creative strategist, because you want them to understand that the lens you're seeing things as well. When you look at ad, you need to explain, OK, I don't think this is a good ad. I don't think it did well because of whatever reason. When your editor looks at ad again, they kind of understand like what else are they supposed to look for instead of just yo editor change this, change that they don't understand, they change it. They don't understand why you want to change it. So they never learn and develop. Yeah, one of the only other Malaysian dudes doing econ. One of my students, right. This dude was already doing 8 million a month. The issue is like he had a huge team of editors because obviously on a scale bigger, I need more more output things. Editor team was like 70 people. He thought that hiring more people means that he could be more removed to do CEO stuff, which what everyone thinks. But turns out, you know, most of his time is just telling the creative team, you'll change this, change that, like this endless brief process, you don't actually get your time back. His problem exactly was the same thing that he didn't know like how to actually develop to let his team instead of just do this do that helping them understand like what lens is he looking at things from? Because overall if you solve that your creators are able to source better clips. Do you have left semi revisions? Speaker 2 Do you think that a good Co founder or one of the Co founders needs to inherently be a creative strategist or not necessarily? Speaker 3 Not necessarily. Of course, if you look at like social media, like X or whatever, it seems that way that everyone must talk about creative strategy only. So if you look at your product feature as well, I look at brands like David Protein. Yeah, this guy isn't exactly a creative shortages. So you really crush it from a brand marketing perspective. You made it out. Speaker 2 So David's a great example because David is not, I mean, it is of course, it is an e-commerce brand, but it's not an e-commerce brand at the same time. Do you know what I'm saying? Like they focus on product, they focus on distribution and brand marketing. And then the e-commerce follows it very naturally just through like real demand versus I feel that and maybe I'm overstepping, but I would say that an e-commerce brand, e-commerce only that are just hacking away at creative strategy in Facebook. They're just growth hacking, so to speak, like they're capturing demand, they're not creating demand. Do you know what I'm saying? Speaker 3 100% and it's why it's very separated, right? These two communities of econ, let's say the first one is all the direct response Bros, other one is like product positioning Bros. It's very segmented out whereas no one is really looking too much at combining both together. It definitely can be done. Look at brands like IME they are doing both, the product side, positioning side, definitely direct response side grants as well. But The thing is it's not one or the other. You need to do both because if you're only relying on just doing more direct response at end of day, like you said, your growth hacking. Whereas if I actually have a position I own, people always think of me as the default. Let's say I'm thinking of like David already. You know it's going to be the highest protein per calorie or grants as well. Like what what they stand for. You don't need to work so hard on the marketing type for your product to actually take off that, which is why of course grants exit that for so much. Yeah. So it's more so looking at it not just from direct response, more marketing, but overall how are you positioning your brand? Speaker 2 Yeah, so we spoke creative. Yep, I want to get into other parts of your playbook. Yep, creative, of course is is a huge one and we can come back to it, but let's talk, you know, funnels, conversion rate, optimization, lifetime value, I mean, there's so many different elements to it. So I guess in, you know, again, going back to your community, brands come to you, they're looking for help getting to that 100K day 7 figure day. Creative is the 1st place you start. Where do you go after that? What's second? Speaker 3 So creative first. Second, I'm taking a look at their landing pages. We were doing this like 2-3 years ago when it wasn't so popular. We started doing all the congruent landing page stuff now, which are more popularized already. Because hey, if you have angle that's working for your ad already for you to create a landing page for it, it's like super straightforward, especially back then. I will advise people to hold on a bit because it takes more time to think you're going to get people to create a page. Right now you can kind of one shot it with AI already where you have the angle in mind. You can just give it a reference page, a listicle, A portorial. It kind of can one shot the whole built for the landing page. Because we were thinking, OK, we were doing so much of these CRO split tests on things like intelligents. It says like a potential lift 10 percent, 20% great. Am I seeing that in my bank account? The revenue? Not really so OK, great, let's go back. What do I will do? End of day, I want to scale my Facebook span how to get there and get running ads. OK, great. How do I forward that further? I'm going to create congruent lending pages to my reading ads. So whatever my reading ad is, I'm just going to create some congruent lending pages where there's physicals editorials tested together. I can double my spend with reading ads, but I can also further double my spend with a Kruger and lending page. And it works even for losing ads where we had scenarios where, you know, this ad flop didn't spend much to a general product page, but also because it wasn't really congruent the whole place. So what we did is we just created more congruent lending page to test for that ad that we thought was the flop, instantly became our top spending ad. Speaker 2 So just to align on definition, congruent to you means whatever the ad's talking about. Let's go back to socks. You know, sweat proof socks. The second they click it, it's sweat proof socks. And if you're talking about a different angle, let's say it's machine washable socks, whatever. It's a different landing page. So even at subscale, let's say you're not spending much in the ad account, you're sending all your ads to different landing pages. Speaker 3 1st we are, but the advice I would give to finders who are let's say below 100K per month is not to focus on that too much just yet. Because if you're sub 100K per month, your ads level or so, you don't really understand about work there. So when we try to create the page, you might not also understand what's working there because like I say, sub hundred KA month, there's a lot of complexities behind it. OK, not right now. You've created the page, create the ad for it. How do you know the page or the ad? Which one is working? Which one is not? Like you can't really tell because you don't have the skill to do it yet. So at that stage, it's better to focus on just the ad. It can still work really well on the general open up page. That's fine. After that you're 100K command or above. Now you have a better understanding of what exact angle is working for you. Then you double down on it with the congruent landing pages. Speaker 2 How do you know at what point or at what data set do you know that OK, the ad is working but now the landing page is not working. What are you looking for? To then know that I'm moving on from creative, a fixed creative and I now need to work on LP. Speaker 3 Yeah. So like what are you thinking of right is how people like to segment it to OK, I one part page CVR, I want part creative as well. Yeah, but you can't think of it in two ways. Some people like to think okay I need to just reduce my at CPC as much as possible and then I need to fix my the name page should increase CBR which is not the way you should look at as well because they all work together as one whole offer right? Like if you look at homosis 100 mil offers his formula he uses it's based off your desired outcome. You claim how much effort it takes on their side, which is why even if you improve that for your creative, your overall CVR goes up. So it's not that you need to work on one thing or the other separate times, you should always be testing them both together. Speaker 2 Yeah. I'm just trying to understand like how you manage all these different variables because even for the landing page, let's say you're sending it to different landing pages, which we are, some traffic's going to advertorials, some traffic's going to Listicle, some traffic's going to PDP, different LP's have different headlines. How do you organize all of these like variables and how do you like what is the system that you use to gather like the actual data? Speaker 3 The most important thing is having a very good naming schemes in your ads. Not just I entitle add 1 which is the default chat scaler one. Like OK in your actual ad naming scheme you should have it. What hook am I testing? You can be hook number or hook angle, whatever you want to use defining in your ad naming scheme. The hook, the desire, the avatar landing page, you can also go for there as well. At our stage right now, we're also in the ad naming scheme, putting in who was the one who executed it, who was the one that idated it, who was the one that briefed it. So for us right now, we're using a lot of AI systems. Previously we were just looking at it from like a sheet for click up, which you can do as well. So we built our own like OS to look at it overall. Now with all these naming schemes, I can actually break it down like even for team's perspective out of all the spend in my account right now, like which percentage of spend is going to which editor, which creative strategies so I can take a look better like what's going on there? Speaker 2 Can you double click on that? Like how do you measure that? And then how do you incentivize them? Speaker 3 On team side, yeah. OK. So we look at who briefed it, who ideated it and who edited it because we not only have our strategies. Speaker 2 So these are all different people. Speaker 3 They can be different people. They can be same people as well. Okay, yeah. So we don't only want our strategists to be the one who's making ads. We've been really good at is how do we incentivize our editors to also make winning ads for us? Our goal is to raise the whole team's level, right? But just create a bunch of strategies and my editors just, you know, the editors alone, I also want them to eventually become creative strategies. So in terms of general like incentives for us, it's just like 3% of spend. Some people have set KPI's to that 3% of spend. If it's above like one click per ad, we can set different ways around it. And we track these three things for different reasons. One, it's easier to divvy up your percentage basis. Let's say your strategist did the briefing, the idea when your editor did the editing, maybe it's like 2% through the strategist, 4% to the editor makes it easy to divvy up. And so when she's looking at who's actually doing a good job in my team or who should be reassigned, what if, like, actually the guy who comes up with your best Ed ideas was your editor? Why should he just be an editor then? Should he not level up to be a creative strategist? Yeah. So it helps us take a look at who actually is doing well, what roles need to be removed and how. The incentives, Sure. Speaker 2 Can you like walk me through in 2026 what is an ideal ecommerce business for you? Yeah, if you could just summarize all this in a TLDR because, you know, it can sometimes I feel that there is 5000 different ways to make this work. And so everything we're talking about, yeah, it it, it all sounds good in in theory, I agree with you completely. And these are all the things that we work on. But I'm trying to understand like what's the through line here? You know, in in your head, if you wanted to scale a business, like from your perspective, you see all of these people in your community? Yep. They're going from zero to 100 KA day. What do they all have in common? Speaker 3 So common traits is honestly their speed up execution, how much grit they have and how well they can implement feedback loops because some people take longer than others. But sometimes you know what you need to do, but you do it and you're just not getting it. It could also be potentially just like you're just not doing it enough until you get it. You haven't put in the required hours in already. The faster you execute, obviously the faster you can get there, the faster you can do feedback loops, assuming that you do that, which they should learning from their mistakes. More they do, more they learn from their mistakes, the faster they're able to figure out what's working and what's not. But like I said, it might take you a few months, it might take you a year or two. Yeah, idea the grid to go through, although you don't see any results. Speaker 2 OK, we spoke quite a lot about early stage. Now let's talk going from the 100K to 7 figure days, effectively turning your business into an 8 figure or 9 figure brand. Like where does everything that you've spoken about where did, where did those traits break? Where do you need to level up? Where do you need to keep investing in? Speaker 3 So biggest trait that these findings will have when we are all bootstrapped, we're always very good at finding, you know, immediate ROI. We're very scrappy with things. That trade backfires a lot when you're trying to scale bigger, whereas you're too cheap. Damn. Like I need to pay 20 GS for creative strategies. Yeah, that's insane, yo. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's insane. Speaker 3 But although it hurts, we need to take a step back as well, especially like we don't see immediate ROI. This dude is not doing well like the first two weeks yo. Should I fire him, be able to take a step back and understand like sometimes to be able to get the results I want? Like it's not going to be immediate whether that is OK, I need to take a step back from creative strategy or although right now it's my highest ROI thing, I want to push scale faster. It is going to break. I need to be able to remove myself for a bit, whether the business plateaus for a bit to actually build a team that can sustain the scale without me. Mindset wise, I think that will be the most important thing that founders will have to figure out with themselves. Beyond that, common issues they have is they're not able to replace themselves. They don't know how to build the team. To be able to do that. Everyone knows you need to hire, even the hiring tricks, like everyone knows like, OK, you go on 19, you pull it, you put higher salaries, but most people still can achieve that because one, of course, some people are too cheap with it. All of us are running arbitrage businesses where your fiance like, what's your goal with this? Oh, I just want to scale big. OK, great. But like what actually does your brand stand for right Mission vision values, Although like at the start, it's kind of BS. Like when you think about it, when you push up, like, bro, what are you telling me about machine values? I'm doing like 50 KA month. Like that's nothing, right? Yeah. And then after that you figure out, OK, and you want these things were actually very, very important that you need to switch your mindset from the quick ROI to thinking about this longer term things that don't seem to make sense just yet. Speaker 2 Let's say you're at that phase where you're doing 8 figures a year. Yep. In your head, what's the dream team look like as far as like personnel? Speaker 3 OK, I've seen a lot of very, very different scenarios for this. I've seen dudes do like 30 million a year. Their team is just them sub editors, DA's literally like that's it. Not to say that it's smart, but it's possible right now. So the basic one, of course, beyond just the BAS, the editors, the biggest issue people have is how to find a really good strategist that can steal the business without you. I think that's the first layer that everyone will need to solve. Whether that is putting someone tuning your editor, them a good creative strategist. That's the first thing that you need to solve. After you can solve the marketing team already, solving everything else becomes a lot easier because you as a founder at this stage, likely like all you're thinking about is growth, growth in the sense of creatives, direct response, paid ads. Once you can solve that side of things, let's say you're mini spending on Meta, a team that goes to Meta without you, then you can start thinking, OK, how many direct reports do I have? To me, how can I minimize that? How can I run a proof of system? So usually it's operations as well. At that stage, you're going to be working a lot of people already, but there's agencies or different team members as well. How can I have less direct reports? So ideally you want to hire the most senior person first, right? At that stage, if you're doing like, you know, 2 million a month, 15% net, like you got a lot of cash to spend and most people don't realize how much cash they have to spend. Yeah, exactly. Or they do, but they're the two like cheap to pay. It happens also like you have so much care to spend around whether you pay 20 GS for like a really good CEO to help you figure out, you know, what else needs to be done, the systems in place. We definitely do that instead of just trying to cheap out to hire like, OK, we're going to hire like one person to mention this one small division, identify multiple small people. I'm going to find the person that can help me build it out for me instead. So it's the one hire. It's the hire all. Speaker 2 What about on the supply chain side? Speaker 3 So on the supply chain side, it's going to be in phases this case, whether you're working with direct the factory right now, whether you're working for drop shipping agent right now, which for a lot of them, they start off with the drop shipping agent. They don't even understand how supply chain works. So being able to set segment first, first step, OK, how do I segment out separating out my sourcing and my fulfillment? So some of these dudes like I see most commonly is like, hey, they conceal to like few mil a month, but like they don't even understand what net serums are or why it's so important. And then once you get to that stage to understand shit, I don't have the cash flow scale. Then like the guest route is figured out. So first separating out sourcing fulfillment and then from there, OK, great on my sourcing side, how can I improve my obviously lead times and get credit? So from that side as well, like they need to understand, OK, now I just need real forecast, right, Instead of just you. I think I'm going to hit within the day in Q4 grade. How do you kind of get there? Double budget, bro, which is common scenario also, right? So getting finance people to help as well to build out your forecast and then to be able to present it for supply chain. It's not too much hassle to deal with supply chain at that stage unless you're. Doing everything really internally it's more so okay you can get operations person to help you with communication on both sides. Getting a really good fractional CFO as well to look at your finances for both sides as well. I don't think it's the hardest part to build out just yet until you have a bigger scale. Speaker 2 Yeah, I can ask you a billion questions, but there's a bunch of guys here that have a lot of questions for you as well. So I'm going to pivot and we can start getting some questions from the audience as well, and we'll see how that goes. So Albert had a question. Speaker 4 So you're, you're running this agency, we've done the numbers, easy math, you're making good money. You're not launching a brand. Why are you launching a brand? Speaker 3 It's something that we've always wanted to do and we put on pause for a longer time as well because we have to understand at this point, like whatever we do, it's going to be public in the first place. So when we launch a brand, it needs to be something worthy that I can showcase publicly without issues of, oh, I'm scared someone's going to RIP me and whatnot. How to do things the right way, which only like, although we have seen so many scenarios, if you ask me how to start a brand last year compared to this year, my approach also be very different. I need to think of, OK, what's the most replicable process that I can tell people? Like a year ago, I might tell you just yo use like a spy tool kilometer, just figure it out from there. But at the same time, if I'm trying to teach people, I try to replicate it myself across like 1000 times. Everyone's going to get the same tools. It's not really possible. How can I look at it in terms of I look at what's in the market in the 1st place, what problems can I solve? How can I piece two and two together, which is something that we've only like started more to realize this year? Speaker 4 And then that's literally the next question, which would be run us through how you're structuring this brand from like what was your research to decide on whatever you decided on if you're them to share it? Yeah. And sort of like what's your structure to like the launch, how are you going to launch it in terms of team creative? Maybe the logistics side of it would be interesting, but I'm more interested in that. Speaker 3 I will say that it's very unfair for us to say it because the team, the supply chain, everything like kind of have it built out already. So there's not new things that I need to build me think OK, product side as well from positioning what I'm looking at. So what problems are there in the market? Why hasn't it resolved already? There's actually a formula that people want to use when they come up with product ideas or just when you're in general. It's called the the scamper framework. I'm not sure if you guys have heard of it. I don't remember the exact acronyms for it. It's like something combine, adapt, whatever it is because there's many different ways for you to frame the product in the market instead of just only looking at it. Hey, I want to create a better product which you can definitely do that better alone does not help you win. OK, the biggest example I will give is for from positioning standpoint. Let's say when I spoke to Hudson from Comfort, he told us like initial problems he was trying to solve was not just your mental health for like foodies. The first problems he was trying to solve is how can I get top quality like fear of God quality foodies for cheap prices. So product alone he can win there already. But if he did not have a strong position, that's all he had. Some Chinese actually can just do it way cheaper and he will not have a strong position. So he had to tie his own mission, values and vision behind it, you know, experiences. He went through that mental health angle. It's had that positioning to his product, which is what made the brand so strong. So it's also very helpful for you to start a brand that you're interested in. Not to say that you need to be your own customer or what not. Just like, you know, if you're trying to sell kids like hide boosting gummies that you don't really believe in, like works or not, I can tell you probably not. But like, will you really believe it? Is it something you're confident in long term? I don't really think so. So that's the first thing to look at. How do you position it? How do you create a better product that is not just better, but also different from there from launch? It's like I said on fair because we have a whole creative team for it already. We're going to launch first on on Metza. So the playbook for us as well. We always do pre-order tests when starting new brands. So that basically means that instead of having to put down cash for stock right away, you can just do things like create your own store. You can mock it up on AI for the product when you sell it just to instant refund. You can record a Shopify flow to instant refund super easy. Then, OK, now that you have traction, you find people actually buying it already. Then you can you find everyone. Then you actually start working on a product so it's less cost on your side. So that's the initial stages of that. Of course, we go into more of the production side of things. So depends how good of a product you want to make, whether you want to have a sourcing agent do it for you or you want to trench it out, go visit a bunch of different factories in China. It depends how much time you have. Let's save a bunch of time. That's the most ideal route, right? Direct relations to your factory, to your three PLS. It's going to take time, a lot of iterations as well. So after finding the factory, of course, finding like reputable people to help you out, whether that's finding vets, you can just pay them on and even find them upward honestly, like you can do a bunch of outreach. It's not as hard as people say it is. So you can let's say for us, we can type, OK, it's that bag that assisted to formulate that product, which helps with overall band authority as well. So after you do all of that, let's say production is done already. It sounds easy that it is, but it's going to be a lot of fuck ups that happened during that period as well. It's just going to be a lot of iterations, a lot of testing, bringing out to people to just ask them what's their opinion on this or would they improve for you, whether it's a doctor or vet as well, giving their opinions, productions in place already. OK, great. It's time to launch then. It's going to be studying meta ads from us. Same thing. Since you already have some data from the preordered test, you kind of have a rough idea of like who's going to create this from there. So from there it's just testing a bunch of concepts. I can tell you like the exact next steps from there. It's just because I need to see what's working from my ad account, really like what avatar is working and double down more formats. That's like the initial stages. Did you any other questions around that? Speaker 4 It's funny because you're literally saying the exact same methods we use for everything. So I'm interested, we call this a marketing launch. When you pre sale etcetera, before you have the product during this marketing launch, what's the actual structure of assets that you have? How many personas do you target? How many lending pages do you make? How many concepts do you make around them? What's the sort of like distribution of these across? What's your thinking around like this? Do you have a playbook 123 or do you go by field? Speaker 3 So for this, our team right now goes a lot by field. Yes, we have one core every time, always at the start. For most people, they might not be that smart to do landing pages because you do have the skill to it. I have a full like CRO team that's killer edit urge. So I have the ability to create a congruent landing page for every single concept that I put out. There's no satellite, OK, I need to create X amount of creatives, right? Just look at whatever my team can produce and Max it out and from there you look at the data, then you. Speaker 2 Pivot just one clarifying question is your when you have initial purchase data like you said you do pre-orders you see women 50 are purchasing it how often is the avatar that exact demo versus a completely different demo? Do you know what I mean? I'll give you an example. I, I once spoke to, you know, the razor brand Harry's. Yep. I, I once spoke to the CMO of Harry's and they told me that the demo of Harry's is actually all older men, but they advertise to millennials. The reason they do that is because older men want to be cool and trendy. So they see these millennial ads of young people and they're like, oh, I want to look like that guy. And therefore they, they, but they're actually selling to a totally different persona. How often do you see that versus the, I mean it being congruent like you would say? Speaker 3 Yeah, it's quite common. It's not like we look at the AD data and just determine from there. The good part is you have people who you know are interested already, so you can also ask them to help you out, whether that is you pay them a certain amount to just survey them or what not. Ask them like, yo, were you interested in it? Then you should ask them other questions. What makes you hesitate to buy? What other things have you tested out from there? It helps you develop your product and your marketing as well. Speaker 2 Yeah, got it. Speaker 5 What's the most efficient marketing channel and creative strategy you're seeing now? And you know, how have you seen the evolution of that? Like, I mean, let's say a few because it, you know, it obviously changes a lot. So maybe like walk through maybe what you've seen over the past few years up until what's really working now. Speaker 3 Obviously it's biggest one is definitely still going to be Metza now and then. It's still going to be the same. I think other channels that we're we're working back then already. It's just most people couldn't figure out how to make it work. Like most people couldn't even get out of Meta ads right now. Whereas as a demand Gen. for for Google, right? It's such a huge platform that people now, now it's called demand Gen. used to call something else back then, right. So besides Meta, if you can correct demand Gen. that's going to be the biggest scale. Next to that is also going to be app login, but app login heavily. Also depends on what type of category you're in. If you're like home home decor stuff, all the brands I know spending six figures a day on app lovin is usually around like home decor related issues for app lovin, not so much supplements. But for Google on the other hand, almost any product category can work there as well. It's just people can't really crack the prospecting side of Google. It's always been a problem. General tips for demand Gen. as well. Like people like to do this long form style native ads right now on Facebook. Those crush it on Google for images. Let's say if you're selling half products VI images of like problems, whether that's derma or whatever, do that. Send them to more congruent landing pages. The pop people miss about Google is also very heavily dependent on the landing pages. How do I still search further right? Great. It's only certain amount of keywords and volume you can have, right? But you can test around different angles of your landing pages, whether that's comparison pages or evertorials. That's something you need to build afterwards. General recommendation is OK, now that you've managed to build out your meta ads team already, We've done it successfully. Next step I will definitely look at for your meta team to handle is pretty straightforward. It's pretty easy. It's really dependent on your category. Google however requires like a different set of skills. It's not so much meta related. You need someone who knows the keywords as well. Then from there like OK, besides the native image ads, they work really well since it's all horizontal as well. If you studied TV ads, like TV ads from like 10 years ago, whether that's like for for what heartburn or gastric related like TV ads they use like this. How cute animations of like, I don't know, water droplets in your stomach. Those how things crush it for YouTube as well. I think I crack it. But yeah, it's it's it's not talked about too much because everyone loves Facebook too much also. But if you have the same creative thinking for your meta team, so your demand Gen. team, it also allows huge scale on that side. Beyond that, like other networks like native, like Tabula and stuff, we don't really do as much. We tested some CTV as well, but it's not really that incremental. So it's mainly the street forests. Speaker 5 And so I mean, interestingly, so we've talked about TikTok. So like, do you even need a proper TikTok strategy to get the numbers you're talking about? Or do you think that once you build a proper meta strategy, adding TikTok on top of that will just like put gasoline on the fire? Speaker 3 All people question TikTok me unfortunately not so good at it. For us it's like OK I have something working on Facebook I'm just going to put on TikTok. I get 2 Ki pretty extra spend. All the guys I know who are crushing it long term are TikTok ads usually are the ones who are very heavy on TikTok shop. Else if you're not really a TikTok shop, For me to crack TikTok ads long term I haven't really seen a success. Sometimes it's usually like it's spikes stuff going up then like that is the message. Speaker 5 Your view is meta can, you know, be sustainable and is good. The outlook for the next you know, I don't know, few 3 five years there's been tons of businesses scaling meta only. I mean TikTok 2 points. It's totally different. Like you know how Google's a different ball game like TikTok even completely different ball game. You know, you have to build actual a lot of people are building communities and you know, getting their product out there where with matter you need less of that. So you think you're comfortable just staying in this realm and see where it goes for, you know, the long term? Speaker 3 For my current fuel set, it makes the most sense for me. It is harder to do it on Meta because OK, now if ad costs are going up, I can't just rely on just like having SIP economics which is why everyone wants to do like subscription based LTV products right now. So that's the route that we are going to reading compared to just being able to crack like my products in these different networks, which other people do, right. Some people like mini scale off like Tabula which for me my skill set I have no idea how to do that which is why I haven't even done it. Speaker 5 Makes sense, like we think the same thing. Like if you're good at if meta is working and you're good enough at it to make the Cpas work, just run with it 90%. Speaker 3 Yeah, at least for our skill set, like for me, why would it make sense for me to learn something that's completely different when I'm really crushing it on? That's a, it's way easier for me to like re engineer my economics to make it make sense. We've talked a little bit marketing, but like what's your viewing product and you think like can you market a bad product? Where does like LTV to cat command retention on this kind of thing? Like is there a point where you just have to think about product and improve that in parallel or you just like marketing only at the start and then deal with product down the line? Like where's your position on that? A lot of people just start off doing the marketing only route, which can work, but often times it's not very sustainable if you just keep marketing and the shitty product. Like great at the very start, you want to make some cash, you want to make some claims that may or not may not be true. You know, most people do that, they make it work, but then you can't really keep doing it long term. A lot of brands are in a scenario where they're just like Facebook arbitrage and then sustain that growth for like not so good product. It's really just getting more aggressive and more aggressive with their claims, more aggressive across different channels, which, hey, if you want to do that, you know, good for you. I'm in a position where yo, I just want to make a good product for good LCD, good positioning where I can be less reliance on making like keeping up with reading ads and still skill. So we try to look at grants, right? If you look at Grants ad library, it's not like they're doing that response insanely well, but their economics Ltd makes sense. Their positioning is really strong. People already think of them as the default when they want their kids to come east. So people are still going to convert even the affinity ads. Speaker 5 When you think of, you know, I mean across all the businesses you're helping, right, Are these mainly product businesses like Evergreen product or are they subscription or is it all across the board? Speaker 3 So the analysis really is really all across the board. All of the 54 dudes to help skills on the KLA, 10% of them were in supplements, but the rest is all like 5% across different, different niches, 5% in apparel, 5% in like gadgets. It's it's, it's very, very spit out. Speaker 5 And would you say these are products or brands? Speaker 3 For our our community at least, they're not really like proper brands just yet. So the next stage for us is to help them figure that out because, OK, we train them out to be really good markers. They know how to market, but they don't really know how to position their brand further. Speaker 5 And so a lot of these seeing like single skews or maybe like a few skews that are really the heroes and then the rest are less or they maybe they don't even have that many skews. Speaker 3 It's usually quite a few skews, yeah. Speaker 5 And what's your thought and strategy around, you know, once you kind of have these few skews, they're doing really well adding on, you know, new products. And have you seen six people see success? And you know, OK, we've got this Hero 1 under the same brand. We've got another one that's scaling. Different product, same brand. Speaker 3 Yeah, so as a really good question you asked as well. Most importantly, I tell founders, if you want to scale a different hero, make sure that you have a team that actually state can sustain skill for the first zero first, because if you do second hero, like your team is split across different attentions, it's not really going to work out as well, right? They're both going to like suffer. You're going to see a good launch for skill two. Yeah, but like sustaining it doesn't really work out too well. Like a good example of this if you guys want to take a look at BBCO, like they have different products which they have one brand for each and they have different teams and parts for each of these products they launch. Speaker 2 I have a question. We've not spoken about this at all. International. How do you approach international, especially at subscale? Resources for translation are not easy. I mean AI translation sucks. I would say. I mean you really. If you want to do it well, in my opinion, you need to get dedicated translators per per region. Payment processing is another huge factor. Again, if you want to improve your conversion rate. If you want to have a conversion rate you you need specific processors per region. Is your strategy to attack 1 Geo from the onset or is it it kind of go very international from the start? Speaker 3 So for us, we go for the more broad strategy usually, let's say even when we're targeting for Facebook ads, right, Let's say kind of one campaign for US when it makes sense. OK, how hard is it to test different Geo duplicate it to just international excluding the US From there, we only run the English ads. We want to see from there like which Geo actually is doing the best first. Speaker 2 In English. Speaker 3 In English, which some people think it's, it's like, oh, it's not going to work in English. But also like surprisingly, even in India, for example, like if you run English ads, you can actually crush it because it signals that it's more like premium. You're like, yeah, from there as well. Then you can narrow it down further to localization first, like OK, randomly like in the in the worldwide campaign, like Germany is doing super well even if English ads, why not too sure. I can take that as a signal already to build a new store, get translators, localize it to further focus on Germany. Not so much. OK, I want to make Australia work for sure. I'm going to put all my resources. Although I'm seeing no results. Like time wise I don't think that makes the most. Speaker 2 Sense. So your strategy is basically they go English, look at where there's interesting demand and then go double down that country. By the way, Germany makes sense. I mean, it's a top five GDP in the world. So they just have a lot of spending power. I was also gonna ask you, I think this is my last question and I'm actually super curious to your answer about really like the e-commerce scene in Asia versus the US, We call it like the Western world, your Malaysia based in terms of the the nature of founders and what they're going after, brand versus drop shifting tactics, different channels, how they approach products. Have you seen enough of a difference in like? You know how the the Asian e-commerce scene works? Speaker 3 Yeah, it's significantly different from how they do it in the West. Same general categorization. People in the West are really good at marketing and brand, whereas systems operations are what really Asians are generally really good at. Let's say. For me, I'm more familiar with Southeast Asia. Most of the brand owners there really don't understand how to do like marketing as well as, you know, brands in the US, the credit shortages just like this copy stuff and that that's really the extent of it. It's just that they have a better understanding of going into different channels by economic sense. Asia title shop is big so they have the balls to able to not just drop ship but just get a warehouse, get the products in place, figure out communications if they're suppliers and then build out multiple channels. The issue is the marketing side is just very big. From what I've seen, they are really good at system stuff, like a lot of brands in Singapore as well, Like temps, like actually small. It's tiny, yeah. But they're able to scale further because they understand that this brand is working. How can I split it across different skills? So more operation side of things? How did it expand horizontally? Yeah. Speaker 5 So when you look at the brands that you're working with, what's like the split generally between like US, rest of world or what are the major markets that you see? Speaker 3 Almost all of them will target US, although they do Europe as well. Some of them are doing Europe only, like everyone wants to go to the US eventually anyways. Speaker 5 And So what do you, what would you say is like a healthy percentage of the business in the US? Like would you say just sell as much as you can efficiently or would you say if the business is 90% US, it just means they're not selling properly in other regions? Speaker 3 It's not something that look at it too much because honestly, it's that okay, great. Are you still scaling? What's your constraint? Are you expanding horizontally just for them? Like maybe expanding geos may not make the most sense right now compared to focusing on the US expanding Omni channel. So I don't really have a settle around that. Speaker 5 No, that makes sense. And then switching gears, do you have a mental model for what makes a good e-commerce product? Because we think about that a lot and we've got a whole list of criteria. And I feel like for you, it's also interesting because when you're bringing on new clients, you know, you immediately, whether it's like, you know, intuitive or not, they're like, Oh yeah, it's, you know, four of my 5. So I'm wondering how you think about that. Speaker 3 Yeah, first, first thing you think about is economics, right? Is it will be high enough? Ideally target Aovs above $60.00 for us. Then there's a score we call like Shopify health score, which is basically AOV times CVR. So if you have a $50 AOV, your CVR is 2. That means your Shopify health score is 100. Ideally you want a health score to be as close to 250 or higher. Then you have easier time marketing on on Facebook. Economics will make more sense. In that case. Economics have to make sense. Google trends hitting as well. So trend dying. If not, hey if it's flat it's going up. Good sign. That's like the very general ones already. Besides that, if I know I target like I have these things in mind, it's just like, you know, what am I really interested in? I don't look at it from just like a monetary perspective, you know, who's going to acquire me and whatnot. Like, you know, what are you actually interested to build? Because if you're just building something but you don't really enjoy it, I don't think it's going to work out long term as well for your own fulfillment and for you to be able to push it, you know, long term. Speaker 5 And so is that metric the first one you said like the most important you had or is there, you know, other things that you know, you think about whether it's like consumable, not a consumable, you know, the the obviously the cost of the product versus what it's selling for Just curious from any other. Speaker 3 1st, it's like set margins, right? Ideal scenario, OK, minimum margins need to be 70% after landed as well. In terms of what type of product? Like everyone wants to do consumables nowadays, but I don't really care about it too much because hey, if you really want to start the brand, like even if you you, you don't do consumable, it kept you like what similar mind. Like, damn, bro, you're kind of boiling out already, you know? Like, would you rather have a business that you enjoy or you're doing it just for the cash? It's what I enjoy though, of course. Speaker 2 Sean, thanks a lot. It is awesome. Speaker 3 Thank you for having me of course from.