Meta Ads Underperforming? Why + What To Do Right Now

All right, we are back with another episode of marketing operators. We could talk soccer quickly. Conor's got the cool hat on. It sounds like a number of us have made it to a world cup game this year. Which one did you make it to, Connor? We were at the USA Turkey game last Thursday and probably the most electric sporting event I've ever been to, just like a crazy energy that I think only comes from an event that happens once every four years and that the USA hosts, I mean, what, it was in like 1992 or 94. I think the last time they hosted the world cup so that all that together was pretty wild and then that was my first time at SoFi and that place is like, I felt like I was in like an alien spaceship or something. It's like just so like futuristic and like concrete that like whole scoreboard they have going around the center of the fields and saying so it was a pretty cool experience and hoping they can bring home the round of 32 and tonight. Do do let's go. Yeah, SoFi is awesome or either because soccer fans outside of the world cup. Not yet, but I do I'm turning into one like I could see myself becoming a soccer fan after this kind of the same way I became like a little bit into tennis when they rolled out that Netflix doc. Yeah, totally. You know, I will say I've got my qualms with soccer. I'm going to take I'm going to take like the the curmudgeon view here. Soccer, great sport, I get it at its best, extremely entertaining. What I think is funny is like there's so much not happening all the time. People are going to hate this take. There's so much not happening all the time except every single moment can be so important. So you can't look away for 90 minutes like I stood up last night. I had the Ecuador, Mexico game on and I just had to throw something away in the trash. I'm like, all right, I'm good for, you know, 30 seconds or whatever. Mystical and it's like and there's only there might not be more than one in a game. There might not be one at all. So I think that's an issue and then we're in the knockout round now. So they're going to penalty kicks and it's so ironic to me that penalty kicks are the exact opposite. Like for all the the space in time and suspense and like the uncertainty that you get from the normal 90 minutes of soccer, penalty kicks are the exact opposite. You know exactly when they're kicking, you know exactly that they may or may not score. You get perfect visibility and what it reminded me of is it almost feels like the tick-tock version of soccer. Like it's like it's brain rot soccer is penalty kicks. And that's my favorite part now. I'm like, dude, just just let me just tune in for the penalty kicks at the end of the game. It's 15 minutes. It's high energy. It's high stakes. I know exactly what's happening. So that's my take on soccer. I'm anti-regulation pro penalty kicks. Fair enough. Dude, the penalty kicks are so exciting though. Like it's swing so far in the other direction. You know what else is great about soccer? The games take like two hours. Like I was shocked at how short those games are. Like literally from first to last whistle, two hours, you know, it's not like a baseball game where you're sitting there forever. Like really any professional sport, it's like, you know, usually three hour game. So I really appreciate that about a two 45 minute pass with the extra time. Like you're in your out. It's quick. It happens fast and you move on. So that thought that was very interesting. I was not expecting that. Have you guys followed that they introduced it? I guess in Qatar a couple years ago, but the water breaks because it was so hot in Qatar, they added an additional water break. So they keep the clock running, but like they stop for everybody to hydrate. And they added it to the games here, no matter what the temperature is. And a lot of people say it's just so that we can run more commercials. We just get an additional commercial break, which I think is hilarious. Great for advertisers. Yeah, I think that's what it is. No, I think that's what is there's been a lot of like feedback on people like so in MetLife in New Jersey, they're telling people not to park here because they're using like essentially all the ground like the parking lots for like commercial things for like brand activations and stuff like that. So I think they're just, yeah, I think they're just trying to try to milk it for all its worth. Look, we're hosting it and largely in the US, let's make it the most capitalist world cup possible. Well, have you guys seen? I'm sure you have all of the content of like Europeans and non-Americans trying all of our food and ranch. And it's so awesome. It's such great content. It's amazing. I saw the ranch video. It's like, what are you taking back with you from the US? He goes, "Ran's dressing. I put it on everything. It's so good." There's like people from like, there's Asian people trying barbecue in Texas for the first time. Just like taking bite of a giant rib and just being like, I love America. That's something I noticed at the game and I've kind of gotten this vibe. Like we have some partners with like one screeners right out of home vendor and they're based out of Boston and obviously Boston has a lot of a lot of games being hosted there. I could see it going one or two ways either. It's super annoying or it's great vibes. Everyone I've talked to said it's awesome and it's great energy. And I noticed the same thing at the game I went to. Just the energy between the two different groups of fans was very. It was just good. There was no tension. You might have it a football game. Everyone was getting along and it was just good vibes all around. It didn't really matter who won. So I think that's been cool to like, it seems like that's happening across the board. Like it's been fun to have all these different people from around the world coming to the US and it just seems like everyone's really getting along. Which we'll see if that remains true and like the round of eight and the round before and all that. But that was cool to see and I really much noticed it at the with the Turkish fans at the USA Turkey game. I wanted to start, you know, I feel like we've had this conversation on a developing basis over the last couple months. Cody, you had a great tweet about it. Which is like meta performance over the last few months. Quick temperature check. We could talk about I've got some examples from from inside of Ridge on how we've been identifying or addressing some of these things. But to take a quick step back, Brian Bumgarner at Northfume, I think it's done a fantastic job sort of like. Frankly, I think we've got this a bit of attention. Zane, our good friend Zane who runs a TikTok agency doing fantastic job, like doing a roundup of who's succeeding on TikTok shop. I feel like he's I just had the thought this morning. He's writing the ex post. He's doing the podcast with with what's working. Great podcast. He's deviated from the shit post and he's like providing value and I'm supportive of that. I think it's really good. Oh, I thought you were going to say you're like disappointed in him for it. No, no, no, no. Well, you could go either way with it. Yeah, we all we all miss the just super low tam posting for like the two dozen people on on D to C Twitter. But now he's doing a great job. Brian Bumgarner similarly. I feel like people are just in a fantastic job of putting out content that's valuable. I say all that because Brian posted a ex article. And again, he's got access to like thousands of Northfume accounts, big data set laying out trends. And he identified some interesting ones that I wasn't quite sure what to make of what I've heard anecdotally from a number of brands at this point is meta meta has really struggled with acquiring new customers to like maintain the performance that we've seen over the last couple months. What he laid out was basically a 12 month trend of increasing CPMs. Click through rates increasing even further than that. So dropping CPCs dropping conversion rates where if you look at it closely for a lot of that period, a one day click a seven day click. Roa is like maybe higher, but that the traffic and the way that we're driving it is fundamentally different year over year. And I think that is extremely odd trend. And it seems highly correlated with people saying that their businesses are struggling at least over the last couple months. So Cody, you had a response this tweet that got a lot of good engagement. Maybe you just walk through like what the main points of that were and like what you know, drove you to finally chime in on the discussion. Motion just dropped there. 2026 creative benchmarks report and it's been getting shared everywhere slack channels linked in Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same four questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate and which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers in over a billion dollars in ad spend to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings like the fact that only 4 to 8% of ads actually become liners and over half of ads actually lose. And for motion customers, this report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your motion dashboard with their run-with AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks. Hit the link in the show notes. I promise you won't regret it. And as always go to motionapp.com until the marketing operator sent you. I'm always scared to do it because you say like, oh, this, let's talk about this, it's struggling. And then you get like five people that are like, well, I'm having the best performance I've ever had. And it's like, I have cool, these are on. So I think they're out listening. There are brands that are doing really well. It seems like RIDGES crushing it right now. There's health seems like it's doing really, really well for the majority. So it's always challenging to figure out what's macro, what's vertical meaning like is beauty in a beauty recession, but maybe health is doing well because there's maybe some evidence there. And then also what's meta, right? Because that's the majority of it. And yes, you can compare other channels to see like is meta hurting more than others. But I do think and I'm hearing more of some of these issues. Now some of them are beauty brands like Audity. So they're a public company, usually one of the, they're actually like usually one of the only really high performing like D to C brands that have gone public. Usually they crush it. They're profitable. They've grown extremely fast. They're great advertisers. They're down like 30% year over year. And then their last two earnings reports, they have, I don't want to say blame meta, but they have said we think that there's an algorithm bug or an algorithm change on our top spending ad channel, which is obviously meta. And what they have shared, we haven't, seen it as significant as them, but it's definitely been significant is they've seen bounce rates just skyrocket. So traffic quality just skyrocket, right? Like I don't know if they said anything about like cost of traffic and things like that, but it's just a very similar thing. So what we are seeing, again, I used to talk about how we we've had such a hard time reaching new audiences and things like that. It's been easy. And part of it is we've optimized for that. We've done things like IA and change exclusions, whatever. But I also think that meta has, this is just my, this is my tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. I think that there's multiple factors here, but I think that meta has pushed really hard into trying to help brands reach new audiences, both on acquisition and then on incremental reach. And there's probably this is like, yeah, I don't really understand how the algorithms work, but there's like from a technical level, there's probably some tradeoff between intent and, and, you know, or intent and reach. Maybe it's exploration and exploitation, where, you know, the feedback last year was like meta is great at intent, but it just goes after the same people. I don't know what you guys are saying. We used to see Northbeam new visit rates 40. I know I know ours have always been worse, but 40s, 50s stuff like that. Now like we're easily 70s, 80s, like significant difference. And in the past, prior to maybe a few months back, we always had a really positive correlation between improving reach and improving ad account performance, improving business health, improving incrementality, like validated with all those. For the first time now, several, several months back, we are, we're able to get new reach, we're able to improve new visit rate, and the traffic quality is just so much poorer than it was. So I think meta's heart was in the right place. I know that they've tested a lot. I don't know that it has all been successful. There's probably other factors, but that's at least one, one of the factors and one of the big things that I'm seeing. Are you guys seeing what Brian laid out with the increasing click through rate, like click through rate at 12 months, all time highs and getting us looking at like an aggregate of a thousand advertisers, click through rate at 12 month, all time highs, which is not how click through rate should work, right? Like that's, we shouldn't be talking about trends in click through rate and see it like dramatically shift just every month, increase over over a year long period. But are you guys seeing that trend, the increase in click through rate and then the decrease in conversion rate? We're definitely seeing decrease in conversion rate. We're definitely seeing traffic quality, but so probably, I mean, I don't think CPMs are down, like frequency is lower. So I'd have to pull that up, but I would say, I would say probably. Yeah. And then some interesting shifts of platforms and stuff, like we're definitely driving more to, and more to reals, more to Instagram. Like I think we're driving spend to places that are doing a good job reaching people, but maybe not the, you know, quality. We've had some audience network spikes that we've tried to, you know, get away from, but there's like factors external to meta macro factors. People not wanting to spend more money than they used to. That's going to affect advertiser performance. The trends in click through rate, the trends in CPM, I find a bit suspicious in like a meta exclusive way. Like the platform itself seems to be behaving different. And that's particularly true with like some of the placement type stuff. And that's when I've talked to brands, it's like the first thing you want to be sort of doing some sort of diagnostic check on is like, make sure you're not spending a ton of money on audience network. That doesn't make any sense if you've never done that in the past. But even, even dollars being shifted into reals and Facebook stories and things. It's like, oh yeah, that is something that you should be suspicious of. In my opinion, it's exactly how we do sort of analyses internally. It's like, if from a high level perspective of performance is getting worse, let's look at what has shifted in that same time period. And then more often than not, it's like some sort of, we'll often see demographic shifts. All of a sudden, we'll start bidding on men more than women or more reals than feed. And like all of those things, I think are a little bit odd. And at least we've been trying internally, so sort of counteract as much as we can. Yeah. So I have the data for you, pulled up with Cloud while we're talking about. Clicker is up 20% year over year. Yeah. And I don't think our ads are any better. CPMs are down 30%. Like down? Yeah. And granted, there's some shifts like we are. I think we were too heavy on VO before. Now we're not having enough on it. But still, it's, yeah, everything points to us just much lower quality audiences that we're reaching. Okay. So do you want to hear my tinfoil hat theory? And then I actually, I want to ask you about how maybe he'd recommend brands diagnose some of these issues. But my tinfoil hat is, Met is obviously trying to best optimize their ad platform to drive performance. So they can get more ad dollars from advertisers. When I hear things like, oh, yeah, click through rate is up 20% year over year 30% year over year. The platform level they seem to be prioritizing clicks. It feels to me that they say, hey, more and more advertisers, especially large ones are optimizing towards click based outcomes. And you look at like an app loving who drives an insane amount of clicks for every impression. That they say, hey, our performance will look better if we can drive more clicks. And therefore, they can push it into placements where they drive more clicks. And that's why like another way to think about this. And I don't have this data pulled up. But like anybody could pull out would be relatively simple. If you get a, let's call it a 1x, one day click roas, and you drove 100 clicks, like you'll see some sort of latent revenue get attributed to those ads. If you can drive, and that'll happen over seven days, 30 days, however you want to do it, but you'll see a lift between one day and whatever like longer period of time you want to be comparing it to typically. And we've seen this across basically all ad channels. If you drive more clicks, you can see a larger increase over time. If I drive a one day click roas, but I drove 400 clicks, there's simply more people that clicked. And if they can convert then on a longer period of time, I can see a larger lift between that one day and seven day period. And if advertisers are increasingly making budget decisions based on data like that, I as an ad platform and now and now incentivize to be driving more clicks. And that's part of my tinfoil hat is like, they may be trying to, you know, reshape the way their platform works and like the outcomes that they're trying to drive. And even when I say outcomes, I mean the softer outcomes, the impressions, the CTRs, the clicks to site moving away from shops, things like that. Let me reshape how my platform works. So it actually will look best in whatever lens that advertisers are looking at it through. That's my, that's my quick tinfoil hat is they may be thinking about it from that perspective. Some engineering, you know, VP on the meta team is thinking that that will be the most advantageous for winning over more ad dollars. That's my quick, that's my, as my, I'll take the tinfoil hat off now. 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It's probably all the same thing, but like how do we get more traffic because the feedback is we're just, we're kind of almost too bottom funnel. And, you know, maybe, maybe that was the wrong thing to do, or maybe just the execution of it as, I'm sure it's an extremely challenging, you know, problem. And I'd also say they probably have like a hundred different objectives at any given time. Like all the different people working on all the different parts of the ad platform. So I think also many of these things can be true. Connor, let me get a bit of consulting from you here. Rich has identified like a meta specific issue. We think we have a meta specific issue. Do you have any, hexclad? How do you, how do you guys dive in around like diagnosing the issue? And what steps might you take to try to improve performance? We're seeing the same trends as well, like our CTRs up, our CPMs, and I'm just looking at the month of June. So CTRs up, CVRs weigh down, like we're seeing like a 50% drop in CVR. CTRs double in the month of June, as over it was last year, CPMs are up like 20%. So we're basically seeing all the exact same trends that you guys are calling out. Which I think is just quickly going back to your tinfoil take here. Like, because it's only a matter of time now until advertisers are going to start saying, oh, meta, meta traffic sucks, right? CVRs down, weigh down on meta. So now what is, what happens then? Does that mean all the that same VP of product that matter is now going to say hey we you're swinging back the other way and we actually need to drive less clicks but more high intent clicks and now we're like swinging back towards more of like the high intent audiences that and now the lower net new visit rate like I it's just like this pendulum that that keeps on swinging back and forth back and forth and anything for us it's it's hard like there's so much nuance here on here like we are spending up a big amount on meta in June year to day really we're spending up quite a quite a good bit more but so much is different in June than June last year right like prime day was in June we ran a little bit longer summer sale in June so like it's hard to say all things being equal how much revenue decreased we would have seen like we saw one day click row as basically flat year over year in June but but I'm assuming it would have been way down if we didn't have all the offer moments happening in June that we're not existing in June last year I think for us the tricky part is like going going back to your point of like one day click versus seven day click in growth they're like we're thinking about this on a much longer time horizon you know I'm happy with the traffic that meta is driving and the new users that meta is driving but it's hard to tell like is this high quality intent traffic that's new to our brand that's going to convert in six months or in nine months or 12 months or is meta truly driving just low intent traffic to our site like we use things like you know server site analytics tools to help gauge this like what's our like product view rate growth what's our adicard rate growth and then we can like filter that by UTM source as well to like kind of back into whether or not this this traffic is high quality or is meta driving you know 50% higher higher traffic year on year but the product view rates flat or the adicard rates flat like to me that's a good signal that this traffic is not great overall I don't I couldn't speak to like what meta is that specifically right now like overall we are seeing growth in in our like product view rate and our adicard rate and all those you know downstream metrics so I'm feeling like somewhat confident in the quality of this traffic but to your point like what do you what do you do like I don't know do you do do you diversify away from meta like maybe maybe that's the solution here but I don't know about you guys but like we're seeing cpms up across the board like in June our Google cpms were up like 100% YouTube is the only one that was down but like amazon was up apple oven was up meta was up Google was up the biggest so it's not like it's not like meta is in a silo here where the competition is only growing in meta but it's not growing elsewhere at least for us it is growing elsewhere I mean I think there are some levers you can pull like going back it's like we know what what targets a more middle bottom of funnel right it's like static images product focused stuff so maybe you start like leaning more into that and like specifically force meta into sending more ads to people that have already visited your website that should be a way to combat someone like the the lower quality traffic I think we already talked about the audience network stuff I think most brands are seeing that that's driving low quality traffic so I think there's some like manual placements that can be done but to an extent like how how much can you really offset the backend changes that meta is making like you can but you can't fully offset it so I think it's I think those are some of the levers you can pull you know maybe you're introducing more dr offers to try to convert some of that traffic earlier and like pull some of that revenue forward and I know that's something that we're starting to think more about like do we roll out a little bit more like easier to entry easier entry point offers in our funnel and that's another lever brands can pull but I know that kind of goes against some brand rules that people have so I think there's a variety of things you can do but the question is like how much can you truly offset the the backend changes that meta is making it's no one really knows yeah I totally agree with that and I do think like when it comes to people addressing these issues doing things like testing new offers launching new sales like kind of loosening the reins on some of those constraints you might have had previously make sense I just talked with my team because I do think I typically don't think we don't typically deviate from our like a media buying strategy like we have a methodology we're using these attribution settings we set up our campaigns this way we do this level of targeting like and we're more or less locked in on that year round and we're making maybe slowly incremental changes that we're testing into for us we were seeing these declines in the Schwery similar to the numbers that you guys are actually closer to codeys we're seeing a decrease decrease in rows decrease in CPM increase in CTR just fundamentally different traffic in the EU in the UK and my ask to the team was there are a number of external factors that help explain worse performance year over year we've got we didn't have as strong of product launches year over year we're just coming off the sale all the points that you mentioned but I do think we should put ourselves in the headspace of what media buying specific changes can we make to try to readdress performance because it does feel like an opportunity and for us that's like make sure you're doing the placement exclusions I think a super key audience network is a no brainer we're doing bid decreases on like reels and stories I don't know the exact like technical changes there that we can make but you can decrease bid by placement and we've continued to found to find that reels and stories are not necessarily increment more incremental we shouldn't have a lower row as target for some of these like short form vertical video placements versus feed so if we can start adjusting our bids a little bit more granularly there and pushing spend into feed like I think those are the small changes that might help just triage some of the issues that we're facing um to at least that's been our approach so that's what I got on I think it's a good solid meta segment if you guys want to move on unless there's any other points on that I got one tube uh things to set but yeah I think bid multiplier as much value rules like that's really smart um because we're definitely seeing shifts there like again why I used to think that those were more incremental when we needed to improve reach that like all right let's you know let's let's uh push to reels a little bit and we'll be okay with that and I think it made sense at the time and now it's like we're seeing less Facebook delivery right in general more in-stream delivery in these different places and yeah I think bid multipliers of value rules are a really good way to to do that um one other uh very big a just not not a big adjustment put a big impact that my teammate is we switch our exclusions and just excluded last we as we were chasing reach and found some tests we we added a lot more exclusions and we pulled them back significantly better performance like much better so what are what are you guys doing for uh exclusions currently yeah I was talking about excluding things like audience network placements and just being more aggressive there um we just say traffic or just do customers we do we so I mean we do a mix we have like our our the campaigns that we view as being more top of funnel we're excluding all engages in site traffic so let's just like be as aggressive as possible and then we'll run like at 40% of the account with slightly slightly less exclusions there and at least recently we haven't changed that approach but that's the exact sort of thing that I would try I'd be trying right now when I feel the platform itself the meta platform itself is behaving differently is like I'd begin sort of toggling some of those those you know levers yeah I need to I would need to go back in and see what we're doing for exclusions right now I think it's probably a mix of things um but yeah I need I would have to go back in and look at some of our top spending assets here yeah like post uh post iOS really we are like not excluding any site traffic you know visitors and it was just customer exclusions and obviously like playing around with different ones whether it's like waste not or different meta stuff but we started adding in you know site exclusions and you know different I've heard the windows but but got a lot you know strict wrong exclusions and we saw like the you know the audience breakdowns if you're spending like we saw those get a lot better right and we had a lot more prospecting spend and in the past that always was correlated with success um but I think maybe because of this other things it kind of did too much so as soon as we changed them back and so we saw our excluding site visitors I think we're still excluding but just like a much narrower period um much better performance so now we're I think we should rethink it test no site exclusions at all um I still think we want the full customer exclusions but definitely like with how much is changing my always biggest learning is like you just can't take anything for granted really and you kind of yes you you want to like lock in on the the big levers right but also like something like that that had a really big impact actually I totally agree I totally agree yeah we're mainly we're mainly just excluding our our purchase list now um I'm like looking at a lot of our top spending assets and it's primarily like yeah pixel purchasers clavio list Shopify exports um and and keeping website visitors and engages out of there um because we don't want to we don't want to avoid those people too much yeah make sense make sense I think that's the next step to try before Q4 hits the smartest e-commerce operators aren't just asking how do we spend more they're asking how do we make every visitor more profitable that is where after sell comes in after sell helps e-commerce brands increase revenue per visitor contribution margin and incremental profit by optimizing the highest intent moments cart checkout post purchase and even the thank you page brands like hex clad rich and pilar increasing their a o v across every cohort using these zero risk upsells we've tested and they have no negative impact on conversion it's just more free money in your pocket and with rocked thanks you can offset your after sell subscription no redesigns no risky funnels just better economics want to see how much money you can make with after sell go to after sell dot com slash rocket revenue forecast put in your numbers and see how much more profit your funnel will make before bfcm starts okay so I wanted to ask I wanted to ask Conner about about one of of their new categories they launched. We've talked a lot about the ridges. like wallet expansion strategy and how you guys are, you've built like just an amazing system to turn out so many new wallet patterns like monthly, weekly, whatever. I mean, it feels like you guys are launching new ones every single week. And then we also talked a lot about how you've actually run holdout tests on ads voting those wallets and you have validated that those do drive incrementality or reaching new audiences, even if they're not necessarily buying that colorway, right? Some people are of course, we're also finding that you launch this new colorway, this new design and ads and it's reaching a new audience and then they're coming into the website, the funnel and they're buying your like hero three colors. But you're also doing a lot of category expansion which has been really fun to watch with the new one being chains. So I just wanted like, give me the run through on everything. Like let's just start with like the why, like what kind of, were you seeing that made you want to expand into chains? - Totally, cool. I will say I've advocated for chains for a super long time. Like probably two years where I'm like, I think we got to try chains. For a couple of reasons, one is people purchase wallets. Like I'm trying to like root it back to like who our customer is or why people buy from us. 'Cause not even who our customer is, it's like what are the attributes that people see in Ridge that might have some portability over to other categories or other products? Chains was, my thesis for chains was I think people are buying our wallets for like a fashion reason that historically like people typically have about wallets. The average guy was getting largely gifted some random leather wallet that he'd used forever. He didn't think about it as any sort of statement piece. And now we're selling carbon fiber and forged ember and cool like titanium's and prints and colors. So I see that like behavioral change in how men are buying things. And if people are valuing us in any way as like a fashion brand or like a way to make a fashion statement then like we could be exploring other categories where they do that. So that's like one piece of it. The second one is it was when I was living in Utah and I'd go to the gym and there's just like a bunch of dudes just wearing chains and you see it, I feel at least this is very anecdotal. I feel like I've been seeing it more and more. In like, you know, I call it like flyover states and I mean that in a very like loving and deering way but like the the Utah's, the Montana's, the Ohio's like these guys that are you know, grittier, outdoor, at the gym, blue collar, et cetera. I see them wearing chains more and more. My ex's dad was an electrician and wore like a cool like little chain that was just like a little style piece. I'm like, okay, that's like he's our guy and I see those guys wearing chains more than they used to. So I felt like it was a trend that we could play into. And then the last one is chains are just a fantastic DDC product. A lot of the same attributes of the wallet, cheap to ship, cheap to store, high AOV, high margin. So I said like from that perspective, they're very similar to rings in that way. Rings, wallets, chains, all very similar economically. So that for me was like the pitch as to what we could do. I think there's reason to believe that people would purchase this sort of product from Ridge, the customer that we'd be appealing to, I think is like a growing market and then three great economic product for DDC acquisition. So that's kind of how we, those are my pitch to the scene that's how we backed into it. Were you seeing any like, a lot of that is anecdotal just from your experience. And I think even in the game, long enough we're often that's probably all you need to take a swing. But were you seeing any trends on Google search trends, going into like a refs and finding any positive trends and the amount of search volume for chains? Was that part of it or was it really primarily off of all the things you just said? - Yeah, no, that's a good question. Not like, not Google trends, not a refs. This is similar to how we got into travel too, where we looked at the travel category and we said, you look at Monos, July, Bayes, away. Those are all nine figure DDC travel brands. In the case of travel and luggage, like we also said they're, maybe not targeting women, but they're gender neutral at best and we felt like there was white space in the category to be like a more men's oriented outdoor rugged, hard shell luggage brand. And the point being, it's not Google trends, but it's like, hey, there are many big brands succeeding in this category right now. Chains doesn't have nearly as many large DR focus DDC brands, but if you look at a Jackson or a crafted, there are people who have built very solid DDC businesses in the chain's category. So it's kind of proven out and that was like signal enough for us to sort of at least begin exploring it. And again, and this maybe comes down to like, how do we think about category launches at Ridge? And I'll actually say something super just semantics here. We don't think about this as a new category. It's really jewelry as the category and we have wedding bands and chains within that now. And it's the same way like, I've brought up this, I've brought this up a little bit, but we have everyday carry category and within that we have wallets and then a growing piece of that is like our tracker card. So like we're beginning to move towards this future where we have multiple sort of hero products within a given category. So just semantics of how we think about it within the business. - Yeah, I was gonna ask you said something or maybe we kind of question and that kind of answers it, but like you said like, hey, one of the things that we will do is like, do we think we have the, like will people buy this from us? Like not only like part of your thought processes is chains even a good category to get into but then also how will they buy it from us? What's your thought process here? I think this one is like you're having success with jewelry so it seems like a next bolt on, but like how else do you think? Because I think that's one where like founders, entrepreneurs can get really confident and maybe think that and it's like how do you do it like actually critically? So you're actually like sure that you have a really good chance or you have the credibility to play there. - Totally. Yeah, and it happens both ways because I think brands will say, you know, I hear there's word a lot. Like we don't have permission from our customers to get into this new category. And it's like, oh, you're actually like being way too conservative about like what people will be willing to buy from you. Sean and I fight about this all the time. Sean ends up the CEO of Ridge, ends up on the very other side of the spectrum where he says we could launch absolutely anything. And I'm like, I just don't think we can launch soap. I'm like, I don't think people will buy soap from Ridge. And for chains, it's just laying somewhere in the middle. I said earlier, like this points around people buying wallets for as a fashion statement, I think like is one thing that leads me to believe chains might work. You bring up wedding bands, which is a great one. Aside from the fact that I do think our wedding band customer is significantly different than our chain customer. Like we end up skewing like a little bit older for wedding bands and like maybe not as they're thinking about it more as like a utility item. Like I'm getting married, I need a ring. I want the never lost forever fit sort of warranty program that we have. I want the silicone attachment and the box. Like that's a utility play where they're not necessarily buying it because it's like the coolest ring or like they're necessarily going to look so much cooler. So I and that's still a little bit TBD. Again, we're like 45 days into the launch. We'll see what's crossover there is. I don't expect there to be much. The last thing that I'll say is I could still see it as being a point for why chains are worth trying. And then really a lot of what we've seen work to like at worst a middling degree is small metal items you carry with you every day. While it's knives, pens, rings, like we just continue to find like hey, when we're operating in this space, like there is enough demand. People are willing to purchase this product from us, especially if we can come in at a, if we can land at the right spot in the market. And that's the other point that I had here was around like pricing and positioning. The other mistake that we've made in the past was with watches, which I've talked about a number of times. This was I think 2022, one of our first early product expansions, we have every, we have the permission to sell watches. Like people like buying small metal items that they carry every day from us. Like watches should work. We just came in at like a $400, $500 price point with the design that like didn't justify that. So we're like just making sure we like nail the price and the offer and like the sort of the merchandising component of it, I think is really key. And that's where in the case of change, we just landed much closer to where the market is. We didn't think, or we decided the market. We want to be playing where a Jackson plays or a crafted plays or even, you know, we want to be playing in a similar part of the market that we do with wedding bands, where you have like Ridge and Manly bands at these like premium yet accessible prices and we didn't come in and say, hey, we're going to be, we're going to be David Yermann. We're going to sell $2,000 chains and like be this high end fashion brand. Like we definitely, we definitely approached it from a pricing perspective that we've seen work well in the past. Very much, I'm encouraging if I'm wrong here, but very much like your like your new wallet designs and colorways are driving incremental customers. I think you said in the past that all your different categories are incremental from one another. It's like you're not seeing a ton of spillover between the categories. It feels like a wallet customer's a wallet customer, our ring customers are a luggage is a luggage and so on and so forth. So I know you're early in here 45 days in, but are you seeing a similar trend on, on chains right now? Like is it primarily first time revenue coming in on this product? Or are you seeing a lot of repeat revenue from wallet buyers or luggage buyers or, you know, insert any category product category already selling? (air whooshing) You know the difference between hitting your numbers missing them, clear signal on what's actually driving growth. It can get really, really noisy. There's so much noise. You got platform data. You got blended data. MMM, all the acronyms, MTA, experiments, all of it, all pointing in different directions. The more you're spending, the faster you move. The more the bad signal can cost you. That's why we use house and we've been using it for years. That's why the other marketing operators do as well. They're the best tool on planet earth for measuring what we call incrementality, which we talk about a lot on the podcast. What is the true impact of your advertising dollars on your business? We have causal MMM for channel level budget calls, causal attribution down to the ad level, and architect their AI agent tells you exactly where your next dollar should go. And the results speak for themselves. StockX saw a 41% lift in IRO, it's using house, and you're not stuck with a help desk. You get an embedded measurement strategy to actually help your team make better decisions. Their whole team is great. We've worked with a lot of them. They are world class air. Go to house.io/operators. H-A-U-S dot I-O slash operators and start backing your budget calls with real causal data. [MUSIC PLAYING] The shape of the revenue that we see, and this is typically-- I mean, we don't have a ton of examples of this, but this is the best sort of launch. We're the first week or 10 days. We saw a 50%, 60%, 70% of revenue come from existing customers. Because you want to see that just makes our lives easier. If the customers we're acquiring elsewhere are going to be at some point interested in chains, then we have this underlying base. What I will say by that is, it's also definitely incremental. I don't know exactly how incremental it's hard to say, but our business is not built on repeat purchases. So it's not as if that chain purchase was cannibalizing someone's second or third wallet order. So it can be returning customers and still be very incremental. And then the flip side of it is after that 7, 10 day period, then all of a sudden we're scaling up ads. We have to be new customer oriented, especially if this is going to be a scalable category for us. And this is what I'm saying within the company this entire time, where we're 7 days in, we're hitting some really solid revenue days. We're really excited about it. And I'm like, hey, we should just pump the brakes a little bit, because 60% of revenue is coming from returning customers. We have to prove this out much further as an acquisition product. And then we see that split change. And over the last 10 days, it's 70% new customers, and 30% returning. So that's kind of what we're looking for in the shape of revenue. I'd even say, I think something like wedding bands was more immediately new customer revenue. So it's not to say it has to look that way for a category to be successful, but those are sort of the trends in new and returning customer revenue of a new category. That might indicate that it will be like a sustainable tool for us. And then let's get into the fun stuff, which is channel, go to market. I was curious, you're going to market for this. How big do you go with it? I don't know. So I, Connor, you texted me this morning, said you wanted to talk about this. So I was thinking about it a little bit more, because some of our go-to-markets, like really not very sexy. Like this was, we did a full video in photo shoot. This would be considered like a tier two launch for us. We did a video, we did a photo shoot. We activated across all the channels. We had multiple email set up. We spent a lot of time on the performance creative front. Like let's come into this with a number of different concepts and angles, and let's engage a number of creators. So we've got like a full toolbox of ad creative, but we're going to launch that on Meta. We're going to launch that on YouTube. I guess one thing I'll add here, because I've brought this up on the podcast before. We continue to see success in layering in like non-DR brand creative as a percentage of the budget, especially for these new launches. So like some of the go-to-market strategy was like, we've got this 15 second cut that's like, I said literally the point of this ad is not to like sell you on the features and benefits of the ring, or even wider by the ring. I want the message to be, "Ridge now has rings," and they look really sick, and like that's it. We've got that in a 15 second cut. And let's make sure we're layering that in like really high value ad inventory like YouTube, and keeping that as a part of the launch. So that was part of it. We built out a capsule page on the site. It got like a second tier home page treatment, so it didn't even have like a home page takeover or anything like that. And that was basically our go-to-market. And the idea was, let's see how this looks for the first 30 days, and then we'll build into it further from there. And there's, we're at the point now, we're waiting on inventory for the next couple of weeks, but we'll build out dedicated flows, dedicated pop-ups, we'll make this sort of an always on performance creative, deliverable, so we're including new ads and creatives. But that's kind of it. And I say that's unsexy because that is like, it's just redundancy. That's what we do across everything else, just to a smaller degree so we could test it. And I don't know if in the future, when we're doing these new hero launches, if we shouldn't make it splash here, is it worth trying to engage larger creators at first in making it more of a brand moment, rather than like, hey, we're gonna send a couple emails, start spending money on ads, sort of slowly build this up from a DR perspective, but that is at least as of now, how we do things at Ridge. - How do the, so is it mainly meta, or are you running like YouTube ads? Is it like meta and then like search, or what's the channel? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get search live. Chains is not like a super high intent category. Like wedding bands are highest intent category. We're able to spend the largest percentage of our budget on Google search, mostly meta YouTube. And then it depends on how it shifts over time. Like we did see, and this is where I'm really, this is maybe another reason that it's worth trying, is I think chains could be a really great gifting product. We saw some of that over Father's Day, wasn't on sale. And honestly, it might not even be like, we'll see, Father's Day, we've got the holiday, so coming up, we'll have plenty of inventory for that. So then all of a sudden, that was a concept that we came into the launch with. This could be great for gifting. Then as we identify those concepts, it's like, okay, maybe we're spending more time on an app love and or something like that. So depending on what signals we're seeing, from a concept perspective, it'll then help dictate channel strategy. And those channel strategies are things that we have observed across our other ones. We know gifting works great for wallets on app love and during Father's Day, so we can sort of quickly follow that with chains if we're seeing any sort of similar behavior. And are you seeing like competitive north beam reported, return on ads done with, with chains out of the gate? - Totally. - Yeah, okay. - Yeah, totally. And that's again, we're like, let's call this our fifth category. The ones that have worked, have almost always like kind of worked off the bat. We don't have a great example. We launched some of our failed ones watches, watches launched terribly, and it got better over time. But we never got it so good that like we could actually scale it. And we tried like t-shirts briefly, like we did a bunch of weird stuff in 2022. And those things that like didn't see that early traction, like we never really got it there. But that's also, I'll just say like our launch strategy is built for us to react that way. Like it's not a huge inventory by even if we, even if we didn't sell one chain, the dollars that we spent on the inventory is like kind of a drop in the bucket. There was no scenario where it's like, oh my God, we have to go scramble all the jets and figure out how to like build this big acquisition funnel to move through all this inventory. This was deliberately like a very tempered launch. - I saw Sean's tweet, I don't know, three weeks ago, four weeks ago about growth via new products. I mean, it's not rocket science that launch new products can really help brands grow. I think it's something that we're not doing a good enough job of that we're really, we're building a team around we're really focused on it in the back end of this year and into 2027. How much of ridges growth can you attribute to the new chains launch? Like however you wanna think about that, like if you didn't have chains, like adding chains, all the revenue from chains added x percentage points to your top line growth and like since you launched, like is it a big chunk? - No, it's not a big chunk. I mean, for a few weeks was very meaningful for the jewelry category. Like I think jewelry as a category, it can probably increase our growth for 2027 by 40% or something 'cause it'll be like totally incremental to the category, something like that. But jewelry's a relatively small subset of the Ridge business, right? So it's like, if the reason the reason Ridge is having such a strong year is because we're able to get growth in EDC, we have luggage, we have things like power banks, things like that. Chains from like a top line growth perspective is gonna be like a really relatively small contributor. But for us, it's like getting more iron in the fire and having like, you know, can chains do $40 million in 2029? Like maybe, and it's like, it'll be good to have that revenue at that point. One of the reasons I'm excited about travel still is like travel is just a bigger category and can be a bigger line of business than something like chains. Like there's just, I don't think there's any path to chains doing $200 million a year. So the idea is it can remain a smaller subset of revenue. It can be high margin. It can help alleviate growth pressure on something like rings at some point, which I also don't think has $200 million potential. So it's just about having like sizable opportunities for wins without spreading ourselves toothed. maybe shifting a little bit here into like what you said about where your growth is coming from. You said most of your growths coming in EDC. If you could choose, I'm sure it's a lot of things, right? I mean, you guys are always having a lot of irons in the fire. You're constantly improving your funnels all of it. But like if there's one or two things that you had to say are driving most of the growth this year for a ridge in EDC, what would those things be? Is it is it product expansion within EDC? Like is it the continuation of launching more and more and more new designs and new colors and just more wallets that? Are reaching new audiences or what would you attribute the growth to? Totally. Yeah, and just like for what it's worth, it's not like we're getting massive growth in EDC, but 10% growth in EDC is multiple, more than what we'll do in changes here, right? So it's like we only need like kind of small, small incremental growth for it to be like a relatively big like nominal impact. Yeah, where's that growth coming from? Nunez is the big one and that's been the case for us for like two years now is when we can get great colorways, great designs like that solves all problems. And I've talked about this before, but like far in a way our most incremental add dollars are spent on Nunez, where we are scraping by getting 1.2, 1.3X incremental rowets on like our ever green. If we're trying to sell a gun metal or a royal black wallet and then we have a cool tattoo design that comes out. And I've talked about this one before. This was last year. We can observe a 4X incremental rowets like it is just so much more impactful. So we've had a couple of those wins, things like TikTok shop, sorry, I missed that. I missed the difference in like the 1.2 Iroes versus the 4X Iroes. What's driving them a tire? The Nunez 1.2 is on like our core evergreen stuff, the gun metal, the black, the carbon, the wallets that we've had for 13 years, it's really hard to drive very incremental results with. It's when we launched something brand new that like we just continue to observe significantly more incremental returns. The second point that I was going to hit there was, oh, channel expansion, TikTok shop. We're spending way more on YouTube year over year, like just so standard, like media buying wins. We've continued to like find opportunity in and are all, it's like, I don't know what the, the inverse of death by a thousand lashes is, but like that's how we're getting to 10% growth. It's just coming from all across the board really slow and sort of like, you know, these marginal improvements. Quick gut check for the operators listening. If you're spending on TV or CTV today, can you actually say what it's driving incrementally? This is exactly why we work and have worked with neon pixel at Hexclad for the last three years. We've grown with them a lot over time and CTV has become one of our top growth channels. They help us treat premium living room TV like a real performance channel. It has smarter household targeting. It has suppression of people who already know us. It is a very robust analytics back end. So we feel really good about the measurement and ultimately, and most importantly, it is a strategy that is built around incremental growth, not just claimed attribution. We look at incrementality is the true North star on measuring channels. And they're a really measurement agnostic. They don't force us into their own black box dashboard. They work inside the measurement systems. We already trust and help us understand what TV is actually doing. If you want to check it out, go to neonpixel.co and ask them to design a controlled CTV test on your numbers. What are you seeing on TikTok shop in terms of product mix, AOV? Like, is it a similar product mix as what's driving growth and revenue on shopifiers? It's very different. Yeah, it's super different. I think we've talked about this a bit, but like our hero product on TikTok shop is our track card, which is like $30. And so that's another big thing. Again, we count the track record within our EDC category. It is ultimately like a wallet accessory. And we've just found like that ends up being one of our top silhouettes. And we found it surprisingly to work extremely well on TikTok shop. And then now we're trying to build out funnels on meta and app love and and seeing like, maybe this is a new sort of beach head into the brand, which is still very TBD, but we think is potentially like a growth opportunity for us going into, you know, the next couple of years. Do you find that people are like buying tracker cards and they're not even buying a Ridge wall. There's buying the tracker card and throwing it in there. The wall they already have. Oh, interesting. Okay. Our top ad for O'Ile is like one that didn't have a Ridge wall. They were using like a leather wallet. Wow. Okay. I want to hit before we before we jump here, we're running out a little bit of time. I want to hit over under with Cody. I love this one. Connor and I did it last week. We had a blast. Oh, you did. Okay. Minutes. Yeah. Same. Are these the same topics? Same, same, same ones. Okay. I removed the ones that we hit. I removed the ones that we hit last week. Okay. So you're familiar with the game because you've got the really key thing here is you've got to assess how is it currently rated and then figure out whether you think it's over underrated. So let's planation or just an answer. Answer and brief explanation. And then we kind of let it deviate quite a bit. We only hit like three of these last week and we ended up going deeper than I expected. Let's do that. Let's go straight to TikTok shop. Good segue here. We're seeing success. We've talked about it a lot. TikTok shop over or underrated. It's very, very, I would say hot right now. I still think it's underrated. Connor, where do you land on this? I think it's perfectly rated. Finally, I think it was underrated for like leading into this year, but I think brands are like you hear about groons has like a whole TikTok shop studio. I was with Wyatt from Mary Ruth Organics last week. He said that they are streaming 24/7. He said they're never not streaming on a TikTok shop live. They hired D-list actors to run these, these lives. And I think we're seeing more and more of that. I know at Hexclat we're investing more and more and more in the platform. Even though our product price point doesn't lend itself as much to, you know, the platform, but yeah, I think it's like, I think it's pretty, pretty well rated right now. Well, well, well, I think it's still early. So what do you mean by that? You know, so like with investing people are like, oh man, it's like too late. I wish I got in the stock later. And it's like, if you look at the long term trends of some of these stocks, it's like sometimes when you think it's still early, it's like, and like everyone has jumped in and you think you, you think it's too late and you've like missed it. If you zoom out in the in the grand scheme of things, it's probably early. Like it's obviously not as early as it was. It's like, it's like, you know, meta ads in 2019, you know, like, yes, you missed the $5. Cacks, but you're still going to get a $30. Cack then compared to the $100. Cack that you're going to get now, you know? So it's like, yes, it's not as good. And there's not as much arbitrage as it was. But I think it's just still on a rapid growth trajectory. And in the grand scheme of things is still early. I think to get success on TikTok shop, there are some brands that like are natural fits for it. Mary Ruth organic is one. Um, you know, the way that comfort does there like promos and their products, it's big tam, it's women oriented, uh, it's impulse prices. It's like really well done. Um, it feels to me at least the way that it will have to work at Ridge. And I spoke to another executive at another company, which she oversaw TikTok shop and she oversaw merchandising, which I thought was a really interesting point because I do think many brands in order to win on TikTok shop will have to take a different merchandising approach. For us, we're seeing a $30 tracker card work. And like if Ridge is going to be really big on TikTok shop two years from now, we'll probably need a lot more like small high utility impulse purchase price products and like, it will force us to like take a new merchandising strategy exclusively for that channel. And then the second one is, and I've talked about this quite a bit, but like the idea of TikTok shop being at its core, just a way to activate affiliates at scale or just creators at scale. I shouldn't even say affiliates. The ability to mobilize dozens or hundreds or thousands of like people to begin creating content about your product. Those two things feel extremely underrated to me. Both of them can happen independent of TikTok shop. And I think TikTok shop ends up getting credit for both where it's like all of a sudden like TikTok shop is the is synonymous with like great merchandising strategy. And I would just, if I could decouple those, I would say the underlying components, the merchandising and the creator activation is highly underrated right now. TikTok shop itself may be perfectly rated. I'd almost go slightly overrated because I don't think people are understanding the tactics that TikTok shop is forcing someone into and that, you know, the shop itself is not necessarily the value. That is a great point. That is a like decoupling those things is because I actually think that's what what we're doing really well with TikTok shop is this year amount of content that's getting produced in the creators that are producing it and the impressions we're getting from that. I think that we still have the opportunity to do better merchandising for TikTok shop. Like can we create products that are sub $100 and still get good efficiency and volume on those products at some point potentially? But for now, we're like, hey, this is a great extension of our of our product seating program that is already pretty big. And I fully agree with that. Like that is the, at least for hex cloud, that is the value. It's not driving. We're not going to drive 50 million in revenue. We might not even drive 10 million in revenue on TikTok shop this year. But I do think we'll drive tens of millions, maybe, maybe hundreds of millions impressions through those creators that are only flowing because we have the set up in the creators and come and apply for it. We send it to them, they're creating content around it. We're starting. and to pull that into the ad account now, so we're getting that flywheel going. I'd say that is way more of a value ad to our business than actually driving revenue through TikTok talk shop. - All right, let's say I wanna hit two more. The last one is more of a joke. I'm hiring for a director of retention right now. I've been thinking a lot about loyalty programs, loyalty programs over underrated. - I'm gonna ask you guys, 'cause we are actually looking into it. And I've been not super open to them. It's not partly because it's just, I have never seen evidence of incrementality on them. I know it's a very hard thing to do, but we're likely going to do one. So I would say it's probably overrated, but I'm trying to be open-minded. - 'Cause I would also say like perceptions, they're not highly rated right now. Loyalty programs are not hot. It feels almost like a relic of like 2015 brands or something. - I think they're properly rated because of that, that they're not hot right now. - If you think about it, they were like, I always think about like comatores, I think I was, I don't know how to say it, but they had like a sick program. Maybe it was more of a referral program, but like brands like that, those like, you know, D to C 1.0, like raise a lot of money, like, and yeah, when brands need to be profitable and budgets get cut, I think that's like survival over the fittest and you see what stays and what doesn't. And you know, if brand, so that's probably why I think they got cut. So yeah, maybe they're, maybe they're appropriately rated. I don't know, have you guys ever seen success? Have you ever seen anybody publish a case study or anything that's like, oh, this actually drove real revenue or it's like hard to know? - I don't mean so like, well, this is kind of the point of this game, but like, I'll break this one apart again, 'cause the out of the box loyalty programs do feel overrated to me or like maybe, maybe properly rated just because people don't like them that much, like it feels like we're past that point. You know, Kith, like they like made news with their loyalty program two years ago. And it's one of those things where it's like, if you fully commit to it and integrate it well, I think brands totally have the ability to, 100% drive a better customer experience. And I just, I don't have evidence of this literally happening, but if you're providing a better customer experience, I do think you'll be driving an incremental revenue at some point. So if you can fully commit and like, thoughtfully integrate a loyalty program, I think it can be beneficial, but those examples are really, really few and far between in my opinion. - I agree. I think like we were doing the exploration of this two years ago in Kith's at the top of our list of like they've just gamified it and it's like a fun brand experience. I think that's where the value is an loyalty program. It's not, hey, for every $100 you spend, you get a hundred points in a hundred points equals $10 off. Like I just, I don't think that that actually drives a lot of incremental orders. I mean, we've grown our like yearly cohort LTV pretty consistently for the last four or five years and like it's certainly not through loyalty programs. It's through better retention tactics and new product go to market. And I don't think having a loyalty program would have made that any better. I think we're, but I think if you, if it's like, I think loyalty programs need to be thought of as like a brand marketing exercise and not a, maybe not for every brand, but at least for a hex cloud, that's how we were thinking about it. Like if we ever roll out a loyalty program, it'll be a really cool brand play, right? Where like you spend X, like we have three tiers, you spend X dollars and if you get into like the Black Apron Club, you get like a custom design Black Apron that says Black Apron Club that no one else is getting. Like a goal-plated, you know, a hex male or like, you know, a gift card to a really nice, like restaurant in your city. Like something like that, that's just kind of more brand oriented and just gives people a really good touch point, but it will not be transactional. I think that's the decision we've made. We're never gonna have a loyalty program that says, hey, you have 2000 points in your account and that's worth $200. I just don't think, I just don't think that's the move. Like just, if you want to give a people a discount, just like run a sale and give them a discount, you know? - Totally, yeah, 100%. And it reminds me a little bit of the TikTok shop answer where it's like, what you just described is like really cool merchandising, developing products that you are going to like reward like certain customers with in order to drive loyalty. And it's like, yeah, that sounds like a great loyalty program. All right, I got one more for you guys. You guys both did it in the group chat this morning. Sending voice notes over or underrated. - So underrated, so underrated. Like, although what I will say is I feel like they become with the insertion of Whisper Flow, I think they've become slightly maybe a little less valuable than they used to be because now Whisper Flow, you can just like, you know, speak to it, it'll write it out. But like for me, I can send a voice note in a fraction of the time that I can write it. But that we have people in our team that just hate it. Like our chief info and admin officer, like I'll send him voice notes and he will freak out at me. He's like, well, you want me to open that and listen to it. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I do. Come on. Like, what's wrong with that? So I think they're underrated though. I love voice notes. I love getting them. I love sending them. - I was gonna say it's Connor McDonald as the recipient of a few voice notes this morning. I think you should be the one that weighs in because it's not about, you know, is it good for sending, but how is it as a recipient? How do you feel about them? - I think they're properly rated. That's where I'm gonna go now. And I say that because some people hate them. Like it is like kind of mixed. And I think that's like probably like the right approach. I didn't mind you guys sending voice notes this morning. Olivia from House sent me one yesterday and started the voice note apologizing for sending a voice note. That's where I'm like, oh, it's like such a, such a, people are so split right now and whether they're good or not. I send them all the time. I'm more of a loom guy. Like I more often than not. I send looms even if like I really just want to be heard saying something. Like 80% of the value of the loom will be like the audio portion of it. But like, you know, maybe I'm sharing a doc or something. So yeah, I'll go properly rated. I don't mind receiving them. I often send them not too often. The only tricky thing is like there will be times where I'll be out and I want like I want to get the message. Oh, it's two things. One, I'll be out and it's not always good to listen to something. That's a little bit trickier. - I'll listen to the, I'll read the transcript then. If I don't want to listen to it, but I want to know what they said, I'll just read the transcript and it usually works pretty well. So that's good. So that makes it much easier. The other one is Apple doesn't have 2x. So you guys sent the voice notes this morning. I'm like, dude, I'd love to listen to this on like 1.5, 1.7. Like, let's speed this up a little bit. So there's my only two qualms. But yeah, let's call it properly rated. - You know how I found out hate's voice notes? - Taylor Holiday. Apparently just not a fan of voice notes. - That surprises me. He strikes me as like I'll do all the efficiency gain things. - So where do you land on a Cody? - I'm a big fan. I'm a, I like voice notes like receiving giving big whisper flow fan. I think the one thing you gotta be careful of 'cause I use whisper flow a lot is it's easy to go very, very long and now you're making the recipient just read like a novel. So it's easy to do that. I am a huge whisper flow fan for, for, for Claude for AI. And I've seen people start calling it yapper strategy. It's like they'll just, they'll just essentially yap whisper flow 10 minute brief just like full brain dump and then just be like all right, go do it. So I'm actually like a very big fan for that as well. But yeah, I think you just gotta be mindful of, you know, is this a good experience to use? So like, like I, I struggle with that with loom. So I'm like, I am just gonna do a short loom. And before I know it, it's like a 12 minute thing. Like that's like I will, I will occasionally restart a loom 'cause I'm like, I didn't need to say half that stuff and that's like, no, I don't want people, you know, having to sit through a 12 minute loom. I don't want to sit through a 12 minute loom. (crickets chirping)