Rapid Scaling a DTC Beauty Brand | Hugo | Episode 2

But welcome to the podcast. This is episode two. I'm here with Hugo. I'm very excited. Hugo, you and I have been swapping ideas back and forth for the last couple of months now. And I've learned a ton from you. So I appreciate that. And I'm excited to let everyone else learn from you as well. Would you start us off by just telling us a bit about how you got here and what kind of market are you are on the spectrum of all the different kinds? What makes you you? Amazing. So yeah, my name is Hugo. I'm the CMO at Sassy Sates. We're an eight-figure beauty brand based here in Europe. I'm in Portugal. Wow, how I got here. I feel like every marketer's career is super different. But mine actually started about-- I want to say five to six years ago-- when I stumbled across this fabulous business, get money online or make money online called drop shipping. So that was my school of business. I like drop shipping, obviously. That's where I learned the trick. Like everything I know about e-commerce, that's where it comes from. But I've never been extremely successful at it. The most I've ever done with was-- I had a little bit of success. And it was like a dog toy that essentially-- it was like a flopping fish, right? And it was actually for cats. But I was selling it for dogs because I knew that dog owners were super emotional buyers, right? Anything you sell to dogs to dog owners, it's like your cracket. So I started selling it to dogs instead of cats. And actually, I started receiving so many emails because there's a battery inside the fish that makes it flop. Obviously, so the dogs are biting it. And some people were telling me, my god, my dog almost choked on this thing. What are you like this company? And I was like, oh my god, I'm going to close this thing out. But what I learned, obviously, through that is-- and what I preferred doing was always D.I.S. was always the Facebook ads at the time. It wasn't meta still. And I like doing the creative work and thinking of all these different things in the copywriting. So at the time, I said, OK, I didn't succeed myself. I dropped shit being. But what if I then start helping other people out with their ads and et cetera? So yeah, that's when I created my own performance, creative agency. And then yeah, I started running up a couple of clients. And I was probably in 2022. And then yeah, in the back end of '22, that's when I met Sassy Sain. So Sassy Sain was actually a client of mine at the time. In 2023, we met in October. The first time I met Sassy Sain, who's the CEO. And yeah, I came in. Well, I came in. Me and my agency, we came in. We were doing the ads. I didn't have anybody doing the ads at the time. And they had just released their Manicure product, a dipping product kit, right? So that was absolutely on fire, ballistic. All they needed is someone to put the gasoline on the fire. And that's exactly what I did. So came in. We started ripping ads, starting scaling. And then, you know, three months after that, and Semen, I had a conversation and Semen was like, bro, why don't you just join the business, come with your team, become a partner, become the CMO, and then we're going to scale this thing together. And that's exactly what we went on to do. So, you know, just to give you like figure ideas, from 2023 to 2024, we 10X the business went from 2 million to 20 million. And then yeah, we never, we never look back. So, that's sort of the brief story of my come up, right? And I've worked obviously with multiple brands, but now, you know, I'm excited to leave the agency behind me and fully focus on the brand side. And that's what I've been doing for the past. Now, I'm on my third season with Sassy Saints, right? So, and just to give you a little bit of context of what Sassy Saints is, we're a beauty brand, obviously. And it was founded by two couples at a time, now only one couple remain. Semen rose, the best people you'll ever meet. But they started during COVID, during the pandemic, where it was a time, obviously, when everybody was trying at home, right? No one could do their beauty treatments or the salon anymore. And that's when the idea came to make an ad homes a long brand. So, that was the whole position they had at the time. And the two first products that was released was a brow lamination kit and lash lift kit, right? Credit, I don't know if you're familiar with those products, but it was you for your lash, for your brow. Deeply, right? And then it's only, you know, they did OK, but it's only when we went into the nail category that really exploded the business and really changed the trajectory. And that was in the back of 2023, at the end of 2023. So, and since then, we've been extremely nail focused. So, if you go to our website right now, all you can find is nail products. So, yeah, that's a bit of the background story. Fantastic. And it's interestingly that one of the key things you started with was drop shipping to dog parents. And did you have a dog at the time? I had no dog. No. I was just-- No, I had no dog, no. And now, correctly, if I'm wrong, but I don't think you have painted nails either, or gel nails, currently. Well, my sense is-- What is it? No, you can't. Yeah. Hey, you know, if you want to, you can't, but I think I've seen your fingers pop up. And so, the question that stands out to me there, is that as you're trying to sell, I think there was an early learning there of what, not to sell to dog owners, or how to be careful. And now, obviously, you're very successful at selling to a persona that's not you. So, I'd be curious to hear as a marketer, how do you get in the mindset of someone who isn't you specifically, so that you can resonate with them, and what that looks like, what you've learned about that. So, you need to understand your customer personas and your audience. So, for me, the way that I see creative strategy is actually in a couple of steps. So, first, it all starts with your product. So, your product has a set of benefits, a certain set of features, and ultimately, those features and benefits, they solve a direct problem. And those problem, you need to ask yourself, well, who are the people that have this exact problem? And then, your job as a marketer is to be just able to speak to them in a way that they feel resonated, that they feel understood, and that they also feel confident that your product will then solve their problems. So, that's step number one. So, if I was to come into your brand and sort of do the whole creative strategy, this is exactly how it would lay out. So, I would study your product, what it does, who it could sort of solve the problem for. And then, you can have a look, and the best way that I prefer is to do a lot of customer surveys. So, back when I had my agency, I used to tell this to, like, on all my sales calls, it's like, I had this one line. What was it? It was that the founders, there's what the founders think the customers care about, and then there's actually what the customers actually care about, right? Which tend to be two different things, and the way that you can actually understand your customers is by talking to them, by doing surveys, by reading multiple reviews online. Even if they're not yours, at least you go to Reddit through Trust Palette Amazon reviews YouTube. I don't know, you try to find the people, right? And you try to understand really your customer. And with all of this research that you do, you then go to chat GPT to a cloud AI, and that's when you ask it to generate these personas. And for me, you know, a really important distinction to make is when I talk about persona, I'm not talking about Hugo, 30-year-old lives in whatever. No, I'm talking about psychographic personas, right? And what are psychographic personas? The way that I see persona is, and the way that I create a persona is that I group people that have the same problem and the same situation into one core persona, right? So I'll give you an example. Like in our brand, we have this one persona that we call busy Bridget, and who is busy Bridget? She's the one that is on the go. She's the one that she can also be a mom. And this is why you don't want to do it super narrow at first. You want to broad, or you want to cast a broad net at first, and then speak directly to the problem. And then as you keep scaling, as you keep growing, you can then get a bit more narrow. Because that's your persona, right? So say busy Bridget in our case. That's the one that doesn't have time to do our nails, whatever, right? She wants like just a quick medicare to do at home 'cause she doesn't have time. And that's the persona at the persona level. Underneath the persona level, you have a sub persona, which then you can make specific ads towards, and I'll give you a concrete example. So busy Bridget at the top, and then on one side, you can have a sub persona, you can have the undergo professional, right? This is the career woman who's always on the go, works, doesn't, and again, the problem that you're solving is the same, which is, and their core desire is the same, which is they want a fast manicure that looks good, and they can do in 10, 15, 20 minutes. But the sub persona, and that's one specific sub persona. Another one can be a mom, a time press mom. You can imagine how, I mean, you have two young kids, you can imagine that parents tend to be super busy. And probably the last thing that they can do is go sitting us along for two hours, right? And those two creatives, there you go. And those two creatives, they're gonna look completely different, and we're gonna script them in a way that's completely different because essentially they have the same desire to the same core problem, but different people. And that's how you create different sub personas. So that's the way that we see that I see creative strategy, which is, yes, I'm not my personas, and by the way, for us, we have about a set of six personas internally that we always speak to. But if you really do the job of researching your audience, researching your customers, actually talk to your actual customers now, why do they buy? What do they actually care about? They will literally tell you, like, hey, about this because I experienced X, Y and Z, and this is perfect for me because X, Y and Z. So that's how you then able as a marketer to make ads that truly resonate with your audience. Okay, and does that ever feed back to other pieces? This is the business too for you, like when you're doing that research. Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Of course. It does because then, like you said, they're product development because I always say that every brand has maybe two to three core personas at max, right? And most only have one hero persona that they just really, really resonate with, that they're brand ethos, that they're product, it really, it's just like a complete match. And then when you're clear on who your audience is and who you're serving, then you can tailor your product development. You can tailor your, just everything, your whole brand, your whole content around this specific persona. So absolutely, like it serves for the whole business, right? Even for the copy on my website, on my landing page, it's like everywhere this feeds into. So it's not just a marketing thing. It's like a, it's also like a brand thing that you must understand. Absolutely. And I know a lot of brands that do the kind of persona to a landing page conversion funnel. Have you guys found that you're, you make those ads and you create landing pages with them or do you send them all to similar places when you're optimizing? Yeah. So you definitely do want to make congruent funnels, right? That's yeah, absolutely. So what we do is that we, we try it. It's, it's, it's an exercise. It's, it's difficult in practice, right? But if you can try to do it as much as you can to create a congruent funnel from the ad to the landing page, then to the PDP, right? Most brands, what they do now, there is us including us is they will have a nod with a specific, you know, persona, so whatever you want to call it, angle. And then they're going to drive traffic to a landed page or a listicle, a laboratory or whatever that has that same specific angle, right? Also the user or the prospect whenever they go through the funnel, it's congruent, right? There's no mismatch. There's no, oh, you said this in your ad and all of a sudden, oh, like, for example, when you're at your selling to woman, then on your landing page, it's full of men. You're like, oh, what the hell? I thought this was for me. And then it turns out it's not right. So it needs to be congruent and absolutely like you, you really need to do it. And for us, you know, listicles work really, really well for that. And you can simply duplicate, if whenever you find a winning template, you duplicate it, you change the copy and then you test it again, right? But in the beginning, you don't need to create, you know, you can lead the traffic straight to a PDP. And then as you keep scaling, as you want to build new funnels, then you can introduce listicles, adversorials, you know, some people are even running quiz funnels like a lot of different things. But yeah, so that's what that's what I would do. And that's what we do as well, so as you said. Okay. Interesting. And I'm thinking about a brand that I spoke to recently that they're, you know, they're spending, let's call it half a million dollars a year. So $50,000 a month on meta. And they were trying to decide, do we go really deep into our one core persona or do we try to have multiple personas and see if that's how we speak broadly? And they knew they had two audience. There was the kid who asked their mom to buy it for them. And there's the mom who said, this would benefit my kid. And so that should go out. And they're trying to speak to the kind of the same problem, but from two different requests. And my suggestion to that was at their spend level, they should probably lean into just the mom buyer. That was the majority and the biggest and figure that out first before expanding. But I'm curious, like at what level do you feel like people start to benefit from these persona splits or especially smaller companies? Is there a kind of minimum before they get to this level and add the same? Yeah. So let's say focus on your core persona because chances are if you're spending 50k per month, you have incredibly, yeah, like that's not a lot. So there's definitely more room to grow unless you're targeting the wrong persona. And that's another key thing as well. So the way that I see personas is imagine your total addressable market, your time. And inside this time, you have different pockets of audiences. And sometimes what can happen for a brand is you're actually focusing on the wrong pocket of audience that actually doesn't really resonate with your brand. And meanwhile, there's these other audiences here in the same, that are in the same time that you're not speaking to, but that would convert like 10 times as much, right? And that's what a brand needs to go through. And that's actually the excise for example, for a new brand or for any brand at any stage needs to go through, which is to find that hero persona. And only the results will tell you whether it's a hero persona or not. So chances are if you're spending 50k, I don't think they've cracked it yet. I don't think they've cracked it yet. Either they haven't found a winning ad, either they're not speaking correctly to that persona, either they're not something is wrong there. So I would definitely not. And always in the beginning, you do want to test different personas, right? To find that hero one. But if for them, it's for example, they, I don't know, like there's a clear persona for the brand, right? Because it's like a baby food, let's just say like, of course you're going to sell to parents, right? But you need to find like what? Because parents is broad, right? It's super broad. How many different parents are there? So you need to then get more specific, but absolutely. In the beginning, of course, you know, test a different, different stuff. But again, I like that terminology because it really encapsulated that for us for that sense, if we're focusing on the wrong persona, we wouldn't be here, you know? And in the beginning, we had to search for them. If I was making claims like, oh yeah, this, this manicure set allows you to save money from this alone. People have been saying that since the 90s, you know what I mean? Like press songs have been invented in the 80s. Like people have been doing this. So the claim no longer like, it's not resonated with people. So you need to be more, um, just a more sophisticated, perhaps. And so that would be my answer. Yeah. Okay. So what you do is, is that persona exploration, something that you say, okay, I'm intentionally now jumping to a new persona and I want to try, you know, this angle or is it just incidental to creative testing and then you pull it out of the insights? Yeah. So I'm constantly, when you reach a certain point, you do want to, that you read, that you've explored a persona and, and you know, you've done a lot of, because it's not just about the persona, but it's also how many creative formats have you tested? Have you done high five? Have you done a lot of low five? Have you done all the, the formats possible? And that's first, how the first routes that I would take, right? If I maximize this thing, yes or no. And then based on that, I will always, uh, so say it's always at 80, 20, right? So for me, I'll know I'll get 80% of my, of my, of my results from this core persona that we have. But then on the side, obviously for us to keep scaling and for us to keep finding new pockets of audiences to scale into, we need to be speaking to new people. Um, but then again, that takes, that sometimes can take the focus away from the core thing, because sometimes we tend to overcomplicate, especially for you, you know, while Twitter we're scrolling, people are saying, "Yo, you need to create a diversification. You need to, you know, like, it's really easy to get caught up in the noise. Um, so you need to be really careful about that." And, and, and that's the, that's what we go through in our brand, which is sometimes yes, we'll go and say, "Okay, looking at the results, let's try to crack a new funnel, let's try to crack some new creatives for a new persona that we haven't really explored to really get to the next level." But again, I would, I would really suggest to be more careful because sometimes it, it can't take the focus away from the main thing, which maybe you haven't even maximized, um, at all. So, yeah, it's hard to, it's hard to say man. Sometimes it's a feeling thing, you know, it's not like a, uh, X amount of span, that X amount of revenue, we switch. Like, you need to feel, you're at account, you need to feel how things are going, um, and everything else. So, yeah, that would be my answer. No, that makes sense. And, uh, let's take a rabbit hole down the, the Twitter thing because I struggle with this as well where there's all these fun ideas coming up, whether it's, you know, an ad idea, it's a test structure, it's a new link page, it's a AI tool, whatever it is. And I think, um, I'm always trying to figure out what's the framework that allows me to figure out like, how, how do I test the right things? And test carefully, we'll also just continuing to do the core. So, um, it sounds like you're familiar with that as well. And I'm curious, have you figured out like, because you do want new ideas coming at you, but at the same time you want to limit them. Um, and I also don't want to be guilty of that as someone who posts online as, as well of just pushing too many ideas out. Yeah, shiny algebra syndrome. And I do believe you need a little bit of it, right? Because sometimes actually I found really good ideas on things that I saw on Twitter or, or specifically when I talk to specific people that they implemented X in their business and then they went crazy, then, okay, we'll go and implement the same thing. And, and one of them, for example, is the, the comfort story with Hudson, right? And I'm sure we'll get into that in just a second as to how we, we created an internal creative program. Um, but there are really, really good ideas that you can find out there, but it's, it's, you need to be able to make a difference between signal and noise, right? Um, and not just to be like blasting different things and, uh, and, uh, throwing stuff at the wall and hope that something sticks, like, you need to be calculated as well. Um, so yeah, and, and, and with, and with time, like, you will develop that muscle a bit a little bit more. I think for me, I've never, trees, struggle with shiny object syndrome. I'm always a bit, mmm, like, okay, why people are sharing this now, like, and, and, and, and, I will use my own judgment. Does this make sense? Yes or no to me? Um, and, like, do I need it right now? Like, is it, is my thing already working? Or is it not working? If I was in a situation where nothing is working, then I lower my guard, then I'm like, okay, whatever these people are telling me, and of course, I still use my judgment, but I'll be more open towards that idea. But if something, I'm not going to be able to do it. something is working really well, you don't want to then go mess it up. So that'd be my, if it's not broken, don't fix it. And yeah, that'd be my philosophy. Yeah. So let's use the example of Hudson. He was talking about a critter program. You saw that and what made you feel like that was signal instead of noise. And then let's get into how you've heard. Curtis, I'm a simple man. I saw the video and the first interview that came out was with Davey Foggeley, right? And I was back in, I think in May, I don't remember, over last year. And when I heard the guy say that he just did 48 million in January, I listened. I'm a simple man, you know, like I listened. And obviously as he kept going in that interview and in that video and explaining about how he's doing all these things with Davey, with his creators and with TikTok shop, to me made a lot of sense, right? Because for us, we've been using a lot of huge secrets at the time, not like actual creators like him and I feel it and whatnot. But what he was saying, again, I use my own intuition and I heard the 48 minutes, I was like, this guy's doing something different here. And immediately after that, I sent it to Sam. And I was like, bro, yeah, this is, this is, this is some, this is different. It feels different. And then, yeah, after that, we decided to sort of emulate whatever he was doing and bringing on our own or build our own internal program. So sometimes, yeah, when you see stuff like that, that's really sound innovative, that makes sense to you. And again, backed up by real results again, right? Then I jumped, I jumped in the opportunity and it turned on great in the end. Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense that he's, he's validated, he's got the revenue to stand behind it and you had the experience to filter and say this, this is a good idea. Yeah. Okay, so, so tell us about this. You've, you've shared this with me before and I think it's absolutely brilliant. Tell us about what kind of what his idea was and how you've interpreted it and used it yourself. Yeah. So, basically for everybody that doesn't know about the comfort, I'm not going to go into like his story and whatnot, but what comfort did is is, yeah, I mean, he doing ridiculous amounts at the time of that interview. There were 40 million per month, which is just an insane number when you think about it. And the, the, the big underlying thing about him is that, you know, he has these core, core internal creator that, you know, it's about 500 content creators and they all produce content on a performance basis, meaning that, you know, how brands are used to working, us included by the way, before I used to work with UGC creators and paying them, paying their retainers, paying them this and $500 per brief and whatnot, like for him, like none of that existed, right? And obviously he had the TikTok shop affiliate engine to create that momentum and get a lot of content creators on board. So he has his affiliates and then he has his core creators with who he's really close with, you know, and I, and to me, I really liked that idea that he's really bringing people into the brand and by people, I mean, the content creators that believe in division, they believe in him, they believe in what is being built with the brand. And ultimately, they're also, you know, they grow with the brand. They have weekly calls. They know the founder. You know, everybody on the team and it felt like a real, intimate win-win situation that I really liked. And obviously when I was looking at our UGC program at the time and how we were doing creative is probably like most today, which is like I just described. You find you always chasing creators, you need a UGC manager, you need to reach out to people, invoice the brief, you don't even know this creator, you need to send the product, it's a mess, right? And when I saw what it was doing with this with this creator, right? Again, like high volume of content, all in a performance basis, they all get better in their own commission basis. We went out and did the same. So what I told myself is, you know, I'm done working with UGC creators. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to find content creators that believe in the brand that I'm going to have weekly calls with. I'm going to train them. I'm going to teach them about the personas, right? Literally like what we're doing right now. I hop on calls with them. I show them everything and et cetera. And these will become my content creators, right? We're going to grow together, we're going to invest into them. And together we're going to build this amazing thing. So that's exactly what we went on to do. So in the beginning, we had an ambassador program and we actually got content creators from the ambassador program. And it was perfect because they were already used to being rewarded on a commission basis, right? Because if you try to sell that to normal UGC creators, sometimes it can be like a hard sell because they're like, I don't know. And UGC creators, sometimes it can be too like this, right? They're like, no, I want my retainer, I want my ends fair enough, right? They want their safety, their safety net. So for me, I just really wanted people who believe in the brand and believe in what we were building and ultimately wanted to get better and believe that they could earn more through this program. So initially we started with a small group and fair enough, like we grew with this group. And now it's about I think 12 internal content creators. And the way that it works is that they are paid on the percentage of the ads spend that all of their content get, right? They produce weekly content for us. I hope I'm gonna call with them every Tuesday 6 p.m. And again, I give them feedback, I share my ad accounts, I share what's working, all the angles that are working, the content that's not working. And also on a weekly basis, I share with them scripts, I share with them like anything that's working. I am one message away on what's up. And yeah, we just built, right now we just built this really tight knitted community of creators. They believe in the brand, you know, I literally flew to Manchester in the UK to meet it with them. We are dinner afterwards. We went to a karaoke bar. So like you can't imagine literally me, we're content creators, like baby, baby, like, and you know, it goes beyond just the results that we're getting with these content creators. But also, like you're building a true mode. And for them, they will tell you like, wow, he will like, we know brand has ever done this for us. Like this is truly special. And they're never gonna leave, you know, and actually fun fact, we have a lot of competitors that reach out to our content creators. They're like, hey, we'd love to work with you and they literally send me screenshots in our WhatsApp group chat with everybody. And they're like, ah, look at them, like they're trying to purchase whatever we're never gonna leave. They literally laugh at them. Right. And that's where you can truly build with these content creators. And you know, they get really good. And that's the thing that you don't get with your DC creators, which is you hope that they're good. And 90% of the time you go to launch that content, it's gonna flop. And then you tell that creator, and then they're gonna try to come back and be like, hey, so how did they perform or whatever? And then you tell them, yeah, look, it didn't perform. So we're gonna go find another one. But here is different. You actually train them. And week over week, they get better, you know? So it's just a way better way, yeah, I just, it's a way better way to work with content creators and to produce you to see content as well for your brand. So that's what we did off the back of what I saw from us. And that's when we started implementing this. And yeah, I wouldn't do it any other way. I couldn't imagine going back to work here with you to see creators and no, like there's no way. So yeah. So I imagine a brand owner might hear that sort of thing. Well, a person on span, they get it's expensive quick, because what if one does really well. And also that seems like a lot of work. In that shift, did you have any of those concerns when you're doing this shift and how did those play out? No, so in the end, right? Because you're still producing your own content internally, it's not that 100% of your spend is gonna go towards their content, right? So already there's that. And number two, you know, you, you give them a percentage of that spend that makes sense for your margins, right? You're not gonna, you're not gonna give them a percentage that doesn't make sense at all. So please know your number before you do something like this. And for us, we were more than happy to do it because we knew that it was a win-win because if we did find a winner and we did find a couple of winners as well with the content creators, like one, we're gonna be able to scale that content. So it's gonna produce the, the support, this property, this proportionate value to our same revenue. And number two, for the content creator, like she's gonna be hooked. You know, like we, we, for example, we had one content creator that for the past and shout out Rebecca. I don't know if she's gonna watch it, but in the beginning, you know, we're gonna be you know, she wasn't in for the first two months, like, and that's the thing that you go through with these content creators and to answer your question about like, isn't it hard to manage? Sometimes, content creators come in and you know, they're not hitting the ground running. Like they're not getting in yet, so because at the end of the day, I do CBOs and I do testing in that way. So if you don't earn the spend, you're not gonna get spent. And this content creator, you know, only in a month, three, then she made about, I think 6,000 equivalent of about six to 7,000 USD. And you know, when I, when I announced it, like she was literally like crying on the call, she was like, my God, I can't believe this. This is amazing, whatever. And when you create something like that, like she's gonna be hooked, like she's gonna produce so much content and not only content for you, but by the way, like the really important piece to this is that you through something like this, you're building your content library. So they're also submitting raw content that you can then use as a brand to make AI voice servers with all these bureaus, right? So it's, so that percentage of that spend in the end, it's honestly, it's not that much in the end. And from a management perspective, yes, I mean, it's, I would say, isn't it more work than working with the U.C. creators? I don't think so because before to manage the U.C. creators, it was a whole process we had internally, a U.G.C. manager. She has her own email. She reaches out to content creators. She negotiates. She does contract. She's like all of this thing. Now whenever, if I want to test a new concept and new script, one message and what's up. And tomorrow I have literally all of them. They all make that script and then I send it to my video editor. and it's done. You know, I don't have to negotiate. - Are they turned around? - If I really push them, I'm like, "Girl, this is really crushing at the moment. "I will get for sure a couple, a couple for sure." - Wow, that's incredible. - Yeah, this is the way I do it. - So turn around and see if we do that. - Yeah, and think about it. You have a product launch or you want to test a new product, right? Or something like that. You have these constant critters who are gonna do it. And you're not paying anything up front again, right? So from a business perspective, it doesn't make sense. And obviously, when you get a winner, we're more than happy because we're scaling it, right? So that we're gonna scale a loser. And the creator then really sees, "Wow, this is possible." Like, I can earn really, really good money through this. So yeah, it's honestly to win, win. So I won't be too worried about that. - Yeah, that's fantastic. And you mentioned that you said them a concept. You say, "This is working really well." You've got this framework that you've shared with me before of how you think about different concepts is are a lot of those going to, and then maybe you can share what that framework is, but are you sharing multiple to them or how does that translate to actually working with the creators? - Yeah, so you can decide, right? Whether you want to do creative testing with them or you want to do expansion of your winning concepts. So what is a concept? A concept is a combination of a, for me, right? A combination of persona, sub persona, and an angle. That's a concept for me, right? So say, again, we take the example, busy-bridged persona, sub persona, the mom, and then the angle, three reasons why moms are loving this manicure is said that you can do in nine minutes, turbo hook adjustment, but you get to just read, right? That's a concept, and then you can change any of the variables, and that becomes a new concept. And then at the tail end of that, you have the creative format, right? So you have either a UGC, which I would send, if I wanted a piece of UGC right from the get-go, I would send that to my content creators. Static ads, compressing ads, like anything, that's a creative format, or like, hi-fi, low-fi, AI voiceover is what the whole, the whole just, right? So that's a concept. And then the way that you can maximize a concept, and that's what we were discussing, I think you want to cover, which is out of that one concept, you can actually, so the first two variables, right? Remember persona, supersonic angle. You can then take that idea, and you're testing the messaging. That's what you're testing with that concept. And then you can take that concept, and then apply it to multiple creative formats. You can say, I'm gonna make statics of this format, because if you made hooks, the hooks should sound like a headline. If your hook doesn't sound like a headline, something's wrong there. So you use those hooks as headlines. You do, for example, I don't know, UGC, and then you do like a demo video, let's just say. And that's all of a sudden, two different creative formats for one concept that you're testing, right? - Okay. - So that's how I see it. And then as to what I give to my concept creators, that can change, sometimes I can give everything that I'm producing, sometimes you don't, then you only give them the winners, and then you kind of let them produce their own concept. Because remember, on a weekly basis, they're also producing their own stuff, which again comes from this desire for us to have creative diversification. And creative diversification comes from different ideas, right? That's truly diverse. 'Cause you can't be diverse with just your two bias, if one person only makes all of the concepts. So that's how we approach it. - Interesting. Yeah, I feel like the tension I feel right now with most accounts is how do you learn from what's working and take the data that's in the account, and you know, like you get more of that, but also have diversification at the same time, 'cause you don't wanna talk about angiometer, all the different variations that you need, but you don't wanna just move towards new, you have to always learn from the past. So it sounds like the way you do that is you take those, you figure out what's working about them, and then share it with the creators. - Correct. Correct. - Yeah, that's how I do it. - And then you mentioned demo videos, as one of your formats, I'm not familiar, what's a demo video, as a format? - Yeah, so demo video is usually when there's just, when you don't see someone talking, it's as if it's UGC, but it's mainly B-roll and someone talking over it. So that's what I would consider a demo video. So demo video can be, well, it comes from demonstration video, that's why it comes from, so it can be like demonstrating how your product actually works. So it's a bit more directive of video or of a creative, rather than more of a problem solution script or a UGC piece of content. So that's what a demo is for you, for me. - Okay. That's great, that's awesome. - Amazing. - And then kind of one of the other things that we were talking about, is just like brands that we respect, and that we're excited to watch, I'm curious. I feel like a lot of our young companies, they always go to their direct competitors and look at exactly what one step away is doing. And I'm curious, what's the rumble of companies we've talked about, the comfort, you're learning from them, which is a totally different category. What other companies are you learning from and you feel like when you've learned from them, it's worked well. - 100%. So let's attack the first piece, right? I've asked to majority of brands do. I never look at what my competitors are doing. Why not do look? It's just to see like out of curiosity. But I never get creative inspiration for my competitors. And I don't understand why you would also do it. Unless you're up and coming, you know, up and coming, and you're just trying to take market share from the get-go, you're trying to just rip, right? Rip their content, rip their ideas, and rip their winning ads. Like please feel free to do it. For example, for us in the UK, we have one specific competitor. I told myself I would mention it. I'm not gonna mention the name, right? But you can tell they're in our ad account. They live in our ad library. Like anything that they come out like we do something, all of a sudden it's there. Actually there's two competitors. There's one in Australia as well. But anyway, that like all of a sudden, their landing pages look exactly the same. And I just think it's, why would you do that? You know, I don't understand that. So we, so no, I don't look at direct competitors. If I do it's just to see, okay, I'll be launching new things and just keep like a night, right? Because you always want to keep a close eye to them, but not imitate them. Where I get, for me personally, where I get the most amount of inspiration, for sure, like lately has been comforts. I think number one, I think they do content, extremely extreme you all. Yeah, a hot sun is just cracked. Like I think right now, yeah, probably the goat. So I really like what he's doing there and what is in with his content career. I think it's the right way to grow a brand. So I like them a lot, but obviously totally different business to ours, like a different magnitude. Who else will look at it? I like DR brands a lot. So the ones that have a bit more direct response, I'm more supplement based. It was typically brands in the skincare health supplements. They understand marketing really, really, really well. When you see, for example, and I took this course from Peter Kell, shout out Peter Kell, VSL Masterclass. Are you familiar with Peter Kell? No, no, not. Yeah, so anyway, he calls himself a VSL artist, right? But he's really good at it. And essentially VSL and these health brands, like the Dr. Gondry and even, what is it? I think is it V-Shred, for example, like all these brands that are making for it to five to six, 20-minute-long ads, like those are some of the best marketers on the planet, right? And I really love to have a look at what they're doing because they understand what I was talking about really, really well. And they understand the customer is better than anybody else. And I think for me, the key is that you need to understand your customer is extremely well. And obviously you have an amazing product that really helps. But no, besides comfort, there's no brand that specifically comes to mind at the moment, to be honest. It's been my biggest inspiration, I would say, back end of last year. So that was a big thing. Yeah, the value of also having one is that you can go really deep and understand the nuance. Because going back to signal versus noise, you've one way to do that is to say, okay, well, I know this brand. And so if there's a small tidbit that comes out about them, I know if that's actually important or if it's just something they're testing. Because now I know a lot about comfort and you can actually keep that as a way to filter. Because even like you could look at a competitor and they're testing something new, you take that and then it fails on their test, they cut it. Like you might not pick up on that. Exactly. And now you have that meta feature, right? Where you can filter the NDA, let me buy impressions, which I hate. Why would meta release that? I don't get it. It's just that by the way, everything was similar. It was to rip my ads. We have a lot of reach campaigns. So just watch out for that. But no, I don't get what they did that update to it. Like what purpose is that she sort of? I don't get it. It's just going to cause all ads to get similar and then it's going to get fatigued quicker. I've been telling people they should run a bunch of audience network campaigns to try to just like jack up impressions on their worst ads. A hundred, but no, we literally we have reach campaigns, you know, in just the old ad accounts. So like yeah, so watch out people if you want to copy my ads. You'll protect it. Watch out for those reach campaigns. So yeah, just answer your question. That's a yeah, and to your point is, you know, yeah, I focus mainly on a couple of things. I try to not get too distracted. And yeah, so I get inspiration from anywhere. And but again, all of my breakthrough ads have come through research. It's not like copying my direct never that doesn't ever work for me. It's always that like one, that one testimonial review that like the customer said, something really specific like a specific way because that's all. Also, what you'll find, if you do research is that your customer, they have a really specific language to talk about certain problems that they have. And unless you understand that language and the verbiage and all the words that they use, your ads are not gonna resonate, right? So it's only when I truly started understanding the problems that they're dealing with at the core that then all of a sudden I started to, you know, finding my winning ads. And then I get, I look at other brands for creative formats, mostly, so it's like, okay, what are the brands that do, for example, high quality ads, I'll go have a look at them, what are the brands that do? I know, yeah, I've always over the best, I'll go have a look at them. So yeah, that's all I do it, mostly, but research, do your research, that's the most important piece. - Interesting. And so you've talked about comments, like your own comments, Amazon comments, Reddit, you've talked about, it sounds like you call customers as well, I'll get them on the phone. - So we don't call them, but we do serve with them via surveys. So it's like, you can tell them, they like get $5 if you answer their survey, and then you'll have answers that way. We've called them once though, but yeah, that was same. Yeah. - Okay, I was gonna ask, one of the things I used to do when I was at a marketing was I would call customers, every time we were trying to break into a new, and I would pay people $20, Amazon gift card, and I would try to stack up like 10 calls back to back, for, and I would just like sit on the phone for two and a half hours just picking up. And some of the stories I learned, I think A was encouraging from the perspective of the business. Like I got to talk to a lot of people that were like, this has literally changed my life, and thank you so much. And I was like, okay, this is cool for myself, but then also getting those, those insights. So like what's a story that might resonate, or otherwise, or like why do people use it? And I feel like it fed into so much of the creative strategy. - Yeah, it's 100%. Like your best ideas, they're not gonna come like, you know, they don't just like appear like, oh yeah, in the shower, yeah, I should do this angle now. Like you're gonna find it through your customers, and you just need to become a really good listener, reader of your customers, and even the ones that are not directly transacting with you, but are transacting in, at least your market, that are the same problems that your customers have, or your prospect, and your audience has. That's how you will find those winning ads, you know? So 100%, when you call them, when you directly talk to them, you get those insights that you then go back whenever you're scripting stuff, you have that in your minds, and then all of a sudden boom, you start resonating much more with your customers, and you'll see it in the RRAS, you'll see it in the CPA, this scalability, and everything. So 100%. - Fantastic. Okay, last thing I wanna ask about is, I'm a big ABO guy, you're seeing good success with CBO, and this is a big debate right now. I know like all the time I get comments, they're like, oh no, I structure this way, I structure this way, and I think in my minds, the structure doesn't matter as much as the output, but I would love to hear from a CBO person, 'cause I'm not like, what do you like about it? How did you get there? And obviously it's working for you, but what's your CBO pitch? - So this is it, we're in a boxy ring, I'm CBO your ABO, but more seriously, yeah, I'm the same as you, by the way, meaning, I'm not well, maybe because you have your own ways and stuff, and you do ABO, but for me, I've been switching around throughout the years, I'm not married, I'm not like, yeah, yeah, ABO is the best thing, and CBO doesn't work. I've tried both, many, many times, believe me, in the beginning, we were actually in the beginning, when we started scaling in the nail industry, we were doing ABO in the midway we switched, and honestly, it's the media buying strategy that I'll get into in just a second, but I wanna point out that it's not the most important thing, like, media buying first off, right? But for me, my management style of the article, because I'm doing the media buying is definitely CBO, and the reason being is that I've always found ABO one to be, my main argument is that it's slow to, it's quite slow to scale, right? So it's like, you launch an ad, it's at, I don't know, $5,000 per day, you come in after three days, is it good, is it bad? Okay, you bump on the budget 20%, it's slow, right? It's a process, it's a grind. And what I liked about CBO is that, you know, at the time, I really wanted to lean more towards the algorithm side of things and to lean more into meta, to make the decisions for me. And the main reason why, again, I love ABO, not only that, is because when it finds a winner in a campaign, like all of a sudden, it can spend like one K tomorrow, two K, three K in a really, really short time frame, right? So first, what we do is that we don't just do one CBO. What we'll do is we'll do multiple CBO. So one creative testing is one new CBO, essentially, right? So if you have a weekly creative batch, that's your CBO. And then inside it, you can decide whether you do minimum spends or no, you can have trust matter to do decisions. I've switched around this, by the way, sometimes I'll go minimum spend, sometimes I won't. And then I'll sort of see where meta allocates to spend. If I was to do ABO, for example, on say, 15, 20 concepts, that'd be quite expensive from the get go, right? Meaning, like, especially knowing that if your creative hit rate is not that high, ABO can be really costly to you. So again, that's only that you need to consider, which is your creative hit rate, if it's really high and you focus more on quality, go for it, do ABO. But if you're more high volume, on the more high volume side of things which we are, then ABO can quickly become expensive and really, really cost you a lot of money. So doing this CBO as well, not only do you have that budget liquidity that you give to meta to kind of allocate decision for you, but also you save money on potential losers that won't have never scaled. But inversely, that creates another problem, which is probably like the main argument of, let's call them ABO people, which is like, yeah, but, you know, like, I got all these concepts, I had said that I'm not getting in spend and like meta doesn't know what it's doing. And I want to force spend towards them, which is, I totally understand because I get that frustration as well when I'm like, look at this ad that has like a 2x whereas it wise enough spending more to it, right? So in that case, what you can do is simply and you shout out to you because you're actually giving that idea, which is to create a ABO on the side, which is your, your ABO that you used to kind of force spend towards certain concepts, right? So that way you can truly validate whether your, your hunch or your, your instinct is true or no. Most often they're not meta will be right. In my experience, again, I speak from my experience for you will jump on me. But yeah, so that's sort of my argument for CBOs. And then obviously for scaling, you do AC, you do scaling campaigns or whatnot. And then if the overall, say the overall campaign doesn't perform well, I just turn it off. And I started a fresh new one, right? So and versus like an ABO, I always felt like I was forced to spend into it because I'm like, I can't turn this off now because like, I know I'm going to put new ads in there like in two days time. So yeah, that's how I'm handling it. And again, if you, if you interview me in the year, it might sound different again. I might be like, yeah, we'll do a B.O now. And you know, you never know. But for now and for the past, yeah, recently, that's what we've been doing it. And again, it's whatever gives you the best results for your business. And I think people should just focus on making better ads, better lending pages, better offers, and then worry about what they should do at the ACBO. So yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it strikes me that you've got kind of like, you need a structure for testing. And so you've got that system set up. You need a structure for being able to pause things that are underperforming. And then you need a structure for scaling. And I think in my mind, it's a good media buying structure does all three of those. It tests well. It cuts well. It scales well. And like your CBO is set up in a way that does that. And I think your point about like pulling things out and testing them. I think if I've seen when companies can do that, then it's a sign that their testing isn't working because they're able to pull it out. But in your case, if you pull out those underperformers and then they don't end up working, then your testing's working. You know, like the structure you have has allowed those top ads to come up. Exactly. And so it's-- It sounds like your structure ends up being pretty similar just that we-- I think also a lot of ours have like-- our buckets are ABO, your buckets are a CBO. And so there's maybe a little bit less flexibility in like how they offer them plays with ours. But very similar idea of scaling up, moving ads across, pausing things, changing parts of the whole process. And the funny thing is, you know, like I'm doing this now. But if I talk to a lot of like scalers and guys are spending 100K days, this is funny. I think Jordan Minard on Twitter said it, like, scaling with a K. I like that saying a lot. So guys that are scaling with a K, 100K days, they're all doing ABO. Right, if you look at their ad account, the most of them are doing ABO creative testing. So again, right, it just shows that, you know, it can work. It can like, whatever works well for you, do it. But obviously, I think, I think, I think majority of the industry does it through ABO. Although I listen to one of their recent marketing operators podcast, it looks like at Ridge, they're doing exactly what we're doing. So I don't think they're doing CBO minimum spans. And then I'm doing ABO, for example. So it changes, man, like, obviously, like, yeah, just find whatever works really well for you. And that should be enough. Right. Yeah, exactly. If it's working. stick to it if it's not working, try something else. I think especially like each product is so different too. I know some products that do really well and just a ton of ASCs and they just literally dump it in and that's it and that's just one big ASC. And I feel like those are the products that maybe meta as the easiest time targeting or the simplest the clearest, one problem statement versus the, I think the more complex the product, the more complex the account normally. Right. Right. So great. It's how do you do then the creative testing? I'm curious now to hear it. Yeah. So the setup that we normally have is we'll take a bucket of new ads and it used to be one concept with a couple of variations. Now normally it's two or three concepts with variations and we'll launch it with, call it, you know, maybe $200 a day if the CPA targets 50. So enough to get a couple of conversions a day and we'll let that run for a few days. If we get today two or three and we're seeing zero conversions, the hook rates aren't good. There's like add to cart signs of ad we could pause that. If there are some conversions, we might let that continue to run. We'll, we'll, we'll, you know, maybe tweak the budgets a little bit up or down depending on the early signs. And then from there, if we have a big winner in that ad set and take that ad set and we'll move it across other ads ads, move it into an ASC and others from there because that what we're trying to do is, you know, you can obviously only move an ad up so much, you know, if I move it 20% in the morning, 20% in the end of the day, like you're still only going to double every other day. First is if I take an ad and I move it to a couple of other ads that I can take and 5x the budget in a single day. So that kind of function of scaling is there. Obviously, ABO testing is the easiest or like the most clear benefit. All the ads get spend or at least every ad site gets spend. There could be concepts in there that don't get a lot of spend, but normally Facebook is prioritizing that well. And then there's also the benefit of the cutting and cutting ones that don't perform well. And being able to go and impose things that aren't working tends to work really well on ABOs. So I think, I think ABO where where it's, you have to be careful with it is the scaling piece of like, how do you scale while keeping CPA stable? And I think if, if you're comfortable moving ads across a bunch of ad sets, turning them on and off and and playing with both placements and budget, it works well. But if you don't want to be doing that, kind of hand holding piece, then I think that's where you end up lacking is on the scaling side of the ad benefit. 100%. Well, this has been very fun. Thank you for the time again. And I think I think we grab it there, but I appreciate it. Amazing. Anytime. I hope people learn that things are through hopefully. And yeah, if anybody wants to reach out, I'm all available to connect. Chad ideas, just like me and Curtis, that's how we met, right? I sent them at DM. I saw his post and I was like, this guy sounds really smart. I need to talk to him. And ever since it's been a couple of months, probably five or six months that we've been, yeah, consequently communicating. So obviously this is a pleasure for me to do this for you. And I enjoyed it. And whatever you're doing, Curtis, this is amazing as well. Amazing. A GC, I want to say is well, we don't work directly with them, but I talked to Curtis a lot. Really, really smart guy. So yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. A little chat with him anytime. And if someone does want to reach out with you, it's what's the best way to LinkedIn or something else? Yeah, LinkedIn is the best one. Yeah, LinkedIn. Cool. All right. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks.