🔮 Revealing the Secrets of E-commerce Marketing with Taylor Holiday - CEO, Common Thread Collective

That's probably one of the best episodes we've recorded to be honest. So good. So good. I love the way he explains things. I guess so clear and efficient. This week we are Taylor Oli Day from Common Threads Collective, the King of Ecommerce in the US. We had the King of B2B Marketing a few months ago with David Garth, now we get the King of Ecommerce. An amazing episode, talked about a lot of things, go deep in the weeds. Talked about also random stuff like him trying to buy the YouTube channel at once. If you like hot sauce and hot wings. You'll like that. Talked about the Mona Lisa of Ecommerce. The probability of having the first one person, Ecommerce brand doing 100 million in revenue, the five P's and creating peak moments in brands. What else? The future of the future of Ecommerce just being a brand being a feed or a collection of feed. It's like a brand can be on a USB stick like a DJ. A record bag is now on a USB stick, a brand can just be a collection of feed that goes to marketplace. I was like shit. It's like mind blown but also makes totals. We try to get into timelines for this. It's probably coming sooner than we think. Great Ecommerce, DTC, episode for all our Ecom listeners. We don't talk only about apps. We also talk about ecom sometimes. We hardly ever talk about ecom and many of you haven't been in Ecom for a long time. It was super interesting. I'm just saying that because if people are like I'm about to turn this episode off because I'm not in Ecom. It's definitely worth listening to because there's a shitload of good stuff. Listening for sure. All right. Enjoy this episode. I've just finished editing this episode. Almost 50% of everything I said was lost. I'll go through and overdub it. You might think some of my questions in the first interview are a bit weird. That's because I was just trying to remember what I actually asked Taylor. All of his content is there. Most of the video content is there. There were the episode. Hopefully you won't notice it. I just wanted to put that little thing in advance. So enjoy. Three ads and a podcast. We know the drill. Welcome to the one come to go through trust. We are very honored to have you like the king of ecommerce coming to the podcast. It's great to have you. We have a ton of topics we want to jam on with you. Things that you spoke about recently that we can just spend as much or as a little time diving into. We want to hear your take. We do this every week. I don't know if you knew the podcast before. We're only missing one week. We keep going at it. We know about you. Some of our listeners in Europe might not know who you are. Do you mind doing a quick intro? What do you do? Taylor Holiday. We're a lot of people who are in the business. We did well as we just developed a habit. You can scroll back to the very beginnings of those YouTube channels and Instagram accounts and see some really raw stuff that's just like, you know, really, really rootsy. But from the beginning, we always just talked and expressed opinions and built a little audience around the stuff that we cared about. And so the thing about our world right is that, unlike maybe if you're a full-time creator, like an audience size matters, in our world, audience size really isn't a thing. It's a very small, it's about the depth of content and the right people to be consuming it, right? We get a customer and it's worth a million dollars to us as a business. So we don't need 100,000 customers. We need like 10, you know? So it's in that sense that we've never been overly concerned about trying to build the biggest audience of the world as much as how could we go really deep with the material. And I think that's where we've pushed our content more and more. Yes, really cool. I've said a few times before that I think there's such a big push to, like, build an audience and everyone's like, I don't know, here's tactics to build your audience on LinkedIn. But at the end of the day, unless you can actually activate that audience and do something, like I've always wondered if you put something out there and you did a survey with like 20 content creators and said, just simply ask your audience to go to this webpage and press this button. How many would actually do it? Because I think there's one thing that's building an audience. But the other thing is actually building an audience that you can utilize. Because really, an audience that doesn't do anything when you need to engage them is pretty useless in my business. Well, I think I think what you're starting to see. And maybe LinkedIn is a little lagging to that. But they're definitely right now is a big rise in the B2B influencer. Like these group of people that are building audiences into, I would say, marketing specific content. Like I did a thread the other day about these four guys that call themselves the brand brothers now. Like the Ashwin and Orrin and a few of them. And they've all adored and Crawford. They built this niche of like doing business. And they're like, they built this niche of like doing brand and creative breakdowns that what's ending up happening is they're getting paid by like the canvas and the survey monkeys to create content in the same way that like micro celebrities on Instagram are getting paid by fashion brands. And so there is, I would say, a maturing. Because generally speaking, like B2B marketing isn't very cutting edge in the way that like consumer facing marketing is. And so B2B marketing tends to lag a little bit to consumer. And I think that's happening. It's just, it's a little more late. This coming here is definitely coming. And talking on the on the topic of media media property. Am I right? Saying that you're looking to buy hot ones. The YouTube channel from BuzzSuite. Well, okay. So I am fascinated by my current, like there are certain ideas that captivate my brain for a long period of time. And it's hard for me to unhook from them when I discover them. One of them, this is the idea of negative CAC. Is that there's this principle in e-commerce in particular where people will talk about like that CAC goes up forever. That you, the cost to acquire customer just increases over time. And if you're using primarily paid media channels like meta, that tends to be true. And I've experienced that for many businesses where just they're fighting this constant increase in acquisition costs. And then I've discovered a few of these businesses that actually have a negative customer acquisition costs. What do I mean by that? I mean that the content that they create, they get paid to create and that content sells product. So there are CAC line item on their P&L is actually a profit center. And so there's examples of this like, you know, I don't know if you guys follow Plant Daddy Kevin a spirit to on Twitter. He's an example where you have a media property. In his case, he made a blog about gardening. And he could sell ad sponsorship to that blog. And that blog is what he uses to sell his product. So you have a media asset that's a profit center. And this is the same thing we do at CTC. I get paid to create content. So the bridges series that I did or I'm doing a series right now called Outliers or today we're releasing one called tactics where we find sponsors that help to create distribution and fund the production of the content. And that content becomes our primary marketing material. Okay, so this idea is something I'm really compelled by. And of course you're watching giant properties like Mr. Beast do this. And in various ways where right now to have leverage with an organic audience is a huge advantage over every brand trying to run paid media for growth. So when I saw this post about the hot ones, one, I'm a big fan. I think the shows hilarious. I've consumed a bunch of the content. It's such an obvious product integration where some channels don't have an obvious like their content is, you know, like the, the knelt boys had to create happy dad and like come up with a reason why it was really good, right? But this is like it's built in. It's right there. And I know the guys that trust pretty well, like I've watched their growth over time and do really well. You know, Kim Kardashian just bought 25% of that business. Those guys got really, really well selling hot sauce. And so when I saw this, I was like, oh wow, this is like, they're only doing 30 million in revenue. This should be way bigger. And so mainly, I just wanted to see the deal. Like that's how it started. I was like, I love to see this stuff. Like so I just wanted to get my eyeballs on the deal. And all of a sudden a bunch of people were like, that's an interesting, I'm in. And in particular, Chaz Flexman, who's a friend of mine, he runs something called Star Day Foods, which is like he has this whole mechanism for generating consumer product and distributing it in grocery in particular. So he has like grocery distribution in a way that's not my world. But he was like, this is interesting to me. And then I don't know if you guys know Isaac Madera's from Mini Katana. He was like, dude, I'd create content. This is awesome. And so I was like, oh, this is like, let's just keep pulling on this thread. And I just kept getting people DMing me, being like, hey, I know so and so, do you want to talk to X, Y, and Z? And so now tomorrow we have the three of us have a call with the bank that's running the deal. So who knows what will come out of it? I don't know that I genuinely have intention. But I am really interested in the overlap of these things, which is like a media property that has access to 13 million YouTube subscribers and a product and the way that that could create and would make my world so much easier when trying to create assets and run growth. So long answer, but that's what I'm up to. No, no, I love that. I love that. It's a good segue into something that you also posted recently, which was a graph which you called the Mona Lisa of Ecommerce. And there's a good segue into that because creating negative CAC or trying to fight the increase of customer acquisition over time creates that kind of perfect graph that you mentioned. You're mind talking about that. I love that. So that's a business. So there's this methodology that certain brands are able to deploy to create expanding margin over time. So if you have a consumable product or a product with really high LTV, maybe it's a subscription business. In the example, I think that Mona Lisa is actually a supplement business is actually the graph of what it is. And so they have like a 200% increase in customer value in a year. So if I require a customer for $50, they become worth $150 to me in a year. So that's the idea there. The three times are 200% increase in value. So what happens is if you can produce that kind of increased value of every customer that you acquire, if you hold your new customer acquisition constant. So I acquire the same number of customers every year or every month. They 5,000 new customers every single month and I never have to increase that. What happens is the percentage of my revenue every month that comes from new versus returning customers begins to shift. When you start month one, you had zero existing customers and you acquired 5,000 existing customers. And then slowly over time, what happens is you're still acquiring 5,000 but now you have 20,000 returning customers and 24 and so your margin expands because you're not paying for that second and third and fourth purchase. You're only paying the same amount of cash as the revenue expands over time. And so that's where you go from having in the first month, maybe you have a two to one MER. You're paying for every dollar. You might even have a 1.5 MER. But the same strategy deployed every month. Eventually you're running at a 10 to one MER. You're running at a 15 to one MER and the margin can expand over time. But you have to be patient. That's a slow process. It compounds gradually over time and depending on how much LTV you get determines how fast you can go. But if you can do that, it is a beautiful thing to watch it come to life. What happens? I love that. I love the name you put to it. The Mona Lisa maybe. It's just a question. I like it. It's like, yeah, it's like what is the most beautiful graph you could imagine if you're an e-commerce business owner and it's that. It's like this widening margin. While revenue, top line revenue grows and margin expands, like that's sort of the dream, right? Usually those things have a cost to one another. Is that something that you guys do at CTC working on like LTV and retention or churn? Like do you work also work on that? Not just in my position? Yeah, so we have an email and SMS offering. And then I would say that retention as a strategy is really holistic and then it involves every channel. So we think about paid media is a lever for retention as well. And we have specific ways that we'll think about that. So as an example, I really think that when I think about paid media, the role it plays in retention is that I don't want to speak to what I would call active customers. So customers that are from the day they purchase, you could graph the average time between their first purchase and second purchase for every customer ever, right? And it ends up being like a bell curve, meaning that there's some point at which most of the customers, if they're going to repurchase, have purchased, right? And that period is what we would call the active period, the period in which they're still likely to repurchase. I don't want to advertise to those people again. But once they lapsed, they haven't been responding to emails, they haven't been responding to SMS, and they've reached beyond that period. Now I'm going to put them back into my paid media funnel. So that's one way I think about paid media doing that. And then the second is, if you're a business that has new product releases a lot, you still want to distribute that information using paid media. But what you want to do is you want to make sure you don't overlap like the efforts and channels. That's where you create a lot of attribution noise. So when we send an email, let's say you're in a parallel brand, and you've got a new clothing line launch, and you want everybody to know about that, new and existing customers. We're going to send the email. We're going to wait usually 36 hours, is when the tail of engaging off that email reaches, if they're going to click on it, they've clicked on it, then we'll fire up our paid media to existing active customers too. So every channel has a different cadence by which it's trying to reach everybody. I think people think retention sometimes, they just think email and SMS. That's obviously a huge part of it, because you can speak for free to people there. But there's people that don't click on emails. They just don't. They're overwhelmed, and they're not going to engage in that channel. You've got to reach back to another way. Yeah, usually about 60% do not click. So 70. That's right. So if all you're doing is hammering that group with email, you're missing the opportunity to, and there's another part of this, which is just, I think that there should be some portion of your budget that is dedicated to just keeping your customers connected to the brand, showing off the cool things that you're doing, giving them the latest update on the new influencers that are wearing the product, keeping you top of mind in their reality. And running like video view campaigns and reach, those are cheap ways to a small audience. It doesn't need it, like, because your customer list isn't huge usually. But just some way that they, the only thing that they see from you isn't an ad for a thing to buy. It's also you're giving them the sort of bigger story surrounding your brand all the time. Yeah, like that. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. But if someone out there who's they just start an business, or they've got a limited budget, a limited runway, how do you approach that discussion of saying you need to build a brand or balancing brand building with performance driving activity or direct response activity? How would you have those conversations with people who might not necessarily, they kind of feel that they need to do branding, but they don't know whether it makes sense for them and their business right now to do that. They can't invest enough to wait for that long term brand building to have an impact. That's a great question. So I think about this the same way I think about personal finance, which is let's imagine you and I were discussing investment advice. And you were struggling to pay your mortgage this month. And I came to you and I was like, I have an investment idea in a condo you should buy over here. Well, whether or not that condo is a good investment is sort of irrelevant relative to your cash position. You need money today to pay your rent tomorrow. Like, it doesn't matter if that yields 100% return 12 months from now. You'll be broke before you get there, right? And so every brand needs to understand where they are at in that cycle. Do I need money today to survive? If so, awareness and brand campaigns probably aren't the answer to that problem, right? But brands are eventually reach a maturity stage where I have some savings. And I go, wait, I now can make the kind of investment that has a longer term payback period. And so now looking at that condo or buying that brand awareness media to create future value that doesn't pay back in a direct response fashion makes a ton of sense. And so this is a question that's relative to your cash position, your present needs, the cut like all these things go into making the right decision there. And so it's really just important to understand in what period do you need the money to come back to you? Because there are different tactics to accomplish different goals. So what do you think about this whole kind of push towards brand formance? So you have performance creative, but it also does the job of brand awareness as well. Do you think that is something that is possible? Do you believe in that? What kind of branded content do you think it's that a brand should start with and how would you suggest they measure the performance of that? I think you always want to be intentional and thoughtful about how to determine if thing the advertising that you're serving is meeting its objective. So I think that's like a truth generally. Now that said, I really believe that there is a place to create the kind of content that is expressly measured by your satisfaction of the communication of your brand story to your customer in a way that is only measured by your satisfaction effect. content. And if you are intimately connected to your customer, I believe that that will matter. Now, that can't be a lot of it because that's really ambiguous. But I think that that stuff does matter. So one, I'll just say that and people probably wouldn't expect that from you. But I really believe that, especially if you were the kind of founder who is intimately connected to your community, and you know your people, and if you love it, they're going to love it. Like you should have some sensibility about that. But then I think that there is, there are dollars that you want to pay back in six months. And so you should measure them on that horizon. And that can be longer form content that can often be related to building your email database where that's like a maybe a longer term payback cycle or growing your organic social audience or whatever it might be building these future value potential in the form of audience access is a good way to think about long term return. So that like, by Q4, if I invest my email database today, I have some sense of their future value. And I know I'll realize it in that moment. So like brands can do that kind of work. And that'll often exist in the form of like a lead gen funnel with a little bit different payback. Maybe it's a ridge does this thing every Q3 where they give away a car. That's a sweep stakes. That's all about building that organic audience ahead of Q4, like those kinds of actions. So I think they're all just on different time horizons. And you should still feel an obligation to measure their impact. But it certainly gets harder. They're further out you go. Yeah, for sure. I wanted to like go one level deeper when you talk about this type of activities, which channel are we talking about? I'm thinking YouTube's Twitter. You mentioned course per view, but is there like others do you use meta? Do you stick to a question? So this is I think I think where we have incorrectly assigned channels to funnel stages. So what you just did is I think that everybody naturally doesn't their head. They go, Oh, TV equals top of funnel. YouTube equals top of funnel. Meta equals bottom of fun. And that's just that to me is like, wait a second, meta has six, like two and a half billion people on the platform. What do you mean? It can't be top of funnel. Literally every human on earth uses this platform. The question is, what is the campaign structure and objective for how you're running it? The audience is the definer of the funnel stage more than is the platform because you can run YouTube remarketing like you that's a tactic that you can very easily deploy that oftentimes is where people start with YouTube actually, or you could run YouTube prospecting and exclusion existing like every channel has that potential. Now, the reason that something like a billboard or TV often gets lumped in that is more about their inability to define their often their audience than their ability to define the audience. In other words, you can't exclude your existing customers from the billboard. Like there's so it's gets called that out of its inability to define the audience, not out of its ability to define the audience. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. One of the things I was just thinking when you mentioned the thinking about the cycle of your active customers and when they might be able like my churn and tactics like you just mentioned to like maybe keep them top of nine or build velocity of your brands to them like top of mine awareness to your brand. I think the measure of churn potentially depending on how you track things could be a good way to do that. Like if you know people are churning after day 29 because it's a subscription and at day 30 there's a bunch that you're going to lose. You can easily see if running a couple of these tactics that don't have to be very expensive like a cost per view on YouTube is like literally pennies. You could measure that and see if like you gain like a couple of percentage points on that on that channel. That could be huge. So I don't know if you have a software background at all. Have you worked in software or app growth marketing? Yeah. So what you're describing and I actually think that this is a world that I try to study a lot because I think growth marketers in SaaS and apps often think very differently about those topics specifically. And so like there's a couple of examples of things that I think are really important. One is yeah, this idea that what action could you assign to a user to make them more likely to stay? So Twitter, the classic example when they launched was they found out that if they could connect you to six people like you wouldn't leave the app. Right? So that customer acquisition cost was all relative to their ability to create the experience on the backend that made people stay for a really long time. So I think about this all the time with the brand is what experiences what I need to give them after getting my product to reduce their likelihood of churn. So let's think about things that could be relative examples of that. If they follow me on Instagram, now I'm in their feed for free all the time. Does that increase their their likelihood of churn? If I get them to consume a video about how to use the product, if I could connect them to other users in their area, maybe it's a run club for a product that use that like what could I do to build the surrounding experience of the product such that they are more likely to become more valuable to mean the future. That's a very like software app style thought process that consumer product doesn't do because the growth hooks aren't built into the product in the same way that they are with an app. But you still I think there's a huge opportunity to think about the user experience as a mechanism for reduce churn or higher LTV, which are functionally the same thing, right? They're just like numerator denominator of that sort of calculation. But I agree with you that there's a lot of work, especially if my product was a subscription product or a consumable, I think you have to live in that reality. You have to constantly be thinking about how to create that experience that the user continues to want to come back. Another thing another similar idea is in in software and apps, there's a metric that people care a lot about called the viral coefficient, right? Which is this idea that for every user you acquire, how many users do they bring with them, right? Now the lowest brow version of thinking about this is like, are you talking about a referral program? And no, I'm not. But I am thinking about how do I give the customer language such that they want to share my product with their audience? And oftentimes if I give them a story about the product, what it'll make them more likely to do is share a cool story. But if I just give them the product, so I'll give you an example. And this is a thing I do all the time. When I go and sit with founders, if you ask them about their product, they'll often launch into an amazing story about what inspired them to make that shoe. So I'll give you an example. I work with a company called APL, they make sneakers, awesome, really cool designer. And I was sitting with one of the, it's a family that runs the business and twin boys that are like the product designers. And he was telling me about how the heel of the shoe was inspired by Japanese pancakes. And like he was walking me through how he was this, and I was like, Adam, that story you just told, if I knew that about this shoe, I would tell it to other people. But, but nowhere in your website, in the post purchase flow, in the ads, does that come to life? So when I get the shoe, I don't, I don't really know what to say about why, or how it was designed. I don't have words for it that are cool that I could talk about to my friends. But if you give me the language, now you make me a hero in my world, I get to tell the cool story. You want me to tell the cool story. So give me the language. And I think that's like really important for bands. And think about is how do you give your customer the story you want them to go tell? And there's a, there's a social media company here in LA that got famous because they had, like for three years running in the in the late 20 teens, they had like the most watched videos on YouTube. It was an organization called First Media. Okay. And their creative director, I listen to him talk one time and he had this line that stuck with me forever that it fits perfectly into this. He says, when you create, you're creating for your audience's audience. Okay. If you think about what social media is, I want to, the hero is me, not you, the brand. The way you make me the hero is you give me content that I can share with other people that makes me look cool. And so if you think about how we all, we all have those group DMs, group text messages. And when you share something cool into those threads, you are cool. You get credibility off of that. And so as brands, we want to empower our customers to be heroes in their world. So by giving them that language. And so I think the viral coefficient is often related to how good of a story did we give our customers to tell about us to their friends about why they have the product. And I think that's like all connected to that's not tactical campaign structure setup stuff. But it is really thinking about how true brand gets built and spread. It's true. And that's that's also why memes work really well. You know, that's you want, that's what you share with your friend. That's the language of the internet. Exactly. That's how things move. That's how ideas spread. Have you guys ever seen there's like that shoe sole called victory that's like all those videos where they like push the sole down it like springs up in the air. Have you ever seen that? So it's like an insole that's supposed to have like a tension built into it so it makes you run faster, whatever. But that's another example where reason something like that spread so well is because I take my shoe off and I do the thing to show people, right? And so like one of the things so when we started Kelo brand so my brother started Kelo the silicone wedding ring company. And one of the reasons that spread so fast was because in conversation someone to be like is that a rubber ring and everyone what they would do is they would unlike you can't do this with your shoe they would take it off and hand it to people, right? So they could like feel it. And so the texture became the story. And so it was very easy to spread versus like your shoe you're going to take off your shoe and be like look here it is, right? So it has to have some visual hook to get you there. But but oftentimes product spread like that. And so what I see is that some brands have this natural high viral coefficient. Sometimes it's because their audience is like young good looking women and so they share a lot on social media and a lot of people follow them and so they have natural virality. And then some people it's like, my customer doesn't share anything on social media so I have to really work at it. But the other thing, the other way you think about this is that if you can find digitally identifiable groups like where people aggregate and congregate online and you can see product into those spaces, then you can often get sort of the benefit of of a virality of that community. Like one of the businesses that I work with right now that's in sport, like youth sport, youth baseball in particular, which is a very niche viral community where the kids all interact with each other constantly. And so if something goes cool in those spaces, it like takes off really, really fast. 'Cause it's all a monkey-see monkey-do culture, right? And so it just, and you don't have to do any advertising, but you just have to implant it and embed it into the right spots and it just goes. So I think businesses would do a lot better to think about how advertising could drive into those effects a little bit more than just trying to think about how they could efficiently pay to acquire every subsequent customer. - Yeah, yeah, mostly what we were talking about last week, actually, yo, the brand, where you were talking about the spreading of DVDs, organic, human and community, the basketball brand. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, and we were talking about N1. Do you remember N1, basketball? - Of course, yeah, of course. - So our generation, I was talking about getting the DVDs back in South of France, I don't know, I got it, but it made it all the way to South of France, so you could be there. - That's right, it was huge. - So yeah, it was, yeah. - That's a brilliant example of like, again, that's literally a story that someone's taking around as a DVD and spreading for you that's about your business. - Yeah, so you've said a few things from your content. I think I know what you're, I think I know your few on this comment is gonna be, but in our last episode, we spoke to this, a chap called Cedric Yarrish, and he is working for an app company that like, 100 million users, like huge scale, and like crazy. And the way he, the way his team is now structured, his former smarting team, is that they focus solely on the deployment of creative, the deployment of ads, and they let the algorithm, they let meta, for instance, control the ads that get the most spend, based on performance, and they just push everything that way. And from doing that and optimizing all these processes around that, his view is that media buying is dead. And I would be interested to get your take on that, because I think you guys are a lot about the technical still getting in the weeds and the campaign structures and all that kind of stuff. So what would be your response to media buying instead? - It's because he doesn't deal with inventory. - There you go. - It's really easy. - Like, there you go. The fundamental missing data point to allow meta, to have complete control over media allocation is inventory. Is in our business, I do not have an infinite amount of every unit and every unit is not the same, of the same value to me. And so there's a problem all the time that happens in advertising for e-commerce. Is let's say I have 10 of unit A and 50 of unit B, and meta goes, oh, the most efficient result is unit A and moves all my dollars to selling unit A, and then it stops going, I'm left with 50 of unit B and I've got nothing to say, and I'm not selling it, and I'm all my cash is tied up in my higher inventory principle. So my dream would be for it to be true that media buying was dead, and that I could allow all the data, meta to optimize based on my inventory, my marginal value of every skew, my cash position, and let it go to work, because I think AI would be better at it. But we are playing different games, him and I, and until they do that, I actually think it is the single biggest problem that businesses have in e-commerce is how they're managing their media buying relative to the connection to their inventory and the marginal value of each unit that they have. So I would even be willing to bet that we don't philosophically disagree, he and I, that in the event that the machines have access to all of the data to accomplish my business objective, the best thing to do is to get out of the way and to go solve the creative problem. But if they don't have that data point, the only choice I have is to play the role of introducing it into the calculation. And do you think it thinks again that way, right, they're talking about integrating with Google Analytics, for instance, do you think they will get a kind of Shopify integration, stock level integration? Yeah, I think that there is no reason for meta to not to try and absorb more and more and more data, and that AI is giving them the capacity to process more information such that their algorithm can now compute all the external signals of the user behavior as well as take into consideration optimization for, because the thing about the system is it's like, it's actually fairly simple, right? Now your choice is for optimization or pretty narrow. You can optimize for website conversions on a seven day click, one day click, like there's like, let's call it eight permutations of optimization settings. But when I start introducing all these other things, you introduce like infinity potential optimization settings, which is way more complicated to build a system. For MetaSake, the narrower the objective set, the easier it is to build a really robust thing that serves it. And so I think that AI and the computational power of AI is what's unlocking their ability to add in more objectives for optimization. It's just a function of compute basically. It is interesting. I mean, for a what I worked at Let's Portaver a while and we used like a feed provider, as I'm sure you guys use feed providers a lot of DBAs and things. And I think a lot of those guys at that time, like five or so years ago, we're working on a way of you kind of using them to surface inventory or do the optimization in platform. So it makes complete sense. That's right. The way they've still. I think feeds, this is like a, you want to go real sort of my future, to put it out of what I think the basically the future of a brand is a feed more than a store. Like that basically you create a set of products with a corresponding set of data and then you feed it to lots of different purchase endpoints, right? You feed it to TikTok shops, you feed it to target.com, you feed it to Walmart, you feed it to Google, you feed it to Meta and transactions happen at all of those layers. And maybe you have a store, maybe you don't, but like websites are archaic. They're really a terrible idea. Like the idea that users should have to type into a browser bar a specific place to go to buy things versus being able to buy things everywhere. Like I just watch my kids like interact with the world and for them like Alexa and Siri are true. Like if I get into an argument with my children, they go to Alexa and whatever Alexa says is right. And I don't ever think of asking Alexa something. It's just not my behavioral pattern at all. So it's going to be so natural for them to go, oh, Alexa, where's this toothbrush? Like and so purchase is going to get disintermediated like to everywhere. And so in that case, what is a brand? Well, a brand is a set of products with a corresponding set of data that it gets fed everywhere into the world. And so I think feeds and the data associated with the product, the inventory position, the marginal cost, all that architecture around really clean data structure of those things is what's being built in e-commerce right now. Like if you look at all the software that's being developed, it's all like better accounting data rails, better inventory data rails because the big mess in e-commerce is like you receive all this product from different sources at different times with different costs. And then you sell it later and you don't know exactly what it costs. And we don't know inventory spread out all these warehouses and different spreadsheets. It's like that it's messy. And in most organizations right now, it's like a web of spreadsheets that maybe Mike knows and Suzy doesn't and it's like it's really messy but that's getting cleaned up. And once that data infrastructure exists, then all of this becomes a lot easier because there's like one, here's my source of everything. And now Meta can go great. Now I know everything about your business and I can optimize to create whatever out there we want. Go feed of products and feed of content. Just feeds everywhere. That's exactly you're just like even say my idea though, like they just did this with Daba for video right, which is you now can take a dynamic feed of video content. And so basically what Meta's doing if you like really follow the dots, they're just like give me everything and get out of my way. Like that's the general messaging. Stop picking which video to give me. Just give me all the videos. Stop picking which product to show. Give me all the products right and let me decide on your behalf. And that's like where a lot of this is heading because humans are bad at this. Like we're bad decision makers. We think we know but we don't. I think that feeds into the another feed. Fills into the idea that you talked about we're going to see the first one person, $100 million E-commerce in the next. I don't know what's the horizon to that do you think? Like is it already happening? I asked five years. I asked five years. Okay. Yeah, that was just my question. That was what I was thinking about. I thought I was thinking about it. I was like how long before I think that happened. And I think that seems right. To me it's hard to know because AI is like evolving in this crazy pace that like does it flatten out or do we all just like end up doing nothing? I don't know. It's crazy right now. It is crazy. It is mad. There's one concept to talk about because I thought it was really cool. You mentioned recently the five P's and our brands can create peak moment. And I think in your space there's the idea that you've got Black Friday Cyber Monday, some like you know, Mother's Day. There's a few days like Christmas and like all looks kind of like all the days and things like that. But you had this concept that I thought was really cool. That allows brand to maybe create more of those moments to scale. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so. One of the things that I try to push back on a lot is brands get stuck on this hamster wheel of just always trying to say the same thing like a little bit differently more efficiently So they're on this like I call it the iterative hamster wheel which is I've got a product I came up with some ads and now I'm just gonna forever try and to beat those ads New hook new headline new variation cut this cut that and you just try forever and the reality is is like like each one is like marginally different in some subtle way and if you've ever seen a scatter plot that I publish of all the ads It looks like that. It's like most of them are the same There's some singular outliers that are really wildly different and then the rest of them are kind of the same The way to combat that system is to actually step back and be marketers is to tell stories and to create a line Minute across your business where everybody's pulling on the same end of the road in the most compelling possible way around driving disproportionate conversion In a singular period of time. So that's like what black Friday cyber Monday is right? It's like a cultural event where everybody's agreed We're all gonna spend a bunch of money today for some gardeners what reason but we just do it and everybody's like Well, that was my best day all year Well, it had nothing to do with the copy on your ad It had nothing to do with whether or not you had a blue background or a red one It's because that's a culturally embedded behavioral thing. So I Think brands all the time should try and figure out how to tag themselves into those kinds of moments or to manufacture them Around their brand in a way that creates an imperative for purchase That isn't related to whether the ad is green or blue or whether the hook is that or good, but it's deeper than that and so I've been saying this a lot and I realized that there's an onus on me to sort of give examples of what I mean To help people see it because the idea of like creative revenue peak a lot of times people just go like oh So like a 20% off sale. It's like no, no, that's that's not what I mean There are there are ways to do this. So I've decided I'm gonna put out this framework and I'm gonna give a bunch of examples over the next few weeks I'm gonna publish a few of these and so you mentioned it's five p's So it's like when you go to create a moment think about these five things What is the product you're selling? What is the place that you are selling it out or where the product should live in people's visual mind? Who are the people you want talking about it? What's the press that would support it and who are the partners that can help distribute it right and so the example that I gave is With one of our clients again APL that did a product release Connected to the Monaco Grand Prix. So it starts with this question of what is our brand position? Okay, in other words because that's gonna help you think about the answers to where should you be? Who should you talk to and so their brand identity is luxury performance? Like if you opened up a brand book of theirs. That's the category. They're trying to define for themselves And so if you think about the overlap of those things like f1 Formula one is sort of the most bougie sport right if you think Formula one you think money and yachts and Mercedes and Lamborghini and Ferrari right so that's a great space to bring that story to life So they created a partnership with the Red Bull Racing team Who next for Stappen is the The driver for that team that obviously creates a lot of press That's a very easy story to see out to the complexes and the hype beasts and all the people that you want talking about your product And then they launched a limited edition shoe And the key here is like there's not gonna be that many people that actually want to buy a Red Bull shoe like it's not This isn't a mass market product. This is like a limited edition marketing story, right? To drive awareness of the brand and sell your black sneakers like that's really what it's for right? So you tie it with the race in Monaco you shoot photography around it the weekend of that launch it goes live you sell 500 limited edition shoes Whatever you increase the awareness and traffic to the brand such that it disproportionately affects all of the revenue business And it gives you some like then you can just take pictures of Max Verstappen wearing Normal APLs and use though like so so it's all just becomes this this compounding Reinforcement of this brand story that makes it so that when you go to sell black sneakers later You've done a lot of that work of embedding and ideas into people and created a peak of revenue off those limited edition shoes Love that I thought was a great example. Thanks for that is great And so just to go back to the example of the concept of just constantly It's relatively testing your creative and things. It's like you could apply it to sports Football for instance you have a season and in that season each team will play each other a number of times And then the next season those same teams will play each other again It's not like everybody plays different teams very well And the next season team A will be team B and team B will be team C But nobody is really going back and saying is always like treat your treat your creative testing in seasons Like each quarter you're gonna take your best performers and then you really try the next season rather than just constantly coming up with just crap You know, you're just gonna end up racing to just random things. Well, and let's let's build on this metaphor because like I think what you see happen in sports and I'll use the NBA is like sort of the most obvious example is that teams Realize that being in the middle is like the worst thing to be right because if you have a team of five players and like last year you finished 500 you were 41 and 41 and you did nothing to your team or you made a small change to it You would be roughly somewhere around the same thing again. Maybe you go 38 and 44 But you you're never gonna become the NBA champion. So what teams do is they either go I want to be the worst where I'm trading all my assets for draft picks and I'm building for the future Or I'm gonna try and win the whole thing. There's nothing worse than being in the middle And I think so often brands live in the middle where it's just like Tomorrow your row ass is not gonna be three times better than it is today It's just like there's no plan you have that is going to suddenly yield Multiple standard deviations above your present mean and so if your present mean isn't profitable or it's not where you need it to be as a business You can't make small changes and expect wildly variable results. It won't happen You need to be like the sun to your spurs get Victor when they're not a bit when being young and you know that's it Yeah, and but this is this like it's it's a it's a we're being facetious a little bit But the truth that's actually how do you win the game? You have a uniquely disproportionately valuable edge in some way. Yeah, and that's where Victor Webbing Yama is is like and you can't win in the NBA Without LeBron or Steph or like you have to have Somebody like that or you can't win and the brands are no different Especially today the world is more competitive than it's ever been yeah if you don't have some edge It is like impossible to win and I think someone asked me the other day like if you were to start any commerce business right now What would you do and I said there was no way I'm starting any commerce business today without some Organic audience edge because the game is way too hard and that you're just you're just forcing yourself into the most difficult game ever if you don't have some clear edge Well, we're coming up to the to the wire but there's something we want to talk about because you will receive have a European audience here right and you guys are doing your Is it your global was it good again your global accelerator the commentary collector global accelerator can we chat about that for a bit I think it's really interesting. Is it in a nutshell tell me I'm completely wrong franchising CTC Two different markets so It's not a franchise model because we still own it like I'm not some no one's paying me for the license to the thing But but it is recognizing that the global market right now offers Labor leverage in a way that the US can't compete with which is that there are people equally as talented whose cost of living is lower and will work for cheaper That's the truth right and so what happens is The problem historically for me of servicing a seven-figure e-commerce brand as CTC Was that I couldn't make the math work for both sides and an early stage business like Should be paying around two to three percent of their revenue and agency fees, okay? so the reason we sort of start and eight figures is That's about twenty thousand dollars a month in agency fees is if you're doing a million dollars a month Two percent of your revenue is twenty thousand dollars. That's where I can make about 50 to 60 percent gross margin on my service Which is what I need to get to 20 percent on my bottom line is somewhere around 56 percent 50 60 percent gross margin and my people of US full-time labor are too expensive to move that price down and make it work Otherwise the only way I can do that is to to fractalize the work down so little that you aren't getting a good service from me There's just no way and so but what happened was I met somebody and It was a person that was in admission our community for a long time and he and I became friends he's in India and He Learned CTC at a level of obsession that I had never experienced like he knows more about us than me like and in a way that was like crazy And he could replicate everything I would I never say or do and he was delivering that as a service And so he would like it's funny. He would do so many things He would like get employees to leak him documents and like all sort like it was like obsess at a level that was crazy But what I found was like wow He can produce the quality of work that matters to me to impact these businesses and finally by building a structure around it I can do it at a price that allows me to actually serve the interest of both sides in this relationship and So we're we're early in that process and now the question is like how much global talent can we find and how good is that group of people and so I put out a tweet initially about that and we've gone through probably 150 interviews from people all over the world and this is the beautiful thing about e-commerce is that like the global market is catching up So whether it's the UK or Nigeria or Eastern Europe or India or the Philippines, like there are so many places where people are really indie commerce all of a sudden. And so the talent and the hunger and the enthusiasm is just really, really high. And so it's exciting and it's a we'll see where it goes, but so far it's been really cool. That's awesome. It's amazing. And I guess testament to you guys' process, right? You know, you know, it's repeatable success enough to put your name to it. That's right. And we have enough infrastructure now around technology and systems to be able to equip people too. So that was another part of it is that we had to get our infrastructure better so that more people could deliver it at the quality that we need without tons of experience, right? And so I think there was like we needed to mature the global market probably needed to mature. Now the question is just like how how fast is that arbitrage on price going to get competed away? Like I think the global markets are going to accelerate and like what they can charge and the quality of the work so fast that I don't know how long it will last and we'll see. But for now there's still a spot that's like a really good wage where people are making more money than they were elsewhere. And yet that's still a labor efficiency for us that it makes sense. And we'll see how long that lasts. Amazing. That's great. All right. A little moment of self-plug. Well, can people find you? What do you want to promote? Yeah, go for it. Well, I mean, I appreciate you guys mentioning that because you know, you have a unique audience that if you are somebody that's interested into grow strategy, into paid media and would be interested in learning about that program, we'd love to talk with you about that. I'm at Taylor Holiday on Twitter. My DMs are open. That's the easiest place to get a hold of me. So please, by all means, reach out. Happy to chat with you. And if you're a seven-figure brand owner and you'd be interested in hearing about that program, but happy to chat with you about it. But otherwise I'll be talking about lots of different things on Twitter. Hopefully all helpful and not too confrontational. And it's been a good jam with you guys. Amazing. Thanks to you guys. It's been great, man. It's been really great. I'm sweating from the heat. I know. Keep it up with the noise. I know. It's fast and energy. So hopefully, I want to make it so that people get too ex speed without having to hit the button. Yeah, exactly. It's like two hours of podcast in 50 minutes. Exactly. It's been amazing. Amazing, man. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. And we'll get it up and out soon and everyone can dig in and love it. Cool. All right, John. Good to meet you guys. I'll see you later. Thanks, man. You too. Bye. Bye.