The $1M → $10M Ecom Growth Map

This is the most interesting place to stop because a lot of people can do the fuss too and they're easier to do to a certain degree because you just need to find the most core angles in the fuss level from one to two so people can just do that by researching their reviews and like, market calendars, you don't need to go deep. You just need to really need to do what is famous. Like, if I list them out, you will find 12. It's like, prime, mothers, like you will find them easily. The three to four is where actually a lot of businesses stagnate and the thing they need to solve for that at that point is offer market. Like offer market federally. You just need to do offer testing. A lot of people don't do that because two big degree that are understood what that is and also how to do it. And more importantly, this is where the DNA of the business, like that's why we have the growth use and it just matters so much. - This episode of the e-commerce playbook is brought to you by Attentive. Marketing works best when it feels personal because when people feel understood they engage. Attentive is the omnichannel marketing platform that helps you do just that by sending personalized SMS, email, and push messages that customers love. It's marketing made personal. Visit Attentive.com/CTC to see how brands turn customer insights into meaningful moments with Attentive. Hey folks, welcome to the e-commerce playbook podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Threat Collective. And we are joined this week by a very special guest, Joyce Sharma, who heads up our global accelerator program here at Common Threat Collective. Now for those of you who don't know, the global accelerator program is primarily focused around seven figure businesses because the sort of core growth strategies, G's, they're not. Core growth strategies that you need at seven figures at the various sort of, across the spectrum of seven figures. And the growth strategies you need at eight figures look very different. So Joyce joining us today to talk a little bit about that. But first off, Joy, how are you doing today, man? - Yeah. - Yeah. - You all right, Ed? - Great. - Well, let's just drive straight into it. So basically, why don't you give us the rundown of what the continuum from like 1 million to 10 million looks like? Because what you would present it to me a little bit earlier is this idea that there's sort of a different core strategy you need to double revenue starting at the beginning of seven figures all the way to eight. So maybe talk a little bit about that spectrum and kind of how you've been thinking about it. - So the way we were playing with this idea was, I wanted to get an assign. What is the one strategy that you can do at a certain revenue level like between seven to eight figures that if you just did that one thing, you would be twice. Like that's the one thing that will double your business, add that standpoint, add that point in your business. And we build different things and we walk through it through everything in the stage. But I think the most important lesson in this is, when people start doing any playbook like this where it's like, oh, this is the one thing I should do at this point. What we want to also make very explicitly clear is like, you do this one thing to this degree. A lot of people, for example, like when you start with creative, it's like, oh, we need to make a lot of ads and we need to make a lot of creatives. And then when you're a million dollars in revenue and like, that's basically where this initially starts, which is like, let's say you have prognarcha fit from zero to one million, I'm considering. That's what you have. You do that and then only you come to us. So I'm just going to talk from my experience at our portfolio that once you do that, the first thing you should be doing when you're one to two million is you should be producing as a debt, like it's creative. Everyone talks about it. It's the same thing. But the difference is you should be figuring a way to produce about 100 ads a month. Like I had a one to two million dollars. Like that's what you should be doing. So when we say the most important thing, that's going to double you, meaning you're a million dollars or we'll make you two million dollars or if you are like 1.5, it will make you three, whatever you're in the range between. That is the one thing that will double your business. But when I say you need to do that and then move onto the next thing, it's like, do so that you can make 100 a month. And that's it. That's the number. That number changes when you go, like, now if you notice, like as we go through this journey at 4 million, I think that's some other level, it's also creative. When we, it's creative again, what happens is like it's just a different approach to creative, right? Now it's just like, can I make more walling? Because your hatred is going to be through the roof because you don't have anything in the account. A lot of people that go through this journey that come to us actually are like, yeah, I just have five as I work. We call them legacy ads because you just found your thing. And it's very easy to find things in an empty add account because you kind of, you have an offer market fit and then you'll make ads that work. And then what happens is because they're first to market those ads, they will just keep working. Till the end of your business, those ads will just work. It has no strategy into it. It has nothing. You just tested things and you found what works. And after six months, my take on this is like an ad just works because of the sheer data that's behind it. And we see this, like, if you have a legacy ad and you turn it off, you're done. Like, if you turn it off, you reset it, that ad never picks up. And that's why the idea is like, at one to two, just make enough creatives, you find something that wanes and those five ads are alone enough to carry your account forward. And that's basically how it goes. That's the idea. And then like, when you're at four to five, you're doing very different things. At four to five, you're probably making 100 ads a week because you've probably found the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit and now you need to do so much and now your hatred regresses to the average and now you're also playing with different people. When you're a million dollars, you're playing with like mom and pop shops, which you can just open your ads library up and you will see like, they have stupid, simple images. Like, it's very easy to beat in that market. And then you're like four or five million. And then you're actually playing with someone decent in the auction, that's why. That was the idea. - Yeah, yeah, another makes sense. So at the kind of initial stage of cracking into the seven-figure range, what you have to focus on is basically ramping up your creatives somehow because there's easy ones to be found, you haven't really been doing anything significant in the ad account probably up to that point. But you know you have a product that works, you have some sort of organic base of revenue. So it's all about cracking creative. And then, so you'd mention then when you get up to five million, all of a sudden your focus has to go back to creative. But in the sort of space between, so from like two to four, there's a couple of ways that you, basically what this kind of looks like to me is like, ways that you're fine tuning creative or building a broader creative strategy. So talk a little bit about the two to three and three to four million range. - Yeah, so that is, you start with work market fit. You find that ads are work. Once you have legacy, what happens is, you don't have a lot of resources out at one to two millions. So you will try to make your ads and what's going to happen is, because you're actually trying to produce ads a cheap cost, you will not find really big ads. And what will happen is then, how can I make each ad that I produce for the lowest cost in the most impactful? That's what second thing is. So between two to three million, what everyone should be focusing on is a market calendar. What I mean by that is, there's something they're not doing. That's why I have it at that stage. So if you're at two million, I truly believe you do this one thing, you will get the formula. That's that. That one thing done for a year, of course don't do it that way. Like just rather, probably don't know what you'll understand what I mean. But it's like, if you want to double the business from two to four, you should do market calendar. Again, what I mean by market calendar here is like, how many evens do you have in a month? For business like that, they probably have like two in a year. Like it's like back Friday and whatever the second biggest thing is, that's all they're doing. And if you just move towards, can I do one a month? Can I have one market moment a month? And then can I just make creatives about that? Because my hatred on that is probably going to be 100% I've never done it. There's no baseline. And it's going to be better than evergreen. Just go and do that. And it's just operationalizing this ruthlessness. This is like more of like how I'm playing the game is like, these are the rules. This is what we're teaching. It's like, you just start playing the game and you do these things and these sound simple. But if you actually experience it on the other side, which this is like what I do every day. I experience both clients interactions are with Twitter to begin with. They would like every DDC owner goes into right. He will read through everything and he will understand everything, but he will just not know what to use when. So what this does is like, probably you read about people doing creatives. You probably don't need it. You're at a different stage. We're at the most important thing to be different. So that's what we're trying to do. So Martin calendar to the easiest level, which is, can I do one marketing moment a month? And can I do it related to a cultural moment that I stand with? And I need to force myself into it. And then can I make images for that? And like to make it even stupid simple for the lowest cost, can I take my best ad, those five legacies and put a banner on top with the marketing moment? Even if it's prime, take your best legacies, put the prime on it, you will win. That is it. And we're trying to like double it on so small numbers. That's all we care about at that point. There's a lot happening in marketing right now, AI, new channels, evolving customer expectations. And if you're like most brands, you're wondering how to keep up while still delivering personalized experiences. That's where attentive comes in. Attentive is the omnichannel marketing platform that helps brands create messages people welcome across SMS, email, and push. Here's how. Attentive identified shoppers across devices and learns from their behavior in real time then AI agents act on that intelligence to personalize every message, send time, and channel. The result, messages that feel helpful, not interruptive. Visit attentive.com/CTC to learn how attentive helps connect people and the brands they love. Yeah, that makes sense. So then just to recap a little bit, like one to two million is about basically like I was saying before, you have product market fit. You're just trying to find some sort of evergreen paid strategy that works. But once you get to that point, the next tranche of growth comes from developing like actual sort of reasons to buy outside of just regular, so the regular sort of evergreen cycle, so that's building that basic marketing calendar. So then the next level up here, like the three or four million kind of roughly speaking range, it's a further defined. So talk a little bit about this. Yeah, this is the most interesting place to stop because a lot of people can do the fuss too. And they're easier to do to a certain degree because you just need to find the most core angles in the fuss levels from one to two so people can just do that by researching their reviews and like marketing calendars, you don't need to go deep. You just need to do what is famous. Like if I list them out, you will find 12. It's like prime mothers, like you will find them easily. The three to four is where actually a lot of businesses stagnate. And the thing that need to solve for that at that point is offer market. like offer market federally, you just need to do offer testing. A lot of people don't do that because to a big degree that are under some what that is and also how to do it. And more importantly, this is where the DNA of the business, like that's why we have like the growth e-score and just matters so much, which is if you're in a industry where I can build subscription into it, you will get out of this charge very easily because you just know what to do. It's like, okay, I got to make a subscription only offer some way shape or form. I need to make it good and you will do testing on that and like all your testing just comes from what is offer, what price, like my e-sure economics and it's easier to do. And that's why a lot of businesses in that industry don't don't get stuck here. But that's like 5% of the total industry. For everyone else, it's harder. It's harder because I was going to call with the growth charges recently and for them it is it has more about consumable cookies. Like it's a hard market. Like yes, there is subscription aspect into it. But end of the those proxies like $10. There's only a limit to what I can charge on that product. So for them, the biggest game would be merchandising. So like I would say there's like levels to it. You can come up with a cool name to this. But like I would say your industry, your end will dictate what you need to solve for. And that's why offer testing is the least standard thing that can happen. That is where you actually need expertise of people who just have done a lot of the look at, which is if your CPG it's everyone it's easy for that cookies brand. It's more about it's actually really about economics, which is like how much demand do I have? Like that business probably needs to merchandise every week. That's what they need to do. They have limited edition flavors. They have so many different things. Like that's the game they would play. That's how they will win an offer winning, which will probably like a sample pack. And then like can I not sell individual products? Like I just don't want to sell individual products. That's what they're going to do. Decrease everything that's low-avie. Like that's the game they will play. Then if you take another business I was posting some characters. We have delta industry. They're so wild. But like if you're a if you're a retail brand that's trying to make it in hope. DDC a lot of times their orders are bigger. Because of I think there's a brand we sell like lights. It's a great example because on average a person would buy 10 of this. So we kept playing with this idea. And again, like I want this to be impactful enough that I'm at three million. This alone would get me to six. And for them it was like if on average a person buys 10, is there a wall in which I can do like the honor ring strategy which is like it is great. Like all of these strategies the closest I can get similar to a SaaS model like the subscription model the more fast drive will win. So in that industry it's like can I get one light and give it like can I motion as for one light. So I can run on a very aggressive roast like if it's a hundred dollar prog. And it's a 10 dollar prog. It's easier to sell the 10 dollar prog. I will still set it at the same pack of $30 that's a point three roast. I'll just go and crush everyone in that market. I'll move in. But the difference is like then can I give people the option to actually come back and buy the full thing because that's what they need. That's what usually sells naturally first and then cut what the value of the first product as 100% credit to us that purchase can a four worth LTV into industry where LTV doesn't exist inherently in the first 30 days. There's a very unique novel problem so far for that particular industry. So that's like another thing. And then similarly like you would need to figure out these offers this where I would say it's like biggest on most businesses. And it gets harder and harder the smaller the skews you are and like how further down you're in the industry. Like if you're in the industry where LTV doesn't exist I have no other product than I would probably play with are there free gifts can I introduce is their cash back like then it becomes a it becomes like can I do it back and this up so into other progs can I have a fill is like it is just all of that that gets built at that stage and this is like the one unknown and that's why like if you look at our profile business that work with us most of them that gets stuck at that point before coming to us like that's it. Like I haven't grown for a year because that's the one thing you just saw for there and the quality of solve at that base will determine how fast you go from that to then. Yeah. And that's a big one. So what's the you would want to double back like you mentioned the or ring strategy can you explain like what that is just for everybody's context. Yeah. So I think our ring on average right now costs like $300. That's probably the price range and so the idea is if I went to meta and I was like, hey, this is $300. Right. Please sell it. What do you think will happen? If you get the 90% of our account on meta that's like a 1.5 X-rays. If you get a 1.5 X-rays this I'm just not doing public math but find the 1.5 X-rays of this your cat you're not going to probably make a lot of money because you're going and you're demanding the action that is just so much friction asking someone to pay $300. So what R does is they have a sizing kit which like they're buying journey naturally was like you need to buy the ring and you will give you the sizing kit for free. They will ship the sizing kit. They will veer from the 10 sizes they send and then the one that fits then you go and tell them and then they make the actual ring in that size and this ship it to you. What the wave they went into acquisition this is the primary across Amazon which was like now they will actually sell the sizing kit that was initially free. They would sell it for $10. You can buy it and then you will come back and then you actually buy the full ring from us. That's when they're going to charge you the $300 and obligation that initially the dollars is free is just a sizing kit and they will give the whole $10 as a credit towards the purchase and now they have something talking email that will actually force people to buy it. But more importantly it's like it's the auction right going in an auction and saying it's a $300 product I'm willing to pay $200 get me a purchase. It is hard. It's very hard your volume is limited and you're probably not going to be as profitable whereas there's a $10 product and I will pay 50 for a person to buy it. You're just going to destroy people in that auction. It's like I don't care what your creative is at this point. It's like I'm going to go and pay a point to Roas to sell my product like you think I'm going to lose in that auction. No. That's what they would just scale very fast like whenever you see really good like business that scale really fast you just need to look at like they have probably done something in their offer that just that makes them stand out in that particular market. What's their competition? Like no. It's the same thing with that light company like that light company would actually destroy a lot of different light companies in that industry just because they would just be so aggressive in something that other people don't sell. And then the real thing that everyone sells is just a back into them. So it's all profit. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And you mentioned before like one of the advantages of working with the accelerator program is like you guys have insight into all of the different sort of innovative strategies around this that exist out there across different industries, different specific examples like you mentioned this light company where there's like a clear like there's a unique that actually could be replicable in different similar types of industries. So again, like instead of kind of throwing, you know, darts at the dartboard and it's kind of seeing what hits. It's like you can go to somebody who's actually has the unusual experience of having seen like dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of things. So so taking from other industries like like there's some industries that currently isn't the DC where their vehicles were quite nobody does that it's not supposed to be something you do. But they're actually some small set of these industries and they DC where if you run it to vessel and then you drive it to purchase it will actually work really well and then depending on how good the vessel like it's a. That's basically yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, there's sort of like an infinite number of things that could work, which is why this is such like an interesting and difficult phase, I guess. So let's let's keep rolling along here. So the next kind of level here would be the four to five million range. Yeah, roughly speaking again where you talk about leveling up your creative production to a hundred a week. We've talked a lot about creative operations. I don't think we need necessarily stick on that one. But then let's jump to the next tranche where in the five to six million range you talk about product development as being the primary focus so expand on that a little bit. It is a similar place so all of these things keep building up so like the reason we skip over four to five is basically you you just make more ads on the new offer and like you get to expand it more. Then what also happens like the way I'm going to expand my offer is like if I'm going to drive towards as was returning every night I can get. And like this is the most important thing that people need to remember which is like every business has LTV and the most profitable source for every business also LTV. So I'm doing pro development which is like if I don't have it front end like if I can't go and say here's the thing buy it and then I'll believe every month for it. Then I need to do the other way which is the only way that exists is here's something you would like to buy this so pro development comes in two ways which is if I have a core for you can either build in front of it or on the back of it which is like this is something if depending on the industry again this is again proprietary knowledge that helps a lot here. To talk to friends that are in the industry just until you and all that stuff but basically if there's a corporate there's always depending on the industry something that's easier to sell if I have a very high LV product it's probably easier to sell something at the front that the quick go get experience into and then it will help improve your acquisition and then the corporate becomes the back end or you just build something on the back end which is like I remember we had like Aaron Aaron used to work here. I think he had this really good idea of like if you sell caps that like if you sell like I know emergency caps that have lights in it you can probably sell the battery of that on a subscription like how much that works I don't know but like that is that is exactly what it means there's like depending on the industry you're in there's something that sells well on the back and this applies to everyone it also applies in adjacent industry which is like their friends of mine and like they're also clients here which is like you don't need to actually sell the same thing if you're in shoes you don't probably need to sell shoes and like it depends on how you like curated like you could sell things that are trending in that industry depending on the target audience like if the target audience for a shoe companies like 21 year old male certain size category whatever it is like those people don't necessarily to buy shoes again from you they can buy any other pro also so coming up with that pro of some the back end like that's what pro development And the reason it's at that range is because again, the aim is your four million. What is the one thing that will get you to eight million with just one thing? And then it usually takes like six months of development to have a product and like understanding these things. Perage development means a lot of things for a lot of different people. And again, it's a continuum. So what I mean is like, Perage development can range from I want to launch a new product every week, which some businesses do. I think there's Portland leather that does this and there are people who will just change the color. So I mean a very specific thing which like you're building that thing for a very specific aspect of it, which is like everyone talks with Perage development. Like I mean Perage development so that you can make more money from every customer. Like that should be the aim of that particular Perage development. Every different type of like changing colors, limitations like all of those have different reasons. But that's what we're doing right now. Yeah. So it's not necessarily like a product launch in order to so like oftentimes a product launch will take the form of like a marketing event, basically, which is like what you're talking about where clothing company will do drops or whatever every week. That becomes a marketing calendar event to kind of just get the numbers. But the reason they're doing is they're either doing it for more acquisition. Like can I run more traffic and get more like either that or I want to squeeze my existing file. When you're four to five, you don't have a file to squeeze to begin with and you probably have acquisition problem and the way you're going to win that is how can I pay more so I can spend more so I can grow my business. And that is the one problem we're trying to solve at that point with that program. So I think that the aim of that thing is very specific. Yeah. So yeah, the product drop thing that is kind of like about volume or whatever. And that's not what this is about. What this is about is basically like product development in order to grow margin essentially, right? Like can you develop a product that increases AOV, increases LTV has some sort of subscription element to it so you can you can facilitate the LTV increase a little bit easier. But being sort of again, like the offer testing piece of this, like being creative about the way that your product sort of exists in the customer's world so that you can develop something that gets you more basically, yeah, more revenue per customer's. I think that bonus points if you can do that in the cash and cycle you have. Yeah. So doing it both sides like can I extend the cash and cycle hours while doing this pro development and fit that additional person that time. That is bonus points. Yeah, right. So cash conversion cycle and LTV just increasing your GQ score all across. That's what you want to see for it. Okay. So that's difficult but straight forward in terms of sort of the explanation. So let's go to this next trot here. We're going to get kind of the upper ranges of the seven figure range. So six to seven million. And actually you have to explain this to me. We can cut this but hedges thread. What does that mean? It's like it's basically a sort of threat. All right. Okay. That makes sense. So what is just like few talk this is like so six to seven million range is actually the range here. You should probably hang out on Twitter. Like before this you just don't do that. It's detrimental to your business. I see. Probably not worth it. So what six to seven does is basically every trick that you see is probably going to be somewhat full hair. Like doing any of the tricks before this is just not impactful. So like we talk about let's change email. Let's do some tactic on email. Your file is not big enough for the cost of that action. Everything has a cost, right? Like when you're small, you need to be very ruthless about really resource allocation. And when we look at from that perspective, it probably no tactics worth it before six million dollars. I would say at six million dollars and million dollars. Again, I'm talking about what is the one thing you can do that will W. I would say probably a cluster of things which go around like I had this thread post which is like if you're in January, you're building a forecast for this year and you want to see how you can double it. Probably try doing the following things. I think the first thing was open international markets. If you are very seasonal, if you're very seasonal this summer, go and make Australia work. That's probably very big. Like, making a borrower, a little bit of Middle East work. Like those places are very incremental to you. It's the vice versa. If you're Austrian brand, make US word. So that's probably the first thing you should start looking at at that face before that don't. Like if you're a US brand and saying like I will start international before six million, probably don't not the best idea. Even at this point, I'm just making hedges of like making hedge against location, seasonality. That's usually a big one. Depends on how big the impact would be and these are easier things to do and that's why they're there. It's audiences. If I'm fully bought by a particular gender, it will be very impactful so that if 10% of my audience is that other gender, you'll probably win. The whole like this whole messaging comes from there was this thing that this is years old from Taylor that basically sat with me and like all of these are just different ways. You say that same thing. There's the way I want to win an auction. If we take this statement to be true, which is like the person who pays the most wins the most in an auction. Like that's how they fundamentally work. Then what happens is you either pay more, you find traffic somewhere else. Now if I want to pay the most or I want to be the most efficient, the way I want to do that is I don't want to take all the audience of a particular category because what will happen is that is one auction. The way I will win is I will win in multiple auction. I want the first set of customers, the lowest hanging fruit of course, a lot of auction. That's what we're doing. Like at some point at this point, easily opening your cap up in United States is going to be more expensive than paying the international cap with the highest margin, with a higher, sorry, worst margins, lower conversion rates. It's still going to be cheaper. Is this name for opening an audience? Like if you're fully women, probably opening at least 10% of male, like I don't want full market penetration. Like I don't want to go there. That's going to be expensive. Probably 10% of that is going to be good. So it's like those things are basically the things we're talking about. Email is actually helpful. Like setting up post purchase. Setting up a CS team to cause people to come back, like holding an email to you into a revenue. But like that's really it's actually helpful because they will produce a cost that they'll produce a revenue that's in excess of the cost they will charge, which most of the signs are not worth out of small level. That's what I mean here. That's how you don't really know this way. I see what you're saying. So basically at this point, what we're talking about is to small finding every sort of like incremental edge that you can find. Basically, whether that's like maybe there's some media buying tactic or whatever or it like you're mentioning like expanding audiences, expanding platforms, expanding countries. But maybe a way to summarize this is like from one to six, it's not really about expansion outside of expanding your creative volume. Is revenue and then yeah, that's all you're doing in different. All you're growing is LTV essentially AOV, growing margin per customer. At this point, now you begin to like you're mentioning, I like this idea of that like now you can dive into DDC Twitter and see what people are talking about because everybody's always talking about these little sort of tactical tricks you can do that might help you. At all the previous points, those are essentially useless. At this point, now those little tactical edges actually could make an incremental difference. It's meaningful to get you to the next level. So let's in the seven, eight million range, you mentioned media buying. So I think that's like kind of feels like more of the same. Are there little tactical tricks you could do? No, I think this is like it's like it's part of a evolution of an organization like we go through this and agencies like when you increase in size, the way you operate something changes. So like the way you should be running that account, I would say start to change it. The reason it will start to change is basically based on the thing that works. If wideness works well for you, your account structure should be very different. That your account structure should start with the default and it should evolve to basically whatever is working. So if you notice like what I wrote in the seven to eight, the range was like just do more of what is needed and then it's seasons of life to whatever has worked for you. And then the more you're doing your account structure, the life blood of your organization, this is going to feed everything. It should actually specifically adapt to it. So general advice for your account is create till seven million. Like you should just take the general advice. And then again, my point is what is the one thing you can do at seven that will get you to 14, I would actually just go and say it's purely media buying because your media buying would actually be so specific to you. And what I mean by specific, it's not going outside of the bond, bonds of like what is best practice. It's like the best practice might change. If it's like if this is not a huge thing for you, articles are not a huge thing for you. Lating page testing is not a huge thing for you. Then I would not have a separate campaign for it. So my account structure will basically adapt to the things that work for you. It's still in the same, it's like this is the tricky button. It's the same bounds, but specifically for you. That's like a hard thing to do. That's some more examples, maybe of that. So you have the white listing example, but what are some more examples of like the way that media buy. Perl launch. If Perl launch is work fell for me, I want 50% of my spend to be evergreen campaigns that will one campaign. And then I want everything that's like outside of that that comes from culture. Perl launches number one. I want different campaigns. They will get turned off and I'll launch new campaign. If sales work for me, this is interesting to me that I will have a sale campaign. That's a lifetime budget campaign and I will put ads into it. I will put prime days ads into it. Then the next like there's another culture moment next month, I would turn off the prime. I will put the new ones in the same thing and extend the life in the budget out and then play the same thing again and it will have all the learnings of prime that will get applied like applied to the next one like it is again the same logic. One CVO, all your sale creatives, but the way that and that got set up is different because I now store the learnings of my culture moment. So if you are promotion heavy brand, probably do that. And then the third one is like if I'm subscription, it will be different. Like then I would be playing a different if white list work well for me, I would take white list out. If I this doesn't work well for me, then I will have a campaign with different ads that's based on the angles. Like then that should be my add account structure. If I'm scaling with launching new landing pages, then I'll probably have a different campaign for like landing pages. So it's basically it's the same bounds being specific to the thing that works for you. And that's why like at that point, you need to actually analyze everything. Like before this, it's like I didn't actually really care what your data is. Like that is probably the thing you need. Like I'll sound a check if I'm right, but most of the time those points are valid at this point. I'm like, okay, what is the one thing you actually missed in the initial steps? Because you probably did one of them so good that you just skip positive. Step like there's a really good chance if it did offers really good, you would just jump from three to six. - Yeah, yeah. - You can easily skip the steps. And that's basically what I'm doing at this point. It's like I'm analyzing what did I miss and then I would change the addocons structure and I have fun with Taylor about this and like, medivine matters in my world. It does, because it's these small things. And that's it. - Yeah, yeah. No, no, that's a good call out too because I feel like at the higher sort of like, a figure level, a lot of the time medivine is basically like if you have the best practices locked down at the campaign structure or whatever, you just start spending so much, right? Like there's no point of finding a small edge because people for a get spending 20 grand a day, if you could go that into impressions, there's like a few million people a day. - Yeah. - What are you going to do? You probably should do everyone in the bomb that he is. - Yeah, right. Right, yeah, yeah. So there's no tactic that's really gonna make a difference. But at this point, it's like, now you're at the sweet spot where actually some of those media buying decisions, like finding those edges within the account actually will make a meaningful difference for you. Before this point, that's just a distraction. After this point, you probably don't need to do it. But to get to that point, that sort of a figure point, this is when kind of focusing on media buying the accents. So explain a little bit more, again, like this is we're talking about the gap between seven and 10 here. What you mean by more of what is working? It may be an example of that. - Well, the example of that is here it's a continuous. Like what is the, you can actually summarize this into like, you should do a right calculation of every activity you've done in the business and then see what has the best strike. Like, Roy could like, push on an innocent capital, like if my hatred on ads or like we call it hatred, you can call it avid spin per ad. Let's just say that. If I'm business one and my avid spin per ad is $100 and my margin made from that, it's a two extra ad and my margin prefer, I guess 20% of that, I make $20 in profit from every ad I make and my cost to produce an ad for some reason for me is $50. Probably the thing I should not scale is creative. Like that's not where I have an edge, right? And then if there's someone else, there are a lot of businesses like these are, like my average spin per ad is two grand. And I make 20% of that margin on every ad I produce and my cost to production is like $50. Like you should probably keep making more of that because it will come down. All of these things come down. It's like all of DDC Twitter is actually built on some kind of art, but I didn't do all the need to understand that. You need to find where it exists for your industry and for your brand. Like it's actually more about the industry and then about the brand. Like the reason they're, if you look at the fastest growing businesses right now, they're subscription because of the arbitrage that exists in the economics of subscription that people don't know. And there are a lot of compliances that let's a lot of things happen. Like I can just keep rebuilding customers without them knowing about the subscription to begin. Like there's so many things that exist. So you need to find what the arbitrage will show you. It's usually a Royca analysis of creative. That's what I would start with. I would look at pro development and pro launches more necessary, which is in short periods of time. What would happen is my average spin per ad will go through the roof. Like if I can do a cultural moment where I can just take a simple static and run it. And my average hit rate on every game period was like say six percent of the ads work in that period, 25 percent of the ads work. Then I would be very ruthless with adding me and Taylor had this last broadcast which was like you should do four peaks a month. Like that's the idea I would strive towards during that time period then like, okay, that's the best return investment for my time. Which is like, can I do a limited edition color? Can I talk about a culture moment? So and so forth. It also might be more offers. Like if offers worked well for you, this is what we were doing. The brand I think I don't know if you talk about this but we're like, if there's an offer that's working really well for me and I want to see if there's additional offers I can stack volume on a lot of times the game in that is like, I don't want to beat the control. Like this is a very wrong thing people have about test and control. Like I want to make something that beat the last thing. I'm fine with it. Like I actually don't care. I just want to stack volume. Can I do another offer on unlisted landing pitch that is about a different product? Like we did this for a brand very recently, which was like the way you unlock different audiences and you will probably realize that this is a good role for you when you do that exercise. Like can I make an unlisted landing pitch for a male audience because hundreds of my precious are female and just merchandise that page purely for that. If that works, then great. I'm going to go and open so many different landing pages. I remember the best thing we did was we started with, okay, if focus coffee works, then you should have a landing pitch for every single persona and you should test persona. Like can I take the same landing page? Make it unlisted and be like focus coffee for moms. Focus coffee for digital creators. Focus coffee for night God. Like that is actually probably, if that works, you should keep expanding. You should keep taking it and then every angle that works to keep taking it further. Like that's why at that point is the unlisted and you should look at your whole business and then see where I have the edge specific to my business. Where is the highest raric on my business? Then I will go and do those things only to double my business at that. - Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I think it's also like worth repeating that point that you made about like it not mattering if the new sort of like unlisted landing page beats the original because you and I both know like a lot of the time that just like doesn't, it's not gonna really happen. Like the likelihood of that happening. - That's the cost, right? The cost of landing pages will be $200. Like, great. Like $200. - Yeah, if it's incremental to your business, then you should do it. And if it's the type of thing that works, then you should do more of it. Okay, so that brings us then to the threshold of eight figures. At this point, it sounds like in the cross the seven figure range, a lot of the time people you're working with are owner operators who are just scrapping and doing everything themselves, they've probably made a few hires. But at this point, now you're really, you're expanding the team, taking a step back from a lot of this stuff. So talk a little bit about kind of what the transition point looks like. - I think this, especially given how I is working I'd be keep talking about this. Like, they're going to be like one person of companies. And I actually believe what it's going to be is you should make a E a player higher, probably by the time you reach them. The biggest impact, again, we're doing the same excites. But what is the one thing I can do at 10 million that will make me 20 is probably if you can have one higher. And it usually is inside the organization because the person working as agencies are like the same. Like, agencies are going, like, it's a, it's a, it's exponential increase. Which like CDC, with bad operators will grow your business 20% of your year, CDC with an bucket of operators will grow your business probably triple in a year. - Yeah. - And that's what I mean. Which is like the internal operators now with AI because you don't need so many people. If you can just have one really good A player, he actually probably would be worth to you more than 10 people if you, if you don't focus. - Yeah, that's why a lot of people also don't have the time. Probably don't do recruiting though. And a lot of times it's like, can I just hire someone in the network? I just want to see if this thing works. But at 10 million, it has worked. You should probably hire really good people. And that's what's, like, the six of a half fast now this course. - Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. So, so let's then keep you back in the, in the seven figure range really quickly because we're getting close to time here. Let's talk about, and I think you already touched on this, but talk about like where, where is the point in this continuum that you see people getting stuck the most? And they was like, where, where are most of the brands that you work with and like, where do they end up plateauing? - I think it depends. So, people, when they come to us across the close to the six million range, we actually get, like, if you ask me brands that grow the fastest with us, that people in the six million range grow in the fastest. Like they go from six to 10, like, super fast because they've done the previous steps. I would say speed of growth actually just led to the activity and the time that actually takes. Pro-development probably takes six months. Like, so to see the actual result, that it will take time. Most of the times, I would say people are at four million mark without doing the steps that were supposed to be done at one to two, because they did something else that was really good. And they just are missing steps. So, if there's a business that had done the steps at the point, like we will keep growing them double, double, double, double. But if they haven't, then I would need to go back and see what they have not done. Recently, well, I think this might change, but initially it was creative. For the longest time, it was creatives. And I remember there was this statement from this client that didn't grow for two years and they came to us and they were like, CDC just demies the most amount of creatives ever. My last agency are the agency before this never asked for these many creatives. And you also didn't grow for two years. So, like, for only there's something to do. So, I think it's related to that. It's them not knowing what is the one thing I should do. Or it's about the pain or the change in the ecosystem that happens when you become a CDC client. That is like the one thing I would just never hide. This was when we were in the bed of the client told me, she's like, what CDC is? Is like, is a change agent for me? Like, I never actually taught the CDC this hard. I just saw ads about DDC businesses that you just chill on the beach and you own a business and print some money. Like, that's why I started these businesses. And then I was like, oh, this is not that. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. So, being like, tending to get stuck at a point where, yeah, I do feel like this happens a lot. We're for some, maybe not fluke, but for some reason, like, there's some trend or whatever that your product is writing. You've reached, you've grown too fast, so to speak. And now what you have to do is double back and say, like, do I have an actual like offer strategy here? Do I have an actual marketing calendar where I'm specifically intentionally laying out the ways I'm going to develop revenue peaks across the year? And do I have some sort of like creative operational system that can actually produce at the level I needed to produce? And that sounds like that's probably like the main thing a lot of people need to focus on. So, but you said it best, like what's the solution here is to come to CT. and actually let us, let us build this for you. So if you want to check it out, if you want to, if you're in the seventh figure range and you want to work with Joy in his team to break through to the next level, to follow this continuum, comment thread code.com, hit that higher us button, let us know that you want to work with us and we'd be happy to chat with you. So Joy, any last thoughts, anything you want to leave the folks with? - Don't be intuition, you know what I said in the size. - Yes, just not approach to use. That's right, generally good advice to just stay off to it. But, all right, appreciate it Joy and for everybody else out there, we'll talk to you next time. Take care. Peace.