The New Ecommerce Playbook: DR Funnels, CRO, and Buyer Behavior

Connor's slipping already in the new year. What's going on? - Someone's gonna take a spot if you don't wanna relax there. - I'll say Dylan, you better have a big episode today. This is like a tryout almost. - I am an operator and I do marketing. - What are your AI hot takes? - Number one. So I think AI is close to being maxed out on software, which might be a crazy concept to think. Instead of having those like product tiles, that's pretty common, like right below the hero section of your homepage like. Take a look at collection styles. They're crushing pretty well. You guys as e-com brand marketers should go look at every info funnel that you can. Info and affiliate are always three to four years ahead of the tactics of my fellow e-com brand marketers. - It's like all tests are big tests as long as they're rooted in research. It doesn't matter if it's shipping a whole new product page that took you six months to build or if it's changing a headline that took your operator 10 minutes to ideate. - And so I think you're gonna see a lot more live streaming just like super organic real content that can't be fake is gonna be much more in demand. - We're gonna destroy trust if every Jones road piece of content, social media, blog, like insert everywhere that you have distribution. It just says AI. People are gonna trust it as much. So I think there's a human renaissance coming on the way. You can become a billion dollar company. If you just do those six things. - Welcome to Marking Operator's episode 95. We've got a dos to say with Dylan Ander, a two time guest. He was actually one of our most popular guests we brought him back to over his book, Billion Dollar Secrets. I've got pages of zero notes. As always, want to thank our sponsors. Motion Rich Panel Pression AI after sell and house. Let's get into it. - All right, I am super pumped with motions newest shipment of AI technology in their tool called analyze this. So basically how it works is you create a report like usual, you know, slice the data, however, however you want, whatever you're trying to get insight to. Once the report is pulled, you just click analyze this, it'll pull the report and then it'll send it right into your inbox. And you can go into the support and it gives you a very, very detailed analysis of what's working, what's not working. And then ultimately it even goes into what you should do next based on the analysis that it's giving you. So just continuing to automate this analysis piece of creative strategy and I'm very excited about it. How it's going to unlock more time and more production for creative strategy teams. - 100%. And it's another example of how important critically analyzing creative is today with Meta's and Dramada, which we've talked about at length on the podcast. Creative diversity has never been more important, but creative diversity to meta is a black box to marketers. We don't know exactly what they think of as new and different and unique. So motions building native tools to help marketers guide us through that process and ultimately to better performance. - So a few specific examples we've been using it for at Hexclad lately. Just launched a new product category and we launched some social funnels around it. So I used it to analyze all of the cocktail shaker ads that we ran and it gave me super clear very actionable insights. And then an even bigger report and even harder to do manual report was looking at all of our Gordon Ramsay ads from September 1st through yesterday. Like think about if Ridge was going to look at all of its everyday carry ads. Like that is literally hundreds, maybe thousands of ads. And it's one thing to be able to pull that report, but it's totally different thing to be able to pump literally millions of dollars of data into the analyze this report and have that analysis spit out in a fraction of the time that it would take, you know, a team of creative strategists to do it manually. So very exciting stuff, very, very different use cases. So it just shows the breadth that this new feature of the product has. - So if you're a marker that wants the insights of motion, go to motionapp.com and tell them that the operator sent you. - Before recording, you were like, "Hey, I have some AI hot takes. I've known you guys got some hot takes. Last time we talked about your zero hot takes, we're definitely going to talk about zero today. What are your AI hot takes?" - So the AI hot takes, number one, there's going to be like quickly, a point of like a plateau, a very little return in software. I think the future of AI is actually machine and robotics. That's where I think AI is going to be tremendous and the future of it. Walt Disney has one of my favorite quotes that humans crazy overestimate what they can do in a year but really underestimate what they could do in 10 years. And that's like for being as a founder, a brand and anything like I've taken that and internalized it tremendously and everyone's like, "Month over month, this is growing so much." Yariyata, it's like, "Well, take a look on the longer scale, like it's going to be beyond anything you think it is." So I think software, it's not cooked, but it's like pretty close to the point of no code, like truly, and if you know just a little code, you're there. So software, there's only so much additional value to add, so many additional wrappers we can have, that I think are value that we get from AI right now is not going to be much more in the software world. - Are you saying that from like a development perspective only or like broadly to all software? - Broadly, like the quality will sharpen, like a lot of these ad creation tools, like the quality will get better, but other than quality improving, like what additional innovation can they make? - Right, well that's what I was going to ask about was the ad creative production stuff because we're not, I think Cody, you probably agree, I think you've said this, we're not quite there yet, unlike having stuff be at account ready. - I have changed my mind in the last two weeks. Dude, we are cookie, like, so we have like high brand standards of fonts and stuff like that. We have a tool working with an agency, but this is all Taylor Holiday's whole Sean thing of like, you know, so there's not as much value in software, so it's software and agency together, which obviously things are going there, but so we're working with an agency that's essentially becoming a AI powered agency, creative agency, and we're building this thing with nano banana, and we actually launched today probably a few hundred statics from this tool, just cannot tell, like they're just mind-blowingly good. So it is accelerating so fast, and I'm so bearish on like AIUGC, like I just think that's like the complete worst, but this is my hot take. That's like the worst problem to solve is AIUGC 'cause that's just like it's completely missing the point, but I do think video's getting really, really good. Like I saw this AirMez ad on my feet, like not for a full production ad, but like for B-roll and animating things and whatever, but for static, it's like, we're there, product stuff. It's not human, but there is stuff you can do with human, so it's accelerating at the fastest pace. - I have a nerd one for you. I know you guys like the nerd stuff. - Sure. - I will send a free book to one of you guys, well you got one already, but do you guys know what C2PA is? So it's like the content to like production, like alliance kind of thing like that. So effectively, like you know in social media, like especially on TikTok, it's like created with AI, like you know that kind of stuff, like that's a lot more times that's created with AI. Do you know how they get that? Every time you take a video or a picture, there's literally a device ID that happens when you take that image. So there's a giant initiative across Adobe, Figma, Google, Meta, like all these companies are coming together if you look up C2PA, and what it means is that they're gonna be able to for the rest of forever if you don't have an actual device ID on your image or your video, they're gonna know it's AI and assume it's AI because how do you take an image or a video without having without having a device? So based on that, I'm not saying these tools are wrong, but keep your eyes out for this whole C2PA thing because us as marketers, we want efficiency. And we're gonna destroy trust if every Jones Road piece of content, social media, blog, like insert everywhere that you have distribution, it just says AI. So I think there's a human renaissance coming on the way that like yeah, it's cool for us to get these ads in a lot of this AI, but I do think it's gonna destroy consumer trust, especially with the older demo. - That was what Adam Misari said. So we did a predictions episode that was one of my takes. It's like what actually becomes wanted by consumers and is almost like a signal is anything that can't be fake because it's so hard to end the stuff that it's so hard to tell. And so the stuff that is just so obviously not faked is actually like the status signal. And it's like, my analogy is it's like being thin used to be a really big status signal in society. And now that anyone can do it, it's actually one pill, one medication. Being jacked is more of a flex now 'cause like it shows hard work and stuff. And so I think you're gonna see a lot more live streaming just like super organic real content that like can't be faked is gonna be much more in demand. And Adam Misari said the other day like very similar points but like he's like, there's gonna be so much AI content. It's gonna be so hard to tell. We're not gonna tag that. It's actually gonna be easier to tag stuff that's real. - And that is C2PA. So if you guys are a really large company, you're actually able to apply to join the alliance. HeatMap is a little baby company compared to that freaking Google and all the others. But if you wanna be part of the member in society of the people changing that, it is little counter to marketing of saying I wanna increase efficiency on AI, but you know, C2PA, watch out for it. - But are you saying then that like, it's basically stamping this like AI label on a lot of stuff that's not actually AI you're just saying 'cause it's coming from a device. - No, so the inverse. If there is no device ID on something that is an image or a video, that means it's made by AI. It was synthetically generated if there's no device ID on it. - I see what you're saying, okay. - So by default, like if I'm understanding what the alliance is putting out so far, everything's gonna be tagged as AI or synthetically generated whatever word they type to use unless it has a device ID. Maybe there'll be some hackers that pass a C2PA ID to go through, but I stick on the white hat usually. - So is the fully rounded out hot take then that the brands that are not generating creative with AI are actually gonna come full circle and be the front runners here? - Yes, sir. - Good, good, good, hot take. I like that, definitely repart so all right. Let's check zero. So first of all, let's check the book. We got a book, not a lot of, it's not everyday. We get to speak to somebody that has written a book. I hear you write another one. Why did you write it? What is this book about? - So, billion dollar websites, I love books. Anyone who's not on audio like behind there, I've got about 300 books. I always say I'm that smart, I just read a lot. Some people like reading, go on audio if you need, like I don't have an audio book, unfortunately, but I, number one, no never wrote a book to get rich. That's for damn sure. I actually lose money when people buy it internationally and I'm not, I refuse to charge $40 for shipping, but that's actually what it costs to like ship to Japan and stuff, which is crazy. But yeah, I wrote the book because so many people have paid it forward to me that I feel like it was the time of 10 years in e-com and made a good amount of internet money that I felt like it was time for me to get back. I do have a little CRO master class, it's like 500 bucks. I'm not an infill guy, I don't even talk about it. So if you guys do want a fast track and I do a CRO master class alongside the book, but like, it's a really cool thing of just like having the book, I have these frameworks that I felt are best like, yeah, I can like make a quick video and just like, you know, put it around and stuff. But like, you know, and just like make a big jam board and that kind of stuff, but like, really going into it to be able to explain it, I feel like a book was the best medium to be able to actually share it across. 'Cause there are novel concepts in there that I truly did invent. You know, like, these are not ones that if you Google, someone else has said them before. It's not even indexed in Google that I wrote these concepts before. - So the book is great. I haven't read all of it, but, you know, everything, I just, you know, everything that you do, I know it's gonna be like top notch and super excited to it. So I need to read it, just tell it, reading. That being said, can we nerd out on the funnel a little bit? What can you tell us about your stats? So you're running it as a free plus shipping book funnel. What are your, what are your upsells? What are your, what do you wanna share as take rate? - I'm happy to share. So hold on, let me ask Connor a question real quick. Connor, do you know, have you seen like people use like books to market like info or a market like SaaS? - Do you know who Russell Brunson is? - Yes. - Okay. - Are you saying like using his book as like an upper funnel to get people into like click funnels? Is that what you mean? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're using it as like a front end offer. - Yeah, I'm just gonna run as like a free plus shipping funnel. - Yeah, yeah, I'm familiar with Russell Brunson and like the click funnel stuff, yeah, absolutely. - Oh, cool. - Oh, cool. - So first off, I, for better or worse, I have to host this on click funnels 'cause there was nothing that'll pass a stripe token ID through. So if you go to billion dollar websites, that's the website. So it's not like fancy or anything, but as you guys have heard me say about websites, the 8020 is not UX. You just copywriting and the images that are on there. So if you sit there and read it, you'll see and you'll get the, you'll get the gist. Even though it's not super sexy UI, like you would think the dude of the website like, you know, wrote. So it's kind of funny, but click funnels is the only one that allows you to one click up sell and actually go and buy. So I'm not running a free plus shipping offer. What I found Cody is like, so like marketing the consumers, they've gotten a lot smarter. One stat is time on paid like pages visited per session has gone up about 200%. It used to be like 1.2 back in the like early like 2010s, but now it's like three and change. So it's done like a 200% increase on how many pages per session, like customers actually look at. So it's like let them walk into Walmart and go around and shop versus like push them in the funnel and force them into that. What time period is this? What time period? This is like, like from when I started, like I remember like, you know, good old universe analytics. It only showed me like 1.4 or 1.5. Now on heat map, I see like 3.5, 3.7, 4.4 as like average. Is that is that consumers want more choice? Are they less trustful that want more choice? Yes. So like they're smarter. They're savvier shoppers. They want to like do their due diligence a little bit more. Same with like software nowadays. Like there used to just be one or two options. Now there's like 25 options for everything. Same with like, you know, makeup products or home goods or anything like that. Like, you know, it's like there's more options. They want to like search around a bit more and like they want more freedom. So I found like the funnels that like cut off the header, cut off the footer, like force them into one thing or like get off the website. That was early 20s. Maybe 20/20 at the latest. We have found the same. And so yeah, I mean, I, the way I learned marketing was like, I think the first real introduction to like DR was like, Dan Kennedy. And so got super into that and obviously got into click funnels and Russell Brunson and all that stuff. But like, yeah, so it's been like a big like funnel guy. And you know, that obviously everyone's running funnels and he come now and landers. But like, yeah, I have noticed that. And it does seem like that like just style of DR is not working as well. And a lot of the conventional wisdom that I think people have had of you need a shorter funnel. You need no headers has not actually worked for us. And generally longer funnel, again, there's limits to it. But longer often has performed better. And then yeah, more options, more choice has actually performed better for us. Home page. My, my no joke, my top 10 customers on heat map by volume all send their ads to their home page. Are these brands at scale that are doing that? Do you think if you think 300 million a year on Shopify is scale? And yeah, on that scale. And from Jones Road, I would call that scale for Hexclad that's, that's not, you know what I guess what I'm getting at is like, like we still put, I don't know the percent off the top of my head, but like most of our, most of our ads are going to landing pages. But that's because we have such a robust, you know, and I bet it's the same for you Cody. Like you guys have a very robust product assortment. So like, not that the home page is nice. Like it's just harder to get to the point. Like if I'm putting an ad on cookware or not, especially if it's like not our hero category, like knives, why should I probably shouldn't put that on the home page? Because our home page is like really cookware positioned and it's like a lot harder to get to our knives experience. Whereas like we have awesome knives landing pages that we've tested it that we've optimized over the years. So I'm just, is it like, do you feel like it's more like narrow product assortment where the, where the home page is winning or is it like Hexclad or Jones Road or like even Ridge now, 'cause that Ridge is a bunch of categories where it's like more, more breadth to the category. - So two methods of thought. One, if your home page truly is optimized to like give an experience for like go shop and go get whatever you want. Yeah, right? It's like you walk into a physical store, you know? There might be someone like greeting you saying, "Hey, how can I help you? What are you looking for?" It's not like saying, "Hey, welcome. We have a sale on our knives, let me go bring you there." Obviously it's not one to one, you know? It's kind of like the thing like if they say they're looking for knives, guess what? If they say they're looking for knives, that's a click on an ad related to kitchen knives. - Right. - So, you know, I can make both arguments that like if your, if your home page is optimized for navigating like a lot of collections tiles, less product tiles, I found like that's one of those things that like works super well if you're looking for like, if you have a large skew count, that's one that works really well. But then also like let's say I was a full time, like I'm not for hire on a W2, but let's say I was a full time, you know, CRO at like a brand like X Clatter Jones Road. I would have a lot of landers, and I would guess media mix would be 50% or more on home page, but then there's other experiences to get them there. So it's like there are top of funnel, minimum of funnel and bottom of funnel pages, just like there are on ads. The other thing too is like specifically on Google, like mostly people think like, okay, Google is like bottom of funnel, but then there's pages like for Google, like Google has different landing pages. Meta has different landing pages. Apploven, I haven't gotten like dive in hands on and see what types of landers work better on Apploven, but like the personalization of like building all these different ones. And it might be a variation of your home page as well that just works a little bit better on each of these. So having like a unique personalized experience for wherever the heck they're coming from, that's what the future of websites is. - One thing we did, I never really saw it took off, but I saw a Caraway page probably four years ago, and I landed on it from NAD, and I was like, oh, that's cool home page, and I went to their home page later. I'm like, something's different. And so they had a lander that looked like a home page. It didn't look like your traditional single funnel with no nav. It had nav and obviously they're higher AOV. And so I compared the differences, and so I started building these pages that we ran for years most of our Travitu called a Trojan Horse, 'cause it's a lander that looks like a home page. And so we tested, we had a faux nav, and so we had a nav that had a hamburger that opened, because that was what people seemed to be wanting, but we did keep people on that page, but we had a few options. So it was almost like a home page. The way I think about it is a home page introduction for the product, 'cause let's say it was a miracle I'm add, you still want, it looks like a home page when you first land there, so it's not the surprising DR funnel. It's got your nav, and then what is relevant if somebody is landing on an ad for the first time from that product? Obviously social proof is important, so we still had our press bar that we have the same one on the home page. But then instead of funneling them into different categories or eyes or lips, we still just had. It was a little bit more of a direct funnel, but I think visually it looked there, and it did have more options. And I think that we've even found success with that of like having options to go to the quiz, having options to go to PDP. So that's a strategy I haven't seen a lot of brands do, but I kind of like that, but that's one thing that has worked for us. Yeah, chill out on the DR tactics, and just if your product is the right thing, they're gonna buy it. We found the same, like Dylan, I think you'd mentioned like starting broad, then getting a little more specific, then getting a little more specific, like having more like category tiles. We've found a bunch of wins in the last six months on introducing collection, like goes to a landing page, but then there's like a collection, like the CTA takes you to a collection, not a product page. We also did the same thing on our home page, like now we have like a gorgeous hero video that like really sells the products well, but the very next section is a shop by category page. Like we've focused a lot on like, how do we just go like start broad, then one level deeper, then one level deeper, and there's been a lot of wins for us doing that with our breadth of categories, and we only have more categories coming in the next six months. So it's gonna be like just more important to like, you don't go from the home page to like, this very, very, very specific product, like that you're just bypassing too much, you're not letting a consumer find what they want. So I think it makes sense intuitively that that would work. So one thing I'm gonna bring back, that makes perfect sense. I'm also super happy you got those wins on collection tiles. They're huge, they're amazing. So like it's anyone listening now, like instead of having those like product tiles, that's pretty common like right below the hero section of your home page, like take a look at collection styles, they're crushing pretty well, and that's if you have enough of a ski count, otherwise going product tiles. - Yep. - Lately every marketer I talk to says the same thing, budgets are tight, goals are higher than ever, and I have to prove what's working, not just report it, and that is the new reality of marketing. If you can't afford to rely on guesses or platform reported results, you need clear causal proof of what's actually driving growth, and that's exactly where house comes in. Incrementality testing is the new scientific way to measure true impact. To see what's moving the needle and what's just noise. So you can reallocate spend based on fact and not faith. Cody Conner and I all use house for incrementality testing, and it's become a core part of the modern measurement stack. They're not working with more than 40 of the top 100 DTC brands, which shows just how quickly this approach is becoming the new standard for serious growth teams. House helps you run real experiments across your channel so you can answer questions that actually matter. Like, which channels are truly driving incremental revenue? How much should I really be spending on meta, Google, or YouTube, and what's the halo effect of my ads on Amazon or retail sales? What sets house apart is the combination of rigorous science and marketer friendly design. The math under the hood is complex, built on causal inference and experimentation, but the platform itself is simple. You can choose your questions, launch a test in minutes, and get clear actionable results you can actually use. Plus, every customer gets a dedicated measurement strategist, someone who's lived in the world of growth and knows how to translate data into strategy. They'll help you design smart tests, interpret the result, and build a repeatable culture of experimentation across your team. With house, you aren't just buying a tool, you're buying the growth marketing team that can help you make the most of it. In a world where every marketing dollar is under a microscope, you need to know what matters with house by going to house.io/operators. It's at h-a-u-s.io/operators and start allocating your budget with confidence. - So, Cody, tying it back to how you were asking about my info funnel. I haven't gotten to scale it yet. It's been almost all organic. Like through newsletters, like I gave a little pop, maybe sponsored one or two kind of thing. Like I have my own newsletter with them for 30,000 people. So like it worked really well. The launch went well. Without, like I spent maybe five grand on ads, that was it, five X-roism dose, you know? Like, especially with like, you know, the book plus the upsell kind of thing. So, you guys as e-com brand marketers should go look at every info funnel that you can. - So, we were talking Connor and I during our predictions, we were talking about that, 'cause one of my predictions was talking about like, like there's this trend of as e-com gets harder, brands need to monetize more of their customer journey. And like stuff that you should be considered like off brand and like too aggressive is now everyone's doing it. Like a few years ago, it was just, you just had your, your button and then it was like, "All right, we're gonna add in-card upsells." And everyone started doing that. But like in checkout upsells then became important. And more people are doing that when it used to be like too aggressive and now you see way more respected due to see brands doing post-purchase upsells than ever before. And like that's something that clicked funnels and other people popularized like eight years ago. So, 100% agree with you on that. - So, that's kind of like what I learned. And like, for example, you'll never find an info funnel that doesn't have like an about the founder section. That's been running for 10 plus years. Even if the founder is not like a famous, big influencer, just saying like, "Hey, like, you know, I'm the founder. Like I'm just a small town person from whatever or whatever you are." You guys should add in and about the founder section. Like Connor, like you're saying like, you know, here's the thing, you know, like hero, beautiful video, collections tiles about the founder. The biggest split has my agency that I ever ran that like had the biggest impact. There's literally a 14% lift in global freaking revenue by adding in about the founder section and in about the founder page at the same time. We did them at the same time to like Lincoln. So, that was literally like a 14% global increase in revenue. Yeah. So, that's something that's been an infotactic forever. - We have that on the home, it's the last section before our opt-in to our newsletter. So, maybe we should test. - Sure, it's getting it up. - Yeah. Hey, who do you like? You know, I have a few people like all these, like I follow this dude, Alfie Robertson. He's like a health, wellness, fitness, coaching, but now he's doing tech and stuff like that. I think he's one of the best in the game right now at like the info product funnel. He's a fantastic content creator. He has distribution across Instagram, YouTube, you know, organic paid. Who are your favorite like info product people that everyone listening should be studying to get good DR like funnel tactics from? - Damn, I didn't think it'd be known as the info guy and be jamming on this, but I'm gonna sell out, no, it's funnels for it. So, what I have always been a fan of and sneak on brands that I own. I have always had paid education upsells. They do really well and they're 100% margin and they're like nine bucks. And like, or we make a little video course and we upsell them. It's not a brand that anyone knows about, like not even my friends know about. Like it's just something that I've done, especially in the, you know, health and wellness space. Like, you know, like, you know, counter like, you know, way on like how to cook a ton of stuff or like Cody for like a course and how makeup can get best applied for like whatever. Like, and you sell it for like nine bucks. I'm sure you'd probably take nine bucks of like, you know, margin on, you know, a 12% uptake rate and guard kind of thing, you know, like on the PDP as well. Or there's three info, which is another thing I've added in e-commerce, which is like, hey, get three e-books for free. And you just put it in your purchasing though. Like, you know, you're thinking email. - Right. - It's probably huge opportunity. Yeah, I mean, there's the margin on that is so good. There's probably huge margin expansion on that. On, especially if it's done correctly. Like, I'm sure there's some lift of like e-book, but like if there's actually like a valuable course and stuff, there's probably LTV components as well. - So Dylan, can I, I wanna ask you about a specific example 'cause we are, we have a new category launching this year and it's very different than anything we've done before to support it. We've created this like 80 page recipe book that we're still figuring out like how we wanna use it. Like, should we use it as like a gift? 'Cause this is like a very, it's gonna be a higher, a high, highly priced product. So we're like, do we use it as a gift? Do we actually try to sell it? And it's gonna be awesome. Like, I've started seeing it already. It's gorgeous. There's a lot of value added recipes in there and just a lot of value added information on how to get the most out of this new product that we're launching. Well, how would you think about using that? Would you try to monetize it? Would you try to use it as like a gift with purchase type offer knowing that the product is gonna be like multiple hundreds of dollars and this gift is like an info product on top of that. Like, what are your thoughts on like the best way to strategically position that? 100%. I would, so low to middle. I mean, you can always try, but it depends on your unit economics, right? 'Cause if you know, it's gonna be a couple hundred bucks. Like, man, I would put that info. I would put that free ebook everywhere, free for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is physical, it sounds like, right? No, it's, it's a digital, yeah, it is digital, yep. Yeah, like, like invest into that content because then they'll love your brand even more. Like, counter, like, imagine now, like, if people are really messing with the ebook and really clicking through it, like, make a physical one. Let the customers tell you, right? That's all like this, this book, million dollar websites, that's literally what it is. Like, understand your customers, right? Like, do something, look for signal. I've also had a new hot topic about attribution which actually kind of ties into this as well. Now becoming like a SaaS marketer, that like I have to do and put my CMO hat on as the founder of a SaaS company, one-to-one attribution. I actually made my best newsletter ever and I said I'm not a doctor, but I'm diagnosing you with chronic attribution anxiety where everything has to be one-to-one for e-com and like, that's really not how it works. Like, some of the best brands I know in the world are doing like pounding Reddit marketing and like your traffic's not one-to-one but your branded search goes up. Like, awareness goes up. So it's like things like that to invest in top funnel, you know, like, beyond that. So it's, it's those kinds of things to be able to look for signal. So if you see signal that like people are looking for cookbooks and like, you know, it's a type of piece of content you put, go put that all over your website, smother it everywhere, put it in your emails, like, you know, have more content 'cause they're just gonna love you even more. Then you can go and upsell a book for, you know, near Perfect Margin 'cause you have no like, you know, CPA on that, you're not paying incrementally for it. So like Cody, like, if you put a free one out, like for Jones Road and like, you know, people really like it, like literally, there could be a video course hosted on Kajabi of some influencer you pay to just go and make a little tutorial. It's completely free, but you get more people in a community. People really love it. You can, I don't know, put a subscription on that. It's like, why, why are all these Ecom brand marketers, like against all of this stuff? Like a company is a company. Like I look at it as conscious capitalism. Conscious capitalism is not some woo-woo thing about like, the, you know, the planet and that kind of stuff. If you're giving more value than you're asking for in return, that is conscious capitalism. So in our beautiful world of capitalism that we currently live in right now, or, you know, a double-sided world, if it's a free exchange, and like, or if it's an exchange that someone can freely do, and they want, and they're like, yeah, Jones Road, like Bobby Brown, whoever, like, I really trusted this, like, group, like this crew, like, square grams, his name attached to this thing on X-Cloud. Like, this is pretty cool. Like, why not let people buy it? Even if it's a tiny line item, but it's a hundred percent profit, why not? So take some of these info, take some of these different things, like, you know, like that, like, you wouldn't think about, and go and monetize those. Like, already, come brands need it, but also, like, what are people, like, what's the worst that happens? Literally, what's the worst that happens? - I mean, people are scared about their brand. - You're saying, you're saying the worst that happens from, like, a brand perspective, putting an offer out like this, yeah, worried about, like, damaging, yeah, right. - No, it's not gonna damage your brand. - No, I agree. - I personally use X-Cloud Pants. I don't personally use Jones Road Beauty products, but, you know, like, I use X-Cloud Pants. Like, if you guys had, like, just a killer in my email inbox recipe, like, someone made a video every, like, you know, but, day, kind of thing, like, yo, here's what you should cook for dinner. Here's like a unique one. And like, if I find seven or eight recipes, and like, it's like 10 bucks a month, I have no issue with that. Like, either I'm gonna be, like, looking online, searching, or you guys can just, like, cater it for me. It's almost like a service, right? So, like-- - Yeah, we thought about going that, like, New York Times route, where, eventually, there's like, hey, here's all the free recipe content you get. And if you're liking this, you can pay X dollars per month, and you're gonna unlock this whole other slate of recipe content. And, recipe content's just the beginning, right? What about, like, hey, here's a knife skills video from Nancy Silverton. Here's, like, more, like, more, like, master-classy type content. - What about reviews of restaurants, right? Like, you can go so far. And here's the other thing as well. I've been obsessed with GEO, my-- So, like, GEO, AISCO, just, you know, getting LLM's to recommend you. Like, how do you get in that training set? I've been beyond obsessed with this. Right now, heat map. We're getting about two or three customers a day from just Google, or get it. We're getting three or four sales calls a week from Chatch, UPT, one or two from Gemini, a week. So, we're getting, like, organically, like 20 people a week, like almost 100 a month, like new customers, just from Google and LLM organic. So, this is something that I'm huge about. So, if you guys really want, like, if you're not planning to sell in a year or two, go invest into that. Every bit of content that goes in your brand and your topical authority, there's PageRank. If my fellow nerd marketer is out there, if you guys really want to understand, every single website on the internet has a number attached to it. It's called your PageRank. There's a 2014 PageRank guy that Google gave out. It's still the same thing nowadays over 10 years later. So, if you're looking to make, like, a behemoth company and be recommended and future-proof your company through brands, it actually comes from content physically on the internet, whether on your website or on other places. 'Cause then all these other outlets think how easy it is. It's like, hey, we made this guide for, like, top 100 restaurants in New York City. You guys want to feature it. The need, why wouldn't the New York Times put that in there? Like, now there's crazy backlinks going to your website. I also have a very big theory that the higher your domain rating on a website, the better your ads perform. 'Cause it's a more trusted website through Meta and Google, TikTok, all those types of things, 'cause they do share certain attributes. So, bit of a ramble that, like, you know, all this content to build out, it's tremendous, it's huge. That's what I'd be doing as a brand owner. - I love it. That's also very, most brands are thinking about what's the next physical product I can. It also includes, obviously, that's like what you need to be doing, but not many brands are thinking about like the info products you can pepper on top of your physical products that ultimately just make the physical product a satisfaction way greater. - I would just say info, not even products. Like, how much info can I put out there, you know? Like, how much value, whether free or paid, can I put out there? 'Cause you can do so much as a super niche brand that just knows more about this stuff than others. - I love it. - Black Friday, you're about to crush it. The real job is keeping that momentum going. Past Black Friday, past holiday, and all the way into next year. Pression helps brands turn peak season wins into predictable, profitable velocity. Powered by a suite of proprietary machine learning models and a causality-first validation layer, pressure reveals what actually drove lift. It combines surveys, it combines multitouch, attribution, and incrementality. And then at forecast, we are next-dollar media will drive real incremental profit. Top brands like Cotary, Guests, Hexclad, Jones Road Beauty, Mary Ruse, and many more are using pressure to quantify halo effects across Shopify, Amazon, Retail, so their team can know exactly where to reinvest. So what actual questions can pressure help you answer? Let's dig into it a little bit. Question number one, do I need to increase, decrease, or reallocate spend for the shopping season? Pressions shows the optimal media mix to drive the strongest Q4 performance, whether your budget grows or shrinks. Question number two, where should I put additional Q4 budget? Pression delivers recommendations based on current BFCM dynamics, your vertical, and your optimal adspan allocation. Question number three, can pressure measure cross-channel effects, especially between Shopify and Amazon? Yes, pressure uniquely tracks halo effects and add impact across both platforms, revealing where to dial back and where to double down. This is actually one of the very first problems that Hexclad onboarded with pressure to solve is understanding the total impact across both.com and Amazon over at spend. Pressions models are benchmarked against $6 billion in ad spend, so the recommendations you are getting aren't just theory, they've actually been tested against billions of real media dollars. And if you're ready to see where your next dollar media will drive the most profit, visit pressionai.com/operators to forecast your growth with pressure. All right, I know one of the other things you think brands should be doing is research, one chat research, we're in a big research phase of our 14 big rocks for a year. Number one is become customer obsessed. It's all about research, not just on zero. It's product dev, it's essentially touches everything for us. But like walk us through, like give us a tactical roadmap that brands can take and listen to and go make better sites because they have it. Tell us what page you got to and walk us through it. Okay, so it starts on page 32, which is very close, right? So to anyone watching here, this is the billion dollar data funnel. The billion dollar data funnel has six parts to it. There's six areas that, you know, you can have this in your granola notes, Cody or whatever is going on. So go listen back to. There's six areas that you need to go for. And in these areas, there are little breakdowns and other ones, but there's raw data analysis. This is like going on GA4, looking what pages, this is kind of like the high sub of your journey analysis, your funnel drop off all that type of stuff. That's what, and these are also not an order of like importance or anything. This is just what I'm looking at here. Number two is user testing. This is not screen recordings. User testing is like usertesting.com. There's like a conversion grinds.com. Like there's like a whole bunch of these that like e-commerce just don't do SaaS companies do this. But like, you know, it's like you get to say, hey, go find knives. So like put them on the homepage and ask them to go find knives. You get to see what they do. Kind of they're expensive like per user, but you get so much intel. So, you know, user testing is something people don't do. Competitor analysis. People do not do competitor analysis the right way. So chapter two of the book is like, what even is a website? The thing that I love about this, this is a novel concept that I created. If you guys can break it, you can I'll send 1,000 to a charity your choice. So far, no one's been able to break it. That a website is literally only five things. Or I actually have like a literal word definition of what a website is. That really hasn't been able to get broken. Where a website is a domain that visually presents an offer and communicates through copy writing and creative assets. The unique value of your products or services compared to the competitors. They're a little bolded in the book for you to be able to see that. So the five parts of a website are the offer, value propositions, copy writing and text, creative and UX pieces. So when you're doing competitor analysis, you have to look at each of those that I call them the five pillars of a website. So when you're doing competitor analysis, Cody, people just go all over the place. Ooh, I like this idea. I like this idea. I like this idea. No, you need to put your blinders on, brother. Like if you're looking at copy writing angles of your competitors, cool. I don't care what amazing idea or breakthrough you have. You have to be like, no Cody, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're just looking at copy writing of competitors. Cool. Now let's look at the landing page level. Let's look at the offer level. What are these offers they are selling? And now you do your competitor analysis on the offers. In the book, there's a free like QR to a little template that I use on how to actually do it. But that's really the big thing. So that's three, number four is edge and intense surveys. We're launching on the heat map.com in the next two weeks. So like a highly useful customer feedback surveys. You guys have heard me talk about this to death. It's really important. And then heat maps and screen recordings. Those are the six parts of the billion dollar data funnel. If you just do those six things, research is your 955. It's beyond your 8020. That if you don't know what your customers want between your website and this goes beyond just your website and optimization of your website and what people know is traditional CRO nowadays. So like you need to understand everything about your customer. I would say if you don't know what they eat and where they eat on Tuesday mornings for breakfast and what they do right after, then you don't know enough about your customer. That there's also in the CRO masterclass I built, there's demographics. Everyone markets to what they know is their demographics. Middle age women at this age like who you know have kids that do this thing and whatever. Those are demographics. But now psychographics are these people looking to save time? Are these people stressed? Are these people, you know, it's like all of the like psychographics and demographics are two very different things. So you need to be able to market in their psychographics or your kind of marketer. If you're just marketing the demographics. It's like you're at like, you know, 202, not 404. I feel like this is something that I don't find most DDC brands actually do very well. I find software companies do way better. Like product. That's why I want to book on it, brother. Yeah. I feel like there's so much CRO that's just, I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of, I think people in DDC what they're really good at is looking at data. Like everyone's got to look at GA4. Everyone's now going to look at heat map. Everyone's going to look at analytics on it. But I think there's so much more focus on that stuff and the conversion rate and whatever it is. And this is where I drop off this, which is not unimportant. It's extremely important. But there's much less of the qualitative of talking to customers. There's much less of that. So speaking of education as well, like, yes, we're a SaaS company, heatmap.com, but like all this qualitative stuff that we don't do that like you just like grab a spreadsheet and do it, right? Like you have to call your customers. That's part of the customer feedback surveys, which is like literally pick up the phone and call your freaking customers. Ask them what they like. Ask them what they don't like see if they pick up. I have times and scripts and stuff in the book that like you can get, but like, you know, it's like just doing that for like 30 minutes a week or 30 minutes a month, you hit so much insight. Then you can have your customer support team do it and like they can do like two, three hours a week kind of thing. Like it's so valuable, it's silly. And then guess what? The AI can compile it all together and tell you exactly what the people are saying. If there are voices like, you know, trepid or, you know, sounds like whatever and people just answer. They do. All right, so you take all this stuff. You have, you do this process. I'm sure you have it in multiple places. You have a ton of data, a ton of insights. Yeah. You have to take that whether you're using AI to do it or not. And then this goes, you have it in the book. I should probably should just write the book. Does this go and then inform a roadmap? Like do you build hypothesis and you're like, these are the main things people are seeing. We don't have this on our website. Here are a bunch of features we think we should test and build and then use some type of framework to prioritize them. Yep, so I'm pretty sure you guys know what it is. It's called the ice method, you know, ice scoring. So it's impact, confidence and ease. Impact is like zero to five, like one to five because you wouldn't put zero on it. But one to five, how impactful could this change be? Like a full website redesign, that's going to be a five. A full new landing page, that's going to be a five. If you're thinking about changing up your footer, it might be one or two, but then comes confidence like based on all your research, how confident are you? That that improvement, that impact will be true, right? So you could be like, we could confident, that based on like four of your six data sources, changing your headline to a thing, which might have like a three impact. It doesn't mean that you always have to go after high impact tests, right, then the third one is ease. People get this one backwards, which is a five is something that's easy to code design or write, you know, doesn't take as much of a lift. And a one is like redoing the nav. You got to look at the images, you got to do all the UX, you got to do the design, you got to go code it, you got to, you know, make sure it works in the app, like, you know, it's like, there's so much there. But the impact is going to be a five out of five. So it's like confidence should also be a three or four. So it's a huge one, right? It's a huge one. So you put all these into a sheet and like the thing that like, as like, you know, running an agency back in the day, I'm like, we're like, ooh, what about this idea? What about this idea? I'm like, cool. And I recommend you guys do this internally in your company, so people feel more attached to your website. In this ice score, tell everyone, cool, just add it to the bottom, whatever idea you have, just add it to the bottom. And then you guys as the CMOs can just take a look, maybe your email marketer or your agency that you work with, like tosses in an idea, that just makes a ton of sense. The impact seems high. You're pretty confident that things going to work, and it's not super hard of a lift. Push that up, but it's like the data wins, right? Like, of course, this is qualitative. You putting it in there. So you have the billion dollar data funnel. You've all your freaking ideas. You put them all together, whether you use AI or not. It's no issue. You put it together. You now have a roadmap of ideas that come from all this data that you did in research. You have the ice score. You literally just do it from top to bottom of 15 down to 1. Just so much gold, so much gold, yeah. That's what we're doing. Research, we're heavying up on research. We're one that I'm really excited about. And now we're redoing our quiz. We're kind of custom build it from scratch. And that's like a really big one. So I have a customer advisory board. It's like a few 300 customers that are in there. So we've got a lot of user research testing on that. We have another tool to get non-customer stuff. So a lot of user research on that. Obviously, a lot of other sources, like you mentioned. And we've just been shipping it hard and really trying to work through it. Do you ever build it? So do you ever take something and get user research on a current thing, get insights, build a feature, and then do you then go to show that to people before you launch it ever? I'm trying to figure out if we're going to do that, or if we'll just ship it. Yeah, so in SaaS, yes. That's what I mean. I give a lot of companies feedback on features before they ship. Yeah, exactly. So I'll have net new features, or new designs, and I'll send it to people being like, hey, is this easier to use? Do you like this? What would you do? What incrementally do we need to do better? So getting all that feedback is cool. But when we're talking about millions of visitors a month, those small amounts of people aren't going to give the best UX feedback, especially in UX or copyrighting. So they'll be very skewed. One thing to step back before I go forward, Cody, this is what you did of your customer council. This is something that so many brands want to do, and they ask me about. One thing that gets a little annoying sometimes, like I'm sure, because you've been around for so long, new super fans. Number one, understand their super fans, right? They're not really going to give you the talk, which they need to do. But number two, how did you build that? Did you just reach out? Did you have CS do that as a part of your flows? Because a lot of people, even if your brand has done 200 sales, if you can get 20 people to be in your little product council and feel special about being part of an early brand, that is gold forever. So you're sitting on a gold mine that might not be as-- or maybe you do understand the value. Why don't you give a little rundown to what you did, actually? I have my methods, but you did it already. So give the people what they may want. Yeah, good question. So we have 14 big rocks for the year. Just our big KPIs, big goals, right? Number one is be customer obsessed. It's just not how we currently or have made decisions in the past. There's a lot of, you know, this is what we think, or guessing, or whatever. And I'm like, well, what does our customer want? And like, no one has the answers, you know? And like, there's definitely some data that we've had that has been, you know, a lot of good stuff, a lot of not. So I'm like, all right, I'm trying to simplify it. E-commerce is really, really difficult, right? Or even just commerce. So I'm like, there's so much data that's available. I just need to make it really easy for my team to know what our north stars are, and 14 is even a lot. But I'm like, this is the most important thing. If we make all of our decisions based on talking to customers and then having models for what they want, we're just not going to-- you just can't lose that way, you know what I mean? It's just the most important thing. So, you know, essentially all of these goals, we have the problem, here's why it's important. Here's the solution, here's what we're going to do. And then who's responsible for it, right? I have a new STP marketing starting, she's going to be responsible for it, one of the reasons I really like her, like, everything is customer first. That's like her background. But I couldn't wait, so I just started it. So we have a Facebook group of 80,000 people, which is also really helpful. And we will use that for feedback. But some things I wanted to be quieter. So I just went in there, maybe a month back, I was like, hey, I'm going to start this thing, is anyone interested, thousands of people interested? And so I kind of made them apply, got 250 people in it, just to pile it at small in there. Because what I knew was if we tried to formalize it too much and we had to fill out a form, and then have our retention team send an email every time, it was just never going to happen. I just had to make it as easy as possible. And maybe I could do a better job asking the question. And I get that it's biased. I'm very aware that the feedback that are-- the people that are signing up for this is maybe not consistent with like a new demographic. So I think you have to be aware of that. But it's helpful. And I just made them essentially sign up, agree that they're going to take whatever surveys, give any feedback, keep everything confidential. I set up a type form account. The AI stuff in there is really cool. And so within 10 minutes, I can just vibe build a thing. AI analyzes it. And so just probably once a week, I'm just going in there. I'll literally be in a meeting with our product team, and I'll have-- and again, I'm literally just piloting it because I think this is really important. I'm handing it off. This is not going to be like CEO forever doing it, just to like pilot it and just like get the momentum started as our organization. But I'll literally be in a meeting. We're talking about our upcoming holiday launch for next year. I'm like, well, we just want you to this year. Let's find out. Let's find out if people like it or not. Let's find out what are people saying. So probably like seven type form surveys that we've done in the last month incredibly helpful. Like, not that I've paid any money for this, but like, oh, we have a launch today body. We have about 70 reviews on each product to start. First time we've ever launched with them. So we shipped a bunch of them samples. Curious to see how that lifts it. But can you recommend it enough to anybody? It's-- that's literally why I wrote a billion dollar websites is for people like Cody, hopefully you guys to go do this. It's amazing. Really valuable. Can't recommend it enough. This is the maker break for any company. All right, I want to give a shout out to Rich Panel because they've quietly become one of the most impactful tools we use at Ridge. You know how SaaS companies love raising prices for the same product every year? Our old support platform did that one too many times. So we made the switch over to Rich Panel and the results have been fantastic. Our SaaS build dropped by about half. And once they rebuilt our workflows with automation, self-service, routing, our cost-particket fell 70%. Same team, same volume, totally different outcome. BFCM this year was our smoothest we've ever been. We've done the most amount of sales. We had the most amount of queries. But with routing, we had a lower cost-particket and our NPS scores have never been higher. The team handled everything without the usual panic. And our CSAT has been sitting around 96% every week. And what I really like is that Rich Panel isn't just software, they bring a playbook. They rebuild your workflows, set up your AI, handle migration and training. And you can be live in under two weeks. The lift is basically zero on your side. And they're launching your returns portal soon, which I'm really excited to test because returns are one of those sneaky P&L items. Everyone ignores until it begins to cost you real money. If you want to cut support costs in half and run a leaner, more efficient operation, head to richpanel.com/demo and they'll take care of everything. So the one thing now, Cody, to be aware of when doing customer feedback service and questions. So if you're talking to your customer, you're asking things about it. Just like I said, the psychographics beyond the demographics. Someone's in your demographic if they purchase and they actually picked up the phone. When you're asking for feedback on your products, like, hey, how can we improve this like lip balm? Like, what do you like about it? What don't you? They may say, how long it lasts? Or there's a whole slew of reasons that they can say. But what you need to do when you're doing those feedback surveys and asking anyone any question about your brand is what's underneath it, right? Because if you take it a face value, that was the mistake I used to make. Is if you take it a face value of, oh, thousands of people have said that we need to make this new product. Cool. That's great. Maybe that is the right answer. But if you're asking how to improve your products, go the level deeper. Is it because people are on the go and you need to maybe change your messaging to a little bit more on the go like quick makeup application? So it's like, people are going to complain or whine or praise like you need to look the layer below that to really figure out what it is. Like customers are not saying, here's what's in my head. Here's how you should market to me. Here's what's happening. It's like you need to take that pot of gold that you just got and you need to go level deeper as a marketer to now say why, though? There's something called the six sigma method, which I love. Any problem to solve can use the six sigma method. Connor, why didn't you-- did you hit your revenue goals this year? Yes. Cody, did you-- or just say no. Just say no for purpose, the exercise. OK, so OK, if you didn't hit your revenue goals, why? Not enough new customers. You didn't message what your customers wanted, maybe. You didn't do the research code. You didn't do the research code he's doing this year. OK, why didn't you do that research? I know at Hexclad, like we do it, but there's not a sing-- in Cody, I wasn't to ask you who's owning it, but we don't have a single person. We don't have a single person who's in charge of customer insights. So it ends up being a little olicard. So we don't do it enough because there's not a single person owning it. I think that's a huge reason why brands probably don't-- May as well as this thing. Why don't you have someone that owns it? We should. Give me a better answer. Probably because it's not directly revenue-driving. Cool. So there you go. That was the six sigma method. I just asked why five times. And when you ask why five times, obviously do it kindly, not like a mean person, but when you ask why five times, it's impossible to not get to a root principle of an issue. So I use this method all the time. After I ask why at once, my team's like, oh, no. I'm like, got to follow the rule. Like, people with IQs, triple hours have figured this out. So like, I ask why. So ultimately, what I'd say for you if that was a true simulation of everything you just said, I'd say, cool. Maybe you should actually go look at your org chart. It's not a problem that you're not doing customer feedback surveys, or you're not talking to your customers. It's actually a problem that is on the org chart level and the roles and responsibilities level. That's how you get to root cause. And once you get to root cause, you can go and fix that. And you fix 30 other things at the same time. Yeah. So Connor, I'm going to do right now under the big rock. Our SVP marketing is going to be responsible for it, but we're probably going to hire a product marketing slash consumer insights person, like TVD. But yeah, I think regardless, this got to be one. But I was like, hey, this is really important. I can't wait. And I also want to-- I was talking to Jay Cohen from Clavio, like two, three years ago. I first met him. He's like a VP at Clavio. And I think he used to be a Shopify because I did some user research for him. And he interviewed me for some stuff. I think when he was at Clavio. And so I was talking to him about it one time. And I was like, who do you think in the org to do it? He's like to see a motion or the CEO should. It's that important. And so that was why I was like, that was a really good answer, you know? And I don't think it's scalable for this CEO. I see him always be doing it with the volume you do. But I do think it's important for the highest level people at the company to be talking to customers consistently and intently. Well, in any new function, it's probably going to fall on the CMO or the had a growth or the CEO to get the initial momentum. And that's not unique to customer insights. And that's any new thing that you need to be doing as an organization. That's how I look at my role. It's like, you've got to get that initial 10% going with your team and then let the team carry it through. And then you're doing check-ins along the way. But it makes sense that you're the one driving this forward for now, Cody. And then you're going to get the momentum and then pass it off to someone else to keep the pedal down. Well, because you also want to show people-- like, I don't know if this actually works, but you want to show people, like, hey, this is so important to me as a leader that I'm doing it. And like, if I'm doing it, I'm setting the culture and I'm showing people that I'm willing to roll up my sleeves and do this. And like, it's that important. And like, everybody should be doing it. Yeah. Cody, can I ask you-- can I like dig one layer deeper into what you were saying like five minutes ago? So you said you're doing-- you have this Facebook group. You created this, like, customer advisory board. You're actually building out surveys in type form, collecting data, and then, like, analyzing it with AI. Like, what are you asking your customers right now? So two-part question. Like, what are you asking? Like, what are you surveying people on right now? And then also, I wanted to ask you about that-- you're the product launch. Because you said you're launching today with, like, 70 plus reviews. That's something we're trying to do better job of is, like, opening up early access to our Facebook group. Like, two months ahead of time. So that way, they can use the product, get a good feel for it, and then we can email them and say, hey, we would really love it if you could leave us a review. And now we're launching with like-- now our cocktail shaker has 50 reviews on the product page instead of zero. And I can't imagine that wouldn't have a really nice positive lift in performance. Maybe we start with like the first one. Dude, I'll literally just share my screen and maybe Dylan could give me some feedback on it. But yeah, you know, type-- we're paying what? 40 bucks a month, you know, type problems there. So like, you know, holiday was the first one I did, right? We just launched holiday. We're starting to build it for next year. But I'm like, all right, here's-- so the cool thing with type forms is you can literally chat to create it, right? So it's like vibe. It's like you can do it in five, 10 minutes, you know? But like, the question-- it's really easy, you know? We wanted to know about their gifts, you know? Are you buying, forget this, to inform future messaging, right? And also timing of the launch. Like, are you buying for yourself? Are you buying, you know, gifts? What is your normal budget range? You know, do you want individuals or kids? Because it's just like-- I think what we're trying to do is start with, I have a hypothesis. First one I have a gripe on. So there is a rule. So never split the difference by Chris Voss. I may have even mentioned it in the last-- Huge one. --of the last episode we did together. He's an FBI hostage negotiator. To get people to emotionally answer and to win a micro negotiation, you need to start questions with what and how. So if you go back to your ones before that, right? They were asking in that format, right? So it can be, you know, multiple choice or long form, or short form, doesn't matter. So what's your typical holiday beauty gift budget range? So cool. It's like, you know, that's good. Like, you know, is your budget range above or below X? Like, that's not going to give as much, right? Like, yes or no answer is not great. So if you go back to that question that I said I had an issue on, do you prefer curated kits or individual products as gifts? Cody, if you are now going and you have to start with question with what or how, how do you re-ask this question? Can you say which or not? No, because that gives a yes or no answer. But some of them are multiple choice. This is a multiple choice one. This is not a-- It's fine. It doesn't matter if it's multiple choice or not. I don't know. And I'm a huge Chris Voss fan. And I don't know if I know if I agree with him. Because so the way that you ask this one, so do you prefer curated kits or individual products as gifts? The real thing that you're trying to understand here is what do you like receiving as gifts? If you ask that, you'll get 10 times the insights. That's psychographics. That's not even a multiple choice. Even on this type of gift or this. That can be multiple choice. How do you like gifts? And you can lift out seven or eight things. So you're saying more open-ended, more optionality is what you're getting in. No, it can be multiple choice. That's no problem. Or will Codium also a fan of radio boxes, meaning you can choose multiple options, not like one of those. No big fan of that, which I'm sure you have as well. But the thing is, you're now just asking about two options here. How do you like your gifts? You can now-- I'm sure you can rattle off 10 more ways that someone can like a gift. Yeah, the goal of this one is just to help inform our holiday collection. Should we have more kits? Should we have more individual stuff? But cool. So you might get additional insights by asking it even more broad. Yeah, yeah, I got it. Let me just show you the rest of the few. And I've got one or two other things I want to get to. But yeah, kind of like it didn't buy surveys well, right? Like a lot of people do surveys of people that bought. I find didn't buy surveys or help. I think that's even like a Russell Brunson thing. I forgot who I got that from. It might have been-- It might have been me. Was it you? It might have been Ezra. I think it's Ezra from one of his courses back in the day. I think I got it from Ezra. He's the OG. OK, cool. So did you buy it? And you can do some conditional stuff. If yes, why do you buy it? If no, why not? How do you feel about timing? So this will inform it. And yeah, you don't have to use type form. But it does a lot of cool. So obviously, you'll get your answers, stuff like this. You can see your individual responses. But also, obviously, they got a plan that'll look at AI and just make it super easy. And then you can kind of click on the answers just to do it. So like, it's extremely helpful. And then just screenshot this, send it to the team. Yeah, I mean, it has just been extremely helpful so far, where I think will be much better positioned. Actually, our first-- so 2024 or holiday collection did not do very well. Badly enough, we got to figure something out. And it's like, oh, why? It was like the first launch we had that ever did not do well. And it was like, all right, I don't do it. I don't know. And so started with the survey. And so now it's like everything we do. Dylan, let me show you one more thing. I think you'll like this. So we're redoing our quiz right now. I'm not still sharing, Emma. Let me know if you have any feedback on this. But we're redoing our quiz just because you love all the psychology stuff. We are adding-- and I'm big, Chris Vospanel comes up-- we're adding a yes letter at the end. So we're trying to get three yeses before we ask them to buy. So we're going-- this is at the end after we get all their age stuff and all that. We ask their name, what can we call you? Do you need zoom in a lot? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's going to be my bad. So we ask their name, right? What can we call you? Rather than saying, what is your name? We ask them that. We personalize. That's a little broad. That feels like confusing. I understand we are going for. I'd probably just ask like, you know-- Would you say, what's your name? Or would you say something else? Yeah, like, you can joke. It depends on how cheeky you want your brand to be. But that seems a little confusing to me. Like, try to be too artist. Yeah, I got you. And then so next one, where should we send your results or personalizing it? You may also be way later. This is the end. Oh, god, I'm not showing the beginning. No, we want all this stuff later. This is not the end. OK, cool. I would probably collapse the name and the email into one. Yeah, we're going to-- we have like a roadmap of stuff we want to test and launch with because we'll do it. But we definitely have that as one of them. And then, so here's the one, which is like, we want to get three yeses before we then show them the results page. Amazing. I saw this. Yeah. We have two right now, so let me know if you have any. We're just showing them like a range and being like, does this feel like the right fit? OK, so which of these feel like the best match for you? You're saying yes, though. If you get a yes or no, anytime you hit a yes or no, you've lost the micro negotiation. That's Chris Boss 101. Like people say forever. Yeah, but you also want the yes. I know it's easier to say that no. But you also want the yes versus which one gives you less of that. So them clicking, this is best for me, is a yes in his framework. OK, you think so? OK, so we'll go there. We can edit that. We'll go there. Are you ready to see your results? Of course, there's a yes. People want to see it. And then we've got to add in one more. Cool. I think that's-- I think that's on its way. If you want to send me the Figma, I'm happy to tear it up even more. I would love that. I would love that. Operators, quick gut check here. Q1 is when everyone realizes the same thing at once. Traffic is more expensive, growth slows down. So the question isn't, how do I drive more demand? It's, how do I make more money from the demand I already have? That is exactly why we use after sell by rocks. Most brands think upsells are about being aggressive, but they really aren't. They are about timing, and the best time to upsell someone is when they're already in buying mode, which is when? It's right after someone buys. So after sell, it lets you put the right offer at the right moment with one click. There's no re-entering payment info. There's no extra check out steps. Brands using after sell see around a 30% lift in AOV. And when you're running real volume, that adds up fast. But here's the part most people miss. It's not just upsells that after sell adds. Once you're live, you unlock the entire rocked monetization suite. Rocked thanks monetizes your thank you page with premium non-competing offers. Think Disney Plus, hello fresh. And brands are seeing $0.30 to $0.50 in pure profit per order. Rocked pay plus as a clean wallet placement at checkout and kicks back another $0.10 to $0.15 in profit per order without hurting conversion. And in some cases, it actually improves conversion. No inventory, no new ads, no operational lift, just margin. This isn't growth hacking. It's just found money. If Q1 is about tightening margins and getting paid more for the traffic you already earned, go to aftersell.com/operators. Activate rocked thanks or rocked pay plus. And you'll get the full after sell suite free for a year or an extended 60 day trial for post purchase upsells. - All right, last question I have for you, because this is actually one I've been meeting to ask you. I know you're big and testing, right? You're like, you don't like full redesigns rebuilds. Let's say there's something we're like, our homepage right now, there's a bunch on it that I'd want to ship and we're doing it on it. I think Hexcladre did a new homepage last year and you guys just shipped it. When there's something like that, but marketers still care about performance, do you ever ship it and build all at once? Would you rather do it section by section? But my current concern with that is it's far too slow. How would you go about a process like that? - Okay, I understand why I didn't do the whole thing at once. That's in patience. Emotional decisions are the worst decisions. We like data, we like making sure that what we did and our hypothesis was correct. It's not just about the pretty UX. So what I call is evolutionary redesign. Like you can go for the jugular when testing. It's not like you're testing button color, right? So it's like, if you're looking at a new nav, okay, cool. We have this like brand new redesign and like repositioning kind of thing. Let's go for it, right? Let's take a look at our here section, go test. If that works, then you can send a really big one. It's possibly a little bigger than my personal comfort and you can go for it. So it's like at least get a little bit of validation before you go do your big ones, right? So it's like if you're doing a website, so here's one thing that people make a huge mistake on. It's not faster to do a full website redesign because you don't know how returning visitors are acting who first saw your new website and then come back to buying your new website. You need at least 60 to 90 days of a new website with no changes to properly test if a new website has improved or not. That gives you like eight or nine at bats to incrementally improve. I'd rather take eight at bats than one at bat and hope for the best for six to nine weeks, six to eight weeks. So people like put on a new website, might do really well for new users, but it might suck for returning users. That's your honey pot. - What about if someone's like, we're gonna ship a whole new experience, we're gonna ship a whole new product page experience or collection page experience, and then we're gonna back into it 'cause then we're gonna back into the bit by bit. Would you, if it sounds like you like the stepwise, but let's say we're sold on shipping this whole new experience, would you still test that big swing experience versus the original experience? And then, we validated, that's this new experience is a higher converting experience as a whole and then back into a stepwise where it's like, great, we have a totally, so let's say you re-did the homepage, you re-did the nav, you made a new PDP template and you added to the here section of the collections or maybe you changed the filtering experience. Cool. Take that whole collections page, site wide, go test it. Take two weeks, cool. If that's validated, you're probably gonna get insight, but now let's say you go and ship the PDP template, let's say it doesn't perform well. You just saved yourself a heck ton of money. So then after your PDP, if that doesn't work, cool, then go to your navigation, then go to your homepage. Like there's no specific order, it's like whatever is most useful for you guys. So it's like, take those gigantic like changes. There's no problem in that. As long as you can attribute to some piece of it, that's not a full website. We're like, cool. Now you can look into heat maps of the A/B test before and after, cool, then more people click on the nav, awesome, cool. So this collection page got more people on more products, got more people on more X, Y, Z, and that's why it led to the lift. Cool, let's use that to inform our PDP, the PDP that might be on deck. Maybe you now learn that you need to like, tweak it that 10, 20% that's gonna make it double, and then go and do that one, and then do the next one. So like people think split testing is just like a headline at a time, or an image at a time. You can go and ship features at a time, but as long as you've attribution of that feature, rock or roll. So how, it's the same thing about homepage, right? And it would be feature or multiple pages, right, multiple sections of page. If performance is up, how do you know, hey, this is why it's up? Maybe it's because we shipped a new hero module that's better maybe because, or are you then looking at heat map? It's like, all right. And intelligence performances up 5%, why do we think so? Well, revenue per click on our new hero module is up. Like, is that how you do it? Or differently? That's the way I would do it if I was forced to do it that way. So content, I am super picky about. Because copywriting and images are the 80/20. So if you're shipping three new sections of repositioning or content or copywriting, you don't get quantitative data on that really, other than high level, this did perform at a higher revenue per session or didn't. So the answer is like, okay, like, you know, bucket testing. I'm a big fan of, right? So I would go bucket by bucket. And you can also be changing your collections page, you know, experience and also working on that homepage. It's not like you're stuck to one test at a time. So it's like you're slowly trying to iterate on your homepage, which is so critical. So test your PDP layout and then a section on the homepage. And then, you know, you can test landers at the same time 'cause those that are on isolated experience. So like, you know, I'm a test running on the lander, your PDP and a section on the homepage. At least they are like, you know, you never want, I have it in the book, you never want more than two overlapping tests in the customer journey. If you have a test in the homepage, the product page and the collection page, that's gonna get distortion. It might be A, B and A, but like test three is actually B in isolation, right? So you're gonna get improper results across the tests. So if you have a, you know, if your homepage is never gonna touch a, you know, like landing page that's coming cold, you can technically run three because it might roll through, be it never run three at the same time, if you're not excluding traffic from each other. How does that feel, I'm curious. A lot of people give me push back on it 'cause they're impatient. - Well, yeah, I mean, Connor, you go first 'cause you guys did ship a homepage. What do you think? - Yeah, I think what we've done in the past when we've done stuff like this is we'll go into Edgemesh, our server side analytics tool and just look at the conversion rate by destination, right? And just make sure that we didn't like, like, oh, this was converting at a two and a half percent and we just ship this new experience and now it's converting at a one to eight. And obviously that's not perfect 'cause that's a period over period. Look, but it's at least a pulse check to make sure that we didn't ship an experience that just totally messed everything up. Like we did this, yeah. So that's where, I think that's like, it's not the most ideal way to do it, but I do think it's a way to make sure that hey, what we did didn't fully break anything and then we can start to back into some more, like, true A/B split test. Like, hey, what happens if we move the founder section to be the third section versus the last section? So that's how we've approached in the past. I think what you're saying, Dylan, like, our approach has always been like, let's test as much as we can at any given time without them interfering with each other, right? Like, you can't have, like, so you have a homepage test and like a product page test and like a landing page test. Like, I think that's a really good advice 'cause I think that is so important, like, velocity of testing and learning and like, publishing these wins. I love that 'cause we try to do that too and I'm sure at times we are probably testing too much and maybe they are interfering, but I thought that point that you made is a really good one. Like, and you have to be able to discern like the tests that are and are not gonna interfere with one another. So let me give you one other about that homepage, right? You can have five variants of that homepage in one test. So one of your hypotheses about this homepage might be moving the heterosexual or the about the founder section up or making a net new one. Cool. Now you have that about the founder plus two new content sections. Now you have those plus a third one and then maybe there's a fourth variation of like a different angle. So you're actually testing a whole bunch of hypotheses of your homepage versus just one option, which has so many variables in it. So here's how you set up the test. Yeah, this is how we've decided to approach it. So like, 'cause right now we wanna do a homepage, last year we did a PDP, which is yes, we want performance, but it's also a redesign. It's like outdated branding, just not great, you know, UX. We will first, if we know we're gonna wanna do it, and if you're once we will test things, iteratively, hey, what happens if we do this review thing versus that? So we will do standard A/B testing, get some learnings, do the whole research process, which now we're doing more thoroughly, and then we'll redesign something and we'll go multi-variate. And then at least if something performs or doesn't perform, we then have some idea why, for example, so we did a new PDP, rather than just A/B testing that against our old one, we did new PDP with all sections, new PDP without this section, new PDP with this component differently. So at least there's one variable difference amongst them, and then whether it's performing or not, it at least gives you a little bit more insight into why versus just, oh, this new thing is performing 10% better, we don't know why, you know, 'cause there's not a learning in that, obviously that's a good outcome, but there's not a learning in that. So I found that to be a good middle ground thing. - So one thing, go to chapter 15 of billion dollar websites, I have very advanced testing tactics, there's technically three types of tests, multi-variate is actually not in the way that you just described it, there's very nuanced differences in how they work, because each variable is held in isolation, so if you have three variables you're changing, it's actually nine variants. So go reach chapter 14 and 15 there, that will like fast track to a lot of these things, these assumptions that you think you have that are incorrect, you know, or can be optimized. - I'm just not gonna talk anymore, 'cause every time I do, Dylan's just like, "No, you didn't read this page, this is why I'm done." It's part of this part of why I wrote it to be honest, where like people like jump on a consultant column, like, you know, like you can pay me for the hour, like that's totally cool, like I'm not, you know, rich enough to not take a high fee for an hour of my time, but like, you can just read the book, it's 20 bucks, like it has absolutely every bit of my brain in there. - Can I ask one more question? - One last one. - Yeah. What's, so we talked a lot about like big swing CRO testing, which is definitely, like I think we all agree that that's the move and that's where the biggest impact comes from. What's a good use case, Dylan, for like, true single variable split testing? Like, you know, everyone always likes to bring up like the button color stuff, like, and that probably doesn't matter that much. But what is, do you have any single variable split test? You're like, this is high, high impact potential, like on the, yeah, it's a five on the eye and the eye score. - Okay, so I'm pretty sure this is one of these, yeah, it is. So one of the biggest, one of the biggest mistakes is that there is such thing as a big swing test and a small swing test. That is objectively false. My biggest winning split test I've ever had, my second biggest, I told you the about the founder story. No joke, it's a, it's a, you know, not cookware, not direct, but it's like home goods, kind of things similar to you guys. I literally changed one word on the nav where like, it's like best sellers, and I just changed it to the general category and that, even nine percent global lift in revenue. That was changing a couple of characters. It's changing one word. And, you know, like, the client was like, it was best sellers and I changed it to drinkware, which is their whole website. So instead of like best sellers and just putting it to all drinkware, nine percent global lift. So like the whole thing of like a big split test and a small split test, there's no such thing. What I say is, what makes a bigest is how well it aligns to your research. If it doesn't align well to your research, it's a small firm way test. It aligns really well to your research. There's no such thing as a quote-unquote small test. - Right. - I feel like then maybe re-frame it. It's almost like a lift, right? And I feel like Dylan, you would say head line of a, you know, it's copy test, a very low dev, very low, no real dev, no design. It's above the fold and it's a very important lever that you can have. And so that's probably something you would prioritize just based on an ice framework. Which is, I think most people consider that a small thing. Like, they think it's a tier three test. I haven't, I've never said that before. I'm kind of trying it live time, but like, I think it's like a tier three test. But like, if you look in your ice score, you're very confident it'll have an impact or maybe you're a three impact of five confidence and five on ease. That's a 13 out of 15. It's probably gonna sit up there in your ice method in your true ice score. - I think that's a very empowering take, by the way. It's like, all tests are big tests as long as they're rooted in research. - Exactly. - It doesn't matter if it's shipping a whole new product page that took you six months to build or if it's changing a headline that took your copy rate or 10 minutes to ideate. - Correct. And that's why spending your 80, 20 time in research, just ask your customers what they want, give them what they want and you get what you want which is money. My favorite phrase in marketing. - Yeah. All right, Dylan, this was great. I could, we'll have to have you back for a third time 'cause it got pages and notes. A lot of good feedback you gave me, you gave Connor. So this is great. I think people are gonna love it. Thank you so much for hopping on and I'll let us know, what do you wanna plug? Where can people find out about you? Where what's the URL for the site? Where can people learn more? - So this little guy, a billion dollar websites. It's 20 bucks. Highly recommend. There's an outdated picture of me on the back, but it still looks good. So that's just billion dollar websites.com. On the founder of hebath.com, we're the only revenue based hebath in the world, but we're doing so much more. Like right now, if you guys like Moby or you're a fan of talking to your data, how about talking to your website and your customers at the same time? That's gonna be a Q1 feature. So it's gonna be pretty sick. I'm pretty excited. We're doing a lot like the SIMGEM, all that type of stuff. Like so hebath.com, that's, you know, that's why I'm gonna let you see him get out there. And then lastly is just join the newsletter. Just go to dillanetter.com, join the newsletter. I just hit 30,000 marketers, which is exciting. I diagnosed everyone with chronic attribution anxiety the other week and it was my best performing newsletter. So yeah, I just treat you guys like humans in a newsletter. I don't do paid sponsorships and just, it's my most valuable thing and might most be love it at brain time of the week. So those are the three things. - All right, that was a great episode. That I think tops the first one that Dylan was on. He's got guys, a wealth of knowledge, super passionate as well. Give me lots of good feedback. Tons of notes and takeaways. I am gonna go start working on our homepage right now. As always, if you enjoyed this, please share it on Twitter, subscribe on YouTube, everywhere you get your podcasts. Please share it. We always appreciate it. As always, we cannot do this without our sponsors. Motion Rich Panel Pression AI, Afrocell and House. We'll see you guys on the next one. [BLANK_AUDIO]