They're Selling $25M Per Year In Non-Alcoholic Aperitifs

Tom, you sent me a while back one of my favorite products that I've had in a long time. You sent me a bunch of it. Got it right here, mother root, got my bottle. You could see just so you know that I'm not lying. It's hard to see, but it's like me. This one's maybe like a third full or halfway full. I'm gonna actually mix one right now, okay? So I've got my glass with cocktail ice cube in there. I'll show you exactly what I do every time. It says very specifically, you give it eight shakes. - Gotta give it eight. - That's right there. - Yep, there we go. - I like the reverse pour as well. - Yeah, I like to kind of float it on top a little bit more. There we go. And what we have here is, if you're only listening and not watching, you could hear the sound of my glass hitting the cocktail or the ice cube of glass. I've got my upper teeth, non-alcoholic upper teeth from mother root. This is a legitimately great product. I'm gonna take a sip right now. That's fantastic, as always. I drink one of those, like probably half the nights at my house, something like that. You sent me enough of it to where it's lasted me a long time, but I love this product. It is one of those products in the non-alcoholic space that I think makes so much sense. It is nine in the morning and I'm drinking what is, what is an upper teeth basically? Because there's no alcohol in it, so it's fine. It's not gonna affect my work day here. But yeah, you sent me this a while ago 'cause we started talking about this company and mother root is like taking off. It makes sense to me that it's taking off. I want to say something smart about the product, just so people have context about it. I drink non-alcoholic beer almost every night. I do drink alcohol too, but I just don't want alcohol most nights. And so I have enough lactic most nights. I subscribe to it, it's great. But there is a thing missing in my life, which is something harder, something a little stiffer. And that is the place that the cocktail holds is so nice at the end of the day to drink a little scotch or like a Manhattan or something like that. And I want something that doesn't have sugar in it or that is like not sweet, but also something, sometimes it has like some stiffness to it. So mother root is this brilliant product 'cause as people hopefully just saw, it is a mixer basically. It is a concentrate that you mix with something like soda water, which is what I just did. You can mix it with all kinds of other things. I haven't gotten really fancy. I'm simple guy, so I haven't gotten super fancy with trying to come up with any crazy, you know. - Simplish balance. - Yeah, mixology, kind of stuff here. But you drink it like that. But there's this thing that every N-A cocktail substitute is missing so far as I can tell. And that is like burn. Because when you drink something like whiskey, it has burn and it has like sort of a nice harshness to it. Even if it's smooth, even if it's like a good liquor. So ginger is really smart. I've noticed this is a problem in this category for a while because you want something stiffer, but it's really hard to sort of simulate the burn of liquor, of a spirit. And so ginger is a smart idea because ginger has a sort of harshness to it. Like that is, so it's like spicy, right? You also sent me, and I is in my fridge as well. I have, it's about half completed. The, a newer variation of mother root, which is actually ginger and jalapeno. And so there is actually something, and I've seen some other N-A cocktail brands do this. They use heat or spice as a way to substitute for that same thing. But I noticed the product right away when you sent it to me. You and I started talking about maybe working together. We didn't end up working together, but we were, we were, we were close. And I think we've got some shared methodology around this stuff. But this brand is ripping, right? UK-based brand has gotten up into over $25 million in revenue in like a couple of years as far as I can tell. I believe the founder was on the UK version of Shark Tank basically, which is what Dragon's Den is that what it's called? - Yeah, it's Dragon's Den. - Yeah, cool, yeah. So tell me a little more about this business. I want to be able to see it a little bit. I'm gonna take another sip. I want to see a little bit first, but yeah, tell me a little more about this business and sort of where it's at. I think it's just a great case study in a lot of different things. - Yeah, sure, so it's actually been around since 2017. So Beth and his founder, she used to work in drinks so she was a brand manager, I believe, at Moe Shandon. She was pregnant, really frustrated with the none-outs at that time. They were either, you know, just trying to substitute for a different alcohol. So whether it's gin or whiskey or something like that and yeah, it's left it to left her a bit, you know, that it just wasn't great. Or they were too sweet. And as she said, none of them had the burn and none of them had the balance and the complexity that you often get from alcohol. So yeah, they launched, I believe, yeah, 2018. She stuck with it through, you know, some quite long periods of, you know, going to trade, going to markets in the UK, going to markets around London, giving samples, listening to customers, developing the recipe further. I think it was in around 2024 that serendipitously they were in a co-working space and just randomly sat next to a guy he was sending up a paid social agency. And he got chatting with them, loved the product and said, "I can help you, I think it will work on paid social agencies called Ballpoint, but it was set up by the founder of a business." He was a previously founder of actually a wine business, but he was also previously had a great through a business called Fribert, which is like a blood testing business. And he got them going very focused on CM3 as a kind of marketer, so CM3, I don't know what the equivalent in the US is net profit. So profit after marketing, cogs and logs, et cetera. - Everybody has a different definition. That's what we, CM3, I do have one client who uses that phrasing, what I mean by it is, left over dollars after everything except for OpEx. So basically like after all of your cost of delivery to cogs shipping, freight to customer, all of those things fulfillment costs, credit card processing fees, all those things, and ads spend critically. So how many dollars do you have left over after that? - I'm having to hold in burps, particularly drinking soda water on this. So the worst possible thing for a podcast, but I really am drinking it and enjoying it. So, you know, CM3 is a, CM3 came out of rocket internet in Germany, I think, where they kind of was CM2, CM3. Very Germanic naming conventions. And I think most of the European tech industry than a DTC industry took it up. But anyway, yeah, so he was focused on that, help them scale through a relatively classic approach to meta, have test campaigns, talk to your customers, do some more ads, they make them look like ads, make them look like native. And he, you know, they help them scale over the last couple of years, and then we left them just for various reasons, but I just wasn't. - Wasn't kind of I agree with them. And since, yeah, January last this year launched the US, and it has been absolutely ripping that. In the US, you got the timing right, by the way, like just, I think there's definitely a thing here. Obviously, the NA moment is real. I just had Andrew Eudarian on yesterday, rerecorded an episode. I think it'll actually come out after this one comes live. But he was talking about being with some young founders. - Yep. - And recently, like, you know, entrepreneurial types, whatever, and just he was noticing that there was, at a founder event, there was so little alcohol being consumed compared to what he would have assumed for a long time ago. And so anyway, the NA space just continues to explode. And so, you know, we talked about this, but you guys were in the UK going and doing well at Mother Root, your growth advisor there, I know. But I'm working closely with them for a while. And you guys went to the US and has just like smashed as you came here, which is not surprising to me. And it is interesting how much like 2018 founding, there's the beginning German issue. You're still, you're still, solidly in the craft beer era there, I think, like some of that stuff. But now here we are a few years later, the moment hits right, and you guys are set up right on paid social, some of the things, like you said, they kind of were set up. And now you're starting to see real tailwinds as I understand it. Talk a little bit about what's happening in the US. I cut you off a little bit, but pick up where you were going right there. - Yeah, it's got an improvement there. So just on the UK, lots of challenge, lots of interesting marking challenges going on there, because it's, we're now on the channel. So we're in three of the UK's top five, sorry, four of the UK's top five grocery chains, Amazon, Akado, various other things. So, and that amazing. - Amazing. - Yeah, more interesting, Chinese, Prassiant, to unpick a lot of it. But in the US, it's really fun, 'cause it's essentially paid social D to C. That's it. So everything we do on paid social we know is, sorry, all the orders we know are more or less from, originates somehow from paid social on what we're doing on paid social. - Yep. So I can go into late. You know how you guys you guys just hit your first hundred thousand dollar day in the U.S. is that right? Yes, so there was a big six-week a day During the jalapeno launch, so they we delimited edition drops every Few months so that was as he said the first one in the U.S. was jalapeno There was also a UK flavor, but it was you know developed specifically for the U.S. market or I think of the U.S. market So it you know Nine months in it's going well. It's been profitable throughout that growth amazing It's been yeah, I can go into all the different Yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine who was saying hey if you need to do any hiring I'm a recruiter blah blah blah and I didn't quite have the heart to tell him That I don't need to do any hiring because I do any of the hiring that I'm gonna do for most positions The first place that I look is in the Philippines with my friends at more staffing more staffing connects you to great talent in the Philippines I'm not talking about just five dollar an hour of virtual assistance. I'm talking about skilled excellent people who really will work hard and care about your business at every level of the business past assistant coordinator level up to manager and director one of the guys I hired actually add an assistant level Initial initially and my business is just one of everybody's favorite people at work who is growing and growing and growing All the time because he's such a good employee and he's going to be an executive at some point at age of growth because of that He is just awesome and I couldn't be more thankful for for the connection that I've gotten to him from more staffing I've continued to go back to more staffing all the time because more staffing is really deeply understands the e-commerce Landscape they've built their business not just as a sort of all-purpose hiring firm in the Philippines recruiting firm in the Philippines But but really as a as a business that understands the e-commerce world deeply Because they're built on the back of us-based e-commerce businesses that had hired a bunch of Filipinos and they saw the power of that in their business And the simple value proposition is this you can find incredible talent in the Philippines People who grew up speaking English have really good e-commerce resumes and because of the reality of global economics You can pay them a great rate in the Philippines that that is still lower than local rates in the US and therefore Everybody wins you get great people you get the top of the market in the Philippines at the same time You still save money by getting those people in your business. It has been transformative in my business In fact in my life to be working with people from the Philippines I'm so thankful for more staffing go check it out any position you need to hire more staffing.co tell them I sent you Well, let's talk a little bit about sort of what has worked for you guys on meta in the process because you you have this thing I think it's worth noting I actually purposefully started off with me mixing and I finished the drink because it's delicious I I started off by talking about that on purpose because I Like I know we're gonna get into meta tactics and some of those things, but I want to just start by noting that like this is a really good product in the moment the right way and I always wants to say to people that that really matters I'm convinced of that more than ever that it matters that you do a great job in your product It matters that you do at a moment that customers care about. I just I just really think that matters a lot and And that sets you up to go do really well on paid social By then leveraging paid social the right way and so but they both really matter and I think a lot of people really do Sometimes they hear you know, especially my more tactical episodes or something and they love the idea that Your media buying set up and your messaging and some of that stuff is like the whole game and that stuff does I listen I talk about it all the time it matters a lot but it really really helps if your product is awesome really really helps if your product is awesome and And and if you kind of hit the moment right and so you guys already got that right at mother root But let's go ahead and then and break down kind of what has worked for you on paid social as you scaled so we can get into this I'd love to talk about it in a couple couple different ways. Let's start by talking about creative Before we talk about media buying a little bit because what what if we start with creative we can go from there to To like sort of then how you how you distribute the creative which is the media buying side But let's talk about creative first and people can go look at the at the ad library from other root and go see a bunch of stuff You'll see things that are working I've definitely spent some time with it at times and some of that stuff so Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in there, but let's talk about sort of what has helped you guys at the level of creative How have you thought about creative do you guys have any sort of internal strategy? I know you've been a big part of that conversation at mother root Yeah, just quickly double click back on the the product. You're right. It is a brilliant product and one of the things that Has basically allowed us to unlock growth in the US is the repeat rate And that's testament to the fact that people get it and they want to buy more of it within kind of 15 to 45 days We're getting people buying their second order and it's a good decent Double digit percentage of people a lot of them are also then doing subscription subscription on First order is pretty low, but second order subscription levels are good So if it wasn't a great product, we couldn't get that and therefore we couldn't spend the amount that we're spending today on On paid social and we wouldn't be going to the degree that we are But yeah in terms of creative Motherery when I joined them they're just being through a coaching program called system the system guys are Very very hot on just to be done into these so Speak to your customers Speak to customers you've just acquired Don't talk to them about your product talk to back talk about them about the journey that got them to the product what What led them to mother root what are the things that are pulling them towards it Pushing them away from competitors. What are the anxieties and the barriers and mother root because they'd been on that they were doing Between five and ten interviews a week with customers doesn't sound loads, but When they when you add those up you run them through AI They were starting to get some really great insights for the creative strategy team and it the creative strategist Subtracted him in the US of one guy that we have part-time um and his feedback when he came in was This is this is my favorite client that I'm working with You have so many insights already That this makes my job pretty easy So pretty classic from there creative sprints. So decide what the designer is is it sorry? Is it a designer-based creative sprint? Is it a category entry point creative sprint um we already had quite a lot of Hypothesis on who the customer was Handily um it's right now not 25 to 40-year-old founders of businesses. It's actually mostly plus 50 plus women Um, and yeah, what do you think why is that? Why is that I mean in the you in the UK that's that's just the the audiences started working They did quite a bit of testing there, but it was again doing the customer interviews we found that it was women over some age who You know were cooking dinner for their kids or got home from work and there's a ritual of monday Tuesday night opening a bottle wine Um, I'm having it last and then by Wednesday you realize you accidentally drunk a bottle of wine and Yeah, there's As you said there's a lot of tailwinds in Nanauk one of them is just people being much more conscious about how much they're drinking They want to cut out they've tried every time they try and allow Same thing that you you just said like no burn it leaves them unsatisfied. It wasn't really a ritual as well So I think actually just the poor is important It's not You know, it's not a can that you just open and tip in you actually have to do something and and people people like that ritual And then it's hard to drink, but it's satisfying and there's probably a little bit of a dopamine hit from ginger and and chili, but That there was just the audience that resonated um and I love that audience. I reckon other business good fab with targeting that audience as well Much low repeat rates sadly, so you can't scale as far as um, but they spend more Fewer people are going after them and so maybe that was why we just we just it just Um kind of naturally is where I've been signed to slay us in the UK, but then in the US that was where we started because of the UK Um Some were confident it was going to work to be already done a fake door test in the US where they literally launch Facebook ads To the US to a US site no product. We were never going to fulfill We just wanted to see what the cacken out cacken a ov was And already on that test very very early tests I think it was like three or four thousand dollars to spend the cack was already better than the UK cack And the a ov was already higher targeting that group. So we went really quite heavily into that initially um So yeah classic persona sprints But sign up by sprints informed bond customer and cheese. So let's get a little more. So um First of all tell me about your new customer interviews What what happened? Who who did that? How did you reach out? What did you actually do people talk about this idea all the time But I don't know if I've ever heard anybody really break down their process So you can be brief about this But just like does somebody buy and they get an automated email saying we want to talk to you or do we reach out to people randomly or how does that work? Yes, it's lachy random Mother is probably yeah, I think they've got too many people being acquired at the moment uh, yeah right So we're trying to do as I said five to ten a week Initially, the whole team was doing it and cleaning the founders and the senior team. And it's a very prescriptive, a few things are very prescriptive email out, no incentive. Pretty, you know, it's at least simply now we want to talk to you about mother rate and you're buying experience with mother rate. Customers always think you're going to talk about the website or talk about the product. Yeah, right. And the interview is quite, um, quite structured in terms of what we're trying to actually find out or what we're trying to do is essentially reconstruct the decision, um, buying the product in the customer's words. So, yeah, it's, I can't remember the guy's name, played David Clay, something or other, who came up with JTBDs. The classic one is, uh, McDonald's stores in the morning in the US used to sell, but they were selling tons and tons of milkshakes. And McDonald's couldn't work out why that was. And speaking to their customers, I actually, what they found out is that it was a breakfast substitute. Um, so then they started doing breakfast movies. So it's easy to drink on your commute to work, rather than eating an augment muffin, for example. That's such a good insight. Really fat. It's just a point to that because there's not about the ingredients per se. It's not about the, like, any of these various potential benefits, right? It's about where it sits in the customer's life, life relative to other options. And, um, and so that's, yeah, that's, that's, that's, so then it helps you think about how to position it a lot, which I think is really interesting. Yeah, so the, yeah, so essentially the, the interview is we're trying to discover what they were trying to achieve and then how they came across from the root, but the other kind of key pieces we're trying to do in their own words. So the temptation and all these interviews is to lead heavily. And that, therefore, there's a quite a structured process that, you know, it's tell me about what you brought or what you were considering, what were you hoping to get out of it, what made it important to you. And you're trying to then get them to reconstruct that purchase moment. So the customer actually finds it quite, they get a degree of wet blush from it because they, um, they think that, you know, you're going to talk about the product, but you start talking about, you know, take me back to when you first started thinking about buying it. What was happening? What were you thinking? What prompted you to think about it? What were you using or doing before and all of these things are largely trying to find out, um, said these pushes and pulls, but then also the anxieties and barriers to buying. And that's turning into, that's turning into then the actual like, you're then turning around writing ads to those moments in, obviously not over simplified, right? Like you're coming in a lot of different angles and all that kind of stuff to try to get to those moments. But there's a lot of work to be done from there, but, but that's basically forming this by giving you a few different personas of like, here's where this fits in people's lives. You mentioned one of them, the 50 plus year old woman who's using this as a substitute for the line she was drinking every night before. That is exactly the smoothie example. It's the same thing. It's like, it's like, oh, there's a certain ritual that's happening in people's lives. This fits as a place relative to that ritual and we are going to try to be there instead of that ritual for this because we understand that. That's actually really different than my 25 to 40-year-old founders, you know, like you said. Yeah. And then it goes down to kind of functional jobs, emotional jobs, social jobs that we also then try and amp up in various bits of the meta funnel and try and sometimes those jobs are the same jobs across different personas. You just have a different essentially message delivery system, EEG person doing the talking there or the creative. And I think this is not that different to what ad agencies have been doing for decades. Sure. Some very classic ad agency breeze where you have a problem as solution, but, you know, ad agencies only had one kind of media to really do that on like TV and its mass market whereas meta advertisers have the fun of joy of being able to make like hundreds and hundreds of different angles and have the most sophisticated targeting system ever made. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, it's funny because I'm thinking through how we approach this problem and I would say our approach to research is actually a little underbaked in some ways, but there's a reason for that, which is that we tend to think that one way to test things is to do the thing you said. And I actually think basically on the brand side, I think basically every branch should be doing what you're describing by the root doing, doing everything they can to really, truly, deeply understand how their customers are thinking about and talking about this product, you know, where it's fitting into their lives, all that stuff. We, I have thought like I wonder if we should start taking this as part of our sort of intake process, our growth strategist, our career strategist should just have a job of like you got to take, you know, one to two calls a week, even just with customers every week for a while to get that. Right now we haven't gone that route, but there's a reason for that, which is that we can do exactly the thing you just said. We can go and test a bunch of angles based on brands, instincts and ideas and then you know what you see people talking about on Reddit or what you see, whatever else. You can go and sort of research in some other ways and say, okay, this is where we think it fits. So we're going to make an angle. And the way we approach this is our whole creative process is built around the message. So the message is the most important thing. That's what I say all the time and we say it internally a lot as well. The notion is people are so obsessed with all kinds of elements of the execution of an ad. And this is you have to do the AI this and you have to, you know, have yappers and you have to, and listen, some of that stuff may actually all work really well. I don't know. But what I think is you can't really sell the product if you haven't, if you haven't, I'm going to use the word convinced. That's actually too rationalistic of a word, but convinced the person about where it fits into their life and about why it's, and why it's more valuable to them than the money in their pocket, basically, why it's worth exchanging their dollars for the product. They have to believe that in some way. And like I said, it's not actually that rational decision, but it's something like that idea. And therefore, therefore we start with, well, what is that message? How are we, how are we telling them that? And then from there, we break out a whole bunch of different ads, trying to execute that message a lot of different ways. For the specific reason that when we have one message, we don't want to fail on the execution of that message by only taking one shot at it because it is possible to execute a good message poorly. And therefore, and therefore we don't want to just take one shot at it. We want to take 10 to 20 shots at that message with a range of styles. So, you know, still image with a lot of text, still image with short text, you know, the Post-it node ad can be a version of this, like more UGC briefs and yeah, partied stuff, like long form explainers, it's more traditional kind of DR, whatever, you know, like, there's just a lot of different ways to go about it. But all of them are centered around this message at the core, that's our way of approaching this problem. And then we can, and then we can sort of substitute for the persona process that you're just, that you're talking about by, by trying a lot of different messages, you know, so we'd sort of build our process so that it's like we're, we're testing. You know, five to 10 messages a week depending on how much creative we're making for a brand and all that kind of stuff and how, how intensive they're creative is. So, but it's basically all aimed at the same thing you just set, which is like we want to find the place, this fits, and one way we could find that place is by getting the ads into the marketplace and seeing if people are responding to it, because presumably if they're responding to it, then that means that we have found that place. And so maybe, maybe making ads with that 50-year-old woman, all about how this is just, how this is a better for you, glass of wine with the alcohol, you know, in so many words. You know, that then allows you to tap into who that customer is and so on. Yeah, I think the, you know, a lot of that persona work, a lot of that faceJKPD interviews, our primary is to define what the message is that we should test our and then we're doing, you know, pretty similar thing that you just described, lots of different ads. Great example is, you know, there's a fairly core message that we use, which is one that we just described, like the over 50s woman who's trying to cut up alcohol, but the other day or last month, we, the UGC ad just blew up and it's now taking 30 to 40% of the spend in the account. So, good. Mid-six figures spend and we're like, can't work out why this ad is blown up and low to the comments on the ad and it's obviously the message really great because it's driving people to Mother Roo, but actually there's a lot of people just commenting on the influence or also on the content creator's dress that she's wearing. And that was interesting. And it's like, that's random, how, I mean, it isn't, that happens to, yeah. Right. You're like, great. Yeah. Yeah. Are there any other personas you guys have landed on besides that woman in her 50s who's replacing her, her ritual glass of wine with this in this whole process? Did you uncover anything else there that you could think of? So, there's the equivalent male persona that we're going after this or the category entry points. A big one that we were surprised about because it's not really a thing in the UK was just a category entry point based set up ads around July 4th and barbecues in the US. Absolutely. Not a lot of those in the UK, not a lot of July 4th barbecues in the UK, Tom. Not by many. And the barbecues. Yeah, the barbecues is hosting. That's what it is. It's summer hosting. I mean, should have probably done a lot more of it in the UK previously. Yeah. But, um, yeah, that one was started, that just ripped that, that, so it wasn't quite a persona driven one. It was a category entry point driven one, but there's obviously a persona in the category entry point. Um, and then we've tested lots that haven't worked. So we were doing one that was around freelancers working late at night, because again, this is maybe where sometimes the research is a little bit off, because we interviewed a couple of people. That's some they told us, oh, I'm, you know, I want to have a drink when I'm doing, working on six different things and I'm late at night. I don't want to coffee. That one didn't quite work. I think maybe it was a bit too niche. Um, and we are, you know, we're running the classic. I think you just, yeah. Yeah, you guys run this that exploit and expand strategy. Yeah, yeah. At the moment, even though, you know, we're scaling fast, we're just like doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on that demographic at the moment. So you should be working with IntelliGems. If you run an e-commerce store, just come on, go get IntelliGems. What are you doing? Not getting IntelliGems. IntelliGems is the one stop shop tool for making every click on your website, more valuable to your business via a mix of conversion rate optimization and upsells both built into the tool. At this point, you know IntelliGems as a CRO tool, CRO beyond the basics. They like the saying that's really right. Not only the simple messaging testing, landing page testing, creative testing on PDPs, all of that kind of stuff, but even more powerfully for your brand, the ability to test things like offers and prices and free shipping thresholds and all that kind of stuff. How much are charging for shipping? Those are the real tests that move the needle most times subscription offers. That's a really big one. You know, we're doing stack discount offers. Effect clients right now doing offers where it's like, hey, is it a one month or two month initial subscription? How much do you lose in conversion rate by getting people into two months right away? What about, you know, a stack discount versus a buy one, get one free? Many of my clients are using IntelliGems. We're really comfortable with the tool because it's just so commonly used in e-commerce for exactly this kind of stuff. And it really makes a difference. We've learned really important things in both the tests I just mentioned, actually. We've learned really important things by testing with IntelliGems and critically by measuring at the level of profit per customer. So we can actually see because IntelliGems ties into your Cogs data. You can actually see not only the conversion rate and average order value impacts, but things like subscription take rate and actual profit per visitor, like I said, because it ties into your Cogs. On top of that, though, IntelliGems has introduced a suite of tools recently all driven are built around driving your AOV up with cross cells and upsells at the level of product pages and carts and checkout and even post purchase upsells so you can get rid of your post purchase upsell tool and switch to IntelliGems have less tools in your site, more stuff in one place, and it's just really awesome. So go to IntelliGems.io, use the code Ferris20, F-A-R-I-S20, get 20% off your first three months, as well as go to IntelliGems.io/audit, a U-D-I-T, use their free tool to have IntelliGems, AI tool, recommend to you what tests you should be running right now. Really fun tool to play with, IntelliGems.io/audit, go get some test ideas for your website to see what could really move the needle. IntelliGems is great, you should use it. That main 50+ or 50, I don't know. Yeah, this is so interesting that you say this. I'm dealing with this in a couple of accounts right now. So you just referenced Explore and Expand as our language for this, right? We talk about two different ways of generating new creative. So we can either explore or expand. And this is, again, I think this is actually where, in some ways, people know, if they know my content, they know that I'm, you know, big on manual bids and sort of algorithmic based media buying. We'll get to that in a second, too. But I actually think the thing in a lot of ways to differentiate what we do right now is, that's part of it. But is this notion of, like, explore and expand in our creative process. And the way we think about that is all the message-driven stuff that I think that I was just mentioning before, you know, explore is already saying, go find new messages or new personas or whatever. So take formats that we know basically work. Okay, so, so basically we're going to try to minimize the potential ways that we'll miss on the execution by using tried and true ad formats. But we're going to change the message because in that way, the variable we're changing. And we don't like AB test these things. So like variable we're changing quote unquote. It's not like we're using randomized controlled trials here. Like the variable we're changing is the message. And so that's explore. So we're going to go find new different messages. And maybe it's like barbecue or maybe it's, you know, go try to reach the young man or whatever it is, okay, and you try and like hit those different things. And then the other part of the work is what we call expand. And that's where you take an existing message that's working. And you try to make try to find new, more creative, more visually and other ways, diverse ways of communicating that same message or a community that same customer in the other case, maybe. And if the interesting thing is there's this question. Like every week our growth rate is have to deal with this question. Should I explore more or should I expand more? And it's actually hard to tell. Like there's no, there's not an obvious answer. Like it would be great if there's like an AI tool that like told you do more of expanding or exploring. But of course it's all hypotheses. And we almost never do 100% of one or the other. But but there are definitely some brands we work with. They can go extremely far, never exploring new messages. Because there are like lots and lots of customers who care about this one thing about the product. And that's all they need to say over and over and over again. And there are other brands that win by just like finding a new way to talk up or to talk to different kinds of customers, different kinds of personas and different really specific categories of points or whatever all the time. I have one brand right now that has just like over and over and over again. They have one message and there's like a two two word phrase. It's in the message that they that if they put that in the hook. No matter what way they say it, they get more spend to new ads. And they've grown their spend a bunch in that process. And they've gone from a thousand dollars a day. This is a media buying only client of ours thousand dollars a day to you know five thousand dollars a day. And they're just you know we're coaching them and giving them direction. They've adopted our sports band framework, but they're developing the creative internally in this case. We're setting up the media buying and coaching and consulting. And they've gotten they've gotten you know five X growth and spend for a younger company. It's been really, really good for them by just taking this one message and finding a whole bunch more ways to say that one message. Eventually they want to get outside of that. But they're they got really far and a really big lift in their business. You know from thirty thousand a month and spend a one fifty or whatever by just doing this one thing over and over. And and and so I think what you're expressing here is important. And like what you like this notion that for this brand you can actually go re there's actually a lot of 50 year old women who want to drink this who want to drink the product. And they also by live be repeat buyers. And so so it makes sense to me that you say like nope we're just going to keep finding more influencers. We speak to that woman and more but you know whatever and just hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer that over and over and over again. Yeah I think we probably like in the early days of the US we probably actually ended up doing too much expand. That's fun. That's fun. Sorry. And now we've been back. Yeah. And now like trying to find new personas etc. Now we've moved slightly we've moved me back when I'll you know good mid mid five figures a day of spend just on the core demographic and actually to be honest caught a bit of it is just the core message as well. Which is like irreplaceable kind of tastes great. The other thing that we. You know sometimes we miss and lots of appetizers miss is just like keep it sometimes the message cannot. It's not a life and fat is running is a buy it see it by a business. This is not quite see it by it because I can't you know it's not for the I can't taste the drink from matter. So you have to just work our ways of getting people to tell people why it tastes great as well as in the alcohol bits and then all the other kind of secondary messaging that we need to go with it. Yeah yeah I think you're right about that. I mean I am I like the point about simplicity as well sometimes this is like it's really clear what the value proposition is and like there's cultural tailwinds here so it makes sense. I was thinking of one example of this expanded to oblivion kind of kind of thing. I've never seen the ad library for caraway. What's that? Yeah the frying pan guys. Yeah yeah right exactly. And and somebody looked at their ad library and every ad was just another picture of a pan. That just basically in so many words or video of it or whatever in so many words said there's no plastic in this. And that was it that was like that was like the whole business. I don't know if they're still doing that or how far I call them exactly but it was just over and over again it was just plastic free cookware. Boom and and I think they got pretty far with that. I don't know I don't have their revenue numbers or anything like that. Rugged bill and washable rugs is the same. Perfect example. Oh my goodness. Oh they seven eight hundred million dollar business when they saw. Yeah right. Yeah insane. Okay let's talk about how you guys have gone about doing the distribution on the actual media buying side and some of that. Let me guess Tom. ABO testing graduate your winners allocate lots of test dollars graduate winners to scale campaigns. Make sure to not ever trust the algorithm. And that's the only way to explain your spend as far as I understand. Yeah no we are we took quite a dogmatic approach to it which was largely single out single campaign one ad set. As I said you can see which and I helped us get to where they were but. What do I get had quite a lot of heated debates with them about are we really actually learning anything when we've got these test assets going because we're not spending enough. It's not statistically significant not really how meta works and so when when we ended it with them we just dumped it we just consolidated everything down to one ad set. And luckily around that time meta launch the in ad set testing in ad set creative testing we're using that for a bit. work really well. But actually, we got to the stage where we just, we just, this sounds like really simplistic. We just put ads into the ad set that's spending thousands and thousands of dollars a day and meta works out what to spend on. And we probably have paused five ads in six or seven months. I think one of them, because we actually didn't have rights to use it. Yeah. Yeah. But actually, no, one was with, uh, god, Jesse, something or other from, uh, whatever it's called, uh, modern, modern family, uh, or my family. Um, yeah, we just didn't have, we, he was on a BBC, the UK TV program he was tasting mother, so we were like, oh, let's just stick that into the ad, uh, into the ad account, uh, yeah, his agent wasn't happy about that. Other than that, it's don't try and test ads, um, in separate ad sets. Don't try and be clever. Let meta decide because meta has built over the last 15 years, probably the greatest platform to work out the right ad/right product in front of the right person at the right time. And hey, guess what, the whole business relies on being able to do that. Um, so they are on our side. Um, I don't think some of the other larger tech advertising platforms necessarily are on our side and they have to work really hard because they don't have this thing where someone types in what they want and then they show some blue links and bidding, they click on it. Um, they have to be really, really smart and they have to give relevant adverts to add to their customers, eG meta and Instagram and Facebook users. And they have to get us good return on ads, and otherwise we'll stop spending money. And so we trust it. Um, and how do we then learn? We learn by using things like runathon motion, um, to try and learn about kind of the higher level insights around this type of advertising work, this messaging worked or random things like, hey, we should find content creators who can dress well, you know, stuff that I don't think would ever A/B test and we probably would have killed that ad, if we'd done an A/B test on it. So yeah, uh, fairly dogmatic approach. The team loves it, I think, because it means it's actually less work and we can spend more time on creative and creative strategy and landing page optimization and, and proper thinking rather than setting up just, like, ultimately nonsense. Statistically, of invalid testing that gives you a comfort blanket. I'm pretty, uh, yeah, I'm the most just fairly passionate about the fact that I don't think any of this stuff works. The, you've hit so many things at once, which is like the, the, the reliability of the meta algorithm, the, you know, the basic principle that I sort of always put in, I always say to internally and to clients is just like meta basically works, meta ads basically works. It, it doesn't always work perfectly. Some people confuse my opinion on this issue with saying that, like, I'm saying meta is never wrong or something like that. It will accuse me of that. I've never once said that, um, but meta basically works. And so you should, you should assume generally that if something is not working, the problem is with you, not with meta, um, and, and therefore meta can basically scale your ads. And, um, this gets tricky in certain ways and I believe me when I tell you I get all that, uh, not every client of ours is successful all the time and any agency or growth person telling you that is lying to you. Like there is, there's challenges along the way for sure. But, um, I, uh, but I, you know, your opinion I think is so right. And I think your opinion also, the thing you're pointing out here that like not only does meta basically work, but the, the quote unquote tests being run by lots of media buyers are just utter nonsense. They are, they are statistically ridiculous. Um, and, uh, and, and yeah, ridiculous is right where they're laughably bad as tests. And I've heard you will say all these cockamimi things about, like, oh, when an ad gets like five purchases in an AVO, then you basically know whether it's working or not. It's like, what in the world? Five purchases doesn't make any sense at all. Um, just give up on all of that nonsense. Combine your, uh, campaigns to every scale campaign is a test campaign. Every test campaign is a scale campaign. Launch your ads that way. Let the work, let the algorithm do the work for you. And when you have good ads and a good product and a good messaging, you've done all the work we talked about up to this point in this podcast episode, uh, you will do, you will do well. You will do well. And you have clarity to your economics and all that kind of stuff. How well you do will depend on all kinds of factors. But, um, but, you know, that, that, the nice thing about that approach to me, among other things, first of all, I think it works. I think it's financially efficient. It's, it's the, it's the, it's the best way to spend your dollars, which is really important, right? Because meta is the probably the biggest line item on your books. If it's not the biggest, it's the second, I guess. And therefore, it's really important that you use those dollars really, really well. You can go and get really excited about, uh, you know, vibe coding your own replacement for some software tool, but that's actually a drop in the bucket relative to the value creation of spending your meta add dollars well as far as your PNL goes to say nothing of the upside, uh, uh, that meta ads can provide before you even talk about cost savings. So, um, so yeah, all kinds of things, um, you know, can, can sort of mess up in that process. But the, but the, the point that I'm making is that like, when, when you do that, it actually allows you, there's like a sneaky benefit of organizing your account this way. Not only does it scale well, but when something goes wrong then, it actually forces you as an operator to then ask the question, well, if something is broken, it's probably not broken at the media buying level because that, because I know the media buying basically works. In that case, where is it broken? Well, somewhere before, it's somewhere in the first 40 minutes of this podcast, let's vote or however long we were talking about first five minutes of it, right? It's, it's the product or it's the tailwinds or it's the personas or it's the messaging or it's the expanding or exploring. That's where the break is. And, uh, and therefore you, you eliminate the media buying thing basically and say that's there. Now, the media buying is tricky. Actually, it's harder than it sounds to do the kind of thing that I'm saying, but, um, I think we do provide a lot of value with like manual bid-based media buying and algorithmic based media buying. It is, it isn't quite as easy as I'm making it sound, I think. But if you have got mastered, then for, then when things are going poorly, all the problem-solving energy can go towards where the real problems are, which is things like product and economics and, and create, I've got to go ahead, Tom. Or, uh, for the other, the other arrow that I've seen consistently break, break meta, and then you go down like a rabbit hole. And what it was was, I don't know, if you're in a big business, someone in the product team was doing an AB test that they released that AB test. Um, and, I don't know, increased site speed by five, uh, five hundred milliseconds or something, or they've just broken something. So many times in my life, I have spent time, I've been doing meta for 15 years, sadly, like chasing down when people are like, meta's broken. And you're like, you're going to look at it and say, you talk to the Tano CTO and they're like, oh yeah, we did release something that seems to have actually accidentally put the hold of the US site into pounds or something like that. And you know, right, so I've been chasing this ghost on meta for the last seven days. In newer convinced, it obviously couldn't be the internal reasons. Blame the external bogeyman, that is meta. And quite often it sat an even like two weeks ago, I launched something on fab. Um, thought it was a good idea. It was a offer testing. So we were looking at like, by two prints, get, by two things get two prints free. Didn't check site speeds on it and it killed our meta conversion. And so I then spent going to your thing about vibe coding. Don't vibe code away. Don't vibe code away like SaaS software. Look at your shop by shop by theme. Look at how fast it is and get clawed or get codex to make your site faster. And if you can afford it, go and use something like edge mesh, which no one ever talks about, which is a brilliant tool for making your site fast. And it will increase your conversion rate 10, 15 percent. Almost certainly a strong endorsement. Yeah, I don't know if you've used them. They, like, no, no one ever seems to talk about them. They are, like, all the operator guys who talk, I don't know, maybe they just don't pay any sponsorship to Cody to stick it on his Twitter or whatever he was doing. I know they use them. And the team there's just great. There were a bunch of X Wall Street quants and they AB tested both mother and fab that they half of the traffic goes to their CDN network half-states on Shopify. And it was a 7, 8, 10 percent increase in conversion. It was brilliant. And yeah, so I'm saying, just the upstream stuff is that kind of what's happening on the site stuff as well. I think, you know, CRO just doesn't seem to be as sexy as it used to be. Yeah. Okay, Tom, make a great product that meets people in a moment where this category tailwinds care a lot about the messaging and talking to the right person in the right way, put ads at scale into your ad account that accomplishes thing with some, with some kind of process built around message around that message and create and create adversity around those messages as well. Left the algorithm, deliver your ads for you, let the machine learning do that, work for you and do all that on a fast, well-run site that isn't broken. And you can build a really business. Yeah. Simple. Easy as pie. Yeah. It's funny, though. Like I do all these podcast episodes and I'm like realizing as we're talking, that's the conclusion we're coming to. And I think it is helpful to hear it in simple terms. Like don't overcomplicate it. That is, if something is broken in that process, it's probably somewhere out there. I think this is going to wait too long. You know, some of those simple things. All right. Any last things that we didn't get to that are you burning on that you think would just be really helpful for people to hear? No, I didn't think so. I think all right, man. I think we just walk. Tom, thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Tom Beverly from Fab and from Mother Root. Yeah, I hope we'll talk to each other. - Tortile. - Thanks Tom. - Bye. (upbeat music) - Big thanks to Tom. Go get yourself some Mother Root and drink that. It's delicious. Like I said, many times I think on the Hexod 'cause it's really good. And hopefully that stories helpful to you. One of the really compelling businesses I've looked at recently at, you know, like I said, passing 25 million this year, they're gonna grow well past that very soon. The velocity for the growth is really impressive. And you can just see the business really moving the right way. I've looked that out account. I've looked at the numbers that Tom's talking about. He's not making those things up. It is really growing very fast and doing very well for all the reasons we said. So go check that business out. Thanks, Tom, for breaking it down with me. If you want to work with us and our team, some of the stuff I was talking about at the level of creative and all the rest, it sounds good for your business. Go to my website, agfgrowth.com, fill out the intake form. Tell me a little bit about your business. And so we can get a conversation and start it to see if we're a fit. I'm really tight on space right now, but it's possible, possible, possible to have one space. Going in the next year, we'll start trying to grow again and open up some spaces. So just get a conversation going, see if it's a fit. And let's see. You can also email me podcastedagfgrowth.com and see if maybe something, if you have any questions about this episode about anything else we're doing, or even if you just want to go straight to me with intake form type stuff. Podcastedagfgrowth.com is the place to do that. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you're watching. Listening, all kinds of great episodes coming up very soon. So don't miss those. And big thanks to more staffing and to intelligence for sponsoring this episode. They're both great, go check 'em out. Thank you. I'll see you next time.