Unlocking Growth Levers with Connor Dault, CMO of Fast-Growth DTC Supplement Brand Gruns

- Well, we got the four Cs. - We got Connor Dalt back, CMO of Groans. - Really that the CMO role I find is frustratingly different across industries and across organizations. - There are many brands that spend way more on marketing than any of us, but I think the way that you can kind of arbitrage that lack of spend compared to others is just by saying things in consistent ways and building that repetition in the consumer's mind. - I believe it's my hypothesis that this is going to be the best way for us to reach new people. - Where are you over investing time and energy that you don't think is yielding productive outcomes? And there's a million things that we can dive into for how do you solve that with resourcing with AI tools, with just dropping stuff that wasn't priority. - I've been eating my Groans daily, dude. - That's how you're. - If you've been wondering why I'm looking so useful and healthy, it's a gum. - Eight of consumers are eating them daily after three months. That's a retention number. - Yeah, we ran this massive consumer survey and we wanted to get a sense of daily habit. - I'm with you, dude. I eat them, now I'm eating 24 gummies a day though 'cause we've got two new product lines that are launched. So I'm like, I'm 25% gummier right now. - Dude, honestly, so I was doing the create gummies for a bit, but I just switched to the powder 'cause I was getting gummy fatigue quick. I'm like, I can just wake up every day and just like, cram my face full of gummies. Like it's not scalable. - Yeah, yeah, but most Americans are under fiber. So really you should think of it as your ability to catch up on fiber, which is, she's eating the gut microbiome. So you're making Hebrewman proud. Good. - I'm at 12 gummies today, or a day. So I got my eight grooms gummies and then I do my three to four create gummies. - Yep. - And then I just ordered mud water just launched like a protein powder. - Yeah, that's really tasty. They launched a really awesome product. It's like P-base protein and then they've a bunch of neutropics and adaptogens in there. Probiotics is really good. It's like 180 calories too. So it's got some good, some good satiating nests to it. So that's my current stack. Well, I want to know if Cody's take, Cody, you have any gummies in the mix right now? Or are you gummies? - Dude, I'm on the, I'm on the, I love how we're saying I'm on it. Like it's like a stack. I'm on the Raspberry lemonade. The limited edition grooms was Raspberry lemonade and I got my daughter on the groom's cubs. So, you know, nice. - How'd she like them holding it down? She's loving it. Dude, I tried to get a video the first time because you sent them to us and she literally tried to open the cabinet to get more after she finished the first match we love. - We love the rave in this children. - Yes. - Yes. - We talk a lot about how like how you introduce cubs to your kids can dictate their experience with them. If you introduce cubs like the groom's cubs products, be introduced it as like, hey, this is like healthy vitamin, but it's a gummy bear. Kids are, I think skeptical, but if you just introduce it as a treat that they get once a day, puts some scarcity into it. It's like basic marketing tactics with your kids. - It's one of her potty snacks right now. So she's potty training. So this is one of like the high currency potty snacks. - Dude, say this for dad operators. - How do you say what's one more than cubed? How do you say that? Anyone? - Quoted. - Quoted. We got sequoted today. Feels good to have everyone back together. We got Connor, Dalp back, friend of the pot officially. I think once you've hit two or more airings, first time Connor was here with Caraway. We had some awesome conversations about digital product. But now he is here as the CMO of Groans. And our one of our content, like strategies with the marketing operators is basically to see what the operators do and then one up them whenever we can. So like, we think they had chat on last week. It was a great podcast, but we're pretty confident we can one up the chat operators podcast. So that's the goal for today. Setting the bar high. Before we get into it, thank you to the sponsors motion, Prussian AI, after-sell Rich Panel and Revo. If you enjoy the show, make sure to like it, subscribe, share with your marketing friends. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) I want to talk to you quickly about motions new AI creative strategists. These are AI agents built by best in class D to C operators. And what's unique about these is that you were using agents to analyze your creative using real data from your meta add account. It's like chat GPT, but way more relevant with way more context. So Conor Rowland, I ran some of these this morning. Let me walk you through them. So a couple quick things here. One, these are, you'd see in the top right of your motion dashboard, you have account-wide tasks that you can have these AI agents run. But the first one I want to show you actually is Jess Bachman's critique this ads messaging, which is at the ad level. So those are our best performing creative last week. You can run this task here. I've got it open here as well. And what we hear from Jess is that one, he loves a concept, instant differentiation. But what I found interesting and kind of painful as always, when you realize there's ad creative that you don't absolutely love, we use the headline almost as rare as winning the lottery. These are like one of eight unique designs. And Jess says that is hyperbolic and undermines credibility. And I 100% agree in I took this to my team and we're taking action on it. Yeah, I love it. I think this stuff takes a lot of time to manually do. Like you could, your creative strategist, especially at brands that are at the scale of Ridge. Like your creative strategist could spend all day every day, just like looking through top performing ads and low performing ads and just trying to come up with reasons why they work or don't work and like what the next steps are. So I don't think that this agent necessarily totally replaces that. But now you're starting at level five and set a level zero. So the amount of time it saves you is huge. And it just empowers your team to go and action things instead of sitting there and kind of getting stuck in analysis paralysis all day long. The second task I ran was fine new customer personas by Jimmy Sleggel and Alex Cooper. They have an agent called Marvis. And this one was cool. I got to upload 500 reviews and then identified people that we might not be speaking to or can better build personas around if we talk about on marketing operators all the time. And I thought this was extremely helpful. Traveler with tech. I mean, between our luggage, between our wallets, between our power banks, this is like exactly who we want to speak to. So I felt they nailed identifying some new and maybe underserved personas for us. I feel like this is so important. I talked to marketers and brand operators every now and again. And they're like, "Oh, we're at 10 million, 20 million. We've hit a wall with Meta." And I asked them some kind of pointed questions and they haven't launched new creative in a long time. And I think this right here is like the absolute starting point for brands that have maybe hit a wall or haven't hit a wall or just looking to continue to scale. 'Cause how do you scale Meta? Will you reach new people? How do you reach new people? You create ads that speak to those people. And this is such an amazing starting point for that. And it's based on your real reviews. Like what better, more trustworthy place to start? - 100%. - That's all to say, "Motion is giving teams an AI adoption cheat code, making it accessible to every D to C advertiser. And best yet, you don't need a motion contract to use this. You can try these agents for free, test them out in your motion account today. So try it out at motionapp.com. - All right, sweet. Let's get into it. So Connor, I got so many questions for you. Like you were crushing it at Carolei. Honestly, like made a move that I think was, is probably hard for a lot of, would be hard for a lot of marketers to do. Like Carolei is very much growing at a rapid rate right now. Most like people in your role, probably one of them have jumped ship, right? They're like, well, I'm gonna keep riding this wave and keep compounding all the work I've done here. You jumped ship to Grooons what, three, four months ago? - Yeah, it was in end of February. So what, five months, five and half months now. - Okay, cool, cool. And like obviously, Grooons has, I think it's really cool how Chad was so like, no one really knew how well Grooons was doing until the news came out about the, the raise and the valuation associated with it. Now it's like, you know, every other tweet from Sean Frank is about gummies, which I love. But I guess where I wanted to start is like, what's the most challenging part about coming into a brand as their marketing leader when the brand's already humming? Like it's, I feel like that's an interesting position to be in. I feel like most of the time you're coming in and like, maybe it's not working as well as it could. And like there's some obvious things to change. But like for my conversation with Chad, it's like, you guys have a great team, you had a great team and like you were like one of the final kind of puzzle pieces to like building out the great marketing stack. So like, I guess a few sub component questions to that larger questions. Like what is getting onboarded and downloaded look like and like your whole process of auditing or like getting up to speed. And then like how do you decide kind of like what to focus on? Like maybe insert yourself into slash change versus like, hey, this is crushing. This is working. Like I'm not going to not be involved. But like let's just let this thing dry. Like what does that process look like over the last six months? I was trying to find a good kind of analogy to help describe what the experience was like. And I kept coming back to Chuck daily was the coach of the pistons for the 92 dream team. And he had to like work with some of the best basketball players on the planet and not teach them how to play basketball but just help them run a more productive offense, run a better defense, and just figure out how to play well together as a team. That's what my experience with groups has felt like so far. There's just world class people everywhere inside of this business. So I didn't really join with the intent of causing immediate. disruption, right? I think with Paraguay, I joined a little bit from a different vantage point as coming as head of growth. I think within a week I was in ads manager and being like, oh, why is this campaign architecture like this? How do we start to make some tweaks and kind of win from that angle? With grooms, it's way different, right? There's so much solid baseline and foundation established. So the first thing I did was I actually did a, I kind of sent out a slack the night before I started and just gave everybody on the team expectations of what I'd want to be talking through over the next couple of weeks and it was basically just a massive download of everything that you've been working on and trying to point out, I wanted to discover a few things. One is, where are you over investing time and energy that you don't think is yielding productive outcomes? And there's a million things that we can dive into for how do you solve that with resourcing with AI tools with just dropping stuff that wasn't priority. And then just starting to, I think help the teams figure out how to work with one another to compound what they were doing to have bigger effects. So like, you know, the growth team was running all of these funnels and pursuing all of these angles and building out personas and just making sure that that had connective tissue into the site experience and into the retention flows and into what influencers and brand teams were talking about. So I've spent a ton of my time just kind of diagnosing a couple of those pieces, right? And it's been awesome to just see what this team's been capable of and it's not easy to grow as quick as Greens had and yeah, it's been really impressive to see. That's interesting. Yeah, that's something I've been talking a lot about on the show and doing a lot about Hexclad is just like, I call like branding campaigns and just creating a lot more cohesiveness across the entire marketing stack. And like, I just think it's not even worth doing something if you're not going to think about how it intersects across multiple channels because your point like, sure you could do a bad ass ad with a really unique fun angle. But like if the if the landing page destination isn't speaking to that, if the post purchase experiences and speaking to that, it's it's not really going to scale. Okay, that's interesting. So I what about like, so you kind of hit on this, but like tactically speaking because I feel like it seems overwhelming, right? To like come into that type of team and be like, God, like how do I learn everything and get downloaded? And like, where do I even start? Like, do you have any any tips or tricks on like more like tactically speaking? Like, so you mentioned the slack message and like, you asked people to kind of like do a brain dump and then you met with them to talk through it. But like, could you even break that out into like steps of like how you got up to speed and in such a, you know, a quick fast growing order? Yeah, I definitely can't. You want to come with a bunch of experience that can kind of guide the initial places that you want to go investigate time. So but you also want to be cognizant of the fact there is no one size fits all playbook. I've already had a bunch of examples of stuff that was just tried and true and such a difference maker for what we did at Carole and it just doesn't translate one for one into the world of trends. Yes. Yes, so many things. Creative types. You talk about campaigns, you know, at Carole, that was a muscle we really started building over the last two years. You know, putting a ton of emphasis into Mother's Day and other kind of actually furniture holidays and that yet has yet to prove to be a massive lever for us at Grounds. You know what I mean? And so there's nuance and industry and category and space. As far as I didn't want to, you know, lead to witness too much with my teams though. I wanted to say like help me understand a lot of those kind of choke points and where you're feeling, you know, stressed out or under resource. And I really just kind of was on a listening tour for the first couple of weeks and started to find my places to begin to plug in. Now there are tons of just kind of low hanging fruit opportunities, right? Some of the ways that we were building out a creative process and leveraging UGC. That was a place where I was like, oh, here's what we had had done prior at Carole with how we were doing a little bit more prescriptive briefing. We were having breached through reflective of kind of point in year and finding a lot of success with that. Why don't you guys start weaving that into your process and hopefully we can find some quick wins. Do you mean like when you say point in year, do you mean like like making more seasonal type in crater lead ads where it's like speaking to a certain time of the year in a certain moment? Exactly. Yeah. Valentine's Day. It's here's, you know, how I set a lens for an at home dinner date with my my person using Carole. And you know, and that that just proved to be really, really repeatable and successful and I'll just kind of always feel on the nose and culturally relevant, I think, with Carole. So yeah, I tried to just work with the teams to say help me understand where I can help you immediately. And I wanted to see what they kind of led with because what you don't want to do is come in with all of these assumptions about stuff that's going to work with no context and just immediately start throwing ideas at the wall and then be met with a bunch of tried that doesn't work that way. Can't do it for such and such reason. So I promised the team that I'd come in and challenge convention. I was like, if the answer is this is just how we do things that I'm going to press on and really try to, you know, pressure test and make sure that still the right decision for the brand. But everything else I did want to kind of let the team lead and say, Hey, tell me where you think we can work together and projects to begin to work on. And again, knockoff some low hanging fruit. And then I started to build my my kind of game plan for bigger, longer term projects that I wanted to start pursuing across the entire marketing org. So a lot of it was that stitching together and cohesion of messaging touch points, leaning into moments a little bit more. How do we think about offer testing and how that sort of proliferates across the entire marketing stack? Some of those kind of like larger lift items, but not ones that were immediately deployable. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've learned that I feel like now because we set all of our targets on a quarterly tempo. But like, it's the channel lead responsibility to pitch me basically. It's like, I'm not, I'm not the one bringing most of the net new ideas to CRO or paid. It's like, no, I want you to come pitch me like what you're the retention, like you're the little retention lead, like you know this part of our program better than anyone. You know where the opportunity is like so to why, but like, I want you to pitch me all the things you think we should do. And then I'll like give you feedback and I'll add on a few of my own ideas. But it's like empowering the team to be the driver of the strategy. And like, I think the quickest way to probably not get off on the right foot with with the groom's team would have been for you to come in and be like, here's all my ideas. I don't have any context from you guys yet. But I'm just going to like dump my ideas on you. But that's not the approach you took at all. It's like you listened, you heard. Totally. Totally. And I want, I want the team to know that I'm not here because any of them are lacking in ability, right? That's not, that's not why Chad wanted to bring in this role. It's to start to tie these teams together. There's so many incredibly effective people leading all of these functions on the marketing team. It was just kind of missing the head to bring it all together. The other area that I really, and as marketers, you guys know, this is especially the types of marketers you are. The other person I spent the most time with when I got started was our CFO, which Fun Fact also named Connor. Not only am I not not only am I not the go to D to C Connor. I'm also in the halls of gurus not even if you say Connor, the one that people think of. So, um, no, so Connor Stassney's our CFO and he is just an absolute height in of a CFO. Um, and he, and I just spent so much time getting acquainted and he knows this business from a numbers perspective is an incredibly surgical operator of those numbers. So I spent a lot of time with him just understanding how the model's been build. How do we set a demand plan? What are some of the levers that you've been pressing? What are some of the forecasting targets that we're trying to hit? Where are you feeling like in the year we might be experiencing some stressors? How do I work with our growth and retention and econ teams to stack levers to make sure that we're able to hit those targets? So, you know, economic profiles, we spent just so much time just getting to to know the business so I can get the foundation there. And then the other piece that I really wanted to arm the team with was a much cleaner sense of priorities of metrics that I felt they needed to be held accountable for that we knew if all of those metrics were being hit and those, those KRs were being hit, it would ladder into the business hitting its overall targets from a rather new perspective. Mm-hmm. If you were on a DTC brand and you're still throwing all your budget at Meta and Google, it might be time to add a smarter, more profitable channel to the mix. Let's talk about rock dads. Rock dads put your brands directly on the checkout pages of premium e-commerce sites right in front of real buyers who've just completed a purchase. It's not a discovery play. It's not broad targeting. It's high intent, net new traffic with verified identity data and zero creative lift. Here's what makes rock ads different. One, you only pay for performance. No clicks, no cost. Two, no waste is spent on repeat customers. You upload a suppression list and rocked only targets net new buyers. Three, higher A O V, higher LTV. These aren't looky lose. They're real customers in the buying mindset. Rock dads is powered by after sell by rocked, which means DTC brands now have access to enterprise grade tech that is powered checkout experiences for giants like ticket master, macy's, and Disney brands like Jones Road, true classic, Mugsy, and Ridge are already seeing it work. And now after sales opening up early access to the marketing operators community. Here's the deal. Qualified brands can claim $10,000 in free ad credits to test rock ads and see the results firsthand. Head to after sell.com to claim your $10,000 offer and start scaling smarter. Yeah, I'm curious. I don't know if you guys saw, but I just bought the domain name CMO WTF. I did see that is 99 bucks. That's a good one. Yeah, no brain. No brain. That fries point. And I've wanted to buy that domain for years. And the reason is because one, it's just great. The three letters and whatever But like really the the CMO role I find I've technically been a CMO I've technically been a CMO for like eight years now or whatever Is like is is frustratingly different across industries and across organizations So Connor you were VP of growth and digital product. It cares away. We've talked a lot about that and those Makes sense together, but even that was a very unique title. I think and we discussed that when when we spoke back in February How different is the role of CMO at groons and like what what what maybe you could just describe briefly like what you say? It over and how that differs from your role at caraway Yeah, it's it's been really really interesting to get into a really uncomfortable position of feeling and posture syndrome again and But I love that feeling so much and losing that is the worst part of a career moment at whatever stop along it that you're in so I actually I lost some remit coming to groons and I gained some so one of the teams that sat with me at carry was our data practice Obviously marketing teams are highly Data needy and intensive and so we have the data team kind of built on out under my team and then other teams would Kind of request in and the problem there obviously is that marketing kind of gets the preferential treatment and ops and cx and finance Everybody's got data needs so coming to groons that was a team that actually now sits with Connor Stass and you cfo he's got this shared service everything that he oversees Reviews as a service to the rest of the end to the rest of the business so horizontally shared function But picking up brand and creative is definitely a new muscle for me. So now I think I love it because it it allows for me to kind of see across the full gamut and At caraway, thankfully, we had really good partners on the on the brand and creative side So much trust gets placed in those teams when you've got this idea for a new offer or new moment campaign that you want to lean into And you've kind of got everything dialed from the growth and retention and site side But you do have to rely on it on a different team with a brief that maybe your team's been responsible for it to get the visuals and Copy and all of those assets and pieces of content back to fuel The levers that you want to deploy as a growth org. So thankfully at caraway I didn't really feel like that was ever an issue The thing that was always challenging was just velocity and prioritization You know, and it was always you guys would probably all experience. It's always a tradeoff discussion of what gets Kind of first and preferential treatment. So with ruins. It's really nice is because you know brand and creative And picking up influence or in some of those other teams that sit under brand here at groans is really nice because now I can sort of take a 30 000 foot view And say all right, we need to attack this new angle. We need to revamp the cubs line. We need to Think about running a sweepstakes whatever it might be Being able to kind of view across the entire spectrum of marketing levers to pull and help the entire team kind of set their priorities Against what we believe those you know biggest business levers to be is is really really cool And I think what's what's interesting about brand and creative is like I I feel like it's It's a bit less kind of Like objective in the assessment of it then growth or retention where there's like hardcore metrics that define the success of it For brand so much of it is feeling and quote vibes and things like that and thankfully groans already as an awesome lively a reverent brand and so just helping that team kind of be tethered into the to the metrics that we're all striving for is Been a really big focus on that side of the house. It was awesome. Yeah, super cool What's what's what's been your experience Connor? How do you feel about kind of like overseen the entire marketing stack? What's the what's that like with where you feel Most adequate and most sort of experience and then how do you interact with the teams? Are you like I am so not the Center of excellence, you know so much more than me in this world I'm curious how you think about that that dynamic. Yeah, so the the teams we have built out right now Just for context we have VP of marketing which is basically like own channels and go to market We just brought on a VP of ecom. She's eight days in She's overseeing web development and digital product We have VP of paid media who oversees performance creative and media buying and then we have a creative director who oversees like content production copywriting design um There are a few of those that I feel like really well versed in where like I can bring a lot to the table and obviously like working with the VP of marketing or VP of paid media It's very much a conversation. They are extremely talented and knowledgeable, but that's where I feel I'm in my wheelhouse the most We are finally knock on wood in like a really solid spot with the creative director and like our general like brand creative processes That was like the bane of my existence for less like 18 months We just like had a lot of turnover on the team. We weren't hitting the right timelines So like we we've done a lot of work there over the last like nine months and now that's really good and I Like that is I am out of my wheelhouse air where I feel I'm most effective is just trying to bring Like competence transitions nicely across all those different teams. So like there were certain things when it comes down to process or strategy that I think are beneficial to like work through with that team But you know talking about fonts and figmar or whatever is like I'm leaving that up to the experts completely. Yeah, that's where I figured out where to kind of draw the lines Yeah, yeah, it's really nice to bring I think business context to To a lot of these teams and help kind of people see the bigger picture my my whole approach is the more that I can arm people with the right context the more that I can entrust them to make the right decisions and I don't want to be somebody that's in the In the weeds of certain functions right it's so much better for me to spend time in certain places and then some time and others So I think just focusing on like non-duplicative time spend is a huge huge point of emphasis for me with running the marketing team here Which is left the experts do the expert work and then my job is to bring them all together and say like this is the thing that we're going to try to go win Against right now. This is a new Pam that we're going after and here's how we're going to make that happen Setting some of that initial vision and then yes enlisting the troops to go to go make it happen with way better ideas and I would ever have I've got a question and Conner I love your perspective first and then I'd love to hear from Cody too you brought up bringing cohesion So like you had um you described the briefing to creators the running paid media the the maybe building landing pages and the uniting that with like the retention efforts and things like that One thing we've been struggling with is figuring out how much complexity do we even want to tolerate there? Right because like there's benefits to cohesion, but then you also There's there's trade-offs with volume right you can't you can't produce as much as maybe you'd want to if you want to remain as cohesive as you can So like could you talk through either at caraway or at grooms like how you thought about that Caraway I would say is much more visual cohesion was kind of the driver We wanted you to know that wherever you saw an experienced caraway We wanted you to be able to subliminy or Pakely connect it right back to the brand that was messaging that to you and we had a color story Which is a huge thing that we leaned into For grooms I would say that the The bigger focus I think there's some polishing of kind of like how the brand is visually represented And we just hired an awesome art director and designer who's coming in and just providing some of that polish and in you know refining some of those edge cases where it probably got a little too loosey goosey On the periphery for me. It's much more about like what are we saying about this product to a specific audience? Being consistent with that and so That's where I think there's so much power and compounding Messaging effects of we're going to start talking about the benefits of fiber that can come from grooms What I was just speaking to you guys about what I don't think is best is for the way that we talk about the average American being under fiber And that grooms can help you address those gaps. I don't want that being said in too many disparate ways Wherever you encounter us because I think it starts to lose some of its effect But if we're going to go out into the wild with a new acquisition angle and start talking about this as a reason to Try grooms and stick with grooms. I think having that consistency pull through into the landing page experience and into the retention journey That you get brought along is super impactful and I'm with you We don't want to you know hinder volume or anything like that in service of of that mission But I think just taking a little bit of time to sets and foundational docs with a couple of great copy lines to pull from Fueled by research that our creative strategy inputs together. I think that's worth just taking the extra beat to make sure that happens Because I've just seen it time and time again like there are many brands that spend way more on marketing than any of us But I think the way that you can kind of arbitrage That lack of spend compared to others is just by saying things in consistent ways and building that repetition in the consumers mind Especially for a category in product like grooms where you might want to buy it in store You might want to buy it online or on Amazon. It's a little bit more like a happenstance Kind of Flip of the switch in the moment purchase and a lot of caraway purchases were which is a far more considered $200 per chest So something like the fiber angle like how often are you guys launching that as a funnel? And do you have like five of them running at the same time? Because that's where like for more context from Ridge like we're balancing our three categories And then there's a potential for different messaging within the categories now we're talking about like eight or nine different funnels And then that's when I really start seeing the trade-offs with cohesion where it's like yeah We're not going to be able to have every landing page directly speak to this funnel much less Have different retention flow setup or whatever so like what where do you guys land on that? Totally into the caraway experience was way more like the Ridge one right like the collection or the category of the product was Way more of the focus and just speaking to that use case and the utility of that line For grooms right it's a it's a pack of gummy bears But the benefits that one can realize are so vast and so yes We do have those very specific kind of angles because the whole hypothesis is that somebody's taking grooms Honor you might be taking grooms for a different reason than Cody is you know I mean and what we want to be able to do is find all of the people that might Perceive value and benefit from taking grooms and speak really intentionally to those people So I talked a little bit earlier about leverage We have so many. I mean, you can look at our ad libraries, 1200 or so ads live in it. And the velocity of output there is insane. Anthony and Claire, who lead growth and performance creative on our team, are incredible. And what we try to do now is stack bigger bets. And those are kind of the bigger levers that we make an informed kind of collective team bet that's speaking to this is going to have really big impact to our ad account to unlocking a new user base and persona and those, yeah, we can't do those all the time. So that that frequency is more on like a four to six week basis that we try to have those mapped down. There's certainly a repository now that we're starting to pull from as we built that bank. Totally. So I'm curious Cody, if you have any sort of different take on that because you're kind of halfway in between you guys are building out different categories. But then also I think miracle bombs, one of those things you've talked about appealing to older women as well as millennials and you could go to the same path about going wider from a messaging perspective. Yeah. So it's definitely like top focus, like outside of outside of, I guess, all like product, like all the non marketing stuff I'm focused on right now for like growth, like this persona sprint we're calling it is our top focus. I believe it's my hypothesis that this is going to be the best way for us to reach new people on meta is take because what we've seen and we've talked about this word like just launching new products has not really driven reach on meta and we have to do new things and how are we speaking to people, whether it's behind a new product or existing product, very differently, much more specifically thinking about like personalization at scale. And I think our, you know, what got us here, it worked very well to here, but it was very broad messaging, very broad, miracle bomb was great for this WTF was great for this, but it's not very specific. And this, some of it comes from just talking to people in the space and obviously being able to see their ad libraries and things like that, but like what seems to be performing really well is what Conner is talking about. And you know, you mentioned like crits doing it or if you want to some or like there's a bunch of brands of deals just like very intentional messaging in the hook of an ad almost like the hook is a targeting like if you're a busy, like, give you an example, one of the creators who actually lives in our town, we work with, I saw a tic-tac from her and she was like, a mom to kids on a walk and like, I think the hook was something like, you know, if you're a mom and you're expecting your second kid. And like, it's not just like if you're a mom, it's like very specific and you look at the comments on it and everyone is like target audience reached. Are they like FBI agent found me and like all of it was just a very specific hook that that that got people exactly where they were at in that life stage. And so I think that's what we're trying to do. I'm like Connor has, you know, given me voice notes and shared a bunch of how they go about it, which I think is great. But yeah, it's not as simple, I think for us. So part of it is like even tactically in the ad account, like what does that look like? Like do we split them up? And then it's like, all right, if we have a campaign and we're trying to like match the creative to the to the ad account. But if we have a campaign that's like, hey, this mom funnel, all right, this is one we're trying to do. Well, it's like, well, then if we have multiple products, like I don't want to necessarily have, you know, five different persona campaigns for five different products, like that just will get so unwieldy. So we're trying to work through that now and trying to figure it out. We'll likely go with like campaigns around a persona. And then actually Connor Maconnell, one of the phrases, you know, it's not just your name and convention phrases that I love. It's also you said on a few episodes back like aggressive templatization. Yes. And how you've kind of been focusing on that on various parts of your marketing department. I love that. That's something we're really thinking about for currently for landing pages. Same thing. How do we get these templates dialed that you can just whip up a headline and that AI tool I showed you. Like that's actually why we're trying to build it. We're trying to get really specific that whole funnel from ad. We're doing huge partnership ad focus, right? And what our growth team was doing because our copywriter didn't have bandwidth to just turn out copy for everything. They would just take like past copy from like, you know, just like our products and put in there, even if like it was a partnership ad talking about being busy and on the go, you know. And so we're trying to have that really dialed where we're actually, you know, built this tool that I like transcribe, you know, the video, match the headline. Not that it's a most important thing about an ad, but like, let's get it all dialed. So you have the headline, you know, the copy that matches your creative landing page should match that as well. We have not gone as far as personalizing pop up or email flows. I think it's like. And Connor, uh, do you want to speak to us at all, but it's like minimum viable product and you have to get enough traction with something before you're like, Hey, let's go and do this big production behind this or like make all these net new landing pages. So I think that's what we're trying to figure out right now. But we do have a few personas that we have like some traction with that. Maybe we didn't do this full strategy that now we're going like full force ton of partnership ads, like bunch of net new landing pages because we, we believe and we have some data that like this is going to be like, kind of something like a viable lever for us. I am super excited to tell you about our newest sponsor, Revo. They are a retention platform for Shopify plus brands. They start with signed in shopping, the accounts and getting to loyalty referrals, memberships, cashback and so much more. They're constantly launching new features. I personally am super excited about the future of signed in shopping for e-commerce brands and really accounts being the beach head for just awesome loyalty and customer experiences. And Revo playing a part in making it a better experience to be a customer of your brand. And Ridge isn't the only brand using Revo today. Hexclad, true classic, Dr. Squatch, Portland Leather goods, Princess Polykitch, Pit Viper, and hundreds of more brands are using Revo on their Shopify plus accounts. That is like a billion dollars in GMV that is a insane list of brands to be listing off. Stewart Chaney, founder lead, he's all over Twitter, he's hands on and slack, great team to work with. I also think they're kind of the next wave of SaaS. You'll see Stewart talking on Twitter about being incredibly AI oriented in their development and they're shipping better features faster than ever before. So excited to see what comes of Revo. I suggest you check it out at revo.io. That's r-i-v-o-dot-io. Connor, I want to ask you like, and Cody alluded to this, like some of the more tactical thing, like how do you tactically approach that? Because you mentioned like, you as a team are collectively making a bet saying, hey, this message, like this angle, which has this hook and this overall narrative, this messaging arc, and the goal is to reach this consumer with like this use case. So like, let's go back to the fiber one, right? Like you guys are making a big bet that you can really have a lot of success and performance out of this, like you need more fiber message for lack of a better term. So like, once you guys have aligned on that, that's a message that you want to do a sprint around. Like can you actually talk us through like the actual more like granular process of like, all right, we're going after this message. So then like, do you like map out all the ads you want to make, speak into that, all the landing pages you want to make, launch with different combinations and like start testing into the best part. Like what does that actually look like from a, like from the moment you agree on the messaging arc you want to go after to actually like, yeah, what's that process look like? How do you actually make funnels out of that? Totally. And this is, this is the place I've spent a ton of time since arriving. So back to your kind of initial question, it was assessing the landscape, be like, oh, let's try to make these sort of 360, angular persona based bets and build that, that bank and repository of those. So the other thing we don't want to do is slow down velocity of typical ad sprints that are a little bit more kind of iterative, kind of unlocking new formats, still, still pursuing those with full force. But again, what we want to try to do is pair a couple of different signals. So what are reviews and social commentary saying like what are some of the kind of trends or repeated things that we're seeing from customers loving the ruins that we can lean into? And then the other thing that's a little bit harder, and I think I've sent code is in voice notes on this is like connecting it to something that's having a bit of a moment in the ether outside of your brand and pairing those two things together. So at Caraway, microplastics was that thing, right? We like knew microplastics was having a massive moment. That was such an obvious tie into our brand. And so we put a ton of emphasis around a microplastics campaign in the month of March, which did super well for the brand. So for Grooons, how fiber emerged was basically that, you know, we started to hypothesize that fiber was going to be the next kind of food stuff thing that had come into attention, protein, super info right now. And our kind of bet is that fiber is going to be one of the next ones that comes in. So we kind of do a bunch of research. I mean, I had chat to be T going to do deep research, trying to go assess how other brands of the space are pursuing that. What is it about fiber? That's really good for humans and how does it serve as the foundation for the gut microbiome? What are the benefits that come from that? Shiny hair, better skin, so much stuff that I bet all of your brains are going where our started to go is like, wow, how many good hooks can come out of this if we start to pursue this? And we just put this kind of notion strategy dock together and started to populate and we've got a great team of creative strategists that, you know, we assigned one of them to this initiative. And then they do a lot of that research. They use some of that deep research prompt that I had provided them and others. And then we start to kind of map out what the key assortment of pillars or hooks that we want to go after are going to be. So even within the world of fiber, let's say within the world of microplastics at Caraway, there's still a bunch of personas that can be carved out from within that overarching kind of like zeitgeist angle to go after. So we start to map out, you know, why somebody had a different life stage or somebody that's in a different situation might want to respond or what we could do to get to arbitrage the attention of somebody. tie it back to that fiber angle. So then we start to connect. - So connect the next year question about that quick. So it's like fibers, this overall like narrative arc that you wanna hit on and like the benefits of it. But then you're going one level lower and saying, well, if you're on GLP ones, you need fiber. If you, I don't know, like once, if you're like having issues with your hair, you need fiber. If you're a 65 year old man, you need fiber for this reason. If you're a 23 year old man or woman, you need fiber for that reason. So you're saying fibers like the outer layer. And then you have a bunch of different sub personas that you're positioning, the need for fiber. - Exactly. - As like a, okay, I got it. - Exactly. And then we've got all the research and collateral to kind of back that. And then it can be applicable at a persona based level. And we use that to map out hooks, angles, start to watch off some ad concepts. Where you're talking about Carnic Donald and this I totally agree with is, there's always a sort of healthy debate of how much to really build into this from a resourcing perspective. Like do we activate specific pop ups and landers and retention flows to speak to that? I think Jerry's still out on how much we want to invest into that. We do try to get a really good read on whether this is going to be something that has a great impact to the business and then kind of figure out what needs to be p0 and attach to the initial rollout and effort. And then what's the stuff that can be fast follow and go add reinforcements to later on. If we believe this is going to have a longer shelf slice for the brand. There are some examples that I really like of relatively lightweight ways to personalize a funnel. Like one of my favorites, I've probably talked about it at some point in the past is eight sleep. They'll do an Andrew Huberman funnel and a Marques funnel and they just have, they have Marques's face in the pop up. They have it at the top of the landing page and then everything else is basically the same. And I'm sure the retention flows are the same. But it's like, if you're coming from a MKBHD ad, you see the pop up, you see the landing page and now you're just shopping the typical PDP. Like that is really, that's a pretty high leverage way to do it and feels relatively scalable. So we've been trying to emulate more of like that sort of lightweight approach. - Yeah. Yeah, I feel like we'll figure it out and you know determine our conviction around it that and then figure out how many of the teams should start to also sort of participate in rolling that out. And yeah, there's just so many different things that we can pursue and there's tons of trade-offs on prioritization as you guys experience every single day. So that's another thing that we have to battle. - So we're, so 'cause going back to Cody, you're comment about Conner's, Verbiage like Conner McDonald's aggressive templatization. So for a new narrative arc, ConnerDult, do you guys have a, right? 'Cause I think Nick Shackleford tweeted something about this the other day of like, how do you test into personas as like a phase one and then you find out what works and then you go deeper with some of the more high time investment, high resource, high money investment assets, right? You guys going and sourcing a bunch of creators to speak about fiber is gonna be a lot higher lift, more expensive, more time than you producing a bunch of statics that just speak to these angles. So like on the ads side of the, on the ads and on the destination, like do you have any sort of like SOP for how you think about testing Indu New Angle? You're like, are we're only doing statics within these templates and we're only doing this landing page and then if something hits, we'll go and try to scale it with like creators, brand video, listicle, whatever it is. Like do you have any like thoughts around how to like approach a net new angle or are you oftentimes being like, we're so confident in this angle that we're gonna go do like a full, like a full swing at this thing. Like those are sweepstakes last year, but like we don't know if it's gonna work or not, but we're pretty confident. It's like we're really gonna go like, we're gonna go hard on this, we're gonna do everything we can and it worked out, but like that was a big risk that that we took and you can't take it all the time with any evergreen, you know, add angle that someone ideates. - Oh, really? I think that's the, that's kind of like the distinction between a campaign and these angles. Do you know what I mean? Like what you're talking about? The sweepstakes was an entire campaign, the entire business needed to orient itself around that. For these angles, it's a little bit more kind of like, it's a very big effort, don't get me wrong, but it's slotted in amongst everything else. And then we kind of rely on the meta algorithm to tell us how big of an opportunity it's going to be. Versus, there are mother's day moments, when we do a flavor launch, there's stuff that is no doubt about it going to be the main emphasis of the business and everywhere you're going to experience us. Hopefully that's one of the first things that you learn. So I think just trying to look at the calendar and figure out the sort of coexistence of those pieces. Again, at Caraway, it was way more about those kind of like brand and themic feature and benefit defining moments on the calendar year. That was what became a really strong performance driver plus product launches. And these kind of like angles sometimes they worked, but we found they worked better when they were paired with a seasonal moment. Talking to moms, busy moms with Cody's example, like that worked best around mother's day. They did have evergreen shelf life certainly, but we always found pairing it with like a big promotional moment on the calendar year when consumer wallets were open. That was the combo that worked super well. So for grooms, it's just, I don't know yet what the ideal combination of for product, marketing activity, calendar moment, flavor launch. I don't know what the right permutations of those things are going to be, but that's what I'm trying to be very methodical with the team and just being very, very intentional about making sure we develop a learning afterwards. So they're like, hey, what about that, made that work? I didn't awesomch out the CMO of Poppy a long time ago and see he expressed that. He's like, we figured out our playbook for how to make poppy boom, you know, and it was cultural moment plus reputable figure plus flavor launch. Like that was the three prong approach that they needed to have a really big step change in revenue occur. And so I don't know what grooms is yet. I've got a bunch of hypotheses. So we're trying to figure out the right mix of like explore, kind of like how I'm going to serve out ads, you know, and then exploit where once we kind of get those signals back that this is going to be a big one, we can action on it super, super, super fast. - Yeah, actually, like I think at Hexclad, we've done a pretty good job of building campaigns around like offers and seasonal moments. Actually, Caraway has been a really awesome inspiration to me about like, I think we need to do about our job of peppering it as ever, green campaigns and not every campaign. That's a 360 campaign has to be a sale or a new product or a sweepstakes, like you can just have a campaign that's cohesive across all your channels. That's all about the microplastics or all about how durable your pan is. Like that is probably just as important than like the sale campaign or the sweepstakes campaign. So that's something we're hoping to do more of in the next couple of years. So that's been, it's cool to hear your approach with it. - We're about halfway done through the year. H1 is almost over. We're prepping for second half of the year. We're also prepping for Q4, which is huge for us. And our budgets are gonna be the highest then. And when our budget's for the highest, we're gonna need the most granularity and the most confidence known where we should spend our dollars. And that's why we turned to Prussian. Prussian is an MMM. And most MMMs that you 60 year old regression models are not really built for D to C. Prussian, you can get readouts really quickly if something is changing, which again, D to C is really volatile. So you can't rely on an outdated MMM that you're only gonna get one read out of quarter. One thing I love about Prussian so much, you're able to see the halo effect. So upper funnel spend, which is again, is huge. We love to fill the funnel prior to a peak moment prior to Q4 holiday, something like that. We're really able to see the halo effect that has. 'Cause sometimes you're not gonna see great attribution from YouTube campaign or from TV campaigns. We'll press it plugs into all of them. And it can actually tell you your base plus your halo. So it's been really helpful for us to understand and actually have confidence to invest in some of these upper funnel channels that are harder to measure with other ways. So I love Prussian. I can't tell you all the technical stuff behind it. But I can't tell you, it gives me and my team more confidence. No, where we should put our budget, especially in some of these pesky upper funnel channels that are much harder to measure. And again, don't wait till Q4. It's gonna be too late then. We're halfway through the year, but we've really gotta all lock in for the rest of the year for Q4. There's a reason we use it. Hexclad, HoloSox, Codary, and 100 more leading brands. So highly recommend checking it out. Go to PrussianAI.com/operators to book a demo today. Shifting gears a little bit. I wanna stay on tactics, but what I'm really curious is your thinking about phases of grooms. So we had Zack's stock on, and Zack's an awesome, an awesome marketer, awesome operator, has tons of experience with his agency and with Holo. And one of the questions we were asking him are like, what are the tactics got you? What are the tactics that took you through these revenue bands? But what are the other, what's not gonna take you through this next revenue band? So I wanna ask you a similar question, which is like, what are the differences in strategies when you look at, and I know some of this is gonna be speculative, 'cause you don't really know, but like in your current opinion, like what got grooms to where it is, strategically and tactically versus what is gonna get grooms to where you want it to go in the next two years, let's say. - I'll get the obvious thing out of the way, which is Chad Freaking nailed the form factor in the product. Like just, you can't replicate that marketing. I feel like you could have hired the worst marketing team on the planet and then the worst marketer himself and grooms still would have achieved some level of success just by the novelty of the product and how easily, loved it was and understood by consumers and then how people just come back and buy more grooms. Like we have this hilarious internal joke that one of our customers, Our calculator says where he's like, we have an entire business model built on people liking the product. It's so true. People try grooms and they buy grooms and they like grooms. So I think what? - I don't know why you guys even have a sugar version 'cause the sugar freeze so good. I'm like, wait, what? This isn't the one with sugar. Like why do you even have to have one with sugar? 'Cause the sugar freeze amazing. - Dude, it's coldly. It's so good and 20 calories, no sugar. It's such a no brainer. It's so much better than those messy powders, you know what I mean? But the, yeah, so what got grooms at this point, I think was A, let's just get the product foundation. That's obviously the baseline. And then I think the business was so intentional about standing up really thoughtful marketing strategies right from the jump, you know what I mean? And having airtight operations and CX and everything else to support it. Chad just had such good exposure with the brands that he got to interact with and the seats and boards that he got to observe. And so the brand had such a head start, you know what I mean? And then some of the early hires that were made here too are just absolute rock stars, you know? Like the number of hats and the amount of space that they covered is out of control. But tons of meta reliance to get the brand off the ground and the way that again, grooms attacks meta, I think is pretty unique. It's the funnels in the build-out stair. And I think that a lot of investment in landing pages and making sure to kind of always find leveled up performance and NCRL wins has been super important. And then I think just lots of thoughtful testing on the retention front and really good team internally here that's just focused on, I think a lot of subscription brands have a hesitancy to like talk to their audience 'cause it's like every touch point is a reminder that you're paying for the subscription and it creates a lot of fear that it's going to just cause incremental churn. And I think our team's pretty darn good at trying to, again, leverage are fun, a reverent brand and pair it with the fact that this is a credible and science-backed product and reinforce those good habits and tell you that you're doing the right things for your body. So all of those pieces from the start, they feel so much more robust and built out than a brand that is this new. It's just like the level of velocity and thoughtful deployment of tactics and strategy here is truly remarkable. And for brand that's only two and a half years old, I think that's not always the case. So I wanna make sure that that's why I think there's still that it's not like this is just, happens since there's a lot of intentionality across all functions. But not what I'm here to do, I would say, I wanna try to unlock different marketing levers to drive growth for us. And I'm never the guy that says, let's stop spending on meta. And I think the reduced dependency on meta all costs, I don't subscribe to that train. It's the most successful advertising engine in the history of the planet. I wanna keep getting the most out of it. And I don't really worry about a high percent of our spend being there, but we're constantly in pursuit of new levers and new channels to pull. So we've launched onto CTV, deployed it through a house test, starting to see some good success there. We obviously do some investment in internal creative and long form YouTube videos, which I think is a great form of arbitrage through longer form assets serving on YouTube. I've seen since my Dollar Shave Club days that long form on YouTube typically sees a little bit of a CPM efficiency. And so you can use that and ladder that into some incremental performance. So unlocking new marketing channels has been a really big focus for this next stage of growth. And it's easier to start to unlock new things 'cause it makes meta work better for you as well. Meta doesn't have to do the introduction and the convincing and the getting you to purchase, and that it can kind of do its thing and not have to be relied on to handle all portions of the funnel. And then I would say that just getting certain teams to work really well together is gonna be key to the next stage of growth, like the influencer team and the paid team and just getting that wiring really, really tight and dialed. I think we're all really excited about what we're seeing from partnerships and white listing ads and the same applies to Groon. So just making sure that we have great SOPs and systems there for build on and then again, figuring out some of those strategic bets, right? Is it campaigns? Is it flavor launches? Is it collapse? I'm trying to figure out ways to crop up the ceiling so that everybody else can start to work on the tactics that can support these bigger bets to unlock new audiences for us. - I think that's a great answer. I always, 'cause I had a tough time like figuring out my role for a long time and like where to zoom in, where to zoom out. And now I feel like I've figured it out and I think what you just said I connect with 'cause the way the framework I take to my role is like my job and I think really all of our job is to unlock new high performing marketing strategies, generally speaking. And like I think it often requires someone in our role to lead the charge on that. Like, hey, what is a better YouTube strategy? It looked like and it requires that marketing leader to kind of come in and at least drive a lot of that roll out. And then measure if it works or not. But like if you've measured, if you've tried it and you've been a leader in rolling that out and it works, it's then your role to like delegate that to the team to run it in an ongoing way and say, all right, like we validated this but now the team is actually the subject matter experts are the one who are gonna go and really make this thing hum, right? Like if you Conner drove for this idea of like this unique fiber angle that really hits at the, but then you're gonna be like, well now team year, it's your job to make it, you know, maybe it's 80% right now, but you gotta get it to 99%. So it's like, it's almost like innovate, measure, delegate and then just repeat that process over and over and over and over and over again. You're constantly triaging like, where's the next opportunity? Like my hand, my involvement in this week's takes this year while it's still a good amount. It's like so much less than last year 'cause last year was the first time we built it out and we validated it. And now the team knows how to optimize it. But now it's like, where's the next opportunity to go in and like innovate and roll out something new? Whereas like you don't need to go and like, like Chad's often talked about Claire, who is your, I think your media buyer and she's a beast. Like you don't need to go and like, insert yourself too much in the day to day of what she's already uniquely, like probably honestly better at you at this point 'cause she lives it and breathes it every day. But if you can go and give her more local maximums to optimize towards, like you're also unlocking her to do even better work, which is kind of what I'm hearing, hearing you say. 100%. I'm surrounded by people so much better at their jobs than I am. I think the other, the other thing I'm curious if your orgs are like this, I've certainly worked at places that are like idea, black holes and everybody's got it. Oh, I've got this great idea to unlock scale performance, step change wins, whatever and such and such function. And then the ability to translate that into executing is always where I think orgs get tripped up or the ability to prioritize and try to, try to light up ideas. And I think that's a major place that I've tried to participate is just like encouraging those ideas and saying, hey, don't just tell me about this thing. Why don't you go try to put a little bit of it into motion see if there's any signal that comes back that says this is a good idea for us or not. And then I'll help put resources behind the pursuit of this. So I'm curious for you guys, no, Cody Jones-Rod, I feel like I've heard you say before the like year of big ideas guy and you want a really good team of operators and executors have you started to kind of try to surround yourself with people that are also bringing ideas to the table and started to delegate that away from yourself a little bit as well. - Depends on what role. No, probably, yeah, creative, definitely. Like I'm not involved in, you know, I'm involved in like the new stuff. Like I'll probably get really involved in like one to two things like across the org or cross marketing that I think are like top priority at the time. So like this persona stuff, I'm very involved in it and I'll like come up with ideas of like guys like we need to do this. This is what I see other brands doing. Like let's meet about this weekly. Like let's all come to the table with it. So I definitely have a good team of like director growth and the senior director of creative strategy who will bring those ideas to the table. I'm not doing like for executing on them. So I'd say it's like collaborative, right? I'm not like telling them what to go execute on but I'm not not involved in it. So yeah, I'll probably be across like one to two where like YouTube right now is a really big focus. So definitely trying to like drive that home. Other parts of the org like retail. I'm like cool. What do you need? I'm like, like so I think it just depends on like knowing your strengths and also knowing like where you can get involved and where you should be involved. So yeah, I think it depends. I'm still like collaborative and not just like completely delegating it. I think that's you know, everyone's got their different their different take on the whole founder mode thing. I'm definitely more on the you know, the founder mode type thing. I think there's pros and cons of each but like I'm not kind of just big. All right guys, like here's your budget. What do you need? I'll see you know in a month. That's just not me and like that's not our culture. Yeah. Yeah. What about you Connor Mack? Yeah, I'm curious like how you've, how you've, I agree like it can be really hard to get buying on a new idea if like all the play, the stakeholders that need to contribute to it aren't aware of it or bought in on it or whatever it is. We've done some things I think internally to help with that process. But yeah, Connor, what about you? Because then you have a very, like I chat with some of your team at, at meta like Jimmy and Chris and they're awesome. Like they're super sharp marketers and I'm sure they have loads of good ideas. No, for sure. I mean, where we've been, well actually let me say to jump back quickly. I like your phrase earlier, Connor Rowline innovate, measure, delegate. I think one trap that we fall into it, Ridge, is not properly measuring. I think we've got a ton of ideas and we'll be like, That's like innovation. It's like boom, we're doing something new and different. And now you guys are doing it. And then we don't properly like reflect on whether that was like a net benefit or or really made any impact at all. Um, so that's one thing we fall into that chapter. We're trying to get better at that like self reflection reporting piece that I think is like really, really keen. When you're moving fast, it's very easy to like commit to doing new things and then delegating that and that becomes process and like you're just doing it and like you you you miss the part where you're supposed to be improving the business. Um, so I think that's been a learning lesson for us. Uh, where I think I'm strong. I we have I have a fantastic team. Um, I think we are best. The way the teams build now with all of our new categories with all the newness, with things like sweepstakes, with things like Marquez Brownlee, we haven't had like a lack of ideas. And I think what where my time is mostly focused and I think what I'm pretty good at is, um, really executing on it at a high level. Like again, there's whether it's from own channels to e-commerce to performance to creative. Like where there's a lot of moving pieces there that just have to be marching in the same direction. If you want to get a really cool, we're preparing right now for the iPhone 17 launch where we'll have a new phone case. It's like that's where my time and energy has gone to the most just as we've had such massive expansion over the last two years. So I've been less of an ideas guy more of like a, uh, uh, screwing around in notion and spreadsheets and making sure we're hitting the deadlines at the quality that we need. Do you think you are like, that is your natural skill set or you think you, you are good at both somewhere in between like whatever. And you just like, that's what your, your company needed right now. I think that's what I think that's, I think that's where I'm best suited to work at Ridge right now. I also really like it. I have talked about, no, on this podcast, but hero dreams of sushi, the documentary, are you as familiar? I know you have talked about this on this podcast. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's like my favorite thing. Heroes famous for just showing up 75 years, making the same sushi every day and getting like just incrementally better. And he's not, I guess there are new ideas involved in that, but he's not like reinventing sushi. He's just making incredibly good, relatively simple sushi. And that's what I want to emulate at Ridge. And I've been on that, that beat for like 18 months now. But you also have great ideas. I mean, you're always, I feel like you're always sharing interesting, thoughtful, I mean, yeah. Like, totally. Who came up with the idea to like, who does your branding on your sweepstakes? Because that's one of the things I'm like always so impressed with. And I'm always on the edge of my seat to AC what you're going to give away, but be like, you guys just always have such compelling, unique branding with your sweepstakes. Yeah. Always feels different. It's like viscerally you go to Ridge.com right now and something's happening. Like you don't even need to read the content to know that something's happening. So like, who's ideas that? Who's ideas that to do two cars? Like, yeah, totally. Well, like the, the, the graphic treatment is what we call it. Like that is a form of, what, like that's finding the, that's an incremental improvement. That's different. That's like, oh, we've been given the sweepstakes. Now we're going to make it as good as possible. We're like, Connor Dalton said, propping up the ceiling. Okay, the ceiling has been propped up for us. We're going to make it as good as possible with this awesome graphic treatment and great partnership plan. We've got this unique retention strategy. That's where my time and energy is going right now. You know, Sean decided we're going to give away a 300,000 Lamborghini Storado. So it's like, okay, that is in many ways propping up the ceiling. And then my job is to like try to maximize that opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. If you know me, you know how cheap I am and how much I love saving money. This year is all about cutting costs and staying lean. You see me talk about it on Twitter. I cannot stand watching great DDC brands. Even mediocre ones get ripped off by SaaS vendors in 2025. So many of them are charging way too much over promising and under delivering. And so I can't stand to see it. So I don't want to say to happen you. I absolutely won't have it happening to me. You've also seen that I'm all in an AI. And both those reasons are why I love rich panel so much. It's about half the price of the beautiful software that we used before. It was built specifically with AI in mind. We made the switch to rich panel right before Black Friday last year. And I almost were good not switching sooner. We had zero downside. The implementation was pretty immediate, which actually shocked me. I was a little worried about it. Not going to lie, but it just went off without a hitch. We saved money. We leveled up our CX at the same time. So here's our numbers. We cut our CX team from 18 to 10 agents. Not before Black Friday, but since onboard the rich panel with our order volume staying the same or even going up our CSAT has saved rock solid at 4.2 out of five. I'd like a little bit better, but that's that's stuff that we can do. AI is handling 70% of the tickets, which is awesome. So our ticket to order ratio has gone way down from about 40% to 14%. So we have fewer full-timers. Our revenue employee has gone out. We don't need as many people to get back to people and able to be a little bit more strategic with where we allocate our resources. So if your current CFCX software needs more people is more expensive than you want to pay and has some janky AI solution, I highly recommend the checkout rich panel. Rich panel guarantees a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back. Again, it's super easy to switch. They take care of data migration, staff training, all that good stuff. So you can go live in under 14 days. So check out richpanel.com and tell them you heard about them from the marketing apparatus podcast. I want to end maybe with this question that I think leads off this last topic well. But so you've been at Grins for about half a year. A little less, I think you said. So what are some of the most impactful projects that you've worked on that you've like innovated in and have driven the team to execute on or that you've actually led yourself and then like how have you measured some of these things and are you finding success with some of these new projects? Like I know the I saw the and we were texting about it and I saw it come out publicly now. So I think I can mention it. But like you guys did this massive this massive study. Right. I think that was a huge, a huge project. Oh, they're human clinical study. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So like like, like, could you speak to like some of that and into the other like projects that you felt have that you've really like driven and have had an impact and how you measure them? Yeah. I mean, I think it all starts from trying to set a vision for where we want the brand to go. And to me, we want to be an anti-supplement supplement brand. There are not many in the space that you feel are fun and you can feel human connection to. So I think we've got such a great opportunity to take playbooks that other industries have been deploying forever, you know, beverage and CPG and suitcases and wallets. And I think we're going to try to apply that to the to the supplement space. And so arbitrage and attention through a fun and engaging brand and world class performance and brand and influencer and all those pieces. But then back it with, hey, this is a real product that could do really great things for me. And so that's where the human clinical came into into play. Conrad and lead the human clinical, right? We hired an outside reputable firm to run that double plant placebo for us. But the marketing of it, right? Like the front end like, okay, we did this thing, but this thing is nothing if we can't get it in front of people. Exactly. So yeah, my team sits together and we put together a rollout plan for how we want to introduce this. So every, every piece of it, right, from Chad's LinkedIn post to what the company was going to be posting to how the site experience would be built out to support it to ads and emails that would reference it where and the welcome flow we would start to introduce the human clinical. So yes, all of those pieces were intentional. I played a, I played a heavy hand there. The other focus in mine is just playbooks and SOPs. For stuff that we believe are going to be repeated business bets for us, it sounds like you guys do it for sweepstakes and things like you want to just remember the little edge cases that tripped you up as soon as you encountered them. So for us, flavor launches are going to be a really big one for us as well as collab. So there's more to come from Grims throughout the rest of the year. So I've been really trying to, you know, work with our teams to put together key documents. I lean so much great intel from you guys on your go to market episode. So much of that resonated, Conrad Donald. Thank you for all the wisdom you bestowed on me for that. But I've spent a lot of time there. And so I think for the launches that you're going to see coming out of Grims for the rest of the year, that's, that's been a really big endeavor for internal teams. Yeah, I think that those are really big points of emphasis and that some of those channel launches getting CTV off the ground and what are the other ways that we can drive up our funnel. How do we leverage partnerships and activations and do those thoughtfully to unlock new audiences? Those are some of the bigger cross functional initiatives that I've just played a little bit of a stronger role. And just because again, it requires prioritization and resourcing from so many teams. So that was kind of the missing piece in the team. And hopefully the teams felt that way since I've arrived as being actually keep us all sort of aligned on the same things. I've got, can I ask one? It's kind of the reverse of that question. I imagine jumping over to Grims working with a bunch of world class people. Super interesting. If you were to go back to hex or not hex, I'd care away tomorrow. I'm the hex. What would you take from Gruns back to Caraway? Like I imagine you just got exposed to so many new strategies and processes and things like that. And is there anything where you're like, Oh, I would have loved to have done that at the cookware brand. It's a good question. I feel that one of the things I'd maybe take back to Caraway is I think it's very hard to convince meta that your products, if they're all sort of housed on the same site have different buying audiences. And so for Caraway, we spent so much time trying to get to stainless steel pan sold and some of those products that maybe have a bit of a masculine tilt and get out of the world of ceramic. But it just felt like we were always sort of circling the same drains of customers and no matter what we tried, it felt very hard to break out of that. I know, Connor McDonald, you've spoken a lot about how you guys approach that architecturally within meta and things like that. So I was always hesitant to like fully pull the trigger and make that happen. And I have to give Jordan his flowers from Keroa. He was always the one pushing like, we need to go. We need to go really like shake the, shake the bottle over here and switch it up and try new pixel and all that stuff. I think I would go back with a little bit more of that mindset. That's like make a new IG handle, make a new pixel, make a new site, really try to just give meta all the indication that it needs. If this is a brand new audience, as opposed to just sort of like hammering impressions against your existing audience over and over. And that's from the segmentation of brands that you feel that way. Like new tropes and grooms are totally, I mean, there's some overlap. And even grooms kids is at it. That's a different site. I think. Same domain. Same domain. Just different funnel within the page. But yeah, a lot of that is informed by just what we're discovering with some of those personas and funnels and how differentiated they can start to feel. And it does feel like sometimes we do unlock an incremental and net new audience. And that was always a hard thing for us to figure out at Keroa. Yeah, that's funny. That's a huge can of worms, dude. Meta-Roy. Yeah, you dropped that at the very end. Yeah. I wanted to ask you guys a question because we've been talking about like being leaders and I think we all have an inclination to be hands on. I learned a lot. I read the Elon Musk Walter Isaacson book where he would have these like moments of surges. I don't know if you guys have ever read where he would find a part of the business that was really needing attention. And he would go just like full force and help to make sure that that got, you know, those wheels got back on the tracks. I do feel like I kind of operate in that way, right? With those teams or initiatives that I go focus on and a lot of that was informed by some feedback that I got from Chad. And so I wanted to ask you guys if there's a spend impactful feedback that you've received within your orgs or in prior orgs that have been really meaningful to you because I've been thinking a lot about feedback, both how to receive it and how to give it. And I'm curious if there's been moments that stick out to you guys in your long and storied careers. I remember having a chat with, I think he's the CFO of Huckberry. And I was just asking him because I'm buddies with Richard and Richard was like, you should really chat with our CFO and because he's like, he's a world class CFO. And he was the one of the people who really opened up my eyes to this whole like innovate, innovate, like measure, delegate because he has role. He's like, I have all the basic blocking and tackling because he's like CFO slash ops guys, not just CFO. He's like, I have all the basic blocking and tackling of a CFO, right? Like I own the PNL, I own budgeting, but he was also a great ops guy. So he would basically, you know, with the team sort of identify areas of opportunity or areas that really needed to improve. And he would basically like the terminology of I've heard used is like parachute in to a part of the org and like work on something like whether it's a specific problem or whatever it was like build out a system of process to like produce a better outcome than they are currently getting to the extent that they would even like shift reporting into him for like the extent of the project, right? If it was six months or 12 months, like the team would actually report into him and then he would parachute back out and they would actually rework who they org shifted into or report it into to like continue that going. So that that was actually like a really impactful conversation. And then I started, I've started like hear some overlap without other people approach that. So that helped me like think about like, Hey, where should I be more or less involved at and like that can change over time. Like it doesn't have to be like I could be more involved in retention for the back half of this year. But then if we do all the things that we think we need to do, like I don't have to be next year. So that was a that's been an impactful conversation that I've like seen repeated and other conversations I've had that was very impactful. I would I have one fine example. This would make for a really great episode in the future though. Because I'm sure I have way more weave. It's been such a fantastic experience. We've made a number of great hires over the last two years that it's not even via feedback. It's just like absorbing knowledge by like working alongside these people. And the example that I'll give is our COO who came from me on these and was at JP Morgan. So like banking background like hardcore finance then was like basically went like zero to one at me on these. So like saw oversaw like really meaningful D to C growth. He does this really great job of like empowering his team to lead. And I think I'll over index and like like I so lead like our weekly we I lead our weekly business review. So I'll like go through a bunch of data and it's like and that's there's benefits that I'm on the call and I'm the guy and I'm talking about it. That's the way the organizations work for a really long time. And we're going to hit this point where I need to be like better empowering and highlighting the team to speak to these things. And I've got a lot of room to grow there but very much conscious of it. And I think that's been a very cool thing to have again, not be a feedback just like I observed it in a call one day. I was like, oh wow. The like the COO sitting back now and like the managers here running this call. And I think I could improve like tenfold in that scenario. Yeah. Powering is so huge. Cody no notes. He's never received feedback. Just always like wow. How we got like three extra episodes for this to do. Yeah. How long you got? How long will your wife let you go for? Are you a little turmoil on the kitchen? Yeah. No, I mean, I mean, I think along that line like so much a Connor like I think probably a lot of new leaders will do that. We're like, you know, they have an ego and I was definitely sway where like you want to be the one who's speaking and things like that. And I think definitely some feedback I got and also just observing like other leaders and other people do it where it's like I try to make a really conscious effort now to ask people on the team, especially junior people like, hey, what do you think? And a lot of this like I've been mentored. Hopefully I can say it on a green spot by cat Cole who CEO of athletic range and like she's just like a fantastic leader has like, you know, years and years of like amazing leadership experience. So like she's done a really good job chairing some stuff with me. But like the people closest to the action probably have the ideas a lot of times and just don't have the always like the space to speak up and just giving them an opportunity and saying like, what do you think like even if they're pretty junior and they're close to it? I think that's that's been like super helpful. So I just try and I think it's become a habit now, but it just took a lot of practice of just asking people like pausing a meeting, especially knowing if you're the most senior person in the room like, you know, a you should be speaking less, but also like you're going to be the one who can set the vibe and the intention of the meeting. And so you're the one who can actually pause and say like, Hey, Connor, what do you think about this? And I found that that is really helpful and has just led to so many more constructive meetings. Like I'll give you an example. I'm in like product meetings and Bobby's in them and like, but it's get like usually a product and it's like, okay, whatever you want. Like they don't say that, but it's kind of like that and I'll pause and I was like, I can do it because I'm her son. I'm just like, Hey, whatever. Like not even go to our associate because we have this like associate. It was like Gen Z and it was like all of the beauty products in the market, right? And I'm just like, Hey, what are you thinking? She's like, no, actually, I really like this. I'm like, it can just like shift the tone of a meeting of the direction of it. So that's been just super simple, but really helpful. I love that. Yeah, we're a big no rules rules company at Grounds. If you guys have read the Netflix culture book and feedback can come from anyone and anywhere within the org. And I think that's so important for us as leaders to make sure that that's adopted. Because otherwise, yeah, coding people stay silent and we probably have all missed out on million dollar ideas from people lower in the ladder despite being afraid to kind of speak out and change direction. Sweet. I like it. I'll write as a fun one with Connor doll from Grounds. I think we successfully leveled up in one of the the operators podcast with Chad from last week. Thank you to our sponsors motion, press an AI after saw Rich panel and Revo. And if you're enjoying the show, make sure to like, subscribe and share with your marketing friends.