How To Increase Sales By Using Psychological Triggers With Growth Hacker Justin Mares

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad. And if you have just tuned in, stumbled across this show because you saw the title or the, you saw the guest's name on here and you're like, what is this? And why is this all about bacon and business? What do they have to do with each other? This is, this is my platform to interview some really inspirational, amazing, successful entrepreneurs, people that I want to pick their brains and. And this is me allowing you to eavesdrop on these conversations where you can guarantee I'm going to be asking some highly selfish questions, picking their brains as clean as I can and letting you listen in and hopefully gathering some actionable strategies, the same strategies that I'm going to be using for myself and just enjoying the conversation. If you like what you hear, I encourage you to share this on social media and get in touch and go snoop out the links that I give you in the show notes for my guest. And if you are not a subscriber on itunes, make sure you click that subscribe button or jump on the newsletter. And if you ever have any questions, if you have any suggestions or you just want to chat with me, send an email. My personal email is askbradakenratbusiness.com I love emails from my listeners and this is the best way to get a hold of me that way. Okay, so today I am bringing back a guest. I don't do this very often, but today's guest was so nice, I invited him twice. Justin Harris from a previous episode called How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth, which is also the name of his previous book. It's a great episode. I'll link back to it where we just talked about a lot of customer acquisition strategies. But Justin is back with a couple cool things to talk about today, especially if you're in the world of e commerce at all. So, Justin, welcome back.

Thanks for having me, man. Glad to be back.

So, God, man, when was the. I don't even have the date on there. When the last time it was. It's probably been a year since we've really chatted.

Yeah, it's been about eight, ten months.

All right. So what have you been up to lately?

I'll let people.

By the way, if people really want to hear your backstory and stuff, they can go listen to the other episode. So I just want to jump into this and talk about what's cool.

Let's do it. So basically, I have founded a company called Kettle and fire. We're the first shelf stable bone broth company and we launched about 10 months ago and have grown to multiple seven figures in revenue in a very short period of time. Yeah, so that's going really well. And then more recently, I acquired an app and I'm now running an app called FOMO. It's usefomo.com formally it was called Notify. That helps ecommerce stores, or really any store improve their conversion rates by showing social data and like, what your customers are doing on your website.

Okay, that's awesome. So I want to get back to that in just a moment because I think that's really super interesting, especially as a guy who has an E comm website. But let's talk about the Kettle and Fire. And it used to be called. Was it Bone Brothers or something like that?

Yeah, it was basically the worst branding hack job you could imagine. It was called Bone Brothers. Yeah. Terrible.

It's funny.

So it was a very lean test.

I love Kettle and Fire, though. That's cool. That's like really a cool name.

Thank you.

Yeah. Did you come up with that?

I did.

Nice. So we were talking a little bit offline about some of the things that you did to grow that to multiple seven figures. But tell me, I mean, so it's a. Yeah, it's a bone broth company. If anybody out there is not really familiar with this from a health standpoint, bone broth is an extremely healthy. What do you call it? It's a broth. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So bone broth is similar but different to the ones that you buy, like broths and the stocks that you buy in the grocery store. So bone broth in general, it uses actual bones, which many of the broths and stocks in the grocery store don't. It's cooked with an apple cider vinegar and it has really long cook time, so 24 hours, as opposed to the two to four hours that normal broth and stocks have. And that that extra time allows it to. Allows the bones, the marrow, the collagen to really seep into the broth so that you get a much, much healthier drink than just your standard salty, overly beef flavored kind of broth or stock. Right on.

Yeah. I gotta buy some. I want to try, try that stuff out. Looks really good. So, alright, so now you got this bone broth company and you've grown it so quickly. What has been, you know, offline, you told me influencers and content marketing. Have those been the two biggest drivers of growth for you?

Absolutely. I mean, so in a short period of time. Yeah, in a short period of time. I mean we've, we've put out enough content where we're ranking really well for different terms. We put out some cool stuff around, you know, helping, helping with recovery from leaky gut with aiding digestion with a bunch of different content pieces that our target audience really, really cares about. And so that in conjunction with a really strong brand and you know, kind of a one of a kind product, has put us in a position where influencers, especially a lot of people in health, if they want to talk about bone broth, which many of them do, you know, and they want to tell their listeners where, or readers, whoever, where they can actually get this stuff that can help improve their health, there's really only one recommendation they can make. Which is, which is us right now. And that, that puts us in a very strong position in terms of building these relationships.

Yeah, it really does. A couple questions on the content marketing. So the first two questions come to mind is like where and how often. So with the content marketing, you create great articles. Are they primarily posted upon your blog or are you posting elsewhere?

Nope. So we have done one guest post so far, but everything else is just on our own website and then we're just taking it into our own, you know, taking responsibility for marketing that and driving people to our site on our own.

So are you doing that? Like, are you doing paid ads to content?

No. So we're putting them in. You know, we have a pretty strong mailing list. We have a couple different influencers that we ask to share our content. Just kind of friends in the health space as well as we do a lot with the Reddit community and a couple different Facebook groups that were, you know, where we think that the types of content that we're creating would be of note and of interest to the people that read certain subreddits or in certain Facebook groups.

Okay, so like partner or getting good with the admins of the various Facebook groups. And then do you just share it with the admin and ask them to kind of share your content or are you just sharing your content inside there?

Yeah, yeah. So it'll be a mix, but generally we ask the admin because we Certainly, you know, we'll say, hey, this is a piece that we're working on. What would you want to see? Or what do you think is interesting? What do you think that hasn't been said around this topic? So we'll get their feedback, we'll bake that feedback into the post and then it makes them more likely to share once we actually launch the post.

I like that ask. I'm jotting some stuff down every time I talk to you. I like to take ask for the admin feedback. Yeah, like you said, that kind of gets them involved. So this kind of just a rabbit trail for a second. I was having this conversation with somebody else the other day about who's writing a book. And I've done this for some previous clients because I used to do a lot of book publishing for people, other business owners where a book was just kind of the tip of the spear, another marketing thing. And when they were starting to write the book, especially if they had any audience going into it, there's different ways that you can go about enlisting, you know, do a pre order on Amazon as well as sharing, starting to share chapters and ask questions and build a Facebook group as you're writing it so that you can share insights with this, this group of people because they have this now vested interest because they're with you while they're writing the book. So when you launch it, they're all going to go buy it.

Exactly. And that's exactly what we did for traction as well.

See?

Oh, that's beautiful.

I love that. Maybe I learned it from you. I don't know.

It's possible.

I don't know where I learned half this crap. But okay, so I love that. And then. So you have not been doing paid. That's good. You haven't been even doing paid content. You've just been putting good content out there, working with some influencers, working with some Facebook groups, etc. How often are you creating content like daily, weekly, monthly?

About once or twice a week. Okay. We've arrived at that after a process of testing a bunch of stuff. Now we're at about once or twice a week. Pretty long form piece. Cool.

Long form. Like how many words?

Around 2,000. Okay.

Yeah, those are big ones. But it's good. Especially in stuff like this. I can't wait to kind of go through there. And by the way, if anybody wants to follow along on this, the notes, these URLs will be in the show notes. But kettleandfire.kettleandfire.com and then influencers we chatted a little bit about this briefly, and I was telling you about how I'm starting to work with some influencers for stiletto coffee.com, which is my wife and I's. So tell me some more about some of the more successful strategies. You can even repeat the ones you told me a minute ago. Because I know that influencer marketing is becoming a very hot topic, even with my audience as well, because they're starting to realize how it's the wave of the future and it's not going away anytime soon.

Completely. Yeah. So influencer marketing has been huge for us. And that's basically two things. On the one hand, that's just creating personal relationships with people that have an interest in health and have access to relatively large health audiences. So that's kind of the one piece. The second piece that's been also huge has been doing a lot of leveraging a lot of influencers on social media. And so one tactic that we've found that works pretty well is reaching out to smaller scale influencers. So say less than like 20,000 followers and just saying, like, sending them a message saying, you know, what's your PayPal email? I'll Venmo you 20 bucks or I'll PayPal you 20 bucks, 30 bucks if you post a photo that I'll send you along with the caption that I'll send you that promotes our product. And because it's so easy for them, like, for them to say no to that offer, they would have to say, no, I don't want $30, $20, whatever, you know. And so because we set up the offer that way, we found a pretty high hit rate with that offer where a lot of people with decently large followings, you know, maybe they're hanging out in the middle of the day or they think, oh, I want to go out to dinner tonight. And that's all of a sudden that's paid for, you know.

Right.

Yeah, exactly. And so it just turns, people don't often turn down money, but people will often, if you say, hey, would you promote this? They'll turn down an unknown opportunity or feel like you're using them or whatever.

Right. And now is that, are you primarily using Instagram for that or are you doing.

Yes, we're using mostly Instagram for that. We tried Snapchat for a bit. We found that didn't work very well.

Yeah. So give me an example. I'm actually on your Instagram page, by the way, but give me an example. You can even just verbally Describe what that photo might. Might have been that they would share.

So it's generally a picture of our product? Yeah, it's generally. And then some. A couple lines, just saying, like, I use bone broth for X, Y or Z reason. And then I suggest this brand or something like that.

Okay, all right, cool. And then are you having them. Are you putting a. Follow them at kettle and, you know, fire. Telling them to.

Exactly.

Okay, dude, that's. And I like that. As I mentioned earlier, this is what's cool is that's like, you know, in the world of marketing, that's like a tripwire to an influencer. Because if you do that once and they know, shoot, this person just gave me money quick. And you give them money before they post it, don't you?

Yeah, completely.

You don't make them post it before.

You give no money. No, they send us their email and then we. Then we send them 20, 30 bucks and the post.

Yeah, that's genius. And especially now when you come back to them, if you wanted to, and I don't know if you've done this, but I definitely would come back to them and say, yeah, listen, how would you like to an affiliate link for this? How would you like to do exactly. Get paid more. Do you. You don't. So you. You don't even offer an affiliate link on the first post, do you?

No, no.

Yeah. It's like, well, that's why I'm giving you the money.

Right.

What about with influencers as far as finding them? It. It can be such a manual process. There's various services that I've been playing with, from famebit to socialbluebook.com to influencer db and influencer co. Like, there's just a million of these. Has there been anything that you've personally done or anybody on your team to just start researching and scouring and finding them? Like any kind of systematic process?

Not really. I mean, we do. We do it pretty manually.

I was hoping for like a holy grail.

No, because I mean, the problem is, like anything, once an influencer gets listed on these channels, all of a sudden they're getting hit up by people way, way more often. And thus they are more expensive because they think they're more valuable. And, you know, and they get hit up all the time. And so you have to have a much better offer. Whereas people, people that, you know, aren't on these services, they're not getting hit up as much, especially if they're in the 20,000 followers kind of threshold. It's really easy to get a hold of those people. And so we just do that on a pretty systematic level.

You and your partner do that personally or do you have a va?

We have a member of our team. Does it? Yeah, it's cool.

Yeah. Because that's something I'm going to be hiring out to do and doing as well on my side. So just to recap that one because I love it so much and I'm going to be using this asap, which is ask for their email. I'd like to. And then tell them what you want to do. I would like to PayPal you 20 or 30 bucks, something like that. Whatever you say in exchange for posting a photo. And then do you wait for the response before you show them the photo you want them to post or do you just usually send it to them right then?

So I usually get their email back, PayPal them, and then once they see the money hit, then I'll send the photo.

Cool.

I love that.

Okay, Any other strategies with influencers you've used that are particularly effective? Maybe with larger influencers, ones that are above 20 and 30,000?

Not really. I mean we haven't really been able to coordinate. We haven't really been able to coordinate those, to be honest.

I got you.

Those have been much more like relationship based. Okay.

Yep, I get it. And you know, those big ones, they can cost a heck of a lot of money to go. Like I personally done a $5,000 drop, although it hasn't gone yet. I've been holding back. I put a deposit down for one. Her name is Melissa Gorga. Have you heard of. She's one of the. She's one of the Desperate House. Not Desperate Housewives. What is it? Real Housewives in New Jersey?

Is that the show?

And she's pretty famous, right? So she's real famous on there. So the nice part about this, my, my friend. My friend Laura betterly helped broker this deal. So, you know, and what's in there is we not only get to. Is she gonna take a picture with the product, but we get to use that picture in ads targeting her fans and everything else.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, so we'll see if that works.

Great.

Probably lose a bunch of money, but.

You know, worth a try. That's what marketing is. Exactly.

Oh yeah. Guessing and testing.

Exactly.

The. Okay, so. Alright, so. Oh, and also you said Facebook ads to people who like health and bone broth and just different stuff. People who follow other people direct to your Shopify page, say hey, exactly. You want to try this out? Are you making any Special offer. It's just. Hey, come here.

For the offer. No, we didn't even get that far into it. I mean. Yeah, yeah, it still converted really well and it was profitable even without a special offer. I love it.

Okay, so anything else you've done in particular to grow Kettle and Fire, or has that been the 80%?

Yeah, those are the big buckets. I mean, we're trying a bunch of stuff, so I'm sure in three to six months I'll have some different answers for you, but for right now, those are definitely the big buckets.

Cool. So let's go over. Still on E Commerce. Let's talk about the app, the fomo.

Yeah.

So you said it used to be called Notify. Now it's use.

So it used to be called Notify. And basically what the app was is it was a Shopify only app. And so I installed it on Kettle and Fire's Shopify store, I guess about six months ago when we were still on Shopify. And Right. Within a week or two of installing, I saw that our conversion rate went up around 30% just from having the app installed. And so at that moment. Yeah, I know. And so at that moment, I reached out to the app developer, because software is a space that I have some background in, and offered if I could buy it because he wasn't doing a great job marketing it. He wasn't interested in growing it that much, to be totally honest. It was making him good money and he was happy with that. I, on the other hand, we were transitioning off of Shopify and I wanted this app so that I could use it on any website. And so ended up making an offer, reach an agreement, and now we ended up buying the app. And so now it's now called fomo and any website can download it and install it with just a single snippet of JavaScript.

That's beautiful.

Yeah.

So before we dive into more of the functionality question, and I don't want to talk about the specifics of the financials of this, but I. I have a lot of interest in buying, selling, acquiring companies, etc. And that's actually been one of the topics of several recent podcasts. That being said, you find an app you like and you just start to talk to them about what might be possible to purchase it. Were you dealing with a pretty astute business person on the other end? Was it just somebody who developed kind of a cool app and it was just a really kind of casual conversation?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say he was an astute Guy, for sure.

Yeah.

But it was also a casual conversation. I mean, there were no bankers involved. You know, it was an acquisition for less than a million dollars. So there was no, no, like huge complexities.

Okay, what about, what about like when it started coming to, to like multiples etc. Where is it? Was there a. Was it already a pretty established business or was it a. It was a.

Really. Well, okay, cool. Yeah, I was doing quite well. I mean, you know, probably, I can probably safely say this, but it was doing tens of thousands of dollars a month.

Nice. Now, if at any point, if you say I can't reveal this or whatever, that's fine. But as I said, this is out of just a lot of personal and professional curiosity. More about the deal as opposed to, you know, this particular one. But did you do any kind of creative financing? Did you just pony up the cash all at once? Was, was there kind of an earn out or kind of a seller note?

Yeah, so there was some seller note aspect to it. We didn't pay it all up front. And there's a component where he gets upside as we continue to grow the business and eventually exit it. And we also, in exchange for that kind of upside that he gets, we also got a little bit more flexibility in terms of payment. So not 100% of it is upfront.

I love it. Cool. Yeah, that's awesome. So back to functionality. So give me. Give me a. Or I've already seen this. I'm trying to do this now for the audience here. So I come to the website. Is there a website using it right now that you want to.

Yeah, the closest thing is if you go to hotels.com, you'll see something where it'll say like, five other people looking at this hotel, or 15 people have booked this hotel today, or 40 people viewed this hotel in the last hour. And so what that is doing and why Hotels.com does that is because it pulls data and it shows social proof. It shows something to a visitor that is normally hidden. Like if you're running Hotels.com, you know how many people are looking at different hotels and visiting your site and all that. But it's really hard to show that information to someone that's just randomly on your website. The only way that you show social data like that right now is through reviews. And so what FOMO does is it allows that type of customer data, that type of customer engagement, it allows you to show what other customers are doing on your website to anyone who's visiting your website. And so what that does is it drastically increases conversion rates by showing people, you know, oh, Jeff from San Diego, or let's, you know, use you. Brad from San Diego just bought six bone broths four hours ago. It's like literally a notification that would be displayed via our app.

So when they come up, like on Stiletto Coffee, for instance, we're not at that point where we're getting like a notification every minute, like write a sale every minute or something like that. But so if somebody comes to my website and the last sale was four hours ago, for instance.

Yep.

When they come there, how does it, how does it work? Will that show up?

No. So you can set time thresholds at which you want to turn off.

Because if I want it to.

Yeah.

So if I have a low volume store and I'm not. And let, let's just say I'm getting.

I'm.

This is not an accurate number, but let's just say I'm getting five sales a day. Right. So it's every few hours and somebody comes there and it's been like several hours. But I want that to show up because I want people to see that something's there. I just want to make sure it's not just all real time.

No. So you can say don't show any. Or don't put a timestamp on any orders that are more than four hours old.

Oh, cool.

You know, and so automatically it would show recent orders that have happened within the last couple of hours, but it wouldn't show anything past that.

Nice. Okay, cool. So, yeah, that works. So even if you don't have. If you're at a lower volume, you're still going to get the benefit of this.

It does.

It's not all real.

Exactly.

That's the key. Cool. I love it. Well, by the time that people hear this show, you can go to stiletto coffee.com and check it out because I will be using this ABSA Smurfly. So when did you. Is this officially out or is it. This is getting ready to roll out.

Yeah. So it's going to be out as of a week from today.

Oh, cool. Cool. So, yeah, so this will. It will be out as of the time that we publish this. For sure.

Exactly.

So what kind of stuff besides, like the podcast, besides working with other people who have lists and influence, are you doing anything in particular to market this?

I mean, it's a little different because it's a software tool. It's inherently. People care a lot less about software than they do about their health. So. So influencers is kind of off the table a little more with this. But what we're doing is we're talking to my network of people, of marketers, of people that care about conversion rate optimization, stuff like this. So we're talking to them. We're going to be launching on Hacker News, Product Hunt, Growthhackers.com, all these different sites. We're basically going to be doing that and then see how the response is and get feedback on the first version. And once we have something that for sure people are in love with, I mean, that's when we kind of hit. Hit the gas in terms of marketing, you know.

Oh, that's cool. So how can people. How can people get it? You said?

Yeah, so if you get it. Yeah, it's. Use FOMO. FOMO.com.

Nice. Did you do FOMO? Because, like, fear of missing out, like, oh, man, everybody's buying this stuff and.

I'm not exactly crap.

That'd be pretty funny, though, if I. If I put FOMO or when I put FOMO on my. On stiletto coffee. And it's just a bunch of guys buying it.

Totally. They may want to hide their names.

We do get a.

We do get a lot of guys.

Buying this, you know, our coffee. I mean, it, for one. It's. I mean, it's marketed primarily to women, but. And I haven't really reached out to all the guys who are buying it, but I have a feeling that a.

Lot of them are buying it as.

Gifts or because they just like really, really good coffee and they don't mind looking at a pair of sexy stiletto heels. Imagine them attached to a beautiful, sexy leg.

So, hey, exactly.

We're for everybody. So what else? Is anything else going on that you're kind of excited about? Any trends you're seeing that are kind of cool? Any problems you're having that you'd love to crack?

Yeah. So, I mean, in terms of trends I'm actually seeing, you know, as I see, you know, granted, this is one of those things where you buy a certain model of car and you start seeing that model everywhere on the streets, you know, but after buying Notify fomo, I've been seeing a lot of this kind of mechanic popping up all over the Internet. Like medium.com now says, you know, when someone that you follow has read an article or liked an article, they display like, oh, this person liked an article, you know, and so you can read an article, and at the bottom it'll say, brad that you follow has already read and liked this article. It Creates kind of a social layer and it gives you more engagement points, more touch points through which you can interact with content.

Okay.

So that's one thing. The other thing that I'm seeing a lot more of and I think this is going to become a much bigger trend over the next year as people kind of respond. But I think there's a ton of websites right now that I call that are doing what I call fighting with their users. And what I mean by that is you go to a website that has Sumome or something like that installed and a user, once they land on your page, they have to fight to engage with your content because you're hitting them with so many, so many pop ups and slide ins and overlays and all that stuff. And no one disagrees that that is not good for user experience. But I think if you think about marketing over the long run and you think about where the Internet is going and where marketing is going, I don't think that the future of marketing is better and better lead capture via pop ups and swipe ins and all of that kind of stuff. I think that the future of marketing is much more like not fighting your users but trying to give them multiple points and multiple ways that they can gauge with you with your content and where you can display like all the products, services, newsletters, things that you have to offer on your site.

Yeah. By the way, did you see the south park episode about this?

No, I didn't. Is there one?

Dude, it's so. It is so surreal. Last season. I forget what it's called, but it has something to do with ads and it is so surreal. Like Hartman and them are flipping through and they're just trying to go somewhere and it's like just non stop. It's all the Nate bads and stuff. It's one of those things that we get it immediately. We start watching it because that's our world of Internet advertising and whatnot.

Yeah.

But then you realize that this is just made the main. It's so annoying and it's so public that it made the mainstream out there of South Park. So, you know, if south park is skewering it, it's mainstream America.

Absolutely.

And it just talks about how sick we get of. It's everything from clickbait to you get to a page and then there's 20 pop ups coming up and ads, ads everywhere so completely.

And I think you're gonna see more and more sites start to value that interaction and that connection with their users a lot more.

Right.

So you're Gonna see a lot, A lot of websites making the conscious decision to remove pop ups and remove a lot of this different kind of stuff on their webpage. Yep.

Yeah, well, and this is also one of the things that's contributed to the rise of ad blockers. And if people haven't looked at what a problem ad blocking software is like for Internet publishers, It's amazing. Like 40% of the people or something silly like completely are using ad blockers. I don't use it because I want to see what ads are being shown competitive intelligence, but I probably would if I was just an average Joe, which is why I'm also so interested in influencer marketing. Because people give them their attention on purpose.

Exactly.

So I think that's a great place to go. Cool, man. So anything else that we can do, like my listeners in droves could hopefully rush out and a check out your kettleandfire.com and get some bone broth and try it out as well as. Dammit. Is it get FOMO or use fomo?

Use fomo.

You need to, you need to register. Get FOMO too.

I know, we tried. We're trying.

Oh, somebody already got it.

Yeah, unfortunately.

Just give them an affiliate link.

I know, that's a good point. I'll reach out to them.

All right, say, listen, you don't have to sell it to us. Here's an affiliate link. Redirect it. Especially if you're not doing anything. May as well make some money. Damn it. Cool. So I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the call. If anybody has any questions, is there a way that they could particularly reach out to you?

Sure, yeah. I'm on Twitter wmares and then anyone can reach me. It's justinusefomo.com would be happy to. Anyone who listened to this interview would be happy to set them up with an extended free trial. Oh, damn fomo. I love it.

I love it. That's cool. It was very generous of you. I appreciate that. By the way, guys, listening, I mentioned this earlier. If you can tell that Justin is a badass at this stuff and understands marketing and he's one of the very few guests that I invited to come on two times. And you can go to baconratbusiness.com traction or just look up Traction and Justin Mares in the podcast guide. I don't know what number it was, but it was a great episode as well. We talked a lot about that. And you can get his book on Amazon. I'll make sure I put the book, you know, on the book link. In the show notes for this episode as well.

Thanks so much.

Yeah but dude thanks for coming back on the show. This has been really really cool and I can't wait to use fomo.

Com.

Thanks man. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. This is great.

My pleasure. For all of my bacon wrapped listeners there's a question I have for you which is what is the biggest nut you are trying to crack in your business? We're all trying to crack nuts and we're all trying to figure out problems whether that's find somebody, raise money, create more sales, more revenues, get into business, you name it. Send me an email and tell me what that nut you're trying to crack is to ask bradakenratbusiness.com if you like the show, share it and subscribe on itunes. Until next time. Thanks again Justin for being on the show.

Thanks so much and we'll talk soon.