YouTube Channel: @RyanDanielMoran

I love wine. Here it goes down, down into my belly.

I love wine, too.

What's up, Steve?

How are you?

Good to see you, man. Me too. I have been looking forward to having you on Wine With Wine for quite some time this month. Inside the 1%, we're talking about building audiences.

Okay.

But we know that there's a way to kind of shortcut the process and it's borrowing somebody else's audience totally. And you basically moved to Austin to pursue a career that allowed you to take advantage of other people's audiences. And we were talking earlier today that when you. A message gets tired, you go on to the next audience to build up new followers. So I was just hoping you could talk about your overall kind of thesis of, of what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Probably about three years ago, I had this idea.

To help influencers build an audience and build products out of that too, because back, I guess, three years ago, it's a little bit different now, but you didn't have to have nearly as large of a following, I guess, as you do now. And just the engagement, I equate it to buying real estate in New York city in like 1900, you know, three or four years ago, where no one was really using businesses to. To launch products. But there's certain parameters I, you know, kind of looked for. And one of them, the first person who I reached out to, his name is Zach Rushalo. Flexible dieting lifestyle on social media.

He's been on our panel at the Capitalism conference. If you recognize that name, we've caught him on some videos as well. Well, in case that rings a bell, beautiful hair Zack. Beautiful hair Zach, we call him at the office.

Yep. That's what he's known around town for bringing sexy back. So at the time, he had, I think, 30k followers, which is still a good amount. But the engagement was. That's really what I look for.

You say 30. 30,000 followers.

30,000 followers. And that number, you know, whether it be 30,000, 300,000, it can make a difference. But there are people who have 300,000 followers and there's no engagement whatsoever.

They're getting 17 likes on their post.

And the comments. Comments are a big thing. And his was through the roof. So really focusing on actual engagement, looking at people's comments, are they commenting? Is there, do they look interesting? What are they selling? Because they're all. Everyone's selling something. My opinion, whether it be, you know, their time, a product. That's right. They're always selling something. And the engagement that Zach had at the time was, you know, disproportional to anyone else who I'd seen. So I just reached out to him and sent him a dm and I was like, hey, you know, I've launched products online using social media before, but never really partnered with an actual person. I was like, I'll help in any way possible.

And Zach didn't have any physical products at the time?

No.

Correct. You went and developed them around his audience?

Correct.

I talk about this in my upcoming book, 12 Months to 1 Million, available now pre order on Amazon, available on May 5, 2020. We talk about the importance of having even a small seed audience. How even if you have just a few hundred people that are really, really ready to buy what it is that you've got, that's an absolute game changer. So it doesn't take tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers to do damage. It takes a few hundred people. And that should allow you to relax into the fact that every, like every comment matters. Every single one matters in the, in the grand scheme of things. Now, Zach went from 30,000 to like 300,000 over the last few years. Did that have to do with the product launch or did that have to do with something else?

That helped. That certainly helped. But when we first started, it was 30,000 and he was in Florida, I was in New York at the time. We were going back and forth. We had never met. We probably went back and forth for a year before we actually met.

Wow.

But we texted, we emailed every day, phone calls once a week. But the biggest thing that we saw with growth was he had an ebook. At the time it was just one ebook. It was kind of a side thing. But the way that we really grew it was he is known for food recipes, so he would again, just DM people, other influencers, people who he was attracted to in terms of like minded, that situation, DM them be like, hey, I'll come and cook for you. Because he was making the food recipes and you know, if you look at the Instagram page, it's really attractive looking food. And to go along with the hair, obviously.

How's this? Good work. It's beautiful.

So it. And by the way, if you want to look up what Steve is talking about, the Instagram handle is flexible dieting lifestyle. And when, when I met Zach, he slid into my DMs.

DM is in my opinion the best way to reach someone, especially if they're, you know, if they don't have a million followers, they have 10,000, 5,000 followers. They'll see it, they'll answer. So we started doing that for a little while and gained traction organically.

So he starts flying to these other micro influencers, cooking for them, and they're shouting it out.

Right.

And as a result, that influence is.

Starting to grow and grow and grow.

I gotta ask you, what do you think was the reason for all the engagement that was different about Zach?

The hair, first and foremost. But besides that, if you look at the page, normally it was any photo that he would post it, you would think would have a thousand, two thousand calories. And when you look at the description and what he was actually selling, it was a fraction of that.

Yeah.

So look at the picture and it would be like, wow, that looks really good. And then you look at the description and be like, how is that only 3 or 400 categories?

In other words, the content was phenomenal.

Correct.

And it was specific to the audience.

Correct.

And that created the responsiveness and the engagement.

Absolutely.

And so you came in and you're like, all right, let's build a business around this. And you wanted to build a brand around this. So tell me about the evolution of the brand.

So I remember our first call when after I bought his ebook that he was selling. Yeah. Dove through it, and I understood what he was selling because I understood the nutrition profile, the calories, the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Sent him a dm, sent him an email, went back and forth, got on the phone with them, and he was like, yeah, I just did this all by myself. I'm like, you don't have anyone else working with you or helping you? Like, he's like, no, this is like a side thing. I co. Own a gym. Like, you know, I'm running home for lunch, making something, taking a picture on my phone and then running out and then dinner and. And he, according to him, said that people were like, where can I get this recipe? He was first just taking the photos of it, and people like, I want to buy this. Where can I get it? So then he put together scrap together an ebook, and that's when I met him. He had one or two iterations of the ebook, but he was like, yeah, this is just kind of like a hobby. And when he told me he built what he built by himself as a hobby, I was. I literally stood up in my kitchen and I was like, we got something here. Like, we gotta take this. It's gonna take a little while, but we got something to gain momentum and. Yeah. And progress. This Forward too. And he was like, really? Like, you think so? I'm like, I know so. I don't wanna sound arrogant but like there's definitely something here. Look at all the engagement. Like people are responding. There was an email us at that time of a couple thousand.

So we were off to the races in that sense. And what we had found was obviously when you come out with a product, if you're innovative, you're going to continue to want to come out with new products. So the new, the new products was from his new recipes and he was still posting photos of what he was eating every day. And people responding on social media like, I want, where's this recipe today? Like I want this today. And time after time it's like, well maybe we'll come out with another ebook, but it won't be ready for a couple months. People are like, no, give us this recipe. So we ran into kind of like catch 22.

We post this photo, but it's not in this ebook and you can't buy it yet. What do we do? So that's when we had the idea to run a subscription model where people signed up for a reoccurring thing and we'd post it behind the paywall and people will get that recipe later that day or the next day.

Yeah. So basically what you're saying is you had a small audience that was responsive and if you're watching or you have a business, you should be encouraged by the fact that there wasn't a huge following, there was just a ton of engagement with the audience and as a result you started launching some products, doing the best you could. It wasn't like you were great copywriters. I don't even think you had like upsell paths or anything. Like you were just giving people what they wanted and as a result built a full time business for you and for Zach. Have a couple team members, I think one full time team member. And now you're starting to launch some, some physical products and some, some other exciting stuff. So. So I'm backtracking through all that to let you know that I know sometimes we kind of put influencers on a pedestal. We kind of have, they have all this engagement, they have all this status. But the truth is that if you've got any following at all that is responsive, then you having the business, you're the one with the asset and that small little following, I don't care if it's 500, people can really do damage in terms of moving the needle when it comes to sales and that should make you feel like, okay, yeah, I can do this now. Even if there's not 100,000 people or even 10,000 people, 1,000 people who are responsive is plenty enough to move the needle, to launch profitably, to. To know exactly what the market wants and to know that you've got something, as Steve said. Would you tell us the inside scoop on how these audiences are built?

The main thing is.

With building a loyal audience, you have to give them, the people you're selling to, the audience, a reason to follow you. Tell me more. Why do people, why do people start following Zach initially?

Because they want more recipes.

They wanted more recipes because they wanted to fulfill that self need for I want to eat this food that looks amazing, but I don't want the 3,000 calories that comes with it. So they were buying that for a selfish purpose. And he understood that it was for. Initially for selfish reasons. But he, he caught on. We caught on pretty quickly that if we created more of these and put the word out, people were going to catch on because people are selfishly looking for lower calorie foods that taste great and they don't want to feel deprived.

So that makes a ton of sense to me. On Instagram. Did you follow the same approach on YouTube?

It was a little bit different because at the time when we first started and he was, he asked me, he's like, you know, I have these followers on Instagram. I want to go on YouTube. Because he loves being in front of the camera, he loves talking, he's great at it. And he had only sold the recipes on Instagram. I was like, all right, you might not want to hear this, but take a recipe, one of your most popular recipes, make a video out of it for free and put it on YouTube. And we will shuttle the people who follow you on Instagram to YouTube. So leverage one platform to grow the other. And we did that starting, I want to say, three or three and a half years ago. So that was one of the biggest things too. It's like, whatever your strong point is, use that and leverage that on other platforms.

So in Zach's case, the real strong point was the recipes.

Yep.

And he had data to suggest what the most popular one would be. That piece of content now becomes a video.

Totally.

He's able to shuttle one to the other.

Yep.

I know that you've kind of.

Talked about going more in that direction, like building brands around specific influencers and audiences. I think that is the best idea that no one is doing right now. So would you talk a Little bit about that idea or that thesis.

Yeah. So the last couple years with Zach, specifically as we've built the following now, and we're into the physical products world, and one of his most sought after and famous recipes was a cookie butter that he was making. Homemade cookie butter, like protein powder. Protein powder. A few other. He would throw the conglomerate together. He was traveling around, cooking for other influencers. But he had this selfish dessert treat that he made and in the airport would throw it in a cup and water and mix it around. He was being stopped by TSA with his bag of powder instead of protein cookie butter. And people were like, what is this? Like, what is protein cookie butter powder? So he put it up on his stories, took a poll. Would you guys be interested? Pulled them in a physical product. And it was an ungodly amounts of yeses versus no. It was like a couple thousand yeses. So he called me from the airport all excited and he's like, we gotta make this. Like, can we make this to sell? And I'm like, yeah, but it's gonna take a little bit of time. And he was like, well, what's a little bit of time? I was like, probably a couple months, six months. And he got so angry at me because he didn't realize that, you know, the 10 steps that it takes to. To do all that.

But we promoted again on social media. We placed a minimum purchase order of 10,000 units, not knowing what to expect in the summer of 18. And we ended up sending it out prior to launch to other friends and influencers who he had cooked before. You know, he hand wrote letters out. I think we sent them out to 10 or 15 different influencers. The two flavors, handwritten note and whatever. And we again, never asked for anyone to put it on their Instagram, stories on their YouTube channel, do a review, none of that.

So I got to interrupt here because I want all of you who are watching or listening to get this. The question is often asked, how do I get influencers to promote my stuff? And what Steve is saying is they never asked. They just gave and gave and gave and built relationships, wrote notes, sent product to them. They built relationships over the long term. And when they had something cool to share with those people, they ended up sharing that. Is that correct?

Totally.

And I remember correctly, that product did 10,000 units, like two weeks with no ad spend.

Is that right? 12 days. Yeah.

In 12.

12 days with the number. Yeah. 10,000 units in 12.

Yeah. And you had all these influencers talking about it, and you had a launch that Was profitable. That was exciting. That went from basically 0 to 60 in 12 days with no ad spend, no direct ask. That's how you get influencers to talk about your stuff by building relationships with them. Now, some people might be listening to say, well, they had a secret weapon. They had a guy behind who was great on camera with great hair, who knew how to cook. Of course it would make sense to do that. What would you say to the person or to the business that doesn't have a star of their business but is still looking to build relationships with influencers to talk about their stuff?

I'm still, again, a huge proponent of reaching out to people. The worst that happens is people don't respond until they start responding. Until you reach out to enough people and that one person responds, or those two people respond.

But have the mindset of, all right, I'm gonna reach out to a person. They don't respond on to the next and just keep reaching out. The only thing that's gonna happen is if you give up that, which is.

Now, you get frustrated, you quit the.

Worst, which means you're not. You don't care about it. That's right.

The other thing I would add to that is go for the smallest yes possible.

Can I send you product? Can we share your content on our channel? Can I introduce you to so and so that I think would be valuable for you? Can we pay you for a shout out on your podcast? Can we interview you on our blog or our podcast? You always go for the obvious yes. You give them something that is just an easy obvious yes. That's how you start a relationship. So many people go for the moon out of the gate. Like, I'm looking to start an equity partnership. We've never met before. Go away, Dick. But if you go for the obvious, easy, yes. Like I was telling you about a partnership I'm pursuing right now with a food blogger, with an influencer that I'm really excited about. And I reached out to her and said, I've been a fan of your work for a long time. I think there are some things that you could do with your business that would really help you. Is it okay if I send you an email with some thoughts that I've got about some things, some areas of opportunity for you? Who says no to that?

Bingo.

Right, so. And that set up an email chain which led to a phone call, which led to a pitch deck, which led to, you know, a partnership that is, is soon to be forming.

Right.

But all you always, like, no one, no one asks for Sex on the first date. If you do your douche.

You take her out, you pay, you open doors.

You hang out a little bit.

Hang out a little bit?

Yeah, like we're doing.

Oh, boy. I didn't know that's where this was going. Well, I better get ready, ladies and gentlemen. Steve, say something smart. Cause I'm blushing. That was the point.

I have a question for you.

Yeah.

How many people hit you up in DMS asking or. Or, you know, with an idea or going for a huge ask where you look at it and you roll your eyes, versus someone who actually presents you with wanting to help?

You have no idea. I mean, it's. It's. I mean, I don't even have a huge following about. We got like, what, 23, 22,000 followers on Instagram?

Big enough.

81,000 subscribers on YouTube. Like, our. Our audience isn't huge, but I am. I won't say I'm inundated with messages, but I would say the ratio of asks to deposits into the bank account.

9 to 1 would be.

Like an exaggeration. To the positive, it is 99%. Can you do this for me? Can you do this for me? Can you do this for me?

What's your opinion on this? I need your help on this. Yeah, that's exactly right.

I don't know who you are.

So if you go the other way.

It always stands out. And I always reply, yep, always.

So that is a big telltale sign if you're reaching out to people, is go to help them first every time.

Yes.

And make sure. Do a little bit of research to look at their profile.

Look.

Look at kind of what they're about versus, you know, just sending off a blanket statement. Yeah. Even including their first name in the mess, the top of the message goes a long way.

That's actually true. Like, I'm shocked at how many people go in for the ask without even saying, hey, Ryan.

Right. Just no name.

It's just always about them. Always about them. And so people are selfish by human nature. But we're saying this so that you can see there's not as much competition as you think. There's not as many people doing this well as you might expect. And so if you go in and just are cool and treat it like a relationship and you add value to the other person, you'll be surprised at the type of responses that you're able to get. Are there any major influencers or celebrities that you've ever opened up a relationship with as a result of this?

Me, personally, where I'VE messaged them or DM them? No, but through Zach and leverage, you know, using his platform to then get into. There's people who we've. Who we've partnered with or have become friends with. Either he's flown out there or if they've flown to Austin, that have over a million followers. Yeah. So. And it's funny too, because you hear that and you're like, holy shit, a million followers. But then we'll go and hang out, or hang out with someone who has 30,000 followers, and that person, when they post a photo, has way more crossover and engagement onto our page than someone who has 1.2.

So what you're saying is somebody has 1.2 million followers and they talk about your business. That might not move the needle as much as somebody with 30,000 followers and really high engagement.

Absolutely.

Why do you think that is?

I just. I think it comes down to the audience that's following that person and how much crossover there can be. So yourself.

That makes sense. That's actually really interesting. That was my braingasm for the night, which is that the connection and like the synergy between the audiences is the most important thing. It's not about partnering with the influencers with the biggest following or the biggest name recognition. It's about going to the audiences that resonate the most with you. Because the net gain in followers or the net gain of engagement is really what you're after. Or let's just say the number of customers that you get is what we're really after. And if you can get more, what you're saying is you can often get more customers from a 50,000 person page, even less a 10,000 person page than a million person following.

100%.

Do you get that?

Listen, are you getting this 100%? There's one woman in particular, because when the product, the cookie butter product launched, we kind of had this idea of what we created and where it could go. But there was, you know, three or four other avenues that have now built up to. One of them is we've amassed a huge Weight Watchers following, which we never foresaw, ever. But there are a lot of. We've become big in the Weight Watcher community. And there's one woman in particular. I think she has 12 or 13,000 followers. She shouts us out all the time. She bought the product on her own, loves it, and now we're. We've built a relationship and the amount of people who buy because of her, we can't. It's. It's unbelievable. That A person who you know versus someone who has six. We did a giveaway today with someone who has 668,000 followers, I think. And I was sitting on both of sitting in front of the website on the back end on the traffic of both times. And the woman who had 13 or 14,000 followers generates as much traffic to our website as the woman, 606,000.

So what you just said is that the person with 13,000 followers got more engaged, got sent more traffic than the.

Person with 600 some thousand neck and neck.

So what I want to know is what was the difference in those two pages?

And this comes, I guess, knowing about your products and how, who's buying them, what they like about it, what they don't like about it. So the one with the smaller audience, she had lost a bunch of weight. So if anyone knows anything about trying to lose weight or dieting, you're trying to still eat tasty food, but it's lower calorie. You have to create a calorie deficit. So this woman who has lost a ton of weight or her followers were trying to, are trying to lose weight too. So it makes total sense if she posts a food product saying, this tastes absolutely delicious. I use this to stay on track. All this stuff, you know, it's unbelievable. Obviously all our followers are following are going to be like, of course I'm going to buy it, you know, let me get my hands on it asap, versus the one, you know, for today. And it still generated a lot of traffic. But he sells coffee. His big thing is his lower calorie coffee drinks. And we tried to leverage it, or did leverage it with creating the cookie butter with coffee.

Mix. We did a smoothie recipe with his coffee and our cookie butter.

But the crossover was kind of a crossover. But the other was like, it was more of an identity crossover. One was like a one time cool mix, but the other was like, it was who they were, it was the journey they were on, it was part of them.

Correct.

Yeah, that, that makes a ton of sense. So like the point is go all in on your person, give them what they want, connect with related audiences and be cool. Be good to those people. All right, do we have, do we have, are we dialing? Josh?

Josh Valentin.

All right.

This is Joshua Valentin.

Hey, Josh. This is Ryan Moran and Steve Dudian. How are you?

Hey, Ryan.

It's been really good, man. It's good to hear from you guys.

Yeah, good to chat with you too. Tell us what's on your mind.

So honestly, kind of one of the big problems I'm running into right now, and this sounds hyperbolic or silly, is like knowing how to partner with the right influencers. So we have like three or four youtubers who are super interested in working with us. You have like 30,000 subscribers. A lot of them don't know how to do email list and email marketing. So we're talking about helping them with that in exchange for working with them on like working with us on content. But it's kind of like a race now to figure out like we're not a niche. So the brand is improved photography. It's not like wedding photography or like portrait photography, family photography. So we're super broad and in that community. So figuring out like what influencers to work with has been kind of difficult.

So let me try and translate. What I think I'm hearing you say is that you've had a lot of interest from interesting audiences, but they're all a little bit different in their niche in the photography space. And you're looking at what is the most valuable relationship to partner with and how do you make that decision? Is that right?

Yeah, that's out of the 21.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so my, my answer is run tests. You do small tests with all of them. You like offer your help just like you're doing to as many of them as you're comfortable helping. But all you do is just run like have them talk about you or talk about your product on their page and see what the response is like. And you partner with the ones that have the greatest response. Test as small as possible also too.

It's like out of the 21, there's a good chance you might like maybe half of them and maybe hate three quarter, you know what I mean? So I would also preface it and like out of the ones that are gaining traction for you too, don't just look at the sheer numbers. Try and establish a relationship with them to see maybe if one or two or five of them could work out or you could see it working out potentially in a year from now, two years from now with that person. Because, you know, if you're not driving in three weeks or four weeks, it's a huge difference than if you absolutely love the person.

Yeah.

And it's going to be sustainable business down the road too.

Does that make sense?

That's awesome. That's actually really, really helpful. So kind of a question on top of that for I guess like cost per view, do you think it's worth partnering with like an influencer with a good engagement but like, 3500, like, followers on their Instagram versus, like, a. Okay, influencer that has, like, a lot of following, like, 50,000 subscribers on YouTube. Is it worth leaning towards the one that seems to have more chemistry with them?

Steve, hit him with a hammer.

I would say, again, it depends on the person it depends on. I'm assuming you've had conversations, you know, with these people and again, like Ryan said, maybe split test it and who comes back with, you know, better results or who seems more hungry. No one can tell you which way to go.

The numbers won't dictate the decision. You will.

Totally.

That's cool. That's. That's really interesting.

All right, Josh, keep us posted on your progress.

Awesome. I love it and appreciate you guys.

All right, likewise, buddy.

C Money, would you do a Google for me? So a notification just popped up on my screen. All it said was, I can't believe.

What Trump just did.

All right, capitalists, thank you for hanging out with us tonight on Wine with Wine. Special thanks to Steve Doudian. Steve, thanks for hanging out with us.

Thanks for having me.

One percenters, thanks for watching. If you watch this on the recording and you want to hang out with us live, we do this inside of our community called the 1%. We'd love to have you inside our community. You can join us over@capitalism.com 1. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Good night.