Daniel Snow - The Snow Agency & Disrupting The Social Media Landscape

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Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode we have Daniel Snow here with us. Daniel Snow is the founder of the Snow Agency as well as founder of the hip hop brand known as rap. Rap has over 6 million followers on Instagram and Daniel has been behind some of the most viral e commerce products such as Goat Case and many more. That being said, make sure you screenshot this episode and tag danielapper on Instagram and tag myself. Post it on your story so that we can share it as well. And last but not least, make sure you subscribe to the Rise of Young podcast. Let's get into the show.

All right, what is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Daniel Snow on the show. Thanks so much for coming on, Daniel.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So first off, you have a lot of phenomenal things going on. You are the founder of the Snow Agency, the brand Rapp on Instagram, which I know a lot of people follow and know. But for those that may not know who you are and what you do, I'd love for you to give a brief description of where you spend your time and what you're building.

Where I spend my time outside of work isn't in too many places right now, but other than work, I like to go for long last week bike rides. I've gotten into biking this week, but most of my time is spent building my businesses and whatnot.

For the people that may not know what the Snow Agency is, I'd love for you to give some insight into what that is.

So Snow Agency is. We're a performance marketing agency where right now we're primarily working with e commerce brands. We have about 40 clients right now. Everyone but one client is E Commerce We've done some apps and lead gen stuff like that in the past. And not saying we can't do it, but just I have a big background in e commerce and a big, I guess, reputation in the space, so to speak. So now we get a lot of commerce clients coming to us and we're very good at it. So we grow e commerce clients through paid marketing channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. We do email marketing, we do ad creatives. And overall, given the strategy that can grow their brand to hopefully be doing millions of dollars a month like some of our clients are doing.

Very cool, man. I want to take it back. When did this all start? I know I've been following you for quite some time and I know that, just touching on, you know, I follow rap, which is a, you know, the huge hip hop brand that you manage as well and own. But where did this start when it comes to, you know, digital advertising, social media, and just marketing overall. And your drive for entrepreneurship?

Yeah, so it started my sophomore year of college during winter break. This was like 2012, I want to say, okay, December of 2012 started out. I was in the gym during winter break. I saw my friend at the gym and he told me, you know, we were catching up at the gym, blah, blah. He told me he was making $45 a week on his phone from Twitter. I did the math. I'm like, oh my God, you're making like $2,500 a year on your phone. That is crazy. There's no way. So I left the gym and I made a Twitter account. Like he had. He had like 25,000 followers on Twitter for a fitness account. I was into fitness at the time and I made a fitness account and that was how I got started in the digital space.

Okay, very cool. What was like the first, like, you know, the first company you launched, you know, and like going from Twitter to everything you have now, like, what was the process?

So the process initially it was first growing the followers. So once I got to about 10,000 followers.

Is this for your personal brand or for a different thing?

No, it was just like a fitness. It wasn't me motivation, fitness stuff on Twitter. And eventually, you know, I was sending pay per click. So sending it to Chacha Mylikes. Back in the day, they were paying per click. Then after doing that, I figured, oh, they're making. They're paying me per click. Obviously I can make my own website in Google, at Google, Taboola, all that stuff can pay me directly. So I did that had some success there. After my first year, we already sending a few hundred thousand page views a day. We were able to able to make a few thousand dollars a day doing that. Well first, before I even got there by that summer, so I mentioned I started December. That summer I was able to start making $100 a day.

Okay.

And instead of getting a summer job, I was able to make a hundred dollars a day on my phone. And that is, you know, in my life. I'm like, I made it. I mean I'm making $100. Like my parents are telling me to get a job, blah blah blah, like last lapse on you at the beach, whatever. I don't have to get a job. So that was awesome. I was like, you know, digital is awesome. And then what really changed my perspective was when I was in college and I saw a Forbes article from these guys on Twitter that were making $100,000 a month. I think the article said, wow. And that I remember like I remember reading that article being like, you know, just like crazy. Like this is. I had my vision, my bar, far too low. I was trying to make $100. These guys are making $100,000 a month from Twitter. Is it 100,000 or a million? I don't even remember. I think it was 100,000. So anyways, that changed my entire way of thinking. And then I got into apps. I had a few successful apps that were the top 25, top 50 and free apps and paid app store. Had some games, had a music app back in 2014 that would just rip all the audio off YouTube and you only had to pay like $5 which is now like the subscription model of YouTube. We had that back in like 2014. But. And then, and then I realized a lot of people on the space that had a lot a large following on Twitter and Instagram didn't know how to monetize their accounts.

Yep.

And I found a very good method of doing that which was through affiliate marketing. So I built essentially one of the, one of the very first self serve advertising platforms for influencers. People had large followings, etc. In college, my senior year, summer going to my senior year, I was studying to go to dental school and we built all the landing pages. We showed people how to run traffic, how to create the content, etc. And it just blew up. Everyone on Twitter was using our platform. Then everyone. I moved on to Instagram. I found the biggest Instagram meme page user. Then all the meme page kids were using it. Then we had celebrities Start using it like Amber Rose, Blac, Chyna, Ralph Kardashian, et cetera. Eventually. The platform was really big. We had like 3,000 influencers in our first year using it. We were doing over $100,000 a day at one point while I was still in college. And our first year we did like $8 million in revenue or something along those lines. So that was really successful. And then naturally, after having all that insight into 4,000 people using our platform, we were able to quantify what every influence, every influencer page, etc. And demographics, what they were worth, meaning how much traffic did they send, what types of people. That was when I actually saw it for the first time. Engagement does not equal influence. Some of these pages with very low engagement were setting massive amounts of sales and I was like, this is crazy, it doesn't make sense. Until I understood, like, more the influence. So I understood all that and then I got into launching my own brands. So first brand we launched with Go Case, leveraging all our relationship.

I saw that everywhere, man. You guys crushed that.

Yeah, Go Case was the first brand we launched. And because we had a huge advantage, obviously we just scaled it probably like harder than any, like one of the hardest, like, influencer ever. And both really.

What is Go Case? For those that may not know, I'm sure they do.

Yeah, it's a phone case that sticks to things, essentially sticks to glass, wood, whatever. We were doing like 75 million impressions organically a day for six months straight. 50 million impressions a day on Twitter and then another probably 50 million on Instagram. We had a whole team of like seven to eight people just buying shoutouts all day long. Shoutouts? Like, yeah. You know, I have a question.

Just how has, especially when you say, like, buying shoutouts, how has the influencer marketing industry changed over the last five years? Because I know there's, you know, so many different ways to do it now and like the, the correct way. And it's, you know, it's a mainstream thing now, influencer marketing with all these massive corporations. So how have you seen it change and where do you see it going?

Just like you said, I. It's changed that it's gotten a lot more expensive because there's a lot more players in the game now. So, you know, the demand has increased. Therefore, influencers are now charging too much money for some of them because they think that they, they're over inflating their own kind of reach. But so, I mean, in my opinion, there's no, like, right way to use it. The Right way to use it is if you're. First off, it depends what kind of like if you're an e commerce brand, in my opinion, there's a few right ways to use it. Right way to use it. Number one is to get celebrities or people who have real influence that to get their content and run it on paid acquisition channels because they can increase sales significantly compared to like regular content. So that's one easy way because now you have the influence of a celebrity, you're using their likings to sell your products. That's one easy way. Second way is to try and make it profitable through influence influencers or at least break even or maybe not lose that much as much as possible. So just being able to get that content to then once again use on paid ads.

Yep.

So it all goes back to if you're able to leverage influencer marketing enough where you're at least breaking even or maybe not losing too much, where you're now gaining followers, you're gaining a ton of brand awareness and you're able to then get all that content to leverage on paid ads. In my opinion, that's the best way to do it. And the more you can naturally spend on influencer from what I find, the cheaper your CPMs are because your brand awareness is out there a lot more. And now it's just a lot easier to acquire customers because it's not all just influencers have done the hard part for you. Another kind of interesting thing I found is that when you're doing a ton of influencer marketing, people would say, oh, I know, go case. I know, perfect school. I saw them on this influencer's page. So they once again, it's a perfect relate. A perfect example of like the likeness is how people remember you. People don't go, oh, I remember them from a Facebook ad.

Right.

You could drive a shit ton of sales from Facebook. It's a revenue generator. But they remember your brand often from the influencers that are representing it or celebrities. So that's kind of how I see it. Proper way to do it. Yeah.

When did rap come into your life?

I think like 2015 or 16. I don't remember the exact time.

Yeah. What inspired you to start that and tell me that story? Because I know that obviously if people follow you on Instagram after this, they'll see Rapp in your bio. And it's one of the biggest hip hop pages on Instagram, almost 6 million followers. When did you start that brand and what was the inspiration behind it?

So before I even had rap I already had like, probably had created over like 10, 15 million followers on social media. So obviously I was very good at that. And my inspiration behind that was I didn't want to make a meme page. I'd create these meme pages, comic pages, whatever, that have zero value and nothing. Essentially they're worth a little bit, but you get the point. And I saw. Well, number one, it crossed a few boxes. Number one was the monetization aspect. Through these large meme type pages, whatever, they have no real influence. They can get a lot of awareness. But the types of people that are buying are typically these like annoying drop shippy type products. Affiliate marketing, you know the stuff like you really don't want to be posting.

Yeah.

And people often post because it's the only way they're making money and oftentimes their livelihood. So I saw rap as check. The first box was it monetizes through organic content, which no other page could do. So that was huge. I could create a brand, monetize it, and still keep that authenticity of the brand. That was number one. Number two, there was no one doing it. So as a casual rap fan, I literally had the problem of I couldn't keep up with the craziness of rap. It was like huge efforts every single day. And even now that I own rap right still there's so many people. Everyone wants to be a rapper and when they break, they break out. It's like, who is this person? I don't know who to listen to. I don't know what's going on. So I saw that as the second thing that no one was doing. The third thing was that the content was never stopping. There's non stop content, there's nonstop drama, there's non stop music being released, there's nonstop news. And that would be very easy to create a following by doing that, by just centralizing all that content. So I got the rap name. I was lucky enough that I already knew the guy who had it.

Okay.

I actually had done a deal with him before and met him in person even. So I felt comfortable doing that. And yeah, and that was it.

When it comes to like, you know, like someone that's listening, if they wanted to go start like a brand and like not only a meme page, but where do you see Instagram going? Because obviously times are so different when it comes to growing, growing on Instagram and building a following and, you know, building that audience. Like, how do you look at Instagram now? If you were to go start a new brand today.

You said like A media type page or like.

Yeah, like a media type page.

What would I do?

Yeah, like, what's the game plan if you were to start one today versus.

You know, I would start one today. I wouldn't start it from scratch. I would buy. I would definitely buy a page. Starting it from scratch is like, it's just like, what, what, what you value your time to be. Like. It's like impossible. Yeah. To go from like zero to let's say a million is like, like, unless. The only real way to do it is if you're still spending money. So you have to be buying shoutouts. Yep. Buying ads or whatever from all these pages. So you're still having to spend ton of money.

Yep.

So I wouldn't start a page unless I felt comfortable investing money into the growth. Because if you're not, you're putting in countless hours to get to, like, to get nowhere. And it's never going to get to that next level where you're going to eventually be able to make money because it's just how it is. There's so many pages now.

How are you guys looking at TikTok as a new platform?

We're on TikTok and failing pretty miserably.

How so?

I wanted to get on TikTok for like two years, but I didn't get. I didn't start until I got the rap name. I was trying to get the rap name for like a year. Okay, and a half, whatever. And finally I got it. But then it just like, it's for us. I don't know, it just. It's not going too great. We have like 50,000 followers. I mean, I feel like everyone has like millions of followers. Is that. But we're like, struggling with TikTok. But I for sure see its value. I'm starting to see it as like how I saw Twitter and Instagram in its early days when I joined those. Although I found that it's a lot easier to grow on TikTok than those two.

But.

You need to create original content consistently. Like, TikTok isn't great for just reposting. And that's what makes it a lot harder. Although it's a lot easier if you're doing it the right way. So that's the one thing I see. But I think TikTok people should really start paying attention to it. We're about to get actually into its ad platform in the beta, so I'm excited to see what that's gonna look like. But yeah, very cool.

Now I just. Regarding, like, your journey Overall, what advice do you have to young entrepreneurs? Obviously, there's a lot of young people listening to my show, but, you know, you started out while you're like, wow, I can make $100 a day on Twitter to now spending millions of dollars on Facebook and having these massive brands. Like, what have you learned throughout that process that you'd want to teach a young individual starting a company today?

I would say for me, even looking back, like, well, number one is that failure. You get used to failure early and appreciate it when it happens. Because I think that that for sure is the number one thing for me. I've had a lot of failure. Not like, failure in terms of, like, oh, I just fail. It's terms like, you know, actually, like, doing things, trying things, like, progressing. I'm failing forward constantly, and, like, never letting that get to me. So be comfortable with failures, number one. But the second thing I like to think of that has put me in a lot of really great positions I'm in today is just my consistent ability to network and not being afraid to talk with people or go out of my way to put myself in places where could be, you know, just out of my comfort zone or whatever. So that for sure is like. And everyone said you hear that a lot. Oh, your network is your net worth. Blah, blah, blah, your network. You hear all that. But, like, I was the type of kid, like, in college, I don't understand what that means. What does that mean? Your network is your value. Like, I really. I really didn't understand it. Yeah, and it's amazing that, you know, very simple, small conversations can really have massive impacts on your life. I gave you the one small. The one small conversation I had that directly changed my life forever and ended up changing many, many, many, many, many other people's lives indirectly, because it changed my life. So you never, you know, you never know where one conversation can take you, and just putting yourself in that position where things can happen is something I think young entrepreneurs should do and not be afraid to seek out their, like, role models and stuff, for sure.

What's your advice for networking at a higher level?

Please don't say, hey, can I pick your brand? Don't ever message some of that. Sometimes I get that, and I just like. Like this random person just that, I don't know, just, like, wants me to take, you know, take time out of my day. It's like, in a sense, a little offensive, honestly. Yeah, it's like, hey, I don't know you at all. Let me just get. Let me get your Time and just pick your brain. Like, yeah, so don't do that. So I would say the best way to do it is to come at it from a value perspective or a humbleness perspective. Like, what can I do at the same time, like to provide value or at least try or attempt to do it.

Yeah, Right.

So which would get people, you know, interested in talking with you and then you can ask them whatever you want because then it's at that point it's just, you know, a normal conversation versus leading off with like, let me just pick your brain because. Right. I mean, who enjoys getting on the phone? Like, not many people. I hate getting on the phone. I'm on the phone all day, so I'll try not to be on the phone if I don't have to be. So, yeah. Leading with value.

It's funny, when I interviewed Rick Ross, he was like, position yourself like a boss. He's like, you came to me and you were like, hey, let me promote your book for 15 minutes. You were really direct and that was that. Right. It's like that don't waste time mentality.

Exactly. Yeah.

You want to pick their brain when they could be doing a lot of different things than helping you with that. They come with value. So I love that. I want to touch on just when it comes to your day to day with the snow agency and everything you're building, like, how do you manage your team and what have you seen impactful on your business when it comes to scaling?

So the first question, how do I manage the team? I would say the number one thing for being able to manage a team is really the two things I try to promote the most is number one for people on your team to take ownership of their work. Because if people don't take ownership of their work, someone has to take ownership of it and it's probably gonna be you. Therefore you're stuck in this little circle where you can't grow anywhere and progress because you always have to be tied down to what's going on. So that's what I really try to do in Rap TV and my agency and give the employees the confidence to own their work and the relationships and everything else that goes in it. Where they don't need me or a manager or anyone else, like oversee them. That's number one. Number two is transparency. I think transparency is like the most important thing. Transparency, your clients to your co workers to, you know, relationships, just being clear and not being afraid to talk with people about what's really going on, etc. So everyone's on the same page I think is super important. And then what was the other question?

Yeah, just when it comes to like you know, building and scaling and working with all these different higher level e commerce brands, like what would you attribute your access to your success to?

I attribute my success to. Well we're able to do that because once again that failure part we tried so many different things. So I felt like especially in the early days of go case I was trying everything. We wasted tons of money, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars easily making mistakes. I mean in a sense millions, even some. But so since we had so much trial and error now we're able to find a way, find what works and apply that and we have like a really great grasp that are now principles that we can apply to any, any brand or anyone trying to sell online. And that's how we're able to have so much consistent success was through all the failures that we've made in the past. But now we know exactly what to do.

Where do you see, you know like product based e commerce companies go wrong?

So it's a mistake I've made which is hard to not like, it's hard to like overcome it which is growing too fast and grow or for some people just like not making customers happy. Growing too fast makes customers not happy as a derivative or some people just blatantly don't get, you know, don't care about their customers at all. They just don't care and they might not be growing too fast. So by not by growing too fast and not being able to have customer, every customer have a great experience with your product does a lot more damage in the long run because it's like a domino effect right when you're running ads and you constantly have people saying I order from them, don't buy from them, they I didn't get my order, blah blah, blah blah blah, wrong size this, that it does a lot of damage. And it's hard to constantly turn new customers at scale if you can't rely on your pre existing customers to return and buy more stuff. So and just understanding that you know like the customer experience comes before trying to grow is a very hard thing. And being, you know, just being okay with that and taking that like revenue hit if you don't think you can meet those needs for the customers like at that moment.

Love that. When you're going to launch a new product, where do you guys double down on it first? Is it influencer marketing? Facebook ads? And how do you decipher, you know how do you pick where to spend more time on if you see what's working?

Yeah. So we for sure live in, I mean, typically what we do to launch a brand I think is great is to get a ton of ugc, ton of like customer testimonials, people using it organically, et cetera. So we can do all types of things with the content. That's number one. Number two, it's great to get a few celebrities or influencers, whatever, so you get their likeness right away. That's number two. And then, you know, we'll use all that content we're getting organically and leverage it on Facebook and Instagram and even YouTube ads.

Love that.

So that's usually what we'll do.

Love it. I have two more quick questions. One of them just being like moving into 2020, what are you excited about with Snow Agency and everything you're building.

For Snow Agency? I'm super excited that we're like really starting to fully build out our team and to be like a one stop shop that's just like a powerhouse for just massively growing these brands. We've done it for so many brands already and now we're starting to be able for them to come to us and just be the best at all these different aspects of growing a business online, you know, email, marketing, creative, all the other types of platforms that we're buying on in house, copywriters, all that stuff. So I'm really excited to just own that entire ecosystem which could then allow our clients to just be the best they can. And then for Raptv, I'm really excited about, we're starting to finally create our own original content which is like a long time coming and just, it's not the easiest thing to do. So we're finally starting to do that and that's exciting and it's fun. So, yeah, love that.

Just the last question to wrap it up. I mean, I love your story because it's like, you know, being in college and seeing your friends start making money on Twitter to now having one of the biggest agencies that's working with all these top brands. What lesson have you learned through your experience that you'd want a young entrepreneur to learn today?

Honestly, the one thing that, and I've heard that I've had this conversation with many people and I think it's the single most, like, it's the single most important, I think like characteristic to get where you want to be is just persistence. Nothing comes easy. Like, it really doesn't. And like I've been, I'VE been so persistent with everything and there has, there's, it feels like always, you know, there's always non stop roadblocks. Even today, there's something new that pops up every second that just like takes the breath out of your lungs. You're just like, oh, I have to deal with this now. But it's your ability to deal with that constantly and not be afraid of it and deal with those challenges head on and understand that, like, you know, it's really making you a better person and a better leader and all that. So, yeah, just having persistence, not being scared of failure.

Love that. Well, that being said, Daniel, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show today. Where's the best place that people can stay updated with everything you have going on?

You can follow me on Instagram aper. It's just D A P P E R On Twitter, only Daniel Snow or you want to follow rap? It's just rapper the Snow Agency. Snow Agency. So there we go.

Awesome. Well, that being said, just thank you so much again, my man. Yeah, thanks.

Thanks for having me.

Foreign.

Legacy of Monsters An Apple original Series the world is on fire. I decided to do something about it. On November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything.

I promise.

Oh, my God.

Go, go, go.

Monarch Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.

Plus.