Derek Videll - Founder of Social Bamboo

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have Derek Vidal with us today. He's the founder of Social Bamboo and D2C brands that can remain in stealth. But Derek's been deep into Meta and Insta ads as of late. His agency Social Bamboo offers consulting, and he also runs a YouTube channel with 10K subscribers in which he makes content about that. So Derek, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Yeah, man, thanks for having me. I've been doing Meta ads for about 8 years now. I've been really taking it seriously for the last 5 or 6 though. Um, I did it just for my first e-commerce business, which was my, uh, first taste of online marketing. But I've been doing it for, uh, really every type of vertical out there for B2C. There's some B2B brands that can still run pretty successful Meta ads, but for basically every B2C offer out there, you're probably gonna find a winning solution with Meta ads. So yeah, I help people that want to run their ads themselves without needing an agency because that's kind of a problem in our space. I mean, there's a lot of great agencies out there, but sometimes they don't get work out at the, the speed you want because you're not their only client, or the brand voice kind of sounds a little bit off, and maybe you just want to save on the cost. So Most people come to me because they want me to teach them just how to run their own ads. But yeah, I've got plenty of information on that regardless of if anyone is, you know, interested in professional services. That's not my point of coming on the show today. I just want to provide as much value as possible. But yeah, that's at least how I make money.

Tell me about yourself and your entrepreneurial career. So you were like a senior field sales manager for some time, Vector Marketing. You had a job for some time when when did you decide to launch your own company?

I sold Cutco knives. That's what vector marketing is. It's a very popular knife brand in the United States. And, uh, I did that for 7 and a half years. I knew it wasn't what I was going to do for the rest of my life, but I was really content doing it while I did. I started in college, and that was when I realized that I did want to be an entrepreneur or work for myself. Because I got a taste of performance-based pay and I realized like, this is how I want to do things. I don't want to make the same amount every week. I want to have the opportunity to work more and make more and get better and make more. So I sold knives in a direct sales sense. It's also cookware, flatware, like everything kitchen, pretty, pretty expensive stuff, you know, high quality. But yeah, you could make a pretty good living there. So by the time I got out of college, I realized I was making more from selling knives than any of the jobs could offer me right out of college. So I was like, I'm taking a pay cut by accepting any of the jobs that I can get with my 4-year degree. So I know maybe, you know, in a few years I'll get promoted. But I mean, like, I am making like 50% more every year that I'm here and I'm already above your salary. So it's like, I guess I'm doing this. Like, I did not plan on not using my college degree. I— but, uh, I don't regret college. It was, it was a good time, and I needed a transition period in life to, to know what I really wanted. But yeah, it, uh, came, came, uh, into play for me junior year of college. So I realized by the time I was getting out that I only wanted to work for myself.

Interesting. Um, when was the point you knew you'd, uh, you'd make it pretty big as, um, marketing agency owner? What was that, uh, monthly figure, man?

I had to be a marketing agency and promote my agency and try to get clients and try to get consulting clients for a long time before I attracted an actual big business. And what's funny is I was running ads for a lot of small businesses that aren't— that didn't last, you know. They, they started in 2020, they had a very niche idea that, you know, it didn't, it didn't come to fruition, but they might have done some coaching. And it was kind of hard for me to know exactly how good my material was because I didn't have a business to throw, you know, actual fuel on the fire until April of 2024. I got a call from a business that was already doing over $100,000 a month. And she said, I really like your YouTube videos. Can you run my ads? And I was like, yeah, definitely. And I, set a pretty low price. And she's like, okay, sounds good. And then that first month her ROAS was over like 10 ROAS. And that just means that for every dollar I put in, it was turning into $10 of revenue. And I was like, whoa, this is crazy. My strategies actually do work as long as I'm selling a product that people want to buy. So that really opened the floodgates. Now I had the testimonial that I needed to create YouTube content around that actually looked like I knew what I was doing. And then I found I attracted more clients. So in my sales job, we called it a rabbit. Like you needed a rabbit at your office, which was the sales rep that just sold so much that it broke the belief for everyone. Right. So that was that client for me that the results, you know, broke the belief like, oh, I can do this. And then, yeah, I was able to attract a lot more quality clients. I was, that was a few years in though.

And what was that figure? Is it $30 grand a month? Like usually that's the magic figure for agencies. Like. And bros start posting car flex pictures on their Instas.

If that's the way they want to spend their money, then that's probably right around the income level that allows that. I would say $10K a month is still like, that's the biggest lifestyle upgrade compared to like $3K a month to $10K is like you're, you're taking care of your own expenses and you got some leftover and you're like, your head's above water consistently. And then after that, it's fun. It's a lot of— you kind of just turn to investing at that point and being real smart with your money.

Yeah. How did the agency pivot from your early days to now? Is it linear, like mostly offering the same thing but in fancier ways?

Yeah, I transitioned from being a flat rate per month to a completely performance-based agency. Because as long as I'm working with the brand, I just have the qualification. So when I do done-for-you services, I just require that the brand is over $10K a month to apply. If they are under, then they can do my Done With You coaching. Otherwise, if they are over that and I take a look at their website and I can see when I throw my fuel on the fire, right? And I know my ads work and I have confidence in my system so much that I'm like, I will take all the risk away from you. So As I got better, I removed the risk to my clients, so it made it even easier to close. But also when you're performance-based, so I just charge a percentage of revenue and I also— that percentage that I charge is based on ROAS. So I still— I'm fully got my skin in the game as far as their profit goes. Like I am fully vested to turn them a profit. As a business. So my focus is always good and it makes it so they're never paying me more than they should or less than they should. So when I did that, it became a lot easier to get clients and also to make more money because I didn't have to convince them like, $3,500 a month, I promise I'm going to be worth it. I promise. Like, and I need 4 months minimum to get there as well, right? Like, I tell them, you can fire me on any day you want. I don't do any minimum contracts for my agency. If you're discontent with the effort, fire me at any time. And then I just do it performance-based. So that was the big switch, which I think a lot of agencies don't want to go to because they're newer and they kind of want to protect their time and say, no, we, we got to charge this much to do the work. But I'm, I'm really like, I will put my money where my mouth is, is kind of how it changed.

Oh, and is it mostly consulting, or do you also do stuff for them behind the scenes? And if so, do you take like part of, uh, I don't know, their ad budget? What's the business model?

I don't do it's percentage of ad budget. I think it's just a weird way to tell the client, hey, the more money of yours that we spend, the, the more money you'll pay me. And it's just kind of a weird association to do a percentage of ad spend. And that would also need to be met with the stipulation of as long as our ROAS is over this, otherwise the agency is incentivized to spend your money recklessly. But I do a percentage of revenue as reported by Meta ads, not by their, not their entire business, just the sales that I bring them. So whatever Meta ad says, a percentage of that, whatever the ROAS is in there.

Do they calculate that with AI or, because back in my days I could just modify the cost per transaction and all of that and that would be sort of biased. So is it calculated scientifically to the to the— to the Sentinel.

If anything, it's underreported. So if anything, it comes out on me. Um, but if you do an API integration with your, your dataset, as they're called now— they used to be called pixels— so which is just a direct, uh, integration with Shopify and Facebook, like, it's gonna track 98%, 99% accurate from that. So But yeah, it'll be, it'll be low on me if anything, right?

So a monthly cost plus like a percentage. So the monthly cost is like, uh, what, $3,000 or just pure cost per company percentage? Isn't that like unconventional?

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm in the business of helping businesses and, and doing right by the customer and being extremely customer focused, and I think it does work out better. I'm not really worried about like, but this is my base that I have to at least get paid this, and on top of that, like I really am like putting my money where my mouth is. Now I do have a setup fee, right? So they're either paying me like $1,000 or $1,500 as a setup fee is what it is right now. That slowly increases over time. But if they're willing to at least throw that amount of money at the beginning, and that kind of just covers, you know, my time at the beginning. And, and yeah, from there, I mean, we have businesses that do in the six figures, so we don't need to nickel and dime them beyond the percentage.

Yeah, you need some financial accountability in there because else you just get like a bunch of low performers that will never make any money even if you do great ads for them. Their product and full workflows will be shit. Um, and but yeah, it's so bold. How do you filter all these folks and make sure that you work with the right person? Because even if they pay you a grand, 1.5 grand, they can totally lose your time, right? So how do you filter these clients? How do you get them through the pipe?

Yeah, I, I really have a pretty short application. I don't try to disqualify them there. I don't mind. I don't mind having a phone call with them either way, actually, even though I know a lot of other coaches try to like really filter out at the application level. I don't even want to talk to you unless you meet all the requirements. I just have them put their website on there and I'm going to check it out. If they don't meet the requirements, which is I don't think that this brand is really that scalable, which is just going to come down to my discretion. I will recommend the coaching program at that point. So it's not like I can't help them either way is why I'll still do the call and sell them whatever they need. Even if they can't buy anything, I'll give them some help. I'll recommend my YouTube channel and all the free content that I think would be good for them and, and I'll earn a new fan. The right way. So I don't filter too much at that level. I like to do the calls, but otherwise it does come down to my discretion at that point. But if they're over $10K or $20K per month and they're a D2C brand, I'm probably not too worried to take it on. Couple exceptions.

Do you control landing pages? Because you can do great ads, they can have shitty landing page. So do you— how do you do with that part?

All right, we do control the backend process. Good question. I'm glad you brought that up. So we take control of the Shopify. We're not doing like their blog for them now, right? But just anything as it relates to the performance of the Meta ads, we take control over too. And that's the other way that we, we actually can, uh, you know, do a full performance deal because yeah, that, that is just as much part of the equation.

What are the hottest products right now? What's selling, uh, in this market? What clients of yours had had massive product-market fit?

It's a good question. The— a lot of them are in, in service. There's services that are for like finance. Financial services is actually a lot bigger than most people would think. In, in so many different ways, whether it be tax help or credit help. Like a lot of those are actually— that's a lot bigger market than you would think. Home renovation ads is another very common one that I do, and those work pretty well for as long as you're not doing a too general of a service. Like roofing is kind of difficult to do sometimes with ads. But if you're selling some special home improvement feature, like those do extremely well, like niche or unique home improvement features do super well. Health and wellness, anything to improve appearance, health, things that have what I like to say are natural urgency, a reason for the customer to want to buy it now because they want to own it now. And you don't have to be a sales-based company. A lot of clothing companies, they work on Meta ads, but you are pretty much running a sale at all times in order to make your ads work. You're just like 25% off. Like that's basically the only ad that works for a lot of like want products. So you wanna sell things that, oh, this helps my acne and I have really bad acne. I need to get this taken care of right away. So things that are, are, you know, bigger problems, the, the bigger the problem, the easier it is to sell for, for e-commerce.

Seems like, uh, I'm looking at your Insta here and I scrolled to the complete bottom watching your evolution as an entrepreneur. Um, initially you were doing like lots of mindset stuff, right? Like I see Dan Henry in there. How did you invest in your own education, your own mindset to get where you are today?

The first thing that I did when I said I want to do some kind of coaching online whether that be selling courses or consulting or whatever, is I actually did buy Dan Henry's $5,000 course because I like to throw skin in the game right away was kind of how I approached it. In the end, the model in that course wasn't, wasn't my winning model, but I still needed some kind of direction when I was new. And it also was kind of my way of committing to the process. Uh, so yeah, I had started like a podcast on my own before that, but yeah, I was, I was kind of all over the place when I first came online. I was talking about everything. I was teaching everything as I learned it from the year or two before that worked for me, and I was just putting it out there. And then I finally realized that when I was teaching people how to hashtag properly and Instagram posting time and how to put hooks on their reels, I wasn't really finding serious business owners. But when I talked about how to scale Meta ads. That's, you know, where the money was, right?

Um, and what about your YouTube nowadays? It seems you've gone away from Insta. Why? And your YouTube, are you trying to make a buck with YouTube? As YouTube scaling, it's where like the greats get educated, in my opinion. That's where I hang out as well. That's where my audience hangs out— CEOs, founders, VCs, right? Um, what's your thesis nowadays?

YouTube is where the, the bigger businesses go for information. I have a podcast that does have even more subscribers than my YouTube channel, but I generate less than 3% of my yearly revenue from that audience, even though it's 2.5 times the subscribers. And it's because a lot of my audio listeners, they're, they're prospective entrepreneurs. So it's really like my top of funnel channel. YouTube is, I went there, I typed in how to run meta ads. I found your video. I watched it. I booked a call with you today and I bought your program today. So it's where the bottom of funnel is at because it factors in their intentionality. They just typed in how to run meta ads. That's a much better client than someone scrolling Instagram that owns a business. And that's as far as Instagram goes. So I can post like every single day on Instagram and it would not compare to me posting once or twice a week on YouTube. Would just— it's just not worth my time. There's a limited amount of hours in the day. I think it's a funny thing when entrepreneurs say you need to post on Instagram every day and stories twice a day and LinkedIn once a day and YouTube twice a week and 10 shorts. And it's like, where's this— where's all this time coming from? Unless you have it like a team that you're dropping like $10,000 a month on. But it's okay. Like Instagram, I'll pop on, I'll post something on my story every once in a while. Every once in a while I'll throw a reel out there. But short-form content is also just not my style. I have tried it. For so long. I film it 9 times to get 800 views and 10 likes. Like, it's not my thing. I'm the Facebook tutorial guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, uh, it's more cerebral. Um, the agency, do you feel it has scaled to your expectations? It's still a lifestyle business, or are you seeking to hyperscale it, like full-on all-in growth?

Yeah, that, that's, uh, what I see right now. I do have an e-commerce business that's expanding, so I've got the— the e-commerce is pretty much always a longer-term play on making money because if you're doing it right, you're putting all the money back into it to buy more products and buy more products and buy higher quantity of products. So that we've got that going on, uh, my fiancée and I. And then the agency is the, the pay me now business and Yeah, I love running an agency. Every day is new because when you get clients from YouTube, my niche is like all B2C businesses and I mean, they're, they're pretty all, they're all over the place. My clients are all over the place and some are extremely unique. So it's, it's, it's fun figuring out their Meta ads. But yeah, we just really focused on the Meta ads. I could scale in the sense of adding YouTube ads or Google ads. As a service. We've dabbled, but we kind of just know to stick to what we know best now and just get more Meta Ads clients is a better way than trying to sell additional services like that that just don't produce as high of an ROI.

So the agency, you've seen it scale sort of somewhat linearly and 10+ years you've run it, right? You've seen revenue grow. Have you seen your time involvement get higher? Is it like a scalable model is sort of what I'm hinting at here?

Yeah, great question. So right now I have 4 media buyers on my team. They're all performance-based too. I pay my employees based on their performance. However much their ads sell is how much they get paid. So I also attract entrepreneurs to work for me, uh, in that way. It is, uh, a job that I've tried to make it a part-time job, but it's just kind of difficult when speed is such a part of the game and marketing. Like, they kind of need to— if a client needs some ad tweaks, we gotta get it done as soon as possible, not wait till, you know, a few days later. So I've got like 4 full-timers, and they take at least 3 to 5 months before they're good. And a year, year and a half before they're great. So I've got 2 of them that have 2 years of it, or 3 of them that have 2 years experience, and one is at like 4 or 5 months right now, and she's doing good too. But it is ultimately the scale will be limited by my people. We use AI tools, we refine our processes, we, you know, we get a more templated approach to things, we get a more proven approach to things as we run ads for more clients. So we get quicker. It is actually one of the best ways that we can scale is like we just do our jobs like really quick and right the first time is like the number one time saver. So we got that going on. I'm growing comfortably. I'm— I feel I'm not trying to be like, how can I scale my agency to like $3 million a year in revenue? Like, because that would just be cool to do. I'm very cool, just like building the business firmly. And, uh, because sometimes businesses grow too quick and they don't have the systems in place. And I like to say the world is actually smaller than we think, uh, is a perspective I've gotten from marketing. So I'm very protective of my name value. I don't want to take on a ton of clients and then not have the support to get them the proper ad service, because if I, if I lose them as a client, I'm— they're probably not coming back. I can't just be Hey, I didn't have enough help before, sorry, but I do now. Can you come back? Like, just doesn't happen. So I really want to make sure that I always can give the proper experience to each client. And my YouTube has been growing at the perfect rate with my marketing agency. It's, it's growing, I don't know, about 250, 300 subs a month right now. It's been slowly, you know, getting more exponential, but Yeah, I, I really like the place that I'm at right now, and I'm not, I'm not trying to grow too quick, but it's, it's growing first. Uh, yeah, safe.

And have you thought to go faceless with your YouTube?

No.

Why not? Why? So I run a faceless— this one is, uh, facelessstudythegrades.com, um, and it fulfills all my expectations. One, because I consume the episodes myself of like great CEOs, right? Two, requires very low of my time, and I'm growing at the figures that you're naming without putting too much of my time. I probably put the same time as you do behind the videos. Most of it is automated. The only danger is YouTube banning me, which is a big danger. That's a big danger. Yeah, that's an existential one.

So what are you doing? Are you generating a ChatGPT script and then having an AI voice of you read it?

Even simpler, NotebookLM with a very good prompt from there, export the MP3, upload it on VEED. VEED has great subtitles. It's just subtitles. You can check it out after we're done here. So it's for a specific type of audience, your type actually, founders, CEOs that don't need images, right? They just want text for the information enter deeply in their cortex, um, and cerebellum. And basically that's it. Uh, oh, there's an AI thumbnail. I use the AI thumbnail on YouTube, so click click. Uh, so in all together it's like 3 minutes per video, uh, and I can churn out like 10 or 15 per day, right? So it's pretty good.

Great idea to have a channel like that going. I would I, I still want to have my channel where I'm face forward because I want them to know my face when they see it in Facebook ads. I want them to know my face so I can get invited to speaking gigs as well. So there is a bit of the, the personal branding side of it that is, uh, yeah, that I wouldn't want to lose from that. Although I've seen people do—

just create another channel and then promote back your, your main channel, right?

Yeah, you use that faceless channel to promote your other channel. And it's—

I'll take some sponsors at some point once it grows, if it grows, right? Because it could die. It's still one of my experiments. Yet it cannot fail because I'm the number one user of that product, right? So, and I get gigantic value from that. Let's say I close a couple grand per day if I listen to one biography of a CEO or founder that can help me, I don't know, 6% close more deals, I'm gonna get a return out of it, right? That's my simple thesis. Now the rest is cream, the YouTube payments, the subscribers, me onboarding sponsors for that one. I don't know, $1,000 per video in the future. Granted, it takes me 3 minutes, right? It's pretty interesting figures. But yeah, let's see where, where that takes me. There's a lot of chatter about like YouTube banning these channels. I don't think they would do it because it gets subscribers and ultimately it's a good product. I use it and I'm a very difficult person to what I consume, right? So it's just like, why would you ban that? Uh, anyways, let's see where that goes. Uh, Derek, thanks for coming on. Where can people find out more about you?

I'm Derek Vidal on, uh, pretty much every platform. Yeah, every platform actually. You can just search my name. So, uh, yeah, YouTube is the main place that I post, and that's where I actually teach you the click-by-clicks on how to set up Meta ads.

That was Derek and Charles for another Founder