Data on time to product-market fit, Rise of inhouse influencers, & Apple expands 30% ad fee globally

Did you see the data on how long it takes to reach product-market fit?

No, how long is it?

Okay, so this is from— this graph is from Lenny Rachitsky, and basically it shows you this graph over here, how long it took from idea to product-market fit. And for some companies like Slack, it basically took 5 years to achieve product-market fit, but it also took them 4 years to launch the product, right? That's why it took them so long to reach product-market fit. Gusto though, they launched their product right away, basically in like month 1 or 2. And then to reach product-market fit, it took them 6 months to get there. The point of this entire graph, and you can see the circles when they reach product-market fit, the triangles when they launched the product. The key takeaway here is you just got to launch your product. If you wait years to launch your product, you don't know when you're going to reach product-market fit.

So like Slack, it took too long, so it just takes longer to reach product-market fit. So what they're saying is the quicker you launch your product, the quicker you can iterate and get to product-market fit. Exactly.

Slack is over here, right? So look, the triangle appears like way far down here and then over there. Figma took a while to launch too, and they didn't reach product market fit until 5 years.

What's funny is Figma and Slack are massive companies.

Yeah, yeah. That's actually interesting. I'm trying to see who else is big here.

Nobody— Maybe the ones that take longer. Maybe, yeah, maybe they tend to be bigger companies.

That's a good point, 'cause I'm looking at the other companies here like, okay, yes, there's Loom. Loom did well. They sold for like a billion, I think, to Atlassian.

Gusto's big. They're worth, I think, over a billion if I'm not mistaken.

So Gusto got there in 6 months. So, oh, Canva's in here. Canva's worth $30 billion, I think, or $28 billion. And they launched a year and then that same year they got product-market fit. Okay, so it's dispelled.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Isn't it funny how a lot of these startups have crazy high valuations and then the hype goes down about them? Like Canva's a great company, but no one really talks about Canva like they used to. And everyone's like, oh yeah, you're not the sexy thing anymore. You're no longer worth $50, $60, or $40 billion. And we're going to write you down based on your actual financials versus a lot of hype.

You know, that's okay. So, you know, people can make fun of Joe Biden, but the fact of the matter is like, people are talking about how he should resign and not be the president, right? But you can't ignore the fact that he also put in 50 years of his life to serving this country, right? And that's something we have to respect no matter what. To your point, people forget, people forget about the past and just look at what happened recently.

They totally forget about the past, right? And especially when you look at politics, yeah, there's the right and the left pretty much in most countries, you know, and a lot of people hate them on both sides. But a lot of these people on both sides have done amazing things in their past. Not all things have been great, but a lot of what they've done in their past has been great. No one cares. And that's the reality of, you know, life, life, business, marketing. You're only as good as your latest hit.

Same thing with hiring people too. It's like, what have you done for me lately? Right? It's the same thing.

Dude, do you remember Jack Dorsey created Twitter, right? Now X. And then he tried to create Stripe or Square. Square.

Sorry.

And now Block. And when he created Square, he tried raising money and a lot of people turned him down. I think a16z was one of the people that turned him down. I could be wrong on that one. Yep. I'm pretty sure it was a16z and it was Mark or Ben or someone said in an interview, we should have been just like, ah, Jack Dorsey, good entrepreneur, X, checkbox, give him money.

It's the same thing with Elon, just go.

Yes. And I think they figured it out right now in which like your latest hits are good. PayPal was good. SpaceX has been good. Tesla's been good. I know people are like, oh, you missed the car delay. Who cares? Based on when you started Tesla to what it's worth now, People have made money hand over fist, at least all the venture capitalists. Generally speaking, he's a good person to back. Checkbox, boom, just give him money, see what happens. And they're not all going to be hits, but it's a numbers game.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. Did you see about the rise of in-house influencers? No. So there's a tweet over here, this guy, Ish Verdusco. So he says, in 5 years, all the smartest founders will be building their own in-house influencers. Here's what I mean and how you can get ahead. The current model involves paying creators/influencers for individual posts, referrals, or longer contracts that pay for set amount of promo over a set duration of time. So, for example, what Ridge Wallet did with MKBHD, they brought him on as chief creative partner, right? So, he's got, you know, massive distribution. He's the guy that does the product reviews.

Yeah.

Product expertise and can bring a lot of great ideas to the company. He got a mix of cash, salary, and equity in the company. Model makes a lot of sense. Both parties are incentivized in long-term versus short-term bursts of promo. I believe we're going to see a lot more of this in the future, plus more founders trying to build up their own influencers in-house. And the smartest ones will realize that building their personal socials while encouraging their employees to do The same is the way to go. It's already happening now, but I'm seeing very few companies do it well. And we talked about this maybe a couple weeks ago, that the intern that grew the company's— I think she grew her profile—

Soft drink smashing cans.

She grew it to like close to a million or so. And she alone, like, that's an example of an in-house influencer. They should pay her a lot, give her equity, and then have her run the thing. Otherwise, she's gonna go somewhere else.

Yes, but what I would recommend to companies is Don't go out there spending an arm and a leg having people internally build up accounts because it's hard to do it. What's easier is you just encourage your team members to use social media and build up their profiles and encourage them. You shouldn't be spending an arm and a leg. If you're going with the route of, hey, you're going to build up your own influencers, whether it's with AI or with people, and you're going to build up these accounts and spend a ton of money, it doesn't always work out the way you want. It's not that easy to get traction. What we find is to be more profitable is Yes, encourage your own employees and have them promote stuff in the business, but they can do it in a very cost-effective way. But what we find to be extremely profitable is you hire someone in-house to manage influencers. They reach out to a lot of nano and micro influencers, and they do deals where you give them 10%, 15%, 20% of the sales depending on the product type that they're selling, and they're getting paid per sale. It's that simple, becomes extremely profitable. There's a company called Legion Athletics that's grown really well from leveraging this strategy. There's a company in St. Louis, it's another fitness company, I'm blanking on the name, but—

First Form?

First Form, there you go. Yep, First Form has done an amazing job of it as well. I think that's what really blew them up. It's still influencers and posters.

A lot of influencers, yeah.

But you got to figure out an angle, and if you just manage it and you do it in a rev-share model, it's extremely profitable. And that's easier than trying to build up 100 accounts because it just scales. It's hard to have a few influencers internally doing really well, but if you have a ton of employees, like 100,000 and you're Microsoft, kind of hard from a political standpoint, but it's kind of easier because you have so many people so you can get more hits percentage-wise. I still think it's just easier to hire an influencer manager and just do a rev-share model.

Yeah, I think you can do that model. I think there's the in-house model where we saw the, the, the the can smasher, those are hard to find. Like you either got it or you don't. But that's a superstar, right? That's hard to find. Or you could be risking a lot.

Also luck. It was the product, easy to do something— it's not really easy. That was creative, but it's easier to do it for B2C than it is to do B2B.

Yeah. Yes, for sure. And I think about— I talk about that guy again that got the 30 million views, the 600K Instagram profile. He has another one that has 700K. And I was looking at his profile again recently and then a couple of his videos are getting like 5, 10, 15 million views. or so. So it's pretty impressive. So I think one, you can have one where you're trying to build superstars. But again, that's lightning in a bottle. So maybe you might want to diversify a little more. But then you should also have the kind of standard model that Neil's talking about too. That way you can de-risk yourself quite a bit. But this also goes— if we think about this high level, marketing 101, it's where's the attention, right? Sure, you know, we're SEOs. But at the end of the day, we're not beholden to SEO. It's wherever the attention is, we should figure out how to make that work because that's what we do for ourselves. That's what we do for our clients too.

Yep.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you could just go to npdigital.com. To learn more about it. And now back to the episode. All right.

Did you, did you see what Apple did with Facebook and Instagram ads?

No. This is interesting. Read, read it.

Apple expends its 30% fee on Facebook and Instagram ads globally when people purchase through, you know, their ecosystem and their devices.

Did they do a part— like, how are they taking that 30% fee? Like, where are they involved in that workflow?

I have no idea because I would never— it doesn't hit us, right? It's getting paid out from—

Yeah, they're taxing Facebook and Instagram.

They're taxing Facebook and Instagram, but I don't want to tax Facebook and Instagram because if I tax them, they're going to figure out how to jack up my ad costs.

Yeah.

And I've never bought ads from my phone.

Yeah.

Have you?

No. Oh, actually, no, I have. I've adjusted my ads on my phone before.

So Apple expanding a 30% fee on Facebook and Instagram ads purchases made through iOS devices to advertisers worldwide starting July 1st. So it's been going for a little bit now. Wow.

Well, I mean, hey, Apple, Apple has a nice ecosystem. Their services revenue, this is like over 10 years ago, they're like, our services revenue is going to grow a lot. And a lot of their revenue is services revenue, right? So, you know, they might be collecting from their apps, they might be collecting from like, I don't know, Apple Music or whatever, which is one of their apps. And in some cases like this, they're just, they're collecting a tax.

So I tell everyone, I don't fault Apple for doing this and I respect them. If I own Apple, I'd be doing the same things. But for marketers, I recommend that you try to purchase your ads on a computer because it's just easier to just make sure everything's okay versus, you know, purchasing on a small little device. And secondly, Keep in mind, if these platforms are getting these massive taxes, and they're trying to hit earnings, what do you think they're going to try to do? Just figure out ways to jack up ad costs to make it worse, more expensive for you. So it's in your best benefit to just go to facebook.com on your computer and do a purchase through there.

Yep. And I'm always like running ads on desktop instead of like mobile. It's just a lot of people work on mobile. I just, I can't do it as well. I need a computer.

Here's the kicker. If you're working with anyone who's trying to purchase your ads on a mobile device, they're probably not that good at running ads. I've never met an amazing ad buyer who buys ads on a cell phone instead of a computer.

Yeah, there's just so much more you can do on the computer.

On a side note, I don't know if we're getting close to the last topic, but we should talk about the agency program.

Oh yeah. Well, you go this time.

All right, so if you guys haven't checked it out, go to marketingschool.io/agency. I always mess up the URL.

It's so simple, it's agency.

I'm used to saying live for some reason.

I don't know why. Because we've done that for so many years.

What was the live one?

Marketing School, because that's a live event.

So marketingschool.io/agency. We have an agency program where if you're an ad agency and you're trying to figure out how to grow, We help you grow, and we pretty much as a group discuss problems and solutions. And Eric and I have been through a lot of these problems over the years. We talk about things like how to decrease churn, how to grow faster and acquire agencies when you don't have tons of cash and you don't have investors. Should you only have one service or multiple services? Should you focus on one industry like D to C or B to B SaaS, or should you focus on offering you know one service to all types of clients? Like these are the problems we all discuss and we pretty much help people grow faster.

And we have people that are at 6 figures, 7 figures, and 8 figures. If you're not quite at 6 yet, I would just say go get to 6 first, um, to, you know, do something. Um, and you know, the thing is last week you weren't on this call, but I was, we had a 7-figure, 8-figure, um, call. So we have 7 and 8-figure agency owners. We had a call and we're talking about deal structuring. And one of the guys, I saw a light bulb moment happen, right? So, um, you know, people in the group will help each other out. People give ideas. I got some ideas on, you know, you know, talent from from kind of elsewhere. So it's a good group. It's called the Agency Owners Association. You can just go to marketing school dot io slash agency. And what I will say is the price is pretty cheap right now. There's long term no long term commitment, and we're going to keep increasing the price over time as we continue to add value to the group. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe, and we'll catch you later.