Nik Sharma, Forbes 30 Under 30 Member & CEO of Sharma Brands, On Growing Your Business Through Digital Marketing

Personally, I like to think a lot about this, as if I'm a consumer. And so personally, I think one of the biggest things you can do for yourself is investing in really good design. A lot of people tend to just pull kind of like off the shelf design, which definitely, to some degree it can work. But the problem is, with modern consumerism, trust is very much articulated through design and through cleanliness and minimalism. Foreign.

Welcome back to the show. Don't forget that I want to send you the Power 9. If you have not gotten it yet, if you have, then you know how powerful it is. And all you have to do is go over to Instagram and message me the word power. Don't message me anything else, only the word power. No exclamation points, no emojis, just the word power. And I want to send it to you. And it is the thing that Chris and I have been doing for over a decade and, and really believe that that was the start of the way of thinking. That can create the future that you want, that can attract what you want, that can make sure that you are keeping in the forefront of your mind all of your goals. So you can use it as a journal prompt as well. But just send me the word power on Instagram messages and I'm going to send you our Power 9. You can do it in less than two minutes a day. I'm telling you, you have two minutes to change your life. You do. You can do this. All right, so today is one of my, I would say one of those mentors who you're like, you're my online mentor and you don' know it. Like, so when I got on with Nick, which I'd also done a mentor pass coaching session, if you don't know what that is, you can actually go on to mentor pass and see if there's anyone on there. Maybe some of your favorite online mentors, some of your favorite business people who you can book an hour of their time and they just go on there and, like, give you the most incredible advice. So I got to do this with Nick before this podcast as well, which really, really rocked my world. But he is one of my mentors for Direct to Consumer Marketing. And I really binge his podcast because I have incredible hydration product coming out that I cannot wait. And it's got so many more details than that. But he's been helping me in answering a lot of questions on what that should look like to launch a consumer product. So if you're ever thinking of doing that, this podcast is going to be great. But he's also just a person who knows how to sell online. So if you love selling online, if you want to learn more about selling online, you're going to love this podcast. So he's widely known as the D2C guy. He's a Forbes 30 Under 30 member, Adweek's Young and Influential, and a resource that brands and investors turn to for growth. So he's the active CEO of Sharma Brands, which is insane and amazing. And also hooks where clients include Feastables, Chamberlain Coffee, Everlane, Jim Beam, Poo Pourri, and more. We all know Poo Pourri. Come on. All right. And before entering the e commerce world, Nick worked on social media strategies for a list celebrities including Pitbull, Priyanka Chopra. Hopefully I got that name right. And Magic to natively increase distribution and increase fan interaction. So he's definitely got a wide array of things that he has done, which brings in so much perspective and wisdom. And I hope that you enjoy this podcast as much as I did. So let's get started. Nick, I am so excited to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.

Of course I'm excited to be here.

Normally I'm listening to you on your podcast and you don't talk back to me when I ask you questions.

Well, I'm here now.

Super cool. And also, I love listening to you guys because you're hilarious and you're so real. Like, I was just listening the other day and I'm like, this is the shit I want to be able to say, but they just say it.

So, yeah, sometimes we run a little too close to the sun, but hopefully it's all for the best.

It's for the best. At least it's for me. So. Okay. I'm so excited that you're here. I was just telling you before you got on, you're one of those people where I'm like, you actually make it so hard for me because there are so many directions to go in. And that's just what I want to warn people on before this podcast is this man and his wisdom can help you in so many different ways, that this is just going to be the opening up of his world, the Nick Sharma world, to your world. And just know that there are a million ways that he's going to be able to help you throughout the process. So you're going to need to go dig deeper. You're going to need to go subscribe to the podcast and do all of those things, because this is just going to be Like a buffet, Like a little bit of a sampling of everything today.

I love it.

Let's first dive into. You have so many companies and things going on. Can you just tell me what those things are?

Yeah, there's definitely a handful. So we have three service businesses that work primarily to e commerce businesses that do usually over 25 or 30 million in revenue. That's kind of our sweet spot. We have one business called Sharma Brands. This is where we do a ton of launches for brands. So companies like Jolie, the Showerhead or Feastables or Spritz Society, these companies come to us, we help them launch. We also do a ton of scaling. So companies like a Everlane or a Crocs or Love Wellness, they'll also come to us and we really help them across scaling, e commerce and their direct consumer channel. We have another company called 1180 which I think by the time this drops will be rebranded to a character. And essentially what we do is customer acquisition again for brands that are in that 50 million plus range. Customer acquisition focused on secondary presence. So it's this idea of leveraging third party Internet publishers, content creators, influencers and other platforms with our targeting and media buying and messaging and learnings. So you put kind of first party info and third party social proof together and that's how we call it secondary presence. And then the third company is called Hooks. That's our, our most recent one. That's where we pretty much do landing pages as a service. And so companies come to us and they might be launching on TV, they might be launching on TikTok, they might be just launching into Target or Walmart, or they just want to make their emails, for example, more efficient. And so they'll come to us, we'll help them build landing pages fully focused on driving conversion and aov and we can pretty much turn around landing pages pretty quickly. And then outside of that, I've got the newsletter, there's this newsletter, I write the podcast you mentioned. All the free time. Outside of that, I'm usually just chilling, maybe watching some basketball, sleeping or working out.

Who's your team?

I would say warriors, but I always get hate for saying the warriors because they're so good. But I lived in the Bay for five years and I think like three or four of those five they kept winning. So I became a Warriors fan. Before that I was a Lakers fan. It's hard to be a fan of the Knicks. I'm in New York now. It's really hard to be a Knicks fan.

Oh man. Well, my husband was into the packers and I became a Packer fan when they were doing really well. And then I was like, what the hell?

Yeah, it's not fun being a fan after a while. It's not what I signed there, but.

I totally know what you mean. Okay. That is an overwhelming and amazing amount of things that you have going on. I think first and foremost, I just want to, like, know how your brain even started to say, I'm ready for this next thing. Because that is like, next level leadership that you have to be in order to run all of those things and to have them be as successful as they are. So did you always know that you were able or capable of like, handling so many things at once or how did that layering come?

It was definitely not planned. Sharma Brands was the first company that started and that wasn't even planned. That was, you know, me getting opportunities to consult with other brands and kind of help them in different places where I had experience. And then, you know, Covid happened and all of a sudden everybody was looking for support or help around E commerce, direct to consumer replacing POS that were being sold at Target, Walmart, Costco that were now pulled and, you know, their projected $300 million of revenue is now gone. And so we just ended up getting a ton of inbound, which kind of forced me to say, okay, well, you know, I could keep doing these like, little consulting things or I could build a team and we could take this opportunity. So that's what I ended up doing. It was very stressful to do at the time. That was like the first time I've done that, put people on my payroll. You know, I'm not responsible for somebody's rent payment, for food on their plate, for food on their kids plates, their spouse's plate. And so I wish I had actually hired like a business coach back then or somebody who I could pay to just shill my problems. You know, things that are going through my mind. There's so many nights where I would just like look at the, you know, like, oh, man, this client's not. They didn't pay net 14. They're supposed to pay net 14 payrolls in two days. I don't have the delta in between. But eventually it all works out. So Sharma Brands was even started as an accident then with 1180. That company. One of my best friends for years now, actually, he was working at a direct to consumer brand and basically said, I'm working insanely hard right now. Like, I'm spending so many hours working. If I'm going to work this hard. I'd rather do it for something where I'm building my own equity, my own, you know, my time should equate to equity, shouldn't just equate to a standard check every month. So we had basically this framework of secondary presence. Him and I actually started running it together six years ago and it was very successful. It always has been successful. And so we decided, let's build a company around this and see if we can just go get 10 brands to pay us to do this. And the idea was, you know, it's going to take as much work to get 10 terrible brands as it will to get 10 really amazing brands. So let's just go get 10 really amazing brands and that's it. That to us is successful. And so we had this goal of 10 brands. We started with two, kind of as like a beta test, you know, you could call it more. It was more of like a side hustle at that point, just seeing if this thing worked. It did work. And then we decided, okay, he's going to make the leap, he's going to go full time. Then that sort of started and then just kept going. And then the third one, which is hooks very similar things. Landing pages is something that we build for clients at Sharma Brands all the time. It's usually one of the first things that we do when a new brand wants to work with us. And it's honestly one of the fastest ways to make any sort of traffic or ad spend work way harder for you. And so we were getting so much inbound from different companies saying, I'm launching in Target, I'm launching on TikTok, we're launching into a new category. We don't really know how to explain it, or our site is not configured to be able to explain the depth of the product that we need to explain. Can you help us build a landing page? And at this point I was also able to leverage the newsletter audience. And so I said, I thought, okay, we're getting so much inbound, maybe there's an opportunity here. So I put up a Google form and said, fill this out. If you would pay five grand for a landing page, we'll do the strategy, the research. We'll have copywriters, designers, UX designers, UI designers, developers. We'll give you the file back so you, as the founder can pay for one page, duplicate it 10 or 15 or 20 times, change the copy on your own. But all the hard part is done. And we had two or three hundred people sign up overnight. And I said, okay, we should Launch this thing. And again, over there, it was not planned. So it was like we said, okay, we'll launch. It's me, it's one other guy. We launch it together. And then it's like we have all these problems. I mean, we've basically been like, sprinting uphill is kind of how I describe it with rocks just falling as we're sprinting up. Like, too many clients coming on at one point, we don't have the supply, just random things that come up. As you kind of build a service business. A lot of it too, where, you know, it's all bootstrapped. So it's. It's very much chicken and the egg. Do you hire a lot up front or do you wait for the demand? But then you wait for the demand and now you have upset clients and no one to fulfill. And so it's been a very interesting balance. Every company, I try to learn something when starting because, you know, 1180 was a much easier start than Sharma Brands. Hooks was a very easy start compared to 1180 and Sharma Brands. And I think the thing I learned with Hooks was that, you know, basically around making sure you have the resources to not end up with upset clients.

Okay, what would you go back and say to yourself from the beginning? Like, what would be three pieces of advice? If you knew you were going to build the same exact thing and you can already see it coming, what would the three things be that you'd be like, look, you're going to need to do this from the beginning.

I think one would be the business coach. Like, the business coach helps not only with thinking about how to hire and how to prioritize and even just, I mean, like, the things I've learned around frameworks and team leading and, you know, how to equip other team leaders with things so their teams are more efficient. Even just the simple change of going from goals and responsibilities to results, you know, nobody has goals in our company. Everybody has results. It's not things they aspire to do, it's things they have to cross off. So kind of like all these little tricks, plus the fact that I can go to him and say, and this guy, by the way, his name is Kevin Cape, he's an amazing guy. You know, I can go to him and say, oh, you know, there's an argument. This is the problem. These are the people arguing. You know, it's, I don't really have a dog in this fight. And also, I don't really know who's right or how to go about this or how Do I do this in a way that, you know, doesn't disrupt company culture or, you know, I have this employee. They're doing this. Is this grounds for termination? You know, just somebody kind of bounce things off of who's already had 40 years of experience operating at a C level. So that's one that I think everybody who really wants to build something great should do. Because it's like. It's like if you're taking the sat, it's like going to the SAT prep. You know, it's like having a tutor. That's basically what it is. You're paying for a tutor for business. The second one would probably be higher help for the things that you're bad at, because the things that you're bad at, you're not motivated to do because you're not good at them. And as a result, they keep falling in the priority list. You know, I hired a chief of staff recently, probably a few months ago, completely changed my life. And, you know, the role description for that was I need somebody who can do the things I need to do that don't require my active thinking. And that person has completely changed the way that my time is scheduled, the calls that I'm on, the things that I do with my time, the things I focus on, which has been really good. And I wish I did that, you know, a year or two earlier. And then I think for the third one, I would say, you know, this was this responsibilities to results change happened probably like two or maybe a year ago. It should have happened, like, at the very beginning. I think it's a completely, you know, it's a great framework for making sure that you can hold yourself accountable. It's a great framework for other team leaders or directors in your company to be able to, you feel confident that, you know, if your results are getting done, somebody else below them has results to get done. It's a very transparent way to keep people accountable when it comes time for a promotion. There's no question about, oh, you know, how much do you like the role? Or what do you. How do you feel you did? It's just like, cool what was crossed off and what was not crossed off. You know, it's very binary, which I love. And it also, because it's so binary, makes it very easy for people to see what is their potential at a company, what is the company doing for them, what are they doing for the company? And it just makes things very easy to see. Whereas, you know, with responsibilities or goals or kind of just like owning a swim lane it's very ambiguous and, you know, not clearly defined.

That is so good because I can't tell you the amount of days that I would struggle with employees in the past where it's like it takes away from you having to be the bad guy and having to explain. So show so much and explain so much. It's literally just all there for you. How do you, is there a certain way that you track results? What do you, is there something that you use?

I think right now we just mainly use notion. So everybody's got quarterly and annual results. And so that, you know, I have my results, my results filter down into, you know, my. Let's say it's like I have to do $100,000 in revenue for something. That result filters down to the five people who report into me and it's like, okay, what does their contribution need to be for me to hit my goal? And their teams do the same thing. So let's say, Lori, you're the director of design. What do your five designers need to do to fulfill your results? And that will create their own individual results. And so it's like everybody's results ladder up and, you know, it makes team touch bases very quick. You don't go through random things, you just go through the results, it makes check ins very quick. You just go through the results, it makes performance review is very quick. You just go through the results, talk about what was done, why something isn't done. Is something on time, is it not on time? And it also just helps you diagnose. Okay, well, if we didn't get this done, then that means that we are lacking resources in some place, or we're lacking process in some place, or we're lacking urgency in some place. You can very quickly diagnose what's not being done and figure out why.

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Yeah, a couple of places. I mean, you know, I think one is, I think a lot of people need to properly check what they're doing in the sense that, you know, more in like a checks and balances way. Really think about is what you're putting out there needed by the market, wanted by the market. You know, there's so many founders I've seen where I just think, man, if they only had a real homie around them, they would have told them this is not an idea worth spending two years on and raising a million dollars. Or this happens a lot in beverage. You know, like sometimes you try one of these new fancy drinks and you're just like, how did somebody not tell the founder that this tastes so bad?

You know, I think that all of the time.

Yeah. And it's mind blowing. And it only hurts everybody involved. The investors get hurt, the founder gets hurt, the team that gets hired on is going to get laid off. You know, like, there's so many people that get affected in there. So I think it's really important to make sure that what you're doing is something that's truly needed by the market, wanted by the market. And there's ways to test that. You can do anything from just looking at trend reports or statistics reports, looking at public company earning equivalent. So if you're starting a shoe company, go look at public earnings documents from shoe companies. If you're starting a cleaning company, go look at the earnings documents from Procter and Gamble or Unilever. So I think that's like one area of research you can do. I think also it's very easy now to, you know, jump on TikTok, create an account for this brand and just start talking and see if there's a response in the market. You know, that's probably the easiest, freestyle, cheapest, most accessible Way to validate if something is going to work. The next level would be, okay, this is what I would do. At least I would create a fake brand for what I'm trying to sell. So if I'm trying to sell a scalp serum, I'll create a fake brand for it, put a mock up of it up on a landing page, you know, which is basically a single page website. You explain the benefits of the thing, what it does, why it's different, how it compares to others on the market, you know, how many uses you get out of it, before and afters. Maybe almost as if you're selling it on a, on a full website, but you're basically scrapping this together. And then you can drive some traffic there. So again, it could either be from content you're creating organically, or you can go and spend some dollars on Facebook or any of these ad platforms, drive some traffic and just validate that. Okay, I'm driving people here. What are they doing? Are they giving me their email? Are they placing a pre order? Are they buying a $1 deposit for when it comes out? Whatever goal you have for that traffic, you want to try to judge how much does the market really want, what you're putting out there. And that's just another great indicator to save you. Right. You might spend, let's say if you spent all these dollars on paid advertising and a good designer and a good copywriter. All this all in might cost on the high end, 10 grand. But that 10 grand is way better to spend than two years of time, tens of thousands of dollars, maybe mortgaging your house. Like there's so many things that entrepreneurs and founders will do to continue their business without first validating it. And so I think validation is the biggest piece that a lot of people overlook, and especially because entrepreneurship is very glamorized and it seems it can be easy, you know, oh, I set this product up, I run some ads, and boom, I've got a business. And next thing you know, I'm in Target. But there's a ton of ups and downs. And if there's not validation, you're not going to have the motivation to continue to persevere when you're constantly walking uphill.

Okay, so what would the next place be as far as setting up? Let's say they, they have that validation now. They've got a product that they think is going to be amazing. Let's talk to people who maybe don't have a really large budget or maybe maybe they're bootstrapping. Yeah, there's so many things to invest in. Oh, my God, there's, you know, design, there's copywriters, there's landing pages. What do you think are some of the most most important things to get your ducks in a row in the beginning to invest in?

So personally, I like to think a lot about this, as if I'm a consumer. And so personally, I think one of the biggest things you can do for yourself is investing in really good design. A lot of people tend to just pull kind of like off the shelf design, which definitely to some degree it can work. But the problem is with modern consumerism, trust is very much articulated through design and through cleanliness and minimalism. So I think, for me, I think, like, if trust is 80% of getting a sale, you know, you can get 40% of the way there just by being a new brand with good design. The second thing I think is you want to generate social proof so, you know, doesn't mean that you have to sell 1000 units before you can start collecting reviews. You know, if I'm launching a product, I'll just ship you some and say, hey, Lori, do you mind writing me a review? I'd love to send you something in exchange. You write me a review, you get to try the product. I get a review out of. It helps us both out. And I think getting really scrappy with that is totally worth it. And then very quickly, you'll start to realize where kind of your strengths are as an entrepreneur. Some people are really good at conveying the vision and the mission of the company and talking about the efficacy of the product. There's a brand called Armrel, which is a colostrum supplement. Their founder is exactly like this. She can get on a call or on video, and when she talks, you feel like, wow, this is a billion dollars. You know, why am I not on this? And some people are like that. And those people might do very well with organic content. Others, they require the other side of it. So they say, you know, I'll focus on product, and I need somebody else to help me with marketing or distribution. Or they might just pay for distribution. There's a ton of people who out the gate can pay for ads. The thing, though, you have to keep in mind is do you have the margin to do that? Do you have the luxury to afford being able to spend dollars to get people to your site? Or do you have to go, you know, the first route, which is, how do I create stuff that's so interesting? It gets in front of people and makes them want to Come to my site, which, personally, I do think if you're a new business, if you're bootstrapped, you almost have to do it the first way. You don't have the luxury to figure that out later. That's probably how I would go about it. I think a lot of it is really focused on making sure you have a good product, and then it's making sure that you're getting that product in front of people. And to do that, you have to have good design, you have to have good copywriting. I also think leveraging something like ChatGPT, you can get very specific with what type of Persona you want it to write for or what type of audience you want it to write for. I can go in and say, actually, one thing I've been doing recently is I'll give it somebody's name who has an Internet presence. So I'll say, I'm selling to Lori harder. Write this product description as if it's something that Lori would be interested in. So good.

That is crazy. Okay. I love that. Okay. Audience acquisition. So maybe people are listening. They're like, okay, I totally have that dialed in. Like, I'm a person who can go out there and talk about the product, but how do we start getting outside? Let's go organically first, and then let's talk about ads. How do we start getting outside of our group, of our current audience?

So it's probably a couple ways. One is if you go the organic route, you are basically trying to ride the algorithms. The algorithms are like waves in an ocean, and you want to try to surf those waves as best as you can without falling. So if you're trying to target a different type of audience or go after a different type of consumer, you really just have to change how you think about the content. So there's actually a branding exercise I love doing, which it's kind of like 73 questions with Vogue. So we would sit down and say, okay, let's take light pink, for example. If light pink was she had a clear Friday night, what would she do? Would she go on a date? Would she go out with her friends and have a glass of wine and then come home early? Is she going out clubbing? You know, she doing a yoga at 7pm at Equinox, then coming home and sleeping because it was a long week Saturday morning, what is she doing? Is she waking up hungover? Is she going to Soul Cycle? She going for a walk? What does Lightpink retweet on her Twitter account? What does she post on Instagram stories? What does she repost from other accounts on Instagram stories? What type of stuff does she DM or what does she comment on? Where does she get her news? What type of content is she interested in doing? This exercise helps you build different Personas that you want to go after, or figure out rather, how do you react to the Persona you're trying to go after? And so in my mind, the way I think about it is to go after different audiences. On the organic side, you have to reorient the way that you think about the Personas. You have to rethink who are you going after and what does that mean that you have to change in your content to try to do that. Now, if you're doing that the paid way, then you can just easily change the audiences you target on Facebook or wherever you're driving the ads. And then you also still have to change the creative. So at the end of the day, you still kind of have to do that exercise to really understand how do I stay consistent from the first touch point they see this brand to the very last. But I think doing these exercises helps a lot. And organic is definitely harder. But I've also noticed that people who do it well organically, they have a hundred times more success when they turn the paid ads on. Because paid ads are essentially like taking an image and just stretching it out from the side, from the corner. The more you stretch it, the blurrier it gets. And so if you have really good organic content, it's like having a really high resolution image. It just stretches really well compared to when you put a terrible image in the middle and then try to pull it out.

Okay, that exercise, actually, I was just thinking about it. It really helps even come up with all of your social pillars, like how you're going to talk, how you're going.

To talk to people on screen. And not only that, but anybody who touches the brand can now see this and say, if there's a question of, okay, how do we respond? Respond to this Facebook comment, or how do we respond to this dm or what does customer service do from a tone of voice standpoint? You know, they can all see this document and very quickly assume how to go about it.

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Yeah, good question. So generally the people who are coming for free stuff are not. They're not good long term customers. That said, they can be if it's done at the right time. So for example, if you are running a free giveaway to your existing customers, it's a different game. But if you're running a free giveaway as a way to attract people to the brand, you're now already bringing in people who are just looking for something free. They're not really interested in anything else. Free is like such a strong word, especially in American culture. Everybody loves free stuff. Even if you think about clubs at school, free pizza is how we got so many people to different clubs, but the quality of those people is not that great. And so I think doing something like a giveaway is great to reward customers who have been with you for a while. It's almost more, I would say, less something of a giveaway, more of something like surprise and delight or creating an opportunity for them there. But the free giveaway stuff, you know, especially to new customers, people who aren't already in your brand ethos, it's just going to yield lower quality people. A lot of publishers like to do the free stuff or big media accounts. They like to do it because they don't really have to sell anything for them. You know, their monetization comes from people getting to their site and then, boom, there's six ads there. And that's how they make money. So for them, it's actually more efficient to just get people there for free. But as a brand, it's not that efficient. And you know what it does is let's say you get 10,000 people, right? You send an email out to these 10,000 people, the open rate's going to be very low, might be 10%. Then out of that 10%, the people who do come to your site, they're going to hit your site. All of your advertising pixels are going to register this person as somebody who's interested in your brand when really they aren't. And so it's going to tell your ad platforms that, hey, this person who came, they're interested. Let's go find more people like this.

Oh, man.

Creates this downstream effect that just, you know, especially if you're on a tight advertising budget, it's not in your favor to do this because the quality just everything gets affected.

Let's talk about ads for a minute, because I think there's a lot of people who, they're dabbling in their own ads. I know that we have been through a lot of different agencies in my career, and I, in the beginning, I did not even know what to at.

Look. Look for.

When I'm looking for someone who's good at ads, what are a couple things that we can ask, first of all, to kind of find out, is this a good person to work with? And then what makes a good bad. What makes a bad ad?

Okay, so if you think about what makes a good ad, in my opinion, it is just constantly answering a few questions. Of course, from a technical standpoint, you have a good hook, you have a good story, you have a good call to action. But in reality, this ad, it should be. It should appeal to somebody who knows everything about your category and the problem you're solving, as well as the brand that you are and the product you're pushing specifically. But it should also work for people who have no idea about those two things as well. So if they don't know your category or problem and they don't know your brand or product, it should still work. So I like to call it more like full funnel ad creative. Rather than thinking about what's top of funnel and what's bottom of funnel, I like to approach it more as full funnel. And the questions you want to answer is what is it? Why does it exist? How is it going to help me? You know, how does it compare to other competitors on the market and why? How soon can I get it? If you answer those five questions, I mean, basically customer acquisition is just answering those five questions over and over and over and over again. And then tactically that means that you have a good hook, you have good social proof that might be customer testimonials or a quote from popsugar. You have good explanation of what comes in the box. Maybe you have a UGC video unboxing the product and you see somebody's reaction light up. You know, tactically that's what it means. But basically those five questions, any type of content you create, organic or ads or you know, collabs, like, if you're constantly answering those five questions, it can all help work towards sales for your brand.

So good. Okay, so when people, we have a lot of people who launch things and they launch the first time and the second time and they're discouraged, they're like, this did not get the traction or numbers I want. They go back and they, they tweak the product or like an already good product, or they go back and try to perfect something else. But really, can you give us a general idea of how much you guys are tweaking things and how much you're testing things and dialing things in before they actually start hitting.

Yeah. So the beauty of a channel like Facebook or Instagram, which is probably the lowest friction channel to get up and running for ads, is very quickly you can see if something works or it doesn't work. It only takes maybe a hundred bucks to realize if something is going to get traction or it's not. And the few numbers you want to look at are the CPM of the ad, which is the cost per a thousand impressions. You want to look at the click through rate, which is the ctr, which is how many, what percentage of people see the ad and end up clicking through to your website. And then you know, those are like two metrics you can look at to basically understand. Okay, with a hundred bucks, does this ad, does it resonate with the platforms in the sense of the CPM will tell you how much Facebook likes your ad or believes it aligns with what Facebook wants to do in terms of giving valuable content to their users or creating ads in a format that Facebook wants to push. So if you have a lower cpm, that means you're doing something that the platform likes, then the click through rate tells you how much the customer likes what you're doing. So if your click through rate is less than half a percent, you're probably not doing something that the customers like. If your click through rate's over a percent, you're doing something that customers do like, then as you spend more, you can try to understand things like cost per website visit, cost per add to cart, customer acquired and all of those metrics will help. But the first two, the CPM and the ctr will directionally help you understand. Is this piece of creative even good? And with a hundred bucks you can put it up and you can test it. You can see, candidly, there's, there's not a lot of like pre testing that happens on our end before something goes up. We make something that we think is going to do well. Everything is a hypothesis. We put it up and then we see if it actually does well. You know, at this point we've gotten pretty good to where we can know what will do well or what won't do well. And I'd say 95% of the time we're right. But there are a lot of times where I've seen founders who just struggle to put something up because they think it has to be perfect or it's not good enough to go up as an ad or be a representation of the brand. When in reality you shouldn't look for compliments on ads, you should look for compliments being dollars in your pocket transacted on Shopify. Just like I think with organic content that you put out and test and see if something works, I think it's worth just putting it up. The best way to pre qualify something is probably testing it on organic actually and seeing if it does well. There something does well in organic, it'll crush on paid, but doesn't necessarily mean the other way around also applies. But yeah, definitely just put something up and see if it works. And then if it works, you add more spend and you keep running it. You test it with different audiences, you might test it with different landing pages. But if it doesn't work, then, you know, no harm done. Maybe a couple thousand people saw it. You take it down. Those couple thousand people probably weren't even really engaged in looking at your ad. There's no such thing as doing harm to your brand in that sense. But then you can analyze it, you can say, okay, let's think about why this one worked and this one didn't. Okay, this one had a better hook. I could see the liquids in the beginning, in the first three seconds, it was kind of interesting thing to look at, or it caught my attention. And then you can apply that to the next video that you put up. But I really do believe that if you're just starting on ads, you really have to figure out what works in the organic sense. Especially because every platform Now, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, they all give you the waves. You just have to go throw your surfboard out there and ride them. And if you can figure out how to ride these waves, you are now creating content that is contextually native to the platforms that they're in. And then when you run ads, all you're doing is putting more eyeballs on content that you know is already contextually native. It's now not just a billboard in somebody's feed or, you know, just something that's irrelevant to their scrolling experience. It's something that's entertaining, it's something that's relevant to the platform. It's something that they're there to see. Most people are on social because they want to be entertained, not because they want to see your billboard. And so as a brand, if you want to play in that space, you have to figure out how to conform to what works in that platform.

In the beginning, you had mentioned positioning when you were choosing between, we could work with shitty brands. We could go get 10 shitty brands, we could go get 10amazing more premium brands.

Yeah.

And you know, making that decision of. Cause I've made that decision now of I want to be a premium product. I've always like with. With our stuff, we've always kind of positioned ourselves in that way. How did you need to show up? What did you need to make sure of in order to start positioning yourself in that way?

You know, I have this concept of like, doing your homework. A lot of people don't like to do their homework, and I was definitely one of them. And I think a lot of it just comes down to doing your homework. You know, if you're going to Meet with somebody, you got to do your homework. You got to understand when you walk in the room, how are you immediately delivering value? What can you do that's helpful to them even if they never become a client? Especially in B2B, which is this world I live in, I might talk to somebody today, but then they might end up being a client eight months later. And if I didn't do my homework and didn't leave a good first impression or didn't bring them value, you know, I'm not on their mind eight months later when they, when they actually need the service. So I think doing your homework is a really big one. I think being honest is another one. There's a lot of people who will just say whatever they need to say in order to win a deal or say what they need to say in order to try to impress somebody, but it just doesn't work. Especially like, as, you know, Gen Z is getting more and more into the work field. Gen Z is just as good as any FBI detective, you know, and they'll find out what's real and what's not real. But the other thing too is like, as you do more and more, you get more successful, you get better at what you do. You're, you know, you become, let's say, top 10 or top 5, top 1% of your craft. Like, the world gets very, very small and everybody knows everybody and you just, you know, you have to be known as somebody who puts good things out and says good things about others and does good things for others. And again, not in a transactional way, but for just. Because that's just who you are as a person.

So good. Well, Nick, I'm going to make sure we have all of your sites below with a little description of what each one does. And also your podcast, we will link that as well because that has been so valuable for me. Like literally one of the most valuable things I've ever found on this journey of launching a direct to consumer product.

So thank you.

Please continue sharing all of your secrets on, because it's so helpful to people like us. And I'm just really grateful for you for showing up because, man, you have a busy life and you still show up and serve in such a big way. Like, truly, you're one of the people who has shown up on this podcast and you're like, I'm here, I'm committed, I'm excited. Like, that is the most beautiful trait of a person, is enthusiasm around anyone that they come in contact with. And you have that. So thank you. So much, you guys. One of the biggest things that we can do for Nick is to go subscribe to his podcast. Go subscribe to his newsletter. I promise you, you're gonna freaking love it. I love it. And let him know what your biggest takeaway was as well. So, so grateful for you again, Nick. And until next time, everyone, earn your happy. Bye.

Bye.