62 Minutes of Meta Ads Secrets from a $150M Media Buyer

Guys, this is Caleb Cruz, a friend, a legend, used to work at one of the biggest, and I would say smartest media buying shops that there is, Fluent. Back in the day they were at least on top. These days I can't speak to it, but it's probably because Caleb left and after he left, a lot of great media buyers go on and since they learn a very valuable skill, they especially the place like Fluent, um, I feel they're entitled to teach, right? I feel like doers are entitled to teach this guy. But it's always hard. You never know how long you're gonna stick with it. And when I saw you do TikTok for the first time, I was like, man, emergent channel, like personal brand for the first time. Entrepreneur. That's tough. And I was just saying like the degree of difficulty of, and the consistency of watching you post content every day and good content and get better was super cool. So the last two years especially I want to key in on that, that people will want to know, how'd you grow on TikTok? Because that's still elusive to me and is. And I hate when the answer is just like, hey man, you just gotta like consistently post and get better. And I screwed up too. And you're not seeing the effort as opposed to the short hacks which like I don't want virality. I would rather have the work. So I just want to know the proven process and how long it's going to take. Otherwise I just don't feel it. And then the other thing I want to jam out on is teams and just my team, like I haven't been quote, unquote, you get to be a lot closer to it than I am. Like actually teaching and getting to see. That's my favorite thing. Like let's say 400, like you said, people that learn from you, that are media buying actively, the pattern recognition that you get across that brand, like that portfolio of like people on situational Q and A calls is so valuable. And especially with media buying, which is ever changing and so fast and iteration loops mean so much. The teachers like the best teachers who have the audience that's actually buying usually are the best ones out. So I want my team if they're. If you guys are watching in the background, get some, get some good nuggets from Caleb and maybe we'll end by making a nano banana of me and him together or something. I don't know. Whatever your biggest magic trick is.

So sweet.

Thank you, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Super excited to pop on and catch up and chat all things content, media, buying, AI. You know, it's just, it's what I'm in all day. So.

Yeah. All right, cool. Well then let's just talk about it more and if you want to escapism to some other topic, then feel free. I always like when people are like, yeah, and I'm just oddly passionate right now about whatever the version of, you know, NFTs are something in the future that you're seeing. That's cool too.

Future predict. I'll put a bookmark in vibe coding because that's my sick.

Let's. Could you teach me the vibe code better maybe? I have some. I've tried for so long to get good at it and I'm finally. The tools are, I think, getting better. I'm not getting better.

Yeah. So it takes like, at least where things are at right now. Like, it takes like a lot of like, patience and like, probably more than anything, stubbornness of like, wanting to get the end result to work enough to like go crazy, like trying to like, continue to prompt the thing and.

Yeah, cool. So that's my only redeeming quality and there is one that I've been stubbornly stuck on. It's this weightless splash page concept I had for when I launched Dan Bilzerian, where I wanted to basically looks maxing apps, scan for like attractiveness, give like guys a score and then most of them are like, how to improve it. Like, you work on your fitness and it's fitness related. What I wanted to do, his. His eventual why that we got to for the launch was I want to help ugly guys, like basically be more attractive, like, and get the things they want in life, not just girls, but, you know, the life he has. So I was like. Once we found that, I was like, what if I flip the club dynamics and instead of like waiting letting the prettiest girls, like skip the line and VIP outside the club, I was like, what if we look smack scanned and let and then basically inverted the wait list to the ugliest guys got in first and then made a PR news story out of it? So to me, thank you for saying, ooh. It's like one of the most, I think innovative concepts on a. On a wait list I've had in a long time. So I was like, dang, two years ago though, when I did it, I just. The tech wasn't there and I wasn't good at coding enough to like actually do it. I'm pretty close. So if you help me put it over the Finish line at the end. That's the one where I'm like sort of there, but not quite. And I want to see your, your stuff. So we got the table AI or ad table AI and the school group to check out too. So yeah, a ton of stuff, guys here. Let's. Let's begin.

Well, yeah, you want to start on just like the content piece, like kind of tick tock content journey and tell.

Me the content journey hero story. It doesn't have to be long, but people deserve to know. It's not like you got lucky.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I was at Fluent for six years the last year I was there, you know, kind of saw the writing on the wall with a couple things and then ultimately just decided I didn't want to be working really for anybody at that point anymore. Had a nice little nest egg saved up. And then September, two years ago, so it's been almost exactly two years. Exited Fluent with no plan outside of like, I think Nick, you think you and I connected before I even left Fluent?

I think so. It was at maybe one of Tim birds, was it? Did you go to the snowboarding ski trip or something like that?

We did the snowboard thing with Justin.

Yeah, Justin, that's right. Yeah, I think it was Tim. It was Justin. Sorry about that. Justin, if you're watching, that was a great trip. I still remember a lot of amazing memories in that house. I'll probably never have a better ski and ski out experience in Breck again.

Absolutely not. Yeah, I, I dream about that place. But yeah, like you, yeah, you and I connected because I was kind of just like putting feelers out. A lot of people from that trip actually were super kind and like offered like, hey, I've got some projects here if you want them. So I knew I had some like work available if I like needed it from just my community. So I knew it wouldn't just be like homeless or whatever. And I had the nest egg. So I was like, okay, I'm just gonna take the next three months, like September, like basically Q4 of that year, I'm just gonna take it off, not try and find a new opportunity, not try and find a new full time job and just kind of like chill. And I'm not very good at that. So the day, last day of working affluent, I created my Mr. Paid social handle on TikTok and posted a video. And then I got, I don't know, like a couple followers that first day. But like the dopamine of it, the dope, the dopamine hit of it? Yeah, it was like, you know, with me getting rid of media buying temporarily, I needed something else to like.

Right. I totally get it. Were you checking your social blade the first day?

Dude, I was obsessed with every metric in the platform. Like testing. Like, I treated it like media buying. So for two months, I just made one to three videos every single day. The vast majority of them did not get above 200 views. I just was not really like pushing through the algorithm, but every video I like, tried to tweak something new and I was like following all these people. I had my feed super curated to the people I wanted to try and be like, on TikTok or not be like, but learn from. And I think that was the biggest thing for me because I was seeing how people were making content, like what types of videos were blowing up. And then November of that year finally got my first like somewhat viral video. Talking about like custom GPTs. Like, it was right when OpenAI released custom GPTs and I was making all these GPTs for doing like different things, like ones that would analyze your ads. And like, I think I was the first one to make a video about doing that.

You're the first one I saw.

And it just like went like crazy.

Do you remember when that was? I like, I like teaching or showing people too real briefly that tipping points like that you can like reverse engineer. If we were to look at this and you pull this thing back long enough. That's why people think like people got famous overnight. But really it's all the work they did prior to that monthly gained. Yeah, this probably doesn't go back far enough, but that ish, like climb up was right around there or even before that.

So that was before that. So like that was the very first video that I had. It was November 2023.

Okay, cool. So yeah, there you guys go. If you're watching this, it's like even before the. The cutoff. Yeah, interesting. So.

So that was when the account finally started to warm up. And then I had a cliffhanger. Yeah. But yeah, then I started making more content just kind of like around AI and like whenever I could, I'd relate it to advertising and those videos would just consistently like blow up on TikTok. And then finally it was like January, I want to say 2024, I made a video. So like at that point I decided, okay, I'm going to make a course. And I started just like brain dumping everything that I learned over the last 10 years into just like this master document of like one liners of like, tips and like, similar to like what you see on Twitter when people do like those tweet storms of just like all this crazy high value stuff. Yep. So I put all that into a Word document for the course, but then I was like, this is a lot of good content. I'm just going to film on it. And so I, right after I was done, like doing a massive brain dump, I like whipped out my phone and I just like basically read every single one of them off. And it was like a 10 minute long video and it got like over a million views. And that like overnight, like changed everything for me because it was like, virality, for the sake of virality is not worth. But if you can go viral, it's. And your exact target demo, it's gold. So that one video I had, like, like, it's still up there and it's pinned on my page. If you look through the comments, there's like thousands of comments of like, marketers, media buyers. Like, all these people are like, this is the best video I've ever seen about marketing. Yeah.

All right, I'm gonna find it. It's the. Your pinned. I probably have seen it. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's like, Maybe it's like 1.5 million or might be 2 million now, I don't know. But I had tons of like, people DMing me. I had all this like tons of consulting. Like. Oh, yeah, 2.8 right there.

Dang.

Good one.

Yeah. Okay, so that brought in. Yeah, basically, yeah, this one.

So that, yeah, that video was like my tipping point into like, like, wow. Okay. I'm getting super validated that people are finding what I'm talking about valuable and hitting. Hitting the right pocket of people on the Internet. If I had my course done when this video went viral, I probably would have made a lot of money. But it wasn't done until like four months later.

Dude. Yeah, you should have called me that day. I would have tell you, but like, dude, scramble, start selling in the comments. No, but like, at that time you probably were just happy even with the consulting and the attention. Like, it. It all happens for a reason. People sometimes jump to teaching too early, to be honest.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at that point I like, I wasn't really even sure what I wanted to do to do yet.

You were just trying to get product market fit as far as distribution goes? Essentially.

Yeah, yeah. And like, honestly, it was even just like fun for no other reason than it just feeling fun to like, make content and have people watch it.

I optimize for too And I try to find lanes where it's also financially rewarding.

Yeah, yeah. So fast forward to like now. You know, TikTok continued to do well for me. I've had like a handful of viral videos. A lot of my AI content does really well. I've continued to kind of like get better at refining my hooks, refining my editing and I feel like I've kind of landed in this style that I try to keep pretty unpolished but like edited.

Yeah, dude, you're like unglossy. Mr. Beast, like style like tight. It's tight is what I would say but. But doesn't look too, too like you're trying too hard.

Yeah, yeah. So like I try and keep all my short form stuff just on my iPhone. I did a couple videos like this like with this nice camera and they didn't do any better and they, the like effort to release a video like this was like 10 times more. So I was like, if I can make 10 times more videos just on my phone and it's basically the same performance. Like I'm just gonna do what's like. I think that is the biggest lesson that I've learned and I think people making content can learn is like do whatever is the lowest barrier thing to just doing it.

Like I couldn't agree more and I really hope the team is watching too. Is like it shipping, just shipping is basically the, the idea and you just learn so fast because of how usually much capital leverage media buyers have is like you are blessed with capital leverage where most like people do not have it when they enter marketing and sales. They have to door knock one to one. You all of a sudden get to go one to many. So then just playing all these hands.

It'S just like yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I agree, I agree. And some people who can't see and they're like, well that's even I thought I'm like that's the way I win. But some media buyers are different. What I found though is 90% of media buyers who are really, really good, that's they lean towards fast iteration and just low effort or not low effort, but like no latency.

Let's call it well even. Like, I mean I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with media buyers where it's like a common thing where it's like oh, the, the ad that I spent like all this time on completely flopped. And the one that just like was a half assed thing, like that's the one that did super well, you know. Yeah.

100%. Yeah. Like you. If you get in love with your own concepts too. Like, when people are fighting over like, hey, like, no, this one's better than on. I'm like, let's just see. Why don't you launch them both? Like, these days, ABO and CBO take care of that problem. Like, yeah, nothing. Nothing splits at ad level. Unless you want it to.

Yeah. It's just, I think, like, to what you just said, like, just test it. I think people sometimes maybe get not annoyed with my philosophy of stuff, but, like, that's kind of like the majority of the time when someone asks me like, oh, should I do this or this? I'm usually like, we'll just test both.

Yeah, like, no, it's.

See if it works.

I think that is in the. In the header of Facebook ad Buyers, it just says test everything. And that's like, if you guys ask, pretty much 50% of the questions there can be answered with that guidance. Or what do I do? It's some sort of compliance. Hit support again, hang up, call again. Like those. That's always how I won. I brute force, like approvals too, until I get them. So I'm like, cool. Ad goes down, launch another compliant one. Hit support over and over while it's in parallel. Those two things, like, in tandem then get you to feel pretty. Like, I feel pretty anti fragile, so to speak. Like in an ad account where I'm like, cool. My approval history in the BM is so good, it's 99. So if I. I can take some shots and get some disapprovals. And then you probably have maybe rep hookups too on top of that.

My guess, not so much anymore. But I used to neither, bro.

I was hoping with your status now as an influencer, I mean, I have.

Like connection into a team at Meta, but they're like the influencer team so that it's not like a, you know, account.

Dang, dude. Me too. All my good reps have, like, graduated into other roles at Meta and they're not in compliance anymore or like management.

Also they've done like a huge reorg at Meta over the last couple years where, like, they used to have way more hands on deck for like. And then I think really the only people who have reps now are like the biggest brands. Like, like the. I forget what they called him, but it was like the global brands like Coca Cola and like, you know, interesting.

So. And what are they? They're just trying to get them to spend more probably at that point.

Yeah. And then they're basically pushed vast majority of everybody just to the meta marketing pro thing.

But you go to the conferences I know I've seen at least you talk about insights that you saw of Just like Meta truly seems to believe that media buyers will be out of a job in a shorter timeframe than I do. I agree we're all headed in that direction. But a matter of when. They seem to be talking about how it's pretty much done for you which is in their best interest.

Yeah.

So my. Can we get a little bit technical into the weeds before we get back out too? I just have some rapid fires because I want to know sometimes like my team will say stuff I'm gonna out myself. This is the most embarrassing thing gc if you're watching this. I told them phrase match and exact match were the opposite and I was like. He's like, no, it's the opposite. I was like, oh, you're right.

Dang.

I get like that's embarrassing. Like quotes first brackets. Geez. So going into that like advantage targeting always a topic me I'm like, I will never before like Advantage plus targeting and it infuriates me how many times I had to deselect it when I taught Max recently. What's your thought? When. When should you use it? When shouldn't you use it?

I think it really depends on the brand. Like I think with all of these new features coming out, there's like, you know, Advantage plus targeting. There's the advantage plus creative stuff. There's like all these new things that meta has rolled out where and all of them just happen to automatically select whenever you make anything which pisses everybody.

Off so then no one has an advantage. I guess my argument that's.

That's a good point. I feel like I see the most impact with stuff like that for like larger brands that are pushing a lot of volume through the platform. And also like end of the day meta is I think more, more so built for E Comm. So like a lot of these tools I think are, are a little bit better at finding somebody who's like if you're selling shoes and like they have like a massive database of people who've purchased shoes. Like it's a little bit easier for them to like figure that puzzle out for you versus like affluent. We're doing like content arbitrage and you know, like that's lead gen and like we're not able to pump data back into the platform. Like they're never going to understand the, the real like end goal that we're trying to accomplish in platform because we just can't connect. We can't build that bridge good enough for them to like optimize around it.

Now I'm from the belief that you were just built to be a better media buyer than me because of arbitrage. Anyone who arbitrage is media buying has my respect and does it properly profitably because it's like I mean the, the market's supposed to be to close gaps like that if it's a you know, perfect fluid economy. So the fact that there are arbitrages and that you can see them take advantage of them and continue to hold them open for. For a while. That's hard.

Yeah.

Playing with sometimes what sense like pennies essentially of margin.

Yeah.

Y. Yeah. That's insane. Like I've never been that close to making or breaking my. My campaign by you know, CPA or CAC to LTV being that close. So it's in. It's insane in mad respect. So then cool. That's a good answer and a safe one. Rewarded video comes to mind. Rewarded video I remove and I don't even know what it is. I can't. I don't. When I look up the meta definition it seems to be like gaming related. Is there a use case for rewarded video ever or should that always be off?

So is that like a. Like a placement?

Do I like I. I don't know.

I can show you like is it within like audience?

I'm really asking for myself normally I'm asking test people but I like. I'm like what is this? And we were. It was not profitable for us for a while so if I were to come in and you can tell me too that this is old news magics but for instance there was a day where everything was optimizing into. It was an auction insights basically a placement and I was like rewarded video and I googled it and I just couldn't make sense of it. It seems to be like maybe some sort of people are on there. I was going to say PlayStation but if you don't have a strong opinion on there that's getting like I said guys pretty into the weeds. What are the things that these days if I haven't bought and truly haven't bought at scale in a couple years now what. What has changed significantly that you would coach me up on if I had to buy media right now.

I think like less about.

Yeah basically I blind spots now for the first time and. And now having to like occasionally train like I said someone new. I'M just, I, I'm always cognizant of like, oh, you don't know what, you don't know what you don't know. Problem.

Yeah.

And just this is in my day kind of thing. So is there anything like that that is significantly shifted as far as the mechanics of the platform or how you build out?

I think with the new like Andromeda update, there's a handful of things that.

See, I don't even know what that is and that's embarrassing.

I mean I didn't really even until like a month or two ago and it's kind of been like talked about for a while. I think they just finally pushed it to everybody in June, I want to say. Okay, so with Meta's releasing of all these Advantage plus AI things and all the different variations of post text and headlines and like they're essentially allowing one ad to have like thousands of potential combinations. Like if you look at all the permutations of like all the, all the different fields. So they had to fundamentally change the way that their ad serving algorithm takes all that into account. So with Andromeda, from my understanding, the goal is to find the right combination of assets and not the winning ad anymore, so.

Oh, that's fascinating. That's extremely, it's.

And it's, yeah, it's like a nuance. But like when you think about it as like, okay, I'm going to load Meta up with like all of these creative assets and they're going to take this video, match it with this, they're.

Going to figure out the customer journey or the prospect conversion journey essentially.

Yeah, yeah. I mean they're going to handle their, yeah, they're handling like the sequencing of the creatives, like what orders they, they, they deliver things to as well as like.

That's exciting actually.

Yeah, it is exciting. But because of that, like the traditional way of buying media or like setting up campaigns, like, you know, my go to has always been abo segmented by like either creative type or whatever it is like you're testing within an ad set and then having no more than like six ads in an ad set. But now with Andromeda, we're start. I'm, I'm starting to see people coming out and saying, oh, I'm, I'm throwing, you know, 12 to 20 ads in an ad set now and having images, videos, you know, gifs, like all the, the whole spectrum of creative in there to like allow the algorithm to kind of like do its thing.

Oh, so okay. And I don't know if I've said this yet, but like to me, always looking to destroy. Like, I. If. If there's a black box cheat, it's like to me a deal with the devil of just like not knowing what it is. If I'm throwing things in there now. If they. If there was understanding as to why those 10 or 12 are chosen. But to me, like, my worst fear is losing all critical thinking to Facebook and then not like the. The playing field levels. And you don't know why. Right. All of a sudden.

Well, they did something in the last year that really is. Has pushed towards that and annoys me as well as other media buyers. But they, they used to have DCOs which were dynamic creative optim optimization ad sets where you would load like your 10 images or your 10 videos at the ad set level and it would be 1 AD. But it basically like, you know, do.

All that black box that the variations, the creative.

They would black box it, but they would at least give you a creative breakdown where you could see distribution of spend so you could see which video or image was at least getting spend. But now they've sunsetted that and they've changed it to being the flexible ads, which is like you can throw all of your creative assets in there, but it. It doesn't even give you a breakdown anymore. It doesn't show you which image or video is getting spent. It just will. It will say, I think they added a breakdown in the last month and it only shows you whether it's an image, a video, a carousel, or like other. So.

Yep. Dude, I'm gonna call it a slippery slope argument for. I know I'm making. But I. It's a slippery slope for sure.

Yeah.

Of when you stop, like soon as it. Flexible pages. Hey, we're just gonna swap pages in your best interests, even if you don't have access to them. That would be extreme. But that type of.

I mean, they kind of have. They kind of have that like you can have multiple landing pages at the ad level now. And it will.

Oh, I didn't know that. And it will. It figures that out with the same conversion event, essentially.

Yeah.

Oh, that's. That I kind of like that simplifies things. Because it knows how to personalize. Is that what it's implying?

Yeah, that's the idea.

Okay. Yeah, I can get behind that level because I never get to that point anyway where I. Where I can. As much as I would love to tell people I'm a multivariate, like tester, it's like never get past ab And AB is pretty much so that's kind of cool. Certain, like things that I like, but for the most part. Yeah.

I mean, I totally agree though. Like, especially like, you know, before I was at Fluent, I was a company called Life Script and like very similar, you know, kind of like arbitrage model, lead gen model. But like every week like we had an analyst on our team and every week we get in a room and we would just like look at the data of all these tests we were running and we would come to conclusions and then that would inform what we did next. And with Meta doing this and like black boxing everything, it makes it really hard for marketers to actually understand what's working and why. And it's like, how, how are you supposed to iterate if you don't know what's winning? You just have to like that.

I'll let that be a rhetorical question for the audience. Yeah, like, I don't know, trust in Mark Zuckerberg and his team that their mission is that they're really committed to their mission. But yeah, like, I've given up. Because you've watched Mark Zuckerberg even say like on record now multiple times throughout the Facebook history. That basically my intentions, the algorithm was too good and I realized that it wasn't achieving the vision. So he just built something too powerful is kind of how I thought. And he just didn't consider second order consequence of what could happen.

Right.

So same thing I'm trying to think, does that make life for a CEO or founder or the company even easier? They get to save. I guess their assumption will be I don't need a media buyer, but then maybe there's like, it'll be a cyclical and everyone will be even and then something happens and the media buyers are back. I don't know. Creative strategist.

Yeah, that's where I was going to go is like, I think that's where you start to see the shift happening where it's like you have more like creative strategists popping up that historically would have been categorized as media buyers, but they're focused more so on just like getting the creative in that is going to perform the best and then having like, basically like, yeah, like a VA or a tool like ad table handle the actual like creation of the ad units but like, you know, letting the system handle the actual media buying of and you know, increasing decreasing budgets and distributing spend and all that. Like this week they at least I'm seeing it this week. It might have been out like a month ago for all I know. But they just rolled out this new feature called ad set budget sharing. So not a, not a cbo, but it's like an abo. But you can select to have budget shared between ad sets up to 20% when it's determined that it's more likely to impact conversion positively.

I can get behind. That's kind of cool. That's like the Titanic. Waterproof like doors that like pretty much you can only lose if you get swiped by an iceberg and all of them break.

Yeah.

Like letting it's compartmentalizing some of the risk.

Yeah, yeah. Like you can still say okay, I want my. I want 90 in this ad set because I know it's crushing the medic and be like, okay, I'm gonna take that little bit and distribute it here and here and here. Because they might feel like those ads are more likely to have conversions. And then they combine that now too with the. I forget what they call it. But like their meta now will spend 75 more of your daily budget like in a seven day period. So like if you have a hundred dollar a day budget, 700 a week, but they could spend $175 on one day and then 25 the next. Basically like they're gonna average to that 700 total for the week. But if they're like okay on Wednesday, like we know people buy shoes on Wednesdays and you're selling shoes, like we're gonna move that budget.

So it probably doesn't go down. It's not a stop loss what you're describing. Right. It's an extra accelerant if, if conversion looks good. Essentially if target CPA is.

Yeah.

Wait, so like that's, that's smart on both sides. That's actually what I would want is just like some guardrails. Like don't give me asymmetric scale ups and don't give me like bankrupt my company outcome. Like I don't want either of those especially because I need predictable lead flow. But you got you E Commerce guys probably like the, the amount of aggressive automations that I've seen. People like you're like maybe yourself or E Commerce buyers. And the scale up curves, I'm just like, whoa, that looks like again a dopamine thrill. Like a ride of a Black Friday promo or whatever. But just. Yeah, that's. That to me is a little bit too scary. It's just like cool. Scale it up. I'm gonna go to bed because I have to. And I get that part of it too.

Yeah. I mean yeah, we. Yeah, and I'll actually, I'm not. I'm not an E comm person. So just straight legion, pretty much like user acquisition. That.

That's kind of my people in your community. Let's shift to that because I told you I want to buy through it and I'm a man of my word. So walk me through what I'm going to find and anyone watching this, you guys should get in there.

Yeah.

So incentivize me to do this. He's not like, we're not like super affiliates or hidden business partners either, guys.

I mean, there is an affiliate code in there if you want to take.

40 from here on out. Yeah, maybe I will grab it then you guys will show. I'll show you. All right.

But yeah, I mean, so I wrapped my course into there. It's kind of the like brain dump with structure Media buying course. And then there's like weekly live calls that I do with the community. Like we just had a creative brainstorm one today. I share a lot about AI tools, like, you know, VO3 arc ads, AI cling, nano banana, obviously, any of these things. And then I put together a lot of like, one of my big goals for the group is to kind of democratize AI SaaS because there's so many of these, like SaaS companies popping out that will take something like Nano Banana and like put a nice little wrapper around it. And so my goal is to kind of like take some of that stuff and like dumb it down, but still have the functionality of it. Like, hey, like you could create hundreds of videos or hundreds of images with Nano Banana just using Google Sheets or using Airtable or using like any of these systems that you're already like playing in every single day. And yeah, so we've got the templates that I'm putting together, the live calls, the course.

Where should I start now that. Now that I'm in, dude.

Because.

Because I'm glad you kept saying that because I was already in. I was like, but yes, I want to learn all this stuff too. When I hit this in a group, what's the first thing I should do? Oh, thank you.

There's a little questionnaire. You know, it's going to help me get a better sense of like what you are looking for. And if there is something specific in there that like I can directly speak. You speak to, I'll usually shoot a DM over and like try and get more clarity around it and then, yeah, introducing yourself. So there's like a thread of like just saying who you are, what you're working on.

That's the hardest thing for me to do. Yeah, I'll introduce myself here. Well, I won't overthink it again. Ship. Hey, guys, it's Nick. I'm live on a podcast with Caleb, so get excited.

There you go. Boom. Oh, yeah. Category? General or intros? Yeah, interest is good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool.

Interesting that he made that a required drop down.

Yeah.

So just a weird friction point for me. All right, cool. I'm in. And you guys should do the same. I am pumped. So what, what, like videos? How do you structure that course? Like, from. A lot of people struggle with, okay, I'm going to teach Facebook ads. Like, when is enough enough? Because it's. I was asked, and I was asked to do one video in Tony Robinson Dean's first course on YouTube videos. And they're like, they were going to teach all these marketing channels and they're like, you can do the video on YouTube ads. I'm like, the video. I was like, I was like, how long? How long you want? And I just like, worried that my. They're like 45 minutes, an hour. I was like, oh, man. What? Then that really caused me a panic of what could I actually teach someone in 45 minutes that wouldn't, like, set them up for catastrophic disaster? So how do you approach that and what do you teach first?

So when I started making the course, like, first thing I did was like that big brain dump or whatever. And then from there I moved everything into an outline of like, okay, like starting out, you got to have your pixel set up, you got to have conversions API set up. Like, why is that important? You have to understand Facebook ad policy or else you're going to have ad accounts shut down. You need to understand FTC compliance or else you're gonna get sued. Some of these, like, basic things.

Yeah.

And then kind of going from there to like, well, before you can do anything in Ads Manager, you have to have creative. So, like, what creatives work well and like, how to find those. Like, how to spy on people in your industry. Understand, like, what people are doing now. How to use Instagram and tick tock organically to, like, get served ads that, like, you would want to be showing to your competitor, like, to your audience.

Yep. You basically curate your own newsfeed type thing.

Yep. And then, yeah, walking through like a ton of creative examples. Like, I have like a Google folder as part of the course that's just like full of like tons of ads that I've clipped from over the last couple years. And then from there, like taking you into like, more of the nuts and bolts of like creating campaigns and whatnot. Um, and then within each kind of like big bucket, there's a couple videos that are like, I call them like master videos or master class videos or whatever, where it's like an hour long video of me just like dumping a bunch of information about whatever it is.

That'S perfect for me.

Yeah. But like, I'll say, like, I made this course without ever taking a course. Like.

Yeah, I remember when you reached out, you were asking like, questions that I thought were, you know, I, I think probably cute. Like at the time, I'm like, bro, I, I forget if you were overthinking it or whatever it was. I was like, you're so good at this. You're gonna be fine. You, you figure it out basically how to do it better over time. Yeah.

So, you know, it's like I filmed it in my, in my extra spare bedroom in my house. Like before I had my studio and like, I had like a nice camera. But like, like, if I were, if I were gonna make the course again today, I think there's a handful of things I would do differently. Like just, you know, make it a little bit more engaging at parts. I think there's a lot of videos of me yapping. So like incorporating more videos and like slides and things like that.

Honestly, yapping is fine. What I found. If you want just like my hot takes on this, yapping is fine. You don't. Like, I wouldn't waste time doing post production cuts or edits to make iterative post refinements like we would for maybe an ad because at that point they're already sold and normally they hit an aha activation point by engaging in the community. I always tell people less about the course videos. Spend more time with your people. Like, do another Q and A call, especially early on. Then do a course video and then as soon as you hear something, just patch it with clips. Like with these days. I've never done this before, but this would. I would be thinking of doing if I did my own course is on Q and A calls Opus. Clip it right into like for later and just be like, cool. Appendix it to a video if it needed an update. Because especially with Facebook ad courses, that's where all of our bottleneck on Q and A calls was for consulting.com is. Like, I almost wish in hindsight, despite the training being like part of what I'm known for it like week, week five, basically of the six 80% of the questions were about week five. People would just skip right to Facebook ads. I don't envy your position being the one teaching Facebook ads. I'm glad it's not me. Although I'm happy to contribute in the community there.

Yeah, I'm always surprised like in the, in the school community so far, like there's not as many questions coming through as I would have thought. And I don't know if it's just like harder to get people engaged in general or.

It is, yeah, that's part of it. And to me it's like a science that I had to figure out. And as far as like community engineering, I feel like Stu McLaren's was the pioneer on that side. And then me and Sam, not necessarily we had a different approach. But I remember being aware of Stu in communities like paired with courses though were not the norm 10 years ago. In fact, Circle came before us as far as an lms, but we started working on school behind the scenes right when we had consulting.com and just like we had this thesis that was slightly different than everyone else is that those two things could be nested and accelerate each other. And we had our own internal like version of Skool that will be more powerful. I wish I had that version still than the consumer version. Just certain features most people don't need. The one piece of advice if I said today that you could implement is at activation point. As soon as someone buys, get them to introduce themselves in the community on a welcome call like Force Force, adopt them to intro like what I just did and then make sure that someone, you or someone else in the community responds to them. If you just do that, you will. That's the 80, 20 essentially. Yeah, just get that first. No one wants to go in there, ask a question and look dumb and no one gets answered. Then you're wet. You're left sitting there like, is that a dumb question? Am I not good? Like do I ever post here again? Like I don't feel welcome. So that's. Yeah, it's. People are sometimes disappointed when I tell them. That's like the secret. A lot of my hacks are like complex. But that's a pretty simple one unfortunately.

No, I think that's great. Like I. For the. It's the people that join that do do the intro. I always feel like are going to. I mean it's. It's true. They do stick around. Like usually the people that don't are the people that cancel their first month because they were never really going to stick around anyway, it was the first.

Activation point we found with 90%. 90% of people that did what I just described. Stay stuck first month.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's hard though. Like, even Sam and Hormozi do a pretty good job on the surface level of, of telling people without all of the work that needs to be done that communities are the next wave. But communities are a lot of work.

Yeah.

We only have one current brand right now that wins with a community moat. What I would say is community led growth.

Yeah.

The rest of our brands are like acquisition led still.

Yeah, I mean, it's. It's kind of funny, like, when I look at my spreadsheet month over month, you know, I was consistently bringing in revenue from the course still. And I'm basically making the same amount with it being in school, but like, for a lot more work.

All right, well, hopefully I can be a small part of the change here. Forward.

Yeah.

Like, I love this stuff. I would just do it for free. I'm in so many courses and stuff at this point.

Yeah.

If you saw my school bar while I was screen sharing, it's.

Yeah, I saw a lot in there.

Yep. So I'm a fanboy and I'm biased, obviously, because I worked on the early days of it, but just know it did suck. A lot of people are like, hey, it's kind of. School kind of sucks. And to me, still, it's still improving and it will continue to get better. Maps feature is innovative. Like, there's a lot going on there.

Okay. My biggest. Can I, can I. Can I vent for a second then?

As long as you want, bro.

Okay. My biggest peeve with school is just the lack of analytics. Like, I cannot see. Like, I just want to see overall, like, what courses my students are taking, like, without having to click individually into every single person.

Oh, you're smart. Yeah.

No, I want to see like, the trial to convert. Like, I tried free trials recently and like, I couldn't just, like, I can't just export all of my users and see, like, did they enter from a trial or not? Like, or like, how many, how. How many payments did this person have? Or, like, I need to. I want data that I can start to map out. Okay. Like, where are my best users? Like, are they coming from TikTok? Are they coming from YouTube? Are they coming from my ads? And, like, start to map out. And I mean, you know me, I'm a media buyer, so, like, I'm an analytics nerd. Like, I want to map out LTV to cac. Against every single acquisition channel. And like you know, yeah, I want.

To do it with like my food and stuff too. Like it's just. Yeah, I get it, bro. I'm gonna send you something in the chat. I'm fine with actually sharing it on this too. I present on this. But figuring that problem out and there's a reason why Sam probably like Sam is a big focus guy. So he's like. And he's building for. Let's call it his most probable customer, not his most obsessed. Like maybe we would be so like analytics. I'm sure you give people too many analytics, they get lost and then. Yeah, so he's optimizing for like his exit outcome. I'm sure valuation and user experience. But to me, I'm the same way. So there's a few hacks though like figuring out what other courses that they're in. That one I have a few strategies for. And even you notice you can't DM people like you're not connected with too outside so it limits prospecting. There's a lot of guardrails that Sam put in there on purpose. And especially like me, I'm INTP SAM's INTJ INTJs usually deduct and like, like consolidate, consolidate, consolidate until it's the simplest, purest, easiest to use version. Like that's what I love about Steve Jobs and Apple. The NTJ ness of it. It's just like simplify over everything. And to me I'm just like cool. That works for most people and it works for me too. However, I know that yeah, I want to optimize and take it seriously. So I. That's what you keyed in on though is this most predictive indicator of someone buying high ticket info or low ticket info is prior bought someone else's course. It's not zero sum which is what I love. I always tell people it's not going into a 711 and you're choosing monster versus Red Bull. All of us pretty much like the ones that don't let ego get in the way collaborate with each other and it'd be like. And even if you don't like each other. Yeah.

So I just got a really interesting idea hit. So there is and this would be just like an acquisition strategy. But like there's a handful of people I know that like also have school communities like on like advertising and everyone's pixeling all their stuff. Like we should all just create like a cumulative audience that we can share with each other on meta and retarget our other people's like members because like what you just said, if somebody's in, you know, Charlie T's group or whoever, like they're probably going to be more interested in mine than somebody random dude.

So yes, you got it. And now you're gonna. I won't even give you a few ideas because you like that one actually is slightly different than what I would have done because everyone like free like JVs, let's call it different in the info space. But before paid media, there was this great Vice article written on this group called the Syndicate and it included like Ryan Deiss, Russell Brunson, Evan Pagan, basically the people I looked up to and still do. They controlled distribution power because they all were friends and it'd be like OPEC price fixing oil or is what they were accusing people of. Except in info like that's not illegal and it actually is the antithesis of what I believe, which is you should actually find your version of the Syndicate doesn't like. It's. They weren't being maliciously trying to like stomp everyone out. At least I hope not. They were fine but paid me to democratize that distribution. But before, let's just say they would have a master promotion calendar and be like, September is Caleb, October is Charlie. And you might all open up free trial for whatever that month is and parlay your whole audience in there, live stream inside the community, it rebuilds and then you go to the next one. You just have to space it out so that you don't. Well, you don't have to, but I would say space it out so you don't detract from each other's length, of course. Yep, yep. But that's cool. I'm glad I could at least give you some value.

I mean, absolutely. I forgot that you worked with Sam and like you were like, that's.

Well, yeah. And some people have remembered, but that popping out again, I wasted my, I wasted my authority in the market the first time around, dude. Like. But I wasn't ready to do it yet. To me, I, I had to prove something to myself that maybe I could do it again without Sam. Because honestly, when we met we were the same age and. But he was, he had way better track record than me. He had like a million dollar SaaS exit. And then he had done the 1.0 SAM oven's version of that course of which like John Vossler who kind of mentored me, helped with. So I was coming into something that he already had Tai Lopez as an affiliate. I was set up to only succeed. It was just going to be a matter of how, how good was it, was it going to be? So to me it was like my. Some of my favorite years though of doing that. And then if you don't after you're in the shine like that a lot of people Sam never cared about. I think he found it amusing when people would come into consulting and immediately start teaching all of our concepts. But to me, like that's like a sign of respect. And the fact even Godsey recently bought consulting.com, who was 19 when I first met him in our mastermind is like a full circle moment. So if he did it to like flex on us, like good, like I love that. And if he did it as a way of like kind of honoring and flexing, amazing. So to me that's what we did with like Frank, like Frank's course Russell, like all those guys were inspiring and we just borrowed bits and pieces and read a ton.

So.

But yeah, I think I burnt out. That was my first burnout was being a quote unquote business guru at 26 is not. I just, I remember just not finding imposter syndrome in it but just being like. I realized the absurdity of like 26 year old. It's almost like the 20 year old life coach type meme, you know, at that level.

So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yep, that's it. So yeah, now I'm I guess over it or at least for now. And then I'll run into a new blocker, but I don't know how even long I want to do this podcast type thing. Like you are one of the hundred people I put down on a list that I just want to learn from. So that's. That's my intention for now.

That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, I'm. I'm not doing a podcast, but I, I am doing guests. Having guests in the school like once a month.

Cool. So like podcast is just a frame. I always tell people dsl. I've seen framed as a podcast episode of just like my podcasts. So yeah, dude, you're making content pixels again. Any I don't do you have to go right now? I know we're over probably.

I'm okay.

Okay, cool. I have a buffer today, which is nice. I have a tendency to go over what like the last, the last thing that I was selfishly interested in and then whatever you want to do or talk about is the airtable launch like codes because we talked about or hinted alluding to like media buyers winning via just shooters shooting essentially. So what workflow could you like walk me through or teach me? That would be sort of the, the minimum viable, like, hey, do this and this alone, like this combo Airtable plus Nano Banana or whatever it is, like simplify the tool stack for me.

Yeah. So yeah, I use airtable a lot mainly just because it does integrate. It plays well with a lot of tools. It's easy to like vibe code scripts into it.

They have like a vibe coding built into it now.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm using ChatGPT and then like having ChatGPT write scripts that I can put into like the script extension in airtable.

Okay, cool.

And then they also have like an automation section that you can run scripts in where things will trigger based off of things that you're doing. So you can, you can build out these really optimized workflows. So you know, you could have something like a Nano banana table where you're like, okay, I'm going to put all my creative in here to generate AI variations. And then you could have like those records then be linked to your like build table for creating ads. And then the way I have it work or like set up with ad table is like with, with airtable there's always different views. So you can have a view that's just like your campaign creation, your ad set creation, your ad creation and then just kind of move down that flow where you'll create your campaign. If you already have a campaign created, you can just select a previously created campaign and then what's really awesome about doing ad building in a system like this is how like very seldomly are you, are you making that many changes like most media buyers and most like people I talk to, it's like, yeah, my creative testing framework is basically the same. I don't need to go start from scratch every single time in Ads Manager or the solution in Ads Manager is duplicating something in Ads Manager and manually swapping out the creative or whatever. Doing it in airtable allows you to just duplicate a row or a block of rows that might be an ad set and then just copy paste boom.

Uploads in Excel stuff for you then all. So you're not using Excel or sheets or anything like that anymore, just straight air table. Yeah, I didn't know that it allowed for that. Or do you have to. Do you have to export it as a certain format and map it much like you would with a CSV type upload?

So that's where my SAS comes in. That's where we're taking basically your, your data like that follows just like the column headers that correspond with the Meta marketing API. We're doing all that like mapping and formatting it in a way that meta accepts and knows what to do with and then sending it off into the API and then it creates all of your ads for you. So.

All right, I'm sold on that. Is that done yet or is it in beta or what's the status?

Yeah, I mean if you were interested we could do like I could. So right now I'm doing like the done for you version which is like building it out with you and making sure it like works how you want it to work. The SaaS version will be that but like all self like guided where it's like like right now we're getting it like authorized with meta so like you can just sign in and like select the ad accounts like connect Google Drive. Yeah, so that that's what the SAS version will be. It'll just be like you log into Ad Table or app adtable AI. You log into Facebook, you log into Google Drive, you connect your stuff, you copy an airtable base into your work space and then you press a button and it like loads everything for you. But the done for you right now is like that but just more hand holding and more manual. So.

Okay. And for anyone watching that, I'm gonna sign up. I've never actually bought two things someone is on here so far. I'm gonna do that before I forget or sign up I guess I don't know if this will work.

Yeah, I mean it might work. I think it'll let you create an account.

All right, let's see. Yeah, because that's. Dude, that's honestly my biggest thing. That's always been slow for me. I'm really quick at the creative iteration. I could show you some other time like my daisy chain in AI tools for creative. But yeah like I'll present on it sometimes of just like how I go as fast as I can. Magix is one of those speed up tools for me but I would drop magics. I think probably there's some core features that I love about it with ad change history. But the big thing is the ad launcher that most people would say that they like about magic stability to launch 60 variations really quick.

Yeah. The other person in the space right now doing something very similar to this but they built out like their whole. It's not just like using Airtable Ad Manage. I don't know if you're familiar with that Raphael. I'm blanking on his last name. He's the founder. But they launched, like, I want to say, in like, January, and they're just blowing up right now.

Okay.

Basically solving the same problem of, like, uploading ads. They're far. They're farther along than I am. So if you're looking for something, like, faster, like, I'm not. I'm not above, like, sending people to people that are doing other cool.

So I. And I mad respect. And that's. Dude, that's the type of people I have on here. People are going to be like, this episode is weird. Like, Nick, just CTA two things for Caleb, and then Caleb, CTA another offer. What kind of weird, weird podcast is this? But, yeah, generally speaking, I just want what's best, right? And if what I always say is, dude, if you have a commitment to it, I would be out. If you're like, yeah, it's just gonna, like, I'm probably just gonna make the alpha beta version of it and then it's. It'll be like a third focus for me. Then I'd be like, okay, I'll go with those guys. But if, like, just because you're behind, if you see a different version of the problem to solve, like, I would rather just go with someone I know who I can bug and call with feature requests. I'm like, caleb, what if it did this?

Yeah, well, you're kind of the perfect person, honestly, to be an early user of it because, like, I want folks in there that are going to, like, push it.

Yes. I'm a super advocate for tech. I'm not a super affiliate for info. I'm just like the guy that goes deeper. But for tech, I'm like, never been a developer, so I've always had to use the best out of box I could find in order to solve that itch or scratch that itch and that edge, like, doesn't work for anyone. Normally I start showing people tools. Like, I think that, like, my audience likes it, but in general, I caught myself doing that this morning. Even with the team, it's just like, hey, or you could do this, or you could do this. And they're like, okay, I just asked for one. One tool. So needless to say, guys, I think you should wait for it. But yeah, I just. I went and looked at that other site too. Looks good. I. I can't speak for it, but I am in that community, bro, now, and I look forward to catching up, like, in the future if we want to change. Do you know Sean Bossler at all? Like, I mentioned him earlier, you and him are the airtable wizards in my life. Like, where I see you do things on video and you make it look like magic. And I was like, dang, wish I had that skill set. So. Right. Product, I think, for you to build for. Sure.

Awesome. Yep. Sweet. Well, yeah, it was great catching up. Super fun. Definitely down to do another one of these again or like, have you in my school or.

Dude, yeah, whatever. Uh, let's do the next one on your turf if that's more valuable. Like, usually with podcasts, I do like having people back, but if you want it like strategic, most leverage focus of your time, like a year has passed or nine months have passed. That's. It's good because then there's progress and updates and I can talk about, hey, since last time. Here's the link. Yeah.

So yeah, in nine months I can be like, we're almost ready to launch.

We're almost ready to launch, right? Like, no, in that situation with our brands, there is certain word tracks you would use is, hey, guys. We had to pivot away from the original vision and we actually had to expand it because we saw an even bigger problem. Like, there you go, going to the moon, we're going to Mars kind of thing with the frame. So, yeah, I did that a lot with over the years with courses of the. Hey, I just didn't film the videos this week. And I'm like, we sold. We sold just week one. Like, you knew we were on like a treadmill and yeah, like, the worst version of that is me pre selling completely with zero course. And then course creator. That happened once in my career. He's like, I don't want to build this course until you can prove that you are like, you can do what you say. And I was like, okay, I'll never do this again. Put my own ad money in there. Like, purchase within the first $200 spent on low ticket. And I was like, cool, now you got to fulfill. And then he just didn't charge back. It was my stripe account. My stripe went down. So don't do that. I'm yeah, big advocate of pre selling though. Anything in info and then hustling to figure it out. People. People will have a lot of trust and respect for you. And there's a lot of genuine, like, frames and. And stuff that you can say. Just being honest. People are patient.

So, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's the biggest. Honestly, like, I know we're trying to wrap up, but the biggest challenge in entrepreneurship right now for me is being able to hustle because of time constraints because I have a baby.

Yeah, man. Well, then, um, dude, this era of your life, though, I think, like, what you were talking about earlier, you'll look back and I probably should have taken my first kid. I wish I would have been able to do that. Second kid, I took three weeks off, and it was very freeing. Um, and it was scary both times, though. It never gets easier to do it. And I just convinced myself the first time that there was no possible way.

So.

Yeah, good for you, man. And if you're. If your son or daughter.

You said son.

Cool. Maybe he'll grow up to be a media buyer, too. We'll see if the world.

He's leading my calls right now.

Oh, man. Yeah. So you never know. I just told. I just taught my daughter how to take her first card payment via Apple Pay this weekend. So, yeah, it's a. Now that the box has been open, she's asking to sell me anything she sent me. Yeah, it's fun. So, dude, enjoy the fatherhood. I'll let you get back to it. Thank you for your time. Go follow him on social, guys.

Cheers.