Ep#83: Why Founders Don't Actually Know Their Customer with Bryan Alston

But the problem with that is it's only gonna be statistically significant if you are investing a lot in making it that way. And to your point about just speaking with customers on the phone or finding things that seem like anomalies that are hidden in the data, that's where a lot of those breakthroughs have come from. And that's why I see marketing as detective work, where there's usually clues that are buried in your existing marketing data and in your existing organization and customer transcripts or things like that that are very easy to ignore and are whispers. That will never reach statistical significance unless you invest in testing them.

Welcome to Startups Decoded, the show that gets real about what it takes to build a successful startup. I'm Andy Walsh, 2x exited founder, advisor, and your host. Each week I talk with great founders and top investors. We unpack the plays that drive real traction. If you're building something bold, this is where you'll get earned insights to scale with confidence. Let's keep growing together. Hit subscribe and share with your community. It would mean the world to me. Hello and welcome back to Startups Decoded. My name is Andy Walsh. This week we're tackling consumer behavior and what we're talking about specifically is how much do you actually know about your customer? We spend a lot of time building, launching, telling stories, but that feedback loop is critical. And to help me unpack that today, I'm excited to have Brian Alston. Brian, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Andy.

We met because I was exploring a beer partner. I'm going across category right now on the non-alcoholic beers, which has been exciting. But when we spoke, I realized there was so much more to you than what I'd anticipated on our first call. And we'll go into that a little bit today, but I'd love to learn a little bit about your journey and how you ended up really going deep on customers and what inspires them.

So I'll just give the Cliff Notes version of my career and then we can double-click on anything. Um, so I'm Brian. I've spent the past 15 years essentially as a marketing detective for consumer brands, like both in the agency world, as well as a chief marketing officer. I've really focused on trying to figure out the underpriced or ignored customers, channels, or messages that brands are overlooking that they can not only experiment into, but build an actual scale from. So the brands I've worked with have included Magic Spoon, Our Place, Greater Than, which is one of the brands I'm sure we'll be talking about, as well as Best Day Brewing and a bunch of other brands more recently. And the consistent through line that I've found across my career is the brands who actually have the most scale tend to focus on acquiring the customers that their competitors have ignored. And instead of it being a stroke of luck or something that is a fluke, like what I found is that there's a very systematic process for identifying these opportunities. and scaling them in a measurable and cost-effective way. And the company I've built now called Moast is essentially my first attempt to turn that decision system into a company, like versus it being within other people's orgs. But I'm sure we'll talk like more about them a bit later.

And what you're looking at, and I love it because if you're a media planner, you'd look at ad effectiveness, but it's so much more than that, right? It's, it's the feedback loop. It's the people you're not talking to and you can only use the data that's in front of you. And if you're not looking broad, then you're missing the trick and connecting those dots is really important. So let's start with a little bit of foundational stuff. If I'm coaching founders, working with startups, even with my own startups decoder platform, for me, I always have a persona in my head in the sense of who a person is. And particularly in the earlier stage, which a lot of the founders on this show are, you are doing a lot of iteration and testing and learning on who you are, what your product is, how you show up, and where you start to get some stickiness.

Yeah.

And that is a live process and that never changes, but you're able to get sharper as you go. But what also happens is that that builds out, right? Rather than having one ICP, you start to find other people. And that's the opportunity from what I'm hearing that you are talking about.

100%. And I think that what you just described is the first step for all brands that they should take. Like, who is the center of the bullseye? But I think the problem that most brands find themselves in, which we talked about on our first conversation, is they will focus on trying to optimize that like center of the bullseye, like using as much data as possible and trying to just sort of like slowly increase their efficiency with that versus adding to it. So instead of seeing like marketing growth as, hey, how do we just like get 2% better at what we're already doing? How do we actually keep that core customer and add more core customers to it? And that's like where we've really seen the customer acquisition breakthroughs. Like for a range of businesses.

A lot of the founders that I talk to will also talk about opportunities that land on their lap that they don't expect. And in that experimentation of learning your audience, understanding them, having direct conversations, which is important too, you get little nuggets of information, I would call it. So what you glean through data is one source, direct feedback is another, but sometimes If you're not paying attention, then you miss out on those opportunities. And the founder of Complex Magazine, like iconic publication, he talked about it like a wharf. So if you have a wharf and maybe there's 4 pylons that go into the ground, rather than trying to build something bigger and shinier on top of that, actually putting another post in the ground per se and spreading, and it's all connected from a central place.

Yes.

But you're able to still be relevant your current audience, but offer more and expand. And that takes a lot of understanding of data and your audience to be able to be confident to do that.

100%. And just to build off of what you said, because I think this is another really important point. I think a lot of people, especially like with where digital marketing has been over the past 10 to 15 years, focus on the data that is the most statistically significant. But the problem with that is it's only going to be statistically significant if you are investing a lot in making it that way. And to your point about, you know, just speaking with customers on the phone or like finding things that seem like anomalies that are sort of hidden in the data, that's where a lot of those breakthroughs have come from. And that's why I see marketing as detective work, where there's usually clues that are buried in your existing marketing data and in your existing organization and customer transcripts or things like that that are very easy to ignore and are sort of whispers. That will never reach statistical significance unless you invest in testing them. And that's essentially like what I focused on, which is how do we identify things that are worth experimenting and then sequencing the experiments with a small budget within the resources we already have in the organization to actually see if it could be statistically significant. And again, I feel like this sounds very simple and basic, but you would be shocked at how few organizations are actually Operating this way with any budget or attention.

And what I see a pattern of too, increasing year on year in the last 2 years with the introduction of a suite of AI tools to shortcut that process, is that it's easy to have a persona or ICP and you train, say it was Clay or even an agent that you built yourself and the automation outreach in the sense of message testing, getting dynamic feedback and really honing in To get to a point where you have warm leads.

Yeah.

But in that process, it has to optimize and it's making decisions on your behalf and you're not getting that insight. You're getting closer to this effectiveness. So you feel like you're making progress, but it's very one-dimensional and you're not getting that feedback loop. So the part where people start, and this is probably a good place to anchor the conversation for now, is demographic data. Is something that people have talked about. And if you went into a large corporation, they'd talk about like all these acronyms. I remember DINK, which is double income, no kids, and all different ways of basically putting people into a box of where they live, how much money they earn. Do they have kids? Do they not? Are they religious? Are they not? Like there's certain things that people start to stereotype because what they're trying to do is get patterns of behavior. And it's how old media planning was done in the sense of choosing where your audience is where are people going wrong and why are people getting false information out of using demographic information in isolation? It's important, of course, to get one ingredient, but what do they miss if they only look at demographic?

That's the billion-dollar question. And like, let's just use the DINK example, the double income, no kids. And let's just say that you are selling a sports drink. How does that help you understand that person? Like, say that it's a DINK couple, Like, what does that really mean in terms of why they would choose your sports drink? How are they using this sports drink on a weekly basis? Like, what other items are on their grocery list that are not sports drinks that you are competing with for share of wallet? Like, what are some of the purchase triggers? Like, things that are about behavior of human beings. That's really where I think people are underfocused. So instead of focusing on high-level demographics that already exist and that like cover broad swatches of the population, for me, I've always focused on let's zoom out and think about what this product actually does. And like Clayton Christensen just like calls it the jobs to be done. Like, what is this product actually doing? And then how do we sort of in an unbiased way look at who are some other cohorts of human beings To actual people who could be matchmade to this product and not in a way that is sort of inherently biased towards whatever the other incumbent has done, but in a way that might be true to how that person's life actually operates.

So there's a part of that too. So starting with a very simple bullseye, like we set up before, but then you start to break into segmentation and, and I'm not talking demographic data now. I'm talking about behavior. So you could be a Professional athlete having the sports drink. Let's carry that product through. Or you could just be someone that plays social soccer on a Sunday with a bunch of friends, and afterwards you choose one. And they're opposite ends of the scale about their needs for having a sports drink, right? That social soccer player on a Sunday, if they had water, it's probably gonna be fine and it's not gonna be life-changing for their career. It's not how they make money. But for them, there's a ritual, there's a lifestyle, there's a lot of other reasons too. So understanding the why. Is that humans are creatures of patterns of behavior, right? And we quite often are led by people around us, whether we realize it or not, which is why creators exist, that the influence of things that trickle down where you feel like you want to belong and be part of a community, there's this sense of connection that comes through being alike. And if you use the word punk, punk is the antithesis of not wanting to fit in in that group. But I see it shift now in consumers where mainstream brands and trends seem to be applied to a lot more people, more than I've ever seen. Like this unique identity, I feel like is disappearing a little bit.

Yeah, totally. And again, there's probably a whole episode about that and about how, you know, social media is influencing like those things and sort of like how people are both in these like silos, but also like consuming a lot of the same products and trends because TikTok makes it that way. But yeah, I like totally agree with you about how consumer behavior is changing and that's why Instead of focusing on like whatever the tactic of the month is, I still feel like there's these like universal truths about human behavior that really haven't changed at all. Like if you think about like marketing 100 years ago, it's really the same as now. It's just slightly more opaque because people's newsfeeds are just bombarded with ads. They can't really trust what they're seeing, et cetera. So that's why I focus less on like whatever the hack is and focus more on like, like what's going to be true 12 months from now or 18 months from now, and then trying to figure out what cohorts we can build into that are gonna still be buying us then because tactics change every week or every month. So yeah, I definitely think that you're spot on there.

There's a few things there I wanna touch on. One, I'm a brand strategist, so you're speaking my language and having a north star is critical. And I heard a great analogy once, which was the gas that it takes to get onto the freeway is a lot. And that is literally chasing after trends. If you stop start all the time, you're burning gas, but once you're on the freeway, way and you're in cruise control, then it becomes more effective and you're heading in a certain direction, but you can adapt and evolve. So what I mean by that, and I'll give you an example, I had Jack Daniels as a client for a long time and it was very focused around music culture and community and music. And we had a creative platform which I designed and built, which was called Front Row with Jack. And Front Row with Jack was almost a manifesto of sorts in the sense of a music consumer. And if you're in the front row, there's a metaphor around being a diehard fan. You're loyal, you got there early, you got a front row spot in front of the barrier, and you just want to get as close as you can to the favorite band in the world. There's so much emotion and association that's attached with that. And then we used it as a framework to then build off a whole series of tactics. So we would do competitions. If you purchase a Jack Daniel's at a bar, you have a chance to win tickets and get front row to see your favorite band. So it became a comms vehicle as well as a brand. And what it did is that anytime they wanted to do social media content and be spontaneous and in the moment of being on trends, they could just comment on it, but then still have that consistent, like, get front row with Jack because they were talking about topical things. So it worked really hard for them in driving on-premise, off-premise, broader TVCs, anything that they were doing in mass market. And I use that example all the time because it allows you to play both. You can play to the strength of the brand, plus you can be reactive, but you're not perpetually chasing your tail on new ideas and burning the gas back to that metaphor that I said before.

100%. And like one of our current clients actually had a really good analogy for what you just described that I definitely want to use, which is like adding cars to the train. So like instead of us being like, okay, cool, we're just going to totally shift the entire business towards this new niche. It's like, no, you already have the train that's left the station. You already have your core 2 or 3 main audiences that you don't want to ignore. So let's add more trains to the caboose or like more cars to the caboose. So that way, again, you can like do what you said, which is build an organization that is still sustainable because you already have your core brand. You already have your core customers that are keeping the lights on. And you can use that to test with a small part of your budget and resources, some of these new opportunities. So that way, again, you aren't constantly like zigzagging around, you know, trying to chase whatever the trend or hack is at the moment.

I love that analogy too. It works on so many levels. I'm a strategic brain and a creative brain, probably in equal portion. But the part of that too is that you bring a new demographic on, there's this new segment, but they can also go into the other carriages and intermingle, and you start to introduce people slowly to each other and Because the thing that you need to be careful of with a brand is that if you start to bring in new messaging, new product features, new audiences, you need to make sure that you don't alienate the current people as well. So there's, there's tension there to be aware of in making sure that you're being loyal to your existing customers, but creating opportunity for new customers as well.

And again, the beauty with digital marketing is you can segment those people. You can have different landing pages, different email flows, different ads. And everything so that way you can sort of still keep them a little bit like sequestered, you know, in terms of like messaging, as long as the core brand and product is the same, how people use your product and how they relate to your brand might be like different. So I feel like instead of ignoring that, I think that there's ways to like systematically test adding those cars to the carriage or not adding them. Like if you test a demographic and you're like, actually the lifetime value is too low or Our customer acquisition cost is too high, then at least you know what is the sort of fence that you're in. And that's why with any experiment, I think it's important to sort of have as wide of a fence as possible. So that way, you know, like, like what is the edge of our brand and the edge of the use case of our product? And like I said, it sounds very simple and basic, but again, the behaviors and the budget allocations and the creative resources allocated to this line of Discovery marketing, as I call it, is very limited in a lot of organizations except the ones who are winning. And a perfect example of this is Liquid Death. You know, um, like when people have been skeptical about like, oh, well, that doesn't sound like that can build a huge company. I'm like, Liquid Death built their company in this exact way. Mike Cesario had an insight that he saw at concerts where the rock stars were putting, um, like water in their cans. So he was like, huh, well, can I use a small budget and design a fake website and some fake cans and ads and see if there's a way to take the most commoditized product in the world, water, build a brand experience around it that appeals to a cohort of people that have been completely ignored by other water companies and essentially break all the rules of how marketing should be done in water and see if that is even viable before we go all in. And obviously we know what happened with them. And that's exactly what, you know, I've done, you know, with a bunch of the brands that we've worked with in the past as well as current businesses.

I give the Liquid Death example a lot and it's, it works in many ways because they create such great aspiration for the brand by being irreverent. And if you were to go into a Whole Foods and look at the shelf, or the fridges where you are having all the competitors, they're typically designed for a more feminine mind. So softer color palettes, whites, et cetera. And they're the opposite. They're a larger size can, they're black, they're very punk and rock and roll with everything about them. And it's contrarian. And if you are someone who has masculine behavior, then having that in your hand versus having something that's soft and more elegant with its design, there's an association, right? And ultimately the contents are exactly the same. In that it's just water. It's, there's nothing that's unique about it, but it's what you're holding onto and a lifestyle and what you're part of. So the purpose is so much bigger than the product.

100%. And that might actually be a good segue into the brand that you reached out to me about, like the Best Day Brewing example, because again, when I met Best Day Brewing, and for the listeners who aren't familiar with them, they are a craft non-alcoholic beer that has fairly, like I would say gender-neutral packaging. It doesn't look as masculine as most beer brands, but it's not feminine. It just sort of has like a nice sort of like general mainstream aesthetic. And when I met them, they had primarily grown through, um, like in-person events and word of mouth. They really had no digital infrastructure or an understanding of who their customer was or who they could be. And essentially they were like, we just want to build a marketing funnel that can copy Athletic Brewing. Like that's the biggest player in the space. They created the category. We want to figure out how we can steal their customers. So that's what I outlined for them as like, hey, here is the ceiling that you will hit that's going to become exponentially more expensive to punch through because you alongside a lot of other brands are essentially paying for their table scraps. You are paying more for the customers who are the most competitive in the space, which are people who are either, if not completely sober, mostly sober men who are into fitness and CrossFit and that kind of lifestyle. And if you just zoom out and think about the percentage of the population of the US who fall into that, it's minuscule, especially since most people in this country don't do CrossFit or ice baths or some of those types of things. And then the ones who do are already brand loyal to Athletic Brewing. So that was option 1. Option 2, which is what they fortunately chose to go with, was actually we outlined here are 7 million potential customers. Who have likely never been advertised to by other non-alcoholic beers before that we could actually be the first brands to advertise to. Here is how we can do that within your existing budget. And here are the specific cohorts and niches that we want to test and the user-generated creative we need to get to source that. And they were like, cool, let's do it. So after about a month of like running these ads and collecting data, our system that we've built, um, which like basically, um, like sifts through all this data to find some of those like niche, like opportunities to recommend what to do next, essentially said, and this was back in January of 2025, this is about a year and a half ago, said the next step is to do a sober date night campaign for Valentine's Day using stop motion advertising. So I was like, okay, cool. And again, just think about the logic of that. This was around the time, like, like frankly, AI generated slop was all over people's newsfeeds. So the types of ads that were doing well At that time were ones that felt very human created. And also stop motion is actually surprisingly affordable to do within the budget constraints that we had. And, um, there had never been any brand who had ever really focused on that aspect of how, um, being sober in certain situations can actually improve like your intimacy. So this was pitched to the client. Um, they were like, yeah, let's do it. Um, in fact, they had remembered from some of the conversations they had had that they forgot about until that moment. So again, this wouldn't have been in any of the analytics. That a lot of customers noticed that when they cut back on their alcohol, their sex life improved. So they were like, huh, well, maybe we should do something around sober sex. Mind you, this is a brand who 3 months before didn't want to take any risk at all. They wanted to just do what was, what felt safe, which is to sort of do the path that Athletic Brewing had already run from in the prior years. Now they're like, sure, let's do this sober sex ad using stop motion and get it done in 3 weeks for a small budget. I think Including all the editing, it was $15,000. So this ad went live, immediately went viral. I'm all over Instagram. I encourage people to, um, like hop over to YouTube if you'd like and just type in Best Day Brewing, um, Hoppy Endings, H-O-P-P-Y Endings, which is the name of the ad. It went extremely viral on Instagram and on TikTok. It did incredibly well as a YouTube pre-roll ad. We even used that exact ad, not all of their ads, but that specific ad on Pornhub and actually saw a 10x return on investment with no backlash to the brand. And in fact, we actually saw that combined, the millions of people that we were able to bring into our funnel with this ad, as well as a bunch of the other more normal user-generated ads that we ran, led Best Day Brewing to become the fastest growing brand in their category. They went from number 10 to number 2 behind Athletic Brewing within 6 months. And we did that not by essentially copying them or trying to fight for the same customers as all the other craft NA beers, including ones who had substantially bigger budgets than we did. We did it by appealing to people like you, Andy, and to people who had likely been outside of that center of the bullseye that the industry had focused on. And by essentially making Best Day Brewing memorable, making it seem fun and nonjudgmental, but also somewhat educational. There were a lot of comments on that ad saying, you know what, I didn't really think about this. But this actually makes a lot of sense. I have noticed that, you know, my date nights are better when I'm not completely blacked out, you know? So again, it was a very memorable and nonjudgmental way to make situational sobriety something that could be done. And again, this is something that had never been like done by any of the other brands in the space, meaning it wouldn't have existed in ChatGPT or like the case studies that you would get on LLMs. So that was like sort of the jumping off point to realizing, huh, maybe there's something repeatable here with this diagnostics process to help surface some of those new customer groups and new creative opportunities and even channel opportunities. And then like now, 18 months later, here I am with Most trying to build that out for any customer or any consumer brand.

It's so fascinating in creating your own segment ultimately, rather than competing on the same terms, it's being curious to be able to ask some questions. In a new light, and I look at my own personal life. And for me, at the end of a day, if I start on one or two non-alcoholic beers, then it softens the night completely. Particularly now, it's so hot and humid in New York City, and the first one you probably drink faster than the rest. And if you start on those ones, for me, it's like it has that the taste of beer. It feels like the end of a day, but there's zero alcohol or pretty much next to no alcohol. So it just changes everything. And rather than Having two or three alcoholic beers, and for me, the behavior there is that I still have both. I'm not trying to be sober, yeah, but I'm not trying to get drunk every night either. So it's that in between, and I would be that person. It's having self-awareness, yes, and people are curious as customers as well. And that's what I love to talk about. If you're doing campaigns, rather than try and sell it someone, you create empathy by. Having a dialogue backwards and forwards that's topical and interesting, and it builds your brand so much more than you would if you're just doing product messaging in a very functional capacity on the same terms, because it's lowest common denominator at that point.

100%. And again, like what you just said at the end about like, oh, just focusing on facts and information about the product. I think there's a place in the funnel for that. Like lower in the funnel, but that's not going to actually do what I think marketing needs to do in a much bigger way, which is how do you attract the attention of these people to even get them in the funnel? And listing off facts about your product that really any competitor can say isn't enough. So again, like that ad, the Sober Sex ad didn't even talk about the product. I mean, the cans were basically the 2 stars of the show, you know, without spoiling, you know, the ad because it's only 30 seconds. So I encourage people to watch it. Like you basically see these 2 beer cans have a date night. And get frisky with each other, you know, and stuff in a way that's meant to be very funny and not vulgar and stuff. And the cans are, are visible in every single frame, but we never once in the entire ad talk about our taste or how the product is made or the price or any of those specific value propositions. The purpose of that is truly top of funnel, filling our funnel with people who are now going to be more primed to remember this product and choose this product on a menu at a restaurant or pick it up in store or order it on Instacart or like something like that. Which again brings me to the other piece that I think has gotten a lot of businesses in trouble, which is how do you measure these things? And the problem with a lot of these businesses who obsess over the attribution models and the data and all of that is it inherently biases everything towards whatever is easiest to measure versus whatever the customer behavior is. And take this non-alcoholic beer, for example, more than 90% of all beers and beverages, period, are purchased in store first. They are not going to like go viral on YouTube. And then like, you're just going to see this spike of people buying a 50-pound case on your website immediately. So if you looked at the success of this campaign, Based solely off of the immediate sales on the website, it was a huge failure. But I told them upfront, we are likely not going to see that website conversion lift for probably 6 to 8 weeks. But I, but I will tell you that we will see an increase to our in-store and on-premise, like in restaurant velocities in that period, as people can try the product first before they come to the website to actually do their research now or to purchase the subscription. And there's going to be proxy signals between now and then that indicates that happens, like store locator use spikes, or, um, like once we actually get the Nielsen data to show our in-store velocities, there's going to be unexplained lifts to that. And that's exactly what happened. So over the course of that following few months, we saw massive surges of sales in store and in the restaurant that directly correlated to the virality spikes of all of the digital marketing we were doing. And we also eventually saw a big surge of people who eventually came to the website to subscribe, who self-reported first hearing about the product on social, making their first purchase in store or at a restaurant, and then coming. And right now the industry just isn't set up to actually measure that in an easy way, which is why people underinvest in top of funnel. And they wonder why they aren't growing, which is a huge issue that we've solved for other brands. Which is how do you actually make top of funnel something that you can diagnose and properly measure with the right metrics versus what ends up happening is if you only look at everything on a 7-day last click attribution window, top of funnel marketing is always going to look like it's a waste of money, even though it might take weeks or even months between first exposure and purchase for many products.

The brand story is, it's such a tricky one. And depending on what stage you're at as a company, it can feel like you're burning money unnecessarily. But if you were to look at some of the biggest players in the world, I'd look at McDonald's, Airbnb, and they're very aspirational lifestyle brands in the way that they communicate their brand story. And it's about the experience. And I did a lot of research back in the day, and I remember McDonald's framework, and they have 4 things that they function on. And one is brand and telling the brand story, McDonald's, and that just drives association and keeps it front of mind. So If someone's driving around and sees a McDonald's franchise, they might go in there and visit it. They do product, so they get you attached to certain products and they double down and talk about what's in the product and get people either wanting to trial or go back and have it again. Then they do price, which is very anchored around getting people in store. If they can get a, a McChicken for $2 for the next couple of weeks, Yeah. Then people get back in there. But they did research and I'm pretty sure it was around after 18 months, if they stopped spending on brand, the sales would decline. Didn't matter how much price work, product work, everything else, it just declined. And Airbnb did the same thing. They lent in heavily to brand and played the long game. But that impact is hard. You need to think about the association and outside of consumer goods into, say you're building a SaaS product where competition is fierce and people can build a lookalike quickly and easily. These days. So that for me, the brand and that human element of what you're building is a way to differentiate and get market share. Because if it's a functional service that you're providing or a functional product that's not sexy, like you can only talk about that so much. Whereas a brand, if it has aspiration and humanity and empathy and things that you can relate to, all of a sudden it has much higher appeal and you can't explain why. It's just part of human nature.

100%. And again, I think brand marketing has become a bad word, not only because of the measurement piece, but because I think people assume that it's, it's fluffy, it's guesswork. It's not something that actually is going to sell the product. And we can probably have a whole episode about tech marketing, which again, I think has skewed way too heavy into focusing on features that can now be completely commoditized and not focusing again on How do you make human beings who are the ones who are making the purchase decision remember you? And I feel like that is something that is not focused on enough. How do you actually cut through the noise and be memorable? And again, that's why, you know, the advantages are if you are the, the first product in your space that's speaking to a specific niche, you inherently are going to probably be able to set the table for them a little bit easier than if you're number 8 or 9. It's going to be easier to be like remembered. If you know more about those people's purchase behaviors or their needs or their lifestyles, you can figure out what creative do we need that's going to only appeal to them, but possibly alienate people who are never going to buy the product anyway. And then also on the channel piece, are there underpriced places outside of just like Meta or TikTok ads where you could be advertising your products that that niche is going to be at? So I feel like that's really where, you know, I built Moat to sort of help make that detective work more scalable. So that way, instead of it being like guesswork and feeling like, well, there's no rigor here, it's how do we actually take the signals that we have that are likely buried in the data of these companies, as well as look at what competitors are not doing versus what they are doing, and actually build a set of experiments that we can run in a very specific sequence that can lead to these massive Breakthroughs. And one of the, you know, probably the most extreme example of this in my career that I know we talked about before is what happened with Greater Than. So this was the brand that I was the CMO for, for many years. And before that, I was their marketing consultant. And they essentially were a sports drink that was initially sold in CrossFit gyms and on golf courses, primarily to men. And they were all natural, no added sugar, cost about $7 or $8 a liter versus the same amount of like Gatorade, which would cost $2 to $3. So keep that in mind. Now, the problem with that is like with Gatorade, they have pretty much set the table for this is how you market a sports drink. Just like you said with water, there is a very specific sort of idea in mind of how water should be marketed and how it should look. And Greater Than basically was like, we'll test anything. Like we have a great product and we know we have a great product. We will say yes to any test. So again, using the more manual version of what I'm now doing with our software, the initial hypothesis was this could be a sports drink for soccer moms, essentially for moms who have athletic children in the house that they can both drink. So that way, that price, that $7 to $8 is spread across the household versus one person. And at the time, there were no drinks that were really focused on the family like that. After about a few weeks of seeing like some good results, but not anything explosive. We began to get these random bursts of virality that were completely untrackable. These huge spikes of sales and traffic we couldn't see. And then after about another week, we began to have pictures of people's breast milk being posted in the comments section of our ads. Now, keep in mind, this looks like a sports drink.

Okay.

The carton has people surfing on it and one flavor has someone like by doing rock climbing and all this stuff that has nothing to do with breastfeeding. But what happened was some of these mothers that we were targeting must have had older children who were athletes, and then they themselves were pregnant or breastfeeding. And they began to notice that when they would consume this sports drink, it would alleviate their fatigue, their muscle cramps, their headaches, as well as their low milk supply issues.

Huh.

And they would post pictures of their breast milk in the comments of our ads. And tag 10 of their friends who were all breastfeeding or about to give birth. And those random bursts of virality were coming from people posting about us in these private mom groups. So again, just going back to what we talked about earlier, this could have been an anomaly. This could have been like 15 people, you know, who just had this experience and we could have ignored it because it's weird and it's something that had never been done before. And this is a sports drink and all this stuff. Instead, we decided to go all in on it. And over the following 3 years, basically pivoted the whole brand to become the first hydration solution for pregnant and breastfeeding moms. And after speaking with a lot of, um, like doctors and lactation consultants about what's going on here, like why are millions of mothers seeing this reaction? It was because they were chronically dehydrated and there had never been any hydration product on the market before Greater Than. That it actively addressed that need of these mothers who have probably higher hydration needs than an athlete. These are people who have plenty of money to spend. They are very specific about what they want to put in their bodies. They are very tribal. So if there's one mom who recommends you, there's 10 other moms like her that will follow her direction. And there's also really high barriers to entry. So if you are the brand that they are recommending, the eventual copycats who came in, when they started advertising to these moms, our acquisition cost lowered because we were the incumbent. So again, going back to the Athletic Brewing piece, if we were trying to copy Athletic Brewing, we would basically be using our money to make them more money. That is the fallacy of what happens when you try to copy your biggest competitors. Not only are you overpaying for their table scraps, but you're also making them more money versus if you actually find a new niche that could be matchmade to your product's benefits and features that is underpriced and has very specific criteria and ways to measure this, you can actually do what happened with Greater Than where they grew from $300,000 a year to $10 million, all online profitably. And that same feedback loop. an experiment framework that got us there. That is what we've now productized into Moast.

It's such a great case study and one of those things that someone tries it for one reason and discovers that it helps with something else. It's fascinating. You hear stories of products like that all the time and being a good listener and looking at the data, et cetera. And, and that understanding purchase decisions ultimately is what you're doing because demography gets you Part of the puzzle. Looking at psychographics and very specific use cases, context of use cases, et cetera, and getting into the weeds is where you find the gold. And sometimes it can be just to help maintain growth. Other times it can be identifying a brand new market like you talked about as well. So what would you say to wrap up today? What are some of those signals that you would recommend people start to look at and how they go about it? To be able to have that feedback loop be something that's consistent within their startup?

So 2 parts to this answer. So for a brand who already knows who their customer is, like, for example, there's this brand we work with called Clove. They are a shoe for doctors and nurses. That's their customer. They don't need to know other cohorts. They essentially fell into the same trap that I just outlined before, where they had an incredibly sophisticated bottom of funnel. So they had All the facts and figures about their product and advertising. They had a really good, like, 7-day attribution window type of marketing, but they had no upper funnel. So the one thing that saved them that I would recommend for any business is actually know how long does it take on average for a new customer in your business to actually go from exposure to purchase? Because for them, it was 2 months. And 0% of their marketing budget was allocated towards investing in marketing and having the right proxy signals to know this ad or this Cohort is going to convert 2 months from now. Instead, they would shut off everything if it didn't get their acquisition cost within 7 days, which means that they were overpaying for fish that were already in the barrel versus putting more fish in the barrel that you can then harvest in 2 months. So again, I think that that is one, a huge issue with current attribution modeling. And then 2, I think that that's a key question that very few brands know. What is the latency period for your product and how do you build marketing Based off of that reality versus trying to optimize your way to make a 7-day attribution model work when that might not be feasible for your product. And then if you are a business like Greater Than or like Best Day Brewing who is in growth mode and you're looking for some of those new niche cohorts, I would encourage you to sort of zoom out and think objectively about what does your product actually do? Is Greater Than a sports drink or is it a high electrolyte solution? With no added sugar or no chemicals and great taste. If it's the second, that opens your field of how you can market that substantially more than being anchored to Gatorade, where you have to have a pro athlete or someone with abs on your website, and you're going to be price anchored to a $2 bottle versus if you have a bigger aperture. Now, all of a sudden you are competing with Pedialyte who sells for $8, you know? So it's like, those are the kinds of things I encourage people to think about. And just like what Liquid Death did, don't be tied to the convention of your category. He He never would have made Liquid Death if he had tried to make a better Fiji Water. He's like, no, here are new rules that appeal to this new customer group who otherwise would be drinking a lot of Mountain Dew. And now we are making water for those people. Here are the rules that convert those folks. So I would say, you know, in terms of some of the proxy signals for the first group, looking at things like drumstop rate, add to carts, onsite behavior, et cetera, as upper funnel metrics, instead of looking solely at an immediate return on investment is going to help build that upper funnel testing. And for the groups of people like the Greater Than Just the Best Day Brewings, it's really more focused on zooming out to think about who are other human beings that could appeal, that could use your product to solve their problems. And you could do that with guesswork, or you could work with MOST. And we, um, are built around actually helping brands have that diagnosis and sequence out the exact set of experiments that we can do within the existing budget you have. To not only identify those opportunities, but measure them and lead to those customer acquisition outcomes.

So fascinating, great framework. And the lesson I'm hearing in that is patience, but also a level of curiosity and actually taking the time to look at that information and really start to see the patterns and double-click to see what you can discover. So great way to wrap up today, Brian. Thank you so much for joining. This has been It's been a really interesting topic.

Yeah, thank you so much, Andy, for having me.

Thanks for listening to Startups Decoded. If today's conversation helped you think differently, share it with a founder in your network. And don't forget to subscribe for real-world startup insights every week. We really value your support. If you're interested in sponsoring the show, email hello@startupsdecoded.com. I'm Andy Walsh. I'll see you next week.