The 0 to 8 Figure Playbook
This episode breaks down actionable strategies and growth frameworks used by successful e-commerce brands to scale from zero to eight figures in revenue. It dives into high-impact marketing tactics, team building for growth, and the mindset shifts required to operate at scale. The conversation highlights key levers for media buyers, including creative testing, audience segmentation, and ROI optimization, alongside operational insights for e-commerce operators on process, culture, and technology that support scaling effectively.
Key Takeaways
How media buyers optimize creative testing to scale faster.
Why audience segmentation strategies hve proven to deliver the highest ROI at scale.
The KPIs that are critical for measuring success beyond just ROAS during rapid growth.
How organizational culture plays into sustaining e-commerce scale and growth.
They key ways operators balance automation with personalization in customer experience.
The number 1 pitfall brands face when scaling paid media, and how it can be avoided
How team structure evolves as an e-commerce brand grows from startup to multi-million dollar revenue.
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
Full Transcript
The 0 to 8 Figure Playbook
Transcript:
(00:00) If you're quite literally starting at zero, I think you just focus on making a diverse range of creative that is messaging to these different types of people we talked about, load it into one campaign and allow meta to dictate where the spend is going to go.
(00:15) Because when you're quite literally at zero, and I know that's not where most people listening to this are, when you're quite literally at zero, you need signal. To Brad's point, spend is a good indicator, but another indicator when you're early on is just looking at Facebook ad comments and Instagram ad comments. Seeing what people are actually saying to the different headlines, different personas that you might be targeting in this creative, because you might identify something really interesting in the comments, which then allows you to make a change to your website. For us, we
(00:39) started with these socks, we had one style of them, and I'm like, "I don't know who's actually going to end up buying this, but we're going to try to sell it to a little bit of everybody." What actually happened first was that we were starting at Facebook ad comments of people in the Midwest saying, "All these would be great for hunting.
(00:56) " I never thought, "Oh, we'd sell these socks to hunting," or that category, never really stood out to me. That's when we started making ads that called out that persona, and that's where we actually caught fire in the first year. One piece that goes into all of these ideas is offer optimization strategy. That can go across so much of it and is very ignored by so many people. Obviously, you've done a ton of offer testing. Zach, I think that's something that you do incredibly well.
(01:20) What are the keys that you wish would be out there that people don't talk about when it comes to offers? [music] And now, let's take a listen to the Scalability School podcast. Okay, and welcome to episode eight, the zero to eight, zero dollar to eight figure playbook. Here we are, Brad and I, Zach's coming on just a second. Brad, always good to be with you, my friend. Likewise. Zero to eight figures for the episode number eight.
(01:52) That's where they have to know it. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Really, what we're going through today is essentially, we talked through a lot of questions we've been getting from listeners. By the way, thank you for those of you that listen and share it with friends. Obviously, our listeners are exploding into the tens at this point, so thank you.
(02:12) We get these questions essentially, how do you put all this together, talking about a lot of different pieces, talking about a lot of different tactics, and what are the things that you can do, and what's a playbook that we can run, and what's the playbook that you guys run, because there's been enough consistency in terms of the performance that you had over time. And so that's really what we're going through today, is like, this is what the playbook looks like.
(02:34) And I'm not sure this might be two episodes, the one, a part one and a part two. We're going to see how we get through it, but that's where we are for right now. So let's go ahead and get started on the playbook itself. As we talk about the part one, start wide strategy. Brad, this is what you went through. You said a great example is loop earplugs.
(02:56) So you start wide, and then eventually you can scale wide, casting a wide net. What goes into this spike start wide strategy in your mind? Yeah, so I'll back up one step. I think what's interesting is we kind of have gone into, I think, each of these steps over the last several episodes. I don't know if we've missed any.
(03:12) I think we've gone through most of these. And so we might not go super deep into each one specifically, but obviously you can refer back to previous episodes and go a little bit deeper. And if you have any questions, you can always DM us on Twitter. We love that t
(03:29) oo. But starting wide is really all about... So if you... Everybody here, for the most part, everybody that's listening is kind of in the seven, eight figure range. So they've got at least some success, and they're trying to figure out how to push it forward a bit more. So at this point, you've probably got your product, at least somewhat dialed in, and you have a sense of what people like, and you're trying to scale it out a little bit further.
(03:45) So starting wide is really all about casting a wide net, particularly with your ad creative and your messaging around what might resonate with people. And the example that you mentioned, Loop Earpugs, I think is an interesting example of our two reasons. One, they continue to go wide, but it gives kind of a great example of how you can actually get to that width as well.
(04:09) And so if you go and you scroll through their ad library, what you'll see is they sell earpugs, and it's not like earbuds where you can put in, listen to music. It's literally like noise canceling earpuds. There's nothing being played as far as I understand that. And I don't know where they started, meaning I don't know which of these wide buckets they started in, but you'll see that they message for parents, right? Or for sleep, or at festivals because you want to drown some of that, or people who are just sensitive to noise, generally speaking. And that's what we mean when we say start wide is you want to build a bunch of
(04:34) those pillars and angles that we've talked about in previous episodes where you can message to a lot of different people and you can build out all of those and launch with a handful of ads. And we can talk about maybe quantities of ads and things like that.
(04:51) Because when you get those up and running and you have all of those different people that you're speaking to and all those different use cases, you can start to get a sense of where do I go from here? Because if you just pick one, it doesn't work. You're kind of out of luck and you got to pivot and go to the next one. So at least starting wide gives you a chance to see when I launch these ads, this is what's resonating with people off the bat.
(05:08) And then you can kind of dig into that a little bit further, which is step two. But I'll pause there. Talking about that, I think one of the things that is in the old time that a lot of meta advertisers specifically have came up through was that you basically run your ads to you build a general ad or a bunch of ads that are talking about your product. And then you put those via different targeting to the audiences you're trying to speak to.
(05:33) And this is obviously in the new model where all of us live, which is you're building the creative to speak to those particular people right away, which I think is just worth calling out because that's a different way. And a lot of people think about this.
(05:51) One thing I'm wondering in your sense is, because when I've talked about this before, the number one thing I hear is, "Well, how do I, if I don't have a ton of budget, as I'm building it from $0 to a lower budget to $5,000 a month to $10,000 a month, how do I start to do this testing in terms of going wide better?" Because I think what ends up happening is a lot of people have done two of these. And persona expansion is not necessarily something that's gone.
(06:17) They haven't tried it a ton and they've maybe listened to the earlier episode and talked about it, but they've started with like two of them. So how do you start to test this from a budgetary standpoint in your... Yeah, I think if you're... Greg, I'm glad you talked about the tactical setup because I think it's a really important point.
(06:35) If you're quite literally starting at zero, I think you just focus on making a diverse range of creative that is messaging to these different types of people who talked about, load it into one campaign and allow meta to dictate where the spend is going to go. Because when you're quite literally at zero, and I know that's not where most people listening to this are, when you're quite literally at zero, you need signal.
(06:53) And even if it's not going to be the long-term thing, it's like you can't get to the long-term thing if you have no cash in your pocket to get to the long-term thing. So sometimes you just have to start with what you see is getting some spend. And I think getting some spend is important because if you launch it... So make all of this creative, load up a CBO, lowest cost, cost caps, whatever, load it in there and see what meta spends towards. Even if it's not performing super profitably off the bat, spend is probably the thing to lean into. And I
(07:19) know we've mentioned this idea of spend velocity recently quite a bit, but that should give you a sense of where you should be then focusing your attention from there. Because meta is telling you people are at least responding to this in some kind of way. They're clicking through, maybe they're not converting quite yet.
(07:36) But from a very simple zero to one perspective, load into one CBO and just start it all there. I don't think it makes sense to be splitting up your budgets across five different campaigns, across five different personas. And I also think you should just use broad targeting. I don't think you need to have coach your targeting. You don't have to do it too much. Yeah.
(07:55) I mean, Brett, so Zach, when I go to Foxhole founders meetups, I meet people and I know this isn't to inflate your ego. This is a real thing. People will say, "Dude, I'm trying to do what Zach Stuck's doing. I'm building a holding company. I've got D2C brands. I have an agency." And a question that commonly comes across is, how are the things that he touches so successful so quickly? So how do you think about this in terms of the step one in terms of the zero to eight for your playbook? Talking about step one starting wide. And you can get into other stuff too, but what are the pieces that you
(08:27) think about with this? Because I think a lot of people are really curious about this, including this. Yeah. I mean, the first hack to all this is that I invented my own time zone, which is ZST. So I can show up 10 minutes late to our podcast recordings and my podcast partners don't absolutely- That's a huge unlock.
(08:44) That's a big unlock. Yeah. I mean, so we'll start there. Riley at Homestead knows all about ZST. The team at Easy Street knows all about ZST as well. So no, I think in all seriousness, the reality is we take a lot of shots like this starting wide to try and figure out just get a taste of what consumers might be interested in.
(09:10) So if it's from anything from a health and wellness brand, all the way to an apparel brand, to a Home Goods brand that we owned. I mean, we started with making a ton of static ads in Facebook. That's the easiest place to start driving traffic to the website, usually to start. And just seeing what people react to. And I think to Brad's point, spend is a good indicator, but another indicator when you're early on is just looking at Facebook ad comments and Instagram ad comments.
(09:33) Seeing what people are actually saying to the different headlines, different personas that you might be targeting in this creative. Because you might identify something really interesting in the comments, which then allows you to make a change to your website. For us, I've talked about this on many podcasts in the past for Hala.
(09:49) We started with these socks. We had one style of them. And I'm like, "I don't know who's actually going to end up buying this, but we're going to try to sell it to a little bit of everybody." And what actually happened first was that we were starting to get Facebook ad comments of people in the Midwest saying, "All these would be great for hunting.
(10:05) " And I never thought we'd sell these socks to hunting or that category never really stood out to me. And that's when we started making ads that called out that persona. And that's where we actually caught fire in the first year. So I think to Brad's point, you just have to study all of the human interaction of the initial ads. And for us, that's why I think a lot of people don't choose to do that.
(10:28) They just look in the ad account. They're like, "These ads aren't working." You have to dig into those things that are the fundamentals, which is just like, "What are people saying about the ads? What are people saying in the first customer reviews? What are the things that they might be saying even in post purchase of why they're buying that might allow you to then find a big unlock to just double down on?" So I'd say if there's anything that we do in the portfolio brands, even with some of our clients that we've had some real success with, is just digging into that initial data as much as we can
(10:56) to try and figure out where there might be a place to double down. So that to me is usually the starting point. I mean, it's interesting in terms of the starting wide. The next question I want to get into is, I would say common mistakes that are made in this one. Within the first step, common mistake always is trying to do too much right off the gates.
(11:17) I mean, I've seen that a hundred times, or as I'm sure you guys have, or like I literally audited an account the other day. It's like, "Oh, we haven't had any winnings." And it'd been running for two weeks at a hundred dollar a day budget and there was 15 creatives.
(11:33) And I was like, "How are you supposed to have any idea?" The financial side of it is like, it's always my opinion. I don't know how you guys feel better to spend more in a shorter period of time even if you can, rather than try to spread it out. What a
(11:51) re other... I mean, I don't know what you think about that or what are other common mistakes you guys see? I'm sure Brad probably does this too. I know Brad's more of a cost control type of person, so try to use if there's interaction happening, then Meta will spend more. Usually for us, when we start, we're running lowest costs and we're trying to gas as much budget as we can right away to learn quicker. Because if Meta's seeing some signal in a 24 hour period, it will start to move spend pretty quickly over to a specific ad. I think this is a point we've maybe made it in previous episodes about it's super overwhelming. Everyone talks about the
(12:16) million things you need to do. You need to do all this crazy stuff on retention. You need to do landing pages. You need to do everything. I mean, I truly think until you're at $3,000, $4,000, $500,000 a month in revenue, just pushing traffic to your website is totally fine.
(12:34) I think that you can get a lot more unlocks in trying to figure out on the ad front of who is actually buying your stuff and what they're resonating with. I mean, this is where the creative diversification stuff starts to come to play. I know Brad, you had some thoughts on that. But to me, we've launched three brands and we've bought three brands at Easy Street over the last three years. Of the ones that we've launched, it's starting wide open.
(12:58) We don't know what headline is going to resonate. We don't know what pain point is going to resonate. Even if we have a super niche single-skew product, we're not sure what is actually going to click. I think that that only can happen really easily in ad creative. Not worrying about, "Oh, I need to do landing pages right away. Oh, I need to do all this crazy email and SMS flow stuff right away.
(13:17) " I think really it comes down to just the fundamentals of trying to figure out why people might buy your product and what starts to click and what actually starts to build momentum. Yeah, I agree. I just wanted to add two tactical things because Zach's mentioning some really tactical things. I wanted to add two tactical things that you can do.
(13:35) One is along with the comments, reviews, and feedback, you can add post-purchase surveys and just ask, "How do you intend to use this product?" Or you can say and leave it open-ended. Or we have a couple of clients where maybe they sell a protein bar. It's like, "How do you plan to use this? Is it a meal replacement? Is it a snack? Is it a pre-workout, a post-workout?" And then you can start to see how they're actually going to plan to use it. And then you can make creative that speaks with the terminology that they're using. "Oh, you plan to use it as a snack.
(13:57) Are you a mom and you need... You're too busy to make a meal?" And then you can dig into that a little bit deeper. The other tactical thing that I'll mention is I'll give this away for... Anyway, that DMS me on T
(14:14) witter, if you're curious. I have a deep research prompt that we use for all clients that onboard with us. And basically, you plug in your... I have... It's a really long prompt. You plug in a URL and it will do a bunch of... It'll run for 20 minutes and it'll give you a bunch of different research on this pillar and angle thing. And it can give you a starting point for what else... The other reasons people might buy your product. Now, it helps if you have some reviews because it'll work that into.
(14:31) But if you're struggling to figure out what does wide mean and what are examples of how I get there, that can be really helpful. So I will share that if you do get me. And ask for it. Awesome. Just value add and get... I mean, probably get 10s of DMS as well. I mean, who knows? Well, maybe five. 10s. Yeah. Exactly. You just have to comment, look, or scale like that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Maybe on YouTube.
(14:54) Maybe people need to comment on YouTube in order to get this. Yeah, exactly. The one thing... Sorry. The one thing that Brad said that I think is super interesting that people, I feel like when they're getting started building brands, don't do enough is use the terminology that their customers use.
(15:11) So, I mean, you could be selling whatever. You could be selling rugs. You could be selling the supplement. You could be selling, honestly, anything. There's definitely terminology that your customers, your true customers will use to define your products, why they use your products, why they like your product.
(15:28) That's just wording that you've never used before in marketing or in any of your ads or on your website or anything like that. Really study that. They go through all of your reviews, go through your Facebook comments, dig in because there might be terminology that you're just missing or you're being too generic about that someone might resonate with if you niche it in a little bit more to the actual customers.
(15:45) Yeah, to Brad's point, I think that that's one big thing. You should definitely spend more time on. I think we've gone into the second piece of this as well, the playbook, which is diversifying winners. Talking about creative diversity, talking about same message, new creative style, duplicate top ads with new copy. I mean, copy is obviously such a huge one that's underutilized.
(16:05) I feel like expand a new personas and demographics. We've talked about this a little bit. Brad, to you in terms of this playbook, what does this mean in terms of diversification for you? Yeah. So, once you start to have some spending and performance going into a couple of different angles, usually what it looks like is you have one ad that's spending 90% of your budget in the ad account and you're like, "Okay, great.
(16:29) I would like to have spend, look, or be evened out across a few more assets." What you can do is then just obsessively pay attention to that ad, how it's getting delivery, and then figuring out what you can do to make it different. Let's say you have a video ad. And so, I have David's protein here as an example because I think their library looks really great.
(16:48) So, we can talk about protein bars again for a second. So, let's say that you've got an angle that's working really well. That's for busy moms. It's like, "Okay, great. How can I..." And the thing that's working right now is a video that's from a mom creator that is talking about how well it works for her. Great.
(17:07) What you can do is you can go to that video and you can figure out how do I iterate this? How do I turn it into statics? How do I turn it into more moms? It's just taking that and expanding it across a bunch of different things. Totally. I mean, a good example of... Let's just take that exact example, busy moms. The post-it note ad is a classic, I'm scrolling through David's protein thing. We do a ton of it at Hollow.
(17:28) There's such an easy way for a mom to resonate with a handwritten note on the fridge, or on, I don't know, maybe a bag in the kitchen, whatever, buy the shoes before you leave the house. I think just taking those moments of that customer demo and trying to say, "What are things that they would do themselves naturally that they might actually pay attention to in the feed that just feels more organic versus maybe just another direct response video that you're basically changing just the three second hook on it.
(17:57) " That to me, I feel like is a great way. For us, we found ways where if we're actually going to do these written format ads, which gets people's attention and they're going to read the text then on this post-it note, is trying to take that and apply it to the use case. Where would a runner be potentially looking at a note that they wrote to themselves? Is that on a gym bag? Is that in chalk where it's at a workout facility or whatever, where it's talking about, "Do 20 burpees today and then also replace your crappy cotton socks with alpaca socks?" I think the biggest thing
(18:34) is trying to get into their headspace and things that they might pay attention to. If, like Brad said, you find something that starts to resonate. Yeah, it's almost a style and a feeling of what they're doing. It's not necessarily as much of a diversifying winners is a part of it, but it's more about taking already what you know and just taking it deeper and taking it in terms of style, in terms of ad type, in terms of potentially ad type, potentially the way it's displayed like you talked about. I think that's a super interesting one, looking at different headlines,
(19:10) urgency, curiosity, emotional versus logical appeals. I think that's a big part of it. When you've seen this not go well before in terms of trying to diversify this, what has been the mistake? I'll say the one that I've seen right out of the gates and that I talk to founder members a lot about is they take an angle to an extreme and then double and triple down on it and don't have enough that they've proven.
(19:39) It is such a niche thing that they think that there's more there that they're necessarily might not be. An example of this is somebody the other day was doubling down on essentially people that they identify the people's like gum health was an issue. It was like oral care product and they were like, "Oh yeah, it's gum health. People are really interested in gum health.
(19:57) " Then all they did was make all this scientific looking ad all about gum health and that's where they took this and there was no other diversification. It was like, "Yeah, there was that angle where they didn't go." Yeah, there was one bullet on this and then it was all in. I understand what you're trying to do.
(20:15) It makes sense, but you also still have to keep that diversification in terms of the message and the type and everything else. I'm not saying that that's not a winning angle, but there's more out. You're going to kill yourself. I don't know what other mistakes you guys see. I'll just hit on one real quick.
(20:32) For Holo, again, just to use our own brand example is it's antimicrobial. It's like a natural fiber. You can talk about the fact that your socks won't stink anymore. No one really gives a shit about that. We've tried it, maybe it resonated in one hook and then it's very easy for you to tell your team or to go tell your agency and be like, "Hey, go make more ads about this," and try to run it as hard as you can.
(20:57) I think unless one absolutely pops off as far as a headline or a hook or some type of new persona that you're going after, be cautious to double down too fast or over index. Definitely over indexing is a could be a huge pain point. We've seen that with Homestead clients in the past, similar to U-Injury, where they have a bag that sells to a specific customer and that's all that they stick to.
(21:22) It's like, "Okay, well, you might have tapped everyone in that niche customer now that has the ability to spend hundreds of dollars on this specific type of bag. You need to think broader than that." Definitely have seen it on both sides. Yeah, I would just add, I think if I had to pick one thing, and Andrew, I think this is what you're alluding to in a way.
(21:41) I think people think probably due to the chatter on Twitter, but they think it's just diversity equals volume and all of a sudden, it's not actually diverse. It's not actually looks different. All of a sudden, you look back and you zoom out and you're looking at a figment board of everything you've created.
(21:59) This all looks the same, but we didn't actually change anything here. We changed the headline because we thought that that's what it meant to create diverse creative. It's like, "Holy shit, we actually haven't achieved that because we just wanted to go and achieve this v
(22:16) olume goal of doing more and more and more." Yeah. Brad's seen the inside of... We did this exactly. We hit a point with one of our new brands where we got an obsession of hiring offshore creatives to just make a ton of statics for us and got to the point where we were making 400 statics a week. They're not unique enough. They were all starting to look the same and also just trying to launch that many assets in a period of time, depending on your spend threshold, can start to break.
(22:45) So yeah, it's definitely about quality of swing over crazy volume and different swing, as Brad's saying. The ads don't look the same. David's Protein, great example of that. Go check out their Facebook ad library. They've got a ton of diversity in their account. I think looking at the third part of this playbook, strategic whitelisting, obviously, is something we've t
(23:08) alked about before. I think to get into this, this is targeting places in your... targeting pages rather, in your winning niches, partnering with relevant content creators, and collaborating with niche influencers, niche, niche, whichever one you feel like, depending on the day. I think this is a big one and one that I would say we are all coming around to in the last six to nine months, and particularly in 2025. I feel like this is an unlock that we're all utilizing. And last year, this was a little bit of a secret sauce.
(23:36) So strategic whitelisting, how does this done well? How do you start to find a few of these folks? And how can this be part of the playbook? Yeah, I think that there's different levels to it. And we just did an episode not too long ago, all about whitelisting. And so if you're looking for more in depth information, I think that's going to be your go to.
(23:53) And I will say before we jump into some of the things you can do quickly with whitelisting to get that started, the next several things, in my opinion, Zach, I'm curious if you disagree with this, the next couple things that we'll talk about, it doesn't have to go in this order.
(24:10) Once you have the thing, you just need something working, and that's the whole point of starting wide, you don't have to go in this exact order. So just want to call that out. No, it should be. It's the Brad $500,000 playbook, you can get it today, $4,799. And it's quite easy payment in the 97. Yeah, it's all easy payments. It's a $20,000 mastermind.
(24:33) It's not a problem. Brad, you got to productize your mind. But no, I understand. I totally get to it. It's not like these can go in any way. I agree with you, but I go. Cool. Yeah, so I think with whitelisting, so there's a couple different levels to it.
(24:50) I think the easiest thing to do is like, okay, you've got an angle and a pillar, however you want to call it, that's working. And you started to diversify kind of the creative and how it looks within that. What you can do, I think that the easiest way to see if whitelisting can at least have some kind of add additional volume to your ad account is just like literally create a page that's like going to chat GPT, give it context about who is responding to your ad right now from a persona and psychographic information.
(25:15) And just say like, I need a Facebook page name, like to go with this or an Instagram page name, like can you give me 10 examples? It's going to give you 10 examples of, I'm not going to make something up off top of my head. It's going to give you 10 examples in your niche. You just grab that plug it into Facebook, make a Facebook page, make an Instagram page, ask it to generate a Facebook profile image with that.
(25:33) And then you set this page up, you duplicate your top ads that are going to that demo to this page, and you see what happens. I think we talked about this on the whitelisting episode, we did that ripped. It doesn't always rip, but it can. Like we can just give an example, right? Let's say you're like a men's skincare brand, then it's like top gifts for men 2025, whatever, that's the page name, or like men's health tips and tricks, whatever.
(25:58) So you can take that as for GPT is really helpful. But just to give like an example of kind of what we're talking about is something along those lines. And yeah, free to do, spin up a page. You don't need likes on it. You don't need crazy stuff. You don't need cover photos unless you really want to. Definitely just a profile photo.
(26:15) And yeah, like Brad said, it's such an easy, I mean, spend an hour on it probably in all reality, but it's an hour task to then see if you can get some more scale. So yeah, we've done this now a handful of times. I think Brad, if you want to keep rolling in through the next stage, I can kind of talk about the influencer whitelisting stuff that we're doing. Yeah.
(26:33) So I think there's kind of like the adjacent one to the niche page. You can make your own niche page, right? The adjacent thing to that is going to like an advertorial site that maybe kind of exists in your industry. I think the quality edit is one that I was actually talking about with somebody on our team today. Like the ritual is perpetually using the quality edit. That's like an adjacent one, but that is one where you have to pay for them for access.
(26:52) That's way more involved. Just duplicate and make your own niche page if you need to for the starting. The next kind of, next step of this is actually going to a content creator or an influencer, like a human being as opposed to a niche page and working with them.
(27:10) And there's different levels to this, whether it's a content creator that has essentially no following, there's micro influencers all the way up through like mega folks. Zach, I think that's where you have a lot more experience. So I'll let you jump in. Yeah. I mean, we tried kind of a handful of them, right? We tried the one to 10,000 follower person, the 10 to a hundred thousand.
(27:29) And then we've also now more recently been trying to like 300,000 to a million five follower, influencer creator, right? I don't know how much detail we wanted to send to a previous episode, but if you haven't listened to that, basically the playbook that we're doing now is we're building a relationship with this person where we're actually taking the time to get their contact information, reach out to them, send them product, just tell them that we're interested in a partnership with them in the future and just see if they want to get free product and see if they like it. It's usually where we start. So it's a slower process this way than the micro or
(27:57) whatever influencer they try out products. Then usually what we're doing is we're signing like a 60 day contract with this individual where they have 30 days to shoot content and then we receive it, edit it, and then 30 days to launch those ads based on that 30 day window. Then we can go into a month to month contract or a longer term contract with these people.
(28:16) We have found that, you know, for hollow and some of our other brands, like now we're spending 30 to $50,000 a month on just like these contracts because this is a great way to add diversification to your ad account of these creators that are really good at making content and running whitelisting ads with their handles of the content that they shoot.
(28:33) One of the bigger hacks though with this is making sure that you're not just giving every one of these partners the same brief. So it's like writing a brief specific to each one. Now this is where the amount of work starts to pick up and this is where I'd say if you're doing a million plus in revenue, this is where you can probably start to tap into this part of the playbook.
(28:53) A million plus in revenue per month. This is where we have found to get incremental scale. So there's definitely been some months where this is like 50% of our ad spend out to all the AI stuff videos that we do, all the internal editing videos that we do, all the statics that we produce internally is this whitelisting ads that with these influencers.
(29:11) I've seen some brands spend a million dollars a month behind an absolute knockout partner like this. So I mean, it's definitely something to look into once you're spending a few hundred thousand dollars a month on Meta when you're trying to feel like you're tapping up against not being able to spend more money. This is a great process.
(29:28) I think that's all super helpful. Again, yeah, a lot of detail in the episode that we reported about it, but I appreciate going through the playbook again. It's useful to hear, I think, across those brands that are doing well and the agencies that represent those brands and the founders membership for this time and time again, that this is a huge part of the reason why they're successful is they have developed and have a longer term vision with whitelisting partners, which is huge. And they've also done what you talked about beginning of their own thing to
(29:56) some degree. One of them was, I think it was Facebook page, it was called Make Your Face Feel Good. And I was like, that's a goodie right there. And I probably picked the... So going into talking about landing page optimization, how often do you think when you start to take winning creatives, personas, and then building landing pages that speak to those particular d
(30:30) emographics, how much does that increase performance that you've seen? That seems to be a common... I mean, because I will say that the times that we've done this, and I've seen other people do this, it's easily an increase in 20% in terms of performance overall, in terms of decrease in pack or whatever metric you're looking at. There seems to be at least a 20... It's not nothing at my point. So I'm curious what you think about it. And what are the keys of landing page optimization as part of the playbook? Yeah.
(30:54) And before I say that, just one more step back. It's each option in here too. And I know I just said that it's not sequential, but I think the point of this episode, generally speaking, is once you have something working, you can just look back on this, take your notes, and it's like, "Great, something's working.
(31:12) What am I supposed to do next?" And you just go pick one of these things and it should be thoughtful. You should be intentional with what you're doing. But the point here is, okay, when you feel stuck and you have something that's working, but you keep running... You add budget and efficiency just drops, then you can come back to this checklist and you say, "Shit, I haven't tried that yet. I should go do that." With intentionality.
(31:29) So to your point, funny enough, in the last week, we've had a really fun win with landing page tests. So we'll just say we have a product going to an older demo. And we're straight up sending it to the PDP founder video talking about why they created it and the reasons explaining the product fed up with all the other options that existed out there. But it was going to the PDP, which worked fine.
(31:54) And this is what I meant, where you could just have to get something working. It was working really, really well. But we took that video and we just like, we looked at where's the spend going on a demographic perspective. Okay, women. It's going primarily 45 and up. Okay, great. Now we know a little bit more about them. What did the comments say? Does X point earlier? What do the reviews say? What is the feedback then to the customer service team? And we start to develop an idea of what really matters to these individuals.
(32:18) And then we take that and we turn it into five reasons why. Just a quick list of page, primarily because it doesn't require a lot of dev time, which I think we just talked about with Ryan Donne on, I think that's literally the last episode. It's just super easy, very copy heavy, couple images you can throw in there. And you can have something up and running in no time.
(32:38) We took all the learnings from that and we just put together five reasons why in order of the volume that these things were coming up. Meaning these issues popped up. The more the issue popped up, the higher it was on the landing page, basically. Since we launched that, I think we're two weeks into this, the performance on the efficiency is doubled. Raul has literally two times time.
(32:59) Now I wouldn't expect it to double every time you do this because there's a couple things that can happen. One, landing pages enable more volume so your efficiency doesn't actually necessarily change. You're just able to spend more because you're spending into it. Or just generally speaking, or you just get more efficiency, which eventually leads to the point number one there. So that's been insane.
(33:17) And the way that we launched it actually was we didn't launch a post click experience, which I'm pretty sure in that episode, we were all like, you should probably launch a post click experience split test. I just duplicated the top ad and flipped the destination. And basically what happened in Meta is day one, original ad to the PDP spent way more. Then they closed, then they closed, then they closed.
(33:34) And day five, it flipped. And now it's not even close. It's all this landing page and still holding on efficiency and still cranking. And I just keep adding budget to it. So that's it. That's my quick example of what I've seen recently. It's nice. I mean, it's nice to listen to a podcast and have something that people can fall onto that gives guaranteed results.
(33:54) You know what I mean? Like that's just so nice. Brad Vlog guaranteed. Guaranteed success. Yeah. The one thing that I want to add is kind of a counter to what Brad just said, which is follows getting the point now where I feel like we've tried every landing page possible that we're only now getting incremental wins off of new landing pages that we test.
(34:13) So I think there's a certain point here where after you've done it, I mean, I think we talked about it in the podcast of Doni. We've launched over 100 landing pages in the last year. After a certain point, there's a template that works best and there's a format and there's language that you use that just works the best.
(34:33) So I mean, I think if you haven't run these landing pages yet, it's definitely worth doing. Definitely start with kind of what we talked about before. Start wide, figure out who's buying your product, see what paying points and headlines and hooks are resonating, get more into the creative diversity, then maybe play around with this whitelisting stuff or move over to a landing page.
(34:49) I think to Brad's point, these are kind of the next two things that we start to mess around with. But there is definitely a point of diminishing returns. You're not going to get this double ROAS every single time you launch a new landing page, especially if you've already tested different formats, variants, A-B tests of what sections show first, all that good stuff.
(35:05) So I think just to bring it back to reality on that other side of it is there will be a point where you can't push it much more and then you lean back into the ad creative stuff and say, "Okay, well, what more can I go do there?" Yeah. I mean, I think one piece that goes into all of these ideas is offer optimization strategy.
(35:24) And that can go across so much of it and is very ignored by so many people. Obviously, you've done a ton of offer testing. Zach, I think that's something that you do incredibly well. What are the keys that you wish would be out there that people don't talk about when it comes to offers? So what are the pieces of it? I mean, it first starts with the math.
(35:46) If the math isn't math-ing, it's never going to work for you. So I say that when it comes to like, "Hey, we're going to offer a discount offers a dollar off. We're going to test that." Or, "Hey, we're going to do a free gift to the purchase." What does that actually mean to your margin? And what does that mean to where performance has to get to for it actually to back out? Even with bundling.
(36:03) So for Holo, great example, started adding bundles in, increased AOV up. With that increased AOV, we were able to spend more into our CPA. And it worked out and it backed out and it was beneficial to us. But I think just starting with the math of understanding, "Hey, I'm going to, to Brad's point in one of our previous episodes, I'm going to make this starter pack or whatever variety pack. And then we're going to try and sell two of them before we give a bigger discount." You have to really do the math on what is the cost of delivery,
(36:31) like the true landing cost of that product at the customer's door with the discount in mind before you actually figure out then, "Okay, is this offer going to make sense for my business or not?" So that's usually where we start. So internally, if we want to change an offer for Holo or one of our other brands is we build on a model, build on a financial model.
(36:51) What is the cost of goods? What is the cost of delivery? Hey, if we add more products to it, does that mean our shipping cost goes up or a pick pack at our 3PL goes up? Yes. So we have to factor that in. Then we start to figure out, "Okay, here's our target range CPA that we can spend into this new offer." Which may mean, "Hey, if we can push up AOV 20 bucks, that may mean we can spend another $10 in cost per acquisition.
(37:10) If we know that our CPC or cost of traffic and conversion rate are at these baseline numbers, I know that I can get four more clicks and get the same conversion rate and it's still going to back out because that's where the actual cost of traffic versus conversion rate backs into your CPA.
(37:31) " So I think starting with the math and figuring out, "Okay, if I roll out a new offer, what could that do? What will that change my AOV to? And then based on that AOV, what can I afford from a cost of traffic or a conversion rate standpoint of maybe my cost of traffic can go up, my conversion rate can come down, or the inverse or the opposite or whatever?" I think you have to take into consideration that math before you pick your offer, but that's what a lot of people don't do. And that's why they're afraid to do it.
(37:55) Because some people might say, "Hey, I can't offer 40% offer. I can't offer 30%. 20 is my max." Well, if you push up AOV and you get people to spend twice as much as they are now, even after discount, even after cost of delivery, your contribution margin that you're able to produce off of your CPA not increasing because conversion rate stays flat, cost of traffic stays flat, because buyer intent goes up with a better offer, that's where the real wins can start to be unlocked. So I say when it comes to offer optimization strategies, start with a
(38:23) math and then figure out how you can roll it out and what it can look like on your site and on your landers and in your ads. Do you think when you, with all these options, the idea in theory is you have something working.
(38:43) You're maybe hitting your head against the glass ceiling and all of these things are checklist options for, "Okay, if I look back and I pick one of these, I'm picking offer, that's maybe going to help me break through the glass ceiling." Is that like exactly the thing about it? Totally. Yeah, yeah. So for example, for Holo, we were trying to triple last year, or triple last year, double this year.
(39:00) To do that, I'm like, "Okay, I need to be able to likely because we're going to double our spend. We're going to go from spending 7 million total in advertising last year to 15 to 20 million this year. Likely the efficiency of that advertising spend is going to go down in theory because those numbers are starting to get pretty big. I then need to find a way where my CPA can go up and the math still makes sense.
(39:20) " So I basically said, "Okay, if my CPA is going to go up from $50 to $75 on a new customer acquisition cost, how can I make those $25 backup?" And for us, because it's more of a first-time purchase, not a crazy LTV play for us, we're trying to be profitable on first purchase, I have to push my AOV up even more.
(39:37) So that's where I'm basically saying, "Okay, maybe we're doing bundles of an 8 pair of socks right now and this can be relevant to anything, t-shirts, supplements, whatever. If I'm selling one, I could sell three." So we basically said, "Hey, instead of selling 8 on average in our bundles, let's push up to 12 and let's not change the discount.
(39:53) " And that, in theory, just pushed up AOV and maintained our margin profile that we wanted to be at. And that's what gave us that little extra room to spend $25 more and still be at the same profit on first purchase.
(40:11) So to me, that's kind of like it comes either when you're stuck and you're not able to push through or when you're really trying to scale up and you know with more scale that your CPA is likely going to go up. So that's kind of like the two points where we start to figure out, "Okay, what's a change in offer that could maybe help fix this?" So let me give you a scenario that was recently presented to me and see what you think and reference to offer and sort of all the things we've talked about.
(40:33) This particular company, or this particular company, they have one... They have a number of products. They think they have three products, but they have basically one bundle that they push up. It's men's skin care. And it comes with all three products and there's not been any innovation necessarily in the offer because it's the same products. And there hasn't been necessarily any innovation in the landing pages.
(40:59) They're sending everything to the landing page for that particular bundle. They don't have the inventory or the money to go out and... I think they're maybe thinking about developing new products, but where do they go? Obviously, I have ideas, but what do you guys think in terms of where they could go? Because I think a lot of folks get into that.
(41:18) How do they make that offer more interesting? Because they don't have the money to go develop a brand new product or bundle it differently. It's not like you've got five face washes or whatever. It's like, who cares if you won? I'm a guy, so I'm going to use one every day maybe. Yeah, that's a good one.
(41:37) It's a tough scenario to try and crack. So there's two things I think of right away. One is an accessory product that can cost less than a dollar that they can source from overseas that can add $10 to $12 in value to their overall bundle that might allow them to push up the price of their bundle without having to push up the price of their face wash or moisturizer or whatever else they're selling. So to me, that's like maybe it's like a scrub brush or something for their skin or whatever.
(42:01) It's like you use this every day before you wash your face and it's like this extra tool that's now necessary to get the best experience. If you can sell that into it, that's a good option. I've seen a lot of brands where they've added this one-off accessory literally to source from overseas is $1, $2, but retail value on it is $15 that'll push up AOV $15. So that's one that I would look into if I'm this company, for example.
(42:26) The other one, which is an obvious one, is just increase the price. Try to find a way to increase the price where you can make the offer seem more compelling. So let's say they're selling this bundle. I just googled men's skincare bundles for 40 bucks, 50 bucks. I'm not sure what they're pricing it at.
(42:43) What I would try to do is try to find a way to, on the front end, through a listicle or a landing page, educate why our product is more premium than anything else that's out on the market so that someone that's coming in from a listicle landing page to a product page, which is likely this bundle page, is already anticipating this being a more premium product so that that way when the price is slightly higher, they have less of a reaction to it.
(43:05) So I think that a lot of brands don't do that enough, is talk about how premium things are and use words like that. Now, the thing that you can do with that is you can always price things up and find ways to discount them down with subscription. So if I'm these guys, I'm doing one of two things. If I'm focused on one-time purchase, I'm trying to find this accessory product that's super cheap to source and easy to source and bring it in and add an extra $15, $20 to the AOV of this bundle and explain why it's necessary to get the best experience of the product. Or B, push the price of the one-time purchase up very high,
(43:32) significantly much higher, discount down on sub and save. Maybe their CPA doesn't change, but now they're getting much more subscription revenue. So I'm probably going one of those two options, the price increase thing is another thing that's in the middle.
(43:49) We've definitely found at Homestead, we had a client that was selling a product for $150. We just increased it to $250 one day on a shoppable landing page. Conversion rate didn't change. So I think if you're acquiring and you're trying to scale and 90% of your customers are new, they don't know what your product is priced at. They don't know what it was priced at.
(44:07) You can take those shots at Gold to see like, "Hey, what happens if I add another $100 to this price?" I mean, my conversion rate could cut in half and it could still back out if my cost of traffic stays the same. So those are the three. Brad, I know you have to go by the way. So Zach and I will close it out, Brad. We want you to stay alive and not have your wife kill you. Oh, it's okay. I can hang tight for a little bit. We're good. Okay.
(44:26) I'll just, we'll wrap it up here then. All right. It's my collapse. Super appreciated. Good idea, Zach. I mean, I think it's kind of that practicality, right? And if you have more questions like this, always feel free to direct message to guys or email me and you're at talksalabigital.com. I will just say that I have only received messages from SaaS vendors.
(44:44) I've never received a question actually from the podcast, which is good and bad. It could be that we're explaining things well or they think I'm a total loser or maybe it's both. So who knows? But anyway, look, you can always reach me and your foxalabigital.com or the guys on Twitter. I think super interesting to go through.
(45:06) Guys, anything else in running through the playbook that we want to make sure that we're mentioning? I think just like this is outside of starting wide because I think that's kind of inescapable. I think you kind of need to do that unless you have a really strong idea of what's going to work. I think this again, it's just a checklist of options that you can work through when you're feeling stuck.
(45:24) And this was inspired for me at least by trying to build an internal tool for our team. Whereas when you're hitting the ceiling and you're not sure what to do next or things aren't looking like they're going in the right direction, go to the checklist and then think about it. Just stare at it for a little bit, pick an option, commit to the option, and then roll the test with that. So yeah, hopefully it's valuable for you all as a resource.
(45:41) Also, I have had people DM me and ask questions. So maybe it is a you thing, I'm not sure. But it has been very great. And I've really enjoyed answering some of those questions. I think at some point, it'd be fun to share some of those anonymously here on an episode.
(45:59) So yeah, Zach, anything from your own? No, I think it's looking at all five of these things in one tweet would be overwhelming and be like, "I don't know where to start." Just chip away at it. I think a lot of people try to do it all at once and they kind of half-ass their way through it. We've used the word intentional on this podcast and full-time.
(46:14) You have to be intentional to get the results that you want to see. So slowly chip away at them, start wide, then go into creative diversity, then maybe try a whitelisting page, then maybe try a listicle, then maybe if that's all of those things are not working, then maybe it's your offer. So I think it's just being intentional about what you choose to do versus trying to do a little bit of everything.
(46:34) Unless you have a big team and you're a big brand, then go for it and do all of these things all at once. Otherwise, for the 99% of us out there, just pick one and chip away at it over the course of the week and likely you'll see some progress. I will say, Brad, that one listener sent both of us a direct message and you had already responded to him. I said, "Whatever Brad says, he's my guru," and then the person just wrote back, "hehe," which I feel like is proper response. So they see you texted us both or message us both.
(47:05) "Hey, look guys, thanks for being here and we'll look forward to the next episode." The only way that we grow this podcast is by you sharing it with your friends. Honestly, reviews don't really mean anything too much anymore. They're really meaningful, but they don't do a lot for the growth of the podcast.
(47:30) So sharing YouTube links, sharing Spotify links, sharing Apple, whatever we call it under the podcast app now, anything you can share, the better we're going to be. Guys, anything else you want to say on this? Yeah, please go check us out on YouTube, rack up those views for us. We'd love to see it. And then subscribe. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well.
(47:48) And I relentlessly refresh the YouTube comments because it dictates my mental health for the day. So please say something nice about all of us. Thank you everyone. Thanks for listening. Honestly.
