18-Year CEO Shares Strategies to Achieve 3x Growth

18-Year CEO Shares Strategies to Achieve 3x Growth Speaker 1: We have like an idea session where everyone's kind of throwing ideas and I had to teach the team how do I evaluate. Picking the ideas, because not all ideas are really the right choice to go with, at least at this time. So you always have a big list of ideas, but how do you determine which is like a high probability idea or a low probability idea? And sometimes you can take a swing at low probability ideas, but you need to decide, okay, what's the ratio of high probability ideas versus low probability ideas that we want to swing for? And sometimes that ratio for us changes throughout the year depending on our performance or the seasonality of things. Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today we have Andrew, who is CEO of CreateUnity, also has a portfolio of brands he's been building and takes a really cool and clever look at how you should be looking at creative, which I think creative is something that's on top of everyone's minds, especially in today's climate, whether you're running on Meta, AppLove and TikTok, wherever it may be. So first of all, super gracious that you're coming and spending time with us, Andrew. I'm excited to get into it, but for the few viewers who may not have heard of you, may not know your background, give us a little bit about your early days and what it took to get to where you are today. Speaker 1: Sure, and thank you so much for inviting me onto the show. I really appreciate it. I'm a big fan of the show. I watch it all the time. Speaker 2: Appreciate that. Speaker 1: So my background, really, I started back in 2005 as an affiliate marketer. So over the years, I've done all faucets of affiliate marketing in one way or the other. At one point, I did pivot to more of an agency model. So I worked a lot with B2B clients, distributors, manufacturers, things like that. But it wasn't really my core passion, so I kind of Pivoted back into affiliate for a while on the paid advertising side. And then in 2021, I'm like, all right, I need something different, something a little bit longer term vision that I can really scale big. And I committed to getting into e-commerce. And so that's where that story begins. Speaker 2: That's awesome. And tell us a little bit about the composition of How your brands and your portfolios kind of set up versus also you have an agency of sorts too. Tell us a little bit about that composition. Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. So my core focus is our e-commerce portfolio company. The goal in the beginning with this when I got into e-commerce was to build and grow our own brands. And over time develop a portfolio. So we're just now getting to the stage where we're launching additional brands, but we have one primary brand still. We do have like a media buy agency. So we work with select clients for just media buying services. And then there's some other company projects that we're working on. But my main focus is really around the e-commerce side of things. Yeah. Speaker 2: Very cool. We're excited to get into it because I think a lot of people always, especially the ones who have scaled brands, and we were kind of on the side of this is like, we think you can do it multiple times over and everyone wants to create a portfolio. We kind of weren't able to be successful in our league because I think we needed to be ultra focused. I definitely want to touch a little bit on how you guys are able to build that and then the systems and the teams around it. But maybe the first step that I think would be really cool to dive into is, You look at kind of where we are sitting in today, you know, mid 2025. And I think it'd be really good to understand like, what is the one thing that you guys are, you feel like you're constantly working on or constantly optimizing, whether it's creative or your operational system, or if it's testing out different platforms, where it's kind of the one place where the common denominator of things you're working on, when it comes to all your brands, that feels like it's something that does stays on top of your mind. Speaker 1: I think one of the main things from my perspective recently is really structure, operational structure within the company. Like you were saying, how do you effectively manage and grow multiple brands? It's a challenge for sure. And then you have to like, there's this transition process where when do you start building maybe pods of teams to help control certain brands? We're kind of going through that phase right now. Our main brand, because it's quite seasonal, this is a slower period of the year, so our team has quite a bit of capacity. So our goal is really to kind of ramp up and get more momentum on the second brand and then gradually expand the team and decide exactly how do we need to structure things. So right now our team capacity is pretty competent for that. We have a larger team than what we need to operate the first brand. So we've kind of been carrying a little bit extra load for the last couple of years in the anticipation that we would be branching into more brands. But it's a bit tricky for sure. In terms of, you know, creatives is something you constantly have to have a team around improving. I'm an advocate of 1% improvement even a month really adds up in the long run across all areas. So we periodically will audit almost quarterly what areas of the company can we actually still improve both in costs and efficiencies. Not all of them are projects that we put to the top of the list, but there's also there's those ones that have like a high impact. So we always kind of revisit this very often and make sure we're making smart decisions in that area. People is also another big piece. It's hard to really cultivate a strong team, especially when maybe we do things a little bit differently than some brands or everyone has their own style and approach. And the fact that we're fully remote also is a little bit of a different challenge as you're growing. When you get past 20, 30 people, it's like, how do you keep everyone in sync? How do you keep the alignment, the motivation? Does everyone see the vision? Are they really committed? And so that's a lot of my job today seems to be finding more of the right people and then trying to really coach them and really be hands on with them to get them up to speed as quickly as possible and to make sure that with this long term. Speaker 3: I mean creative the conversation that a lot of people are having recently is. Things change very quickly, right? And you have the team that's kind of set up to ideate, carry out, and then kind of test and then iterate, right? I'm very curious the process of how are you guys actually coming up with strategy? Where are you guys taking inspiration from and actually rolling out some of these ideas? Speaker 1: So the creative part, I've spent the last few years really trying to structure the creative team that would allow me to step out of it because when you're the founder, you really have the most context to how everything in the business operates. And in the past I would step away for say two weeks at a time and you'd very quickly see performance kind of veer off track. And then it takes several weeks to get it back on track and so you lose time, you lose money. And then it was early last year where we really had kind of a big breakthrough. We've gradually like improved our team over like bringing in more the right people, kind of the structure of the creative side of the team. But really when we got things really nailed into a process, so we use ClickUp pretty heavily for a lot of this stuff. We mapped it out. We did maybe four iterations of improvements in Q1 of last year. And then we also brought in a couple more people to really take more ownership. What we found was that it's hard to improve and keep consistency if you don't know, if you don't have a specific task being owned by a specific person. And we didn't really have The detail structure of that as well as we should have until last Q1. And what I mean by that is like, okay, so we have like an idea session where everyone's kind of throwing ideas, and I had to teach the team how do I evaluate Picking the ideas, because not all ideas are really the right choice to go with, at least at this time. So you always have a big list of ideas, but how do you determine which is like a high probability idea or a low probability idea? And sometimes you can take a swing at low probability ideas, but you need to decide, okay, what's the ratio of high probability ideas versus low probability ideas that we want to swing for? And sometimes that ratio for us changes throughout the year, depending on our performance or the seasonality of things. But once we fixed the process and really drove super, super deep, and we had each step of the process from ideation all the way through the final output attract individual people, we could start coaching those people who are missing those steps. Or we found that certain people just weren't competent enough and we had to like rotate them out. When we started putting multiple people, we kind of cut the number of people we had in the idea sessions out. Because some people just give random ideas. They don't have enough context to the business or to marketing and they might be okay ideas but they're maybe trendy ideas and I tend to try to focus on more evergreen concepts predominantly. Things that we can reiterate over and over and over long term. So we kind of consolidated who were the brains behind the idea session. I was involved for quite some time, and then I slowly started to pull myself out of those sessions. But then we ultimately had one person shortlisting and deciding what task we're going to focus on first. And then by having the processes on ClickUp, And our marketing manager involved really hands-on in that process with the team. Our output started to get better quality. We haven't really been veering off track very often. Occasionally I see something change or that they're making a small mistake, but I think that's expected at times. But that really solved a lot. So I've been able to move my attention away from creatives. I occasionally pop into some of the meetings just to see how the discussion's going. Are they talking about the right ideas? We don't have like a real direct creative strategist on the team. We're kind of using some of our copywriters to kind of control that aspect of things. But we've also built quite a few custom data reports because I think A lot of people don't understand how to read data and it's about patterns and you have to kind of simplify it for the team so they just really quickly know where to focus their attention. When you're testing hundreds or thousands of ads over the year, you need to cut through the noise. What are like the five or ten percent that we need to dive a bit deeper into and understand what's working. So we tend to track like concept levels. So for example, In Q4, we'll launch like 200, 300 ads a week. So quite a lot. Most of those are iterations. But you'll see after a period of time, when you look at our data report, we aggregate all ad spend. Every ad has their own ID, which is tied to a concept. And then we have variations. So if you do an iteration, it's like V1, V2, V3, but the core concept is the same ID. And you can see patterns. Those patterns are great because now we have a list in our report of all the ideas we launched over a period of time. And there's certain concepts that just stand out on ROAS or better performance. And so we know the team can look at that report very easily and understand, okay, let's dive deeper into these concepts. Now, what are like creative styles that we can apply to this concept, shoot new actors, things like that. And so providing Teaching your team how to understand the data at least a little bit. And then having one person in control of really shortlisting ideas, because then I can coach that person to think more like how I think. Speaker 2: So smart. Speaker 3: Process is, I think, probably the most important piece, right? Because if without the process, I think a lot of brands need to have a systematic approach to coming up with creatives, deploying weekly, iterating weekly. Because without that, I feel like if you kind of hit this like low period, it's like you're trying to play catch up and say, oh, well, we need more creative, we need better creative, right? And I'm sure like even we've fallen fall to that too, where it's like, oh, we're kind of like a little bit complacent, right? Performance is good. And then it's like, oh, well, something something broke. And it's like, well, we don't have a backup, right? We'd love to get a little bit more into the weeds of your creative strategy and how you guys are actually coming up with concepts. For the people that we've spoken to, other brands, I think the biggest struggle right now is coming up with the actual Creatives that are going to target the right audience, right? Especially with this new update from Meta, they prefer volume now, right? So how can brands use their data to come up with a high volume stream of creatives? What are you guys doing there? What would be some of the tips that you would share for brands out there? Speaker 1: Sure, and I'll disclose like so, our brand's Aeromoto. It's a portable tire inflator brand and we're very seasonal, like 70% of our business is the last four months of the year. So that's when creative is very important for us. Throughout the year, We tend to struggle a lot with the creatives no matter what we test or what we do. It's like nothing's really meaningful. Occasionally we find a winner that we scale but it tends to be short term. But in Q4 very different. So I think what would be applicable to your question is how we approach getting prepared for Q4 because that's a really unique thing that we approach and I think it might help others think about it differently. So we tend to start seeing an uptick in performance in September, mid to late September. I think it's like the very, very early Christmas buyers, the most 5% earliest guys or ladies. And so when we start to see that happening, that's when our team is very focused on diversity of ideas, really going super broad. We have a small mix of ideas historically that work, typically some of our core angles, maybe even some past concepts. We like to revalidate them every year, but generally they're pretty consistent. But that's where we dive in. What are all the angles that we haven't tested yet this year? What are all the new ad styles and trends and podcast styles or whatever might be out there? So we go super, super broad throughout September. So that way our team can shoot content. We can get content from actors and really kind of just do a broad test. And what we're looking for in those cases, what are the concepts or ideas, whether it be angles or ad styles, That stand out, even just slightly stand out. Because there's not usually something that's a home run for us yet at that time. But you can typically see there's like a 10 or 20% better result from certain concepts than others. So then going into the first part of October, we kind of double down on those groups of ads that we find that are just a little bit standing out. So we start to consolidate and take a little bit less risk on the ideas that we test. That gives us opportunity to test more actors around those angles, maybe change up the styles, do a lot more iterations of the hooks and the lead portions of the videos, test the tempos, the links, things of that nature. And then by mid-October, We're pretty clear on what's working because performance improves again, you have a little bit more of those early Christmas shoppers, so the performance starts to pick up for us. And that gives us a two to four week period where we can continue to kind of just get more content around those concepts because we find that once you find concepts that work, Your win rate goes up. So you just need a lot of hook content. That's really one of the main drivers for us. So when I say we launch two to three hundred ads a week throughout Q4, it's mostly iterations by the end of October onward. It's almost all iterations because we have maybe ten concepts that work really, really well. Now we want volume as you were saying. So we'll push out as much volume as we can to the point where you just have to like cap because we only have so much inventory. So like last year, We got to a point where we had 900 ads like stockpiled ready to launch. It's a little bit overkill, I know, but I'd rather have the ads and not need them versus the other situation. But when we have things dialed in and things are really working well, then you just control how much you launch. But this kind of process where you kind of validate the ideas, double down again, and then whatever's working best there, double down again. Just kind of keep that double down process. That really allows us to have a huge volume of very winning creatives throughout all of Q4. Speaker 3: I think iterations mean something different for everybody, right? For some, it's like, well, let me just change the first three seconds, right? For others, it's, well, this concept works. Let me change the CTA or let me recreate this video, but with just a different creator, right? What are the best ways to actually take a winner and iterate on it? Speaker 1: Great question. So we track, you know, hook rates, hold rates, average watch times. We find that evaluating those metrics tend to be most often the more accurate way to look at things. Obviously, are you getting the right people to watch the hook? And then how much of the content are they digesting? So obviously, if the people that are watching the hook are staying on 50% through the hold rate, that means there's something resonating with them, right? And that usually leads to longer average watch time. So there's more sold. So we tend to see that as like a big indicator. Iterations for me can be a lot of things for sure. It's a very broad topic basically. But for us, Links of videos are important. It's not the most important thing, but it's one of them. Hooks are for sure where we lean into the most. So just changing out the first three seconds. Sometimes it's just changing out the headline in the first three seconds. Sometimes it's changing out the whole piece of content in the first three seconds. That can vary. Speaker 3: How do you ideate that? Because you have something that's working, right? There's obviously a very specific headline or text overlay that's attracting that audience and they're resonating. How do you actually go about creating multiple versions of it? Speaker 1: One, we just create new ways of saying the same thing as many times as we can. Sometimes it's a longer form of it. Other times it's a more concise form of it. That's one aspect. And then the other aspect, we kind of go with a little bit more of a spray and pray kind of methodology where we just go, all kinds of ideas that we can think of and see if they, as long as they're congruent with the ad and then also apply those. And then we do a quick test. Cause usually when you have like a winning concept and you launch a new idea around it, you'll know much more quickly than a cold ad if it's going to make traction or not. So we do a little bit of spray and pray and a little bit again, doubling down on the core thing that we see working. I would say most often it's the, The content itself, not the headline that we change, that seems to be the most impactful thing for us. And then if we're really trying to fuel a winning creative, we will reshoot it with multiple actors for sure. That's like a give me. That's a very impactful piece. And then like I said, cutting down the size from like 30 seconds to 15 or 60 seconds or whatever, that's a great way to accelerate. Some people just want to get to the point. Others are a little bit okay with just watching a longer form video. We also change up like The audio, sometimes we have music playing in the background. We will replace it with maybe 10 different trending audios that are going around right now because people are hearing those more often or the algorithms are liking that kind of audio for some reason. So we'll just change the background noise sometimes. We haven't had much success with the colors, changing colors of banners and stuff. Sometimes we see an impact and I think it depends on the brand as well. But for us it hasn't been super impactful so we don't put a lot of attention there. We don't often do a tremendous amount of call-to-action testing. That's something we don't do because I think if the first half of the video, this is my theory, if the first half of the video is doing its job people are already pretty qualified. Now if you're changing out the call-to-action it might be if you're Repositioning offers. So if it's a percentage offer versus like a buy one get one, those are good CTA offers to test. But if you're doing more like, hey, click here, check out our deal, see what's going on, that kind of general CTA, we don't really do a lot of testing with. Speaker 3: This might be a more in the weeds question, but from what I've Red that's coming out of meta and the best practices for like creative testing is they want volume, but they want diversity. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Right. So I go back and forth on this where it's like you have a winning ad that's very clear why it's a winner and you're like, okay, how do I extend the shelf life of this? Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 3: It's obviously what we just mentioned, right? Change the first three seconds, maybe recreate it with a different creator. Now the way that in my head, it almost feels like counterintuitive because it's like, Well, if I'm just recreating the same ad over and over and over again, is this something that is scalable, right? In my head, it can either work really well or it doesn't, right? So I'm very curious your philosophy on Over-iterating too much or do you find that, you know what, it's fine, we have a winner, let's just keep going at it until it breaks? Speaker 1: I think it's also about how aggressive you're scaling it to. You can extend the life of ads by not scaling so aggressively, which could give you a little bit longer runway to find new winners or things to come to support it. So just be mindful of that. We've seen that. My theory, I don't think diversity is huge outside of hooks. I do think that's a big impact but when you're talking about like say mixing diversity of image ads or you know VSL or long form or short form, I don't find that as impactful as meta keeps leaning into. We do add that but it's such a small mix. I think it maybe taps into certain segments of the audience, but I don't really ever see a major impact and improvement of results from that. Speaker 3: By having diversity. Speaker 1: By having diversity. I think you should have it, but I don't think you should put a lot of emphasis and resources around it, right? Because I personally haven't seen a major... I like to go by the data. If the data says it's working, great, put more resources on it. I don't see that happening. We have concepts. One particular concept we've been working with for over two years. It's consistently, even throughout our weaker period of the year, this time of year, it's consistently one of our best performers. We've iterated it probably 1,500 times or more. And it's weird because I don't understand exactly why. It's a very simple ad. But even throughout Q4 it was one of our top spenders as well and it's been going for two and a half years almost. So I think it depends on obviously your addressable market. The bigger the market you have then those kind of ads will last longer because there's some people that just haven't seen it yet. If you have a smaller more niche market or very competitive market and a lot of competitors using similar styles I think your ad fatigue will happen a little bit more frequently. But Yeah, I'm not sure if I fully addressed your question, but that's my thoughts on it, yeah. Speaker 3: I mean, I would love to maybe get into that example. Speaker 1: Sure. Speaker 3: Right, like what is this example? Like what was one, how did you find the concept, realize it was a winner, and then what are the things you're doing to iterate on it? Speaker 1: Yeah, so one of our editors based in the Philippines actually created this concept off of a script that we had and in the beginning we were also trying to really deep dive and try to understand why is this ad consistently working and It's such a simple ad. It's a very simple, straightforward product demo ad. Nothing special. Maybe 60 seconds. Speaker 3: And this is for the pump? Speaker 1: For the air motor, yes. Correct, yeah. One thing that we identified in the initial hook was it was a really odd background. It was like the product on the table and someone just opened it out of the box. But the background, like the tablecloth or whatever, is like a really weird pattern, like a burnt orangish color with a really weird design. And I think that just kind of stood out a lot. And so it caught more people's attention. So we tried to iterate off that concept and come up with more really weird backgrounds. We did not have the same success with it. But what we found is... We can use this ad for all the holidays, all the special promo deals, so like going into July 4th, for example. We'll take the same ad, just add a banner with, like, you know, July 4th sale, etc. Relaunch it, and it works. So we've been able to tailor it a bit to, like, promo periods. Same thing for Christmas, and it just works. And I think it's not a major change. We've also re-shot it, so we'll take the same, like, first 5 or 10 seconds of the video, and then we'll refresh the content behind it. That seems to work as well. And then I'd have to check with the team on what other iterations are actually working. I'm not super in the weeds on that particular one, but it's just consistently we find new ideas, new ways of testing it. And we tend to do very broad tests. Take that ad, we'll do 50 iterations of it and we'll test it over a couple of week period and usually we'll find a few solid winners out of it. Speaker 3: No, I love that. I appreciate the live example. I think a lot of people try to, they have their version of like iterating and creating and I don't think there's one right way to do it. Speaker 1: I don't think so either. Speaker 3: Right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: And so I think just getting the idea of like, okay, well, what are some of the things that I should be doing? I think that was super helpful. Speaker 1: So thank you. And I also think like, You know, volume does play a big part, right? We all want to be efficient with our budgets, but sometimes you just have to spend and you have to test, test, test. And like, I like to be structured. And try to figure out why is something working and how can we replicate that over and over. But I think it's really difficult to figure out the algorithm. Like why does a creative just stick? And it's a fluid situation where you have a theory but it doesn't mean your theory is accurate. 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That's why big brands such as Dr. Squash and even Vital Proteins are using Recharge. So if you're looking for a powerful, all-in-one subscription platform, head over to Get Recharged today to see how you can pump up your LTV for your brand. Now, let's get back to the episode. But I'm more so curious on like obviously, you know, you've built Aeromoto to be multi-figure brand. But I can also tell that you guys have a lot of output in terms of even just creative. Talk a little bit about like your infrastructure and what this looks like. 10 different agencies. Is this a bunch of in-house people? Maybe you can also talk a little bit about the tools you guys are using. Is it spreadsheets or is it motion or is it, you know, something else that someone hasn't heard of? So a little bit about the infrastructure of the engine that's making this possible. I think sometimes people are just like, I don't even know where to start to hit that type of output. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's taken four years, so it's not a quick process for sure. You know, when I got into ecom, My background being marketing and at the end of the day, you can't really get anything going until you have revenue, right? You need some revenue and my advice is like, okay, find something that generates revenue. Then your second step is find how to make it consistent. Then you can improve upon consistency. So in the beginning, my whole thought was do as much of it in-house as possible because I like control. Maybe I'm a control freak, I'm not sure, but it's also about, I also know how agencies can operate. It's not always the most cost effective, meaning you can pay an agency for 20 creatives a month, or I can take the same resources, build an internal team. Yes, it's a little slower to get off the ground, but then we can have five or 10x the output for the same cost. It just takes you a little longer to get there. So I think there's a value in both, depending. But the way I reviewed it was, what's my strength, which is marketing, What's my goals and also what's your resources? If your strength is not marketing, then you might need to lean in the beginning on some agencies that help you get started so you can focus on where you're strongest. And then ultimately, I would suggest in most cases, bring some of that in-house over time as it makes sense and as you can support it, as long as you have the right people leading that area of the team. So right now, we only have one agency relationship. It's an email marketing agency. Everything else we do in-house. The first year, my first hire was a support rep. And my second hire was a marketing manager. Neither of which were super experienced, but I just needed some support. I truly had no idea what I was doing with hiring at that time. So I made a lot of mistakes the first year, for sure. At the end of the year, we had about seven people, I believe. But I realized I was still doing like 95% of everything. I was working around the clock and in Q4 I was quite stressed and intense because we got a huge bump in sales and I was trying to maximize that period. But going into the second year, I needed some operational support. Someone to help me structure things, someone to really take over the hiring because I wasn't really doing a good job of that at all. So we just slow built things really, really slow. Everything was being done in house. I wouldn't say it was being done perfectly. But you know, sometimes you can do it 70 or 80% right and then come back later and improve upon it further and just kind of keep iterating that improvement process over time. So we just slowly started building things out. But outside of getting the Ops person that second year, the next thing I started focusing on was creatives. Because obviously we need to have consistent creative output. You know, we didn't really have a structured process at that time to have a weekly cadence of testing ads. More importantly, my product requires demonstration and you have to hook it to a tire. So it's not easy to just even send it to a UGC creator and let them wait five or ten minutes recording a video of it inflating their tire. So we had to bring some of that in-house so we could really shoot the type of shots that we needed. And then we would start to find things that worked and then we would use UGC actors to accelerate more volume of that kind of content. So it's just a really slow build around that area. Fast forward now, our team's about 50 people. A big part of it is like the marketing and creative side. The other largest would be like our phone and support team. So I put a lot of emphasis on the creative aspect of things and that's why we can produce so much volume. We have, I believe, eight editors. We have one person leading the editing team. We have three copywriters. We have a content manager who does all the sourcing of actors and that kind of stuff and helping our production manager who shoots content on site or in a studio. So we've just slowly built this over time. Speaker 3: I'm very curious because it's something that's been top of mind for me and our team, which is leveraging AI. Some of the use cases for us is taking all of our reviews, all of our post-purchase surveys, all of our customer zero-party data, feeding it to an AI and trying to extract these little nuggets that we can then go and turn into creatives. Obviously, you can do it yourself and kind of scroll through 10,000 rows on an Excel sheet, but in my opinion, I think it's just a lot easier to have something that can kind of summarize everything all at once. I'm curious your guys' take. Are you guys using AI to help your guys' systems? What are some unique use cases that you're using it for? Speaker 1: Specific to creative? Yeah. What we found is that obviously it's great for research, but you also need to supplement it with your own data. Because otherwise it's just too broad, too general, and not always accurate. Or it hits like the most common points and it's just not as effective because that's what everyone's tapping into. So something we've started to do is not only take our own data, but also like reviews on Amazon from competitors, dig through Reddit and feed it some of that kind of data and we're finding some unique angles sometimes that we haven't tapped into or that competitors haven't tapped into. What we find is The prompts you use or like the input of the instructions is important. So we'll like one of the ways that we I use it for scripts, for example, is we'll find ads that are running for, say, two or three months from other brands in our space or outside of our space. We'll transcribe it, plug it into ChatGPT and tell it to give us an actual breakdown of the structure. And then we can use that as a template or a playbook where we can then feed it input, feed it the data that we have and say, hey, build us a script around this angle. So we want to control the angle sometimes. And then it kind of spits out a rough script based on that framework and then we can test that framework. And then we'll do that periodically and so now we have a pretty good group of ad structures that work pretty well. They don't always work so we kind of rinse and repeat that piece. I think for the new brand that we just recently launched is where we're seeing more benefit from the AI technology. Just because it's easier to sell this product and it can just spit out so many ideas. I think volume is a big part of the benefit there for us. Beyond that, yeah, really research and copy is probably not different than how you're using it, but I also think it's important to, okay, you give it input of your data, you get some research, you test something, go back and give it more feedback on how it turned out or what you saw. So maybe say, hey, this gave us a very strong hook rate or like, you know, for people watching it the first three seconds. But conversion rates pretty soft. With the watch times like six seconds we're trying to get watch time to like 10 or 12 seconds and then see if it comes up with iterations that kind of help boost that. We're kind of testing a lot of those kind of tactics right now see if it's impactful but I think a feedback loop is really important with AI so it gets a little bit sharper every time. Speaker 3: Got it. For the creative research part, right? You're putting in the different data points, so like your own data that may be going to Reddit, maybe going to Amazon, right? What are some of the things that you are prompting or how are you prompting the AI to get you what you need, right? I find that even for us, sometimes I'll get two general responses, right? Things that I could have maybe just come up by myself, right? How are you guys able to kind of get those like unique selling points and you know, obviously you have so much data coming into it from all these different sources, right? Like Reddit, I think is such a untapped source for a lot of people because these are people that are just genuinely talking about their problems. And those are the things that you want to tap into. But how do you actually get out the unique headlines that can actually be utilized? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is where Using AI becomes very time-intensive because there's no tool that really shortcuts this part. You have to be very specific with what you're looking for. So you can feed it data and it can summarize things, but it doesn't know what you've already tested. It doesn't know what maybe is considered too broad or too general. So you have to kind of guide it in some of those steps. I would say that oftentimes we're not finding a lot of wildly interesting ideas coming from AI. Outside of inputting it from like Reddit predominantly, Amazon reviews don't usually produce a lot of new ideas because it's mostly simple feedback. Oh, I love this product or I don't. But Reddit's really great because it's the context of a consumer sharing their experience or complaint or some other issue. That's been helpful with ideas. Many of them we've already tested or thought of ourselves, so it's not like super mind-blowing, but every once in a while you get something in there. But I think you have to guide it. So you have to say, you feed it the data, you say, summarize this data, give us all these kind of key angles and points that you identify in the messaging. Okay, now let's deep dive further into this particular area. What are all the subsegments of that that we might be able to evaluate? So that's kind of how we approach it. Speaker 3: Love it. Speaker 2: It's really cool. I want to talk a little bit about the fact that after scaling your motto, obviously you made a decision to start and explore building new brands. I think this decision comes from one part of it is like, I think I can do this, right? That mental bandwidth has to come and then you have to also go and execute against it to go and find it. Talk a little about that. I think a lot of people who've scaled brands, I feel like can probably get over the mental piece of like, yeah, I think I can do this again. I think I can go about it again. How did you cross that bridge? Because you've also had success now creating other brands. What was that process like? Do you have times where you're like, damn, I'm getting stretched thin a little bit? Are there times where you're like, hey, maybe I shouldn't have started this one just yet? And then what are the reasons of why it has been successful? What are some of those processes that you put in place? Speaker 1: Yeah, when I first got into e-commerce, it was 2021, and I started testing a variety of products and categories. I very quickly found the AirMoto tire inflator category, but for that first roughly 18 months, we were really trying to run four products at any given time. But that whole time, AirMoto was our biggest revenue driver. The problem was none of them, including AirMoto, was working very, very well. And so one, I didn't know what I was doing for the e-comm operation side and stuff. Secondly, our team still was a bit, you know, inexperienced so they didn't know what to do and also by lacking processes, things just got like a cluster of everything, right? So shortly after I onboarded my ops person, we decided to just cut everything and focus only on Aeromoto because nothing was operating right. We were too splintered, nothing was efficient and we still didn't know what we were doing or figuring out all these pieces, didn't have a creative process, all that kind of stuff. So now that we've been running Irmodo for just over four years, our team has grown and our processes are significantly better. There's two reasons why I think, in my case, we had to take this step and finally launch a second brand. One, we're very seasonal. And so as you're growing your team, you're really kind of taking on more risk throughout the year if we're waiting for Q4 to give us the result. And, you know, at some point in time, we're going to have a challenge with Q4 and I want to be prepared for when that happens so I don't have to downgrade my team because that's like the hardest part of the whole business is really the team. So it was more of like a necessity, but when is the right time to do that? Because we thought about doing it last year, but I think this year we decided it was the highest priority to start doing that. Second thing is to evaluate when you're ready. How much am I spending in the day-to-day of the current brand? Am I like having to roll up my sleeves and be in the trenches like the first two years? Or has the team structure really kind of improved my life on that operation side? And can I take a little bit more energy and focus away? And I think you have to have good checks and balances with making sure things are on track. So like with our performance reports that we have and all these other things, I can tell if things are off track and if the team is putting too much time one direction and not enough time on our main brand. So I felt like we were ready for that step in addition to I felt it was a necessity that we had to do. So we've only had this brand for two months, so still pretty early, but what I can see is the team that we have now is more than capable of getting this brand going and off the ground. Once we get it a bit more profitable and scaling, then we'll start to expand the team to continue supporting that. Speaker 2: And then in terms of like, you know, you talked about performance reports and you guys are really, really intertwined with data. What are you guys using for tooling there? Is this all custom build or you guys heavily rely on a few different tools? How does reporting and analysis work for you guys? Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. We basically connect to all the APIs using a tool called HevoData. That brings all of our data into BigQuery, a database, and then we build a lot of reports using Looker Studio. So we really make all the metadata, Amazon data, basically everything. There's a couple other tools we use to pull all data, but Hevo data is like 90% of it. But that's what we do. We pull it in there. It refreshes every half hour or so. So we have a dedicated media buy report. We have brand and business level report. So we can see how things are performing, how things are trending an hour every, half hour to hour cadence. So that gives us much more confidence, especially during Q4 when we're spending big money, if things are on the right track or not. We built kind of our own kind of similar motion app, but it's not a dashboard, it's just a report. And so that's how we aggregate all the ad and creative data and then we just have tables and charts. One thing I think like Motion and some of the others are missing is like the aggregate data and then also like how do you identify creative fatigue and things like that. So we can drill down to campaign, ad set or ad level or even ad concept level and we can start to see on the graph if that concept is increasing in CPA, then you know to reduce budgets, keep it kind of at bay and kind of detract that kind of stuff. But if you don't have an easy visual way, then the team's just guessing, right? Or you see it way too late. Speaker 2: You gotta turn that into a SaaS company. Speaker 1: I would, but it's a headache to deal with a lot. There's a lot of changes and updates all the time. But it's a very powerful thing to have that I think a lot of people are not thinking too much about. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's incredible. Speaker 3: Before we wrap up, I'm very curious your take on what the future of performance creative is going to look like. I feel like over the last couple of years it's changed rapidly. It went from this TikTok style, UGC cuts, edits, to maybe more raw, testimonials, unedited type of content. But I'm curious your take on where we're heading and what the future might look like. Speaker 1: I think we're definitely being forced to allow the algorithms and the other AI learnings and tools that like Meta is building to take more control. And also even using like ChatGPT and those types of services to build scripts and ideas. I think it's good in the short term, but I think in the longer term it just levels the playing field for everyone. So if you're relying, leaning too much into that, then you have no advantage again. That's why we still want to keep some manual inputs, some manual process involved. How do we, you know, get better at that in, you know, with even being more manual still. In terms of creatives, I don't really know exactly like where the styles and like the trends and all that will happen. I try not to focus too much on trends because they're like one-hit wonders and when you think about time investment, resources, you know, what's the longest term, what's the long value out of that? It's maybe a couple of months. I tend to see that the same stuff works pretty consistently long term if you understand the structure of the ad and the content. The other thing I think is like we have like one core angle with Air Modo that just has historically been our best performer. Over time as we've scaled, the acquisition cost of that has gone up. But there's like a baseline level performance that it just, even if we have a great period of time, it settles back down. It's just like consistently there. It may not be a super strong performer, but it's like your foundation. And then that means, okay, now you need to also focus on how do you make your business more competitive so you can support higher CPA or growing costs in that nature. But in terms of where the future of creative is, I'm learning as quickly as you're learning. Speaker 3: No, I love that. No, this was incredibly tactful. Appreciate the golden nuggets that you dropped across the board. But if you were to leave the audience with one last kind of chew, something that they can implement in their business starting today, what would that one thing be? Speaker 1: Processes for sure. I think most people are failing because they don't have processes that keep consistency in their business whether it be creative or other areas. That's something that I didn't fully understand my first year was how important it really was because I was focused on sales. The other thing is I think people need to pay more attention to data. We try to make all decisions now based on data. Even new categories that we get into, we do super deep research. I want to give myself the highest probability of success in anything that I do. So we do the Eisenhower Matrix often. So we recategorize all of our ideas, projects, agendas, and make sure that our time and the profit impact is shorter period of time, highest impact. And we consistently do that monthly, quarterly, yearly, all the time, just to make sure we're focused on the right areas. Because there's only so much you can take on. Speaker 2: Chew on that. That was awesome. Speaker 3: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.