$70M on TikTok Shop?! The Halo Effect on Amazon Revealed

So, you're doing 70 million on Tik Tok shot this year. What's the halo effect dollar amount on Amazon? Tik Tok's a very microcreator driven platform. So, for us, we reach out to like 3,000 creators every single day. What? Really? We look for creators that are sort of micro to mid-tier, right? They cost somewhere between $200 and $2,000. I'd like to hear some of the unconventional marketing methods that you're using for uh the supplements. Like for us on Amazon, we don't do any competitive product targeting. We only do complimentary product targeting. Like the chance that you're going to, you know, promote your vitamin C gummy on my vitamin C gummy and steal a consumer that's about to check out on my Amazon page is very hard, right? Like I would say the the rorowaz on that is generally not going to be that profitable. But where you can get a lot of value is if you advertise your vitamin C gummy maybe on an elderberry product or another similar product that consumers generally buy together because now you're a value ad, not you know a value fight. You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Ferrar and Kevin King. Mr. Ferrar, how you doing, man? How be you? I am sweating. You're sweating. You've been 107 degrees, Kev. Oh, I thought you were going to say I've been doing Richard Simmons workouts on VHS. Well, I do that every morning. Of course. I I got to keep this, you know, bothering me. I keep asking you to send me pictures of you in the spandex, but you haven't done it yet. Oh, I have so many things I could say. You haven't done it yet, but come on now. All right. Okay. Okay. So, I hear I hear that uh you have a little companion that you just got. I do. I do. I have a little uh a little new new addition to the kingdom here. I got a Yeah. Yesterday, uh I went to a to drove up from Austin to Oklahoma City and picked up a little uh little miniature dachshin named Kona right at 8 weeks in one day today. 8 weeks old in one day. So if you hear a little uh little whining in the background, that's her. She's right here at my feet. Not you. Yeah, that's not me. That's not me passing gas. That's that's not nothing like that. Just Oh yeah, sure. That's just a a little Kona cuz uh if I take her if she's out of my sight, she kind of freaks out cuz as you know little puppy change of change of uh scenery, change of situation, change of environment away from the pack for the first time is a little scary. So I've got a Dallas and you've got Kona. I know you used to live in Hawaii. I used to live in Kona. Was it Kona? I knew I couldn't remember which which uh I'll say I should have said I'm naming this after you, Norm. You're my good buddy. That you can still I'm saying this I'm naming her after you. No wonder when I sent out a little survey of like to you and my parents and a few people like which name do you like best? You said Kona. No wonder now. There we go. I knew I knew it on the big island of Hawaii. I just couldn't remember which which town it was. But okay, that that makes sense. Yep. So good good name change or good name choice. you know, when next time you're doing uh doing those workouts to to Richard Simmons or is it Jane Fonda, whichever one that you're you're still doing, because I know you still have all those VHS tapes from the 70s and ' 80s. You know, what would help if if you took some supplements? Uh because you know, sometimes some there's some certain supplements that are just basically people say are just a placebo. Uh and then other supplements actually work. And our our guest today is probably I think I think they if they're not the number one supplement seller on Amazon, they're right up there. Um uh what is it like I think four he'll tell us four or $500 million a year, something like that in supplements, but not just on Amazon. They're actually all over the place. I mean they they're doing massive Tik Tok stuff. They're doing they're doing uh stuff in retail uh all over the place. I mean it's it's like they've built a real brand, not just a online presence. uh which is pretty cool, right? So, and that's exactly what we've been talking about uh creating multi- channelannel and how to market with that multi- channelannel uh marketplace. So, this is going to be perfect. All right, so let's bring in our guest today, Jay Hunter. Oh, that's not you got all you had to do is hit one button. Just one button. That's it. I'm going to get to it. There we go. I'm just thinking about my workout. Hey, fellas. How you doing, Jay? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. How are you? Uh we're good, man. Good to good to have you on, man. Thanks, uh thanks for joining us. Yeah, glad to be here. So, tell us a little bit for people that don't know uh who you are. Tell us uh what what's your story? What kind of game you have here? What what do you got going on uh in this e-commerce space? For sure. Yeah. Uh Jay Hunter, I'm chief revenue officer at Mary Roose. We're a vitamin supplement company. We we sell a few vitamins. Uh we're most well known uh you know, for I think our different formats. So we sell a lot of liquid vitamins which I think are pretty unique. Uh but also gummies and capsules. Uh you know Mary with Ruth herself is very passionate about just vitamins for for all life stages. So I think that's really what we try to deliver. Uh you know for me I sort of came up on Amazon and these days I do a lot of different things at Mary Roose. Uh mostly ecom sales uh a lot of digital marketing uh and a little bit of analytics. So how did the brand come about? Uh so Mary Ruth started the brand about 10 years ago. Uh she was uh like a there's a person named Mary Ruth. There's a person named Yes, Mary Ruth is a real person. Sound like a jamaima or something. There's a person named Mary Ruth. Okay. I get asked that quite a bit. Uh Mary Ruth, a real person. She's still the CEO today. Still very involved in the business. Uh but about 10 years ago, she was sort of like a wellness nutritionist uh and she had uh some personal clients and she really wanted to make a product uh that everyone could take, right? So sort of a broadspectctrum multivitamin that was good for everyone, for the whole family. Uh and that is our hero like original hero product is our morning multivitamin. Uh it's raspberry flavored. Uh we have like a new new hero product today which I can speak about a bit later but that's how it started. She started with just one product in a dream. I think Amazon was her first channel. Uh you know I came on a couple years after that. Uh Amazon's still our strongest channel today but now we're a lot more omni channel. Retail, Amazon, DTOC, Tik Tok, sort of all over. Awesome. So were you doing something ecom before you joined Mary Roose? Did you have your own brand or what was your what were you doing before? Yeah, I did uh for a long time I did Amazon advertising uh consultancy. So, you know, I would come in help you with your sponsored product or sponsored brand ads, a little bit of DSP. Uh you know, I did that for a couple different firms. I had a firm I owned myself with my father. Uh and then we later merged that with Canopy Management. You know, that went extremely well. Uh but I got the call from Mary Ruth's husband one day like, "Hey, you know, I really need someone to manage my Amazon account full-time. This thing's getting bigger than I can manage." uh you know and when I came on then the business was about $12 million. Uh this year we'll do north of 500 for sure. So it's it's going well. It's been a strong good fun ride. There's a ton of different commodities or a ton of different supplements on Amazon. It's a great business to get into. There's a lot of black hack techniques that go on in there. Like how do you stand apart? Yeah. I mean I think for us it's always been you know a little bit about the brand, right? I think it helps that we have a face to the brand and it's very relatable. Uh I think for us, you know, we've always tried our best to stay away from any of the black hat or even, you know, dark gray area tactics, right? I think my big philosophy and I think it's true of the whole company, but we're just grinders, right? So, uh I think for us building the brand, like we've always been pretty grindy, right? Just 1% better every single day. Uh but we have tried to marry what I call like performance marketing with brand marketing, right? So, I want to do a lot of the performance marketing where I can judge the rorowaz or performance of the money we spent to build the brand yesterday. Uh, but I want to do it at a big enough scale where, you know, you feel like I'm I'm sending a brand message that's similar across all the channels. So, I think a little bit of mix of those things. How many SKs are comprised at 500 million? Uh, 250 today. I I do think there's probably about 75 we don't necessarily have to have. Uh, we're working on getting better at our skew rationalization. I would say that's still a struggle for us. uh put about 250 with about 150 maybe 160 winners. And what's a a winner is over a certain cell sales volume or or just what's a winner? What defines a winner? Judge the products based on their subcategory, right? Because you know uh for example, our hero product today is our morning multivitamin plus hair growth. So it now has like a clinically studied hair growth immediate. That's a very high volume, high velocity category. And so the bar is a bit higher versus, you know, maybe a more niche product which we still care about which is like our infant multivitamin, right? Where there's only, you know, so many infants versus the more general population. So I think it depends on the subcategory of the product, but I would say like a winning product. You want to do over a million bucks a year, I'd say, is is a winner. How long have you been on Amazon again? Uh, I probably been working on Amazon about 10 years now. And the brand the brand has been almost that whole time that they've existed. They've existed 10 years. So probably about nine and a half years, right? I think right around the time sponsored products like started to exist. Uh I think right right around then. So about 95 I think 19 I mean sorry 2015. Yeah. About then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's uh that's crazy. All these products come on lots of supplements. a lot of supplement companies just did it like they they are making it and of course you I I think like Kevin said I think you're number one in the space uh dollar-wise anyways so what are you doing differently like how are you building that moat to protect your uh main products uh I mean I think for us channel diversification is a big one uh but you know I'm very big on I want consumers to shop where they want right so we haven't necessarily forced channel diversification. I think we tried to show all the channels some love while we're growing the brand. Uh I think for us the biggest thing to like keep the mo uh you know and continue building it is like we always go where the green lights are today. I would say like the fastest way to grow either a new brand or existing brand on Amazon is actually to run Tik Tok shops because I think that that sort of the halo effect and performance benefit you get from the huge brand awareness that Tik Tok shops bring you is just like so powerful to Amazon. Um I also think like no matter what your size, you know, even in our size, you have to stay scrappy, right? So you got to come up with new ideas on how you're going to run your sponsored product ads different than every other guy is doing it, right? You got to be, I think, more honest about what keywords your products deserve to win. You a little bit more grindy in some of those areas. I think that's the way, you know, whether you're a new or existing brand is like how you keep pushing and gaining market share. And some some of that though, you mentioned it earlier, is innovating. I mean, you're in a space where there really is no no barrier to entry other than uh reviews, you know, review moch or something like that. and and it brings a lot of people in because there's a lot of money. But one of the ways that you guys have done it is by innovating. You gone, you know, when gummies became popular, you did gummies. Yeah. Then once everybody was having gummies, like how can we how can we differentiate the product now? And you went to what's the dissolvable stuff under the tongue or Yeah, we have dissolvable strips. That's correct. Yeah, we have So that's like the hot new thing right now. And uh you're always staying like one step ahead. So is that part of the plan and super important to you guys? Yeah, I think innovation, especially strategic innovation, I would say, right, is like highly important to us. So, we are trying to find things that we think fit what we call like our core brand platforms, right? Like the the people that we want to take care of, whether that's kids, infant, toddler, or the whole family or women's health. Uh, so we're trying to find innovation there all the time. But I do think, you know, I think ecom is always exciting, you know, DC in general, but I do think like you want to put out a good product and you do want to put out like an innovative product. Like the time where you could launch a new vitamin C gummies on Amazon has sort of come to an end. You know, you need to differentiate whether that's in format, that could be in flavor, that could be in efficacy, that could be with some new ingredient that no one's tried. Uh, but I do think you got to push the needle a bit, right? you can't just get away on your, you know, Amazon knowhow and marketing charm. I think you need a little bit of differentiation. So, for us, that's very big. Like, we just launched a new nighttime multi-mineral, but it comes with like a new clinically studied skin benefit ingredient uh and it has like some clinical trials that really support the claims you can make around it. And I think doing something like that uh is very important for the category. So, I think uh if I understand you correctly, Jay, uh Kevin and I should abandon our vitamin C gummy. If you have a bigger review mo, it could be okay. We're just launching it. We have no money. Uh but I do want to talk a little bit about Tik Tok shop. So, percentage of Tik Tok shop sales compared to Amazon and the halo effect. Yeah. So, that's a good question. If uh I got to do the quick math in my head. So, I would say, you know, this year is our biggest year for Tik Tok shops. It didn't exist in January of 2024, but by the end of this year, we'll probably do about 70 million Tik Tok shops. It's probably one the size of my Amazon business. Uh, so it's growing. Uh, not quite there yet, but I do think like it's the number one driver of incremental sales on Amazon today, more so than any of my other channels. More than my meta-pome billboards, even influencers. I think the number one driver is Tik Tok shops. Uh I think it's just the sheer volume of like awareness and views that we're getting through that platform uh that that drives drives Amazon. So So you're doing 70 million on Tik Tok shop this year. What what halo effect do you do? You It's hard to track, but if you had to give your best guess, what's the halo effect dollar amount on Amazon? Is it another 30, another 70, another 100? If I if I had to say between Amazon and retail because I do think you know I have good retail distribution. I think that's requirement to see the right halo effect but you know I'm at Walmart or Target or CVS. I do think Tik Tok's providing halo effect of velocities in retail and velocity on Amazon. I would say if I had to guess 35 to 45 million probably in sales. Uh you know I have to I have to tell this story to my board every time they ask. I do think my opinion to any brand is as long as you're running your Tik Tok shops profitably, right? Uh the halo effect is is the nice cherry on top and you're sort of invincible, right? If you're running your Tik Tok shop account at a break even or a loss and you're just counting on the halo effect, it's very difficult to like really understand the true incremental value and like you're gambling a bit. So for us, we try to run the channel very profitable by itself and just take everything else as as a nice to have. Hey, Norm, you'll love this, man. I talked to a seller the other day doing 50K a month, but when I asked them what their actual profit was, they just kind of stared at me. Are you serious? That's kind of like driving blindfolded. Exactly, man. I told them you got to check out Sellerboard, this cool profit tool that's built just for Amazon sellers. It tracks everything like fees, PPC, refunds, promos, even changing cogs during using FIFO. Aha. But does it do FBM shipping costs, too? Sure does. That way, you can keep your quarter 4 chaos totally under control and know your numbers because not only does it do that, but it makes your PPC bids, it forecasts inventory, it sends review requests, and even helps you get reimbursements from Amazon. Now, that's like having a CFO in your back pocket. You know what? It's just $15 a month, but you got to go to sellerboard.commisfits.board.com. sellerboard.com/misfits. And if you do that, they'll even throw in a free two-month trial. So, you want me to say go to sellerboard.com misfits and get your number straight before your accountant loses it? Exactly. All right. I'd like to hear some of the unconventional marketing methods that you're using for uh the supplements. Yeah. Especially especially like because you there's certain certain things you can't say too. I mean like so how do you get like to to Norm's point, how do you guys guys get around that in unconventional ways? Yeah, for sure. I think at our size, you know, compliance is very big. So we're quite strict on our compliance. Uh especially working with creators, you know, we try to make sure they know everything they should and shouldn't say. Uh you know, what's legal to say. Uh but I think two pieces. I think one again is sort of some of the scrappy ideas that we have or strategies we roll out. like a good one on Amazon and I'm gonna have to switch my playbook after I give everyone this, but like for us on Amazon, we don't do any competitive product targeting, right? So like this is this is like a scrappy idea that I or strategy I would recommend it to stay ahead, but like we don't do any competitive product targeting. We only do complimentary product targeting. So like the chance that you're going to, you know, promote your vitamin C gummy on my vitamin C gummy and steal a consumer that's about to check out on my Amazon page is very hard, right? Like I would say the the rorowaz on that is generally not going to be that profitable. But where you can get a lot of value is if you advertise your vitamin C gummy maybe on an elderberry product or another similar product that consumers generally buy together because now you're a value ad not you know a value fight. I think that's something like those types of ideas uh have kept us very scrappy like on Amazon and on other channels we we pour similar tactics like that. I think it's always about getting a little bit creative. I think from a bigger marketing perspective, uh, you know, we try to stick to provable claims and giving as much of that information to creators so that they can talk about the things they're they're allowed to talk about. Uh, I do think one thing that we have a sort of a competitive advantage on is our products taste good, right? You know, not to say other other brands products don't taste good, but like a lot of people sell capsules that don't have a taste. I think for supplements, it's hard to feel the effects of the product on the first day, right? You generally have to take it for a little while and have a routine. And so for us, we can win on the first day with taste, right? Like, oh, the product tastes delicious, so even if I don't know it's going to work yet, I can still keep taking the product. And I think those two things, you know, sort of how we we've stayed ahead in the early days. H So, so Mary R the on the branding side of things, are you showing the the founder on all the packaging uh and showing making this look like it's uh are you doubling down on like her backstory or is it grown beyond that now? I think it's grown beyond that. I do think it still helps like the warmth of Mary Ruth's face being on the bottle like she's on the packaging. I think that really helps especially in retail on the shelf, right? If you look at a sea of products at Whole Foods, you know, she's one of the only ones in our category that has a face on it. And I I do think customers, you know, gives it a little bit more trust and credibility for the marketing. Uh, you know, Mary Ruth has four kids under six, so it's a little difficult for me to get her to film every day. We do run a lot of content with Mary within it and that's honestly still our best performing content today. But I do think it's grown even outside of that, right? We can run a little bit more professional videos today. We do a lot of creator content whether that's testimonial or speaking on the benefits of the product and that's been successful for us as well. So I've tried to mix it. That's sort of my job here is to like can we keep the marketing going without me calling Ruth every day. Uh I think we sort of found a good balance of a little bit of both. A lot of uh Amazon brands find it uh well first just to get them on to any other channel. Uh a lot of them don't do which is completely wrong nowadays I think. But when you went into retail that's a completely different bird. Did you have to switch up your packaging or do you have separate packaging that goes into retail? like what what did you do and how did well I I guess the other thing is did you go into retail? Did you do your research before you even uh decided to go into retail? Lots of different questions there. Uh we are very big on break everything and then fix it afterwards. Uh so I would say we went into retail uh you know quite aggressively quite scrappy. I have like an amazing head of retail sales uh Matt Buckley who who's a very seasoned veteran in the space. We did sell a lot of products to a lot of uh retailers and we we maybe could have been a bit more selective on what we did, but I think his his strategy was great, right? I think if you have ever have retail opportunity, even if you're not ready, this is not the greatest advice for everyone, but you should just dive in because it's incredibly hard to get space on the retail shelf and most of your challenges you can figure out after. I do think it's almost like running a completely different business. You need to be ready for the large orders that are going to come in, how you're going to fill those, making sure you have stock, uh, understanding your trade spend, and just the economics. Uh, if you can strategize before, that's great. But if you get a retail opportunity, I highly suggest you take it. It's it's one of the fastest growing pieces of our business. Uh, and you know, it's a very steady business once it gets going. Like, you can reliably count on retailer orders coming in all the time as long as you know, you're moving velocities. So, if you get a chance to jump in, uh, I do highly suggest you you plan your channel strategy. You have unique sizes for the different types of retailers like what they call FDM, which is food, drug, and mask, like a Target or CVS versus like what you do for Whole Foods or Amazon or even your DDC site. So, uh, recommend you plan if you can, but if you get the opportunity, you should dive on it. So, you manufacturing in the US or with a c-acker or do you have your own facility? Uh, no, we're not vertically integrated today. So all co-ackers we have a few you know we have a number of different formats uh and like types of products so not there's no c-acker that makes every single item uh but everything is exception of two co-ands almost everything is US-based majority of our volume is is manufacturing US so we really haven't been that impacted by tariffs thankfully how big is the team uh the whole team uh is about 240 employees today at Mary Roose uh in my direct or about 50 that's pretty good $2 million in revenue per employee uh per head. That that's that's really good. Yeah. Every every uh we you know everyone everyone is working hard I will say uh and a lot of AI adoption these days which I think letting a lot of employees you know do more with less. So what about I was just going to ask about mistakes. If you were to talk to sellers online sellers what are some of the mistakes that you made and then go over to the retail side and what are some of the mistakes? What are the mistakes that you made over there? Yeah, I mean the first one I would say for you know DTOC and for retail is we did not take forecasting seriously enough. It is incredibly difficult for your supply chain to order the right amount of inventory. If you tell them you're going to sell product A and you end up selling a lot of product B. So I will say like investing and understanding like what you're going to sell and having a plan around that highly important. That's one of our biggest mistakes. Even today we're still trying to catch up on some products and just maintaining healthy stock. Uh I would say the other piece is just like not putting the right data infrastructure in place early on. Today we have like a very robust analytics department uh which is going well and we have a lot of sort of data at our fingertips. But it's like the compounding effect of just getting 1% better every day is just like very hard to beat, very hard to fail. But you need to understand what 1% better every day is. And to do that, you really got to be able to see your data, right? What are your Amazon conversion rates? What are your velocities at retail? How much are you spending on marketing? Need to understand a little bit about your media mix and where you should spend. Uh and so I think not having that analytics capabilities earlier hurt us a little bit, but I think we feel much better about it now. So what's your strength then? Is is it in the the listing? Is in the keyword optimization? Is it in that you have a moat? Because she was one of the early ones 10 years ago, built a moat around with a lot of reviews. What's what's the key differentiating factor for you guys? I would say, you know, this might sound like flip, but I think it's still our scrappiness, right? Like for Tik Tok shops, there's no playbook. There's no one knows what to do. No one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one on my team had an idea on like this is how Tik Tok shops is going to be successful. We just did something though, right? And I think that's where brands a lot of brands get caught up is like you just have to take some action. You might not know if it's the right action, but I think our ability to just start something up and then as soon as we see the green light like 10x it uh I think is hard to match, right? And that's what sort of keeps our moat going, you know, quite long is I would say anytime we've seen, you know, we used to run meta ads before iOS 14 when it was, I would have said the holy grail, right? And like highly efficient to grow your DTC business. Uh today, you know, we're very fast on Tik Tok shops. I think apploving is like a new ad platform that not enough people are taking advantage of that's new. Like we're always trying to do, you know, what's working first and fast. Uh and I think that's helped us like sustain our moat for a long time. Let's talk about that app thing. That's kind of what Norm said earlier about unconventional marketing. Yeah. And there's like I know people are doing what's that Roblox or something like that. Another one that Yeah. Um so talk about some of these alternative channel. Everybody knows Tik Tok has heard Tik Tok listening to this knows Tik Tok shop. They know Amazon, Walmart, Shopify. But a lot of people are like well you talk about this apploving thing. Uh can you explain what that is and why you're seeing success there? Yeah. So Apploven uh you know they they essentially if you have any app on your phone and it has ads it's likely served by applovening. So uh you know I think previously it was a little bit more closed off where it was only entertainment and other apps that you would get ads for but now you know you might see it but play any free game we have had a lot of ads you'll get those from apploven and there's a lot of CPG brands now there which is which has sort of been opened up. So apploving, you know, again is is essentially running those ads on any app. Uh today I do think it requires like a little bit higher level creative, right? So I think one of the requirements is you got to have some polished creative. You can't just run your meta ads. That's a strategy that doesn't work. But I do think it has a huge reach, huge awareness and sort of the CPMs on that channel are much better than a lot of the other channels like meta. And so we've been investing there a lot. You know, I I firmly believe Meta, Tik Tok, and Apploving are sort of the new TV, right? People get home, they sit on their couch, they don't usually flick the TV on. They scroll one of those three things. They're either playing their free iPhone game, they're on Meta, or they're on Tik Tok. And so for us, we try to have a comprehensive strategy across the three. But I think AppLoving, sort of the new underdog one, just requires a little bit more content investment. You can't really go in with their B-roll. You got to have sort of like a nice professional video, I think, to really crack the code there. What's up everybody? your good old buddies Norm and Kevin here and I've got an Amazon creative team that I want to introduce you to. That's right Kevin. It's called the house of AMZ and it's the leading provider in combining marketing and branding with laser focus on Amazon. Hey, Norm. They do a lot of really cool stuff if you haven't seen what they do, like full listing graphics, premium A+ content, storefront design, branding, photography, renderings, packaging design, and a whole lot of other stuff that Amazon sellers need. Yeah. And guess what? They have nine years active in this space. So, you can skip the guesswork, trust the experts, there's no fees, there's no retainers, you pay per project. So, if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's houseofamz.com. House of AMZ. There was another one I thought you said that I didn't know of. Which one? Roblox. Yeah. Yeah. Are you doing anything on Roblox? Nothing today. But I think that's one of the next frontiers, right? Roblox is like a enclosed sort of like game platform, right? But they have a tons of mini games inside of the game. Uh, and I do think like advertising on those types of channels is going to be huge in the future. we haven't tapped in yet, but something we've been thinking about and looking at for sure. But to do that, that's that's what real brands do is they go where the you said it earlier, I'm going to go where the customers are and then let them use whatever their shopping cart of choice is, whether that's come to our website or go to Amazon or Tik Tok shop or buy it in an app, uh, you know, on Facebook or something. Um, so where do you see this space going in supplements from a marketing point of view? Is it going to get tougher and tougher or or are there really enough innovations out in your in your long-term vision that we can keep innovating? You know, next thing we're going to do is vitamins that are I don't know, you you you step on them. Uh you just get out of bed and you you step on them with your big toe and they that's all you got to do or I mean what what what's what's coming next to keep staying on the edge? Uh yeah, I mean look, I'm not the the number one product innovator at the business. You know, I try to come up with some fun ideas, but I do keep thinking that innovation is running out and then something new comes out. I think there's a couple brands now that do like vitamin patches where you just put them on and then melts into your skin and you have your vitamins. So, uh I keep thinking we're going to run out and people keep coming up with with things. I I do think as always like the game gets harder. I feel this is true of most categories, but the game gets harder as time goes on, right? So, my number one advice always is just start. You know, the rest you'll figure out. Uh, so move move quick basically. Move quick always. Quick, move fast. Um, but you take I I think I I I think your next product is going to be like meta glasses. So your vitamin C is going to be like you put on some shades and and just by looking through it, you get the vitamin C and you get the carrot, you know, the stuff that's in whatever it's in carrots to make your eyes stronger and that's all it's going to be. That's that's where that's where we're going, right? Yeah, I think so. I think say a thing. Yeah. You know, they say there's there's they say there's three ways to win a business, right? Be first, be smartest, or cheat. We don't believe in cheating. It's nice to think we're smart, but it's quite difficult to be the smartest. It's just a lot easier to be first or be fast. So, now once you get the sale, that's one thing. Somebody likes your product and they might go and choose a different brand. So, I love building communities. How are you building that community like that loyal community that's going to keep coming back for more of your products? That's a that's a big question. I would say we're trying to do it a lot of ways, right? I think we're building like just a general customer community. Uh, you know, we do that through a bunch of ways, but we're really, especially on our DTOC site, you know, it's hard to incentivize customers to shop on your DC site today, right? If you want convenience, you would pick my product up at the grocery store. If you want fastest shipping or cheapest shipping, you get it from Amazon. If you want best price, you get from Tik Tok. So, on DC, like we're really trying to to push community building, right? and sort of like in a category that's a little complicated and a little scary like how do we educate consumers? So for us, you know, we have like a loyalty program. Mary Ruth hosts two uh like custom Zoom uh what she calls fireside chats each month. She hosts two of them on the same day. Uh and she does it like 100% just a regular Zoom room. Anyone could join. People just have to mute themselves. It's uh like highly engaged because customers can ask her anything they want. uh you know we do a little bit through like personalized CRM journey right like we really try to send custom emails I think you know a little bit that's AI and automation but like how do we show customers what is like personalized for them on the website and then also through sort of the follow-up emails and communication so I think we're trying to do all those things I think community building is one of the hardest things to do like right and do well uh but I think for us like it really helps that Mary Ruth like for her that's the biggest passion right is she wants to take care of people and she wants to communicate with them uh And so like you know even if one person sends us a message about a product uh and how maybe it wasn't right or or they don't love it or they think we need to improve it like she's so great at like taking that feedback and making sure we take some action on it. So I think you know those are sort of all the ways. So So uh walk me through how you deal with influencers or creators on Tik Tok. How do you how do you how did you guys start there when you're like all right we're going to give this a shot. What did you do? Did you already have some from Meta or from somewhere else that you were working with and say, "Hey, you guys on TikTok, can you do some stuff?" Or did you go out and recruit people or or walk me through that that process and what qualifies someone to promote for you guys? Yeah, I think for us, uh, you know, we're pretty aggressive. I do think Tik Tok shops is a little bit of a number game. So, we did go in with almost none of the creators we have today. These are all mostly new creators. I think at this point, some of the creators that we had outside of Tik Tok are also on Tik Tok shops. Uh, but you know, Tik Tok's a very microcreator driven platform. So for us, you know, today we use like a AI bot called Yuka that helps us sort of outreach to creators, but we reach out to like 3,000 creators every single day. What? Really? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it does it automatically. Uh, you know, we send them a message, we invite them to engage with us, and then they can request a sample and if they get a sample, they can review the product and and, you know, leave their testimonial. Um, so that's the process for how we get the creators and then we just try to provide the creator as much information as we can, but we really leave the creative aspect up to them. So we'll say, "Hey, this is the product we'd love for you to talk about. Love for you to get a free sample. Here's some of the things we'd love for you to say, like how it tastes. We'd love for you to talk about this or that benefit. Here's some things that our lawyers ask you please not to talk about that you shouldn't talk about for both of us." Uh, and then we sort of give them freedom on the creative, right? We want to empower the creators. I also think creators are quite picky about their content and making sure they're giving their audience what they want to see. So, we just try to provide like a dos and don'ts, best practices. We'll send them videos that have done really well, but we really leave the creative like in their hands to deliver. And I think that's what's worked best for us because that gets you the most authentic content. Are you doing anything with AI in regards to uh the the creative process or how's AI impacted uh what Mary Ruth's doing? Yeah, I'm actually on the marketing side, not necessarily on the the analyzing reports side. No, no. Yeah, on the marketing side, we're using it a lot. I would say I'm I'm actually doing a speaking event on this tomorrow at a CMO conference. But I think for us, we're using AI as much as possible. And I think, you know, I have a little bit of I don't want to say mandate, but I I do tell the team a lot that I think it's like hugely impactful for them to use AI to just continue to level up and be like complimentary. So for us, it's a lot of human plus AI. And I would say the AI today helps us on creative a ton of stuff. Writing scripts for, you know, some of the content creators where we actually want them to create something very specific. It really helps us with some of the dos and don'ts. It does help us with like analyzing creative that's performed, but then helping us determine like what should we recommend creators talk about based on what's worked for other creators, which I think has been really helpful. Um, you know, we're using it to analyze like our thumb stop ratios. We're using it to uh write headline uh like headline or subject lines for email and then also for SMS messages. Uh I think for us we use it a lot in the creative process today for just you know taking on I think a lot of that work that was like maybe a little bit more administrative or less fun for the team. Right now they can really spend time on like strategy and concepts and then AI can do some of the heavy lift on like writing copy or putting those types of things together. So we're using it pretty much everywhere on the marketing side today. Is that custom stuff or is that just general chat GBT cla type of stuff or are you building custom tools? It's it's a big mix. We use like you know we have some custom GBTs for some of that. We use Claude a little bit for sure but we use like this one tool called Opus which does like AI clip editing for us some out of our long form content. We use another one called preient AI which like helps with an AI media mix model. Uh I think today a lot of the tools you use probably have some type of AI component, right? And so we try to leverage that everywhere we can. Uh and then we build some of our own custom stuff, but most of that is chat GBT, custom GPTs, right? So it's not, you know, we're not I think we're not the most advanced. We're not in sort of the AI agent world just yet, but I do think like the team is headed that direction. Uh and I think we're we're gaining more knowledge every day on it. So where's where have you seen the biggest ROI with your AI? It's definitely just creative output, right? Like I think a lot of people still don't quite understand like, you know, if we're 10 years ago, most media buying on Meta or wherever was 90% how good you bought the ads in your ad strategy and 10% the content. These days it's 95% content, 5% how good can you buy the ads, right? Mo most of the platforms have an amazing let the algorithm figure it out and it'll crush. Right? So, uh I think it's all about how much content you put out. I I just know this because I I I built these slides for this this thing I have tomorrow. But like before we were using AI for all those different things, script writing, creative analysis, we were probably pumping out I don't know 130 to 150 different creatives every month. Now we we're producing 500 to 540 new creatives every month. And I think the volume of creative and how fast you can test and iterate on it is 100% the name of the game, especially for the big platforms like Meta and Tik Tok. Are you doing any uh UGC AI like avatars and stuff or are you still I think it's it's almost all human. I think until I think we're getting very close to the you know the the era where there'll be a video of me and you won't be able to distinguish if it was me on this podcast or my AI avatar. I think we're not quite there yet. And I do think the platforms especially Tik Tok but also Meta are sort of anti that kind of content, right? Like I think Tik Tok especially like they're fighting such a battle already on how many videos can they show of people shilling you something versus how many videos that you actually want to see and right what's the right balance before their platform's not cool. I think if they let too much of the sort of what people consider like the AI sloped in you know people will stop coming to Tik Tok because right now they're winning because they have the best algorithm in the world to show you the exact cat video you want to see next. And like the second that's not the case and you're presenting a bunch of content people don't want to see, I think it sort of breaks. Well, that the content will we itself out. Tik Tok actually does have a AI and UGC generator uh for AI avatars. Um yeah, that they're they're it's in they're testing right now, but the the technology I agree with you, but have you seen Mirage.app? I did I did see this, right? Like it's getting it's almost there, right? Mirage.app is like ridiculously good. And if you look at what just happened in uh in China just uh recently doing one right live stream $7.5 million uh on a live stream it was all AI. I think uh there's some tools there that are damn close now especially for for testing purposes for sure. But we're getting we're getting close where you're going to be able to do some amazing amazing stuff um really really fast. Back to your point of speed uh and testing creatives and stuff. you're going to be able to to really lock in uh some cool stuff with AI. It's the entrepreneurs that are going to be able to do this, too. Act fast, they'll get results. They'll be the innovators. Yeah. And if you let it sit too long, everybody does it. You know, it's just uh you got to be on it right away. Uh, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about other than like optimizing a listing or, you know, having a a well-written listing, what are brands doing now? How can they scale an organic listing? Everything's paid. Is there any way that you can scale organically? I think that's probably the most difficult thing, right? Uh, you know, I think at my size, it's not the right word to use, but you know, I'm a little bit of a bully where I put a little bit more dollars on the marketing, right, to keep my competitive advantage. That's old Dan Kennedy who he who can spend the most to win a customer wins. For sure. For sure. That's his old saying. Uh, I do think if you're going to get creative organically, it's got to be organic social, right? Like it is possible to spend the right amount of time to create like good organic videos. I think there's some brands you could look at like there's this new brand uh Cheers which has like a I think sort of I don't know I don't know if there's right claim but sort of like a hangover supplement. They crush on organic content and that's been a huge spillover to both their Tik Tok shop success and their Amazon success but they're just like they make good funny you know legitimate videos and I think you can still win like that but it does require like a lot of creativity more than I have for sure. Uh but I think it you know it's still possible to win organically but it'd be heavy organic social. I would say it's a lot harder to optimize your listing and game the keywords, right? I feel like that error is a little bit over and there's there's not a lot of ways where you can like juice, you know, sales to sort of get ranking. I also think some of the other platforms, almost every other platform except for Amazon doesn't rely as much on keyword ranking, right? Like Tik Tok's very influencer ranking driven. So, I would say organic social is probably the only way I could see to do it very scrappily. Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin and Norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors, 8 fig. Let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for Amazon sellers. That's right, it's called 8Fig. On average, sellers working with 8ig grow up to 400% in less than a year. 8FIG offers both funding and free tools for e-commerce growth and cash flow management. And here's how it works. 8ig provides flexible datadriven funding tailored to your exact needs. You know, they can fund anywhere from up to $50,000 all the way up to 10 million. 8FIG gives you free tools to forecast demand, manage inventory, and analyze cash flow. Visit 8fig.co. That's 8fig.co to learn more or check the link in the show notes below. Just mention marketing misfits and get 25% off your cost. That's 8fig.co 8fig.co. CEO. See you on the other side. So, repeat sales are probably a big a big deal in in your business, especially when it comes to your customer acquisition costs. So, how do you how how much of your business is repeat sales uh from someone buying every month or whatever regimen they're on? And how do you encourage that or to to make that better? And how do you determine lifetime value for a brand new product? Oh yeah, those those are tough ones. Uh the first the first one's easier. Uh about 35% of our revenue on Amazon is subscription today, right? Uh but I would say for repeat purchase, it's probably closer to like 55%, right? We have those 35% subscription and then quite a bit of that is additional repeat purchase where people maybe just don't subscribe and they they continue to purchase. Uh on our website, it's probably about 60% uh repeat purchase and about 50% subscription. and the rest is new customers. So, I think we have a pretty good balance there. It's a lot harder for me to tell in the other channels like Tik Tok and retail because they just had such explosive growth. So, a lot of the customers are new, but that's just because those channels are very new. And it's really hard for me to marry my retail data with my, you know, Amazon or DDC data or ecom data to just understand what customers are shopping on on both channels. That's something I think every brand is always working on. Uh, I think for me LTV, I'm always thinking about LTV as the lifetime profit of a customer, right? And I think that's like the most important way to look at it is not just a lifetime sales value, but the lifetime profit of those customers for their value. Uh, I think for us, you know, we try our best to just measure it on each channel. Uh, and I think if you're like an aggressive business that you want to grow, but you want to stay profitable, we're usually targeting to be profitable on an order by the second month. Uh we've had a lot of success lately with Tik Tok shops. So that's generally been happening on the first month. But I think by month two is the most ideal like be profitable in our category where repeat purchases are sort of I would say a given but but highly likely. There's a lot of uh different well the US is highly diversified. They've got a huge group multicultural. Uh, do you target any of these different uh, groups, Spanish or whoever else you uh, play into that marketplace? Yeah, I would say these days we're doing a lot more bilingual stuff, right? So, a lot of Spanish content. Uh, we're actually live on Tik Tok shops 24 hours a day and we have a few hours each week that we do Spanish content on that live stream. Um, and so we we're definitely pushing a lot more bilingual and, you know, just even other languages on the content. We're not quite there where I feel like we're doing the appropri appropriate mix or share, but something's big on our mind. And I also think, you know, most of our revenue today is US-based, but I think for the future for us, we're we're very bullish on international and that that'll come with a lot of sort of like new language creative as well. Uh just a bit more difficult because, you know, most of the team only speaks English today. So, just on that cultural question I just asked, I know like I'm up here in Canada and if you're here in English, like in Toronto and you have the same campaign in Quebec, it'll probably fail. It's a whole different culture over there compared to here. Uh now, do you have to target that? Like if you're dealing in uh you know, different markets, do you have to change the way that you're marketing to different people? We don't today. I think that's probably like if if you want to maximize and have like the most optimized marketing stack of all time, I think that's very important. I think for us, we try to go with what we think will resonate with the largest amount of consumers in America, but since we're mostly US-based, we keep it pretty consistent. I would say we don't do that today, but it's a great idea. Uh, and I'm probably gonna have to poke the team about it after this. So, that's two today, Nor. That's two there. There. So, so you mentioned something earlier. You live stream 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So, do you have a little studio set up there as your office is where you have people coming in literally 24 hours a day and doing live streams on TikTok, uh, talking about supplements and vitamins? That's correct. Yeah, I'm actually at the office today. So, they're right. I don't know if you guys keep hearing a little bit background noise on the bell, but that's them on the live stream having fun. Uh, every time I hear that, someone just you made a sale. Someone made a sale or maybe someone uh, you know, won a contest. Uh we try to do, you know, a bunch of stuff to engage the audience, but yeah, we're live 24 hours a day, every day. Uh it's tough. I don't recommend it for every brand. I think for us, you know, we like it and and it's going well. Uh but yeah, they're mostly talking about the products, trying to educate consumers on the products and we think, you know, for Tik Tok in China on Do Yin, like which is the China Tik Tok, it's live streaming is so huge, right? I think like 85 or 90% of all sales are coming through live streams. Uh, we know it's not like that in the US, but again, it's it's it's better to be early and be first. So, uh, I think we're still filling it out, trying to figure out what the right vibe is. I probably won't keep it 24 hours forever. Uh, but at least for now. Well, what made you decide to do that? And are these people based on commission based or because whoever pulls a bad shift, you know, at 4 in the morning, what? But then you think about there's a lot of people can't sleep. They're up at 4 in the morning looking for vitamins or something that's going to get them to sleep. 100%. We actually so we pay hourly rate for this this role internally, right? It's sort of like a almost like a company employee. Um I would say you'd be surprised like the the the general sales are pretty consistent except for the peak times which I would say are like 6:00 to 9 a.m. and then 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. Pst uh are like the real core hours, but the rest of the hours are pretty consistent I would say. Um we're starting to do some more stuff that's like mega lives. Uh but yeah, I mean we just we have creators come in each day right to the office. Usually people pull like a two to four hour shift uh and then someone else comes in and swaps places with them. Is this just Tik Tok or you doing YouTube live and other stuff too? Just Tik Tok right now. I do think like multi- uh channel uh you know is big. Yeah. I think for me I just had a vision. I just want to be the first brand to be live 24 hours a day. sort of like an old skew QVC QVC. Uh and so I I pushed the team harder and they were going for 21 hours for a long time and we just recently upped it this month actually to 24 hours. Um and you know it's been great. I think they're actually having a lot of fun with it. So yeah, Kevin uh would volunteer for the uh 2 to uh 4 or 5 in the morning. Um you know, if if you need some that's a perfect time. Yeah, I'm a night owl. So I I'll be the guy that's on there buying something at 2:30 in the morning. The team the team knows. Same for me because I'm sending them screenshots like, "Oh, can we move this on the counter at those same times?" So you you're checking in on it. Uh yeah, I always love to watch, you know, I think it's just interesting and it's live, right? So the content is always unique every single time, which I think is just amazing. So, if we took Tik Tok shop off the board, what is the next growth opportunity that you'd uh give advice on? Where would you go? Honestly, and this is going to be low cont. I still think meta, right? I think a lot of people say met Meta algorithm changed, meta buying, you know, ad buying UI changed. It's tough. I think if you're still heads down grinding and scrappy on Meta, Meta can still work for every single channel. still has a great return on investment. I think again like you just need to be practical and honest like where you deserve to win. Do you really have the best static creative or even video creative? Did you really talk about your best points? Is that really the hook that's going to work? I think people just like throw up some ad and like ah the ROI wasn't good. Meta doesn't work. But like it's like just the start of the game, you know? Like uh I think you just have to like really be committed to figuring it out. And I still today meta is still one of our biggest levers. So men Menace still steers a little bit older too, doesn't it? Yeah, I think so. You find that certain thing different things sell better probably on Meta than or there's probably different sales patterns on Meta than Tik Tok? A little bit I would say for sure. Uh for us though, like I do think this and this is true for a lot of brands, but like I do think there's a critical mass at which like if you have enough people talking about your product, like everyone else has a big FOMO on it. And so for us like our multi- plus hair growth is like sort of has that huge effect. So that's the bestselling product in every single channel I have uh without a doubt. But I do think like the items like number five through number 15 are a little bit different on every channel from like retail to versus what like Tik Tok drives versus even what Meta drives or what we sell on Amazon. I think it's a little bit different everywhere for sure. All right, I want to go down a different rabbit hole. We kind of talked a little bit about this just before we were coming on and this is building a brand versus a personal brand. So what are you doing and we know that you're building a personal brand but right now so I should mention that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think uh yeah I mean you know brand building is fun. I think personal brand building is something I I never thought I would do. Uh but I've been doing doing it more lately. Right. Uh, so I think right now I'm doing it again. A little bit scrappy, a little bit grindy, but I just started posting on LinkedIn every day was like my first step. You know, I was just like, "Hey, I want to sort of be known more in like the professional community and build my own brand." And so I started doing that on LinkedIn. Uh, my next frontier is is Twitter or X, right? I'm sort of starting to post there every day. Uh, you know, I'm trying to do a few more speaking engagements in person, some podcasts, right? I think those are all the things I'm doing to sort of build my brand up. I am trying to create content though. think it's true of brand building and personal brand building is just like trying to do content that adds value, right? Like even on this podcast, right? I want to tell people stuff like they could practically implement or would help them or it's like, "Oh, Jay struggling with that also. Good to know." Uh I think I just did a post like this yesterday which which got quite a few responses. But you know, for me, I just like to share, right? Like I like to see other brands, other people win. So I'm a big open book. Anyone can reach out to me anytime for anything. I'm always I'm always happy to help. So, go ahead, Kev. No, you get it. No, I was just uh wondering uh like do you go full out on your personal brand like you would a normal brand? Uh do you like do you almost have a brand guide? How are you doing it on the on the personal side? I'm totally just winging it. So, uh I think like I did map out a little bit like my LinkedIn strategy and I was like, "Okay, what are the type of like pillars I want to talk about?" Right? So, it's the same thing I would do if I was doing it for Mary Roose. Uh, but I was just like, what what am I good at? What do I think I could add value to other people with? I think what are some like vulnerable things I want to share that maybe hopefully I would get help from people with. I just think uh I think the the the founders of a brand called Midday Squares are the absolute best at this and they talk about it all the time. Um, but I do think like authenticity, whether you're a brand or whether you're, you know, a personal brand, like is the is the number one thing that people resonate with. Like that's the thing that's going to make people buy from you. That's going to make the thing that's going to make people want to talk to you or hear from you is just like just be yourself, right? Just share what you know, what you know what what you've gone through. I think like people just love to see that, you know? I think that's why reality TV crushes, right? People just want to see like, oh, this is what this person's really about. So, but is it what they're really about? or they perform. Yeah, true. How authentic is is it and how much direction is there on that? Uh that's that's what you always got to worry about. So So branding though is tough. I mean Mary Roose, it took 10 it's been 10 years. I mean so to build your own personal brand posting on LinkedIn and X that that definitely helped but you got to extend it beyond that into where you you control the community or the customer. What are you what are your plans or do you have any? Are you thought that through yet? On the personal side? On the personal side, I have not. I I went in this one, you know, look, I think I I it's true for everyone, but you know, I want to build my sort of career and resume, which I think is great, but for me, I I don't really have any outcomes, right? Like I'm not looking to monetize a community or necessarily start my own business, right? I'm I'm pretty big on being an operator, not a founder. I just think like for me, a lot of it's just networking. Even the little bit of work I've done so far on the personal brand side, like I've just met like a ton of new founders, new services. I mean, I think even from that led me to a podcast that led me here on this one, right? Like just meeting a lot of new people and talking to people has been like hugely valuable even for our work at Mary Roose. Uh but also for me like just professionally like leveling up my game and learning new things. So I'm trying to go into it without expectations on getting something at the end. Then I think you know it's it's been great because every every every time something happens it feels like a blessing. Hey Kevin King and Norm Ferrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify. Make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm? Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast? Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say. I'll I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair, too. We'll just You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes. But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits. Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. So, what's it like being one of the top brands and having constantly having people chipping at your heels? It's like one of these. I got a little puppy sitting right here. It's like a little puppy constantly trying to bite you or bite your finger or something. Uh cuz they're just like reaching for whatever they can get and exploring. What What's that like? You constantly having to do a fight with like listings getting suspended for stupid reasons and and all those kinds of things or just you walk me through that because when you're at the top, you're a target. Yeah, I would say uh you know, interesting. It hasn't been like that for us, right? And I I don't know. I think it's maybe a little bit of Mar's energy, right? But she always tells us like like we can't run any marketing that's us versus another brand, right? We never speak ill on other brands or other people. That's like core to the culture and the philosophy. Uh and so like we don't really experience that, right? Like my Amazon listings almost never go down for no good reason. Uh I have great Amazon contacts if they did, but like we're generally not in fights with other brands and you know, I wouldn't want to be. And for me, I I just think the category is huge. like our category, any category, like there's enough space for everyone to win, you know. I'll share my top strategies today with my top competitor and feel okay about it, you know. Uh I just think that there's plenty of space for everywhere one and like, you know, I feel good in general about our strategy. Uh you know, it takes a certain level of like execution which I think is sometimes hard to pull off. So for me, I'm usually not thinking about the other brands. Not not in a disrespectful way, but just like for us, it's always us versus us. How can we better than we were yesterday? And I think that mentality has sort of helped keep a bubble around us, too. All right, I I'll bite. So, what's uh what's one of your top strategies that you're willing to share? Sure. Yeah. Uh I've talked Tik Tok shops to death. I think App Leven's cool. Um I think I like still today direct partnerships with influencers, but I think doing so at like a reasonable rate and with a direct ROI attached, right? I think influencer marketing is like sort of tough for a lot of brands. So, sort of unique strategy that I would recommend to any brand that I think works really well for us is we look for creators that are sort of micro to mid-tier, right? They cost somewhere between 200 and $2,000, somewhere in that range, not above that. And then we try to partner with them for a couple, you know, usually one or two months. Number of creative deliverables, let's say two to three deliverables. And the idea is that we want to measure their performance based on real ROI driven. So, we usually give them a coupon code maybe for 15% off and then we create that coupon code on Shopify and on Amazon and we let those influencers tell their audience that they should shop where they like to shop. It's available on either one. Same type of experience, same price. Uh, but I think doing something like that where like you can have real measurable results on the influencer performance is a great way to just like spin up your influencer program and then scale it is sort of look for the creators that you can like grow with versus the creators all the way at the top that might cost a lot and are a little bit bigger of a gamble. So I would say for me that I think that's one of the most interesting, you know, well performing strategies that we're rolling out right now that's still working amazingly well. So it's basically fundamentals. Basically fundamentals. I always say that but yes, I agree. fundamentals. That's interesting. Everybody thinks it's tactics. Everybody looks to Kevin for tactics, right? And it's really goes back to the fundamentals and a lot of old school techniques for sure. So listeners out there, if there's one thing you could uh or one thing we may have overlooked, and there's probably a lot we overlooked, but what would you like to say to them? Uh, I think I I I think I said this already, but just start, right? Whatever the strategy is, whatever the idea is, just start. Break some things along the way, fix it after. Uh, I think that's that's always my number one advice is like just got to get some momentum and I won't say it fall into place for free, but a lot of things will fall into place for you. Uh, and the momentum builds. So, just get started is my advice. All right, Kevin, any other questions? So, is Mary Roose going to be the first billion dollar uh vitamin seller on Amazon? Uh, we're we're hoping we're we're on that we're on that route. Yeah. So, uh we're working we're working on it. I'm I'm hoping to bring it to fruition soon. That'd be that'd be cool. And then you could sell it for 2.5 billion and go build the Jun brand any way you want. I'm very interested in joining whoever starts the next PNG. I think for me that's like the most interesting thing is who's going to bring the bring the new era PNG out. So yeah. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, I think we're at the end of the podcast and I usually have or we have a question that we always ask our misfit at the end of the podcast and that is if they know a misfit. Uh yeah, I think I think I know a lot of misfits. Uh- which is good. But, uh, I think there's a new super exciting brand. They're pretty big on their shop, but they're also having great Amazon retail success this year called Drink Nell. Uh, and I think Connor, one of the co-founders there, would be just like a great person to have. He's like he's got a great community building influencer strategy I think people would love. Uh, and it's really like a new upcoming scrappy brand that I think like a lot of people would, you know, sort of resonate with and understand. So, I think he'd be great. All right. And if people want to reach out to you or Mary Roose or you personally, what's uh what's the best way to do that? Uh yeah, I mean uh honestly you can DM me on LinkedIn or email address is just letter J hunter atmarywithorganics.com. Again, I'm always happy to help any single person on earth. So feel free to reach out anytime and we can always watch you as you grow to a billion dollars. Right. Of course. Of course. All right, Jay. Well, thanks a lot for uh coming on the podcast today. I'm gonna remove you, but we'll be right back there. It's always always interesting when you get down to it, you know, it's the fundamentals. Uh, you know, like you said, everybody always wants hacks from me or they want shortcuts or they want this and I give some of that and things that work temporarily. Uh, and people love it, but that's not where really where the the core strength is. I mean, they're doing over $500 million. So, they're not doing anything overly special or like some secret sauce. It's just doing things, executing at a high level, and taking care of the fundamentals properly. Come on, Kev. You're just saying that, right? It's really all about tactics. It is. It's just tactics. It's just 100%. They need to join. They need to come to a billion dollar seller summit and learn something. That's not a thing. I mean, they It could help their brand so much. Just imagine the ROI they would get if they come to that. All right. Well, I think that's it for today. How do people get a hold of us? Yeah. Then go to marketingmisfits.co. Marketingmisfits.co. And or or you can get a hold of us uh for our upcoming collective mind society trip at collectiveminds. Two s's there. Collectiveminds and then another one for society. Two s's backtoback. collectivemindsoccoccocciety.com where we're going to be uh taking a group of entrepreneurs in uh early November to Tampa, Florida for a big uh Tampa's the cigar capital of the world and we got uh 22 on 19 actually plus me and Norm uh and and assistant. 22 people going to 10 different cigar bars, eating good food, no presentations, no uh nothing like that. Just having a great time, enjoying each other. uh shooting the shooting the bull uh around the campfire as uh Norm and I like to say. Uh so check that out if you want details on that and we have we have some videos somewhere on what's that those YouTubers or what's that called that tube or something like that. Yeah. Okay. The YouTube. So go to the YouTube check out uh for the long form videos marketing misfits podcast and we just opened up uh to another channel the marketing misfits clips and those are all three minute or less segments from the long form podcast. So it will like this podcast we'll extract a bunch put them over there. So whatever you like we got uh we got a channel for everybody. Oh, by the way, we have a Tik Tok channel that we just started a couple weeks ago. Oh, wow. Did you know that? When are we going to have the 247 live channel? Well, we'll talk to Jay about that. Oh, yeah. We'll get his Maybe we'll get you some of his uh people. There you go. There you go. That'd be good. All right, man. We'll see you uh all next Tuesday uh for a brand new episode. If you like this episode, be sure to like it. Leave us a comment down in the comments or or share this uh with somebody else if you think they'll get some good value out of it. But other than that, we will see you again, Norman and I will be back next Tuesday with another brand new episode and another guest. And also, you can vote on Kevin getting a beard. As you noticed, Jay, myself, we had beards. Kevin did not. So, I think it's time for him to start growing. All right, everybody. We'll see you later. Take care. [Music]