How To Build an Online Business In 2025

How To Build an Online Business In 2025 Speaker 3: What are some of the best strategies when it comes to building out planning pages? Speaker 1: We approach it from several different angles. Number one, because we're selling mostly to older demographic, on the meta side, we're using advertorials. There's a first pre-sale page, there's a second pre-sale page, then there's an order form with order bumps, different things to maximize the average order value. And after the purchase, we have the OTOs, the upsells. And so we would have usually like three upsells after the main purchase. Also for each one of those, we would have downsells. So the kind of the whole overall like funnel structure is like 10 different steps. Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today we have what some may call the OG. Some may call the person to help build brands. Some people call it creates the best masterminds. But Alex Vantoff, who's come here from Miami, and a lot of you, again, probably bucket yourself in knowing him in different ways. But we've had the pleasure to have you here today to share and break down different things you're working on. One, two, kind of the way you look at building brands in a completely different scope than what we usually talk about here on Chew on This. So really excited about that. But more importantly, man, first of all, just wanted to say, huge fan of you, both Ash and I, and two, for all the differences you've made in brands today. Thank you so much for taking the time out to come here on Chew on This. Speaker 1: Thank you so much, guys. It's a pleasure to be here, and I'm a big fan of your work as well, guys. So, you know, same way we're fans of each other. Speaker 2: Well, Alex, for the few people who don't know you, give them a little bit of the background of, a little bit of your journey to where you've been and where you're at today. Speaker 1: I'm originally from Ukraine. I moved to the United States five years ago. I started my entrepreneurial journey probably in 2016 as a freelancer. Over time, some of the clients I worked with were in e-commerce, so that skewed my whole journey. Naturally, and so I went deeper into that. Started with initially like Google, then got into Facebook pretty like early on, like running ads for clients. And over time, one of the clients was running dropshipping business. And so I got into dropshipping for myself. And from there, you know, just been building businesses. Also started the education company a few years ago. So we do e-commerce and then we help people to scale their e-commerce businesses. Speaker 2: It's incredible. I think it's truly the definition of learning something through building and then sharing it as well and actually making sure you follow along around the impact. Before we jump into one thing, because I feel like when I've come to your masterminds or when I listen to you speak and whatnot, This world of like, you know, what seems like the elephant in the room when you hear the word dropshipping, or you hear about like somebody just scaling a single product or whatnot, it feels like it's a little bit like taboo. It feels like it's one of those things that's like, oh, we don't really talk about that because you know, it's not really how you build a brand, this and that. What's your thoughts on just how you look at E-commerce, DTC building, whatnot. And why does dropshipping actually have a place in that? And why does it belong instead of being something that young 18-year-olds do before they actually start to build a brand? Speaker 1: For sure, I mean, I think it's dropshipping overall has a pretty bad reputation, I think, for whatever reason. But as an industry, I was looking at the stats. It's like 200 or 300 billion dollar industry. It's massive. And it's also growing like year over year. So as an industry, it's just a fulfillment method, right? People have ruined it with like slow shipping times from China, you know, not caring about customer experience. But many like very successful companies are still operating on dropshipping model like Wayfair. Many of their products, they just drop ship directly from the manufacturers. They don't have those products in stock. And so it's just a fulfillment model. And I think there's a wrong way to do it. And then there is a right way to do it. Because even from China, We still ship some products from China currently, not to the United States. For here we have actually, maybe not from here, we have a warehouse here in New Jersey. They actually ship our products to the United States and then across the world we're shipping our products from China and it's like From five to nine days shipping times, which is not like, it's not ideal. It's not like three to five, but it's still like not, it's still acceptable. And also we maintain the cost efficiency because we don't have to ship, you know, the whole bulk of products, let's say to UK or to Canada or to like, let's say Australia. We can ship them directly from China to customers around the world. And so we have this hybrid model. I think dropshipping is great for people that are just starting out. It could be a great validation matter to see whether products actually work. Instead of buying, let's say, 10,000 units of the product that you may not know even sells, you can basically validate it with initially shipping from China. Then, over time, transition to the 3PL model. That's the right way to do it, I believe. The wrong way to do it is just choose the cheapest shipping option from China. Like 30 days 40 days shipping time, you know, it's not the best experience for the customers or not even ship at all I've seen those stories on Twitter. Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, you know who you are I mean one the biggest thing for me is that It allows you to especially if you're just starting out, right? I picture this 18 year old sitting in his room trying to figure out how do I make money? right, the the product is something that you can You can always buy in bulk and bring here at some point, right? You need the cash to really do that. But the biggest thing is really sharpening your tools here, which is figuring out the right creative for that product, the right funnel for that product, whether it's the website or what landing. landing page experience that you're actually providing to the potential customer. I think I would love to start and kick off and get into it, right? I think the biggest thing that's on everybody's mind right now is this big update from meta, right? Andromeda, leveraging AI to Pretty much categorize and analyze all the creatives, the landing page experiences, conversion rates, everything, right? So now more than ever, creative and the funnel that it directs to matters so much, right? Create an experience, whether it's a landing page funnel and that conversion rate is strong, that's a positive signal back to Metto. And whereas that formula was always kind of there and Metto was always looking at conversion rates, I think it matters more now because that is how they're prioritizing advertisers, right? So the advertisers that are putting out the best content, the best creative, the best ads, and actually have an experience that can convert a lot of people, is a positive signal so that you can perform better in the auction, right? So would love to kind of get into, maybe we'll start at the creative side and then move our way down the funnel, no pun intended. But creatives I feel like have been We've seen these booms from the UGC creator, whatever's trending on TikTok. Now I feel like the consumers that are very hip to this type of content are saying, oh, these are just ads now. I would love to get your take on how you view the landscape of ads and what are the creatives that you see that are performing well and what should brands be doing? Speaker 1: For sure. I think the creative strategy overall should be suited for a particular niche. For example, if you're selling Jewelry products, you can get away with very short UGC pieces, just demonstrating the product, demonstrating the emotion, and that could work very well. Also, banner ads, image ads, you can do very well with that. If you're selling the product that needs more explanation, then the format of the ad usually needs to be longer. In our business, for instance, We operate in the beauty space, so we're using VSLs. So these would be between like three to sometimes 20 minutes videos. And there's a storyline there, either the story of the customer or even like a doctor that explains like a specific, you know, why, for example, Your skin looks like why your skin, why you're getting older, right? Like why your skin kind of like maybe some ingredients that you're lacking kind of like explaining what is the root cause of the problem that you're having and also in the process discrediting all of the other solutions because I think no matter what niche you take, we're all in competitive spaces. You guys in one of the most like competitive categories like that that are out there and so As part of selling your product one way or another, you have to show why other products don't work for people. What is that unique mechanism of the product that makes this product work that other products do not have? It could be a unique ingredient in the formula. It could be how the product is made. It could be where the ingredients are sourced from. So there could be different, little unique advantage points. That you can use to your advantage to show why your product is different. So I believe that it's It's more about how you position yourself differently than it's about a product actually being better than others. For that purpose, we're using these longer videos because it just gives us more room to explain why our products are different from the other products on the market. And so we see a lot of success with that. On your note, like what you mentioned about TikTok, It's very weird, but I'm seeing, actually had a conversation with a few entrepreneurs literally last week that they're doing extremely well just repurposing TikTok content on Facebook, as is. Just kind of like removing the TikTok logo, obviously, but very dynamic, very fast, good hooks, good scroll stoppers, and very short ads as well. It works tremendously for them right now. So I think combining both, at the end of the day, the algorithm on TikTok, I think it's more advanced than it is on Meta. I talked to some engineers in Meta, they're just like, yeah, their algorithm is better. I'm like, why don't you build the same algorithm? It's like, oh no, we would have to rebuild the whole company from scratch. And so, I think what's coming from TikTok, even from the trans perspective, kind of like what type of format's working, what scroll stoppers are working, what hooks are working, TikTok is still a big inspiration point for a lot of products because if it pushes organically, and the beauty of The beauty of, let's say, TikTok is that you can clearly see the engagement and you can clearly see the views, comments, likes. You can see which videos are just pop up naturally with the algorithm, which ones, you know, kind of like algorithm picks up. And so you can act very fast and like jump on the hook that's working very well or scroll stop or like replicate those for yourself. Or if these are your creators, let's say you have a good TikTok shop program, organic program, you can repurpose those creators on Facebook. And I have seen Yeah. Yeah. It could work very well as well. So I think it depends on the product. If your product is more complex, you might need to kind of skew towards longer videos, longer format to explain your product more and build the storyline and differentiating points. But also if your product is easy to understand and you can explain everything about your product, how it's different, like in 30, 60 seconds, you can also have a lot of success with that. Speaker 2: I agree. Speaker 3: I think the content nowadays also is Kind of going back to the roots of what marketing really is, right? It's about kind of the storytelling approach. It's about kind of pinpointing a specific problem, agitating it, and then providing a solution, right? When you have these types of video ads that people are putting out, it's like, oh, I found this game-changing product. It does this. Like, nobody wants to see that anymore, right? It's like, hey, I'm getting married in four weeks. I need to fit in my dress. You know, I've tried this, this, and this. Nothing's worked. I finally found this, blah, blah, blah, right? It's like, okay, can you attract the right audience with the right story and educate them enough to the point where, okay, this is probably for me. I want to go and learn more, right? So I think when it comes to the ad creation, one, it's got to do one of many things, which is one, get the right audience, right? To keep that audience captive throughout so that you can explain why your product is a solution to the problem that you're agitating, and then get them to the most important page, which is your landing page, right? And so I wanna kinda go to that side of things where a lot, and honestly, a lot of brand owners and operators are still relying on their product page to try and convert cold traffic, right? When you're scrolling on TikTok, scrolling on Instagram, you don't have your credit card out in the open. You're not in the mindset of shopping, right? Somebody or some brand has literally stopped you from scrolling, got you somewhat interested in what they're selling. And now getting them to a page that's going to convince you is very important. So we'd love to get your take on how you guys approach kind of landing pages and just in this environment, right, of how competitive it is to bring CAC down and convert somebody, what are some of the best strategies when it comes to building out landing pages? Speaker 1: 100%. And like you said, I think it's one of the biggest like leverages overall, that one of the biggest like needle movers. Implementing the right landing page strategy, the right funnel. For us, we approach it from several different angles. Number one, because we're selling mostly to older demographic, on the meta side, we're using advertorials. There is a first pre-sale page, there is a second pre-sale page, then there is an order form with order bumps. Kind of different things to maximize the average order value. And after the purchase, we have the OTOs, the upsells. And so we would have usually like three upsells after the main purchase. Also for each one of those, we would have downsells. So the kind of the whole overall like funnel structure is like 10 different steps. I think for most brand owners, I think they don't go that deep. They would have like one, two upsells for the most part. That's kind of complex. We have the whole team working on that. We have the copywriters because copy for each one of these pages needs to be structured. After the OTO, we have on our OTOs, we have VSLs. Um, which kind of also like by itself is like five, 10 minutes video explaining, okay, cool. You just bought this product. That's awesome. And it will give you the results that you're looking for. However, once you start using this product, you might notice that like this other things that, you know, kind of like you know you might have this problem or there's another problem product that can amplify the results you're getting from the main product you just purchased and so now you kind of like logically explain why that other product would make sense and by doing this we're For example, to give you kind of numbers, let's say we're selling a product on the front end for $50. Through BondLink on the front end, we're getting that AV to about $80, $90. But then through OTOs, we're getting our average for the value to like $120, $130. So it basically goes, the product we're selling, let's say for $50, it goes to like $120, $130. So that gives us the advantage, obviously in terms of how much we can spend on acquiring customers. I would not recommend that for everyone, but if you're selling to an older demographic, probably that could be a good pass. I would just go and reverse engineer what are the most successful brands that are selling similar products to my audience that are fast growing, that are doing big numbers. I would just go and buy all of their products. Beyond the surface, you can see on the surface, you can see creatives, you can see landing pages, all of that is visible. But a lot of the things that people don't see are usually the things that actually make a big difference, which is the OTOs, the upsell sequences. Sometimes they might even call you and upsell you other products. Hey, thank you so much for buying this product. It will work amazingly for you, then asking them some questions about their experience, what they're looking for, and then recommending some other products. So that initiative can work very well too. That is kind of more like advanced complex structure. For the simpler structure, especially if you're selling to a younger demographic, like let's say if you're like average customers like 30, 35, maybe 40, they might not need all of that complexity. And you can get away with simple landing pages like Five reasons why, seven reasons why, nine reasons why. Very simple landing pages. You can create those with Replo, GemPages, PageFly. There's many great, amazing landing page builders. There's many brands that are advertising with those as well, like Javi Coffee, for example, has great ones that you can model. I just like to kind of like see, okay, who's doing very well selling comparable products? And then kind of like emulate and model, learn from the data, make some adjustments and kind of go from there. Speaker 2: I'm very curious because I remember when I came to the Mastermind in Dubai, it felt like there was a whole different world of how marketing was happening. And I was like, just itching to get back to tell Ash about it. Because it was like, you guys, I remember even just Mark's presentation, your presentation, everyone's presentation, it was like, you guys were talking about a world that was what people don't talk about daily. And it came down to like, even talking about VSLs, right? When you break that down, the concept of Creating something long form like that, it just doesn't get talked about because I feel like most brands are struggling to even get that perfect 30 second piece of content or get the right creator to create a one minute piece of content or even seed enough product to get people to post about it. Can you break down for some of us, like, Where is the starting point to go and create a VSL? Do you have to get a studio and an actor and a script? How do you go about that process? I feel like there's an idea where we all put a lot of time into creating an advertorial, but the truth is it's because we think that our product needs consumption of information. If we can do that through a listening format or a visual format, alongside an avatar, it almost strengthens it. So in theory, everything you guys are saying makes sense. But then there's this idea of like, well, how do I go and get started on it? What are the components that you need to, if someone wanted to tomorrow go and test a VSL strategy, and then of course, there's other parts to it, but they wanted to go and build one, what would it take? Speaker 1: For sure. It's a great question. So I think the best way to do it is to model what's working already. I would just, okay, who's, again, like who's my most successful competitors, how they're advertising, or any of them are using VSLs. Then just transcribe that VSL word by word. Where's the footage? Okay, so this piece of footage, they're talking about this, they're showing this piece of footage. It's kind of like each segment, like B-roll, like standard, you know, process. Like every three seconds you have visual part and also you have what the person is actually saying. Speaker 2: Are you using a tool to break this down or just someone internally manually doing that process? Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a bunch of tools. I mean, we built like so get hooked AIR tool. That's literally what it does. Just basically transcribe. And then what it can do is you can just rewrite it for yourself. I think in terms of learning that structure, it's probably one of the best ways to do it. You just rewrite that. Maybe you change a few words in there. Maybe your product is not for skin, but for nails. Make those slight adjustments. And then in terms of like putting the footage together, it's a lot of B-roll. Sometimes like you don't need like a spokesperson. Sometimes many of our VSLs, for instance, are just B-roll after B-roll after B-roll. The whole video is a B-roll. There's no like... Speaker 2: Someone just voice notes, like a voiceover? Speaker 1: Yeah. And voiceovers also if you don't have anyone... Who can do that for you? You can hire people on Fiverr who would do the voiceovers. Or you can just do 11 laps, for instance. Very realistic. It got to the point where it's very hard to say whether it's real or not. Let's say you wanted to have a spokesperson, but you want to first validate, okay, is it worth the investment for me to invest in a spokesperson, arrange a studio, whatever? You can validate it with AI UGC. Captions, for instance, has a very good AI UGC quality. It's literally, I'll show you after, it's very hard to differentiate it from real person speaking. And so let's say the person is speaking throughout the video, and then you just mix it up with B-roll, so it's not just focused on them. And it turns out like it's a real person speaking. So that's just for the validation purpose. Obviously, for long-term strategy, you absolutely need some like a spokesperson, like real people, ideal authority figures. So with VSL, one of the things that amplifies the success of it is having the authority figure. So it could be the I mean, if you watch some of the infomercials like at night or some of the successful brands, they have the authority figure like Cindy Crawford, right? Celebrity, well-known, respected, right? She talks about the products or any other celebrities that represent brands. So that's one of the ways. But also, I mean, just a person who's good on camera, who's likable, or a doctor, if you're selling the product that people need an endorsement from a doctor to make a purchasing decision, like health or beauty products, usually those need a lot, or even there's a brand called Dr. Marty Petz, very successful company, part of the Golden Hippo. So Golden Hippo, you can just go, any of their brands operate on this model, where they have the authority figure, Yeah, they're doing very well. And they've been doing this for a long time. So they have the authority figure. I'm a doctor who has credentials, who is well-respected, who presents well on camera, obviously has great scripts as well that explain the product, why people have this problem in the first place, what is the root cause of the problem that they're trying to solve, and then also how is this product different from other products, where it's sourced. How it's made, kind of like all the differentiating points from other products in the market. So that's kind of like more complex, kind of like long-term strategy. But if you just wanted to do it like tomorrow, you can just do AI, you just see, you can do B roll. If you operate the brand, you probably have lots of B roll. If you don't have it, no problem. You can hire actors. Backstage.com has over 700,000 actors. You guys using Backstage.com? Speaker 3: About to. Speaker 1: Yeah? Speaker 3: Great. Speaker 1: Yeah, 700,000 actors. You can choose age, ethnicity, gender. Speaker 2: It's real actors? Speaker 1: Yeah, real actors. And so the beauty of those compared to like, let's say if you go on Fiverr, And you try to hire, let's say, UGC people. The UGC people these days are kind of spoiled. It's $500 for a 30-second video. So on Backstage.com, they're not as spoiled yet with these kind of rates. So you can get very good... Speaker 3: And better quality, too. Speaker 1: Yeah, they're actors. They're actors. If you want the best results, you'd have to send them the script. So the script in the first place needs to be good. And then also they can shoot, for example, when we work with creators, we're asking them to send us, let's say, 10, 20 pieces of the B-roll so that we can repurpose that B-roll for future ads. So over time, we're building this huge library of B-roll that we can just plug and play into different videos and just make these different variations. Different script, different voiceover, just different pieces of B-roll like we can create based on limited variations. 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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. What are the key KPIs you're looking for when you're looking at like if a VSL is doing well? Obviously you're looking at the sale, but what are some of the other important metrics that are there? Because now this is a long form piece of content, right? So I'm sure there's like a lot of stages to how people are reading that and then understanding it and acting on it. Speaker 1: One of the most important metrics we've noticed is the cost per three second video view. It has to be ideally below like 12 cents or even like 10 cents. If it's below like 10 cents, it's a scalable piece of content. And if it converts. So yeah, it's cost per view. It's also basically signals from Facebook, That is, okay, it's a good piece of content. They're giving us good cost per view. So if soft metrics are good on that side, and then the conversions metrics are good as well, then it's a scalable piece of content. Speaker 3: I mean, given that these pieces of content are super long, are you looking at hold rate at all? Is there a benchmark for that? Speaker 1: For what? Speaker 3: For hold rate. Speaker 1: Oh, hold rate. No, we're not paying a lot of attention to that. Speaker 3: So just the initial like probably thumb stop and then the cost per first three seconds? Speaker 1: Yeah, those are the main ones we're looking at. Because of the length of the content, it could be like let's say 10-15% only. And so, yeah, it's kind of like skewed from that perspective. And also the VSLs could be like five minutes or it could be 20 minutes, right? So then the criteria would be different. Speaker 3: For, at least for the angles, right, for the BSLs, right, I know you mentioned, all right, take a look at your competitors, see what they're doing, and obviously try to fit it for your brand, right? How are you guys thinking about just creative strategy in general, right? How are you guys even coming up with the angles to at least You know, put out there into, you know, the ad account. You know, do you guys, you know, mind reviews, post-purchase surveys? I mean, I feel like those are the main places to look, right? But how are you guys really getting, like, really agitating those problems? Because the VSL, I mean, for somebody to watch a 20 minute long video, it has to be on point, right? So how can people really extract those ideas and kind of translate those into those videos? Speaker 1: For sure. Great question. It's mostly research. So like you mentioned, like Amazon, we also do like reviews from forums. Sometimes people just write this like huge, like kind of, you know, Reddit. Yeah, Reddit. So they say like, be explaining their experiences in a very emotional way. And so you can find many angles this way. There is a Google Chrome plugin, I think it's called Google Discussions. So if you put specific keywords, it will give you specific forums that mention those keywords. So it kind of can simplify that. Search for those for you. But now also there is a ChatGPT and deep research. It can simplify that process significantly. Mark from my team was like experimenting with other tools. I think it was Gemini. Gemini has very good deep research, provides even more links to different sources than... So for example, let's make it kind of actionable for people. Let's say if you guys wanted to sell collagen powder, right? So in that case, you would just ask what are the most... I mean you probably already know like some of the angles for your products, right? So it could be like, okay, so I'm selling this and this product. These are like the angles that are working right now, that they're working very well. What other angles You can find for people that can use collagen and in what areas of life their life quality can improve. Speaker 2: Outside of what you have. Speaker 1: Yeah, and so that could be tremendous. I think overall with these tools, this whole research process just simplified 10x. Because before we would do all of that manually, now it just could be automatic. Speaker 3: So once you get that information, right, is that now, okay, we'll send it to the copywriters or script writers and then kind of formulate something after the fact? Speaker 1: Yeah. So after you have the initial angles, it's important, like with VSLs, it's important to follow the structure. Right, so there is usually like a hook. There is a lead. There is, you know, some story that person tells. You need to explain the unique mechanism of the product, unique mechanism of the solution. Then usually they end with, it's called a AV close. So it's where you're basically saying, hey, you know, based on what we've seen, people that are getting the best results are using this product for at least four to six months. And it's beautiful saying that like, you know, right now we're offering this product, like six months supply was a great discount. And so kind of like, Incentivizing people to buy more products on the front end. So when they click through, they already have the intent to buying more. And so yeah, after you have the angles, like you just follow the structure that you already have. And just kind of wrap it around that main angle that you found through the research. And once you test, let's say, three, five of these, like, different variations, you can also write, I mean, you'd have to prompt it, like, you'd have to prompt it, like, pretty well. Like, for example, if you feed, like, ChatGPT with, like, five, 10, 20 good VSLs from your competition, And you ask it to learn from those and then you provide all the information about your product and then ask ChatGPT to write. The VSL based on the structure that was outlined for all these other VSLs for your product, it will give you pretty decent output. So in terms of the shortcut, that could be it. And so once you test a few of these and you find what's working, then majority of the upside could be in the variations of the existing VSL. For example, if you have You know, good like 5-10 minute VSL and it's converting and it's profitable. You're able to spend $50,000, $200,000 on it. You can create just variations of the hooks, variations of the leads, like first like 30, like 60 seconds of the footage and then the rest of the VSL could be the same. But this way you don't have to kind of recreate the whole thing from scratch and also taking into consideration if average watch time for your video would be like Let's say 15, 20, maybe 30 seconds. Then most of the people just watch those first 30 seconds. But you know that whoever is watching beyond that is likely to buy. Then you know that the second part of your VSL is good. All you have to change is that first one minute of the footage, let's say. Because that's where most people will just drop off. And because you're exposing, like you're spending, let's say hundreds of thousands of dollars on the ad, you expose that, like your frequency is at this point probably two or three. So people probably have seen that. So now you just need to refresh the first part of it and you can create more winning variations of that via sales without putting the effort into recreating the whole thing. Speaker 2: So I'm curious more from the lens of like I've always seen you talk about how you see a problem and you're trying to create a solution for it. In that same vein, you've been building Get Hooked, right? Tell us a little bit about that because I think that's also solving a problem. What's the, and out of curiosity, what's kind of the angle with what type of problem you're trying to solve there and why is it different? And then also, I think if you can give more live applications, similar to how you just talked about like ChatGPT and how that can be used, how are you guys, how are we supposed to use something like GetHooked? Speaker 1: For sure. Yeah, with GetHooked, I mean, initially we just started for ourselves because we wanted to We wanted to spy and see what's working for different brands in the space. And so that originally was the intention. And then we just shared it with some people. People started to use it. And so we decided to build it farther. And I mean, one of the things that we do with GetHooked is we give the criteria for the winning app. Because it's very important, let's say, If you're looking at your ad library, if you're a competitor, there could be, let's say, 1,000 ads. So how do you know which ad exactly is even worth modeling? Because if you model a losing ad, then you probably have a losing ad as well. And so we have criteria based on different signals. That identifies the ads that they're basically spending the most money on. And you can filter by those criteria. You can also filter by, for example, out of all of the brands that they're currently advertising, how many active ads they have. Like, so for example, if you only want to look at the brands that have over like 100 or 200 or 300 active ads, you can filter so you can easily see and find inspiration, not just directly from your competitors, because you're just creating kind of like something very similar, but also, oh, maybe there's a brand selling. Yeah, maybe like a totally different kind of niche, but there's a brand that's like popping off. They have a lot of active ads, like last month they had Like 20 active ads, like this month they have like 500. Okay, what happened there? And so kind of like gives you that criteria. It also has filters for the length of the video. Like so you can filter VSLs pretty much like if the video is longer than three minutes It's it's many cases. It's a VSL so or five minutes. So we have that we have those filters So that's just on the discovery part kind of like for the inspiration to see what's working Then you can generate the transcript right away. So if you need to kind of like recreate it rewrite it with ChatGPT Just copy paste it rewrite it and it has very good Script creation. So if you take your competitor at Let's say, and use it as an inspiration, provide basic information about your product. It will recreate scripts for you, like the whole process that we talked about. If someone wants to get started with VSLs very fast, that just eliminates all of the kind of just shortcuts, that whole process, because it will give you Pretty good, very well trained. The prompts that we have put in to train that rewriting process are this long. If someone wanted to recreate it for themselves, they would have to play with ChatGPT for hours. It will give you a very good script. It will give you three different hooks that you could use. You can also copy that whole Outline with a script with details about your product. You can just copy and paste it, send it to your creators if you want them to recreate it or to let's say your video editors if you want them to put it together for you. So just kind of like streamlines that part of the process. What we're working on right now is just creative analytics. And making, helping entrepreneurs making better decisions with their ads. Because analyzing the data, especially if you're running like hundreds of different creatives, and they're in different ad sets, and they're in different, you know, campaigns, different ad sets, like it's just like, it's kind of difficult. And also with different like attribution tools. I know what you guys use, like TripleWhale use. TripleWhale. We're also using TripleWhale, but also TripleWhale doesn't populate, let's say the average watch time. Right? For the video or to cost per three second view. Does it populate for you? Speaker 3: I don't even use it for creative analysis. Speaker 1: Okay. Yeah. So for us, it's like we always, we're looking at ads manager for soft metrics. We're looking at triple whale for actually contribution and attribution metrics. And then it's like, okay, we're trying to kind of make sense of it, right? And so bringing all of these together to help entrepreneurs making better decisions with their ads, caught losing ads faster. Okay. If, let's say, after analyzing the whole performance, like, okay, after these ads, usually if they have like 10 seconds or let's say 20 cents cost per 10 second view, these ads are not scalable. Kind of like identifying all of those metrics that predicate very early whether the creative has the scalability potential. Based on the data you have. So if you have hundreds of thousands or million dollars worth of data, there's a lot of like patterns that have already been happened. And so helping entrepreneurs come to those conclusions so they can make better decisions, make more money with winning ads, spend less money on losing ads. So that's basically what we want to, what we're working on right now. Speaker 3: One thing that you just mentioned, which I want to double down on, is that what you're trying to do is if you have a history of data, leveraging it in a way that you're looking at your average cost for whatever winners you have currently. So if you know that the cost per three second views is X, your ideal CPA is this, or your cost per initiate checkout is this, Those should be the benchmarks that you're kind of measuring against, not some arbitrary number that we're coming out with, right? So let's just say, for example, I think what you mentioned earlier was if your cost per three-second views is around $0.10, right? But if a brand is, you know, at X scale, it's actually, it's okay to be at $0.15, right? Aiming for that and something under is probably what you should be doing versus listening to some arbitrary benchmark numbers that probably don't have anything to do with your niche too. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's because data tells the whole story and usually like we spend money on that. I mean, it's basically the biggest expense in their business, right? I don't know how easy it is. And then looking at those like, okay, something is working, right? Because we're making sales, but also something is not working. So where are those things where we can cut costs and And make the business more efficient because that goes directly to your bottom line. And so it's, I think it's like, yeah, it's one of those like very high, because it's the biggest like expense, it's one of those like very high like needle movers. I think it's overall has been like, yeah, you know, we're just like testing ads. Yeah, they're not working. Yeah, some ads are working, some ads are not. But why? And so we kind of questioned ourselves, like, why is it, like, does it have to be this way? Because I know some, like, and also, like, because I'm talking to a lot of people, it's like, I know some people that operate, like, on 0.8 return on aspen. I know some people that operate on, like, 2.5 return on aspen. Okay. So what do those people do differently? Is it just because of the product? Do they have, like, super unique product that never was sold before? Or is it because they have a different strategy? And so kind of like questioning the status quo, right? Like, okay, yeah, Facebook is like a break-even platform, or you're just losing money. And like, oh, yeah, everyone's losing money on Facebook. Okay, what if it wasn't this way? And so, I don't know, we're just asking ourselves these questions, because, okay, maybe we won't get it like from 1.1x return, for instance, to like 3x. What if we get it to 1.5? That's like 50% increase in efficiency and that can be done by just properly looking at the data because we already spend money acquiring that data and making data-driven decisions. Speaker 2: You know, you talked a little bit about the tactical pieces of building a VSL. You talked a little bit about building GetHooked and now I'd be really curious on like You also have this element of we're helping a lot of brands, right? Build whatever part of their funnel or whatever part of their business they need help in. What are like maybe if you can, I probably want to say like 20 examples, but we don't have that much time. But like give me like three to four examples of like Mistakes that you're seeing people make, whether it's mindset, whether it's tactical mistakes, whether it's just when you hop in the business and you're like, what the hell, you know, like, what are some of those things that are, that I think for everyone else feels like common sense, but it's actually coming up too often or mistakes you're like, you know, a lot of people are probably making because you've got a bird's eye view at so many businesses. Maybe you can call out a few. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fascinating because It's like we have, I've been doing the education part like last four years, five years. And throughout that time, you know, many people come through our like ecosystem, you know, we're helping them. And it's interesting to see, you know, some people just like scaling to like nine figures. And then there's some people that just, you know, get stuck like at seven. And so the common trends that I have seen is, number one is a mindset. I think people that have very like short term thinking, just kind of like focusing on profit, don't care about the longevity of the business, don't care about like building the team and building the system, just focusing on what's working right now. I think that's probably the biggest one because that predicates all of the other actions that they do. Number two, I think it's the ability to think more logically and less emotionally. Like, bad day on Facebook. And, you know, like all of us have, right? So, okay, you know, some entrepreneurs would say, oh, Facebook is, like, let's shut it down. And some entrepreneurs, okay, maybe just bad day. Maybe just bad data. Or maybe, like, I did something wrong that caused that. And so, and it's hard, you know, we're all humans to think logically sometimes. And so having more kind of like data, that's why being data driven is so important and making decisions based on the right data. And the third one is I think just systems-based thinking, like finding the inefficiencies in the system. It's like looking at the whole process holistically. Okay, we do this, we do this, we do this, we do this. This is the output we have. Okay, how much time it takes. Okay, what is the output of Let's say this person on the team, this person on the team, this person on the team, are there any automations or softwares or AI we can implement to improve that process? So the business constantly evolves. I think overall, as industry changes, new technology comes in, businesses become more efficient probably five, ten years from now. Maybe in one year from now, it could be a three-person team that can operate a nine-figure business. I think it's possible. Like I had this entrepreneur coming to my office like last week. He's 21. He's from Utah. Very, very fascinating individual. He has he's doing one half million dollars a month in his business. He started his business eight months ago. He has no full time people on his team. Speaker 2: Supplement? Speaker 1: He sells consumable product yeah kind of kind of yeah kind of supplement yeah like just just freelancers you know some AI tools and it's just very like lean efficient business and so I think just overall like was this whole technology was evolution that we're in right now It's important to kind of just reevaluate like everyone on the team, like even what you do. And also the output from each part of the process and how that could be streamlined and made more efficient. And I think those are the businesses that evolve. Like it's like people who were like riding horses and then, you know, cars came in. Speaker 2: Like, it's a great call out. Speaker 3: No, this was awesome. I think even now I have a lot of things I want to go back and test, especially the app that you guys are putting out. I think that's going to be super helpful for a lot of people. The one thing I want from you now is if you could give one piece of advice for viewers and listeners to take back and implement in their business right now, what would that one thing be? Speaker 1: Okay, if I would just stick to one is Just pick pick someone Who was done what you want to do And then figure out what they do and just do it I think it's like ecommerce like overall like this circle is like we We kind of like just like learning from each other and we we kind of okay. So this is this is the status quo This is what's? This is what's kind of the accepted. This is what's not accepted. This is kind of like baseline. And sometimes there's outliers. So I would look for the outliers, people who are just doing something like differently or more efficiently. And I would learn from those people. Yeah, if there was one piece of advice, that probably would be it. Find a mentor. And I need to do the second one. Speaker 2: You get to have one more. Speaker 1: Yeah, use more AI. I think it's just like in terms of, we're just chatting with Mark as well. Like right now on our team, like every business that we touch, like we want to have someone on the team who's like AI integrator. Because with all of these AI tools, we basically get excited about all these tools. But the actual implementation and building workflows and the systems around that, that's what takes the most time. And most business owners don't have time. So if you already have a business that functions, you're profitable, you make money, just allocate that To a person, whatever that is, these people are well-paid because they bring so much efficiency to your business. Allocate $100,000 a year for a person on your team who can look in different departments in your business and can create these different workflows, combining different tools, like pulling data from this tool, sending it to this one, to this one. Streamlining that whole process using the technology because the people who will do that will get the competitive advantage. They can run more lean, more efficiently, and they can make more money, more margin, they can spend more on acquiring customers, they can scale faster. Unknown Speaker: Chew on that. Speaker 2: 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.