How to Diversify Away from Meta and WIN

How to Diversify Away from Meta and WIN Speaker 3: So for your monthly paid budget, would you put App Lovin in the top three? Speaker 1: It might be one. So this last 30 days, $530,000 in spend. Our CPMs are sitting at about $24. For us on Meta, this is like 40 to 80. And our CPC is 83 cents. Bro, when's the last time you saw a CPC below a dollar? Speaker 2: Ash was happy back then. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm happy with two. Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today we have a special series brought to you by App Lovin where we talk about how you're going to diversify away from all the different marketing channels you're used to spending money on. We have the OG of e-commerce here, Nick Shackelford, who, I don't know what he means to you guys, but for some people, he's a partner at Breeze. For some people, he's the OG content creator. For some people, he ran the agency that ran your ads. Whatever way that he fits into your mindset, we have an honor to bring him here on the pod. And he's gonna actually spill the beans on how he's diversifying away from channels like Meta And how he's been building Breeze with an incredible team. And Nick, first of all, thanks for taking the time to be here. Speaker 1: It's a matter of time, dude. It's taken way too long. Well, it's not the easiest to get to. Like, obviously, I'm coming all the way from California. You know how that goes on that trip. But this place is super important to us. The topic is extremely important to us. And it's actually, like, really well-timed, mainly because Everything kind of like feels like it sucks. Like everything that everyone's talking about is like, this is all gone. No one's buying anything. Something's going wrong. So it's probably the best time to be talking about, A, diversification or B, like, should we still be doing what we're doing? Speaker 2: It's amazing. I think what you said right out of the gate, which was so true, which is everything feels like it's not going right. And I think so much of when even Ash comes in the morning, I know his mood based on just how he is. It's like, okay, that is directly correlated to the KatKon Meta. And you look at that and you kind of have this inkling feeling like, do we have to rely on this? Do we have to fall for this? Sometimes you're just like, yeah, because it's hard to go and diversify, but then you kind of hear everyone preaching like, oh, well, spend money on Snapchat, check out Pinterest, do this. And then you're like, well, I don't know if those platforms are working. Maybe before we even jump into some of this, I think what's really cool with how you guys are building Breeze is like, You guys almost started with diversification right out of the gate because you kind of had to and then maybe walk us through that. Speaker 1: Okay, so I know how you feel about this. So you feel like you have a bad, like if your CAC is bad, your day is kind of ruined. Dude, we could wake up any day and lose an account. Or we'll lose multiple accounts or multiple pages because of the space we play in. So I think if you kind of enter this, there's a different hat that I wear depending on where the biggest need is. And right now it's part of our breeze, right? And my core role is I'm in charge of retention, customer support, subscription, which is a huge part of You know, an RTD, non-alcoholic beverage space. And so Aaron, Aaron Noss, which is our founder, started this thing, big brain on paid media side. But I've had to learn it because I came from the performance side. I came from the media buying side. And basically, he had that fully on lock and our media buying team is pretty elite. Like, you know, come with the guys that are running our stuff. So they're the real deal. And when I sat there and when I started seeing this channel that basically our advertising channels are being like, hey, it counts down, it counts down, it counts down. I literally said to myself, I go. I can't keep getting tapped to what we like to call pump the money machine, which is send an email or hit the subscribers, like run a promo. That dilutes the brand on a level too quick. Every once in a while you want to treat them. Our birthday is coming up, 420. So we want to appropriately say, hey, come see us. That's the right time to make that. And I actually, out of necessity, had to find App Lovin. And I didn't, I, look, I was not hunting. I'm not a, I'm not a taboola guy. I'm not an outbring guy. I'm not a news breaker. I'm not any of these guys, but I now have to be just out of pure survival. Speaker 2: It's incredible. Speaker 1: What really went wrong was for us to advertise, you, you, we have to be very, Creative in the way that we're talking about our product. And you'll start seeing this trend if you look at it on TikTok, if you look at it on sometimes on Instagram, it's all my gardening girlies. Have you seen this before? So it's the girls that are talking about gardening and there's leaves everywhere. And they're like, they're alluding to consumption of cannabis. On our landing pages, like it has to be very clean, it has to be hemp. And we always have to have that squeeze page or page in between. You guys are familiar with this knowing with all the restrictions you guys have to deal with. And we kind of were like, The easiest path to purchase is to get them to PDP, but Meta is not going to allow us to do this. So we can't spend as much there or we can't be as compliant there. App Lovin, and frankly, some of these guys are going, it's a real product. It's not a bad experience. And it's worth investing our time and effort and money into it. And look, as it gets more and more expensive, because we can afford a CAC anywhere from $85 to $120. So we have range to go. And last month alone, we publicly posted about this. LinkedIn, every month we do a breakdown of where our ad spend is. I think that's something very unique about us building in public. We spent over $500,000 last month alone on App Lovin. Not because we wanted to, because that was the only channel that would take our money. It was like Q4 and we're like, crank the budgets, crank the budgets. The only platform that had available inventory at a CAC that were acceptable was App Lovin. Speaker 2: That's crazy. It's insane. Speaker 1: And it sucks. But whether it sucks or it doesn't, it's where our money can be spent. Speaker 3: I want to go back because even when you guys had that first initial run and things were picking up, I remember it was Aaron's video on TikTok that went viral, right? Speaker 1: Still one of our best ads. Speaker 3: I think going back to that and kind of leveraging that, I want to understand the story of how kind of getting on TikTok and not specifically saying exactly what it is, alluding to it and creating the funnel through like TikTok ads, TikTok shop. What was that experience like and how did you guys even like, how were you able to even do that? Speaker 1: TikTok was interesting. I wish TikTok was I don't know about you guys, but it's not a major part of our marketing mix currently, which sucks, but I'll give the whole story as to why this happened. Aaron's video, he's sitting by a fire, and I want to talk to you about this drink. So he goes into the science. I'm not going to pretend to know the science as much as he does, because he can just rattle it off in his brain. But he's sitting there essentially talking about the benefits, the effects, how you're going to feel, the effect that you're going to get. And he sells you exactly on how it's going to go as soon as you get it. Because if you haven't drank in it before, or if you have, it's a 15 minute onset, you can truly feel it. And you guys know in the supplement game, if you talk about the effect that they get and they actually get the effect, The anticipation of receiving it, taking it, feeling it, getting it, dude, they're in. Lel TV is dude, they're gonna stick with you. And so Aaron made this core video on Meta first, and that was like our rocket ship moment. We ported that over to TikTok. Here's actually what nobody was really talking about, especially in our space. We have our infused and we have our non-infused, non-alcoholic alternatives. There's two specifics and different paths that are both incredibly important to us. TikTok only allowed our non-infused. The issue is the more viral we went on TikTok, the more orders we drove on TikTok, the more orders we'd get on Amazon. Amazon would only allow our non-infused product. So we're selling what's called a flow non-alcoholic. So all of a sudden, Aaron's talking about the effect of the core or like the infused. People, we ported that asset over into TikTok. TikTok is driving interest on Amazon. Amazon won't take our infused. So all of a sudden people are buying and going, dude, I don't feel that. That effect that you're talking about, we don't get. So now all of a sudden reviews, listen, so if you went to our Amazon right now, you'd see it and it's like 3.8, 4.2, like we're battling to come back up because we should have been explicitly clear that like we're selling you on the effect of infused, go to the dot com, but TikTok and Amazon could only take our non-infused. So it was a weird, it sucked. Speaker 2: It sucked so bad. Speaker 1: That's again, that's the understanding of being like very omni-channel on all the other platforms. It's because it's a core product of ours and we got to figure out how to sell it. But Meta isn't always the place that I can pump the specific product. Speaker 3: So the reason I ask this, right, is because a lot of people ask, how do I start diversifying away from Meta, right? And the whole idea was taking what was working on Meta and simply just applying it to another channel, right? So you took that video, you post it on TikTok. Did well. Started to, you know, run ads behind it. I remember you guys were pumping budget behind there. Now is the next step to take that video and apply it to another channel again? Speaker 1: I think it's like ease of implementation. It's like speed of implementation, ease of implementation is ranked highest on how fast or like how can we get this going. So if you have, again, the same thing we did with App Lovin, like we have proven assets. Start there. A proven page, start there. And then we look at what we call like tranches of spend. What is the first $10,000 of spend that we have? Because we're paid guys. We're willing to spend. We know the investment needed to get the returning or learnings. And so we'll take the cohort of ads that we know are working, the ads or the landing pages that we know are working, and we just let that sit. And so depending on like platform-specific performance, which I think a lot of people don't think through, is use what you currently have. Launch there and then you start optimizing on it because we're willing to try anything. Like I think I'm gonna get news breakup this week just because I have to be everywhere. We have giddy up on the performance media buying starting end of this week or next week because we know we literally have to be everywhere as long as we set CAC targets. So there's no way around it. Speaker 2: So maybe we can jump into a little bit of like, even just on the content end, right? You guys have this really cool mix of an elevated product that shows really well, but then also you have a founder who does, you know, a lot of that front-end engine piece of it, which is really cool. How complicated does your content engine have to be when you are diversifying? Because I feel like the other thing that comes up when we talk about diversification With other people or other brands or founders, it's like, well, I don't have content for this platform. I don't have content for this. And so maybe you can give us a little peek into kind of how you guys go about how you're building out that engine. Speaker 1: I'm so thankful I don't have to run or lead this because it's such a beast on it. So fly on the wall. So we have, like you mentioned, Aaron, heavy piece of content, Travis, which is our formulator. And he's like our Bill Nye science guy that knows the ingredients in a level that It's crazy, like a small antidote before I get back to this. We were at South by Southwest testing new product or tasting new things coming up. And he was literally going, he was like, all right, take the sip. Okay, now you should see all that flavor. That flavor on the back end, that's the actual Ghana speaking to you a little bit. So he speaks in this way where it's very medicinal almost like, and he really, really, really cares. It's like a mission to him. So you have Aaron who's speaking from the visionary. Here's why we have it. Here's what this product is going to do for you. Travis is able to speak to it from a depth of ingredient knowledge level. And then Corbyn, who's our brand manager that knows every Peace of our content. And so those, we always start with our founders or the people that can speak the easiest to it. And we're not shy of it. It's like, hey, like I'm Corbin, I do this. Or hey, I'm Travis, I do this. I think you actually legally have to disclose you're part of the brand. And so that's something I think a lot of founders kind of mess up or they don't speak to. Like you can't pick up the be like, you guys should try this. Because you guys obviously are biased and there's a reason why you feel that way. So we always start with the humans first because it's a heavy effect on it. But even on this most recent launch, I think we're a unique piece to this because of compliance, we essentially have to be very image heavy just for speed of launch. And if you invest so much time and effort on getting content, especially when you do TikTok creators, briefing, sending their products, they shoot the content, approving, iterating on this. To do all that effort and then lose accounts or to do all that effort and then it doesn't get enough spend on it because you can't, it's just that then investment just kind of sucks. So we have a lead copywriter, name is Daniel. We have Corbyn who does brand, like basically owns the brand. We have two designers and then we have a influencer management. So now we're about like four or five people already. And then we'll start doing like our own edits. And then we use Constant Creative 2 on our end to just To pump up variations. So all in I think at our level of spend which is about a million plus a month. We have a team of six plus some freelancers in there and anywhere between 30 to 80 assets if we can get that going on a weekly basis. Speaker 3: I mean, it sounds like the content itself, just given the restriction you guys have, have to be very specific. Speaker 1: Dude, it is. And I actually wonder if we weren't such a niche product and maybe when we stop selling or stop focusing on the infused, this strategy might have to change because we could be way more creative and funny. We can't do the crazy Long-form selling stories because you're like dude, I have to get initially to the product. Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Speaker 3: No, I agree. So then what is What is the strategy for selling De-Infused and kind of tiptoeing around the actual messaging and the actual benefits of the product and the features of the product? But how are you guys getting creative that will actually convert if you can't necessarily say what it is and what it does? Speaker 1: Basically, how I've interpreted it is like we're feeling adjacent. Instead of saying high, it's elevated, like feel elevated. So we're taking every word that you see that would be associated with feeling high, feeling buzzed. Smoking or drinking, like anything that you could insinuate or just like a little bit adjacent to it. So buzz is happy or euphoria. High is euphoric or uplifting. Like so we're just literally, you go into ChatGPT, like these are the words I can't say, give me ones that I can and it's just adjacent to it. So, and that's, even on like your, some of your guys' ads, like you call out as much specific Words as possible or you just see what other people are commenting and engaging with it. So it's not super high-depth or crazy because we can't be and we can't be very story-like or long-form because we just don't have the time. Why invest in any of this and then you just lose it? That's the part that really sucks. Speaker 2: I'm curious, some of the methodologies you guys are having to implement at Breeze, right? Taking it from a lens of like obviously you guys have to operate that brand a certain way, are there certain things you guys are doing that like you feel like could almost be adapted to like regular brands that don't have to do that? I almost feel like sometimes when I look at some of the content you guys put out and it's like blurred out letters or it's like You know, I guess that you're kind of spacing around or like it beeps out, you know, Aaron's voice on the on the on the word, like, is there is there maybe any like truth to like also testing stuff like that when you don't have to do that? Like, have you have you played around with that idea? Because There's part to it where it's like, it's almost a mystery of what's going on here. Speaker 1: And why are you blocking that? Speaker 2: And why are you blocking that? And I'm just curious, like, have you tested this theory? Because you're obviously affiliated to a lot of other brands as well. Just curious if you guys have thought about that or is there some truth to also looking at it in that lens? Speaker 1: We did two tests. It was for, it was an adaptogenic mint company. It's not infused at all. We've like bleeped out words that were not needing to be bleeped out, but it like insinuated that there was something like, why are you doing this? We did run some tests on this. CTR is there, but then at the end of the day that you land on the product and there's nothing like super unique about it on the product page, that makes it like, why is that bleeped out? So you can't really, you can't falsify the bleeping or the covering it. I think feminine products is the only other area where like you want to call out, like take care of like, Your bits and pieces, your kitty, your thing like that, like that is probably the only other area that you would bleep things or cover things. But at that point, your target audience, your demo, like they know what they're doing. Like they get that already. So I don't know. I think because of how hard I wouldn't, like if I had a brand, they're like, hey, we want to play tongue in cheek and hide some things or blur some things. Dude, it's already hard enough for these people to get it just normal advertising. I probably wouldn't even push them into doing it. If I'm being completely honest. Speaker 3: I want to get back into kind of the other channels that you guys are slamming spend on. I think on your monthly kind of recaps, App Lovin is definitely up there. Speaker 1: Yeah, last month for sure too. Speaker 3: I think last month you guys spent close to half a million, right? Speaker 1: I think it was like 509, like just over it. Speaker 3: Wow, that's crazy. Walk me through what the strategy has turned into post the initial, right, the 10,000 investment, just to see how things go. How has the strategy changed specifically for App Lovin versus, you know, something like Meta or TikTok? Speaker 1: TikTok, I feel like we're in a holding pattern even with GMB on TikTok. I think we're just something there for us right now is just broken and I don't have or know to solve based on what I'm seeing from the team. Creators like seeding, we need that because that content powers everything else. So I think that will Always be a thing. And you can kind of check the sentiment on the, like broadly on Twitter and across other places that we like, that I care to listen to. And everyone's like not super stoked on how it's performing. Snapchat on the other hand, we have invested a tremendous amount of money into figuring this out. I think that experience in between a lot of the stories is actually very close to what Instagram Reels is. And Instagram Reels has historically performed really, really well for us. The likelihood of a compliance across these channels, Snap is a little bit looser. They'll play ball with us. Meta is not as loose, but we want, that's the core demographic. The reason why App Lovin makes so much sense to us is because the person on the, like the, let's say like the demo buyers, everybody's on it. Like I flew here to you guys, right? I looked down the aisle. Granted, there's only four seats in front of me. You know what I mean? Speaker 3: Everybody in front of you. Speaker 1: All four people, you know what I mean? All four people. And we sit there and all of a sudden... Yeah, I look at my phone and you have this older gentleman who's solitary. You have his daughter next to him. She's a candy crush. You have the wife across the aisle and she's sitting on some form of gem hit hider. All three of those people are very, very different consumers. All those guys are getting ads. Every fucking one of them. And so I sit there, I go, okay, they definitely are a good demographic. They're definitely the people that we want buying to it. I feel like the targeting is so similar to what we have on Meta, even when we just kind of keep it, keep it wide open, that we just let it like black box, do your shit. Go, like just, just find me the people. And we've, we've done like end cards is really the most customization we can do with like very direct call outs to like, The wife, the husband, or even like the dude that wants a different type of buzz. I think that's the best play or the most customization we can do on it. Twitter, we tried to get up and running. Right now, my feed is just hemp ads. Stizzy, Cornbread, like a couple of guys are just selling basically like Delta actual flour, which is interesting. Google, dude, and I wanted to talk about this with you guys. We've been banned on Google for so long. And our buyer is savage. Gem is an absolute savage in this space. But they're just really, really cracking down on us for some reason, which means, I guess, we can't do YouTube. We can't do any connected TV. We can't do any of this long form, where I think our story in a part... Speaker 2: You can't even do shopping. Speaker 1: Can't get in. For me right now, I can't touch it. And it's really, really weird and frustrating. We can't even do SMS. We like burned SMS. Like they don't allow our back and forth. Like we have a couple of solutions that we're trying to work through. One of them is like we have to launch a merch company. We need to do this anyways, but like having the merch side or things that we can sell that's very like Brez logoed, that could be a very interesting thing. And look, you guys were big on this before. It might actually be time for an app. To do push notifications because if I can control something like World of Breeze or some weird stuff like this, yeah. Speaker 3: That's crazy. Speaker 1: I think we have to. Speaker 3: You can't even send out a text message. Speaker 1: No, no, it's funny because a hilarious story. We were using a team where you can go like back and forth like one-on-one communication and the list was so savage. Like the list was so big. We did our Black Friday push and it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars and Aaron was like, send it again, hit it again. So we kept hitting and the team was like, yo, that's a lot. And as soon as I knew it too, I was like, I'm nervous. Carrier band, like full-on Verizon. Dude, I even think Singular came back to business and said, you're done. Singular was like, yo, yo, stop, stop. You're cooked. Solve that, dude. Speaker 3: You're out. Speaker 1: Even on that level, it was donezo. I wish, dude. That's why I was like, all right, we need the fucking app. We need to be able to push something somewhere. Speaker 3: How about email? Email seems like it's a... Speaker 1: This is my ballpark. That email, so email. We got like a quarter of a million, probably more than at this point. I checked last week, about a quarter of a million. Some of this is suppressed, of course, but this is, we have a good strategy, good pop-up, good little team that I get to work with there. And then we have like 15,000 subscribers. Subscription, I want this every single month type of status. Unknown Speaker: 15,000 already. Speaker 1: Our birthday, I was telling Ash before we jumped on, our birthday is 420 this year. My goal is I selfishly want 20,000. And we work with a couple of good teams and this is like, dude, I was on the media buying side forever, right? I earned my stripes running media. And now I live on this side and I'm going like, dude, the amount of stuff that I know now and the way that it like allows me to think through the emails, the remarketing, the messaging, it's so nice to just be like fully all in. And I love the agencies. I'm glad that we did it. I'm glad I have it. It taught me what I had. I taught me the things that I needed to know to be able to be incredible on this side. But now I'm over here going, dude, there's so much that can be done specifically in email. Speaker 3: I think I forgot who we spoke to about this. It might have been Jimmy, where it's like we take So much pride in like really segmenting flows for like acquisition, like we make specific content for a certain demographic, we make a landing page for a certain demographic, and then you go to email and you blast one email to everybody. And it's like, well, you actually have more data on these people than acquiring a new customer. Why are you not specifically showing this person who came in, bought a month supply of this product, show them something relevant to that. So I think the knowledge that you've gotten just from media buying and understanding how creatives play a role in, you know, audience targeting and the landing pages that need to be done to actually convert those people. It's performance and email and that should just be easy mode at the end of the day. Speaker 2: It feels like it. Speaker 1: It feels like I got a crazy education and all of a sudden, like you've been playing the pros and all of a sudden you're like, yo, you need to go, you got injured, go to the amateur side. And all of a sudden you come back and you're like, oh dude, my team, I know exactly what I want. Speaker 3: And you're making way more money. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's true. So even to this level, Because of diversification and being very everywhere, our thing that we're trying to solve right now, I think we found a couple people that were really good. We were like, our job description was... I'm an e-commerce manager, right? And really it's like, I really need a really good CRO person that understands that and a little bit of like merchandising. So even though it's e-commerce, there need to be more CRO. And our weakness is like, we can't get pages up with any speed from approval process, from like design side, from just like speed of implementation for the media buying team. And I think that's like, I think we have a 1% or less than conversion rate. How do you win on that? We spend enough money that that is the only lever that I think us and La Paz need to continue to fix. If we just get that, that fix alone is like hundreds of thousands of, below millions of dollars a month. Just that change that we got that dialed in. I bring this up because on email specifically, We're running this test on like pop-ups. So like we have, everybody has like a Welcome Flow. And I think this is something that anybody could test at any time, no matter the traffic size is like we have our specific offer, which is like $5 off. But because our traffic source on Meta has dropped recently and our spend on App Lovin and our spend on TikTok and our spend on Amazon, all these other platforms are starting to pick up. Their customer behavior on LTV for purchase speed through Welcome Flow. Has changed. The ability for them to sign up into subscription has changed. So now I'm sitting here going like, fuck, I don't know what channel that we actually want to be spending on. Like I need to tell my, I need to tell Brandon, the guys, like we should be spending more here. Or like, yo, can you turn that back? If you really, really like, can you slow that spend down for a little bit? And so we're running like specific pop-up tests based upon traffic source tagged into like Aaliyah to see, do I need to rotate? Like I'm doing an ABC test a little bit right now because of how much traffic is hitting the site. Should we offer them right into subscription on email one? Should we put them right into a $5 offer on email two? Or should we do that email one? And the last one was like, should we put them into like a welcome gift where they spend X dollars? So like we have three offers on traffic right now and split up by traffic source. And I think not enough people are thinking shit through that. Speaker 3: No, I definitely was not thinking that it's that specific. Like you would just assume, okay, this is my target demo. They're going to do X, Y, and Z, and that's going to be applied across all channels. Speaker 1: No. Simply put, I think that you can start there. I think that's like, nothing's wrong with that. But when you're spending as much as you guys and us, why am I not? Speaker 3: Are you seeing a difference? Speaker 1: We're four weeks in. So like right now, because App Lovin specifically changed, this is what sparked it. We knew how long that we knew what the take rate was going to be on a welcome flow. We could be a predictable revenue from welcome flow when traffic source was primarily Meta and Google. When that traffic source started to change and the makeup started to be different, I was like, our revenue, our daily flow revenue was very different. I was like, I don't really know what lever was doing that. Like, I don't know what changed. Conversion rate seems seemingly the same. And then very clearly we had like an inadvertent holdout test where the channel goes down. And also I'm like, Oh God, revenue, like we're doing $5,000 a day all of a sudden and $17,000 a day when average was 20 to 30. Well, traffic source is the only change. I was like, well, I need to know this so that I can build some sort of plan if that's only a thing I get. And dude, if we turn on affiliates on the performance side, not like affiliate creator wise, what is this traffic going to be like? To Boo and Albert, like what is that going to look like? So those are the areas now that I wish I was More proactive when we were cracking new channels out of necessity, but now I'm going like, all right, well, every channel we add, that just means like that has to be tagged on the welcome flow or specific welcome pop-up and then welcome flow. Speaker 2: Got it. Speaker 3: You basically need a whole different net for each traffic source. Speaker 1: We'll run a unique offer. Per asset. So you kind of just take it one step further, but it's just on the landing side. Speaker 3: No, it makes sense. I mean, like even with App Lovin, when we were running it, the cost of traffic is super low. So naturally your conversion rate is going to be much lower. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: Which we saw too, very clearly. Right. And then if you're looking at a singular pop-up with, you know, just running Meta to it, your opt-in is probably anywhere of like 10% plus. Start running App Lovin, that gets cut in half. Now you on the other side are probably like, what the hell is happening? Speaker 1: Freaking me out on my revenue. Speaker 3: Yes. So that makes sense. I think cost of traffic, the actual quality of the audience too, right? People are like playing a game, they want to check it out and then get back to their game, right? So like the attention span is... Way lower than it was on, say, Meta or TikTok. I guess, are you writing different pieces of content now for different channels? Or is it more sort of like, are we just gonna change maybe the offer on the pop-up and have that be the different kind of acquisition tool? Speaker 1: I think stage one is the pop-up needs to be specifically different. That's the first one. Stage two would be welcome flow initial email. Series, like whether it's my one, two or three or one, two or one, that's like stage two. So once I understand that there is a different take rate and there is a different offer that's going to work per traffic source, the actual offer, then it's timing of first email and then it's timing of second email. Because we might need them to get that email in like an hour and a half. Or they might need to get that email in like 15 minutes because they're out of the app yet. Right? They want to go back and play the game, but they just opted in real quick. So that is like the next phase. And I probably would say I'd feel better talking about what I'm learning in like June. Maybe, yeah, June would be like, oh, I got some real stuff to share. Speaker 3: Nobody's talked about this at all. Speaker 1: But why not? Why do you think they wouldn't go there? Speaker 3: I honestly, in my opinion, I think the majority of the brands in our little bubble that we have are, it's like 80% meta, right? So they haven't had to think about it. I think the top 5% brands, you guys, JRB, Ridge, like the guys that are truly diversifying, they're probably the only ones that would talk about it. And for, again, these guys are nine figure brands and you guys are coming close to that, but it's like, The five-figure brands, the six-figure brands aren't going to have the ability and the resources to do what you're doing and split testing to that degree. That's my thought on that. Speaker 1: Well, then I would say what they could do is give me two offers. Is it a $5 off or is it a percentage off? I'd just start there. We were like 10% off, 20% off on the pop-up. When we tested through it, dollar converts on a double opt-in every single time. So if you were like 10% off your first order, which that's probably what you're doing, that's probably what everybody else here is doing, go to dollars and split test that. That's the only thing I care about. If that's the only thing you do, I guarantee you something will be better than that. Speaker 2: I'm curious because you're talking a little bit about bandwidth and team and different things you have to do. I think one other challenge that comes up a lot when we have a discussion about like moving away from Meta or diversifying and testing App Lovin or TV or whatever it may be. I think a lot of people kind of freeze up with the idea of like, well, do I go and hire an agency or do I figure out how to give this to my current media buyer? Who's going to take this on? I'd love to understand your guys' process because, again, in a very short amount of time, a lot of platforms, partly because you have to, but also just, again, you work with a lot of brands, you know a lot of brands. What are some of the efficient ways to go about diversifying without it always being a $6,000 a month agency? Speaker 1: Yes. So I probably should have said this at the beginning. So I've been agency For 11 years, agency side, owning my own. And before that I worked for Common Thread and Tim Bird. So like I've been on the performance side from the agency side more than I've been on the brand side. Now Breeze and then all the time like we've been doing with brands. So I have a little bit of perspective on how I would want to do this and I have a big perspective on how Aaron approaches this and what we're cool with. It's basically the first initial thought process is do I have an interest in, and I'm the brand, so say I'm a brand, I'm the five-figure, four-figure, six-figure range. Do I have an interest in learning this thing? Does it interest me enough? Am I a product person or am I a marketing person? If you come in and you're like, yo, I actually need to know a little bit about Meta or a little bit of these channels, I don't have the time to invest in learning it. I have the money or a little bit of money to invest in someone doing it for me, but I'm gonna be really close to them. So I have a person doing this right now. He has a freelancer that they can go back and forth and he can explain the justification on it and so that way he can learn alongside it. But that dude has no time to learn it. He is still trying to figure out his product and he's got plenty of other shit to figure out with on the website or product sourcing or apps, you name it, right? There's a lot of stuff that a solo team or smaller team needs to understand. When we're at our size and because we have the agency background, our default is consultants are the cheapest and fastest thing to get up and running. So, for instance, right now, I have two consultants in the customer support side and on the subscription side. I know enough about consulting or customer service. I know enough about subscription, but I didn't have the processes, protocols, or SOPs that I was going to develop. And I didn't want to go and hire a person, bring them into a broken system, bring them into a broken routine. So I was like, cool, I'm willing to pay what our full role would be to get enough of this foundation built out. Then I'll go replace them full time. And I think that relationship is like super open and honest. You can tell the agency, look, I love you. I hope that we can stay together as long as possible, but I eventually would like to have this in time so I can have them full time and for more or less like own their time and attention, right? And so that's very upfront. That's what we want. So I would say there's some pairs is like we have an Amazon agency. I would love to have a marketplace lead. I haven't found the person yet. Like that dude or girl, whoever it's going to be, I hope they're incredible. But right now, the costs that you pay for all the support on that core channel, it doesn't make sense to bring that in-house. So I think that's the biggest justification. I don't think you need an agency to run Meta or Google outside of like the If you're in a restricted category like us, it probably makes sense to have a partner because they probably have workarounds or access or reps to get accounts and all these things back. That makes sense. But if you're soloing it, I think you can manage. What I call is like you get a spot check. So you have a consultant help you set it up. You continue to run it and you document your questions on a weekly basis and you tune back in and try to get them on a bi-weekly or every month and you run through the things that you have questions on and then come back. From an email standpoint, I think email is the best. Like if you could pay somebody to spot check like what I'm doing right now, like I have a team Whenever this goes live, my team will find out randomly. So I have a team auditing the team that I'm currently running with just for them to be like, hey, like, I don't hate you. I love you. I want you to stay with me. But I want somebody else to have a perspective just in case. And I think there's nothing wrong with that as long as you're clear that I want to keep my people. So my recommendation is if you're under Five figures, six figures, you should be able to want to run it and grow yourself so you don't have to spend five to six G's on someone to manage it. You can spend that towards your ads. But it does make sense to spend like two G's or three G's of consulting time to get your understanding of platform navigation at the bare minimum. Running. Unknown Speaker: I love that. Speaker 3: I haven't thought about that ever. I feel like we should probably do some of that. Speaker 1: The thing that's different with you guys is like you guys have an agency background and you understand how some of these things work and a lot of people don't know how the like you're basically buying slotted time from an agency side and I think in we're in the year 2025 The amount of people that do one thing really, really well and you can convince them like, I just need your brain for like a couple hours this one specific day. Here's a couple hundred bucks or here's a G or here's two Gs. But it's on you to come with the right questions and you have to kind of come with the right type of energy. If not, you're just gonna sit there and be like, so what do you think? And they're doing a live audit. That's no, nobody wants that. Speaker 3: How are you finding the right people for this? Speaker 1: Did you want me to say this from a Nick standpoint or from someone that doesn't have a platform like me? Or both? Speaker 2: Both, yeah. Speaker 1: So I usually just straight up tweet it or ask it because somebody somewhere will listen. This is why I've invested so much in trying to build some sort of platform so that when I need help, I can get it. If you don't have it, I would, so we, you go to mentor bash, you go to intro, you go to I'm afraid of like Upwork and the freelance platforms because I've had personal horror stories and I've seen other horror stories. But I would start there. I think Twitter right now is probably the best Grouping of people, unfortunately, whether you like it or not in DTC, DTC land on X. But I think that's the initial place I'd start. Also, what we do sometimes, I don't do this all the time, but when I really need it, I'll go look at job descriptions from other competitor brands or brands that I aspire to be, see their job description, grab the job description. And then I'll, and this is specifically on LinkedIn, and then I'll put it in ChatGPT, like what roles would service this specific job description? And I'll just start typing in that role in the LinkedIn. And then you hopefully find the people that are like working that specific job. And it's like, hey, you have a job, no problem. I'm not trying to steal you, but would you give me, like, can I give you some time? Or can I buy some of your time? And that also works when you want to poach people too. Speaker 3: Love that. Speaker 2: Super, super tactical. I'm very curious because you've obviously already dropped so many gems and I know you have so many different ideas and different things you've been doing but whether it's App Lovin related or other platforms related, what are some cool things you guys have tried that's kind of been like, oh wow, didn't know that's gonna work or just anything that's more on the hacky side of going and trying and testing and trialing and you know, I think we live in a world right now where What was working is almost kind of like it's history, right? It's like and then there's no there's almost feels like there's no connection to it and you have to come up with new ways to do things. I'm very curious on like Outside of what you guys have to do with Breeze because of the nature of the product, what's kind of more, even whether it's on the retention side or acquisition side, what are some things that you guys have done that's been different and interesting? Speaker 1: Very timely question, because I literally just did something this week. So thank you. I'm glad I did some shit this week. If Elon messaged me and was like, what did you get done? I'd be like, this is what I'd say. This is the shit right here. So we're slow to give gifts for keeping people on subscription or retention. This is my fault. I'm slow to find the partners. I'm slow to get the product. I'm slow to get the gift that I think is worth it. So I was like, hey, I need to increase. I'm trying to, my Q1 goal is, can I increase take rate and can I reduce churn? Which is literally two core metrics that are very important to subscription basis. And so what we did is like, because I don't have those, we basically launched a giveaway to all subscribers and non-subscribers that if you were subscribed by a certain day in March, you're entered to win a free six pack. So we have no gift to give. We have product and we have no incentive other than like be subscribed by this period. That was the largest day of subscriptions and that was the largest day of reactivation of subscriptions in our brand history in just under two years. For just for a free six-pack. The product that they're already getting, the product that they're already about, and that was an email to the list and that like, A, drove incremental revenue from that email alone, but then all the activations of some people coming in. Speaker 2: I would have thought you were doing a one-year supply or something. Speaker 1: No, not even, just literally a six-pack. And that's what I was thinking, like, it's just a giveaway. We already have the product. It's the cheapest thing technically that we have to give away without it. And that's on brand. Because sometimes you never know, like, should I give a koozie? Should I do a high-end koozie? Should I do, like, this mixer? Like, you don't know, like, the quality of the product potentially, but you know that they love our drink. So we ran that. That was a really cool test on the back end. So anybody can run that. Double up whatever you're willing to offer. And if you incentivize them to stick with you through this specific period, which is end of March, that worked. And then one of our big goals this year is like we want to give a million cans out. Like that's like the literal goal. Like we want cans in hands, one million. South by Southwest, we gave away 30,000 cans. Speaker 2: Wow. Speaker 1: And the investment was in the six figures. And so we're like, it's crazy. I flew in. Flew in, landed, went to go sign in and went to the registrant's tent. So if you've ever been there, it's like right next to where you get out your phone. Everyone's like kind of hanging out, meeting there. There's like no bowl and like other people over here. Breeze is like right in the back in the middle. And we basically took up the entire floor and we put like BOSU balls for people to sit on, but we made it look like a Like our landing page, if you land on our site, you see it's like these mountains, these hills, it's like futuristic. We put these silver BOSU balls or purple BOSU balls for people to sit on. It's like a breeze world that you walk in and we are slinging cans. So I think that because our retail presence in Austin is so strong, Us activating in Austin and giving that many cans do, I think a retail pull through will be pretty tremendous. I won't be able to measure it yet, but I'm betting that that investment will probably net out hopefully by end of the year. Wow. Speaker 2: That's super smart. Speaker 3: Amazing. Speaker 2: And you hear, I mean, again, you see it where it's like, Do you see the brands that are doing things, whether it's like a Poppy, and you know, congratulations to them, or you see, you know, the world of RTD right now too. Speaker 1: Can I pop off on this real quick for you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really? Okay. Dude, it makes me super excited. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Because you have Poppy, you have Olipop, who got a massive investment, you have Alani New, you have Ghost, you have The Rock, Zoa. So you have all these guys, but here's what's interesting. Where are all those guys playing at? Energy. All energy. Poppy's not, Olipop is not. Those are like functional, but it's like energy and then functional better for you. We don't have energy. And we have Infuse. We're already this big with these two areas that those guys are not playing in. That's what I'm sitting here, and I keep getting tagged. As Poppy started popping off, pun intended, we started getting all these, like, yo, I see why you're in Beverage. I see why you're in Beverage. I didn't see this. Aaron did. Obviously, this dude's got gnarly, gnarly vision on it. And so I'm sitting here going, this could be very interesting. I cut you off, sorry. No, no, no. Speaker 2: It's super cool to see just the level of creativity has to go into activations. It's a different level. It's not coming with the creative. It's not just coming up with the landing page. And those are not just things. Those are still hard. But there's something about activation that's like, you have to actually go and first of all, put your money where your mouth is. And then secondly, Hope that what you're doing and what you have as a vision, other people recognize that. And then you kind of don't get to get any gratification from any of this until way later. You know, and so like, there's almost like all of these layers that are just feel like you're literally just putting money out. Hoping. Speaker 1: Hoping. Yeah. Speaker 2: And I find it to be one of the most ballsy ways of marketing. Speaker 1: So do you, it's funny you said this because you have, I don't know if you guys have done Expo West. If you haven't done it, we'll hopefully do it next year. There's a woman named Scout Bronson. She owns The Swa. Speaker 2: Katy Perry. Speaker 1: Yeah, Katy Perry's non-alcoholic brand. So she posted like the real cost of what a booth is on LinkedIn. Dope post. I'll send it to you guys. You guys should pop that up. She was like documenting it all down. But what it really does is like, You're out there. You're talking. You're selling. You're on. You have boots on the ground giveaway. And I think that's part of that. Once we're in that, we're transcended, that's that gap of we're not just DTC. We have to be everywhere to do what we want to do. That's where we are now. And we're two years in. Speaker 2: It's wild. The two years piece is the craziest. Speaker 1: That's so cool. Speaker 3: Yeah, my deck is gonna be different yours is 30 million in like So for your monthly paid budget, would you put app lovin in the top three it might be one I'll put I'll pull it. Speaker 1: Yeah, let me know. This is Dave. So this is the last 30 days. $530,000 in spend. Speaker 2: Wow. Speaker 1: $530,000 in spend. Okay. Our current CAC, higher than we want it, but we're going to make this work. Our CAC is $137. Okay. I need this to be, as I told you before, I need this to be 90 to 110. Okay. So we're about 20 bucks off. Our CPMs are sitting at about $24 for us on Meta. This is like 40 to 80 sometimes. And our CPC is 83 cents. Bro, when's the last time you saw a CBC below a dollar? Speaker 2: Ash was happy back then. Yeah, I'm happy with two. Speaker 1: Dude, I'm happy. Oh my God. Oh my God. Okay. So this is why. So we're basically wide open targeting about 21 plus for obvious reasons. And so this is the blurb. I was like, all right, I need a little bit of more information. Due to the others, our other paid channels going down the last 30 days, we made a specific decision to scale up Lovin to try and maintain performance. App Lovin performs best for us at the $12,500 to $15,000 a day. That's like our sweet spot. That's what the team is like. Speaker 3: Got it. That's cool. Speaker 1: It's funny because we do, I don't know if you guys do this, we do like daily spend threads. So like the team will post and like our media bio post and then everything, all information on the day is there and we update it every hour on the hour of what spend is. Speaker 3: Oh, wow. Speaker 1: And so it's like straight screenshots. It's kind of crazy. I'll show you guys after this. And then we're taking all of our Meta creatives, adding as many App Lovin videos as possible. So we're just like pouring it over. We noticed the top five videos decided to pause all other creatives. We took the top five ads, started testing end cards and landing pages. We got the landing pages this week. So I don't have any info on this. So instead, our main focus has been continuous testing of end cards and landing pages with top five creatives. So if creatives kind of stay the same, it's just CTAs at the back. And so I have... Speaker 3: That makes sense. Speaker 1: So it's like she's doing a mixie. It's sped up. You see the tribies in the bottom corner. She's doing her mix. Can's fully there. Back to our website. So that was a screen record. Obviously we took it, but it's stupid. And so our overall, so for instance, this is what a scale thread would look like. So scale thread 318. They'll send a screenshot. Speaker 3: Oh, we've seen these. Speaker 1: So this is what you see on LinkedIn, but we do the daily ones for the internal team. And so as of right now, like this morning, this was sent to me. I'll do the latest one. This is 55 minutes ago, $55,000 in revenue, $54,000 in DTC revenue. TikTok shop revenue is $100, so you can see we're seeing there. Amazon revenue is $3,000. GoPuff, 37 bucks, getting that spend up. Overall spend currently at this moment, an hour ago, is $12,000. Meta, 5K in spend. Snapchat, 1,200 in spend. Amazon, 400, Bing, 200. TikTok, Shopify, $55. App Lovin, 4,445. So it's almost one-to-one right now. Speaker 3: Wow. Speaker 1: Geez. Speaker 3: One thing that you want the audience to take back and implement in their business today, what would be that one piece of feedback? Speaker 1: It's weird to say, but it's like optimizing of the pop-up. I think you can change the offer. I think the number one thing that you can do today, if you're running a percentage off, please go test the specific dollar amount off that one. And then two, if you look at our website, drinkbreeze.com, we have the bottom right corner, which is like, it'll always stick with you for the offer. So once the pop-up, once you exit out of the pop-up, we always stick with the offer at the bottom right corner. Not enough brands are having that. And that, to me, is an easy add-on. You can do it in Klaviyo, you can do it in Aaliyah, you can do it in whoever, whatever service you're using, but just optimizing on that, it would be the place that we'd play with. Speaker 2: Chew on that. 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.