Why AppLovin BEATS Meta for PROOF Wallets

Why AppLovin BEATS Meta for PROOF Wallets Speaker 1: I pulled some 60-day numbers just to give a comparison between Meta, AppLovin and Google. Meta ROAS 1.2. Anywhere from a 60 to 80 cost cap. AppLovin ROAS identical 1.2 and that is with $50 CPA goal. Google ROAS 1.99. Now the spend associated with that Meta 1,050,000, AppLovin 550,000, Google 132,000. So yeah, I mean it's matching ROAS. Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today's a special episode brought to you by AppLovin where we're going to be talking about how you can diversify away from channels like Meta to be able to see how you can test new platforms. Today we have the founders of PROOF Wallets and they've been building this brand for some time and they're going to be talking about some of the strategies they've been doing to build the brand. Dana and Chet, first of all, I just want to say thank you for taking the time out to come here all the way from Columbus and making time to be able to share some of your tactics, some of your brand building skills to our audience. Our audience is made up of seven, eight and nine figure brand builders. But they're all looking for the one or two tactics they can take away from watching a 30 to 45 minute episode, something to chew on, something to take away. So we're super excited to break things down. For the few people who haven't heard of your brand or haven't heard of you guys yet, can you guys give a little bit about your background? And I know you guys have a really cool one too, but what your background is and how you guys got to PROOF. Speaker 3: PROOF Wallets is kind of a game-changing Minimalist wallet where we've compiled both aerospace grade aluminum and high quality either leather, we do top and full grain leather. One of the main functions of the wallet is the pull tab. People really tend to gravitate toward us because we have built such a product that we can guarantee it for life. And so that is, I mean, definitely want to hit on that in this podcast because it drives a lot of sales. But product aside, Our story starts when us, when we Left active-duty military. Made a pact before we got our college to, we were going to start a business. We were going to make a dollar. You know, we had started businesses. I saw some of the questions you had in here. There's some interesting failed businesses from our past. We would pact with each other. We were going to start a business and we were just going to make a dollar profit, something. I mean, we were shooting low. Initially, we did try some billion-dollar ideas, which also failed. And that took us to manufacturing. There's a whole backstory there, but I don't want to get too much into it. Ultimately, we found ourself into a niche. Speaker 1: I'll go into that a little bit just because it is kind of a cool story. But really how we got started was when we were in college, Chad called me one day and he was working for a company called Battelle, which is actually the world's largest not-for-profit, but they got their hands in everything, you know, anything from defense to You know, technology, laboratory testing, you name it, they're involved in it somewhere. He was working for the armored vehicle department as an intern and he called me one day and said, hey, these guys are, you know, severely overpaying for their raw materials to build these vehicles. What do you think about, you know, trying to sell them the, you know, the same parts cheaper? And I think I said something like, hell yeah, great. But I mean, you're you're an intern. And this is the world's largest not for profit. And Chet's very persistent. And probably about six months of just Straight persistence. Eventually, they're like, fine, fine, one product and you have to quit because now it's a conflict of interest, you know, and so heat shrink tubing was the first thing and we just bought it in bulk and same day delivered it at like a third of the cost and eventually they supplied the whole inventory list and I started picking apart, you know, okay, we can cut costs here, cut costs here and just started adding products and While he was, he was studying, we were both studying engineering, but he had taken a class on machining and some of the parts we were sourcing were machined parts, very high tolerance shafts specifically. And I was like, man, if we could just do this ourselves, then we would make some serious money, at the time serious money. So we bought a I don't know how I got approved for it but I got approved for a pretty high credit card limit and bought a CNC mill on a credit card, put it in my garage, we taught ourselves how to use it and essentially that's what leapfrogged us to where we are now. So we just started adding products. Speaker 3: So picture a couple of guys that are We found this one massive unicorn of a customer and then we went to bat like, man, this is going to be huge. Let's find the next one. So we start cold calling and it's like, wait, who are you? Show me your facility. It's in my brother's garage. Come look. So that led us to DTC because we were able to build a professional realistic Storefront on the internet for zero dollars. I mean, maybe just 30 bucks or something But it was real it was a realistic we could we could fake it before we made it in that industry the manufacturing You know wanted to be making era aerospace parts. You've got to have half a million dollar inspection equipment, so just ultimately where we came was from the path of least resistance, I mean it was like I First we just wanted to make a dollar. Then we found this arbitrage situation from this Battelle company. Just had an in because the purchaser for the company was a former retired master sergeant in the Marine Corps. And so me and her were friends to begin with and I was like, hey, can my brother, can we, can we, and she was like, oh yeah, you know, I'll set the meeting up. And next thing you know, we were, I went from being an intern to like meeting with the vice president of operations over there. So I'm like walking past my previous boss's office, you know, I said, hey buddy, I'm going to talk to the man. Granted, we weren't really making that much money, but it was, It was a lot more than $1, which was the pact. Speaker 2: Wow, that's incredible. First of all, that's awesome because you hear about a lot of people's stories and I think a lot of people's stories like start with an idea and then they go figure it out. I think with your guys' thing, it was like starting with something that wasn't even like the cultivated idea. It just loomed into that and I think that's super inspiring because it can literally come from any onset. Which is really cool. So take us from there, right? You stumble upon this operation, you're doing the arbitrage thing, and now obviously at some point something hits where you're like, hey, we can potentially create a product of this. So give us what that journey looks like and then maybe get us to a fast-forward point of where we are today. Speaker 1: So I think it was 2018, which was like the year of the fidget spinner, actually. And we don't Honestly, I often tell this story, but that was our first DTC Ecom product, but they were high-end. We were selling $7,500. Solid metal fidget spinners, but we catered to $7,500 fidget spinners. $75 to $100 fidget spinners. Speaker 3: That year you could have found $75. Yeah, probably. We weren't making those ones. What we were doing was, actually we initially tried to sell to a company. This was like before we had the breakthrough idea that, okay, we can just sell these things on the internet. We were trying to land a subscription box guy and you know when a subscription box buys anything they gotta buy however many subscriptions they have so this guy had I think at the time 4,000 maybe 8,000 subscribers and he was in talks with us because we were in the same city and we were We were going to make him a fidget spinner. And so it was like a hundred hours. I don't like you guys may not have manufacturing experience, but when making the first one, anything, anything in this room, this microphone, making the first one took this guy a month of just dreaming about making this one thing. And so we made it, and he went and looked at it, and he was like, yeah, okay, this is awesome, man. Too expensive. Just threw it down, you know? And it was that startup hustle, and Dane, being a relentless genius that he is, was like, all right, I'm selling this one. And before we even knew that there were Facebook ads, he was spamming. So we were just spamming all over Facebook. Speaker 2: Really? Speaker 1: Groups. Speaker 3: So we engraved some military insignia on it because that's the groups that we just happened to belong to as military veterans and we just couldn't keep them in stock. Speaker 2: Wow. Speaker 3: It was like, you know, fidget spinners. You'd think kids buying them at the gas station. Our average customer was 45 years old and he was paying $75 for his fidget spinner. Wow. It was just like a... Speaker 2: Found your niche. Speaker 3: Yeah, we found it and it died fast. You know, because it was like the fidget spinner bubble and everybody was like, what are you going to do when it's over? And we're like, I don't know, we're making too much money to think about it. Speaker 1: No, I think we made like $350,000, $350,000 that year, which was... Speaker 3: It was a quarter. It was in a quarter. I mean, it took off and then died in three months. And that's a pretty standard for that type of a product, we've learned. Speaker 1: So that was where the company MilSpin came from. So that was our, that's our other brand, MilSpin. Everything's made in America in our Columbus, Ohio facility. And that was where that name came from, Military Spinner. But essentially we had to move on. So we moved into firearm accessories, Glock accessories specifically, but solid metal, highly detailed engraved backplates for Glock handguns. And essentially just built off of that. And the brand still exists today. And we removed ourselves from it to focus on PROOF, but we still operate out of the same facility. And so that is everything from clock accessories to tools, you know, multi-tool knives, whatnot. Speaker 3: The logic was pretty simple. 45-year-old men were willing to spend $75 on a fidget spinner just because it had his military insignia on it. What else can we engrave military insignia on that you can imagine a 45-year-old man buying? And we settle on gun parts. To our own demise. Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it's a relentless uphill battle because you can't advertise. We did, you know, trying to skirt the rules of Facebook and, you know, then you get your account shut down and then you rebuild and get it shut down. Like, if you look at our sales over the site, tons of money, we're broke. And eventually it's just like, Alright guys, this is seven years into this. I'm done. It's time to move on. I was actually at an Amazon conference. It was the first time I ever went to this type of conference because I honestly just felt like going to listen to somebody speak. And talk at you. It didn't resonate with me. And that was the first time I had done it. And Mike Beckham from Simple Modern, as well as a couple other guys were speaking there. And he said something that was like really powerful that hit me and completely changed my mindset moving forward. And it was You can't be in a niche. If you want a nine-figure brand, you have to go after the big market. And it's scary, but you're just not making it in a niche. You're not getting that big. Speaker 3: Game-changing advice. Speaker 1: Yeah. For us. Speaker 3: And I guess anybody. Speaker 1: So then, that kind of started the wheels turning. It was like, what are we going to do? And it was honestly a toss up in my mind between wallets and hydration powder. But hydration powder is like, I mean, you're making pennies per unit, you know, but it's ultra high volume. Ultimately, I just didn't feel like we could build a passionate brand behind it. And the wallet, there's only a few decent sized players in the wallet industry. And there's It's a massive market, but there's a lot of shortcomings with what is currently out there. There's a reason we weren't used. None of the four core people in our company for this brand were using all the wallets that you would typically hear about, you know, the minimalist style wallets. And it ultimately came down to because we couldn't carry enough cards. So we created this version. Which allows it because of the way it's designed with this wraparound leather rather than just two, you know, solid chunks of metal here. It allows it to expand. Like we say, it can hold up to 25 cards. Honestly, I could stick probably 40 in here. But it can also hold one card securely. Speaker 3: It starts to look kind of funky at that point. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's a phone book, you know, but it can hold it. And we didn't even realize how important that was to people other than ourselves until we put it on the market. And it's like, people want a slimmer, Wallet, but they need to be carrying all these different cards for whatever reason, you know, their health insurance cards, driver's license, pilot's license, hunting license, you know, it starts adding up real quick. You know, we're, we have three different companies that you know, I probably have a debit card and a credit card at least for each of them. So, and I use them, you know, so that was, that's ultimately what brought us to PROOF and we're very new. We launched this brand August of last year, but we are We're skyrocketing. When we launched the brand, originally it was going to be a $45 wallet. And it was supposed to be just an Amazon brand. We wanted to really build that market. Speaker 3: Price point, very important for Amazon, obviously. And so it was cost of goods to what the product actually was. Speaker 1: You know, we were aiming for that $45. So originally when we sent the initial inventory to Amazon, It's like a three, four week period before, you know, it's actually truly in stock. And I was just like, I got to do something, I got to do something, you know, so started running Facebook ads for it to our Shopify site. And this was actually another point that Mike Beckham hit on a couple years ago, was price testing. You have to price test and nobody remembers what the hell they paid for your product. I think it's a little different when you only have one or two products like we do. But ultimately, if you got 10 plus products, people do not remember whether they paid $25, $35, $45. So we started price testing this wallet all the way from $45 all the way up to $175. And what we found was 125 was like the optimal. That is where we would make the absolute most profit by a long shot. We would convert obviously way better at $45, but But at 125 now we can spend so much more on advertising and acquire so many more customers that ultimately created far more profit for us. So we upgraded the materials, upgraded the packaging, and declared it, you know, our baseline was going to be $125. And that's really, you know, I think what truly opened the doors for us to be able to grow as quickly as we could is by price testing. Speaker 3: That's the thing to chew on. Speaker 2: That's amazing. Speaker 3: For your customers, for the viewers here, the price testing is insanely powerful because you now have the data. I mean, that used to be a thing. Speaker 2: And don't get too greedy about just a high conversion rate, right? Speaker 1: No, you got to look at everything. So here's a mind-blowing stat about our Millspin brand. So before we knew how to price test, Originally, how we would price test was, let's change all the prices for, you know, one, two, three days. And then change it to something else and compare those conversion rates. You can't do it that way. You got to use a software like IntelliGems or something where you're splitting the traffic. Once we price tested with our old method on Milspin for our core product line and ultimately determined that price didn't matter and we settled at $40 for, it was at $35, we settled at $40. When we got IntelliGems and price tested properly, What we determined was $40 was the absolute worst price we could have ever been at. Like it was a third of the conversion rate between $35 and $45. $35 and $45 converted like almost to the exact decimal point equivalent. $40 was a third of the conversion rate and we rode that for like two years. The amount of money we lost because of that. Yeah, I mean it's It's really surprising what you find out when you price test. Speaker 2: That's incredible. Speaker 4: I love the scrappiness behind it and I love the fact that it's like, alright, well we have all this inventory and we're waiting, it's a waiting game for Amazon. We've been through it before where we've sent inventory and it's like refresh, refresh until it's live, right? I'm so curious, like when you guys got onto Facebook, what was the thought process and the strategy that you guys How did you get the message out there in a way where you guys have been able to scale very quickly? Because it takes other brands a ton of time just to test different angles, different pricing, different offers, different landing pages, but it sounds like you guys have an incredible product which makes it easier, but how did you guys get the message out there and what was that message that allowed you to scale pretty quickly? Speaker 1: I would say hitting on all the frustrations initially. So the other big name brands out there, people complain about them tearing holes in their pockets, not being able to carry enough cards, destroying their credit cards. Those are like the three main complaints of them. So we hit on that super hard while simultaneously, like ultimately it's just saying like, this is the greatest wallet that's ever been produced. And yes, it's expensive. We know it's expensive. But I guarantee you, once you get it in your hands and use it for a few days, you'll understand why. Speaker 3: Our initial ad, like the initial one that put us on the map and its versions of it are still running, the big bold text, we deliver perfection. And it was a photograph taken on a phone of the wallet just on a dashboard of a newer vehicle and not very photoshopped, you know, like just a real photograph of a real wallet. And we spent countless hours trying to dissect this one ad and recreate it and all of that. And we've come up with new strategies since then. But this one particular ad, I think it's a power statement that we deliver perfection. We're military veterans, you know, which gives us a little bit of social proof. We stand behind our word. And if you have any problem with this, and that's kind of where the lifetime guarantee thing came in, is we do stand behind the product. So we do, we will deliver you perfection. And if you disagree with that, we'll buy it back from you and we'll pay for shipping. You know what I mean? Like we, we want you, you will have a good experience with this company. And then enough people did that talk about social proof, they comment, I bought one, I like it, I bought one, I like it, I bought one, I like it, I bought one, I like it. And now you've got hundreds and hundreds of good, real comments from real non-robot people on those ads. Speaker 2: It's incredible. Speaker 4: So, I mean, you guys are, you killed the meta game pretty quickly, right? You've kind of scaled up now. Where did you go from there, right? A lot of brands, they Advertise on Meta, get to a certain point, they're like, all right, cool, one channel, good to kind of just grow the brand from there. Where'd you guys go to next? And what was like the mindset of like, how do you, how did you guys want to grow? Like, where did you want to go from there? Speaker 1: Yeah. So I mean, initially, and this was advice from Roman Khan, ...was just focus on Meta. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: Like, get this up to, you know, 600 grand a month spend before you look into any other place. Like, there's so much opportunity on Meta. Don't deter your efforts, you know, until you really get this down. And so we did that. And after we met with him maybe two or three times, you know, I had caught wind of AppLovin just from Twitter, you know, the early users' performance on it. And obviously, I wanted to use it, but we weren't at their spend requirements yet. The second we got up to 600k spend on Meta, they let us in and we just kind of hit the ground running. So AppLovin and Google, we started I would say within two weeks of each other. But AppLovin, we've been able to scale it far higher than Google. Which, I don't know if that's surprising or not. We're not, I wouldn't say we're good at Google at all. And actually, I don't even run it myself. I have an agency doing Google because it's just so foreign to me. And every time I've tried, it hasn't been a great success. But with AppLovin, it's very video heavy, as you know. And surprisingly, On Meta, we are extremely static heavy. Speaker 4: Hmm. Speaker 1: Like probably 10 to 1 statics, which doesn't help for growing AppLovin. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: You know, like we need to get our video game. Speaker 2: Content creation, yeah. Speaker 1: But we have enough to, you know, keep us. Speaker 2: Fairly steady on AppLovin, but what is it about the platform that, you know, when you look at it, people chalk it up to it's mobile gamers, right? Speaker 3: You'd be surprised. The people that reach out to me saying they've seen my face on that ad are I mean even guys like I served with in the military, you know, that are about to retire. Speaker 2: Which just shows them a massive, like, that they have to reach AppLovin has. Speaker 3: Yeah, like the highest ranking enlisted man in a Navy battalion, for instance, was the most recent guy. He's a Navy senior chief and he was like, hey man, I used to do some volunteer work with him and he's like, hey I saw you on my mobile game and I was like, How old are you? You're supposed to be slapping the iPod out of a kid's hands, not playing on it. Speaker 1: I do think there's a misconception of what a mobile game is. When I first thought of it, I was, you know, people are playing video games. That's really not the case, at least for our customers. Intellectual games, you know, words with friends, Scrabble. Speaker 2: Fair point, fair call out. Speaker 1: So, that I would say is the biggest misconception. Speaker 2: Yeah, the word game is pretty broad. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Right, I think that's fair, like at the end of the day, like just because you think of game and you think Candy Crush first, isn't what the spectrum of it is. So, it's a really good call out. Speaker 1: I actually saw one of her ads on, I downloaded a App to control my TV like a Sony Bravia remote and I see before I paid for like the full subscription to get rid of the ads I would see ours on it. And, you know, it all says, like, these are ran by AppLovin. And so it's not even a game. It's just a, you know, it's an app. Speaker 2: But when you... No, it's so true. I think that's a great call out you said, too, which is like getting people to think differently about what AppLovin even runs on. I am curious, like, When you look at performance next to Meta, talk to me about your day-to-day. I think as you guys have been building for a while, I think Meta is just something you wake up and think about. Whereas AppLovin kind of feels like it's the new kid on the block, the girl next door. I'm curious though, After some time, it stops becoming the new kid on the block and it's like, hey, this is part of my regime. This is part of our spend build out and people are adding it to their forecast now. You know, saying, hey, how do we scale on it? I have countless people who have reached out to us saying, like, do you know agencies that specialize in AppLovin or content creators that specialize in that? So I'm curious, like, how are you guys building out for AppLovin now? I know you already mentioned about the video assets, but how does it fit into the stack? Speaker 1: So I'll go over some numbers here, but We don't treat AppLovin differently than Meta. Like when we're creating videos now, it's... They're going to be used on Meta, and they're going to be used on AppLovin. And other than trying to not break the 60-second mark, that's the only caveat to when we produce a video. It's like, OK, we need to try and keep it under 60 seconds so we can use it on AppLovin. I pulled some 60-day and 30-day numbers just to give a comparison between Meta, AppLovin, and Google in no particular order. Meta ROAS. So keep in mind, we are scaling. So when you hear these ROAS numbers, you might be like, oh, those aren't that great. But it's because we're pushing the limit to, you know, just over break even. Meta ROAS 1.2. And that's with anywhere from a $60 to $80 cost cap. App love and ROAS, identical, 1.2. And that is with 1.3 ROAS goals or $50 CPA goal campaigns. Google ROAS 1.99. So that's last 60 days. Now the spend associated with that last 60 days, Meta, $1,050,000. AppLovin, $550,000. Wow. Google, $132,000. That's insane. So yeah, I mean it's matching ROAS exactly Both of them slightly undershoot our goals that we input to the system, but we're getting what we expect. Speaker 2: Can you talk a little bit about that growth trajectory? You're spending half a million on AppLovin. Can you give us a little bit of color on how you scaled up to that? Was it pretty instant? Speaker 1: I think it was like March 20th is when we started and we used a $10,000 credit which I think we blew through in I want to say 10 days. I think in the first 30 days we probably spent like $30,000 to $40,000. So last $60,000 was $550,000. In the last 30 days, 340 of that was in the last 30. So we are continuously trying to push the envelope. Speaker 2: That's nearly doubling month over month though. You probably spent about 160 the month before then. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think exactly 160. But like I said, we need to be feeding it more creative and we're not. So I did tone it down in the past week or so because I mean I was Trying to max it out. And we're not keeping up with creating content, so that is... I don't think it's a fault of AppLovin or Meta at all. It's just we need to get our crap together and produce more videos. But the reason we struggle there is because, you know, there's only five or six people that are focusing on the PROOF brand internally, and you see our faces too many times. You know, it gets old. We need other people. Speaker 3: Yes, no longer user-generated. It's like owner-generated. Speaker 1: So we're starting to get a lot more user-generated, great content, and I think that's going to continue to grow. Speaker 4: Especially when you guys are now diversifying and getting into different channel mixes, how have you guys thought about incrementality? How are you guys measuring, you know, all right, well, if we're gonna spend X amount here, are we actually growing or is it kind of cutting into what's already there? I think that's a big concern for people when they start, you know, mixing and matching and spending in other areas. How are you guys thinking about it? Speaker 1: So I think we're kind of in a slightly different boat than Most, you know, well-established brands is that like damn near every purchase is incremental for us right now. It's like our new customer percentage is like 95% because we're growing so rapidly. But the overlap between Meta and AppLovin, we use TripleWhale to, you know, for attribution. It's only a 10% overlap there, is what we're finding. So, I mean, it's absolutely incremental. Our new visitor percentage, give you Meta, AppLovin, and Google for the last 30 and 60, they're really the same for 30 and 60 days, but Meta 92%, new visitor percentage, AppLovin 90%, Google 90%. So, like, we're new, we're growing rapidly, you know, like it's almost It would be difficult for us to have an incrementality issue, I think, at our stage. Yes, because, you know, we are new. New customer percentage last 60 days. Meta 93.6, AppLovin 94.5, Google 92.5. The last 30 days are pretty much identical there as well. Yeah, I mean, 35% of our customers And our orders are driven from AppLovin at this point. Speaker 4: That's amazing. Speaker 2: Wow. That's powerful. Speaker 4: I want to go back to the creative side of things because I think for brands that have maybe tested it or are still, you know, obviously scaling on the platform, end cards are such a big focus for that platform if you want to make it successful, right? So curious, any tips, tricks when it comes to end cards on AppLovin? Speaker 1: We are pretty primitive. We've probably pushed out 10 to 15 different end cards and they all kind of resort back to the very first one I ever created. Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's primitive. Speaker 1: Yeah, we're really not doing anything fancy. A lot of times you see these really fancy end cards that are almost like interactive. Speaker 3: You know we did want to position ourselves premium and so we were really staying off from from discounts and advertising discounts and AppLovin was probably the end card was the AppLovin end card was the first place that we were like all right let's just see because we really needed to get that traction with that with the $10,000 credit that they gave us. We have to get some sales make sure we prove this that way we can continue spending with them when we run out of the free money. And that worked for us, and I don't think it took a hit on us as far as our positioning went at all. It was very like niche kind of area. Now being 35% of our new customers, it's a little different, but at the time that definitely helped. It was an easy place to sneak in a discount that not tons of people would see, and it helped us. If your end card doesn't work, then none of your videos are going to work. So it helped us dial in our videos prior to the end card because we went to bat with multiple videos and then, you know, if you don't have any data from nobody buying anything, then you don't even know. It was the end card or was it the video? We just weren't sure. Speaker 4: So that's the question. What do you think actually moves the needle the most? Speaker 3: I think that 60 seconds of forced advertising has to. I mean, you have 60 seconds to, you know, Communicate and this person is they have to watch for 60 seconds. Speaker 2: It's not like they can go on their phone. Speaker 3: I don't even know what happens if you if you leave that 60 seconds, you might might lose the whole game or something of that nature. Speaker 1: What is nice about the the new dashboard that they came out with was like originally you couldn't see What they were clicking on. I don't know if they were clicking on the video or the end card. Now you can at least see the click-through rates associated with each, but I don't think you can see what converted. I don't know if you can. Like whether they converted off of the video or the end card. You might be able to. I don't, I'm not sure, but I haven't found it. Speaker 3: You got data on the click-through? What's, what are they clicking? Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I can't pull it up on my phone, but if you were to go in the dashboard, you can see it broken up. Speaker 3: I mean, you would assume that whatever they're clicking, that's probably what's converting. I mean, maybe the conversion rates are different, but that's... At least we have click-through data. Speaker 2: I think you mentioned the new dashboard. I think a lot of people were excited about that because I think there was a part of it which felt like, you know, is this really working? How do we know it's working? And I think the dashboard did solve a lot more of like, okay, now I see it working and I kind of understand why too, which is super helpful. By the way, this has been incredible so far because I think a lot of people sometimes need to understand and see proof cases. No pun intended, but people need to see things that are like, hey, oh wow, it is possible versus the small anecdotes you see on Twitter and LinkedIn. Oh, I've spent X amount doing Q4 and like... Speaker 3: Sign up for my mentorship. Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you don't hear about them anymore. So it's awesome to see something that's sustainable, right, but also growing. I'm curious in terms of, you know, we're in this theme of just diversification and channel diversification, you know, outside of Meta, Google and AppLovin. Where does the channels like TikTok and some of the other, you know, marketplaces, I know Amazon, but where do they all sit in your guys' priority? And is there anywhere else you guys are spending time? Speaker 1: I mean, none of them are even on our radar at this point. Like we've tried them all for Our other brands with little to no success, which is probably why they're not on our radar right now, but there's just, there's so much opportunity with the current channels that we're working with that... Speaker 2: Stay focused. Speaker 1: Yeah, but we are now testing Tatari. So actually as of yesterday, the pilot campaign just went live. So we'll see how that goes. We like TV. We've had a lot of success with TV for previous brands in the past and actually briefly for this brand on local news stations running local news ads. Speaker 3: There's a little tidbit there. This is a very beautiful bump set spike strategy. So we, as a new company, we were trying to build social proof, right? I mean, we're this new company nobody's ever heard of. Nobody's seen the logo. This is the first time they've seen the wallet. In our annual planning meeting, we came up with the idea of we're going to do a local news segment. This is just Cleveland. It was like Good Day Cleveland, I think. Good Morning Cleveland, Good Day Cleveland, something like that. Fox 8 News just broadcasts in the 50-mile radius around the city. And, you know, made sure that we were able to have their permission to reuse this content. And so here we are on a professional news set, two young... Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed former veterans that are starting this wallet company and we're being interviewed by a guy in a suit and you know we have the product and it's just this professional setting and we turn into Meta ads and for at least a three-week period it was our top performing ad on Meta in there. Speaker 2: That's really cool. Those little tidbits are the things that kind of give you hope into saying oh well we got to try in different formats now. Speaker 3: I think just being creative in any way. I mean, the problem in this case was we're new and we need to prove to people that we're not a scam. Speaker 2: That's right. Speaker 3: You know, so we throw our veterans out. Speaker 1: Like our core demographic is older, like 45 and up. And, you know, that demographic, especially on Facebook, They've all been scammed. I've been scammed. You guys probably have too at some point. They're so weary of it that when you're starting out, you really got to prove that you're legit. Speaker 4: One thing that you mentioned was 95% of orders is obviously new customers. Are you guys thinking about what a roadmap for maybe expansion would look like to see if you can get people to come back? Speaker 3: 100%. Non-stop. I mean, you have to with the model of offering something with a lifetime guarantee. We're going out of business quick if they're not coming back. We are very careful about making sure that people have a great experience with us and that's everything from post-purchase emails coming from me personally. I do not recommend that you do this, but I do give my personal cell phone number out to first-time customers. We're about to, I keep saying this, but we're about to the point where I'm about to shut this off because it's becoming kind of a distraction, but on Christmas Day I had the people wishing me Merry Christmas. You know what I'm saying? And so you talk about building rapport with the customer. It's not scalable at all, but that's just one of the small examples of something that we're doing to Just have as many multiple touch points with the customer good experience as we can. Speaker 1: We hold customer service, honestly, as priority number one over literally every other aspect of the company. We go to pretty great lengths to provide some extraordinary experiences for as many people as we can. Speaker 3: May have seen the most recent, maybe not, but Dane just flew a Father's Day gift out to somebody in New Orleans. Speaker 1: I had promised her We took too many orders, custom engraved orders, for Father's Day. That was our mistake. So we started overnighting everything, making sure we got them all to everybody that ordered in time. And this lady had commented on a Facebook ad saying, like, hey, you know, Father's Day is like three days away, and my order hasn't shipped. And I messaged her. I said, I promise you it will get there in time. Like, I'm going to be overnighting it. Then our guys went to overnight it, and you can't. Like, it couldn't get there because they live in a remote area. And so it wasn't going to show up until, like, the Monday after. And they told her that, and she was distraught. Not angry at all. Like, just in tears because she was in Alaska. She's a traveling nurse, and so she was already feeling guilty about not being there for Father's Day. And I had promised that it would be there and now it can't be there. And I was like, look, I'll be on a plane tomorrow morning. I will hand deliver it to your husband. And, uh, it was awesome. Like it, honestly, it made my father's day and I ended up missing the majority of my father's day because of it. Camp planes. I mean, that's just, honestly, that's just one example of hundreds that we, We want to make this experience so memorable that you talk about it for 20 years because they will go and tell everybody they know about it and I mean if you just look at some any ad that you see of ours that has any kind of you know more than one comment on it most of them have you know 10, 20, 50, 100 comments and they're just overly It's static customers, so much so that people are like, bot, fake, fake, bot. And they're like, no, this is real and this company is like, they truly care about their customers. Speaker 2: So now we're going to wrap up here, but I have some quick fire questions for you guys. What was the weirdest warranty request that you got? Speaker 3: I mean, two of them. I guess the most recent one was we pranked our social media or we pranked our customer service lady, so it wasn't real. So we called them. We were actually videotaping it because we were going to turn it into an ad. We will replace it if you shoot it, if you run it over and you blow it up or something. So we had them We had him put it in a microwave, you know, while he was shooting on the phone. We were just trying to get this footage. We're saying, wait, you're going to microwave it? Yeah, we'll cover it. Yes. Unknown Speaker: And we did it. Speaker 3: It worked. It worked beautifully. Yet to be published. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Speaker 3: We've had a guy, stolen wallet was... Speaker 1: Yeah, so like that's one of our, you know, aspects of the warranty. If you lose it or it gets stolen, we'll replace it for you. Speaker 2: Oh wow, even lose it or stolen. Speaker 1: Yeah, and honestly, it does not get abused. Like, well, very, I would say I can count on like two fingers. Speaker 3: Insignificantly amount, insignificant amount of abuse. Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I don't even know how many walls we sold at this point, but I bet no more than 10 people have said that they've lost or stolen their wallet. Speaker 2: It's incredible. Speaker 1: But, and we, we push this, like, look, We want to attract the top of the top of our society as our customers, like morally sound, truly great humans that would never try to get one over on a company as generous and well-meaning as ours. Because at the end of the day, you're the one who has to look in the mirror. I think that's a pretty powerful deterrent. Yeah, honestly, we don't get crazy warranty claims. Speaker 2: That's really cool. And then if you could only sell to one hobby or job or one profession for the rest of the time, what profession do you think buys PROOF Wallets the most? Speaker 3: Entrepreneurs. Speaker 2: Entrepreneurs. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: Like that. Speaker 3: Yeah. Businessmen. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Early on, I would call. Our first 100 customers I've called, you know, who are you? What are you into? What do you like? What are you about? And they're all men's men, you know, a lot of outdoors men. They all seem to be wealthy and they really enjoyed the fact that we were in business and shared a little bit of my story, you know, because I'm asking so much information from them that I got to kind of give back. But entrepreneurs, businessmen. Speaker 4: Thank you guys. I mean, this was awesome. I know you had a chew earlier in the show, but the way we like to do it is right at the end. We'd love for you guys to give one final piece of feedback for the audience and listeners. Something to implement in their business starting today. What would that one thing be? Speaker 1: I would say without a doubt, stop treating customer service as an expense. And make that a priority because your customers will tell, they will do your marketing for you if you treat them right. Speaker 4: Love that. Speaker 1: It's worth eating the cost as much as possible to make their experience better. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Speaker 3: I'm not following that. Speaker 2: No. Speaker 3: That's what we stand by. That's where we got to where we are. I love that. Speaker 2: Show on that, guys. That is awesome. Speaker 4: 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.