Podcasts about DTC

Angie Tebbe is on a mission to make vitamins cool. “I believe that if you're going to start something from scratch, dream big,” says Tebbe, who left the Target merchant job she thought she'd retire from on a gut instinct that she should be doing something tied to wellness. Within 8 weeks of quitting, she hatched the idea for Rae Wellness, a brand of natural supplements that address big issues including stress, sex, skin, sleep, and digestion. The target market is women like herself in their 20s and 30s. “We're all about the psychographic: I'm not putting myself on the priority list because I want to conquer the world.” Tebbe identified a white space in the supplement market between very expensive products aimed at the “One percent” and lower end, sugar-laden vitamins that were not aimed at women. Her goal was to make lives better, in an easy, accessible manner, for as many women as possible. “I have always thought of brands and companies, those that soar and succeed are mission based,” Tebbe says. “It makes them authentic. Consumers can see through things. Target taught Tebbe to translate high-end products for mass, and so she set out to do just that with Rae Wellness. The brand launched in 2019 as direct-to-consumer and quickly found its audience, amassing more than 160,000 Tik Tok followers. “I knew it needed to be omnichannel,” Tebbe said. Soon after, Rae landed on the shelves at Target. She takes us through the process of conceptualizing and building the brand, the importance of being an omnichannel and the challenges of raising venture capital, which she did—a $9.5 million Series A in June of 2021. Following our conversation with Tebbe, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Kim Sovell is an adjunct marketing professor and specialist in omnichannel retail. The key today, she says, is giving consumers options. “How do I reach as many customers as I can as conveniently as they want it.” She expects to see the explosion of direct-to-consumer brands continue; DTC now represents a more than $1 billion market. Going direct allows brands to be flexible with pricing and experiment with special incentives and promotions. But don't write off physical stores, she says. “You want to be available, multiple ways.”

“As you discount your product, you could potentially see better ad conversion.” @jayde3sai #DTCPOD“Sometimes when you discount to both new and returning customers, and your margin ends up going down. ” @jayde3sai #DTCPODWe Speak About:[01:17] DTC discounting twitter threadLearn more about how and when to discount  In today's episode of DTC Finds, we're looking at a Twitter thread by David Rekuc, discussing discounting We'll dive into this thread and breakdown what he has to say about it as well as our take on the pros and cons of discountingStay tuned as we learn more about this marketing strategy and its effects.If you'd like to learn more about Trend and our influencer marketing platform for influencers and brands visit trend.io. You can also follow us for tips on growing your following and running successful campaigns on Instagram and LinkedIn.Mentioned Links:David's Twitter thread on discounting: https://twitter.com/DaveRekuc/status/1458841785292234754

Today on the show we have Alexandra Fine. One of the women behind Dame. Dame is leading a sexual wellness revolution as a women-powered resource for game-changing products for pleasure and supportive content. Through in-depth research, smart design, community input, and plenty of empathy, the Dame team has designed a line of exceptional tools to enhance sexual wellness for vulva-havers and their partners everywhere. Dame is not only revolutionizing toys for sex, but changing the way we experience, understand, and explore sexuality as part of holistic wellbeing. Since 2014, the team has opened doors that have long been closed to the sexuality industry, becoming a key player in the movement to bring pleasure to the forefront of wellness. We talk through her approach to building this business, crowdfunding, marketing and how she uses the businesses challenges as her opportunity. You might have heard that Dame sued the MTA and has had some pretty exciting stuff in the works these past few weeks.LINKS WE MENTION:Alexandra's TwitterAlexandra's LinkedInAlexandra's InstagramDame's InstagramDame's LinkedInDame's TwitterFemale Startup Club's InstagramDoone's InstagramIn partnership with Klaviyo, the best email marketing tool for ecommerce businesses.Female Startup Club's YouTubeFemale Startup Club's Private Facebook GroupSay hello to Doone: hello@femalestartupclub.com

In This Episode You'll Hear About:How most of his childhood was spent outdoors in his hometown near SeattleHow even as a kid he had an entrepreneurial spirit by upselling pizza slices to his schoolmatesHow his different jobs of working the door at nightclubs in San Francisco, to working in event planning and working music festivals gave him the experience needed to start EvermillHow cooking and grocery shopping all the time sparked the idea for Evermill, along with wanting a more environmentally friendly spice system with a modern lookThe process of designing the Evermill jars, getting a patent on the idea of self-aligning jars, and putting the product in motionHow his dream goal for Evermill was to be featured on Oprah's Favorite Things list and they achieved itHis lessons learned bootstrapping and now finishing up fundraising What Evermill has coming next and their plans for the futureExclusive Deals from Our Sponsors:Get 30% off your first 3 months with Malomo by going to: https://gomalomo.com/stairwaytoceoUse the promo code STAIRWAY200 for $200 off Outer furniture by shopping HEREGet 2 months FREE with Gorgias by clicking HERE and mentioning the podcastTo Find Out More:https://evermill.com/Use the code Stairway30 to get $30 off! Want the Inside Scoop?:Text Lee at 310-510-6044Quotes:“People spend a ton of money on their kitchens and they just cannot figure this out because it's like it comes from everywhere, and there's a lot of waste in it, because they buy it for it to be used, then it sits and then they don't know how to use it, or they buy another one because they need it, they don't know if that's fresh or not. So they throw it out.”“I was very frustrated by the issue of spices and so I started to kind of try and solve that problem.”“Buying things once and refilling it with a product and packaging, has to account for a lot of ways.” “Evermill blend is what we think of as the most universal blend. It's salty, garlicky, it's got a little bit of heat, a little bit of lemon in it. It's one of those you can throw it on a chicken, you can put it on some fish, you can put it in a salad dressing, roast vegetables with it. It just has kind of a catch all for everything.”“Then we came up with the teardrop idea of all the jars  self-aligning because if we were going to charge this much for a spice rack and there's going to be this beautiful thing that was so well thought of, I would hate for it to be ruined by misaligned labels.”“We started this company 13 months ago in October of last year. And our PR was like ‘who's your number one goal?' And it was Oprah. Oprah's everyone's number one goal. And then a couple months ago I heard back, asking for us to send more product and we said of course, then shortly after we found out that we were selected.”“Our ideal customer was a host and just like constantly having people over for dinner, and being a very nurturing, generous host. And so that's who's kind of embodied in and who we want to create products for.”“In terms of getting a company off the ground, you just gotta do it.”“I mean, it's a 24 hour job, you are constantly working, there's not a lot of breaks, there's not a lot of vacations. You can't really. We're a three person company now. So, you know, if someone goes off, there's not a team to watch what's going on.”“Right now we've got a great set of 12 and 18, and they're the building blocks of most spice blends. So you can build any blend you want from these. So getting to the point where people can choose what they want is their number one piece of customer feedback.”“Just do it and start and just keep working at it. Just don't give up. It's going to get there eventually.”

Does the world really need another subscription box? Do parents really need to buy more things for their kids? Well, when we're talking about Lovevery, the answer is yes and yes. In the crowded spaces of DTC subscription services and childrens products, Lovevery is making its presence known. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I talk to Rod Morris, the co-founder and president of Lovevery, who told me all about the development of the company's amazing products, and, more importantly, how he and his team went about making them stand out among the rest. It takes a lot of hard work — but it all starts with a complete obsession with creating a brand that you believe in and products that fill a gap in the market. Rod took me behind the scenes of getting press and testimonials for Lovevery, he told me how they create social content that sees engagement that blows the competition out of the water, and we also dug into his tips for fundraising and what the upside is to going public. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Winning with Connected TV: If you can break format and do something divergent, you will be able to find success in the world of connected TV. People are engaged by unique content, so you should constantly be looking for ways to take wha's working and flip it on its head.Understanding the International Market: When you take your company abroad, there is a steep learning curve to understand how to win customers and take a part of the marketshare. Even if your product works the same wherever you sell it, the process of marketing it and adhering to regulations varies. These are important things to consider and prepare yourself for if/when you are seeking to expand overseas.It Takes Heart, Soul and Obsession: The way to keep LTV high and keep growing you need a mix of ingredients. First, you have to truly be obsessed with your product, love it, and constantly strive to improve it. Second, invest in content and reaching the audience you care about with useful and engaging content. Finally, you have to stay connected and work with customers so that they feel invested in the product and the company rather than being on-off shoppers.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

First, Jason sums up Jack Dorsey's departure from Twitter's CEO role (1:41). Then he breaks down the stats from Mr. Beast's latest YouTube video (11:05). After the news, Haus CEO and Co-Founder Helena Price Hambrecht joins (16:53) to discuss her DTC alcohol brand, changing habits of American drinkers and more.

If you're engaging in dietary supplement marketing, there's a gap within the marketplace that you're missing. If your competitors knew about this gap it would result is some serious competition for you. And without understanding the marketplace you can't optimize health products or online dietary supplement businesses.Brought to you by http://www.creativethirst.com The revenue optimization agency for health supplement companies. Specializing in split tests, funnels, upsells, and direct response copywriting so you can maximize profitability and scale.- - -Getting people to your sales page or funnel is how you grow a direct to consumer supplement company. But how do you get them there?The quickest way to do that is though paid advertising.Buying buyers with ad dollars to scale is how all the supplement business do it.Now you can discover the strategies and tactics that work in supplement advertising.For just $7.Click here to grab your copy of the Health Supplement Ad Swipe Guide.

We're joined by Chris Bell, CEO & Founder of Perch, one of the fastest growing and most acquisitive companies offering a platform to e-commerce brands leveraging "Fulfilled by Amazon" and other third party marketplaces. We learn how the model works, why the business model is attracting so much investor interest, and what's on the horizon for one of the hottest sectors in retail today. And if you run a brand looking to be acquired, you'll definitely want to check this episode out.But first we open up with the top retail stories that caught our attention this past week, including what to make of the "Great Rebalancing" evident in earnings reports from Best Buy, Dick's Sporting Goods and Nordstrom. We also give our take on the new hybrid format from Starbucks and Amazon Go.Steve Dennis is an advisor, keynote speaker and author on strategic growth and business innovation. You can learn more about Steve on his       website.    The expanded and revised edition of his bestselling book  Remarkable Retail: How To Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Disruption is now available at  Amazon or just about anywhere else books are sold. Steve regularly shares his insights in his role as a      Forbes senior contributor and on       Twitter and       LinkedIn. You can also check out his speaker "sizzle" reel      here.Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada's top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus  Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  ,      The Food Professor  with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois and now in its second season, Conversations with CommerceNext!  You can learn more about Michael   here  or on     LinkedIn. Be sure and check out Michael's latest venture for fun and influencer riches - Last Request Barbecue,  his YouTube BBQ cooking channel! 

You'll learn from an entrepreneur who manages her business using EOS or "Entrepreneurial Operating System"For more on Encircled and show notes: https://www.shopify.com/blog/encircled-operations?utm_campaign=shopifymasters&utm_medium=youtube&utm_source=podcast Tune in to learn What is it like to work with a technical designer to create your products What is the Entrepreneurial Operating System Her experience going on Dragons Den and its impact on her business 

Tune into your Turbulence with Monique Maley, President of Articulate Persuasion   In Episode 118 of the Lion's Share Marketing Podcast, Tyler and Jon break down NBC's new partnership with Yahoo for CTV ads. Tyler and Jon discuss the benefits of doubling down on connected TV opportunities and expect to see an influx of DTC brands allocating marketing dollars to. Then Tyler is joined by our featured guest, Monique Maley, to discuss navigating turbulence in your communication as a marketer as well as building confidence within your team.   In our discussion with Monique, the President of Articulate Persuasion, she shares how her unique history and training as an actress have helped her understand the power of connection with an audience. It's all about messaging. Who are you trying to connect with? The connection amongst internal teams is just as important as brands connecting to their audience. Monique states the value of mindful communication as a leader and emphasizes the many benefits of authentic confidence and how to achieve it.   Monique's key takeaway encourages marketing leaders to focus on their blind spots in their current roles. After identifying what's in your blind spot, you'll have the clarity to take the next step in achieving your goals.    Join Tyler, Jon, and Monique to gain insight on navigating the turbulence in your life and career, and learn how you can take the next steps in achieving your goals through better communication and building authentic confidence.    Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction 01:05 - In the News: NBC Partners with Yahoo for DSP Ads 06:30 - Featured Guest: Monique Maley 07:15 - Monique's Acting History 09:13 - Discussion of Turbulence 12:20 - Identifying Turbulence and Addressing It 16:05 - Being Understood as a Marketing Leader 18:10 - Internal and External Confidence 21:38 - Developing Authentic Confidence 23:58 - Writing as a Marketer 30:23 - Monique's Key Takeaway 32:47 - Outro Featured Guests | Monique Maley LinkedIn What's In the News  NBC Universal's Peacock CTV inventory via Yahoo DSP Lion's Share Marketing Podcast Learn More About Tyler & Jon www.tylersickmeyer.com  Need Marketing Help?  www.FidelitasDevelopment.com Music Intro Music – Colony House – Buy “2:20” on iTunes Outro Music – Skillet – Buy “Lions” on iTunes  

Nicholas is the CEO at 253 Media. 253 Media is a team of web designers and developers that specialize in Webflow and Shopify builds. Nicholas has been in the marketing space for over 11 years now with experience in the auto industry, eCommerce, DTC, and more! We had the opportunity to talk about all things sales, marketing, and his hobbies (including cycling & motocross)! This was a great episode and fun to record! Check out his business 253 Media for all your digital marketing needs! Huge shoutout to our sponsors for this episode! Make sure you check out Monarch Social for all your digital marketing needs! And just in time for the holidays get hooked up with your gourmet, non-alcoholic sparkling cider from Sheffield Cider and save 10% off your order of a case with code “think10”! If you're interested in starting your own Virtual Assistant Agency, use code “think10” for 10% off my new course that just launched! Join my newsletter and pre-order my new book Sale Genius here! If you can't – consider leaving a review!

Our guest today is Founder and President of a conversion rate optimization agency responsible for serving massive brands, like Nike, Xerox, and Adobe.Jon MacDonald joins the Wavebreak Podcast to share everything he's learned about growth while running a conversion rate optimization agency for 12 years, and how much of that will matter during unprecedented times in 2022.In this episode you'll learn:The highest frequency conversion rate killers that Jon and his team consistently find when tearing down a new client's ecommerce website. Why tactics are more relevant than you think, but still take a backseat to core tenants and philosophies.How prioritizing user experience could lead to more unexpected growth than chasing the latest trends and tools.Jon MacDonald is Founder and President of The Good, a conversion rate optimization firm turning browsers into buyers for some of the world's largest brands.Join Our Private Email ListOur industry-leading DTC newsletter is trusted by ecommerce and marketing leaders at top brands like Goop, Skims, Cartier, Walmart, and thousands more.Click here to sign up ->Links MentionedThe GoodOpting In To OptimizationLearn more about Wavebreak: the email & CRM agency for high-growth DTC brandsSponsored by KlaviyoKlaviyo — Over 265,000 innovative brands are growing their businesses by listening and understanding to cues from their customers--easily turning that information into valuable marketing messages used to build highly segmented, automated email & SMS campaigns, such as win back campaigns or abandoned cart recovery and more.

Why do we drink? Do we love the taste? Do we want to relax and unwind? Maybe it's about the ritual of a well-crafted cocktail. But is it possible to have the ritual without the alcohol? We'll find out today as we mix up some mocktails with Ritual, a zero proof liquor alternative. Let's get sauced without the sauce.

LINK TO SURVEY HERE In this new mini series within the FSC podcast, I'm taking you on the journey while I develop my non alc wine brand and build it in public. Everything from money stuff, to how you divide the company, learnings as we go and the ups & downs of building a CPG brand.Links we mention: Spark Tank Pitch Application Hype ClubIf you have something you want me to cover, reach out on Twitter or Instagram.In partnership with Klaviyo, the best email marketing tool for ecommerce businesses.Female Startup Club's YouTubeFemale Startup Club's InstagramDoone's InstagramIn partnership with Klaviyo, the best email marketing tool for ecommerce businesses.Female Startup Club's YouTubeFemale Startup Club's Private Facebook GroupSay hello to Doone: hello@femalestartupclub.com

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup And now for something a little different. Hello and welcome to the DTC Podcast. Today we're talking about how "the next internet" or Web3 will change the landscape for DTC Brands in the next 5-10 years. This wide-ranging conversation covers the core of crypto, Centralization vs Decentralization, and how Web3 gives consumers, brands, and advertisers more skin in the game. We chat about the best current brand implementations within the metaverse, as well as what you should be thinking about already to take advantage of the next big 100x. Chris is a friend and someone who's been a digital marketing for almost 20 years. For his take on the Web3 opportunity, download his whitepaper here: https://thelazymarketer.com/whitepaper-extreme-opportunities-in-the-wild-web3-frontier/ Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

Becoming a Gift Influencer Drips vs. Drops? Drips all the way. Businesses should be providing drips to their customers, constant communication. Whereas drops are the seasonality of pushing your customer. “I love the always-on drip culture. I do still think there's excitement and like sexiness to a big drop. But you have to make sure that those drops are super, super necessary in the moment, like hitting exactly where they need to hit and then using the drips throughout the year to prepare for the big drops, but then also make sure that you're staying relevant and on top of mind.” -IngridThe best part of the holiday season is giving! But there's different kinds of gifters. According to Brian and Ingrid, they're both gift influencers.We're going to see more of an experiential gift this season than an actual material gift.“This is a year where people are going to be giving things that get people out and moving and doing things.” -BrianAssociated Links:Subscribe to Insiders to get our exclusive offers for Black Friday!Listen to our other episodes of Future CommerceListen to our newest podcast, Infinite ShelfCheck out our latest report Nine by NineWatch the Nine by Nine live experienceBands mentioned: Our Place, Tracksmith, SferraHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

To watch this episode visit our Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/-M1ZPpv3ew0David Gaylord will share key lessons he's learned while marketing Bushbalm: Three essential components of the marketing stack for new businessesRule of thumb for allocating marketing spendWays to scale your brand using public relations

The old saying goes that men are from Mars, women are from Venus. And while that's not literally true, when it comes to marketing, men and women do seem like two different species. What resonates with a man is wildly different than what resonates with a woman. For instance, I love a good ingredients list and couldn't care less about how much lather I get from my body wash. A lot of men apparently feel the exact opposite. These are the kinds of things that all businesses need to think of when it comes to targeting and sending the right message. And it's a topic I went deep on in the episode of Up Next in Commerce with Matt Mullenax, the Co-Founder and CEO of Huron. Matt talked me through all the ways he had to test, poll, and iterate on his advertising to get his men's body care brand off the ground. But when he found the right formula, all of a sudden it was like striking gold. We're talking crazy click-through rates, plummeting CPAs, and a direct line into the messaging that men are aligned with. Do you want to know what it is? And are you interested in what other heavy lifts Matt is working on now for long-term payoffs? Find out on this episode!Main Takeaways:The Humanization of Brand: People used to be excited by the novelty of buying online. As the DTC world evolved, consumers have gotten smarter and these days, your brand has to resonate in ways beyond just having a good product available. Some of the aspects of humanizing the brand, such as building personal connections, will require a heavy lift upfront, but the long-term value.An Atypical CX Strategy: Historically, CX has been seen as reactive, but there are ways to be proactive and ensure an exceptional customer experience no matter the situation. You should not wait for a problem to arise to help a customer out. If you know there might be a delay in shipping or some other situation arises, by reaching out before the product is delayed, you build trust with your customer.Find Your Internal Cheat Codes: Whether you have a founder with deep connections in manufacturing or you're friends with an Instagram influencer, there are certain elements you bring to that table that you should tap into to give you a leg up in one way or another.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

Investing in creators vs debt, Wirecutter boycott, end of call to cancel Slow Ventures. A Former Facebook VP Thinks Investing in Humans Is the Future of VC. Investing Directly in People Is the Future of VC. Here's How to Do It. Life Capital 2021: The Future of The Professional Creator Ecosystem. Wirecutter Thanksgiving strike and boycott is on. Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin Outbid a Group of Crypto Investors for Copy of U.S. Constitution. Niantic raises $300M at a $9B valuation to build the 'real-world metaverse' Mouse jigglers are a thing. Pokemon Go Creator Niantic Launches Bitcoin-Hunting AR Game. The end of "click to subscribe, call to cancel"? One of the news industry's favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says. A Robot Wrote This Book Review. The unbearable fussiness of the smart home. Locked out of "God mode," runners are hacking their treadmills. Google Pixel 6a will run on a Tensor chip, but a lesser camera than Pixel 6. Android Auto and Pixel 6 won't play nice, but Google is working on a fix. The Pixel 5 could have actually been good if Google's chip plans had worked out. iMessage Reactions Will No Longer Annoy Android Users Thanks to Emoji Change. Google Store Black Friday 2021 deals are now live in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia Google Stadia is celebrating its second birthday with hardware for free or cheap You can now pre-order the 2nd-gen Pixel Stand from Google, ships next month Samsung to Choose Taylor, Texas, for $17 Billion Chip-Making Factory. Casper's return to private life isn't a canary for DTC companies going public. Jeff Jarvis: The Times treats an iPhone as a luxury. I hate to break it to them, but I think many people would say that these days a subscription to The Times is a luxury. Jay Last, One of the Rebels Who Founded Silicon Valley, Dies at 92. Picks: Stacey - Thanksgiving Piecaken. Jeff - What is your state's favorite Thanksgiving dish? Google shares popular searches in the US. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Stacey Higginbotham Guest: Sam Lessin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: akamai.com/twig UserWay.org/twit andela.com/for-companies

Investing in creators vs debt, Wirecutter boycott, end of call to cancel Slow Ventures. A Former Facebook VP Thinks Investing in Humans Is the Future of VC. Investing Directly in People Is the Future of VC. Here's How to Do It. Life Capital 2021: The Future of The Professional Creator Ecosystem. Wirecutter Thanksgiving strike and boycott is on. Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin Outbid a Group of Crypto Investors for Copy of U.S. Constitution. Niantic raises $300M at a $9B valuation to build the 'real-world metaverse' Mouse jigglers are a thing. Pokemon Go Creator Niantic Launches Bitcoin-Hunting AR Game. The end of "click to subscribe, call to cancel"? One of the news industry's favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says. A Robot Wrote This Book Review. The unbearable fussiness of the smart home. Locked out of "God mode," runners are hacking their treadmills. Google Pixel 6a will run on a Tensor chip, but a lesser camera than Pixel 6. Android Auto and Pixel 6 won't play nice, but Google is working on a fix. The Pixel 5 could have actually been good if Google's chip plans had worked out. iMessage Reactions Will No Longer Annoy Android Users Thanks to Emoji Change. Google Store Black Friday 2021 deals are now live in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia Google Stadia is celebrating its second birthday with hardware for free or cheap You can now pre-order the 2nd-gen Pixel Stand from Google, ships next month Samsung to Choose Taylor, Texas, for $17 Billion Chip-Making Factory. Casper's return to private life isn't a canary for DTC companies going public. Jeff Jarvis: The Times treats an iPhone as a luxury. I hate to break it to them, but I think many people would say that these days a subscription to The Times is a luxury. Jay Last, One of the Rebels Who Founded Silicon Valley, Dies at 92. Picks: Stacey - Thanksgiving Piecaken. Jeff - What is your state's favorite Thanksgiving dish? Google shares popular searches in the US. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Stacey Higginbotham Guest: Sam Lessin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: akamai.com/twig UserWay.org/twit andela.com/for-companies

Investing in creators vs debt, Wirecutter boycott, end of call to cancel Slow Ventures. A Former Facebook VP Thinks Investing in Humans Is the Future of VC. Investing Directly in People Is the Future of VC. Here's How to Do It. Life Capital 2021: The Future of The Professional Creator Ecosystem. Wirecutter Thanksgiving strike and boycott is on. Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin Outbid a Group of Crypto Investors for Copy of U.S. Constitution. Niantic raises $300M at a $9B valuation to build the 'real-world metaverse' Mouse jigglers are a thing. Pokemon Go Creator Niantic Launches Bitcoin-Hunting AR Game. The end of "click to subscribe, call to cancel"? One of the news industry's favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says. A Robot Wrote This Book Review. The unbearable fussiness of the smart home. Locked out of "God mode," runners are hacking their treadmills. Google Pixel 6a will run on a Tensor chip, but a lesser camera than Pixel 6. Android Auto and Pixel 6 won't play nice, but Google is working on a fix. The Pixel 5 could have actually been good if Google's chip plans had worked out. iMessage Reactions Will No Longer Annoy Android Users Thanks to Emoji Change. Google Store Black Friday 2021 deals are now live in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia Google Stadia is celebrating its second birthday with hardware for free or cheap You can now pre-order the 2nd-gen Pixel Stand from Google, ships next month Samsung to Choose Taylor, Texas, for $17 Billion Chip-Making Factory. Casper's return to private life isn't a canary for DTC companies going public. Jeff Jarvis: The Times treats an iPhone as a luxury. I hate to break it to them, but I think many people would say that these days a subscription to The Times is a luxury. Jay Last, One of the Rebels Who Founded Silicon Valley, Dies at 92. Picks: Stacey - Thanksgiving Piecaken. Jeff - What is your state's favorite Thanksgiving dish? Google shares popular searches in the US. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Stacey Higginbotham Guest: Sam Lessin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: akamai.com/twig UserWay.org/twit andela.com/for-companies

Investing in creators vs debt, Wirecutter boycott, end of call to cancel Slow Ventures. A Former Facebook VP Thinks Investing in Humans Is the Future of VC. Investing Directly in People Is the Future of VC. Here's How to Do It. Life Capital 2021: The Future of The Professional Creator Ecosystem. Wirecutter Thanksgiving strike and boycott is on. Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin Outbid a Group of Crypto Investors for Copy of U.S. Constitution. Niantic raises $300M at a $9B valuation to build the 'real-world metaverse' Mouse jigglers are a thing. Pokemon Go Creator Niantic Launches Bitcoin-Hunting AR Game. The end of "click to subscribe, call to cancel"? One of the news industry's favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says. A Robot Wrote This Book Review. The unbearable fussiness of the smart home. Locked out of "God mode," runners are hacking their treadmills. Google Pixel 6a will run on a Tensor chip, but a lesser camera than Pixel 6. Android Auto and Pixel 6 won't play nice, but Google is working on a fix. The Pixel 5 could have actually been good if Google's chip plans had worked out. iMessage Reactions Will No Longer Annoy Android Users Thanks to Emoji Change. Google Store Black Friday 2021 deals are now live in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia Google Stadia is celebrating its second birthday with hardware for free or cheap You can now pre-order the 2nd-gen Pixel Stand from Google, ships next month Samsung to Choose Taylor, Texas, for $17 Billion Chip-Making Factory. Casper's return to private life isn't a canary for DTC companies going public. Jeff Jarvis: The Times treats an iPhone as a luxury. I hate to break it to them, but I think many people would say that these days a subscription to The Times is a luxury. Jay Last, One of the Rebels Who Founded Silicon Valley, Dies at 92. Picks: Stacey - Thanksgiving Piecaken. Jeff - What is your state's favorite Thanksgiving dish? Google shares popular searches in the US. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Stacey Higginbotham Guest: Sam Lessin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: akamai.com/twig UserWay.org/twit andela.com/for-companies

Investing in creators vs debt, Wirecutter boycott, end of call to cancel Slow Ventures. A Former Facebook VP Thinks Investing in Humans Is the Future of VC. Investing Directly in People Is the Future of VC. Here's How to Do It. Life Capital 2021: The Future of The Professional Creator Ecosystem. Wirecutter Thanksgiving strike and boycott is on. Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin Outbid a Group of Crypto Investors for Copy of U.S. Constitution. Niantic raises $300M at a $9B valuation to build the 'real-world metaverse' Mouse jigglers are a thing. Pokemon Go Creator Niantic Launches Bitcoin-Hunting AR Game. The end of "click to subscribe, call to cancel"? One of the news industry's favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says. A Robot Wrote This Book Review. The unbearable fussiness of the smart home. Locked out of "God mode," runners are hacking their treadmills. Google Pixel 6a will run on a Tensor chip, but a lesser camera than Pixel 6. Android Auto and Pixel 6 won't play nice, but Google is working on a fix. The Pixel 5 could have actually been good if Google's chip plans had worked out. iMessage Reactions Will No Longer Annoy Android Users Thanks to Emoji Change. Google Store Black Friday 2021 deals are now live in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia Google Stadia is celebrating its second birthday with hardware for free or cheap You can now pre-order the 2nd-gen Pixel Stand from Google, ships next month Samsung to Choose Taylor, Texas, for $17 Billion Chip-Making Factory. Casper's return to private life isn't a canary for DTC companies going public. Jeff Jarvis: The Times treats an iPhone as a luxury. I hate to break it to them, but I think many people would say that these days a subscription to The Times is a luxury. Jay Last, One of the Rebels Who Founded Silicon Valley, Dies at 92. Picks: Stacey - Thanksgiving Piecaken. Jeff - What is your state's favorite Thanksgiving dish? Google shares popular searches in the US. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Stacey Higginbotham Guest: Sam Lessin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: akamai.com/twig UserWay.org/twit andela.com/for-companies

Today's guest is Sameer Vaswani who is the founder of Prodigy Snacks.Sameer has been an entrepreneur from the age of 22, setting up his first restaurant in Nottinghill. After that, he moved to West Africa and ran a successful confectionary business that he later sold. While he was there his eyes were opened to how damaging the practices were going on in the confectionery & manufacturing world so his mission began to change that with Prodigy Snacks.In this chat, we talk about Sameer's journey into entrepreneurship, his challenges in creating a product that challenges the status quo of chocolate. Sameer dives into ingredients and explains what is really going into some of the foods we are eating and the impact they can have on our body and the planet. This is a great listen and really opened my eyes to certain issues in food. Now, Please sit back and enjoy my conversation with Sameer from Prodigy Snacks.IN THIS CHAT:1:00: Parents influence and journey into entrepreneurship5:30: Opening up a restaurant at 22 and the lessons learned 10:30: Learning lessons and moving past failures16:30: How and why West Africa influenced him20:30: Why some ingredients are evil25:30: Plastic Negative - what it really means and Repurpose Global.28:30: Manufacturing challenges of creating a new product33:30: Online vs retail and the change over the years26:30: DTC challenges and opportunitySupport the show (http://www.jaygreenwood.com)

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Hello and welcome to a DTC Bonus podcast, this week with Adrian Evans, Senior Manager of Retention and customer strategy at The Farmer's Dog, as well as Simon Data's Director of Client support, Breanna Stewart. Simon Data is a Customer Data Platform that helps DTC brands unlock the power of their customer data and the Farmer's Dog is one of the world's fastest-growing pet foods companies that uses Simon as their CDP as well as their ESP. This podcast dives deep with specific examples about how knowing more about your customers (and acting on that data) can help you sell more products. Why most dog food isn't even allowed to be considered “food” Why The Farmer's Dog focused on a CDP before choosing an ESP How The Farmer's Dog found its most valuable customer avatars Why first-party data is essential in the cookiepocalypse Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

“We're helping brands and agencies learn what creatives are working best and why” @rezakhadjavi #DTCPOD“Teams who take naming conventions really seriously have  a really important cultural effect.” @rezakhadjavi #DTCPOD“We want to create an environment where our creative strategy is data driven.” @rezakhadjavi  #DTCPOD“People are putting on a lot more of a creative strategist hat and thinking critically about the way that they're positioning their product.”@rezakhadjavi #DTCPOD“Most people don't know exactly what they're doing and they're trying to figure it out. So don't be discouraged.” @rezakhadjavi  #DTCPODWe Speak About:[01:46] Reza introduces himself and Motion  [02:45] Biggest challenges when finding creative [10:00] The importance of naming convention [19:39] Trends to look for when finding winning creative  [25:26] Analyzing ads by funnel stage [28:22] Ad sets for variables[32:46] Top three learnings from the field [34:23] What's next for Motion and where to find Reza Khadjavi onlineHow to find ad creative that's working fastReza Khadjavi, CEO of Motion, joins the POD to give some insight on the software industry's creative strategies. Motion helps brands find creative wins.Reza recognized that there is a lot of creative out there, and finding what works can benefit a brand's ad spending and profits.Motion takes the approach of finding successful creative through data driven strategies.Reza recognizes that there are always trends to look for when locating creative that consumers respond well to, and implementing these strategies into brands is part of their process.A big part of ad success is finding a sync between creative and funnel stageMotion looks at all kinds of creative analysis when finding what curates the most reponses. Reza recognizes that creative is meant to be very visual, and this must be acknowledged in the process of obtaining a good stream of high quality creative.  Motion uses a funnel stage when running the same analysis to see where the creative fits best.  The brand has fostered further success by viewing the process as adding and alerting a few variables at a time to see what works.Reza recommends flipping between stage funnels to see what creative works best where.Stay tuned as Reza discusses more about motion and their strategies for optimizing and finding creative content for brands.If you'd like to learn more about Trend and our influencer marketing platform for influencers and brands visit trend.io. You can also follow us for tips on growing your following and running successful campaigns on Instagram and LinkedIn.Mentioned Links:Motion website: https://motionapp.com/Reza Khadjavi's twitter: https://twitter.com/rezakhadjavi

In today's podcast, we are talking with Rich Zeldes about the different ways brands can advertise, create a following in the digital space and increase conversion. How much should you focus on the tried and true channels? Should you, for example, use SMS, TikTok, Connected TV and podcasts to advertise? What are some of the challenges of these? Make sure you tune in to find out! Rich Zeldes is the Founder and CEO of Zeldes Media Advisors and has over 25 years of marketing and media services experience. He is focused on driving profitable growth for emerging health, beauty, food, fashion and cannabis brands across the DTC, Amazon and Retail distribution landscape. He is obsessed with helping to navigate today's evolving media ecosystem by offering executive-level strategy, insights and attention to brand founders and their leadership.

In This Episode You'll Hear About:What is was like growing up in Maryland as one of five siblingsWhat his experience was like interning at the White HouseHow moving to Boston with a new tech startup shifted his career path How being passionate about people and working in the startup world gave him the passion for being a “wantrepreneur”How losing his uncle to skin cancer raised his awareness of the disease and increased his mindfulness of wearing sunscreenHow starting his sunscreen nonprofit, Skin Protection Foundation gave him the idea for starting BaskWhere Bask is now just 7 months after launching and what they have planned for the futureExclusive Deals from Our Sponsors:Get 30% off your first 3 months with Malomo by going to: https://gomalomo.com/stairwaytoceoUse the promo code STAIRWAY200 for $200 off Outer furniture by shopping HEREGet 2 months FREE with Gorgias by clicking HERE and mentioning the podcastTo Find Out More:https://basksuncare.com/Want the Inside Scoop?:Text Lee at 310-510-6044Quotes:“I just love people, and that's kind of always been a constant throughout my life.”“I never knew what I wanted to do growing up.  I was really jealous of those kids that had this profound sense of what they were going to be when they grow up. What I did know was that I wanted to do something impactful, something important.”“Life doesn't slow down because you're trying to accomplish something with your startup. So you have to deal with all these things when you're the only one who's there to deal with your company. There's something unforgiving about it.”“I've got a spreadsheet that I'm adding to daily of new business ideas, and it's just something that I have always wanted to do, be an entrepreneur.”“When I tell people about the starting Bask was, I really kind of stumbled into it.”“In talking with those entrepreneurs, I just became fascinated with the idea of DTC, and challenger versus incumbent brands, previously assumed to be entrenched categories.”“One of the things that always stood out to me was skin cancer is the most diagnosed cancer in the United States, more so than every other cancer combined. Despite the fact that it is easily objectively, the most preventable”“I thought, why can't we build a better-for-you sunscreen that's wrapped in a beautiful brand that's purposeful and intentional, and really appeals to Millennials and Gen Z, and talk about sun care differently in a way that gets people excited about it and then use those proceeds to fund the non-profit”“We want to end skin cancer. If we build a company that makes it enjoyable and fun to wear sunscreen as opposed to being a chore, we can get sunscreen into so many more people's hands.”“The thing that we knew was that Bask could not have oxybenzone or octinoxate, there's only 14 active ingredients that you're legally allowed to use in the United States, and those two are used in 80% plus of sunscreen.”“We want you to be out in the sun, but to do it safely.”“One of the crazy things about starting your own company is that you are going to do things that you have never done before. Basically every single day, you have to like completely learn something new and then master it because the future of your organization depends on it.”“It's really frustrating to get the no's, but you have to be willing to deal with the no's.”“Trust in yourself and just do it. There's never a good time, and if you keep waiting for that perfect time, your window will close. So do it. I encourage anybody to make a bet on themselves”

We keep it real here on Infinite Shelf. We don't paint a shiny varnish on a messy topic and gloss over the details. We put on our reality hats, face facts, and try to solve the problem as best we can. Today on the pod we'll do exactly that in my interview with Givz Founder and CEO, Andrew Forman. Listen now!

There are about a million different inspirational quotes about being your authentic self and how to bring authenticity to everything you do — including your business. Matthew Herman and his company, Boy Smells, brings those cliches to life in real and very cliche ways. Boy Smells produces candles, fragrances, and more that defy the traditional gendered lines that have been drawn for decades in favor of creating a genderful experience that allows all customers to bring a mix of masculinity and femininity to their lives as they see fit. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Matthew and I talked about what that looks like in practice, and we dove into how and why Boy Smells has pivoted from focusing on wholesale, to DTC and now to retail and partnerships. Main Takeaways:Finding Functional Experts: Adding headcount is one of the most stressful parts of scaling. To make things easier, the focus should be on finding and bringing in functional experts. You will save time and money bringing in a better candidate who might cost more but can get to work quickly rather than bringing in a novice and trying to train them to work in your system.A Pyramid of Products: Creating products that can stand the test of time is important. But having one evergreen product won't sustain a business. You have to strive to have a three-tiered pyramid mix of products, which starts with a base of core products, followed by seasonal products, and topped with special, one-of-a-kind, buzzy products that can drive sales and engagement.Don't Jump In: You hear all the time that when you have an idea, you should jump in and do it. In reality, you're often much better served by gaining experience at already-established companies so that you can learn from their successes and failures and bring that knowledge to your own venture.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

For more than a decade, digitally-native, vertically integrated brands (Warby Parker, Allbirds, et al)--as well as other innovative direct-to-consumer (companies (from Wayfair to Rent-the-Runway to Poshmark)--have sucked up a lot of attention in the industry and attracted many billions of venture capital. Yet as more face the harsh light of the public markets we're learning that some are rather small businesses and most are losing quite a lot of money.Does the recent meltdown of Casper suggest that the sky high valuations of DTC brands are about to crash back to earth, or should we be more sanguine about the "growth over profit" strategy that most are pursuing. In particular, we discuss why the idea that significant direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies could be built without physical stores was a flawed investment premise and why it's turned out to be so difficult to profitably scale many of these brands. We also remind listeners that vertically integrated DTC retail is far from new, and wonder why legacy brands (Duluth Trading, Lands' End) carry anemic valuations relative to the insurgent brands that are far smaller and continue to hemorrhage cash. But first we open up with the Top 3 retail stories that caught our attention this week, including continued strength in US retail sales despite waning consumer confidence, what to take away for the most recent batch of retailer earnings reports and unpack just what the heck happened at Casper.Photo by Jp Valery on UnsplashSteve Dennis is an advisor, keynote speaker and author on strategic growth and business innovation. You can learn more about Steve on his       website.    The expanded and revised edition of his bestselling book  Remarkable Retail: How To Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Disruption is now available at  Amazon or just about anywhere else books are sold. Steve regularly shares his insights in his role as a      Forbes senior contributor and on       Twitter and       LinkedIn. You can also check out his speaker "sizzle" reel      here.Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada's top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus  Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  ,      The Food Professor  with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois and now in its second season, Conversations with CommerceNext!  You can learn more about Michael   here  or on     LinkedIn. Be sure and check out Michael's latest venture for fun and influencer riches - Last Request Barbecue,  his YouTube BBQ cooking channel! 

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Visit mercury.com/partner/dtc-newsletter Ian Leslie recently completed over 5 years as CMO for Industry West, an online furniture retailer, and has since moved to the service side, as a senior director of retail operations for Bolt.com Today's wide-ranging chat was a little different than normal, more personal and raw. Here are some of the issues we covered. Why we're both in the DTC Space Mental Health and DTC Strivers Key lessons from 5 Years at the game-changing Furniture Brand Industry West The future of fast checkouts Baseball cards, NFTs, and Adobe's big news. DTC Twitters Value (and its drawbacks) Real Talk about the coming (and already here) supply chain crunch Ian Leslie Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

Alex Weinstein joins the Wavebreak Podcast to talk about the marketing strategies he employs at Hungryroot, a one-click grocery experience that pulled $200 million in revenue this past year.In this episode you'll learn:How Hungryroot better understands its customers through a simple quiz that builds a powerful base for their entire data driven approach.  Which metrics actually matter to your marketing success, and why human economics are the “most important thing” to data driven marketing. How to actually leverage data to challenge assumptions and build your business, rely less on expensive advertising, and zig when everyone else zags.Alex Weinstein is Chief Digital Officer at Hungryroot, your personal grocer, delivering modern, healthy food with recipe and meal planning support.Join Our Private Email ListOur industry-leading DTC newsletter is trusted by ecommerce and marketing leaders at top brands like Goop, Skims, Cartier, Walmart, and thousands more.Click here to sign up ->Links MentionedHungryrootAlex Weinstein WebsiteLearn more about Wavebreak: the email & CRM agency for high-growth DTC brandsSponsored by KlaviyoKlaviyo — Over 265,000 innovative brands are growing their businesses by listening and understanding to cues from their customers--easily turning that information into valuable marketing messages used to build highly segmented, automated email & SMS campaigns, such as win back campaigns or abandoned cart recovery and more.

My First Million Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Strategy 1: Buy an existing assetYou need the most upfront money here but there can be an incredible value to capture by simply owning and upgrading an asset better than the current holderStrategy 2: Provide supply to a marketplace with existing demandFind deviations of keywords on google search that lack supply to fulfill the demanded and desired searchIf you understand what makes supply marketable and what the marketplace algorithms prioritize, you can drive more demandStrategy 3: Launch a unique product where you can buy customers through paid acquisitionBuy the top Google-searched word in a unique product categoryGoogle search is a magic lamp and you can be the genie, give them what they wantStrategy 4: They didn't discuss a 4th but Justin has an awesomeblog/substack where he gives the latest knowledge on side hustles, D2C businesses, market opportunities, and moreOther awesome D2C Ideas discussed:AirBnB camping properties: more affordable and less maintenanceNon-alcoholic wine: booming product category with limited optionsPhthalate-free products: health > price & convenienceAnd more….Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgJustin Mares (@jwmares) joins Sam (@TheSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) on this episode. Justin breaks down his most popular blog post, the 4 types of side hustles, and brings all kinds of ideas for how you can start your own. They also talk about Justin's DTC businesses - Kettle & Fire, Perfect Keto, and Surely Wines. They end the episode with a few ideas around camping, a new dating app, and how to leverage VAs & no code tools. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:23) How Sam & Justin know each other * (5:17) Justin's DTC bone broth company * (10:00) Frameworks for side hustles * (13:22) Side Hustle 1: Buying an asset * (17:51) Side Hustle 2: Launching on top of a marketplace with demand * (22:08) Side Hustle 3: Unique product that grows through paid acquisition * (25:31) How Justin balances all his projects * (30:38) The $30K/year CGM experiment * (39:09) The skinny on Duck Duck Go * (42:32) Ideas: Airbnb camping * (45:27) Idea: Non alcoholic wine * (51:10) How to naturally boost your T levels * (1:01:04) Idea: Dating app based on your credit card usage * (1:03:49) Idea: The no code automation officer * (1:07:28) How to follow Justin

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Welcome to All Killer No Filler, and today we're talking with Spencer from Pilothouse TikTok team as well as Sam and Kyle from Helmkin, who currently run DTC's TikTok Ads. We cover: How to treat creative testing differently on TikTok How brands are innovating to be more native on the platform Lead Gen in q4 on TikTok Big Brands Doing Organic Awesomely (like Duolingo) The Psychology of Dr. Squatch Eric gets dropship trolled on TikTok. Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

Good news, everyone: Mary Ann is back! Yes, after a short absence we have our third Friday host back where she belongs. Namely right in front of a microphone, talking to us.And it was good to have her back, as we had a small mountain of news to talk through:OpenSea could be worth $10 billion: Right before we recorded, news broke that OpenSea could raise new capital at a far-greater valuation than it did earlier this year. While we had some jokes, we also did a little math on why OpenSea could really be worth so much money.Other rapid-fire funding rounds: If OpenSea does raise again, it will join good company in putting together several rounds in under a year. Facily has done the same, as has Justt. In short, the old 18-month cycle for raising capital is so dated it might as well get delivered by telegram.Lambda School rebrands:Casper goes private: After a tough time as a public concern, DTC mattress company Casper is going private. Notably its issues have not dampened market interest in taking other DTC companies public.What makes a founder, a founder:We're entering the holiday period, so expect the usual disruptions to Equity's production calendar. We'll be taking short breaks as per usual, but will be recharging some ahead of what should prove to be a very, very busy 2022.

Smart Contracts are the New Covenants “All this stuff is stuff that's been out that we've been talking about for quite some time, but it's actually finding its way into the mainstream now and that's really exciting.” -Brian The future is fractional ownership and we are seeing it happen right now with an autonomous organization potentially fractionally owning the governance of us all being able to acquire a copy of the Constitution of the United States of America.“There's an ecom brain drain risk here in that these sexier, open source projects today are effectively of this variety where  folks are putting in many months of effort, a person months of effort, I should say, for what to what end.” -Phillip“Curation doesn't necessarily mean marketplace.” - BrianThis is what a lot of brand collabs feel like according to Phillip:Associated Links:Listen to our other episodes of Future CommerceListen to our newest podcast, Infinite ShelfCheck out our latest report Nine by NineWatch the Nine by Nine live experienceSubscribe to InsidersPhillip's Insiders piece with Melissa LeeHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

“Not all organic creative can be paid creative and not all paid creative can be organic creative” @flexiblefoodie #DTCPOD“If you don't have the right partners in place, it's only going to cost you more down the road, so put time in your creating process.” @flexiblefoodie #DTCPOD“Just because you have the assets you have doesn't mean you have to present them in the way that you have them.” @flexiblefoodie #DTCPOD“People don't want to see product after product after product, and so you need to find a way to mention the product in different buckets.” @flexiblefoodie  #DTCPOD“TikTok creative does not need to be perfect because it could be the simplest, stupidest thing in the world, but it could take off in 2 seconds” @flexiblefoodie #DTCPODWe Speak About:[01:04] Kendall introduces herself and Flexible Creative  [03:48] Common and effective social growth strategy themes [05:34] What to consider when creating content [08:29] furthering connections and eliciting a response [13:48] Influencer strategy vs. social strategy [17:02] Creator strategies [22:20] Key learning and tips from utilizing TikTok[28:25] What's next for Kendall Dickieson and where to her and the brand onlineHow to grow your Instagram and TikTok account to thousands of followersKendall Dickieson, Founder of Flexible Creative, joins the POD to give some insight on customer acquisition and building a presence on social media.Flexible creative is a business that helps brands share their story and build connections to their audience to unlock customer acquisition organicallyKendall specializes in optimizing DTC and CGP brands presence across multiple niches through social management. Kendall takes an approach of prioritizing distribution for social growth and recommends investing in strategy first before execution.Kendall recognizes the importance of being detail oriented with creative and limiting broad approaches.To win on social content, it's important to not overthink itFlexible Creative stands out as a brand growth business due to Kendall's extensive experience with social creative . While it is important to think outside the box with social marketing, sometimes it's about working smarter not harder. Kendall takes the approach of tieing engagement back to products and brands rather than overstimulating customers with the same social engagement .  The brand has also fostered further growth for brands by acknowledging the success that video platforms, such as TikTok, can bring.Kendall recommends producing and distributing content on a whim, because these can often outperform strategically designed content on platforms such as TikTok. Stay tuned as Kendall discusses ways to work with creators and the importance of driving community first. If you'd like to learn more about Trend and our influencer marketing platform for influencers and brands visit trend.io. You can also follow us for tips on growing your following and running successful campaigns on Instagram and LinkedIn.Mentioned Links:Kendall Dickieson website: https://www.kendalldickieson.com/Kendall Dickieson twitter: https://twitter.com/flexiblefoodie

To watch this episode visit our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2ASIvPUTSc David Gaylord, the co-founder of Bushbalm will share the product development learnings of: Ideation for their first hero product Finding the ideal production partner and  how they work with chemists Incorporating data and marketing trends into product development How to  manage large orders from retail partners For more on Bushbalm and transcript: https://www.shopify.com/blog/bushbalm-product-development?utm_campaign=shopifymasters&utm_medium=description&utm_source=podcast

Michelle Wiles is the Head of Brand at Son of a Tailor, a DTC “clothing tech” company that delivers made-to-order men's clothing at scale. Their garments are custom fits to provide the best wearing experience, and reduce waste in their production process. Michelle joined Son of a Tailor after starting her career at Proctor & Gamble, VaynerMedia, and MBA school. As Head of Brand, Michelle leads the charge of infusing brand ethos at all levels of the company. In this episode, Michelle and host Katie dive into sustainability in the fashion industry and maintaining a strong brand—and how both of those impact a brand's marketing. Michelle describes how Son of a Tailor's unique ordering system and algorithm allows them to keep production waste low and customer loyalty high. She stresses the importance of transparency in brand, especially when you're trying to be sustainable: if you're going to talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk.  Tune in to the episode to hear more from Michelle about sustainability, fashion, ecommerce and supply chain challenges, the future of Son of a Tailor, and more! In-flight topics: Sustainability in the fashion industry Son of a Tailor's unique ordering system Importance of a strong brand in marketing Driving customer loyalty Navigating ecommerce challenges What's next for Son of a Tailor ...and more! Relevant Links: Website: https://www.sonofatailor.com/  Insta: https://www.instagram.com/sonofatailor/?hl=en  Michelle's Insta: https://www.instagram.com/michellewiles_/?hl=en

Our guest today is Ron Schneidermann, CEO at AllTrails, the ultimate guide for outdoor adventures. AllTrails was early to the consumer subscription space, launching a $3/month premium tier way back in 2012. Ron joined as CMO and COO in 2015, and then took over as CEO in 2019, helping to grow AllTrails to over 1 million subscribers and tens of millions of active users worldwide.On the podcast, we talk with Ron about the magic of consumer subscriptions, experimenting with freemium strategies, and how private equity isn't always as bad as you've been led to believe.In this episode, you'll learn: How to refine and optimize your freemium strategy Two things you need to keep an eye on as a founder The pros & cons of outside funding vs. organic growth How Ron fast-tracked AllTrails' profitability Links & Resources Accenture Hotwire Yelp Liftopia Alex Honnold Spectrum Equity Ron Schneidermann's Links Ron Schneidermann's LinkedIn page AllTrails Celebrates 1 Million Paid Subscribers! (January press release) AllTrails' website AllTrails is hiring Follow AllTrails on Twitter Follow us on Twitter: David Barnard Jacob Eiting RevenueCat Sub Club Episode Transcript00:00:00 David:Our guest today is Ron Schneidermann, CEO at AllTrails, the ultimate guide for outdoor adventures, AllTrails was early to the consumer subscription space, launching a $3 per month premium tier, way back in 2012. Ron joined as CMO and COO in 2015, and then took over as CEO in 2019, helping to grow AllTrails to over 1 million subscribers and tens of millions of active users world.On the podcast, we talk with Ron about the magic of consumer subscriptions, experimenting with freemium strategies, and how private equity isn't always as bad as you've been led to believe.Hey, Ron! Welcome to the podcast. 00:00:59 Ron:Thanks for having me.00:01:00 David:Yeah. Really looking forward to the chat today. I wanted to kick it off, and most people know what AllTrails is, and it's a fantastic brand. It kind of tells you what it is right there on the tin. What's your pitch? We're in 2021, post pandemic.Give us the short version of what AllTrails is. What does it mean? 00:01:21 Ron:Yeah. So AllTrails is a free app and website that helps you find trails all over the globe, so you can spend more time enjoying the outdoors, and spending time in nature.00:01:34 David:That's awesome.00:01:35 Jacob:That's a very nice mission. That's way more beautiful than helping developers make more money. Both are important, but I can smell that. It smells, “piney” and I like it.00:01:46 David:Yeah, it smells like the Colorado forest. I haven't been hiking forever, and doing all the research to chat with you today was like, oh man, I need to go hiking more.00:01:55 Ron:I heard there's a great app for that.00:01:57 David:I heard that.So, I did want to also ask about your journey to AllTrails. You got there fairly early, and then grew in, and you're now CEO. Tell me, off the bat, what led you to AllTrails way back in 2015 when it was just six people?00:02:20 Ron:Yeah. To answer that I'm going to go a little bit further back in time. My first job right after college was at Accenture, at a global management consulting firm. It was great. A good jumping off point, and I learned a ton. I didn't know anything going into that job. You know, you get the rubber stamp and it opens doors.By the end of my third year there, I kind of had a realization. Epifany is a little too strong a word, but I just kind kinda realized I can't take a job just for money again. The amount of time and energy that I was putting into it, and the lack of work-life balance, it really made me rethink who I want to be. Who does working Ron want to be?So, I was able to parlay that Accenture job into a biz dev role over at Hotwire, an online travel company. That was really where it opened my eyes. Like, I am so much happier, and I am honestly so much better when I'm working at something that I'm just personally passionate about.That guiding principle has really held through throughout my career trajectory. From Hotwire, I want to do my own startup in the ski space. I love to ski. So, I did that for nine years. It was a ton of fun. Then I was over at Yelp, doing growth for a bit. I love finding non-chain restaurants, and supporting mom and pop businesses, and stuff. I live in Yelp, so that was great.Then, when the opportunity for AllTrails presented itself, it was just kind of a no-brainer. Of course I'm going to take this.I'll say this to you, one little addendum, one of the things I learned along the way, too. I am not a zero to one guy. That is not when I am at my best. It just causes me stress and anxiety, and just, figuring out how to keep the lights on for another day.So, again, knowing kind of that sense of self knowing. Like, alright, I'm best at B to C. I'm at my best when I'm using products I personally want to use and like talking about. I like hypergrowth, and I think that's probably my sweet spot.So, it starts to all align when AllTrials showed up.00:04:34 David:Yeah. And then how did that go from? You joined the company as COO, right? And then, what was the progression inside the company to eventually taking over as CEO?00:04:45 Ron:Yeah. So if you want to demo and COO, I dunno why I really wanted to have both, like, I didn't want to just be CMO in a vacuum, but not have any ownership or agency over kind of team composition and strategy and stuff. So I thought that it was really. Really important. And when you're a six person company, it's pretty easy to grab titles.It's not like how to take it from anyone.00:05:08 Jacob:I was going to ask, like, I mean, it's, it's not like you see this a lot where it's like a six person company and they had like five C-levels and you're like, okay. Yeah, sure. Like, like my title, for example. But like, I'm kind of curious, like, you know, you like your background, you founded a company, like you were like a real CX whatever.Right? Like it's not like it was fake. So how did, how did that, how did you go as like an executive, like choosing your next thing? That'd be a hell of a pitch to get you to like join a tiny little like, team like that.00:05:36 Ron:You know, I think I, I spent a lot of time thinking through again. I don't know, I, to be perfectly honest, I was, I was a little bit bored at the end of my tenure at Yelp. I love Yelp. It's a great company, but it was just, it was too big for me. And so I spent a lot of time thinking through what's next again?That whole question, like zero to one. Do I need, do I need to start something myself or what? So the smallness didn't bother me. I actually really liked the smallness cause it was almost like, it was almost like a cheat code. Like I got to do a startup, like basically from scratch, but I didn't have to do it from scratch.And then.00:06:09 Jacob:They had, they had a kernel of something at00:06:11 Ron:They did, they did. And you know, it was actually to, to give my predecessor credit. It was, it was actually more than that. Like they had, they had solid product market fit from a monetization perspective. And then what really got me across the line with their product channel. And I feel like that's often overlooked and that's something you kind of pick up in time.Like it's not just like, is this a product people are willing to pay money for, but just straight up, how are you going to get this out to market? And can you, can you do it in a way that is, you know, viable and scalable and, and ultimately, you know, going to be, be more efficient than, you know, it's kind of like net out, right?Like the whole LTV to CAC thing and everything that00:06:49 Jacob:Yeah. It's, it's something more efficient than paying for every single install. Right.00:06:53 Ron:Exactly. And so. You know, I, it felt like there was good bones, you know, maybe it was like a fixer upper kind of house. but it had good bones, like it had, it had the foundation in place. And I could see, you know, back in 2015, the product sucked, it sucked. and, and what was shocking after I came was how bad the data was.I didn't realize that when I was kind of doing my own diligence, but it was00:07:20 Jacob:You mean like analytics on the internally, what the company knew about itself or you mean like the, the, the trail00:07:25 Ron:The trail data, like the trail data that we were showing, you know, and that's that's subs high consequence. and so that was like a hard pivot, within a couple months, like, all right, this is, you know, all hands on deck thing.We're not doing anything else until we figure this out. but again, it just, it felt like there was a diamond in the rough, in this one. You know, I've been here six years now and I can say like, unequivocally, this is the highlight of my career. Maybe I just got lucky. I don't know. But, man, like, yeah, this has been a really, really great run so far.00:07:59 Jacob:I was just going to ask about the, that channel and monetization fit. I mean, I guess this was maybe I'm jumping ahead in our agenda here, but, but yeah, they were already charging a subscription before you got there. Right. And in terms of like monetization, maybe like describe that model a little bit and, and how that has changed.00:08:20 Ron:Yeah, I had never done this subscription business before coming here. So this was my first subscription business. And I'll tell you, you guys already know this. I'm sure your listeners already know this too. subscription businesses are magical. Oh my goodness. Compared to like e-commerce or you're trying to re when, you know, the transaction every single00:08:40 Jacob:I know I was looking at Hotwire just now, when you mentioned it. And I was just thinking about like, how many of those there were at that era, right? Like, and still are like, when you had to book a hotel on Google and they're like, oh, here's 15 different sites. You can actually like book it through it's like Wolf,00:08:53 Ron:Oh, so tough. Same with Liftopia. Liftopia the ski startup. There was the same thing. Right. you know, but, but with a much smaller niche and segment, and then, and then Yelp is, you know, they're, they're kind of the media model and then trying to, you know, kind of pivot more towards like B2B and subscriptions for businesses and value added services and stuff.And coming here doing a consumer subscription business, an annual subscription, the auto renew. It's like an annuity, like it just builds up every single year. Like obviously, like you can't take retention for granted and I'm sure we'll talk about that, but you know, just, if you're able to kinda, you know, do a, do a pretty good job on the retention side and you see this thing build up And just.Raise the tide every single year that I've been here and have it just, is that much more momentum that just gets like brought into each new fiscal year for us. It's just, it's incredible. It is incredible. the leverage that it offers. So that was cool. That was definitely a, 00:09:51 Jacob:One of those good bones.00:09:54 David:Yeah. And that's what I was going to ask you say the bones were good. Yeah, AllTrails had launched their subscription in 2012. So about three years before you joined, what was the state of that? And that's really early in the kind of consumer subscription software space. Was there a lot of push back was like, how was traction, chargebacks and things like that was the bones were there, but were there some serious doubts or questions in your mind as to how this subscription app space was going to play out? 00:10:28 Ron:Yeah, I mean, so can I share a secret with you guys? I honestly didn't know that our subscription business loss in 2012, until you guys showed me the research that you did leading up to this, I had always thought that, it launched with our ass. We launched our apps in, I think early 2015, I joined in September, 2018.And I just lumped everything together just in that, you know,00:10:53 Jacob:Yeah. It's yeah,00:10:54 Ron:Yeah. So I, I, I had always thought that it, that we had launched it when our apps launched, but I guess we were on the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, the subscription space here.00:11:05 Jacob:So, so, but that, then I'm, then I'm correct to assume that, you know, if you launched a description 2012 was on the web, if you didn't have apps until 20, 20, 15. Right. Right. Which, I mean, my, my experience, I guess I've been on old trails website, but like my vast majority of experience has been on the web.Right. Because I'm like, or sorry on the, on the phone because I'm going for a hike and I'm like, I need a map and like, boom, there's AllTrails. Right. Which I guess is that channel fit. You're talking about.00:11:27 Ron:Yeah. And that's been, that's been one of the cool things when I started. So a couple, a couple, I guess, data points, just to show like, sort of that, that snapshot in time of 2015, we probably had 20,000. subscribers at that point, maybe a million cumulative registered users since 2010, when we first launched and maybe 20,000 active paying subs.And in January of this year, we put out a press release. We don't normally do that, but it was two pretty cool milestones. We had cracked 25 million registered users and a million paying subs at the start of this. So, you know, again, like the, the, the unlock has been really cool and very, very powerful. but the other thing, like you said, like this was, you know, a web driven subscription business.At first, when I, when I first started here. probably 70% of our, of our web traffic was desktop desktop to mobile 70 30. And obviously that's inverted, since then, and then Mo the, the, the mobile apps, the native apps are by far the best form factor for what we're trying to do. Like you said, Jake would like take it with you on the go, the navigation, the GPS stuff, everything baked in there.And so that's become really the workhorses of, of subscription business and, and of our overall, UDC flat.00:12:42 Jacob:Yeah. I mean, it's so helpful. you guys have good SEO when you search a trail, it comes up on AllTrails. Right. But that's, I would imagine like this stage probably mostly like demand gen for the app,00:12:53 Ron:That's exactly it. No, that's exactly it. Right. So our se our legacy SEO, this is what, again, one of the beauties of being around for 11 years and counting, we have this amazing legacy SEO and that's, that was that product channel fit that brought me here was the sales pitch was he just showed me Google analytics.And he just like, look, look at all of this for your00:13:12 Jacob:Just like a hyper-local very valuable data, right. Index. And if you're, if you're the winner, that's a great real estate to00:13:20 Ron:I know. And, and so what we've been doing obviously as, sort of consumer behavior has changed and gone mobile first is, we're able to parlay all of that mobile first SEO traffic it's, incremental organic app installs, and that's a huge driver. Of our business. We get millions and millions of incremental app installs that we don't pay a dime for every mom's.00:13:42 Jacob:Yeah. And going back to your point, like yeah. Not having to push. Up the hill completely is a bit, you know, you think about a Compounding annuity analogy as you made, right? Like the cost of that compounding really, you know, if you net out the whole asset, right? Like that's going to be a big part of it is like, how much does it cost to push that that, that, that flywheel up a little bit. 00:14:02 Ron:It's a moat for business too, you know, you're around long enough and you're doing something good. You're going to see a ton of competitors start flooding into the space, which is great as validation of what we're doing, but the product market fit product channel fit conundrum is, is real.It's real. And you know, I see really great products, you know, beautifully designed products that just crank can't crack the code on either of those. And then they kind of, you know, whether on the line, right? Like see it all the time.00:14:31 David:No, that was actually my next question is that in those early days, and you already said when you joined and when y'all launched the apps in 2015, they were crap. So take me, how did you go from this crap up and what experimentation, what pain, what suffering did 00:14:53 Jacob:There's some, there's some old, there's some like a old guard at, at all trials that are going to listen to this and be like, crap. They were great.00:15:00 David:But what did it take and what was the approach to, to find you, you had some level of product market fit, but then to actually build a great product around those early signs. 00:15:12 Ron:There, there are a couple of philosophical things that we decided immediately. One was around funding. Do we want to go take funding, and try and do this faster? Do we want to do this kind of organically? And my predecessor had done a small seed round. I think he raised 3 million bucks in 2012.And we were still kind of drafting off of that. And then there was a little bit of subscription revenue and then a whole bunch of just, you know, classic entrepreneur head on the swivel stuff. Like let's throw a bunch of shit up on the wall. Like, let's see what we can do. So there's, you know, a media play and programmatic ads.Whatever, right. Just trying to buy time more than anything. Right? Like keep the servers running for a little bit longer. But we decided we very intentionally decided not to take funding. We wanted to control our own destiny. And part of it to be clear, part of it was the handshake agreement with the original founder, was to grow it and sell it.He wanted us to, to, to sell it. And so, so then if that was kind of the. The Mandy. And I was like, well, why would we even just, you know, deal with the, the opportunity cost and the headache of going out and trying to raise funds, as a pain in the ass. So, you know, it was like, let's just, let's put our heads00:16:22 Jacob:Especially, especially for our consumer subscription company in 2015, like00:16:27 Ron:Right? Yeah.00:16:28 Jacob:Ben kind of been party to that. It's not, it wasn't easy. Let's put it that way.00:16:32 Ron:Tried doing it in 2005, by the way I was with Liftopia was insane anyways. but so we decided to put our heads down and just say super scrappy, super scrappy, super lean. And so, it just came down to like relentless prioritization and essentially what we ended up doing was triaging sort of a different funnel metric each quarter.Right. So one quarter is. We've got to tackle bounce rate. All right. Now we've got to tackle signup rate and now we've got to tackle pro conversion rate. And now we've got to talk over attention and we just kind of spent cycles, through 2016 and through 2017, just each, each quarter, just like laser focus in on that one metric and do what we can and then move.And it worked because by the end of 2017, we actually achieved profitability. Which was cool, which was really, really great. You know, like we wanted again, when you've been around the block long enough, you talked to enough entrepreneurs, you've seen, you've seen enough. there's so many examples of people going and getting too much funding too soon, and then they develop bad habits, right?Yeah. Let's get a little hot in here. Is it.00:17:36 Jacob:I never heard of that.00:17:39 Ron:So, you know, but so you see it right? Like that you, you get the, unsustainable growth channels, again, the product channel fit question, like how are you actually going to bring this to market? And how are you going to do it when that VC money dries up? Like, is this actually00:17:50 Jacob:Five X that VC money, right.00:17:52 Ron:Right? Is this sustainable?Or you're just connecting yourself to the next round of00:17:56 Jacob:You can put yourself in a, in a dead man's corner, right. Where you're not your, market's not big enough, whatever you end up killing and otherwise like really great business,00:18:05 Ron:Totally. And I, you know, I'd seen that, I'd seen that. I really didn't want to do that here. It felt like because so much of our growth was coming through SEO. It felt like obviously there's an opportunity, which we later unlocked on the ASO side of things. It felt like even beyond both of those though, it's just like word of mouth and PR and viral loops and network effects.00:18:27 Jacob:Product market fit as a broad thing, right? Like growth kind of have you have a really good product and it serves a niche, like grit just starts to start to go.00:18:36 Ron:And especially organic growth, right? Like, and that was really the big key as like, do we need to be like one of these DTC companies and just raise millions of dollars for Instagram ads? Or can we, can we do something that's more sustainable for the long haul? And that was, that was one of the bats.The other big bet that we placed was, from a brand positioning perspective. You know, when I came in the app was definitely geared towards like the through hikers and search and rescue and, and the hardcore, like, you know, back country folks. And the challenge with, with, with that segment is that there's always these, you know, really esoteric and extreme product requirements that they want because they're they're edge cases.They're by definition, all edge cases. And in this space in particular, a lot of them. Kind of living the, you know, the van life, life, you know, trying to live as frugally as possible. and so they don't want to really pay you any money either. It's like this isn't a good growth segment. We got, we gotta rethink this one.And so, I've told this story a lot, you know, this strong man to this day still is, is my wife where like she likes going outside with me. You know, she's always down to go on a high. you know, spend time outside. We have three kids, totally trying to raise them on the trail. we have a dog who loves being on the trail and, but, but if I'm not there, you know, she's, she's not going out there.Right. So it's like, okay, okay. Maybe here's the play. Like what, what if we use technology? Kind of tear down the barriers for entry, like instill confidence, whether through like product functionality or content, but really make it so that someone like my wife and the hundreds of millions of people around the globe, like her who, who know that they feel better when they time spend in nature.They're just a little scared to do it. Like, can we help augment that? Can we help supplement that? And I think that's going to be the unlock. And that was the big bet. That was the other big bet that we placed in 2015. And you know, 00:20:30 Jacob:And just to summarize that, I understand it's like to kind of not ignore these like extreme users that are on the edge on the edges, you know, serve them, but maybe not in the way that they would want, but like let's focus on, you know, this larger segment. I mean, I think that's the thing, even some good founder advice is good for founders.Sometimes doesn't always apply. Like B to C stuff sometimes where it's like, yeah, like, listen to your most vocal users often. There's something there, but like with an ounce of like moderation, because yeah. They can lead you in really strange places. And think about the network. Think about the like user.Maybe you're not talking to her, her the next year saying next a hundred million users that you have to get. and that's potentially a much bigger surface area. And that doesn't mean you're going to abandon those court users. Like they might grumble a little bit and they might not be totally served by your use case.And like, that's maybe just life. but, but you know, you've now potentially, like if you think about the, you know, the mission of just getting people outdoors, like you've achieved that much better by going for this much larger market segment. Right.00:21:31 Ron:Yeah, and they're not mutually exclusive. It's just which one are we prioritizing? Which one are we preferencing? And how are we, you know, what kind of language are we? Are we using lingo or not? Right. Are we making this accessible for everybody or not for imagery? Right. Are we doing like, you know, Alex, Honnold like dangling one handed off of a cliff,00:21:51 Jacob:Or just, or just a picture of the N the end cap at an REI, Right. Like,00:21:56 Ron:Yeah. Yeah. Or, or just like, you know, a family like smiling and having fun out in nature together, you know, like, all right. It doesn't cater to the core, but they're not necessarily going to like walk away because they see that stuff either. 00:22:07 Jacob:Right. I mean, and that comes to. Channel fit As well, right? Like not your products fit and your products oriented for, and that like B to C you kind of, you can't divorce the two, like you can't have totally independent marketing and channel channels for the product itself, which maybe you could get away with a little bit in B2B.But, but, but they, but they don't necessarily have to be like completely like linked, you know, you can kind of serve both niches on the, on the product side to your point.00:22:34 David:And speaking of getting more folks out in the mission of AllTrails. I'd love to hear about your freemium strategy, because that's a huge part of it. Like what early on, what was your approach? And then how did that evolve over time? As far as what features you do give away for free to kind of reach the broadest audience possible, and then what things you pay wall to actually get paid? 00:22:57 Jacob:And, and, and I'd like to highlight how Ron, when we asked you to describe AllTrails, you put free in the name, which I'm sure was very intentional. Right? You said it is a free app, right? It is not a premium app. I mean, it is a premium app, but the highlight the free. So00:23:09 Ron:Yeah,00:23:10 Jacob:That framing, what, what, tell us about your free app.00:23:13 Ron:There's, this is a, this is, an ongoing. Like not debate, but, it's an open question always. And we're constantly like asking our employees and our board, like let's challenge our assumptions here just because we did something a certain way last year. Doesn't mean we need to do it this way.Like let's constantly reevaluate this, for us, there's sort of three main buckets we have. Free on authenticated users and then we have free registered users. So kind of that registration wall is like the first key funnel, metric. And then there's, pro subscribers, right? So we have two, two kind of core, success metrics.One is registration rate and one is pro conversion rate. And then what goes in front and behind the paywall and the red wall, the registration wall. Constantly influx constantly. And plus we actually just did this really fun workshop a couple of weeks ago, internally here. It was like the history of AllTrailss pro and just showing kind of which features started when I, you know, again in 2015, like what was the pro feature set?How much of those? We actually ended up pulling in front of the red wall and new features that we put back behind the paywall. So I feel like we're constantly in a state of experimentation here. we've been, we've been experimenting with that since day one. We've been experimenting with pricing also on day one.And there's still, I don't feel like we've cracked the code at all at all. When I, when I first started here, I'll chose pro was 50 bucks a year and I spent the first, like two months just trying to get as, as much like, obviously all the quant data that I could get my hands on, but as much qualitative data as I could get to.So reading every app store review, every Reddit thread, every blog post. Talking to customers, all of it. And aside from everyone telling us that our data socked and, you know, we can, we got them lost. So we got them tickets from the park ranger for telling them to bring a dog when it's not that currently, whatever it was.The other piece of feedback that we got was like 50 bucks, like it's way too much. And so we immediately started testing pricing and, and, and we tested it at 30 bucks a year and we tested that 15 bucks a year to kinda all right. If we really just take that price down is, the in incremental, purchase rate, gonna offset, you know, the, the change in that revenue per transaction.They were about to wash it, which was really interesting from a net revenue perspective, 15 bucks a year versus 30 bucks a year was, was basically flat. But we went with 30 because it gave us more maneuverability. We could do more. for the folks who were like price sensitive, do do discounting, intro offers, whatever.At 15, we really couldn't go any low, lower. So it's just like, this is it for everybody all the time. but even that we're revisiting now and thinking through like, all right, maybe are there other different tiers? We've never done monthly before. So what is, what is a world in which there's a monthly price?I don't, I don't love it. I mean, again, annual is magic. Like why mess with a good thing, but there is a cohort of users, especially outside of the U S where that's a pretty high00:26:16 Jacob:Oh, I mean, I live in the Midwest. Like I would, I only need your app from, from April to November. Right. Like I really don't need to pay all year.00:26:24 Ron:For the two weeks in00:26:25 Jacob:Yeah. I, but I mean, I think there's the counter argument there of the simplicity. It's like, yeah, sure. But. Whatever your value is. So your, your, your, this is the price.I really, I I've seen that effect before on the price experimentation, you just end up with the same area under the curve. Like, no matter how you move it, and some apps are like that, some apps are not. but I do think it's really fascinating, the wisdom of crowds, right. And just how, like, they know like the, the, the, the masses have priced and valued your products.And then just like showing that like, it's very efficient, right. No matter where it goes, then you can come down to like, It's almost a good place to be. Cause then yeah, you have that like opera, you can choose where you want it to price. You can basically, you're freed from the like fiduciary duty of like maximum extraction.And you can like, like, just focus on like, okay, what's gonna what's right. For us for some of those goals on company growth and stuff like that. If it was right for the mission. And then like also give yourself some like tactical opportunities in terms of discounting and other stuff like this, and then positioning as well.Like what is it? I think that's almost as important. It's like, how do you use. How do you see all trials? Like how do you see it as like, what's the value of perception? Like a $30 skew and a 50 and a 15, those are very different. Right. And those are, you know, I think about consumer goods on those scales.That's like each one of those things has like a different, like, feel to it.00:27:43 Ron:Totally. And, and then on top of it, though, our business is driven by UGC, right? We have this classic UGC flywheel. And so obviously we know our pro users are more engaged, but a ton of engagement comes from our free users as well. And so you can't kind of, turn the squeeze on them too hard without like really fundamentally damaging the business.00:28:05 Jacob:What kind of user generated content? Is it like pictures and updated and stuff or what? What's00:28:10 Ron:Yeah, ratings, reviews, photos, recordings, you know, and then there's this also this virtuous cycle that we have, this beautiful relationship we have with our users, where they, they help us create as well as Curie our trail Content. So that's the thing with trail content, just to go down this rabbit hole for a second, Joe Content, super fluid, like it's not like streets that are, that are relatively static.You know, a trail is you get, you get flooding, you get fires, you get maintenance, you get development, down trees, whatever. Like they're constantly in a state of flux. And it's really, really hard to stay on top of it. We can't do it alone. And so we00:28:49 Jacob:And there's no, it's not like, it's not like roads where there's like a national database, right. Of like uniform data00:28:55 Ron:Yeah, no, not at all. Right. so we, we do. We have this like really beautiful symbiotic relationship with our, with our users, you know, and, and it's kind of like, we both get value from each other and we're both very transparent about like the relationship, like you guys help us and you help the community.Right. And we'll package it. We'll, we'll keep improving and investing in the product experience and everything else. and again, like, this is where it seems to be working, but this is when, when we were talking about. Th th the choke points in the funnel and that, that red wall and the broken version Weill, this is the thing that's top of mind over all of it. 00:29:30 David:Yeah, that's great. I did want to move on and talk about in 2018, AllTrails raised, 75 million led by spectrum equity. And so I'm curious about that, about that story. So, I know, you know, the plan was to sell and then you've shared on other podcasts that, part of that was the founder taking, taking some money kind of his exit event.But I'm really curious just from like a company building perspective. I think so many founders and entrepreneurs think, oh, if I can just. More money. If I can just hire more people, everything's going to be easier. but I imagine that's not the full story. So I'd love to hear about the raise, but then also kind of how that changed the company and changed the trajectory.00:30:18 Ron:Yeah. So like I said earlier, right. That the handshake agreement was to grow and sell it. So we knew going in exactly what the deal was. and once we hit profitability in 2017, it kind of felt like, all right, it's probably next year. It's probably our year. And we got an inbound from one of the big tech companies early, you know, probably end of Q1 of 2018.And so I was like, all right, game on, right? This is it. We'll go get a bank. we'll run a formal process here. And we started going through it. We started going through it. This was actually, it was fun, right? Like I got to put together sort of like, all right, here's our top 100 strategic partnerships broken out by category, broken out by vertical.Here's like the, you know, the accretive value here is, you know, the, the investment credit. It was like a really fun thought exercise. You know, we're talking to online travel companies and real estate companies, and obviously like the retailers and just so many different types of companies out there. And we ran a process and it was, it was fun.But, and as we were going through it, well, a couple things happen. One is our business really took off. Like it was a breakout trajectory year for us. So that always helps. Anytime you, you meet with someone, you share your plan and then you come back a month later and it's like, Hey, actually, Outperforming outpacing.So your price just went up. so that was, I mean, that was great. Like a great position to be in. I've never had leveraged like that. And the other, the other thing was like, we could walk away at any point. If we, if we didn't like it, I had done a lot of fundraising before and that I've never had a position of, of leverage like that.So that was cool. But as we were going through the process and talking to these different strategic acquires, the other thing that kept jumping out was like, I don't want to just go be middle management at some big company that I already like have chosen not to work out anyways, because it doesn't align with what I want to do with my time.And so, you know, we're kind of going through, it's like, is this really, is this it is this the only path? and we're talking to our bankers about it and like, you know, there's a, a huge ecosystem of financial investors that are really excited about this consumer subscription space. let's, let's do a spike there.And so we started talking to somebody. Different financial firms out there. And that's where it got really, really interesting. you know, I think, I think we all probably have preconceptions about like private equity groups, like, you know, I know, right.00:32:36 Jacob:Just, it then the light dimmed here. When you said00:32:39 Ron:I know, cause a lot of the classic ones, they're just there in your shorts about like your bottom line expenses and micromanaging and telling you to cut costs and00:32:47 Jacob:That's, that's the, that's the, the stereotype at least.00:32:50 Ron:Totally right. but there's this whole class of growth equity shops out there and, and we, we sort of plugged into it and I would squarely put spectrum equity and that one, and the first time we talked to them, it was so clear. They're like, you guys, aren't thinking big enough. It's like, what? I love that.Okay. Let's talk growth. You know, like you guys need to be thinking global. Right. And it was just like, there was so much alignment around. This, this opportunity in front of us. And instead of like pulling the rip cord and just kind of being absorbed and integrated into something else, it's like, how about, like, we really make a, make a run at this.And so the more we talk to them, the more it's was like, yes, hell yes. And it wasn't just from like, a funding perspective, you know? Cause if it was just that like again, then you just do an auction and you just see whoever's the highest. But we really wanted, like I needed a partner. I wanted a value added partner that I wanted someone who could bring in, you know, a sense of community, not have to reinvent the wheel all the time.That's always nice when you can plug into our portfolio of similar companies and just pick their brain. All right. Like how did you guys00:33:54 Jacob:Yeah. I mean, that's an under, that's an underappreciated aspect of raising versus like going at your own. It's like the network, like it's, I think feces oversell it, but maybe founders undervalue it. Right? Like00:34:05 Ron:A hundred percent. Couldn't agree more. It does. It really does. and so yeah, we kinda went, yeah. I, I feel incredibly fortunate that we were able to partner up with spectrum equity. And so David two question, I have, it's like it for us, it was this huge unlock. It was this huge online. Like we have another partner, we're going to be more formal, with our board structure and, you know, the, the sort of like metrics, which is great, like we needed to level up, and our corporate diligence and everything.And they've been, they've been a partner and we've, we've grown the board. We've added more expertise. And again, like the, the portfolio being, being sister companies with, with like Headspace and the not worldwide and survey monkey, whatever, like these cool companies that I respect and be able to, you know, hit up the CEO and be like, okay, how did you guys deal with this?Because like you said, like there are a ton of challenges that come when you're going through that, you know, that the slope of the curve at that point, right? Like the true hyper-growth curves. All right. You know, we can't fall back on, on money as an excuse, you know, like it's purely an execution play and how do we do more faster?And that's honestly like, that's my, I think one of the coolest things I can say about my board, that the single biggest piece of feedback I get from them where they're just like yelling at me all the time and a great way. It's like, you gotta do more faster. Why aren't you doing more faster? Right. Like that is the mantra here because everyone sees this opportunity.It's ours, it's ours to go take. Right. But we got to execute and do it as fast as we can.00:35:33 Jacob:Yeah. That's that's, I mean, I'll say as somebody recently constructing a board, like that was sort of my cause as a founder and as a CEO, like you're always, you're just, you're you're at, you should be at the limits if you're doing your job. Right, right. Like you should be kind of feeling at least like thinking, you know, what your limits are and what the company's limits are.And it's nice. Even if there isn't anything more you can do. It's nice to have some people who like, ostensibly are aligned with you to be like, Are you sure there's not more right? Like, is there anything like, are you doing like, could, could you change this? Like, could you go go faster potentially? And sometimes the answer's no, but it does always kinda, you leave those board meetings going like, like maybe there is like, maybe there is some way we could do this, like better or faster, right.00:36:10 Ron:Yeah. And then you build a team, right? And that leads back to like the team growth. And this, you know, this is our third year in a row of, of doubling head count. Hopefully next year will be our fourth year in a row. And all of the leverage, I'm a big believer, like two things are the lifeblood for companies like ours.One is culture and the other is momentum. And you can't, if you lose either of them, Right. Like, you cannot take your eye off of either of those as a CEO, as a founder, whatever it is. and so like building both, you know, they, they got to go hand in hand, or you can sacrifice culture as you're doing the internal hypergrowth.00:36:43 Jacob:Have an exit strategy, right?00:36:45 Ron:Exactly.00:36:46 Jacob:Going to last very long.00:36:47 Ron:Because you'll never get it back. That's exactly right. But, but generating momentum through like value added hires and raising the bar or bringing, you know, a bringing in a plus, I love being the dumbest person in the room. That's my favorite thing at all. Choose walking in there. It was like, all right, I'm going to learn something.Someone's going to teach me something cool. and building a team.00:37:06 David:So it sounds like the biggest unlock for y'all taking the money was just the ability to hire faster, hire better folks, offer better pay. but was there anything else that you feel like taking funding helped unlock for AllTrails? Did you, were you able to spend Mo did you start spending more on, on user acquisition or ramping anything else out? 00:37:27 Jacob:Can I ask a clarifying question without like you sharing your term sheet or whatever, but like D w like these, these deals can be very different than like a venture deal, right. Where like, almost always all of it hits the books and it's dilutive, meaning that the company gets the money, but this was like kind of a buyout for the founder as an alternative to a sale.It's like, did you guys structure it? So some hit the books and not, or was it all to the founders or how did it, whatever you're comfortable00:37:50 Ron:We, we hardly took any primary capital in 2018. I didn't, I didn't want it. I don't want it. Like I liked our organic trajectory. I didn't want. And obviously I've gotten to know spectrum a lot better. They're not built from the CNA, but you take money from a VC. And the expectation is like the success metric is suspended as hard and aggressive as possible because they're incentivized to keep you hooked, you know, on the next round.And I wanted to, you know, accelerate more like on the product development side of things, but I didn't want to get stuck in a, a growth model that's dependent on unsustainable paid acquisition. Right. So. almost the entire deal with secondary capital, which was great, which was00:38:33 Jacob:And for the financial illiterate IME, like 18 months ago,00:38:37 Ron:Yeah,00:38:38 Jacob:The company gets the money. Secondary would be somebody who's already a shareholder gets the00:38:41 Ron:Exactly the people on the cap table. so it was buying out the founder, buying out the original investors, like really cleaning it out. It was a new chapter, a new book altogether. At that point and, you know, start sort of starting together. I think, you know, to the question earlier, in terms of like the other value as like, I really can't stress enough, just the strategic value add that I was able to get like, again, because as a founder or as a CEO or as an example, You're kind of stuck in your own head a lot and you can talk to other founders, but you know, there's this like culture, especially in Silicon valley, like, oh bro, coaching it.Yeah. I mean just crushing it, you know? No, one's, you know.00:39:19 Jacob:I didn't, you didn't have to put air quotes around culture there, but like, I could hear the00:39:24 Ron:Yeah.00:39:24 Jacob:I'm called.00:39:25 Ron:You know, and very few people are like really open and transparent, about the challenges and what have you. And so being able to go in. and have this board that I trust that I feel like we're all aligned. I've had boards, you know, especially VC backed boards, where you get like a different, you know, venture capitalists from every round that you do.Like you have a lot of misaligned incentives. You have a lot of sharp elbows in a room.00:39:47 Jacob:I was gonna say, there's a lot of, you know, these are all competitors in a lot of cases, right? Hopefully you pick well, and you have people that are professionals, but like you can totally end up in a situation where you have frenemies,00:39:57 Ron:Yeah, you're watching your back at your own boards. That's a horrible way to live. Whereas with this one, it was so clean. It was like, we were owned by spectrum. This is great. I work at on their behalf. This is great. We've got the two of them there's me. And then, and then, but to their credit, they're like, let's bring on two more operators.And so, you know, they didn't care about like, well, we have to have 51% plus of the seats. It was just like, no, let's just surround ourselves with really awesome. And so we got, you know, we got the former CEO of ancestry, who, you know, they know a thing or two about, subscription businesses. And then we got the COO of Robin hood and obviously like they know a thing or two about hyper-growth and everything else.And again, like, so it's almost like it's this team, you know, it's like this dream team we're just collectively, like they're helping me chart stuff. Like see things. I wouldn't have been able to see on my own, whatever the pattern00:40:45 Jacob:Yeah.I mean, I think it's, it's, it's a good story in the sense that like, I think, I think we think too terminally sometimes about companies, right? Like it's like, they're born, they are grown and then they get sold and then they die usually like nine times out of 10, right? Like it's, it's not often that an intern, like I say, all goes well and the integration goes, well, some spectrum of results.Right. But this is a result where I think you, you guys have a company that's two important. To let die, right? Like if you had sold, I don't know what, you know, your fangs or whoever was like, I'm sure I could see any number of massive tech company wanting this to be a part of their data set or part of their like social, like aspect of whatever.It's just, I could see a plugging into a lot of things, but you know, to get Google's exciting acquisition today and not saying you guys. Talking to Google or not, but as an example, like their exciting acquisition today is tomorrow is like, you know, happy trails, blog posts, right. That actually a good name for the, the shutting down AllTrails, acquisition at Google blogposts.But, but the, you know, and this is a, this is a path where, you know, people who are passionate about the mission, the employees and the users, like can kind of, you know, get that exit that people are looking for. But without like jeopardizing. Thing that's important. And like, maybe this is very hippie, right?But like, I think there is some aspect of companies that's beyond like the capital value and beyond like, even like the culture, but like actually achieving the mission and, and making that change in the world or providing that service. That's, that's, that's more important than, you know, Hypergrowth or whatever.And look, I mean, we should get into talking about now, like posts around, but it sounds like you guys are in hyper-growth anyway. Right. So it didn't, it's not like it's, it's this false dichotomy of right. Like either you're like raising for venture and you're like going at it really hard or Like you're a lifestyle business or, you know, whatever.And it's just like, Maybe, whereas maybe us like lampooning, this straw man of a false narrative has like most of the talking about this to like make that is the, the, the totality of the false dichotomy is us talking about it. But I really think this is a great example of like one of those like interesting, you know, outcomes and, and stories.So it tell us about what's happening now. 00:42:52 David:I appreciate you sharing that specifically because even in researching it, I listened to a couple of your other interviews. I still assume that that the. A pretty big primary chunk that, that went into the balance sheet of the company and then it accelerated it from there. So it's an even more interesting story to me that that raise was mostly secondary.So from the $3 million seed way back in, whatever it was 20 12, 20 13, it really has been an almost bootstrapped company and becoming what it is today on. Little capital is really incredible and it really kind of speaks to consumer subscription space and, and how you can operate and go big without spending a ton of money.If you do it right. If you don't, if you don't just plug into Instagram and blow $5 million of VC money acquiring the wrong users, if you actually talk to them and build a good product and everything else. but I did00:43:55 Ron:Well, and I was just stay on top of not only that at the first board meeting that we had with. I, I walked in and I said, Hey, you know, this is great high five super-stoked, we're also, I think we should donate 1% of our revenue to environmental causes. I know you guys just shelled out a whole lot of money, but would that be okay?And to their credit, they're like Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. And you know, one of the first things we did post-transaction was signing up for 1% for the planet, you know, like there there's totally a different path here. I didn't realize it. And I think it's cool for people.I don't know. I, I wish I heard this earlier in my career. Like there are, like you said, like there's not a dichotomy, like there's so many different ways to do this. I think we have. Fetishizing almost, or like putting on a pedestal this whole like massive VC round kind of stuff, you know, and there's a time and a place for it, for sure.But like, that's not the success metric in and of itself, like more often than not, especially for earlier companies, the death knell. And so I think that, I'm always, you know, I get, I get hit up by people, you know, for whatever I'll all the time talking about this kind of stuff. And so I was like, dude, if you can boot shop, if you can control your own destiny, like do it, you know, find right partners that are gonna unlock growth and everything else.Don't fall, don't fall victim to that. Like, just that story that you think is like the classic Silicon valley startup story, which is you go out, you raise a big round and you have an IPO. It never works. It never works that way00:45:19 Jacob:Who would do that?00:45:20 Ron:To too many man.00:45:22 Jacob:We're running out of time. I do want to know. So you're talking about like doubling and so I'm guessing like the pandemic, like we've seen across the ecosystem has been really, especially, I can imagine there's two aspects to it, right? Like one your digital service.And then secondly, like you're very good compatible with like, social distancing. So did you like think you would be having this conversation for whatever four years after the spectrum, deal like doubling every head count every year? Cause that's typically not what private equity companies growth rates look like.00:45:51 Ron:I know. No, it was, I mean, so I'll preface this by saying we were incredibly fortunate during COVID and sometimes you just get lucky. Sometimes you get like, there's a ton of great companies out there that just like how to pull sales reps out of the field, or we're an equip for like the supply chain issues or whatever it was.Right. Like, Well, like you said, we're digital first company. we, we already, we had a somewhat distributed workforce, so we already like using zoom and slack and going fully remote. Like we, we saw no, no drop in productivity. Now granted like when, when the world shut down mid-March that was a little bit scary.But we knew it would be temporary. I, you know how long no one really knew. Bye bye. Mid April, we were going to our board and saying like, look like, I know things look a little bleak right now. Like the, the machine has fully ground to a hall, but we think actually like this is going to be an insane accelerant.Once things open back up, there's nothing to do. Like you said, it lends itself perfectly to social distancing. You know, people who can't travel anymore. Like, all right, we're going to explore our local state parks now, you know, like we'll scratch that. It's that way I got three kids and you know, school is canceled and obviously, you know, summer camps forget.What are we going to do? What are we going to do with these kids? And it's like, we're going to run them ragged on the trail, you know, every weekend we're just going on the trail and we're running them ragged and00:47:10 Jacob:There's a good ad campaign in there. Just00:47:11 Ron:Totally right. And so,00:47:13 Jacob:Sleeping kids in the back of a Subaru Forester and it's like,00:47:16 Ron:Yes, exactly. So, I mean, you know, we made, we did make a big strategic decision, to get in front of it and, and start hiring like crazy, and just make, you know, make a play, make a play. And, and again, Sometimes you get lucky. you know, that works, that works all these companies around us, that we were never able to like really poach from or whatever.Something like we're able to go grab their talent. Like not just from people who are like, oh, but people were actively working there who were just like, I don't want to do this with my life anymore. I like spending time outside. I had the number of people, the number of inbound applicants that like write in their cover letter.I was looking at which apps I use the most. And I just started applying to those jobs. You know, I think that there really is. It's like really. Great. And I applaud it and I love it. And I hope it never stops people like taking more agency and control over their career and not just like reactively, you know, just doing whatever leftovers00:48:10 Jacob:Yeah. I mean, the geographic unlock of remote, I think is a big part of that. Right. Cause suddenly like you're, you can just literally go on your phone and pretty probably today, nine times out of 10, you're going to be able to work for that company depending on your like, you know, locale or like time00:48:22 Ron:Totally.00:48:23 Jacob:It wasn't that way two years ago,00:48:25 Ron:Not at all, not at all. Exactly. So, a lot changed. A lot has changed in this time. With all of that, with the big accelerant they were seeing on the usability side through 2020, there is, I think David, you had asked this like pre pre-show, you know: there's two big questions hanging over our business as we went into 2021.One is, are the registered users who we got last year during COVID are they going to convert to pro like our conversion to pro happens over time? We look at a lot of stuff through a cohorted basis, and it goes up and to the right. It will take years for some users across the line to go pro, but it's great.It just keeps going up. So, are the folks who signed up when there was nothing else to do, are they ever going to convert to pro or not? The other big question is: all the folks who converted to pro in the height of the pandemic in 2020, once the world opens up, are they going to retain? Or, are we going to have the bottom drop out from under us?These were two questions hanging over our heads. We have a seasonal business, it follows the sun pretty much. So, as we headed into May, June, July of this year, thankfully that the answer for both was a resounding “yes.” The folks who signed up last year are converting at a higher rate than normal.The folks who subscribed are retaining at higher rates than normal, too. And I think it's kind of more of a testament to how the zeitgeists has changed a little bit post pandemic. Being outside just makes people feel good. I guess it's that simple. It's not very complicated.You feel better when you spend time outside, and people are just incorporating it into their regular routines.00:50:08 Jacob:Yeah. It's interesting. For positives and negatives, I think you came up three cherries, right? It just really lined up, and then it's continued. You're talking about the hiring thing, too. Like a lot of habits changed during COVID, and I don't think anything will necessarily go back. Especially if people have found a new, happier, maximum for their lives. You guys are part of that. That's great. and that seems like, I dunno, we don't have total good analytic quantitative data on this, but it doesn't seem like the whole boosts from last year totally collapsed.It seems like it just was like an accelerate, and I think other industries would sort of back that up. 00:50:54 David:Yep. Well, we're coming up on time. Is there anything else I should've asked you? 00:50:59 Ron:No, this was fun.00:51:00 Jacob:You guys are probably hiring, right?00:51:02 Ron:We're hiring like crazy right now. Yeah, absolutely.00:51:06 Jacob:AllTrails?00:51:07 Ron:Yeah.00:51:08 Jacob:There you go.00:51:08 David:Any particular roles you want to shout out? 00:51:11 Ron:We're always starving for great engineering talent. Android, iOS, front end, back end dev ops, security, all of it. PMs, product designers, mapping designers, customer support, the full gamut. The entire company, every department is hiring right now.00:51:28 David:Well, it sounds like a really fun company to work for. We'll put links to your job page and to your personal LinkedIn, and a few other places in the show notes, but this was really fun chatting with you today, Ron. Thank you so much for taking the time. 00:51:41 Ron:My pleasure guys. Thanks for having me. This was fun.

In This Episode You'll Hear About:What it was like growing up in Scranton, Ohio where the hit show The Office, was basedHow growing up being active in sports and performing in front of others carried over throughout his life How his passion for wanting to express himself and entertain others led him to move to New York CityHow losing his first wife to cancer shifted his perspective on life and redirected his dreams towards creating BrrrnHow the idea for Brrrn came about, starting as a brick and mortar location and shifting to a DTC brand and fitness platform due to COVIDHow Brrrn shifted platforms in 2020 and created an online community for workout classes with the Brrrn slide boardTo Find Out More:https://thebrrrn.com/Exclusive Deals from Our Sponsors:Get 30% off your first 3 months with Malomo by going to: https://gomalomo.com/stairwaytoceoUse the promo code STAIRWAY200 for $200 off Outer furniture by shopping HEREGet 2 months FREE with Gorgias by clicking HERE and mentioning the podcastWant the Inside Scoop?:Text Lee at 310-510-6044Quotes:“Winning builds confidence and losing builds character. I'm happy that I learned how to lose at a I expected to win.”“I was doing so many different jobs that it became like I had three full-time jobs trying to pursue this one dream.”“Talking to this Harvard professor, talking about cold being an ally, not an enemy for her to feel and perform her best. And I went home that day I was like, ‘if all that stuff is true, then why aren't people working out in cooler temperatures indoors? Why hasn't there been any cool temperature fitness studio?” “The pun burn came to me because of the limited research that I've found that had to do with exposing yourself to cooler temperatures can allow you to burn more calories than you would in hot or ambient temperatures because of what your body has to go through in order to stay warm specifically between the the range of l 41 to 64 degrees fahrenheit.”“The idea came to me, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's a group exercise, workout program, very similar to what was happening at the time with Soul Cycle but with cold, and we can do winter themed workouts in this fridge.”“I was grieving the loss of who I was but it gave me a chance to put blinders on and to go 100% into this entrepreneurial track.”“Anything that's worth having is hard, and obviously not being a stranger to adversity, this just seems like another opportunity to grow.”“The one thing that we did in our studio was have a slide board. Not only were we innovating the workout environment, we're also changing the way that people moved.” “I think the best brands listen to their customers obsessively to improve the end to end experience.”“The growing pains of pivoting hit you in ways that you don't expect.”“Just let go and just trust the process. I know how cliche that sounds, but it really does allow things to become more fluid and like listening and taking your time and not feeling like you have to rush into every opportunity and be selective. And also the riches are in the niches.”“If something's keeping you up at night, answer that call. And before you share it with the world, and ask someone to help make it a reality with you, know that the best thing you can do to compliment what your pursuits are as an entrepreneur, is to be the biggest critic of the thing that you want to do.”

Why are private branding strategies becoming increasingly important to the retail industry? We unpack this question in detail, first clarifying some often confusing terminology, while also making the important distinction between "private labels" and "private brands." Mostly we center the important role of exclusive products in providing competitive differentiation, minimizing web-enabled price shopping and improving margins. We also call out how retailers young and old, vertically integrated and multi-line, are doubling down on private brands as a way to become more remarkable.What's behind big shifts at Amazon, Target and Bed, Bath & Beyond? Why are DNVB's partnering up with legacy players like Nordstrom for semi-exclusive distribution?  Why are Nike and others moving away from wholesale distribution to more exclusive, DTC channels? We take it all on!But first we open up the with the Top 3 retail stories that caught our attention this past week, including some take-aways from "Singles Day" (aka the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival) and what to make of the big bounce back in sales and earnings for some legacy players--and the lack of profitability among many so-called disruptor brands. While we're not exactly sure just what the heck the "Metaverse" is (a second life for Second Life?), we do take on Facebook's (er, Meta's) plans to market it through their own physical stores.Steve Dennis is an advisor, keynote speaker and author on strategic growth and business innovation. You can learn more about Steve on his       website.    The expanded and revised edition of his bestselling book  Remarkable Retail: How To Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Disruption is now available at  Amazon or just about anywhere else books are sold. Steve regularly shares his insights in his role as a      Forbes senior contributor and on       Twitter and       LinkedIn. You can also check out his speaker "sizzle" reel      here.Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada's top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus        Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  and       The Food Professor  with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois.  You can learn more about Michael       here  or on       LinkedIn. 

Jim McCann is the founder and chairman of 1-800-Flowers, one of the first companies to pioneer and popularize the use of both toll-free telephone numbers and Web sites in the early days of the Internet to sell goods and services directly to consumers.What started as a flower shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1976 has since grown into a publicly-traded company worth over $2 billion with thousands of employees.SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER & STAY UPDATED > http://bit.ly/tfh-newsletterFOLLOW TFH ON INSTAGRAM > http://www.instagram.com/thefounderhourFOLLOW TFH ON TWITTER > http://www.twitter.com/thefounderhourINTERESTED IN BECOMING A SPONSOR? EMAIL US > partnerships@thefounderhour.com

So much from the past is long gone — corded phones, the food pyramid, writing checks at the grocery store. But on the flip side, there are things from years gone by that have come back — mom jeans anyone? And then, there are the things that last the test of time. Traditions, styles, and yes, even businesses. Pioneer Linens is one of those companies that has stood strong for more than 100 years and sure, it has gone through its fair share of changes and pivots over the years, but as President, Penny Murphy, told me on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, the commitment to serving its customers has remained through it all. And today, Pioneer Linens is succeeding by giving customers the best experience not just in-store, but online as well. In fact, Pioneer moved into the ecommerce world way back in the 1990s, and Penny led the charge. We got into that story and dug into the company's long history, the lessons Penny and her daughters have carried into running the business today, and where this century-old company is headed next. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:A Lasting Legacy: Although a company may pivot or change throughout its history, what customers remember most is the experience they had and the people within the company they interacted with. No matter where your business is headed, the most important thing to remember is to create the best customer experience possible and connect with customers as much as you can.Lessons From The Past: Even if you don't have a 100-year company history to rely on, you can always look to the past for trends and ideas that are likely to come back around. There is a saying that history repeats itself — and it's true. So be a student of history and prepare yourself with knowledge of what has happened before so you can be ready for the future.Instant Gratification: Although it is sometimes risky to carry a lot of inventory, it's equally risky to not have enough of what customers want readily available. When customers shop, they are often looking to solve a problem right now, and if you can't meet their needs, you will lose out on a sale today, and also the possibility of future sales from that same customer.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

Neil Blakemore joins Amanda + Kim for the second half of our conversation about the true crime trend. See the full episode notes at thedepartment.world.

Daniel McCarthy is the Assistant Professor of Marketing at Emory University & the Director & Co-founder of Theta. Daniel shares his 3 DTC business model trends plus extra insider knowledge on DTC brands. Listen now! 

You'll from these two entrepreneurs how looking for clothes for their wedding started a gender-defying clothing company. For more on Kirrin Finch and show notes: https://www.shopify.com/blog/kirrin-finch-operations?utm_campaign=shopifymasters&utm_medium=description&utm_source=podcast Tune in to learn The big surprise when these entrepreneurs did their market research for the first time  Why you should have 1 flagship product when you do not have experience in an industry What is a Fit Party and why you should hold one when creating a clothing brand 

Brendan Hughes is CEO of Optily, a software solution that combines proven digital ad strategies with innovative technology to enable marketers accelerate their Ecommerce store growth.  On this podcast we talk about fine tuning the parts of the funnel, how Optily can help your business grow, and why short form videos are successful for DTC brands. To learn more, visit: http://honestecommerce.co Resources: Try Optily for 14 days optily.com/request-a-demo/ and also get 15% discount on your first year Have a “no-strings attached” free 1 hour ad strategy consultation calendly.com/brendan-optily/ad-strategy-consultation  Connect with Brendan linkedin.com/in/brendanhughes Scale your business with electriceye.io Download Mesa at the Shopify App Store apps.shopify.com/mesa Respond to any of Rewind's welcome emails and mention HONEST ECOMMERCE to get 1 month free rewind.io/honest Level up your customer support gorgias.grsm.io/honest Get started with a free account at klaviyo.com/honest

Our guest today learned the ins and outs of retail by taking action, despite not having any prior retail experience.Sterling Jones joins the Wavebreak Podcast to share the story of how Jojo's Chocolate—a brand he co-founded with his own Mom—grew into a retail success.In this episode you'll learn:The story of how Jojo—Sterling's Mom—created Jojo's Chocolate in an effort to satisfy her own sugary cravings whilst battling cancer.The priceless retail lessons Sterling learned firsthand, like printing barcode labels that were too small for grocery store clerks to scan.How ‘understanding your customer' can be a true competitive edge, and how to actionably implement.  Sterling Jones is a co-founder of Jojo's Chocolate, deliciously low-sugar dark chocolate made by Momma Jojo while fighting cancer and sugar cravings.Join Our Private Email ListOur industry-leading DTC newsletter is trusted by ecommerce and marketing leaders at top brands like Goop, Skims, Cartier, Walmart, and thousands more.Click here to sign up ->Links MentionedJojo's ChocolateLearn more about Wavebreak: the email & CRM agency for high-growth DTC brandsSponsored by KlaviyoKlaviyo — Over 265,000 innovative brands are growing their businesses by listening and understanding to cues from their customers--easily turning that information into valuable marketing messages used to build highly segmented, automated email & SMS campaigns, such as win back campaigns or abandoned cart recovery and more.