Podcast appearances and mentions of taylor holiday

As our unofficial “shadow guest”, Taylor Holiday, CEO of Common Thread Collective, finally joins us to unpack what growing a brand actually looks like in 2025. From shifting Meta performance and rising creative demands to tighter margins and changing consumer behavior, we explore the real constraints shaping how brands operate today.We talk about how the best brands are adjusting their messaging to drive performance, how to think about media spend through a margin-first lens, and why bundling, offer structure, and disciplined execution are more important than ever.Taylor also shares his take on the evolving balance between brand and product-led growth, how to think about testing in a high-cost environment, and why most teams of the future will look leaner, faster, and increasingly AI-powered.If you have a question for the MOperators Hotline, click the link to be in with a chance of it being discussed on the show: https://forms.gle/1W7nKoNK5Zakm1Xv600:00 Introduction 04:08 E-commerce Challenges and Growth Strategies11:08 Navigating Meta's Advertising Landscape18:14 Optimizing for Incrementality and Brand Engagement25:21 The Role of Brand Activations and Measurement37:44 Unlocking New Reach in Marketing40:05 The Short-Term Impact of Advertising43:39 Balancing Brand and Performance Marketing46:24 Evolving Marketing Strategies for Growth49:19 The Role of Creative Campaigns in Business Growth53:08 The Future of Marketing and AI Integration01:00:09 The Changing Landscape of Creative Development01:05:42 The Role of Humans in an AI-Driven WorldOperators Exclusive Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/9operators/shared_invite/zt-2tdfu426r-TepSHJP~evAyDfR29U2qUw Powered by:Motion.⁠⁠⁠https://motionapp.com/pricing?utm_source=marketing-operators-podcast&utm_medium=paidsponsor&utm_campaign=march-2024-ad-reads⁠⁠⁠https://motionapp.com/creative-trendsPrescient AI.⁠⁠⁠https://www.prescientai.com/operatorsRichpanel.⁠⁠⁠https://www.richpanel.com/?utm_source=MO&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ytdescAftersell.https://www.aftersell.com/operatorsHaus.http://Haus.io/operatorsSubscribe to the 9 Operators Podcast here:https://www.youtube.com/@Operators9Subscribe to the Finance Operators Podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/@FinanceOperatorsFOPSSign up to the 9 Operators newsletter here: https://9operators.com/

This week's episode of the podcast is in a new format: MDM Mailbag. I recruited Taylor Holiday, the CEO of eCommerce advertising agency Common Thread Collective and a prominent voice on DTC Twitter, to answer questions submitted by the MDM community. Among other topics, those questions related to:Any visible weakness in consumer spending related to tariffs;The viability of AppLovin and Pinterest for eCommerce advertising;The evolving business model of digital advertising agencies;The appropriate proportion of platform budget to route through Advantage+ and PMax.Thanks to the sponsors of this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Marketing analytics that makes it easy to get answers, iterate fast, and show the impact of your work. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free.ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user's real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

ADSN is the ESPN for the ads/marketing industry. This week, hosts James Borow and Daniel welcome guest commentators Eric Seufert and Taylor Holiday to talk about current market volatility, tariffs, and the impact on ad platforms and DTC brands.ADSN is made possible by: dash.fi - https://dash.fiMeasured - https://measured.com/Follow ADSN: Keep up with ADSN:https://TheADSN.comhttps://x.com/The_ADSNhttps://youtube.com/@theadsn

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signupHello and welcome to the DTC Podcast! Today, we're talking with Taylor Holiday, Managing Partner at Common Thread Collective (CTC)—one of the leading agencies in e-commerce growth.CTC rode the wave of e-commerce's explosive growth, scaling from 60 to nearly 200 employees during COVID. But as market conditions changed, so did their approach. Taylor shares how e-commerce brands must pivot from chasing revenue to focusing on profitability and sustainable growth.Key Takeaways:✅ Why Service Businesses Are Underrated: Agencies can be more profitable than SaaS and DTC brands with the right model.✅ The Secret to Scaling Agencies: Focus on fewer employees, higher salaries, and keeping the best people doing the most valuable work.✅ The Right Way to Spend on Ads: Many brands are overspending inefficiently—start by cutting waste, then rebuild smarter.✅ Why Product Expansion Is Key: Growth isn't about selling more of the same product; it's about launching new ones to unlock fresh demand.✅ Meta Ads in 2025: Advantage Plus is the future—let Meta's AI do the work but control the outcome through bid caps.✅ AI in Agencies: CTC uses AI for internal knowledge sharing, customer service automation, and creative strategy.

Send us a textPeek into a head-turning conversation comparing the daily utility of Meta Ray-Bans versus Apple's Vision Pro. How do these technologies influence branding and consumer engagement? We've got first-hand accounts that might just reshape your tech investments.In this episode, Jordan West with Andrew Faris, who began his e-commerce adventure with Kalo, a famed silicone wedding ring brand, and grew his expertise through strategic roles at Common Thread Collective. Together, they discuss the power of community engagement, the importance of authenticity in branding, and the innovative marketing approaches that have propelled them to success.Listen and learn in this episode!Key takeaways from this episode:Usable Technology:Meta Ray-Bans showcase the value of consumer-friendly tech that integrates into daily life, unlike Apple's Vision Pro.E-commerce Growth:The e-commerce sector continues to expand, making it an opportune time for new entrants thanks to shared industry knowledge.Effective Marketing:Authentic engagement with niche communities, like CrossFit, is crucial for brand success. Tailored strategies are necessary for different markets.Creative Advertising:High-volume, low-cost creative ad production can be effective, but diverse advertising strategies may also yield success.Financial Management Tools:Tools like Lifetimely and Triple Whale are vital for managing cash flow and ensuring business transparency.Knowledge Sharing:Free resources and advanced software tools have enhanced e-commerce operations, benefiting businesses across the board.Podcast Networking:Podcasts serve as excellent networking tools, facilitating connections and industry insights.Niche Market Focus:Targeting the smallest viable market can drive success, as advised by experts like Seth Godin and Alex Hormozi.Involvement in Business:Staying engaged in day-to-day operations is valuable, as highlighted by Andrew Farris's personal approach to business management.Today's Guest:Andrew Faris, who has been involved in e-commerce for approximately a decade, mainly outside of the SaaS sector. He began his career in branding with Kalo, a silicone wedding ring company, and swiftly achieved significant growth without external funding. After Kalo, he became one of the initial strategists at the Common Thread Collective (CTC) and was involved in managing brand strategies with Taylor Holiday. Andrew later led growth at CTC, which spun off brands under 4 by 400, and is now managing his agency, AGF Growth, focusing on a select number of clients.Growth Plan: www.upgrowthcommerce.com/growMillion Dollar Offers: www.upgrowthcommerce.com/growIn this episode's sponsor is Revenued - is a financial technology company that provides businesses with revenue-based financing solutions. Instead of relying on credit scores or collateral, Revenued offers funding based on a company's revenue. This allows businesses to access capital quickly and repay it as they generate income. Learn more here: Revenued

Recruit, onboard, and train incredible virtual professionals in the Philippines with my friends at More Staffing by visiting ⁠https://morestaffing.co/af⁠. Get the best media buying training on the Internet + a free coaching call with Common Thread Collective's media buyers when you sign up for ADmission here: https://bit.ly/3x99lip // Taylor Holiday is the founder and CEO of Common Thread Collective. Follow Taylor On X: @taylorholiday Work With Common Thread Collective: www.commonthreadco.com // SUBSCRIBE TO MY CHANNEL! // FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/andrewjfaris Email: podcast@ajfgrowth.com Work with Andrew: https://ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Send us a textExplore cash flow strategies, like leveraging pre-sales for inventory, using ad platform invoicing, and credit extensions to scale e-commerce businesses. Personal insights highlight supplier negotiation, inventory management, and low-risk financing for growth.In this episode, Jordan West with guest Grayson Cross gets into the nuts and bolts of cash flow management and financing for e-commerce brands. Grayson shares practical strategies for leveraging customer pre-sales, utilizing monthly invoicing options from major ad platforms, and optimizing credit cards and invoice financing services to extend payment timelines. Listen and learn in this episode!Key takeaways from this episode:Embrace Change:Change is essential for growth despite its challenges.Leverage Pre-Sales:Pre-sell limited editions to fund inventory, as seen in the gaming industry.Personal Interaction:Founders should engage customers through personal digital content.Ad Platform Payments:Use invoicing from platforms like Facebook and Google to manage cash flow.Smart Credit Use:Utilize credit cards like Amex Plum with net 60 terms, and tools like Ampla for extended payment terms and rewards.Invoice Financing:Services like Settle and Melio offer extended payment terms to ease cash flow.Tiered Financing:Use a mix of financing options strategically, from asset-based lending to revenue-based financing.Supplier Negotiation:Build strong supplier relationships and negotiate better terms for improved cash flow.Inventory Management:Keep inventory aligned with sales; use solutions like Portless for better flow and shipping.Strategic Debt:Leverage debt wisely for growth, balancing risks and rewards.Post-COVID Strategy:Adapt to post-COVID challenges to sustain growth.Entrepreneurship Reality:Entrepreneurship requires practical knowledge and self-awareness.Cash Flow Priority:Keep OpEx under 20%, using a mix of financing tools, and maintain accurate accounting methods.Hierarchical Financing:Start with low-risk options like supplier terms before exploring riskier financing models.Today's Guest: Grayson Cross, a proven serial entrepreneur and the head of growth as well as a full partner at Weekend Digital. Weekend encompasses various branches including investment, digital, studios, and motorsports. Grayson has deep expertise in digital marketing and media buying, having started his entrepreneurial journey at the young age of 14. With a robust background that includes managing significant sales for a leading firearm accessory brand and working closely with notable industry figures like Taylor Holiday, Grayson is adept at helping businesses scale and achieve substantial exits, particularly through effective cash flow management and lean operational strategies.Recommended Apps/Tools:Portless: https://www.portless.com/ Growth Plan: www.upgrowthcommerce.com/In this episode's sponsor is Revenued - is a financial technology company that provides businesses with revenue-based financing solutions. Instead of relying on credit scores or collateral, Revenued offers funding based on a company's revenue. This allows businesses to access capital quickly and repay it as they generate income. Learn more here: Revenued

Colab with The Ecommerce Playbook! Taylor and Andrew do our second Tim Ferris-inspired "Random Show." In this episode, we talk about: What the heck is Andrew's business and why is he thinking about it so badly? Why is Taylor tweeting and talking so much about incrementality? How much should you spend on ad creative relative to your Meta Ads budget? What's the best way to leave money to your kids when you die? What's the point of watching a movie like Deadpool vs. Wolverine? And much more. Enjoy! EPISODE SPONSORS MORE STAFFING Virtual Assistants can be helpful, but Virtual Professionals can change your business. Hire incredible ecom talent from the Philippines with my friends at More Staffing at ⁠⁠https://morestaffing.co/af⁠.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ BILY Get enhanced Meta Ads event tracking on your store with 100% server side tracking at the lowest rate in all of ecom with Bily by visiting ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bily.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠. THE BEST MEDIA BUYING TRAINING ON THE INTERNET: Get a free coaching call when you sign up for ADmission here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3x99lip SUBSCRIBE TO TAYLOR'S CONTENT ON THE CTC YOUTUBE CHANNEL https://www.youtube.com/@commonthreadco⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ AFP EPISODES REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE: "Driveline Baseball Revolutionized Pro Sports. Now They're Growing An Incredible Business." (Apple; Spotify) "Exactly How Supply Chain Executives From The Philippines Completely Changed This 8-Figure Brand" (Apple; Spotify) ALSO REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE X Post About Kids & Self-Control: https://x.com/SteveStuWill/status/1818678008506728627 Taylor's TikTok About How To Leave Your Kids Money: https://www.tiktok.com/@davidmeltzer/video/7376061516887493931?_t=8mtlKy3V8SE&_r=1 Brady Fiegl Video: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRo52qCv/ FOLLOW UP WITH TAYLOR Follow Taylor On X: @taylorholiday FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW Follow Andrew on X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@andrewjfaris⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email Andrew: podcast@ajfgrowth.com Work with Andrew: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

00:00 Introduction & The Reality of E-commerce Growth 31:26 Disparity in E-commerce Growth 33:20 Challenging the Perception of E-commerce 35:08 Challenges Faced by Seven-Figure and Eight-Figure Stores 45:41 Growth Rates of Seven-Figure and Eight-Figure Stores 53:07 Comparison of Growth Rates 55:20 Challenging Conventional Wisdom 58:36 The Importance of Having a Competitive Advantage 01:03:20 The Correlation Between Customer Sentiment and the Market 01:04:47 Setting Realistic Growth Expectations 01:07:40 The Role of Capital in Driving Growth 01:09:02 Understanding the Broader Market Context Operators Exclusive Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/9operators/shared_invite/zt-20pd2eq4n-UVM6oTQkdltEwLINwkCWIA Powered By: Fulfil.io. https://bit.ly/3pAp2vu The Only Cloud ERP Designed to Efficiently Scale 8 and 9-Figure Brands. Northbeam. https://www.northbeam.io/ Postscript. https://postscript.io/ Subscribe to The Marketing Operators Podcast here:https://www.youtube.com/@MarketingOperators Subscribe to The Marketing Operators Podcast here: / @marketingoperators Sign up to our weekly newsletter here: https://www.9operators.com/

00:00 Introduction and Overview 03:22 The Impact of Cap Tables on the Organization 05:17 Equity as a Tool for Employee Retention08:38 The Power Dynamics of Board Control 23:21 The Importance of Trust in Equity Allocation 26:46 Reflecting on Past Decisions: What Would You Change? 27:41 Navigating the Challenges of Equity and Ownership 38:02 The Importance of Open Communication and Fairness 45:17 Understanding the Psychology of Equity and Monetization 53:24 Insights into the E-commerce Industry: A Preview of Data Operators Exclusive Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/9operators/shared_invite/zt-20pd2eq4n-UVM6oTQkdltEwLINwkCWIA Powered By: Fulfil.io. https://bit.ly/3pAp2vu The Only Cloud ERP Designed to Efficiently Scale 8 and 9-Figure Brands. Northbeam. https://www.northbeam.io/ Postscript. https://postscript.io/ Subscribe to The Marketing Operators Podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/@MarketingOperators Subscribe to The Marketing Operators Podcast here: / @marketingoperators Sign up to our weekly newsletter here: https://www.9operators.com/

Do social comments help or hinder your ad performance? Do negative comments hurt? Should we be deleting negative comments off our ads? Sarah asks guest Nate Lagos his opinion on this and his answer might surprise you…   We also cover:   What the “Bandwagon” effect is and why it's so important when it comes to social proof in marketing your brand. The difference between social proof, comments on social media, and reviews and why you need to know the difference. Why any kind of engagement better than just positive engagement…   Also, Nate does a true confession… Tweet/X link: Taylor Holiday https://x.com/TaylorHoliday/status/1810561219323121882   Guest: Nate Lagos  Twitter: https://x.com/natelagos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natelagos/ Tactical and Practical Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tactical-practical/id1752915534 Learn more at: https://www.sarahlevinger.co Twitter: https://x.com/SarahLevinger Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahlevinger/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarah.levinger/ Watch me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKwfjt_7PU5N_2fTfHemXXg Thanks to Cytrus for the theme song, “Sky High” You can follow and find them on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/track/1oKGDsxjRdQlf2xHLZsiSJ?si=8fbd275dbbb54cbf  

This week's episode features Taylor Holiday from Common Threads Collective, a key figure in the e-commerce industry. One of our best episodes to date! We get into various topics, including the Mona Lisa of e-commerce, the probability of a single-handed e-commerce brand reaching $100 million in revenue, creating peak moments in brands, and the future of e-commerce as a brand represented by a collection of feeds. Even if you're not deeply involved in e-commerce, this episode offers valuable insights. Tune in for a fascinating discussion on the evolving landscape of e-commerce and brand building. Chapters

It's a pod colab! Today on the show, The Ecommerce Playbook and The Andrew Faris Podcast join forces for a longer, wider-ranging, in-person conversation with Common Thread Collective's CEO and DTC super-genius Taylor Holiday. Among the topics covered: Do you really HAVE to grow your business? The case for negative CAC (i.e. YOU GET PAID to acquire customers) My ongoing defense of the longform explainer And much more. Enjoy! EPISODE SPONSOR Virtual assistants can be helpful, but virtual professionals can change your business. Recruit, onboard, and train incredible virtual professionals in the Philippines by visiting ⁠⁠https://morenow.co/af⁠⁠. SPECIAL OFFER ON THE BEST DTC EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITY ON THE INTERNET: SUBSCRIBE TO TAYLOR'S VIDEO & PODCAST CONTENT: CTC YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@commonthreadco REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE With $10M In Revenue And $0 In Ad Spend, Isaac Medeiros Is In A Class Of His Own" (Spotify; Apple) Growing Profitability ft. Alan Doan of Missouri Quilt Co" Ecommerce Playbook Episode (YouTube) NVIDIA CEO Jensen Yang's "I Wish You Suffering" Video Kevin Espiritu On Negative Cac FOLLOW UP WITH TAYLOR Follow Taylor On X: https://twitter.com/taylorholiday FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW Follow Andrew on Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@andrewjfaris⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email Andrew: podcast@ajfgrowth.com Work with Andrew: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ EPISODE MUSIC Music Outro: "⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Rusty Little Scissors⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠" by The Devious Means

Today, CJ hosts Taylor Holiday, a legend in the e-commerce and D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) world. He is also the CEO and founder of Common Thread Collective, one of the leading marketing agencies for e-commerce brands. Taylor takes us on a deep dive into marketing best practices and shares profound insights from his years of experience in D2C and e-commerce businesses. He talks about bridging the gap between marketing and finance and what marketers often miss about monetization. He explains when to do marketing in-house and when to hire experts, how unit economics and expectations differ in B2C versus B2B, and why it's so challenging to forecast inventory in e-commerce. Taylor also gives his top tip for anyone starting an e-commerce or D2C business today.If you're looking for an ERP head to NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist.—SPONSORS:NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. More than 37,000 thousand companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get a customized KPI checklist. Maxio is the only billing and financial operations platform that was purpose built for B2B SaaS. They're helping SaaS finance teams automate billing and revenue recognition, manage collections and payments, and put together investor grade reporting packages.

In this episode, we're heading to the vibrant and bustling eCommerceFuel Live 2024 in New Orleans. Join me, Kurt Elster, for raw, unscripted conversations with some of the biggest names in eCommerce. Get ready to hear from Brett Curry of OMGcommerce, Elaine Eason at QuietLight, Eulalie Cook from Tadpull, Jimmy Kim of Sendlane, and the incredibly talented copywriter Lianna Patch. We'll also dive into insights with Taylor Holiday from Common Thread Collective, among other notable guests. This episode is all about getting to the heart of eCommerce - the unfiltered, real-world experiences and strategies from those who breathe life into this industry every day. So, tune in and get ready to absorb wisdom and stories that you won't find anywhere else.Highlights:Exclusive, unscripted interviews with eCommerce expertsA deep dive into the unpolished, real side of the eCommerce worldInsights and stories from top industry professionalsShow LinksECF LiveSponsorsFree 30-day trial of Zipify OCUIntelligemsNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin Kurt's newsletterHelp the showAsk a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook GroupLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Kurt up to?See our recent work at EthercycleSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelApply to work with Kurt to grow your store.

I've already had Jack Rubin on once before, and that's for a simple reason: he's one of the most impressive DTC operators I've been around, building one of the best DTC businesses I've seen from the inside. So there's lots to share. In this episode, learn how Jack's relentless focus on his core funnel led him to increase his Meta spend by 500% in the last year while lowering his CAC and growing to a very profitable $50M+ in revenue. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS [00:14] DTC business growth [05:33] Business simplicity and focus [10:16] Improving subscription funnels [11:43] Scaling ad spend growth [15:53] Building massive creative operations [20:22] Lean OpEx as percentage of revenue with More Staffing [23:19] Seasonal Starter Kit offer [27:11] Customer LTV hypotheses [36:32] Brand vs. performance marketing [37:55] Meta targeting efficiency EPISODE SPONSOR Virtual assistants can be helpful, but virtual professionals can change your business. Recruit, onboard, and train incredible virtual professionals in the Philippines by visiting ⁠https://morenow.co/af⁠. REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Jack's Earlier AJFG Episode (Spotify, Apple) Kynship DTC Advertising Agency: www.kynship.co Jack's Starter Kit Landing Page: https://try.purdyandfigg.com/starterkit-offer Taylor Holiday's 4 Peaks Theory FOLLOW UP WITH JACK Follow Jack On Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackrubin1 FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW Follow Andrew on Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@andrewjfaris⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email Andrew: podcast@ajfgrowth.com Work with Andrew: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ EPISODE MUSIC Music Intro: "⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tell Me Mama⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠" by The Devious Means Music Outro: "⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Rusty Little Scissors⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠" by The Devious Means

With examples ranging from his own collaboration with influential figures to the impact of Joe Rogan's endorsement, Mark highlights how these strategic partnerships can lead to exponential growth. Curious about where the next opportunities for leverage lie? Mark provides thought-provoking insights that will transform your approach to scaling your brand.In this episode, Jordan West and Mark Ritz, co-founder and CEO of Carnivore Snax delve into the strategy of being different and engaging with customers in the ever-evolving e-commerce space. From implementing email marketing to innovative advertising techniques, Mark shares valuable insights that will help you captivate your target audience and create a loyal customer base.Listen and learn in this episode!Key takeaways from this episode:The importance of having a certain person or thing present in a strategyFocus on product quality and full control over manufacturing and supply chainBeing obsessed with maintaining high standardsBeing different as a company in terms of engagement in the e-commerce spaceImplementation of email marketing, advertising, and other strategiesThe ability to send direct messages on InstagramThe value of warm introductions and getting responses to direct messagesThe strategy of launching new products monthly, making them limited editionEngaging platform with exclusive access and benefits for membersRecommended App/Tool:Inveterate: https://www.inveterate.com/Recommended Podcast:Joe Rogan: https://www.joerogan.com/Taylor Holiday: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Sa9tlWmT3n9C2K8hN6Us4Today's Guest:Mark Ritz, co-founder and CEO at Carnivore Snax, with a background of 7 years in the e-comm space, Mark has always been passionate about this field. Prior to his venture in e-commerce, he spent 12 years working for Costco Wholesale, where he developed a deep appreciation for the membership model and company culture. This experience greatly influenced how Carnivore Snax operates today. Mark has also held the position of Director of E-commerce for a couple of companies, specializing in email marketing. His desire to run his own business led him to join forces with a co-founder who presented an innovative product idea. After trying the product, Mark was convinced and together, they decided to launch and expand the company.Connect and learn more about Mark and Carnivore Snax here: Website: https://carnivoresnax.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-ritz-0b73b0124/X: https://twitter.com/ritzfitGet 5 Offers for 2 Products (10 in total) along with 10 highly engaging tried and true creatives, 30 captivating headlines, descriptions, and ad texts sent to you for only $99. Go to https://www.upgrowthcommerce.com/offer and order now - this offer is only available for a limited time.We love our podcast community and listeners so much that we have decided to offer a free eCommerce Growth Plan for your brand! To learn more and how we can help, click here: upgrowthcommerce.com/grow Join our community and connect with other eCommerce brand owners and marketers! https://www.facebook.com/groups/secretstoscalingpodcast

The e-commerce space is quickly becoming oversaturated. It's getting harder and harder to stand out and make a name for yourself.But lucking into going viral isn't the only way to build a successful online business—it's all about knowing your strategy and what business metrics to pay attention to. If you're in this boat right now, stop what you're doing and listen to Taylor Holiday!In this episode of the Perfectly Mentored Podcast, Taylor Holiday joins Jason Portnoy as they chat about everything e-commerce (solutions and insights). If you're ready to step up your e-commerce game, then tune in and transform the way you view the industry!Topics Covered  What's the state of e-commerce right now? [1:47]How can e-commerce store owners judge their marketing properly? [4:37]Most business owners have no idea what their numbers are [7:49]What do you think of people who aren't afraid to “swim naked” [10:10]Listening to public critique and what it takes to reframe belief [12:56]Sometimes, multiple strategies work [15:57] Based on that, would you have changed anything? [19:54]What's the best way to view data and acquire valuable insights from it? [24:22]Why e-commerce businesses get burned by agencies [29:34] There's more confusion now with e-commerce store owners than there has ever been [32:08]Now, business people have to actually use business metrics that they haven't been using [34:25]Everything's moving at a faster pace nowadays [37:40] A lot of people simply don't know how to keep their customers happy [42:00]There's too much mimicking and not enough innovation nowadays [45:33]What's your take on e-commerce stores hiring agencies vs keeping things in-house? [47:48] Want to work with Jason one-on-one? Click HereConnect with Jason PortnoyWebsiteInstagramTikTokLike the episode? Watch and support us on YouTube.Visit us also on Apple Podcasts! Help us spread the word by subscribing and leaving a review—we appreciate your feedback!

With data from hundreds of DTC brands, Taylor Holiday breaks down the formula for success in this new era of marketing. Taylor is the CEO and Co-founder of Common Thread Collective, a leading growth agency for DTC brands in North America. Learn more: https://commonthreadco.com https://generogrowth.com

We're going through the winter of eCommerce and brands everywhere are struggling. Nevertheless, brands willing to figure out how to bootstrap through hard times are finding opportunities to scale.In this episode, Jordan West interviews Taylor Holiday of Common Thread Collective. They talk about the state of eCommerce right now, the attributes of brands that are succeeding right now, and the surprising best channel performance.Listen and learn in this episode!KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODEService providers' number one job is education.Even if you have a brand reputation, there's still the reality that trust = consistency x time. You have to spend more time educating why you're doing what you're doing.We're in a tunnel, there's a light at the end, but we've got some challenging times ahead. At the end of that, there's going to be more resiliency, more innovation, and better businesses.Moving way too slowly and conservatively when you can capture a ton more market value can be your biggest mistake.There's still nothing close to Meta ads. It's still so disproportionately the best primary value capture opportunity for every business. Google is always going to be the king of demand capture.Diversification is the siren's song of death. There is an opportunity cost to every dollar that you take out of Facebook and put into an alternative channel. That opportunity cost is damaging. The fundamental inhibitor to most businesses' growth is the lack of financial understanding.Recommended App:Statlas.io https://statlas.io/Recommended Book:Competitive Strategy by Michael Porterhttps://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Industries-Competitors/dp/0684841487 Today's Guest:Taylor Holiday is an athlete and is now the CEO of Common Thread Collective. They are an eCommerce growth agency that helps brands that have a clear sense of who they are, do a great job in building their brands, and are looking for growth strategy.Connect and learn more about Taylor and Common Thread Collective here: Website:  https://www.commonthreadco.com LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-holiday-a169b322 Twitter:  https://www.twitter.com/taylorholiday Get 5 Offers for 2 Products (10 in total) along with 10 highly engaging tried and true creatives, 30 captivating headlines, descriptions, and ad texts sent to you for only $99. Go to https://www.upgrowthcommerce.com/offer and order now - this offer is only available for a limited time.Get the latest strategies, tips and case studies sent to you weekly by signing up for the free Secrets to Scaling Newsletter. Also, get first access to our Founder-Only Slack channel, our CMO Dashboard to plan out your marketing efforts and so. much. more.Join the Beta:https://www.secrets.upgrowthcommerce.com/We love our podcast community and listeners so much that we have decided to offer a free eCommerce Growth Plan for your brand! To learn more and how we can help, click here: upgrowthcommerce.com/grow Join our community and connect with other eCommerce brand owners and marketers! https://www.facebook.com/groups/secretstoscalingpodcast

It's the "very special episode" time of year and I'm doing my part. To round out 2022, I joined up with The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast for a colab episode where Taylor Holiday (CEO of Common Thread Collective), Richard Gaffin (Senior Copywriter & Podcast Cohost at CTC) and I reflected on the unique ability of failure to form us and teach us for the long term. Whether it's been a great or terrible year for you in 2022, there's something here for you to chew on. Places to follow up with Taylor, Richard, CTC, & The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast: Listen to The Ecommerce Playbook. Explore working with CTC. Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorholiday Follow Richard on Twitter: @richardgaffin Places to follow up with me: Follow me on Twitter: @andrewjfaris Email me: podcast@ajfgrowth.com Work with me: www.ajfgrowth.com Intro Music: "Tell Me Mama" by The Devious Means Outro Music: "Rusty Little Scissors" by The Devious Means

On this episode, we get into George Taylor's allegations that media coverage effectively killed Tru Colors, the for-profit brewery he founded with a social mission to help curb street violence. Plus, a word of warning about scammers during the holiday season (and, really, any season). And, Michael Praats has some personal news.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Taylor Holiday, the CEO and founder of the Common Thread Collective, an eCommerce growth agency. Taylor and I discuss the general state of eCommerce advertising, what happened within the eCommerce category in Q3 and what he sees happening now in Q4. We also speak about the coming reckoning in the eCommerce advertising debt market (with background on what this is!), misconceptions about how Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy impacts eCommerce advertising, and the nature of setting direct response advertising budgets. Common Thread company publishes a regular newsletter containing recent eCommerce advertising performance data.

It's the last day of my weeklong BFCM special! This week I've got 5 very short episodes with super ecom experts giving you ONE (and only one!) tip to maximize Black Friday/Cyber Monday. The best part? They're ALL still actionable for your teams, even this late in the game. To close out the week, I just couldn't stay away from my business partner, friend, and former CTC & 4x400 colleague and boss, Taylor Holiday. Taylor's got one last tip for BFCM focused on making sure you understand your finances. As he's said elsewhere: the next DTC winners will be those who are operationally excellent, and he's got some help for you to do that here. You can follow Taylor on Twitter at @TaylorHoliday, work with Common Thread Collective by visiting their website, and/or click here to check out CTC's learning & early stage growth community, Admission. Follow me on Twitter at @andrewjfaris. Work with me at www.ajfgrowth.com. Email me with questions or thoughts at podcast@ajfgrowth.com. Intro & outro music: "Holiday" by The Devious Means

In Andrew's farewell episode, he passes the torch over to CTC's Taylor Holiday and Richard Gaffin. Andrew reflects on his time hosting the podcast, and what's next for the show. “Moving forward, what you can expect from us is a conversation about frameworks, about large-scale thinking, and interesting things happening in the DTC space and what they mean for you.” Show Notes: - Try Freshmarketer: https://bit.ly/3S5wXcH - Keep listening to Andrew at “The Andrew Faris Podcast,” head to his new website at www.ajfgrowth.com, or follow him on Twitter @andrewjfaris.

The buzz around Web. 3.0, NFTs, and the metaverse is undeniable, but how much should brands actually be paying attention to? And where will brands and consumers actually get the most out of these trends? We asked Taylor Holiday, the CEO of Common Thread Collective, those questions and more on this episode.Tune in to learn:Facing the future and what's exciting about the years ahead. (4:35)What's the deal with NFTs? (6:20)Brands need to deliver for both our physical and digital worlds. (11:00)What people miss about Facebook/Meta. 29:00)How do you think of Web 3.0? (34:20)The most contrarian opinion about the ecommerce world. (42:00)What disiruptions are coming to the supply chain next? (50:45)Mentions:The Light of Other DaysLex Fridman PodcastUp Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerceMission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Resilience is often the key to success. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Common Thread Collective executives Orchid Bertelsen, Taylor Holiday, and Aaron Orendorff to discuss the seven characteristics of an “antifragile” ecommerce brand + 21 tactics. - Read the full article on developing an antifragile ecommerce brand: https://commonthreadco.com/blogs/coachs-corner/antifragile-ecommerce - Watch this podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6BkM1vbTYSM

Kyle Dake and David Taylor join the show to talk about Athletes For Medical Freedom + the guys recap Collegiate Duals day 2 and preview MatMan Open + Scuffle. Send in user submissions to 515-509-5071 or FRLsubmissions@flosports.tv! Use promo code FLO at takedownshop.com for 20% off. Run of Show 0:00 - Kyle Dake and David Taylor discuss the purpose and reasons behind Athletes For Medical Freedom (41:20) - Iowa vs NC State recap + takeaways (1:05:30) - Who is winning the NCAA team title? (1:13:14) - Midlands was canceled, but several people stepped up and now we have two tournaments to discuss (1:24:20) - Southern Scuffle preview + picks (1:45:10) - questions from friends

We're looking out to the (near) future at some very creative opportunities for eCommerce in NFTs. These ideas could help circumvent some of the margin pressure and economic challenges brands are facing today.  This episode features Taylor Holiday, the founder of Common Thread Collective. Before running an eCommerce agency he had his own D2C brand so he brings a ton of knowledge from being on both the brand and the agency side of eComm business. Taylor is an NFT enthusiast and has some brilliant ideas about NFTs and their place in the changing sphere of eCommerce.  In this fascinating conversation, you'll learn a ton about NFTs -- what they are and how you might be able to use them to combat margin pressure in your eCommerce brand.  Episode Highlights: 4:37 Taylors large business vision  6:23 The difference between running a brand and running an agency  7:30 Complexities around cash flow management & human relational problems 9:40 The importance of your product to the success of your brand  11:20 What the hell is going on with Facebook  14:33 Quantifying what other brands are seeing in metrics right now 15:19 The primary metric to care about post iOS launch  16:56 aMER (acquisition marketing efficiency rating): why it's critical  20:07 Diversification is not primarily an advertising strategy  23:39 Where to start if you're moving out of Facebook  25:05 Why Web3 is so exciting & what it means for current margin pressure  26:31 Margin innovation and opportunities in the metaverse 32:04 Why you shouldn't blow off investing in cryptocurrency  33:19 Examples of creativity with eCommerce in NFTs used to bring in fast cash 36:16 Why NFTs are a better version of Kickstarter  37:35 Creating built-in affiliates with NFT holders 38:44 The NFT as a community access token as well as an asset 43:13 How to continue to add value associated with holding your NFTs 47:34 Shopify beta opportunity for eCommerce in NFTs sold like a SKU  48:37 Using NFTs for access to special content or promotions  52:28 What's just interesting and what's actually important in the future of eCommerce in NFTs 56:51 What % of Shopify stores might invest in NFTs next year?  57:56 Raising funds & engaging a target market with NFTs 1:02:42 The calendar cleanse process that has helped Taylor manage his many priorities  Resources: @TaylorHoliday on Twitter Common Thread Collective. RTFKT The Hundreds, Adam Bomb Squad Mintgate.io Crypto Dads The Brand Growth Membership @a_brawn on Twitter Review or subscribe on iTunes

In this bonus (dare we say, “emergency”) episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast, Andrew is joined by CTC's VP of Marketing, Aaron Orendorff, and CEO, Taylor Holiday. Go behind-the-scenes as they share, benchmark, and examine the DTC metrics that matter most. “What we're hopeful to do with this information is to help add another layer of context to your questions and struggles in a way that provides a richer narrative than an individual anecdote or response.”

In this special episode, Andrew Faris and Taylor Holiday, CEO of Common Thread Collective, talk with Orchid Bertelsen — CTC's new Chief Operating Officer. With six years of experience at Nestle USA, Orchid explains why operational leadership is no long a luxury for DTC ecommerce brands. “The problem isn't that people aren't willing to take hills. They're willing to take hills, but sometimes they take the wrong ones.”

Taylor Holiday is the managing partner at Common Thread CoLinks MentionedTheBKShow.comFollow Taylor on Twitterhttps://commonthreadco.com/https://4x400.com/https://www.youradmission.co/DropshipBreakthru.com — Learn how to start an Ecommerce business from Episode #36 guest, Jon Warren and myselfDropshipPodcast.com — Listen to Jon Warren and I talk all things high ticket dropshipping and get looks behind the curtain of some of my businessesLearnWithChase.com — Learn Ecommerce Email Marketing with Episode #28 guest, Chase DimondLearnWithEzra.com — Check out Ezra Firestone's World Class course via my partner linkBenKnegendorf.com/bonjoro — Build better relationships with your customers by sending thank you videos directly from you, the founder, post purchaseBenKnegendorf.comWant to pick Ben's brain?  Book a 15-minute call!Join The BK Show's newsletterFollow Ben on TwitterFollow The BK Show on FacebookFollow The BK Show on InstagramSubscribe to The BK Show YouTube ChannelNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin The BK Show's newsletterHelp the showLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Ben up to?Follow Ben on TwitterFollow Ben on InstagramApply to work with Ben to grow your business.

Taylor Holiday is a leading expert on FB ads and eCommerce and managing partner at Common Thread Collective.Links MentionedTheBKShow.comDropshipBreakthru.comCommonThreadCo.comYourAdmission.co — Learn FB Ads from Taylor and his teamFollow Taylor on TwitterFollow Ben on TwitterSubscribe to The BK Show YouTube ChannelNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin The BK Show's newsletterHelp the showLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcasts 

In this episode of the Perfectly Mentored Podcast, Taylor Holiday, Managing Partner and CEO of Common Thread Collective,  joins Jason  to share some effective e-commerce tips and strategies that everyone in the industry should add to their game plans.Topics Covered:What's in store for e-commerce in 2021? [1:07]The importance of defining success [8:53]How important is it to build a brand instead of just selling products? [10:23]How important is omnipresence now? [12:25]Thoughts on smaller brands and how they should advertise themselves.  [15:22]What's the strategy for e-commerce brands to win today, tomorrow, and in the future? [19:54]How should brands look at their strategies and measure success when every platform is losing money? [24:37]How do e-commerce brands continue to grow without relying on Facebook? [31:08]What are your best tips for creating organic demand? [33:37]If someone's just getting into e-commerce right now, what's the plan of attack right out of the gate? [36:46]What are the biggest mistakes you see e-commerce brands making? [42:07]What is the most underrated channel for e-commerce brands today? [46:10]What are the most important metrics for an e-commerce brand to look at? [48:00]What is the most important advice for ecom store owners to know? [49:22]What are your top five rules to create a better working culture? [50:08]What are the must-have apps for managing your teams and clients in a remote working environment? [51:33]Connect with us:Perfectly Mentored InstagramWatch the Interviews on YouTubePerfectly Mentored FacebookConnect with Taylor HolidayTwitterWebsiteConnect with Jason Portnoyjportnoy.comInstagramWant to see how Jason and his team can help you grow your business? CLICK HERELike the episode? Watch and support us on YouTube

ROAS is plummeting. Reporting is a mess. And the sky is falling across paid media. As a guide through the storm, Taylor Holiday joins the pod to answer one question: “How in the world we are possibly analyzing Facebook ad data right now?”

What kind of businesses aren't afraid? What kind of businesses actually get better under pressure? What kind of businesses will thrive in the aftermath of iOS 14.5? We answer these questions and share how to build an anti-fragile ecommerce brand in our monthly installment of the "One Topic with Taylor" series featuring Taylor Holiday, CEO of Common Thread Collective.

Taylor Holiday is the Founder of Common Thread Collective, an Online Sales Agency.Their mission is to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams and they do this by focusing on helping consumer product e-commerce businesses scale from 0 - $20M.In this episode we talk about how Taylor went from playing a professional sport to starting an agency, and now holding company with 175 employees.Taylor talks about the things that have allowed him to succeed, his emphasis on finding great people & building strong teams, how they acquire & retain clients, and so much more!Make sure to drop both Taylor and myself a follow on Twitter:Taylor's Twitter profile link: https://twitter.com/TaylorHolidayMy Twitter profile link: https://twitter.com/ecomchasedimond​

Cody Wittick is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Kynship, an influencer marketing agency located in Orange County, CA.Links MentionedTheBKShow.comKynship.coKynship's Influencer Marketing CourseFollow Cody on TwitterFollow Cody on InstagramEpisode #7 with Taylor Holiday that was referencedDropshipWithJon.com — Learn how to start an Ecommerce business from Episode #36 guest, Jon WarrenDropshipPodcast.com — Listen to Jon Warren and I talk all things high ticket dropshipping and get looks behind the curtain of some of my businessesLearnWithChase.com — Learn Ecommerce Email Marketing with Episode #28 guest, Chase DimondLearnWithEzra.com — Check out Ezra Firestone's World Class course via my partner linkBenKnegendorf.com/bonjoro — Build better relationships with your customers by sending thank you videos directly from you, the founder, post purchase.  Start your Free 14 day trial through my partner link and see for yourself!BenKnegendorf.comWant to pick Ben's brain?  Book a 15-minute call!Join The BK Show's newsletterFollow Ben on TwitterFollow The BK Show on FacebookFollow The BK Show on InstagramSubscribe to The BK Show YouTube ChannelNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin The BK Show's newsletterHelp the showLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Ben up to?Follow Ben on TwitterFollow Ben on InstagramApply to work with Ben to grow your business.

This episode is packed with one liners that we can learn from. Taylor talks about how Dibbs is changing the fractional market and pushing us closer to a more digital investment class. 

The SparkNotes: We talk about blockchain, NFT's, the future of owned digital goods, and the potential impacts this has on the future of retail.

Taylor Holiday is the managing partner at Common Thread CoLinks MentionedTheBKShow.comFollow Taylor on Twitterhttps://commonthreadco.com/https://4x400.com/https://www.youradmission.co/DropshipWithJon.com — Learn how to start an Ecommerce business from Episode #36 guest, Jon WarrenDropshipPodcast.com — Listen to Jon Warren and I talk all things high ticket dropshipping and get looks behind the curtain of some of my businessesLearnWithChase.com — Learn Ecommerce Email Marketing with Episode #28 guest, Chase DimondLearnWithEzra.com — Check out Ezra Firestone's World Class course via my partner linkBenKnegendorf.com/bonjoro — Build better relationships with your customers by sending thank you videos directly from you, the founder, post purchaseBenKnegendorf.comWant to pick Ben's brain?  Book a 15-minute call!Join The BK Show's newsletterFollow Ben on TwitterFollow The BK Show on FacebookFollow The BK Show on InstagramSubscribe to The BK Show YouTube ChannelNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin The BK Show's newsletterHelp the showLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Ben up to?Follow Ben on TwitterFollow Ben on InstagramApply to work with Ben to grow your business.

For more than two decades, Dan McGaw has been engrossed in the world of marketing technology. And through the years, there has rarely been a new MarTech tool that Dan hasn’t given a shot. Why has he placed such an emphasis on knowing the latest tools available to marketers? Because every company, big or small, needs to invest in tools that will elevate their business rather than slow it down. Some tools are better than others, and sifting through the rubbish to find the diamonds is a daunting task. That’s where Dan and his company, McGaw.io, come in.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Dan discusses all of the marketing technology he’s bullish on at the moment, and why he believes ecommerce companies will be investing heavily in certain tools and operational activities. From campaign tracking, to multi-touch attribution, to recommendation engines, to personalization, Dan’s toolbelt has a tool for you, and he also has some comforting words for anyone who is worried about the potential of a cookieless future. Main Takeaways:Text Me Back: Companies are misusing SMS messaging as simply a way to send promotional messages. Instead, brands should think about texting as a way to open two-way communication with their customers, especially through the use of direct questions and interactive exchanges.An Easy Way to Personalize: There are opportunities to personalize the shopping experience that are being left on the table. Brands reflexively choose the easy option of sending a cart abandonment email reminding users what they left in their cart. What would be more effective is sending an email that utilizes their entire shopping history, including things they didn’t add to their cart. Just because they didn’t add a particular item, doesn’t mean they weren’t interested. After all, they simply could have been distracted or otherwise disposed of before making the transaction. C is for Cookie: Despite the fact that many people are worried about the death of third-party cookies, they will not completely disappear. And, in fact, there are actually already alternatives to cookies available that work in a similar way. Find out what they are and how to use them by tuning in!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---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone and welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder at mission.org. First things first, I would love it if you could hit subscribe and leave a rating and review, let me know how I'm doing and what you guys are interested in hearing in the future. All right, onto the show. Today, we have Dan McGaw, the CEO and founder of McGaw.io. Dan, welcome.Dan:Hey, how are you today?Stephanie:Good. How are you?Dan:I'm doing amazing. I'm living the dream right now. So having a ton of fun.Stephanie:You are. So tell me a bit about McGaw. So I was reading about your background and what you were known for, and someone called you the godfather of the marketing tech stack and one of the original growth hackers. So if I'm setting you up big here, let me know. But tell me, how did you get those names and what does your current company do?Dan:Yeah, great question. Well, I got those names from other people calling me, which is pretty fascinating to say the least because I remember the first time that I heard that I was like, "What?" But then it kind of caught some legs. So I've been in this space for over 20 years. So I've been doing marketing technology marketing since 1998. So I've been doing mass emails since before mass email was even a thing. So I just have been around for a really long time and I've been in the marketing technology space since before there was even a concept known as marketing technology. So definitely have had a long history of doing this. I've been an entrepreneur for a long time, even have been, another funny, fancy title that I was given is I am a United States ambassador of entrepreneurship.Stephanie:I saw that too. I didn't know what that meant though so I was afraid to put that one out there.Dan:Right? So I was selected by the United States State Department to be an ambassador of entrepreneurship to Mexico and I was flown to Mexico and I had to advise a bunch of companies and corporations and colleges on how to build entrepreneur ecosystem. So it's just been really fascinating. I think that the big thing that I will just say is I have a really big mouth and I'm always out there doing something stupid and I'm not afraid to say how I feel. So it's kind of wound me up with some cool places and I've done some really cool stuff, but yeah, I've had an amazing career. Everything from working at a cemetery, to making pizzas to now of course doing some really bad-ass marketing technology stuff. So I hope that helps.Stephanie:So what'd you do at the cemetery? Now you've piqued my interest there. We'll just have a conversation about that now.Dan:Yeah. Right. And that was the creepiest job I've ever had, but so awesome. I just did, I was a lands crew person and I weed whacked and I blew leaves. I think I was 14 in middle school, but I've always had the hustle so I just wanted to work and make cash. And I mean, I started my first company when I was 13 and was very successful in that business. So I've always just wanted to make money and that's actually how I got into marketing technologies. I saw marketing technology was going to blow up and we chose a vein in there and stuck with it and it worked out really well.Stephanie:That's cool. So how did you see that area was going to blow up? I mean, you're saying that it was before there was even a terminology around it. How did you see this as an industry I want to get into and now I know what to actually do to even be helpful.Dan:Yeah. Fascinating question. So my first company was basically in the music business. We started one of the first online booking agencies for DJs and producers. So everybody here has probably watched the Fyre documentary on Hulu or Netflix. I literally did that same exact business except for I was not a fraud, which is so fascinating. We started an online website and bulletin boards marketing DJs and producers that basically would do raves. Today we now call it EDM and it's all this big billion dollar industry, but back then it was like nothing. And I was just young and didn't know what the hell I was doing. And so I said, "Hey, we're going to figure out how to promote these DJs because I love raves like any ..." What 13 year old goes to raves? But either way-Stephanie:Yeah, really. Where are your parents? We don't know where Dan went. He's been gone for a week.Dan:Supporting me a 100%, crazy enough, but I started that and then really started figuring out the internet and none of our competitors were using the internet. They were still just like relationship based. And as we went through that process, I learned a little bit about development, HTML and nobody was doing anything. So so far in like those days, AOL didn't even have a concept of mass email. You had to get white listed to send mass emails. So I just kind of started doing it to come to find out that there wasn't really any technology back then to do this stuff. So before there was all this tech to be able to make it happen, I was already kind of making it happen manually. So I got really involved, naturally Google analytics which was urchin came out and like ad tech became and there wasn't MarTech. It was just ad tech at the time, Google analytics and traffic tracking.Dan:I got really big into UTM tracking, which is kind of the first bit of it. So fast forward a little bit to like 2000, I think like 11 or something like that, Kissmetrics was a large analytics company. I got hired there as the head of marketing. I was hired to replace Neil Patel, one of the founders. So I wound up becoming like the head of marketing at one of the rocket ship analytics companies. But all the stuff in between the middle there was kind of you just made it up as you went. And then 2011, 2012 was when MarTech kind of like took off and I saw that as a humongous opportunity. So I've just kind of have stayed in that industry.Stephanie:Okay, cool. And what brands do you work with today for context?Dan:Yeah, really, really good question. I mean, our clients weren't ... So our company mission is to help companies of all sizes realize that their customer data is their most valuable asset. So we work with some really, really small companies all the way up to some really, really big ones. So some big ones that people would know like King's Hawaiian Bread. We do a lot of their implementation work. We are managing their ecommerce. Hydro.com, which is like the Peloton of rowing. We do work with them. Some other people might be familiar with like forksoverknives.com. They were a long time client of ours. We no longer work with them, but I mean, we helped blow them up. These are some really popular brands that people would be aware of, but we also work with some of the MarTech companies. So even Kissmetrics has hired us. Segment.com has hired us. Looker which is owned by Google has hired us. So it's really across the board. It's been a lot of fun.Stephanie:Cool. And what kind of challenges do you see the bigger brand struggling with today? And is it kind of similar to maybe with the smaller brands that you work with? Like same kind of thing or are they very different problems you have to focus on?Dan:I think the problems are exactly the same. I think the tactics which are being used are slightly different because the tool set changes, but there's two primary problems that most companies have and that's when they come to us, which is great, is they either lack visibility into their customer journey or they lack the ability to engage in the customer journey. And this is a pretty big problem that every business faces is that they can't see what's happening in that customer journey or they can't act in there. And that's where the marketing stack which is what our specialty really is, is we help companies basically connect all the tools together, integrate them, operate them and be able to gain visibility into that journey so they can provide engagement there.Dan:And this is one of the biggest problems that you're facing in marketing today because everybody's figured out ad tech. Everybody's figured out email automation and everybody is kind of trying to figure out analytics now, but there's still this huge middle and bottom that nobody understands and that's really where our company kind of sits nice and sweetly. So the customer journey is huge right now. I mean, that's what everybody's focused on.Stephanie:Cool. So where do you see companies going wrong right now in the customer journey? Like are there similar things or like you guys all keep doing the same thing and it's messing everything up or is everything very different, all the problems that you maybe discover as you were starting to look into how the brands are operating.Dan:Yeah. The biggest thing that we see that that's fairly consistent, and it's the thing that no marketer really focuses on is it's the taxonomy of the integration. So like what does taxonomy mean? So every time that somebody does an action or we learn an attribute about somebody who's coming through our funnel, that's got to have a name to it. It's got to have a label or as you might call, nomenclature. We've got to all call it the same thing. And that's a big problem that we see across organizations and I'll try to put this ... If you're working with an online education company, the marketing team is calling it a signup, but the development team is calling it an enrollment, but customer success is calling it a registration. And the problem is when this happens and the data all goes into the systems, you now have three attributes for the same exact action, and it makes it really hard to tie all these things together.Dan:So the fundamental problem that we see most companies have is that they just don't have a consistent taxonomy across the stack. So when they finally start looking at the customer journey, they have it all in different namings, and then they have to spend all their time transforming things to get them to line up. So that foundational thing is the last thing everybody focuses on, but when they get that right and it works across the entire stack using a unified taxonomy, which sounds so technical but it really isn't, they really are able to create magic because now everybody is calling the first name of a customer by first underscore name in the analytics, but in the attributes you see in marketing automation is Fname. Right? So that's usually the key problem that we see is that taxonomy is wrong. And then the second problem that we see is that the tools are not connected.Stephanie:Yeah. So it's funny talking about how the taxonomy is wrong. A lot of people listening might be like, that's so easy. And I'd say for a startup like starting out, it's very easy if you know to do that from the start. Like of course, have your variables, make sure they're exactly what you want and train people up, have your data dictionary, whatever you may have so everyone uses the same term. But actually when it's a bigger company which I've seen like back in my Google days, everyone's operating off different things. How do you bring the org together and all the different departments to be able to not only agree like this is the variable, but then make sure everyone's using it that way? Because that's actually a lot trickier than I think some might think.Dan:Yeah, it's extremely, extremely hard to get that cross department alignment. And it's fascinating because like this is one of the things that a growth team would ultimately help with, is kind of cross department alignment in regards to these things. But growth is always focused on action, not necessarily planning. So a new companies or I don't want to say new companies, excuse me. The new role a lot of companies are rolling out is revenue operations, marketing operations, sales operations, revenue operations is the big position that SaaS companies are hiring because it straddles across marketing sales and customer success And that's the big thing that's happening. And I think in a lot of the enterprise companies, you're going to see a lot more of these revenue operations style roles that are coming out that try to align it.Dan:Because everybody's realizing if your data's crap, okay, great, we can't do any of these cool things. This is where a lot of companies are getting their CIOs involved. I think the conversation over the past two years has really shifted away from, hey, we're just talking to marketing technology. So now the CIO calls the shots for all of this because the CIO is the one who makes the decision on business intelligence and all that. So I think a lot of CIOs own the problem. I don't think that they understand the problem because it's outside of their purview, which is sales and marketing. So I think it will be really, really hard, but it's really important for a company to have good data. And without good data, you're kind of, you can't do machine learning, you can't do artificial intelligence, you can't do personalization. But right now it's the CIO, which I think needs to hire the revenue operations person to really get that done.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. And a side note, if anyone's like, "I really want to hear more from CIOs," we have a whole podcast called IT visionaries where we interview CIOs from fortune 500 companies. So go check it out. So okay. You get your data all set and correct at the company that you're working with. What's the next thing that you encounter that's either an issue or that you see happening a lot right now?Dan:Well, I mean, just to make sure, I mean, the taxonomy, the data dictionary like you said, which I think is possibly a more common term or a schema. I mean, there's just so many ways to call this, which is ridiculous. The integration of the tools I think is really, really important. A lot of companies don't understand the way that tools can now integrate. We have a concept that we call data recycling. You typically see companies that are looking for what's known as we want our source of truth or our single record of truth. And for us, we find that to be a really, really bad model. What you should be trying to do is mirror your data across many, many different tools over and over and over again, and then recycle this data throughout the entire tools. If you have a single record of truth, which is always great, that means that you're helping one team and holding back many other teams.Dan:So we try to make it so that we recycle the data as much as we can and that's through basically data recycling. Leveraging a customer data platform is always really helpful for this, leveraging tools like Zapier, leveraging tools like tray.io, Workado is always really, really good, but you have to string the systems together along in a very, very structured manner to make it so that that data can even flow. Because even if you call everything the same, if nothing's connected in the right way, you're still not going to make any progress. So integration is also a key part of that.Stephanie:Yep. Cool. So now thinking about a little bit farther down the line like maybe when it comes to actually either interacting with the customer or guiding them around on your website or something, what things can be improved there because I've talked to quite a few companies or people on this podcast who say, "Any plugins, get away with all the plugins, they just slow your website down. You just need to focus on website speed. But then you were mentioning earlier how much do you love tools, and so tell me more about that.Dan:Yeah. I mean, I definitely think website speed is extremely, extremely important. I mean, when you're a large ecommerce company, speed is obviously paramount because it affects everything from SEO rankings to people actually converting on the website. But I also think you have to very much focus on personalization and creating a customer journey for the user. I think there's two kinds of use here. I mean, one marketing automation is great because it enables you to do so much, but sometimes we lose the human element and we kind of forget that people are still humans. They want to have a communication channel with us. So you want to make sure that you can personalize the experience and tailor that experience as much as you can. But at the same time, you just don't want to overdo it. So we focus a lot on personalization throughout the website, getting people back to where they want it to be, back to where they left off.Dan:And this would be, so as an example where you don't want to use a plugin because you want to let them use their experience. As things are happening on the website, we can track that in real time. We can save that in marketing automation, we can save that in any tool. So when the person leaves the website, we can very easily send them an email saying, hey, picked up where you left off. Especially if it's ecommerce, right? Last product that they viewed, they don't need to add it to their cart. I think it's the stupidest thing that we do. We send cart abandonment emails to people when they add something to their cart, because we think they have interest. If you send people an email which showed them the last five items that they've viewed, it adds the same value, right?Dan:Just because I added it to my cart, yes, it means I'm interested. Just because I didn't add it to my cart doesn't mean that I'm not interested in it. It means I probably have a five-year-old that's distracting me and I didn't get to add it to my cart. So we see allowing people to pick up where they left off as a really, really easy thing to do. But personalization in helping them accomplish their journey I think is the biggest thing. Marketers job is ... I come from a developer company where the marketer's job was, we were there to manipulate and trick people. And it's like that's not my job.Dan:But a marketer's job in my opinion is to basically help somebody accomplish their goals by serving them what they wanted in the first place. Right. It's to create that magical customer experience, knowing what they already wanted and serving them that on a silver platter, not tricking them to figure out, oh, you should've bought this, right? And I think that's where growth hacking went bad a few years back is it got a little like slimy and really it's about how do we just create the best customer experience for them through personalization?Stephanie:Yeah. So sometimes I think that personalization that I could see it going too far and I've talked to this a bit on the show before of like when you call in on the phone and it's like a robot and they're pretending to type, and they're trying to personalize it to your name and they're jacking with your name or sometimes you get an email and it's so over the top, like Stephanie, I saw this, this and this and it made me thought of you and whatever. I'm like, "Oh, creepy." How do you walk that fine line of giving people something that is helpful, but not being creepy.Dan:Yeah. And just because you're using the word creepy, it brings back some awesome ... I have a webinar and deck that I did before COVID happened. I was traveling the country doing this talk about automation without being creepy. But what does creepy really mean? So what I advise everybody who's listening to this podcast, grab your cell phone and I need you to go to your text messages and I want you to text (415) 915-9011. I'll just say a number again, (415) 915-9011. And I just want you to text the word creepy to that number and then follow along with the text prompt. There's a bot that will follow along with creepy. And then if you're really, really well known on the internet, you're going to get a super creepy email that will surprise you on what the internet already knows about you and that we have access to through your email. So either way, nice experiment for your people to go try, but-Stephanie:I want to do that now. Now that piques my interest. I don't know if I'm well-known enough on the internet though, but we'll see. It'll pull things from like Facebook. I'm like, "Here's what you're doing, Stephanie, back in high school."Dan:Yeah. We'll see. I mean, and usually the minimum that you're going to get is like we get your zip code or it might have your wrong zip code, but there's for myself and had over 300 attributes. I was like, "Holy crap, the internet knows way too much about me." But that being said, you do follow this line of creepiness to straddle, right? And you have to understand like target as an example can predict with nearly 90% accuracy that you're going to be pregnant within three months or you are pregnant within three months and that's crazy data science that you have and that blurs the line of creepiness. What you have to understand is that you don't want to impact life moments like that. Always, you don't want to precede those things, but what you have to figure out is how do you understand what they're looking for and then just serve that element to them?Dan:Because with an email address and with your IP address, we can basically find out anything we want, which is really, really terrifying to think about. So you have to make sure that you're just superseding what somebody is probably already looking for and there's definitely enrichment that you can get. So knowing that it's raining in somebodies area and sending them an email is not necessarily a bad thing, but you don't need to tell them that you know that you know it's raining, right? Like don't say, "Hey, it's raining, you should buy an umbrella." But yes, it's okay to send them umbrellas and rain boots and things like that, which banana republic knows how to send emails based upon that but they don't say it's raining. So there's a lot of ways that you can be helpful to somebody without telling them that what you're doing. But I mean, you can be really creepy if you want.Stephanie:I mean, I think that it sounds simple, but I like that where it's you have all this information, but you don't have to be like, "Hey, here's the zip code you live in? And apparently there's this festival going on right now." Like you can send something where it's like, oh, how did you know? Cool, okay. That's helpful because now I know of an event or whatever nearby without you saying, I know exactly the attributes of why I'm sending you this email because of this or whatever. So that's interesting.Dan:Yeah. There's an API for that too. When you talk about the events, I immediately think of companies that have APIs that allow you to have events and people's areas. So definitely an API for that nowadays.Stephanie:There you go. So what are some of your favorite tools that you're using where you're seeing the biggest success with right now? And it can be marketing tools., it can be stuff around like helping the customer journey. I mean, what comes to mind where you're like, "Oh, 2021, I'm really leaning into these things or we're implementing these things on our customer's websites."Dan:Yeah. So there's probably two primaries that I would go with. One, I'm super big fan of text message marketing, but I think a lot of companies get it wrong in the fact that they use it as a promotional channel and they use it as spray and pray. So I think text is really, really big. We use a software called autopilot, which is our marketing automation tool. They have an integration with Twilio so you can build a Twilio bot. So earlier I said, "Hey, text this number and text this word to it." It adds you to a subscription list and then it will automatically send you information and it can talk back and forth with you. And those types of technologies are where you really get some interesting engagement from consumers in regards to your services. So definitely is a real unique channel, but I wouldn't say that that's something that you would leverage on your website all the time.Dan:However, as somebody's going through your checkout flow and you collect their cell phone information, this is a way that you can reach out to them. Hey, we shipped your order to you and it has arrived today, right? Provide them helpful tips and then say, "Hey, you received your order. On a scale from one to five, how did it arrive?" And things like that. And providing this two way communication channel is really, really good for consumers. It gives them a communication channel. You do have to connect it to a support system and things like that. But customers really find it unique when you're trying to have a two-way conversation with them compared to like buy my 20% off thing.Dan:People hate getting those spam promotions. They hit stop more than you would like to think. So I think that for me, leveraging the SMS bots, whether that be through Autopilot and I think there's a company called Text In, which does really, really good there. There's another company called salesmsg.com. And no, I'm not talking about the Panda Express MSG, but salesmessage.com. They're more integrated with HubSpot or more meant for sales teams, but they work really, really good for customer support too. So text is huge for me. And then the flip side-Stephanie:How do you think about engaging people in texts? Because that's an issue where, I mean, I even think about like World Market right now just sent me a text this morning, like oh, 20% off. They send it to me like every week. I'm like is every week, 20% off week? I start to lose interest and I just haven't had the time to hit stop yet. But how do you think about building a flow that's going to keep your customer actually engaged and excited to see your texts coming in? So I feel like it's a two-way thing instead of just blasting them with promotions.Dan:Yeah. It's got to be really personalized. And this is why when we think about text messages, we think about it from a helper perspective. Right? So we have to think about like the things that are going to optimize their customer experience, not the things that are going to help us, right? Sending somebody a 20% discount is not helping them, that's helping us. So when we think about the change in that fundamentals is of course like when somebody is coming through your website, like hey, you can of course, hey, do you want to be updated with sales and promotions? Right. But I would target it more, hey, do you want to be made aware when we launch new skirts or hey, do you want to be made aware when we do these specific things, and try to only send the messages what's they're requesting which is going to help them in whatever they're trying to accomplish.Dan:And you get unique opportunities like when somebody is going through the checkout experience, right? Like, hey, do you want us to keep you aware of certain things that they're already interested in or hey, do you want to be shipping notifications? Do you want us to keep you aware of your shipping notifications? And those are good ways to get people going, but asking questions is going to get you much more than, hey, here's 20% off. Right. So I think asking questions, that's where the bot part comes into play is asking the question, like do you feel that our customer experience is optimal? Can you reply back with a one to 10 on how your checkout experience was? People respond back with a seven or two or a five. That's the interaction they're looking for, not hey, here's 20% off, right?Stephanie:Yeah. Unless you walk in the door. That's when I always think I'm like, if I walk into the door of a retail location and then I get that text, cool. I'm happy with it. But if you're just sending it to me when I'm at home ... Yeah. It is so possible. I know I'm like, they've got the beacons in the stores, you can do it. There's so many ways to do it now, but I don't see many brands at least retail locations doing that quite yet. But maybe I just don't go into retail stores obviously.Dan:Well, yeah. Yeah. The retail stores is hard. Yeah. I mean, I definitely think if anybody on this podcast wants to do that, let's do that because I know how to do that, leveraging radar, mobile apps and all that stuff. So like totally cool. I think my favorite campaign was by Burger King. They said if you were within 500 meters of a McDonald's, we will send you a free coupon for a free Whopper and you have five minutes to buy it. So if you had the Burger King app, came in within 500 meters or so I think it was even maybe a hundred yards of a McDonald's, you would get an instant push notification, you have five minutes to get your free Whopper. Holy crap. I mean, can we say contextual?Dan:But yeah, that's all possible. I agree with you. If I walked into JC Penney and JC Penny sent me a 10% off discount, I would totally use it. We were working with an ice-cream retailer, which I can unfortunately say the name. They're trying to create a loyalty program, but they couldn't figure out how to do it. And we're like, "Dude, just put a fricking number on the side of your building that says text loyalty now to this number and you're in our loyalty program. And then connect that to beacons and you can do more stuff with it, connect it to your app and do more stuff with it." And-Stephanie:Did they do it?Dan:No, they didn't listen because they were too traditional, who needs technology either way. But [crosstalk] is super powerful.Stephanie:That'd be a really good thing to do now that I'm in Austin area. So hey, anyone listening from Austin, give me a shout out. I'm here now. Yeah. But that's a good area to do that because there's so much like artwork and graffiti that turns into artwork on all the buildings out here, but people pay attention to it. So I think it does depend on the city you're in of like, are people open to that or will they see it and be like, "Man, there's writing on a building."Dan:Yeah. I think text is awesome. I mean, you just, people suck at it and I think people suck at most marketing in general. They just try to spray out there and hope for the best. So the one other technology, there's two technologies that we're testing a lot right now. One is called ConvertFlow, convertflow.com which is really, really good. The other one is right message. And both of the technologies are relatively the same. They're a pop-up technology that happens in your website, except for they're integrated in with your marketing automation solution and they also track a lot of what's going on on the website. So you can provide real time personalization to the website based upon what people clicked or what people did. And for anybody who follows the B2B space, there's like these drift chat bots.Dan:So if somebody comes to the site, a pop-up comes up, what is your goal today? Did you want to see a demo? Do you want to see this? Do you want to see this? People click on it. And then only the chat bot is able to control like what happens next. The difference with these technologies, specifically ConvertFlow is that when those types of things come up, you can click on something, it will drive you different places on the website, but it can also change the headline copy of the page. It can also change like things that are happening. So if somebody comes back, it can be like, "Welcome back, Dan. We hope that we were able to help you in your last visit. Last time you left off, you were looking at socks, let's go look at socks again, right? Or is there something else we can help you find?"Dan:And then of course you could constantly be contextually changing the experience for that user. For us, ConvertFlow has one of the most powerful engines to it and it's super cheap. These two twins created the platform, super, super cool guys, but they're really good at that. And then the flip side would be right message, which right message is more of a kind of a chatbot-esq. It doesn't change your websites, but it does constantly provide you personalization to push people down the funnel based upon what they sent.Stephanie:Cool. Like how many tests should a company be running to see what works and then how much should they pull it back and narrow it down to?Dan:Yeah, man, you should be running tons of tests. I mean, there's a linear line between the number of tests that you run and as well as the growth that you can create at a company. So I would just say you should run as many as you possibly can, that you can hit statistical significance with, speaking of which we have a tool for that. If you Google AB testing calculator Chrome extension, go check it out. It'll help you know if you have statistical significance. But yeah, I mean really, you should be running tests all the time. You shouldn't be launching anything that's not a test in our opinion. That's a big part of our business.Dan:So companies like Hydro, we run all of their AB Testing experiments and we're always running tests, right? So like for me, you should not be doing anything unless you're testing it. The thing that I would just add as a caveat of that is you have to have enough traffic to run the test. You have to hit statistical significance and you have to know what you're doing from a data perspective because false positives, I lost a company $125,000 in 24 hours because I had a false positive. I made a mistake. Luckily, this was a long time ago, but-Stephanie:What was the false positive? Tell me the story, or backstory of that.Dan:Yeah. I mean, a great problem that you have is that people only focus on one metric. So when you create an AB test, the test, I worked at a company called codeschool.com. Going back to that developer centric company, we were an online education company for developers. We created an experiment called the summer school campaign or summer camp campaign. And I had optimized the AB test for sign-ups and then purchases. The problem was we didn't optimize the test for lifetime value. Lifetime value was 75% less on the winner of the test. So we saw an immediate increase in conversions. We got super, super excited, come to find out that those users were 75% less valuable based upon that test.Dan:So there's a thing known as you have to basically reverse look at tests. So when they've been running for two months, go back and look at that to see if it hurt lifetime value, it hurt retention, anything like that. But we basically had just wrote a headline, which wasn't 100% percent true to the developer. Like it wasn't 100% in line, so they wound up churning after their first I think it was two months. The other users who didn't see that headline stuck around for like six months. So it was just-Stephanie:Okay. So was the headline, it made them think it was something that it wasn't where they came in-Dan:Yeah.Stephanie:Okay, got it. Yeah.Dan:That's what the developer said that we manipulate people and it was like, no, we just had a misalignment in regards to what we wrote. I wasn't trying to manipulate somebody, but either way, that's marketing.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, to me, that's just always a good reminder that all of this is a long game and anything that's focused on like a quick hit and trying to pique someone's interesting and get them in, it's probably not going to work out long-term.Dan:And if anybody knows of Kissmetrics, that was the whole reason why the company went out of business and got sold to a private equity firm is there was too many people at the leadership level that were focused on quick hits and it's what put us out of business. You got to focus on, you've got to have a good mix of short-term and long-term focus and why we've been so successful and are still successful even at our company and our clients, we focus on the longterm as much as we do on the short term.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. Very cool. So when thinking about marketing and all these data attributes that you can have on your customer, how do you think about a, sorry, a potential cookieless world?Dan:Oh, it doesn't bother me at all. Cookies, whether you like it or not, the cookie is not going to die. It's third-party cookies they're talking about which are going to die. It's not first party cookies. The problem that people don't understand is we've already come up with millions of solutions to create better first-party cookies, if I could talk, better first-party cookies, which we hide third-party cookies behind. So I mean, we just had a whole debate about this last week.Dan:Cname cloaking and proxies and all this stuff. There's already a ton of ways to kind of hide it and change it. The cookie's not dying. It's just the way that the cookie gets used is what they're saying is going to die. But cookieless world is going to happen. Is it necessarily going to be ... I almost want to say it's a false or that the cookie is going to die because you can't completely kill a cache in a user's browser about what we know about the user or you'll break the internet.Dan:And the internet is not prepared to completely get rid of all those technologies, so there's always going to be a hack around it. So we have a technology called utm.ao that we use for campaign tracking. So if anybody out there uses UTMs, they have a stupid UTM spreadsheet. We solve that problem. But the real problem is that the technology is now making it so that before you even before you even get to the website, we know who you are. So that's all going to be passed to the website through URL parameters, and there's all kinds of hokey stuff there. So I guess like I'm not that stressed, if that makes any sense.Stephanie:So why are other people so stressed? Because I listened to different ad tech podcasts and other marketing shows. And I mean, there's been so many conversations where people are stressing about it. So why are you so chill about it then and they are so worried?Dan:Yeah. Well one, if you're an ad tech company, Apple's out to cut your throat, right? Like there's just no way around it. Facebook is in a complete battle with Apple, which I think one, Apple is totally doing this for a promotional stunt because their job is to own your data, right? Like don't let them fool you, they know every single thing you do and they hold it on. It's the reason why they're one of the most valuable companies in the world is they know every single action you do. So for a Facebook, it's definitely really, really concerning because they have to be able to get companies like, and I'll just use one of our clients, King's Wine to figure out how to do Cname cloaking and proxy changes and stuff like that, which is really, really hard.Dan:But if you're using myself as like your consulting firm, like that's our job is to figure that stuff out and to solve those problems for you and to deal with it. So I guess like for me, I'm not stressed because that's what we do. But for the ad companies, like how the hell did they get everybody else to know how to do that, right? They've got to teach mission.org how to load a advertising pixel in this certain way and there's no way that mission.org is going to figure that out unless they hire me. So that would be the reason why there's the big difference is I actually know how it works. Most people have no idea how any of this stuff works.Stephanie:Yeah. Okay. Well that's good then. So then no one has to be worried and just hire someone who can help you, sounds like the gist of it.Dan:The general thesis of it. And it's expensive. It's a lot of service that stuff. So I mean, the problem is that 95% to 98% of the internet is not going to be able to understand it or fix it and that's where a lot of people are really panicking on how do we get this done? But there's always a hack.Stephanie:Yeah. And a certain point though, I wonder if Apple is going to have to change the way they do things. I mean, I know that they have been like ruling the market for a long time, but I see now that they're trying to get into something like podcasting and they have big competitors out there who already know how to do podcasts advertising, and they know how to show the dynamic ads and actually showcase metrics to the advertisers. There's so much competition when it comes to that. I can see Apple having to change the way they do things and provide more data and show the ROI instead of being like the black box of like yeah, just put it on here and it's in your best interest because we're a big platform.Dan:Yeah. Well, we have to remember that they did invent the pod cast and that came from the iPod. But they're allowed to, I mean, I think when you have that dominance, you're allowed to be slow to things. I mean, when we think back, I used to run a bunch of mobile app companies and like they sucked at giving us data about the mobile app. So we had to figure out all these other things. But when you're the gateway to the rest of it, right, when you're the heroine of the drugs, you can be a little late to solving your problems and that's unfortunately how Apple is. So they're going to be late to the party, but when they step on the throat of anybody else, they make changes. And I think the easiest way to think about it, does anybody remember the QR code? And it hasn't gone anywhere, but all the QR code apps, there's none of them, they're gone because it's part of your camera now. So when-Stephanie:It's funny how you forget about that. Like I remember being like, "Oh, which QR code app is the best one that I need?" And it's like, they're all the same, just pick one.Dan:And now none of them are around, just like the calculator apps. And like when Apple wants to ... And in our business, one of the things that we try to help our customers figure out and this is something I hope all of your podcast people listen, if you've never read the book, Crossing The Chasm, it's a really, really good read. But you have what's known as basically these innovators, which are out front. Most innovators die, right? They just don't live forever. And what we've recommended to our clients is be the early majority, right? Don't be the person always out trying to be a hipster because then you wind up finding out that like, hey, this stupid business idea blows up. I mean, I was put out of business one time by Facebook changing a feature like, oh my God, I can't believe Facebook changed a feature I went out of business.Dan:There's definitely things that other big companies, when you build on their platform, you have to be aware of that if they just decide to get into that space, you could go out of business or you could not have a feature which your business is around. So we always recommend people don't always try to be the innovator, wait for there to like be something solid, wait for something to be proven, wait for something to be figured out. Because if you're always going from the next hot flip to the next hot flip, and you're always a hipster, you're going to spend 10X more money than I am, and I'm going to still make the same amount of money if not more than you and that's always fascinating.Stephanie:Yeah. I also recommend that book and it's come up a few times on here. It's a really good one. I mean, how do you think about companies relying on a platform? Because I see so many brands right now just launching on Amazon, for example, and not even worrying about building out their own website presence or even developing their own community. Like how do you think about that?Dan:Well, I think my opinion would be different if they would have been doing that 15 years ago. Right. But if you've ever read the book, The Everything Store About Jeff Bezos, just understand he is coming for your throat too. I mean, they're just like Apple. If you read what they did to the book publishing industry, I'm like, "Holy crap. Wow, they completely gutted that industry." So for now I mean, there's not much you can do about it. You have to play with it. But I think it's definitely imperative that you create your own online presence. And I think this is where Shopify is trying to come fill a void is there is definitely, you have to do both at the same time because at any time Amazon is just going to come out with Amazon basic of your product and you're done. They've done it hundreds of times, if not thousands of times.Dan:So you do have to build your own kind of side sliver as a brand. And I think the best book that I think I've ever read, which made me understand not only my childhood and why I am the way I am as an adult is the book Antifragile.Stephanie:Yeah. You seem to love them.Dan:Yeah. It's such a great book. But you have to have optionality and if you put all of your cards on Amazon, well, you don't have any optionality. And I think creating those options is a huge business. I mean, I read 42 books last year. So we want to get into like talking about all the cool things I learned just last year on that stuff. But optionality is huge. I think it's really, really important.Stephanie:Yeah, we've had a great guest on from, let's see, it was Taylor Holiday from, I think something collective. I can't remember what his company was, but he said, "You need to figure out how you can basically win even when you're wrong." So like when your models are wrong, which to me I'm like, "Yeah, you're talking about being anti fragile and making sure that you won't fail, even if your models set you in the wrong direction, how can you still benefit and have upside?" Which I thought was really interesting to frame it that way.Dan:Yeah. And I think in regards to the platforms and I'll try to bring this back to like the marketing technology platforms, there's a lot of optionality that you can look at and you need to have a backup plan to your backup plan in regards to marketing technology tools. I mean, Marketo got bought by Adobe and that's going to revolutionize the way their product works. And I mean, there's a lot of things in Marketo that suck already and Adobe buying it just means that it's going to slow down, right?Dan:So you have to be prepared to be able to say, "What's my backup plan to Marketo? And if I was to switch, what is that going to take?" And that's one reason why we recommend a lot of companies to leverage customer data platforms because it makes switching easy, but then you run into the same problem. Well, if you have a customer data platform and all of my data goes to the CDP, well, what happens when that CDP gets acquired? Right. What happens when Twilio buys Segment for 3.2 billion? How does that change my ... what's going to happen to the CDP? So you just have to ask those questions, like what are my other options with these platforms when I choose it and how much am I baked into this tool? And if I lost this tool tomorrow, what would it take to replace it?Stephanie:Yeah, that's really good to have a mindset like that and be thinking about all angles. So really good. So from a general ecommerce standpoint, what kind of trends are you guys preparing for in 2021?Dan:Well, first one, just going back, the death of the cookie.Stephanie:Or apparently you're not preparing at all and you're like, "I'm good."Dan:No, I mean, we started ... I mean, if Google the death of cookies McGaw.io and we wrote a blog post about this a year ago. So we've been tracking this for a long time. I think that the biggest thing that we are focused on, the biggest thing that we see in ecommerce right now, everybody wants to do multi-touch attribution. Everybody's trying to figure out how do they do multi-touch attribution to better align their return on ad spend. Because the key problem that you have is all these retailers are spending millions of dollars a year on advertising spend. And then if they look in Facebook, they see a conversion in Google, they see a conversion in LinkedIn or whatever the platform they see a conversion and they're attributing one sale to five different conversions. So they're really trying to say, "We understand that those five conversions we see in these different platforms or from one purchase, and we need to be able to pull that data together." So touch attribution is huge.Dan:We're extremely well-known in that space so a lot of companies are working with us on that, but every company is a unique snowflake for multi-touch attribution. Recommendation engines are probably the other thing that we see a lot of companies really trying to figure out. There's a cool technology called blue shift. Really, really good for ecommerce especially if you have thousands of products. They use machine, excuse me, machine learning to consume your catalog. And then also use machine learning to distribute that catalog as a recommendation to people based upon the best channel that suits them at the best time for them. Blue shift is crushes it. Great technology, Josh, the CMO or CGO, chief growth officer is a good buddy of mine.Dan:So we see a lot of the trend in regards, how do we make proper recommendations on the right channel at the right time with the right message. And then the last thing would just be customer data platforms. So those are the big three trends. I mean, one of the reasons why we're crushing it right now is like we know CDPs better than almost anybody else, customer data platforms. And customer data platforms, it's not a fad, it's not a trend. It really is the future on how you need to manage your data and your customer data specifically. So those would be the three big things that I would lean on for 2021 and going, especially into 2022.Stephanie:Cool. So you were just mentioning channels. What kind of channels are you guys most bullish on right now? Maybe are there any new ones out there? We've had a lot of people mention TikTok. You and I were talking about Clubhouse earlier. Is there anything that you guys are kind of shifting your focus towards and trying out?Dan:Oh, I love TikTok. Man, they tried to hire me as a brand ambassador and I so wanted to do it, but we had to turn it down and I love TikTok. I spent so much time on there. It's ridiculous.Stephanie:I do too. It's great.Dan:I think TikTok is great, a really, really cheap channel, but you got to learn how to do it, but it's a harder curve so I think that's good. I think that there's a lot of ... YouTube, oh my God, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. We haven't even hit how valuable YouTube is. I mean, they're going to be ridiculous. So I think between those two channels, figuring out video is going to be really, really important for companies across the channels with TikTok and YouTube. I think if you can't figure that out in the next five years, you're really going to struggle. There's a cool tool called Fleeq, F-L-E-E-Q.com, which will help you do that for video. So I think YouTube and TikTok are huge if you want to be successful. I think there are some other really surprising ones. Like I always try to tell people you should invest more in Bing. Bing's really cheap. I always think that's always really, really good.Stephanie:I haven't heard Bing yet. That's a new one. Okay.Dan:Yeah. It's just so cheap. Not as much volume, but just the per dollar comparison is good. And the last one that I'll just say is direct mail. Like, oh my gosh, it's so cheap.Stephanie:What are you guys doing in direct mail right now? Because that was also something I've brought up a couple of times of like so many people are now at home and I am delighted when I get mail that's not something spammy where I can actually look through a great catalog and like, oh, this is actually cool stuff. And I always mention the Trader Joe's pamphlet where I'm like, "They have really fun content that also sells their products as well." But it's, I mean, I look forward to that one. So how are you guys approaching the direct mail piece?Dan:Yeah, so depending upon what the integration ... I mean, there's a company called lob.com, which makes direct mail really, really easy. And we leverage autopilot as our automation tool and we've been able to, I mean, personalize tons of stuff. In regards to giving people recommendations, we are able to literally write text on the postcards saying the technologies they use through data enrichment. So there's a lot of stuff that you're able to do there, but we have to remember is like sending somebody a thank you card or a birthday card in the mail as direct mail like happy birthday. It's your birthday coming up soon. Right? Like that's not hard, but people love it. And with COVID, I think the best quote that I had somebody say to me into COVID, the most exciting part of my day is walking to the end of my driveway and collecting my mail. And I was like, "What?"Dan:So I think it's just a great medium to use. And if you build it as part of your automated personalization journey, I mean, once again, you don't have to know it's raining in somebody's area to send them direct mail. Right. But you can know that it's going to snow two weeks ahead of time or there's a good possibility, you could send them a coupon for snow boots. Right. Like I just, the options are endless. So yeah, I mean, I think it's great. Hey, you abandoned your cart and you left these three things on and you print like three things on there. I mean, the personalization is really, really crazy and awesome.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. All right. So we have a quick lightning round brought to you by Salesforce commerce cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?Dan:Can I admit I'm scared? Yeah.Stephanie:You can admit it. Yes. All right. I'll start with the easier ones first. So you sound like a little bookworm. What are the next three books on your list?Dan:Oh, next three books. I don't know. I'm not prepared for that one. I think Atomic Habits-Stephanie:I usually ask one, but I'm like, "That's too easy for you." You have to tell me three.Dan:Yeah. I'm slacking on my book thing because I had a goal at the end of the year to hit 20 books and I demolished it. So I could probably say my last three books, but Atomic Habits, Billionaire Plan and Maverick. Those are the three books that I want to finish right now.Stephanie:Cool. Where are you traveling to next when we can travel again more easily?Dan:Oh, well that's an easy one. I fly to Snowshoe West Virginia and less than four weeks to go snowboarding again and I'm super excited for that trip. I traveled multiple times during COVID so-Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, I have too, but some people haven't. So if you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Dan:We are in the process of creating a podcast of what we call The Stack and we'll be talking to VPs of marketing and CEOs about their marketing technology, sales technology and customer success technology. My first interview is hopefully going to be with mission.org and figuring out how you guys manage your marketing tech stack.Stephanie:All right. Yeah. Bring us on. And we also have a whole marketing trends podcast where we interview CMOs. So then we'll have to bring you on that one as well.Dan:I think that'd be great. I think it would be a lot of fun. This has been awesome. You are amazing at this. Good, good work. I thought this was fun.Stephanie:Thanks. Yeah. I mean, we talked about in the beginning, what was our line was just don't be generic. So I think that was a good motto of our interview. All right. Two more questions. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Dan:Nicest thing that anybody's ... My godfather took me for my first snowboarding lesson when I was like eight years old. It's the best memory I think of my entire life because it's something I've used forever.Stephanie:Oh, I like that. Alright. And then what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next few year? And it can't be the three things that you mentioned earlier.Dan:Oh, come on. The next biggest thing in ecommerce that's going to happen. Amazon will start to die. They're going to get ... I think Amazon is going to get split up because Jeff Bezos will want to do it. I think that's going to be one of the biggest things that happens in ecommerce in the next five to 10 years though. I don't know how long it's going to take, but I think that and Congress realizing that Amazon, they're too big.Stephanie:All right. Well, that's a good answer. I'm glad that I punted the other three so you had to think of a new one. All right, Dan. Well, this has been an awesome interview. Thank you for not being generic. Where can people find out more about you and McGaw.io?Dan:Yeah, so definitely you can go to McGaw.io, but I'm most active on LinkedIn, so go to LinkedIn and search up Dan McGaw. There's three of us, but you'll be able to find my pretty face. Go there and send me a connection request and play along. I've got over 25,000 followers there and I try to stay active.Stephanie:Amazing. All right. Thanks for joining us.Dan:Yeah, thanks so much. And the one thing I forgot, look up Build Cool Shit, my book which is all about how to build a marketing tech stack. If you go to McGaw.io, I'll send you a free copy. It's on the headline, but I forgot all about it. I have a book called Build Cool Shit. So I forgot that's-Stephanie:We will link it up. Don't you worry. Cool.Dan:Thank you very much.

On the show today is Taylor Holiday. Taylor went from professional baseball player to accidental e-commerce marketer to agency owner and now to being a part of a whole host of businesses all related to direct to consumer e-commerce.I wanted to bring him on because Taylor has a fascinating background in sports that very tangibly affected his career as a marketer. He's established himself and his agency Common Thread Collective as one of the top resources for DTC marketing. He's got some amazing experience and insights on Facebook advertising that we can all learn from.You'll hear about how they got a Power Balance bracelet onto the wrists of millions and millions of athletes, how he worked with athletes like Kobe Bryant, Drew Brees, and Derrick Rose, and how a trip to Vegas for a high-stakes poker tournament ended up getting them a crazy amount of free advertising and exposure.More on Taylor: @taylorholiday on Twitter Common Thread Collective Sponsored by SparkLoop — the referral tool for newsletters. Hundreds of smart newsletter creators use SparkLoop to get more, high-quality email subscribers on autopilot. Get started in 5 minutes and start a free 30-day trial → sparkloop.app/eim

Pop the champagne and drop the beat … We just sold our first brand. And, yes, the math in that outlandish headline is right: a 15,500% increase from our initial investment. In early 2018, 4x400 — Common Thread Collective’s ecommerce holding company — acquired 80% of FC Goods. The price? $5,000. In Oct. of 2020, we sold it for $1.2M. Minus the founder’s 20% and less broker’s fees, that nets out to $780k. From $5k to $780k: 15,500% ROI. Of course, that clickbaity calculation is far from the whole story. That’s why this is a special episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast with guests Taylor Holiday and Aaron Orendoff … to reveal everything. All the numbers. The entire journey. Every struggle. Every loss. Every win. At the end of the episode, Taylor and I share 10 takeaways — the biggest and most-tactical lessons we learned. Best of all, I’ve summarized them all with examples and illustrations in this article to make the takeaways easier to take away: https://bit.ly/36HjDGf

Revenue. Profitability. Payback Window. Lifetime Value. The list goes on and on what leaders of brands should be tracking. In this episode J.D. and Jonny talk to Taylor Holiday, a Co-Founder and CEO of Common Thread Collective, an eCommerce growth agency that exists to help brands properly scale and organize metric chaos.We tackle:How Taylor helped navigate the brand from a sleep product to a sleep missionHow Taylor navigated his career into founding CTC, and what has got the group to where it is todayWhat he thinks makes a Good Company and how they built that internally and externallyAn eCommerce metric masterclassHow to bring back iconic sports brands of yesteryearA Q4 Holidays predication for all to hearWe wrap up the episode with a roundup of all the movements and news in the greater commerce industry.

This episode we're talking to Taylor Holiday, Managing Partner of Common Thread Collective. We focus on how consistent social media creation can boost engagement and hone your communication skills with your target audience.  We discuss how quickly the ecommerce landscape is changing and how to keep up when today’s groundbreaking ideas become outdated in a matter of months.  We also chat about entrepreneurship and how impactful mentors and literature inspired Taylor to empower his employees to buy into the vision at Common Thread Collective and fast tract them to pursue their own personal goals.

Back by popular demand, is the second monthly installment of “One Topic with Taylor” series on the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. CEO of Common Thread Collective, Taylor Holiday and host, Andrew Faris get together (*socially distant) to talk about a highly debated subject: whether or not your brand should discount.

As 2020 continues to throw curveballs left and right, the only thing we know for sure is that we have no idea what is coming next. That’s a tough pill to swallow, especially if you are a business owner trying to plan for the next quarter, or even the next week. Consumer behavior continues to shift in varying directions, and every industry in the world seems to be in a constant state of flux.  With so much volatility, what is an entrepreneur to do? Taylor Holiday has some ideas. Taylor is the Managing Partner of Common Thread Collective, an agency that helps eCommerce companies grow from zero to millions. Recently, the companies he works with have been forced to change the way they operate. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Taylor takes us through what it means to build an antifragile business, and how that mentality can lead to a thriving business despite what the market or current environment has in store. Because, as Taylor says, there’s no point in trying to predict what the future holds, and instead, founders should be creating many different models so you can prevail even during volatile times. So what does that mean for your Q4 strategy? How should you be preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? And what data should you really be looking at when developing a Facebook ad strategy? Find out all of that and more in this interview.   Main Takeaways: Never-Ending Qs for Q4: 2020 has been the year of uncertainty, and Q4 will be no different. Traditional planning for end of year events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday have to be approached with a new mindset, one that can adapt and pivot quickly. Companies need to put systems and plans in place so that they are prepared to take on any and all scenarios that might arise. Building Something That Works in Spite of You: Modeling and forecasting are tools that every business uses to help guide strategy, but neither are ever 100% accurate. Because humans are wrong more often than they are right, it is critical to set up systems that can survive not only when you’re right, but also when you’re wrong. That is the fundamental practice of being antifragile.  How The Past Predicts The Future: Drawing insights from historical ad campaigns is a double-edged sword.  When it comes to analyzing data, you can’t look too far back or too far forward. Yesterday’s ad data can help inform your decision for what to do tomorrow, but it can’t help you make a month or year-long ad strategy. What can be beneficial, however, is poking through the creative assets of campaigns from companies decades ago, pre-internet. Those are timeless sources of inspiration that can help you stand out from the uniform ad campaigns of today.    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 --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, we have Taylor Holiday join the show, the Managing Partner of Common Thread Collective. Taylor, welcome. Taylor: Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to be here. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you here as well. I have followed your Twitter threads and I think we're going to have a lot to talk about today. Taylor: Okay. That's good. Now I feel accountable to everything I've ever said. So here we go. Let's see what I can dig up. Stephanie: Yep. I've looked at everything back to 2008, so we're going to cover all of it. Stephanie: I wanted to start with your background a little bit. I saw that you were in the world of sports. Taylor: Yeah, I did many [crosstalk 00:00:50]. Stephanie: And I wanted to hear how you evolved. Taylor: Another lifetime ago, I was a professional athlete. I played baseball in the Yankees organization for a couple of years, and that was my life for the first 25 years of my life, was committed to that pursuit. Then one day I got a call and they told me that they were no longer interested in my services and I had to figure out what on earth I was going to do from there. That sort of set me off onto the second phase of life. I'd like to think I'm breaking my life in this sort of 25 year chunks. I'm about halfway through the second quarter. Stephanie: That's awesome. What did you decide to do after that? Taylor: Well, I didn't really decide much. I was finishing up, so I got drafted when I was a junior in college, so I had some school to finish. I was sort of in the off season. I would go back to school and take them at a semester at a time. When I got released, I started trying to figure out, okay, well, what was I going to do? And I was a political science major with a minor in psychology, and I loved to argue, and so I figured, well, I'll try and be a lawyer. That was sort of what I was prepping to do. I was prepping to take the LSAT and head off to be a lawyer. Then I had a good friend that had been a childhood friend, and is still now my business partner named Josh, who was starting a company. In between class, he would let me come to their office, which was him and his brother in a garage, and print the orders off the website and take them to the post office, and that was my job part-time. Stephanie: Sweet. Taylor: One day, day one, there was one order, and then within a year and a half we had done 60 million in revenue and that became my business school, and how I got into entrepreneurship. Stephanie: Wow. That is crazy. That's really good growth, and I'm sure you learned a ton while working there. Taylor: It was wild. But it sort of met everything in me that being an athlete did. There was a team of people that I love, working towards a common goal, every day you showed up and had something to do intentionally to be better. I was single, I was young, I had nothing else to do. We just lived at the office, and it was everything. As the business was sort of growing, we got asked this question of like, "Well, this is a real company. What's your job going to be?" And they went, "Well, you're the young person. Why don't we figure out Ecommerce, social media, and you know some famous people, so how about influencer marketing?" And I was like, "Okay." Then I started Googling, how do you set up a Facebook page. And just had no idea what I was doing, but learned, got to play in a sandbox, where suddenly I developed a skill that mattered in the world. I got really lucky in that sense that they entrusted me with that responsibility. Stephanie: That's great. What kind of famous people do you know? Now I'm intrigued? Taylor: Oh, so many famous people. No, not really. I had played professional sports, so I had a lot of relationships with athletes and agents and people like that. Our product was built for that community, and so it was just literally Facebook messaging friends and being like, "Hey, can I send you this product? Would you wear it?" That snowballed really quickly. We ended up building an incredible athlete team with ... at one point, we had all four MVPs of the major sports. We were brokering deals with Kobe Bryant and China, Shaquille O'Neal was a business partner. It was wild. We got involved in so many things in that first business that we had no business doing as 26, 27 year old kids, and made every mistake you could possibly make, but just learned so much that has sort of been the foundation for what we get the chance to do today. Stephanie: That's great. Yeah, that's a really good story. So fast forward to today. Tell me a bit about Common Thread Collective. What is it and what is your role there? What's your day to day look like? Taylor: Yeah. Common Thread Collective is an Ecommerce growth agency. We help consumer product Ecom businesses grow from zero to $30 million. That's sort of the range that we focus on, and we do that through a combination of paid acquisition services, email, SMS retention and landing page development, and then creative for that whole customer journey. So, we really see our role as the guide for our clients along that growth trajectory that we've lived ourselves and are currently living alongside them with the brands that we own and operate. So, we sort of approach growth from an operator's mindset, which we think really sets us apart from a lot of marketing agencies. My job is to be the CEO of that organization. It is certainly a very different job than when I started where I was doing the work. I spend much more of my time now thinking about organizational structure and culture and hiring than I do about marketing. That has just sort of been my own personal evolution, which I'm learning to love. But yeah, that's what it does. Stephanie: That's cool. So how do you go about picking who you want to partner with, which companies you want to? Taylor: In terms of the clients? Stephanie: Yeah, clients. Taylor: Yeah, so our mission for Common Thread Collective and really for our whole ecosystem, and I think Andrew talked a little bit about this on your podcast, is to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. That is our heartbeat. It's what drives us because we ourselves have experienced the transformation that comes from being a successful entrepreneur, what it offers you in life. So, we love to partner specifically with founders and entrepreneurs who are in that range of business. Usually, when clients come to us, they're somewhere between two to 10 million in revenue, and we're helping them sort of reach that next phase of growth along the way. That connection to the person who is passionately committed to the product or idea that they have is what motivates us. It's what keeps us engaged, because the reality is, when you work at an agency, you're not going to love every product that you're working on. Taylor: You're not going to care as deeply as the founder about hair care and sports wear and fitness equipment and beauty products and vitamins. There's just no way, but what we learn is that, what really works is when we care about the people. That's when our people internally are the most inspired, that's when they wake up in the middle of the night and think about ideas for the product, is that when they fall in love with the humans on the other side of it. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. I want to jump right into something I've been following. You were discussing a little bit about how brands should be approaching holiday season, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and how they should be thinking about their marketing and advertising efforts. I think it was on Twitter, maybe as an email thread, but I was hoping we could dive right into that, because we hadn't actually talked about that on the podcast so far, and I think it's a perfect time to kind of discuss how you think brands should be prepping for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and how it's different than in the past. Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. This is a crazy time, right? It's never been a more volatile moment in the history of Ecommerce, which is not necessarily the longest history in the world. I would put it right up there with every business season in our country's history, certainly in terms of the volatility of the moment. When you think about trying to forecast into an environment that is this volatile, there's huge error bars on any prediction that you're going to make as a business owner. If you think about some of the things that we're looking at, as we think about Q4, is retail going to be open? Are people going to be able to shop in stores? We have no idea? Is the USPS going to be able to handle the influx of demand on the infrastructure? We have no idea. Taylor: What is the social position of our country going to be after this election? We have no idea. As you think about that, what you have to sort of agree or accept is the idea that whatever you think is going to happen is likely going to be wrong. What that means is that, unlike years before, where we were in a more stable environment, you need to have plans that account for different possibilities. As you think about something like your Black Friday promotion, which in years past, maybe a very simple exercise of just going well, we're going to try and bundle some products and do a discount, you need to consider the possibility, well, what happens, what would our discount be if USPS doubled their rates? Would we still be able to offer and afford free shipping? Taylor: I would start to have multiple plans. The same is true for the tone of your messaging. If we come out of an incredibly hostile election on November 4th, and three weeks later we're in holiday season, and the country's significant unrest, what is the right message for your brand to have to sell products into that environment? Rather than trying to guess which one is going to be accurate, I would begin to have a multitude of plans for this moment in ways that we've never really had to consider that level of volatility before. That's one of the big things we're talking with our clients about, is this idea of how do you deal with the idea that you are most likely going to be wrong about whatever you think is going to happen in the future? Stephanie: Yeah, that's really good. I like the idea of making scenarios so you don't have to predict the future. How are you thinking about advertising? I think you were mentioning that you can actually prep in a way that you know it's going to be expensive to advertise during those times, and so how brands can actually start prepping early so maybe they're not being met with these really high costs. Taylor: Yeah. I would just contend that I don't actually know that it's going to be expensive. I think that's a theory that people have, is this idea that big retailers are going to be allocating a bunch of money into the platform and CPMs are going to be through the roof. But we have seen really dramatic things happen where like, last time when the pandemic got peaked in April, all of a sudden cell phone usage goes through the roof, the inventory allotment for ads goes really high, CPMs plummet. The idea that we know for sure, this is, again, sort of that idea of the contingency planning, I think is really hard. What that means, and I think what you're driving me towards is this idea that, how do I build revenue in a more predictable fashion when the ad environment could be incredibly volatile? Taylor: What I would say is that, when I think about forecasting, we described Ecommerce forecasting like a layer cake. The base layer, the foundation with the least variability is your existing customer set. You know that when you acquire a customer, they're going to produce future revenue for you as well as present revenue, and they do that really predictably. It's not subject to CPMs, it's not subject to the levels of volatility based on any sort of thing. So you can always start by my existing customer side is going to produce future revenue, and you can look at cohort specific LTV data and figure out exactly how much future revenue. That's the foundation of your forecast. Then the next layer is owned audiences. If I think about like organic SEO, my keyword rank of position two on keyword, CrossFit sports bra is going to produce for me a certain volume of traffic that will lead to revenue. Taylor: That's more predictable, even than advertising CPMs. The same thing with my remarketing traffic is going to be more predictable than my prospecting traffic. My email database that I've collected ahead of the moment that aren't yet customers, but they're people that I can speak to for free is subject to less volatility than those environments. The more that ahead of this Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you can develop owned audiences of communication that allow you to forecast more accurately your future revenue, the better position you're going to be in, and the less subject to that crazy volatility you're going to be. The end tactic there, out of that sort of ideology, is that right now you should be accumulating as many emails and YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers and website visitors that you possibly can to help you build a foundation for that future revenue in a way that's less volatile. Stephanie: Oh, I love that. Are there any specific examples of creative campaigns that you're working on with your brands right now, or that you know of? Taylor: Yeah. So, one of the big things that we love as a vehicle for this is quiz funnels. A lot of our brands are running these quiz funnels, and what I mean by that is you come to the website and there's like, hey, let me ask you some questions to help make a perfect product recommendation to you. And it's email gated. So, you're saying, hey, give us your email, and at the end of this, we'll send you a specific product recommendation. So, what that does, what we've been able to see is that, with many of these quiz funnels, you're able to prospect at virtually the same return as your general campaigns, but you're collecting emails at four to five to six X the rate. In those examples, what you're doing is you're almost able to match your present value, but you're banking a lot more future revenue off of all of those owned audience emails that you're capturing. Taylor: That's one example of the way that we think about this, of like, not just like the singularity of how much revenue I'm making now, but what additional assets are being accumulated to drive future value. Another example I would use, and this is something we talked a lot about last year, is that website traffic. So, when you go to do remarketing, which most of your revenue in the holiday period, specifically Black Friday Cyber Monday, is going to be driven out of your remarketing audiences. What that means is that website traffic today has a high future value. The more website traffic you can generate now, the better. Let's say you have two Facebook ad campaigns, and one has a 50 cent CPC, and one has a dollar CPC, but the ROAS is the same, I'm going to give preferential treatment in scale to the campaign with the lower CPC, even if the ROAS is the same or slightly less, because that traffic is going to yield future revenue in a way that's really important. Those kinds of thoughts around, what is the incremental value of the audience creation, is a really important consideration. Stephanie: Oh, I like that. How often are you checking in with those ... when you're starting to do that prospecting, in a way, early, how often are you checking back with them so you stay top of mind? Taylor: The window that I think about, so we have our general campaign set up, which is that we look at our time lag report, which in Google is basically the average window that a customer will make a purchase in. You can look at and see, like, what percentage of your customers make a purchase within 24 hours, within 48 hours? Usually, almost 80% of your are making a purchase within seven days. For the initial consideration, our primary remarketing funnels usually attempt to encapsulate the primary consideration phase, which is usually somewhere around seven to 10 days. But in terms of this strategy, what we're doing is we're building an audience that, ultimately, when it comes to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the widest Facebook audience you can look at is 180 days. Taylor: The second you get within six months, which just happened for us a couple of weeks ago, we got within that six month window of this. Now, you've got an audience that you're going to speak to again at Black Friday. I don't know that we have an intentional strategy to speak to them again at a 45 day window or a 90 day window. We don't. But I think that one, that's a good idea. I think that it might be worthwhile to just sort of warm them up again, but as long as they're within that 180 day window, I have the capacity to speak to them at Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Stephanie: Got it. That makes sense. So, what kind of mistakes do you see companies making when it comes to these growth strategies? Taylor: Oh man, that's a broad question. One of the primary ones is what we call the single account ROAS problem, which is this idea that most people are running their ad accounts on the idea that every purchase is the same just based on the cost to acquire the customer. Let's say I have a target of a two to one ROAS, which basically means that I'm paying 50% of the purchase price in acquisition. Well, the reality is that not all customers are equal to you, and not all product sales net you the same amount of dollars in your pocket. One of the things that we work really hard to get really clear with our clients on is the value of customers by different cohorts, so by first product purchases an example. If you think about every skew that you have in your store, every skew has a different margin and has a different return rate and has a different shipping cost. Taylor: Each of these three variables mean that, even at a fixed ROAS, so if you applied a two to one ROAS across every skew that you have, the net dollars in your pocket is different for every skew. Really understanding which products net you the most dollars as a business owner is a critical data element that I do not see enough people consider, and they don't design their ad accounts to reflect the variable value of the product. Stephanie: That's a good one. I haven't heard anyone talk about that as a mistake yet, so that must mean a lot of companies are making it. Taylor: Yeah. It's because it's hard. The information is hard to access, and it's hard to get granular visibility too. It's a much simpler decision-making mechanism to go, "Well, my blended cogs are 30%, and so if I get a two to one I'm making 20% generally across my business." That's a much easier consideration to make than to try and actually break it down by individual skew and get really specific on the decisions. Stephanie: Yep. Are there any best practices when it comes to developing spreadsheets or dashboards or something that can give you easy access to that information that you've seen your brands or yourself develop? Taylor: Yeah. We've built a tool to do this, to calculate cohort specific LTV data, to ultimately give us a view that we care a lot about, which is your 60 day LTV by specific cohorts. The reason we look at that time window is because most early stage Ecommerce businesses can't really wait much longer than 60 days to really realize the value. They just don't have the cash position to be able to wait longer than that, nor do I think it's really wise to wait longer than that. We've built something internally to do it, so I wish I could say like, hey, just go copy this spreadsheet and set it up, but it is difficult information to access, but you can do it. You can build cohort models for your business, but beyond just the LTV, the easiest thing to do is to really deeply understand that you did economics by every skew that you have. Taylor: What I would do to start is I would export every product that you have, I would mark the MSRP, so the retail sales price. Then next to that, I would put the cost to you as a business. Then I would put the return rate of the product, and then I would put the shipping cost of the product, and then I would calculate the net value of every skew. Just being aware of that for your merchandise set, like for the entirety of your product catalog will give you the kind of information that you need to then think more specifically about your ad account. Stephanie: That's great. To shift a bit into, we were just talking about how to grow a company, then track metrics and all that. I know you also have just been recently talking about an anti-fragile Ecommerce playbook. I was hoping you could kind of detail what that means, how are you setting up the anti-fragile Ecommerce companies, and what does that playbook look like? Taylor: Yeah. This goes back to this idea that we are bad at predicting the future. When I think about how I want to build a business, I want to build a business that thrives when I'm wrong. I actually want to accept the fact that I am not going to be able to determine the future, and I want to set up the business to be able to survive in almost any environment. That's sort of the idea of anti-fragile, is not just that I'm resistant to negative, but actually the negatives can be in an environment in which I succeed. The way in which I think that you're afforded the opportunity to do that is by having a specific set of attributes related to your business that allow you to sort of thrive in variability. Some of those are ... now you're going to make me try and quote my exact tweet to see if I can remember all of them, but one of them is high margin, right? Taylor: This is seemingly obvious, but this idea, the more room for error that you have to still be profitable, the more that the variability on your CAC, as an example, still does it affect you, and it allows you to potentially win when others can't. So, high margin is one. Another is, and this is a really underrated one, is great payment terms with your manufacturing supplier. One of the biggest things that destroys cashflow for Ecommerce businesses is obligation to front the cash for inventory. One of the best skills I think an entrepreneur can have is relational development and negotiation skills with their supplier to develop trust, to get to net 30 terms on delivery, where you're actually realizing the revenue of your product before you have to pay for it. That allows your cash conversion cycle to speed up tremendously in a way that's super, super helpful. Another one [crosstalk 00:21:19]. Stephanie: When I saw that, I'm like, that's huge. We have the same thing in media. People will start coming and be like, "Oh, we have net 60 or net 90 payment terms." You just can't take no for an answer sometimes, and just keep trying to build up the relationship and be like, "We really can't do that." Oftentimes, you'll be able to get down to net 30, just like you're mentioning here. So I thought that one was a really good point. Sorry, keep going. Taylor: Yeah, that's exactly right. You just got to think about your cash conversion cycle and how you're going to not be in a position where you have to sort or seek outside capitalization to fund when you're winning. That happens in Ecom because of the cost of inventory upfront, which makes it a complex cash management business. Another one, and again, these seem obvious, but I think we don't consider them enough is low OPEX as a percentage of your revenue. We have this principle, we call the four quarter accounting principle, which gives you sort of a directional guide to where you want your revenue to go. So, if you think about your top line revenues of business, we break it into four quarters. The idea is, if you want 25% profit, then your costs need to exist in these quadrants. Taylor: You need to have 25% CAC, so a four to one, what we would call marketing efficiency rating, so total revenue divided by total sales is 25%. 25% cost of delivery, which is basically the cost of the product from wherever you're manufacturing it all the way to the customer. Then 25% of OPEX, and that's your payroll, your rent and all of those things. If you look at your P&L and you look at it relative to each of those four quarters, you can figure out where your profit gets eaten up and where you need to go make improvements. So, the lower your OPEX is, so you can do this by not having a really expensive office by controlling your overhead in an employee count in smart ways. Really, just looking at how do I run this business as clean as necessary or as possible in order to give myself opportunity again, because there's going to be variability in my other places. Taylor: The shipping thing is a good example, where it's like, maybe my cost of delivery is normally 23%, but because of the shipping thing, maybe it's going to go to 27% of my revenue. If that destroys your profit, because your OPEX is too high, then it gives you a lack of options. That's a really important one to consider. Gosh, what else did I say in there? Stephanie: You also said diverse traffic mix, which I like. Taylor: Okay. Yeah, so this goes back to the point that we're talking about. Just like an investment portfolio, if you're over-indexed on any single channel, if that channel deteriorates in value, your business is in real trouble, but if you have a diverse traffic sourcing, and I think, so the question is, what's a diverse traffic sourcing? A good baseline metric is 50% paid, 50% organic. You're going to be able to survive volatility in any one of those channels, because you have a good amount of traffic from other sources. All of these things, make it so that when the inevitable problem strikes, your business is set up for it. Taylor: I think that we under consider how important it is to get into these positions of strong foundations of anti-fragility before we pursue further growth. Especially in this crazy environment where we're in now, where basically every forecast that I see every business make is wrong. The question is, what do you do? A lot of people want to try and think about like, well, how do I forecast better? I just go like, I think that's a fool's errand. I think attempting to predict the future, there are just too many inputs to do it well. So, instead, how do you build a business that when you're wrong, you still win? Stephanie: Yep. Yeah, I love that. I think it's such a bad mindset to think that like, you have to be perfect. I think that that's how companies do it. Even when I worked at other finance groups within companies, we were usually not right, which is why we did scenarios because you usually are wrong. Taylor: Well, that's exactly it. The quote that I always come back to is that, all models are wrong, some are useful. They're useful in their ability to understand where you're importantly wrong. When you have a detailed model, let's say I have a prediction that shows me what I'm expecting my traffic to be by every channel next month. Okay, so for direct organic search paid, search paid social, I have a prediction. Well, the reason that model is so important is not because it's going to be right, but because it allows me, as I'm actualizing the data, to understand where I am importantly wrong. As the data's coming in, I can start to see, Ooh, I'm missing my prediction in email by a lot, and it allows you to then think about strategies to go and solve that problem, where if you don't have that model, if you don't have that prediction, it's really hard to determine where the problem comes from. Stephanie: Yep, exactly. It's like the pandemic too, who would have predicted that? It's straight out of Missing, Taleb's book. That's a black swan event, you never would have predicted it, so why try? Just different scenarios, and a worst case scenario like now. Taylor: It seems a lot like I'm reading Antifragile as I'm thinking about the application of Ecommerce. It's like, well, how do you think about a business like that? What I see is I see frustration from our entrepreneur partners about their forecast being wrong, and they get really upset about it. I get it. It's really hard. You have to make decisions about this. So, it is an important exercise and you want to reduce the margin of error as much as possible going forward, but you have to begin to expect that. That's one of the things I think about being a more seasoned entrepreneur who have seen thousands and thousands of forecasts be wrong is I'm no longer surprised when they are. So, it just gives me a different frame of the problem. Stephanie: Yup. When people are trying to think of those black swan events or scenarios, how can someone go about building a scenario if they don't even really know how to anticipate it? They don't even know what to prepare for. Taylor: I like the idea of, rather than trying to predict the future, you should extrapolate the present. That's the Nassim Taleb idea, which is that, where are you now, and where do you believe you will be in the next month based on the present? If you extrapolate the present versus predict the future, then what it allows you to do is to think about, okay, my organic search is currently at 20,000 visits a month, and it has grown by 5% a month. If that continues, I'll be at 21,000 visitors next month. You put that into place, and then as you actualize it in real time, then you can understand what's happening. What you need to understand is that, the further out you go, the wider the margin of error becomes. Predicting tomorrow is a lot easier than predicting a week from now, which is a lot easier than predicting a year from now, because the number of inputs and variables just increase as you move out. Taylor: That idea of constantly re-forecasting and constantly actualizing your prediction and making adjustments, that's the skill, that's the exercise to continually get in the habit of doing and understanding where you were wrong. Then, doing your best to understand why, I think sorting out causality can often be sort of this thing that we chase and we make assumptions around. I think it's sometimes useful, but more importantly, it allows you to make adjustments in your next forecast, and then do it again and then do it again and then do it again. But again, no matter how many times you do it, you're always going to be wrong, and that wrongness is the thing that I think is really informative, and it allows you to ask the question, how do I make sure I'm okay when I'm wrong? That becomes the important thing to then go build. Stephanie: Yup. I love that. Yeah, it reminds me back in my Fannie Mae days, I used to do with a housing forecast, and we would literally be forecasting for like the next month, and we would have data almost halfway through that month and we would still be wrong. I think it boggled my mind how we'd be wrong, but even thinking of that, I'm like, there's just no way, once you get past a certain point, you just have to keep re forecasting, even if you're halfway through the month sometimes again. Taylor: This is such an important understanding about how we as humans process information. My favorite example is something I call the roulette run problem, where if you've ever been to Vegas, there is a reason that at the roulette table, they display all of the recent numbers for you. The reason is, is because what your brain does, when you see a bunch of reds in a row is you go, uh, well, the next one has to be black. And you build this relationship between past data and future data that is not real. We do this all the time with information as humans. We're just really bad at computating things in a statistically rigorous way about the future. This is also why humans are actually really bad media buyers, and why we try and train all of our internal media buyers to make as few of decisions as possible inside of the ad account. Taylor: Because if you think about what most people are doing inside of a Facebook ad account, is they're loading up a dashboard. They're looking at past data. So, they're looking at historical data and making inferences about the future without using a computer, without using a calculator, without so much as writing down chicken scratch. They're trying to make predictive decisions about how things like CTR and CPC and ROAS are going to relate to the future, and they're almost always wrong in those decisions. This is just like, it's really important to understand what the biases are that affect us as humans in our decision-making. Stephanie: That's great. Talk a little bit more about humans being bad media buyers, how are you all going about buying media? What are some best practices? Other than just saying like, "Okay, just rely on the platform, let it do its job." What kind of things are you guys trying out and doing and seeing success with right now? Taylor: What I'm going to push back on is that language that you use, I think diminishes the right idea, which is people love to say like, "Oh, well, yeah, just let the algorithm do it." They say that in a way that reflects that that's the simplistic decision. What I'll tell you is it's not. It actually takes incredible discipline to be thoughtful about allowing the computer to do what the computer does best and focus on what you do best. With our media buyers, their job, if you think about any machine learning tool, the key to a great machine learning tool is the inputs. Machine learning tool is just taking a set of inputs and understanding them to generate future outputs. Well, the key to being a great media buyer is you set a good structure of inputs. I'll give you an example. Taylor: Let's go back to this idea of different product values and different average order values by purchase types. If you were to export your last 30 days of orders and you were to build a scatter plot, where across every day, every dot was an order by AOV, you would have a variation of different order values. If you think about one of the most common mistakes I see in an ad account is you have a campaign that's bidding for lowest cost, which is the conversion objective, where you're basically saying to Facebook, give me the lowest CPA that you can inside of this ad set. Then in that ad set, what they will do is they will sell a bunch of different products with different prices. Let's imagine I have five different skews. I'm a jewelry brand, and they range in price from $50 to $500. Well, what product is Facebook going to favor if the structural setup is lowest cost and you give it those options? Stephanie: Yeah, the cheapest one. Taylor: So, you're building a structure where the computer output is going to be focused on the skew that likely doesn't generate you the best net outcome. That is a tactical media buying error that has to do with poor structural setup and understanding of the tool, that has nothing to do with the decision making of which ad you should allocate the budget to. That's the kind of thing we teach our people to think about over and over and over again is, am I setting up the right structure for the output that I want? Stephanie: That makes sense. You would instead maybe have like similar price products so they can all actually see the performance, instead of teaching the algorithm to, of course, always showcase the cheapest one because you don't have a budget? Taylor: That's right. Or I'm going to bid for highest value instead of lowest cost. Facebook has different conversion objectives I can set up relative to the thing that I want. The question is, and we play this game at our company every Friday morning called [inaudible 00:33:36], where I pull up an ad account and we go through campaigns and I make the media buyers tell me, what are you intending to accomplish with this campaign? What were you trying to do? Then let's discuss of whether the structural setup and inputs were right for that outcome. Did you design the system accurately to generate the thing that you want? Because Facebook's tool is incredibly good at getting you what you want, but over and over and over again, I see people design systems that will never, ever generate the outcome they want. So they're setting up games where the rules mean they will never win. Stephanie: Yup. That's really good lessons. Any other things that you've seen, like similar themes of ad buying, where you were like, I've seen quite a few people do it this way and it's wrong. Anything else that has come on your radar? Taylor: Yeah. The big other thing is just the relationship of budget to number of variables. One of the things, again, this all comes back to some basic statistical ideas, where if you think about ... have you ever seen a graph of how long it takes to normalize the data for flipping a coin? Like how many coin flips it takes before you basically get to 50% outcomes? Have you ever seen a graph that looks like that? What it is, is that like, when it's a two sided coin, the amount of flips that it takes to normalize the data, so in other words, the time at which it will reach the predicted outcome of 50%, it's somewhere, usually in the range, by the time you get to 100 flips, it's almost always going to be at 50%. Now, if you take a six sided die, okay, do you think it takes more or less rolls to get there? Taylor: It takes substantially more, because there's more possible outcomes, so the amount of time that it takes for the data to normalize is a lot more rolls than if there's only two possible outcomes. Taylor: So the same is true of the way that you build a campaign. The more end nodes in your structure, so think of an end node as an ad set or a campaign to an ad set to an ad. The number of variables in your campaign is going to determine the amount of budget that is required to get to statistical significance, to get to accurate outcomes. The other big mistake I see people make is they build these campaigns with all these end nodes, all of these ad sets, all of these ads and a very tiny budget. You might as well check back in three years and then you'll actually get a definitive result. What they do is they build campaigns like that, and then they make decisions on insufficient data. What that is, is it's basically looking at four flips of a coin and then saying, "Oh, it's 70, 30 heads. The truth here must be this coin yield 70% heads." Taylor: Instead, you have to build structures that allow you to get to accurate information quickly by having an appropriate amount of budget against the number of nodes in your test, if that makes. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes complete sense. Is there any ratio where you're like, for every 10 ads, you need $1,000, or is there any ranges like that? Taylor: Facebook gives you this information. They tell you that they want 50 conversions per ad set per week. That's what they need to get you out of the learning phase. There's a lot of people that are these Facebook truthers, that think like Facebook has all these ulterior motives to attempt to get you to spend money. I get it. They are rationally self-interested, but your success is actually in their interest. So, they will give you directional understanding of how to use their tool best. So, part of what they tell you is that they designed this thing called the learning phase, which is basically their way of declaring that the data that you're seeing is not trustworthy yet. When you are still learning, you should not act on this data because it's not actually predictive of the future. Taylor: But then when you get out of learning phase, now you're in an actual set of outcomes that are more predictive, they're more accurate, they're more deep, they're more true about the set of inputs that are there. So, the way to get out of that is this idea of ensuring that, based on your budget and based on your target CPA, you can get to 50 conversions per week per ad set. Because campaigns use a daily budget, if you take 50 and you divide it by seven, the formula that we give people is 7.14, which is just 50 divided by seven, so for your daily budget. 7.14 times your target CPA. Again, that's the payment that you want for the objective times the number of ad sets in the campaign, that needs to be your daily budget in order to get through optimization as fast as possible. Stephanie: Ooh, that's good. I'm writing down the formula now, so we can put it in our show notes. Taylor: Yup. Stephanie: Okay, cool. Awesome. That's really good tips around Facebook ads. I agree about the, like when you were mentioning the learning phase, we have our own ad network, and it's just the same thing. Our growth team's always like, "Hey, we need about $1,000 just to learn and then we'll let you know what the cost per click is." It's not just Facebook, it's other platforms as well. Taylor: That's right. People get frustrated by that because it's a media buyer, especially if you're a company that's charging on a percentage of ad spend, it's really hard for that to feel like anything, but a self serving piece of information. But the reality is, it just goes back to an understanding of how data happens. It's like, again, if you wanted me to tell you the results of flipping a coin, give me a hundred flips, not five, and it's the same thing. That's the understanding that we need to get to about how you get to statistical significance. Stephanie: Yep. So, are there any surprising campaigns that your team has initiated or certain kinds of ads that you were like, "That's not going to work", and they actually performed well? Taylor: Oh man, all the time. I'm so horrible at predicting what will work well, creatively in particular. Man, anything that I think is like a really interesting format right now. Stephanie: I feel like the formats right now are ... they have to be kind of different. There's a lot happening with the ad platforms because of brands pulling back and other brands dipping in on those ad platforms, but also just with the styles of ads that are going out. With the whole world, it just seems like things are different. So, I'm wondering how you guys are approaching that. Taylor: Yeah. Different is a good thing. The hardest thing is actually to avoid ruts. Because there's this horrible habit that we have in the media buying world. I'll lump us into this. We fall guilty to it too, which is the way that you generate ad creative is you go to Facebook ad library, you look up your favorite brand and you copy the styling of their ads, because you're making an assumption that they're working. But I'm a big believer in sort of the purple cow principle from Seth Godin, which is this idea that, the value of an ad deteriorates in repetition of its use. Every time that an ad goes out into the world and every time it's replicated, it becomes less valuable. That same thing happens with ad formats. We've seen it with influencer ads and UGC and the Mashable style, and these formats that have become really popular, eventually their impact is reduced as people encounter them. Taylor: I think that the key thing, and this is the biggest challenge inside of an organization like ours, is how do you produce a system that constantly generates novel ideas? That's what I would think a lot about. Again, I know this isn't the simple answer, where I can say to you, just use an ID story squared, whatever format, but I would be lying to you if I said that. Instead, I would really take space to challenge yourself to think like, one think a lot about the beginning of the ad. I know this is cliche, but it's just so true, is that video average watch times on Facebook are like four seconds for great ads. You just don't have as much time to say the thing that you're intending to say. It's sort of the David Ogilvy quote, "If you're selling a fire extinguisher, lead with the fire." That is just fundamentally true. Taylor: I would think about that as a core principle, but beyond that, you've got to break the feed. You've got to be novel, and you've got to figure out a way to differentiate yourself. People are scrolling a mile a day on their phone. If you plan to stop them and break them, then you've got to figure out a way to be compelling right off the bat, and a great metric for tracking this, so we have this principle that we sort of developed off of AIDA, which is a sort of legendary advertising hierarchy of effects model, and we've sort of applied modern metrics to it. So, if you think about the first one, the most important one before ... so with the hierarchy of effects model, they happen in sequence. The second one can't happen until the first one happens. I think this is really true of Facebook ads, which is you don't get a chance to communicate your message until you stop them and capture their attention. Taylor: A metric we focus on a ton is three second views divided by impressions. In other words, what percentage of your served ad impressions result in a three-second consumption? You want to see that number get close to a north of 40%. Otherwise, you are paying for a lot of people to scroll past your ad. Stephanie: Yep. I like that. I like having specific metrics set up for the AIDA format, which for anyone who's like, "What's AIDA?" Attention, interest, desire, action retailers. Taylor: That's right. That's exactly right. We assign a metric to each of those variables, so attention is this three-second views divided by impressions. Interest is video average watch time. Desire is outbound CTR. Then action is ultimately CPA or ROAS or whatever you use there. But the important thing again, with these models, is to think about them happening, they have to happen in sequence. What that does, what I love about using that as a feedback loop for our creatives is that the worst feedback that you can give to a designer or a creative is your ad's not working. That is so not helpful, because what do you do with feedback that says it's not working? What you can do is if, instead of thinking about the ad as a single unit, I think about it as component parts. If I say to them, "Hey, your three-second view to impression ratio is really low." Taylor: Well, now I can think about what's happening at the beginning of the ad. Or if I say, "Hey, everybody's dropping off at four seconds." Now, I can think about what's happening at that point in the ad. So, you can start to now deconstruct the actual ad into pieces that allows a creative to actually take it and iterate in ways that are productive. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. It seems it could get a bit overwhelming if you have tons of ads running, like starting to just try and dissect, what's happening at the four second mark, or what's happening when it should be the D in AIDA? How are you thinking about, if the company has like a large amount of ads that they're testing? Taylor: This is a great question, because this is the number one marketer's dilemma, is that, what do I do next? There's a thousand million gazillion things to do. The answer is you sequence by volume of opportunities. I'm going to just start with the ads that are running in my campaign with the highest spend, and I'm going to iterate on those first because that's my area of highest potential impact. Then I'm going to sequence the rate at which I engage with my ad creative relative to their potential impact. That's a really important thing to think about is that, the sequence by which you decide to do things has opportunity cost to it. So, you have to make sure that you are going after the areas of highest impact relentlessly first. Stephanie: I love that. Yeah, really a good way to think about it. How are you thinking about maybe ... oftentimes, history repeats itself, how are you thinking about looking at historical ad styles or going back to direct mail, which a lot of people are doing right now since everyone's at home? How are you thinking about viewing history to maybe impact present day advertising methods or growth strategies for your brands? Taylor: Yeah. We have this course that we teach to all of our designers called advertising philosophy. The idea is to do that exact thing, which is to understand the fundamentals of advertising that are always true. So, we start with things like behavioral psychology. We read The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton, which talks about different human biases, to help them understand things that are just true of people, period. Then from there, we sort of begin to allocate that against the medium. We read a little bit on advertising and the history of advertising the change, the history of advertising, which are all just chockfull of amazing adding examples that are primarily prints from a legacy of magazine print ads, but they're so much in those print ads. If you think about how hard it was to actually create impact with a print ad, like someone had to open a magazine, they had to see the ad, then they'd to physically go somewhere to take action. It was way harder to be an advertiser there. Taylor: So, the copy had to be so strong and the visuals had to be compelling. There's so much to be learned from a lot of those principles that I think we underestimate the value of the art and history of advertising before we worry about applying it to the modern medium. So, we teach that to all of our people, because one, we want them to fall in love with advertising, because we think it's an incredible art form. A lot of times, for creatives, advertising is sort of seen as the thing that you do when you fail at being a real creative. We just don't believe that. We believe that it is like a true, true art form that reaches millions and millions of people, and if you can learn to really love it and to love the way in which you can impact human behavior with your communication, it can unlock like inspiration for you. That's a long winded way of answering, and it's not just as simple as direct mail, but you've probably realized by now my answers are rarely simple. Stephanie: No, I love them all. Every time I'm Like, ooh, that's a good quote. We should pull that one, because yeah, that's a really good point. Even thinking about when we're generating ads for Mission, it takes so much brain power to think about like, what's good copy, what kind of images should we use? What is someone going to remark about? It's a process. It's harder than even building out a podcast sometimes. So, I can [crosstalk 00:47:18]. Taylor: Yeah, as a simple hack, because I think these things are cyclical. If you are really creatively stalled and you're looking for inspiration, I would really encourage you not to use Facebook ad library as a mechanism for copying. Go look at one of these books, they're full of ads, and literally copy an ad from 1960, and think about the language, the imagery, and literally replicate it in the modern day. It will be more impactful than copying somebody's ad from Facebook ad library. That is a much better source of really potentially impactful ad creative than is the stuff that you're going to see from basically every brand on the internet. Stephanie: Yeah. That's really great. Are there any brands that you're watching that are actually always head of someone, where you're like, these brands all have the same ads, but this particular one is always kind of ahead of the game? Taylor: Yeah. I put out the other day, like one of the things I've gotten shamelessly relentless about is when I see something amazing, I go try and figure out who did it and try and hire them. So, TRUFF, the hot sauce company, their ad creative is as good as anybody's I've seen in the last few months. I put out on Twitter the other day, like I was citing that as an example. I just said, whoever did this, if you reach out to me, I'll double your salary to come work for me right now. Taylor: I think what they've done is really, really fascinating, clever ways of taking a sort of historically boring product in hot sauce and making it super compelling. One of the things, a lot of creatives feel constrained by the product attributes, like our initial entry point in ad creative all the time is like the product features. We just have this phrase that we tell our creatives all the time, which is you live in an infinite creative universe. You can say and do anything and make it relevant to this product. One of my favorite examples of this is there's this legendary ad from Gillette razors. It's a picture of an egg in a frying pan, and the headline is, this is an ad about razorblades. Taylor: The copy just talks about how the nonstick material in the pan is the same thing that they use to build the razors so it doesn't grab your face when it goes by. It's just brilliant. But the idea is like, it's a picture of an egg in a frying pan. It didn't come with the asset library from the client when they sent it over. But if you open yourself up to the possibility of telling stories broader than just the library of photos you receive from the client, and you really embrace this idea of an infinite creative universe, you can do anything. I think that's when you get to the really interesting stuff. Stephanie: Oh, that's great. I love that. Yeah, one of the ads that a friend's company is running, it's for socks, but it's literally a piece of corn growing out of two different. Something like very random, not relevant and it's their best performing ad. Taylor: That is the thing. It's like random. Again, you've got to think about somebody who is scrolling endlessly on their phone, and what is going to stop them Taylor: It's just about understanding, and this is the thing. You've got to be an internet user. In the same way, like everyone thinks about platforms like Reddit is this really specific sub-culture where you'd have this specific language. I saw a hilarious ad for a Reddit out the other day that understood this really well. It was Fresh Box, or one of the meal delivery services. The ad was basically like, "Hey, Reddit, my boss asked me to run an ad on Reddit, so I went ahead and took care of it for you." It's basically this meme app that Reddit users use, which is a robot blowing up the brand. It was basically the satirical way of understanding the medium so clearly, that they mock themselves in a way that made them endeared and loved by the Reddit users. That sort of ability to understand the place and the environment in which people are receiving your content is a real skill. Stephanie: Yeah. No, that's a really good example. I know we only have a couple minutes left, so I did want to ask a higher level Ecommerce question because from the interview, I just know you're so excited about predicting the future and you just feel very confident about it. Taylor: Do it. Stephanie: I wanted to hear, what kind of trends or patterns or disruptions are you most excited about right now in Ecommerce, or do you see coming down the pike? Taylor: Let's see. One of the things that I like, I'm sort of betting on for the future, is the global Ecommerce market. I think about the ... when anytime I see a marketplace where there is this pent up demand, that the infrastructure doesn't yet support, but it's finding a way to happen even before the infrastructure exists, what that means is that, by the time the infrastructure catches up, you're going to have a massive moment of arbitrage. Think of it like a wave that builds up that suddenly then released by some sort of technological innovation, and that's where there's periods of arbitrage before everybody else shows up and the competition's there. I think about a market like India, where you have this massive, massive market that is coming online really, really fast, and you have this problem, which is a payments infrastructure. Taylor: Nobody there has credit cards. Almost everything is cash on delivery, and none of the systems yet support the infrastructure for that delivery and payments processing. But yet, there's massive engagement from the user base. The second that gets solved, it's going to be a huge opportunity. This is true in a ton of other countries, where you have ad inventory costs that are extremely low, you have demand that's really high and you just don't have the systems that need it yet. That's a thing I'm watching and following really closely, as we already have clients that are seeing 30, 40, in some cases, 50% of their spend in international markets, where there's tons of friction in fulfilling the product. The second that, that all goes away, we are on the precipice of a truly global marketplace in a way that we haven't even begun to process. It's going to be really, really cool. Stephanie: Ooh, that is a very good answer. What other parts, or what other places in the globe are you looking at right now? India of course, is a big one next million users, everyone's focused there, but what other smaller markets are you looking at right now that you see a big opportunity, or your brands [crosstalk 00:56:20]? Taylor: Places where like, so the United Arab Emirates is anytime you ... especially, if you have any sort of luxury product, there's massive opportunity there. There's highly efficient opportunity. It's pretty volume constrained. It's a small country. Super interesting. I think Southeast Asia is super, super interesting to me. Nigeria, even from a talent standpoint in the Ecommerce world, that's a giant country. I think sometimes, because we have these geographically warped maps because of our Western centric view, we don't realize how big some of these countries are. Those are a few, Nigeria, Southeast Asia and India from a hiring standpoint, from a potential market opportunity standpoint are places that we're following really closely. Stephanie: And is good spots to watch. All right, so we have a few minutes left. I want to hop into a quick lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Taylor? Taylor: Ready, fire. Stephanie: All right. What's next on your reading list? Taylor: What is next? I'm going to pull up audible right now. Do I have a countdown on my clock? Shoot. Where's my reading app? Audible. Someone just sent me a book. Oh, I know what it ... Here, let me take it. I'm failing at the time challenge, but [crosstalk 00:57:36]. Stephanie: That's okay. Thankfully, we can edit this podcast and make it [crosstalk 00:57:39]. Taylor: Yeah, a book called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson. It's all about sort of racial history in the United States and some of the things that have led to our own version of a caste system. This is a big sort of initiative for me personally, in my own learning and development right now, is sort of redesigning my own sense of history, as well as we've got a bunch of big diversity inclusion initiatives inside of CTC right now. So, I'm trying to do the work of my own education, and that's a book that was just recommended to me. Stephanie: That sounds good. I will have to check that out as well. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Taylor: Man, Netflix is so dead right now. It's one of the biggest drawbacks of COVID era. We just finished Money Heist, which is awesome, or Heist, maybe it's just called, which is dub from a Spanish show. So good. But I'm watching a show on Amazon right now called Upload, which is about this idea that like in the future, they've invented a way that when you die, they upload your consciousness into this digital world and you can interact with the present world. It's sort of a comedy, but it's ... I like those sort of futurist dystopian content. Stephanie: That's interesting. If you were to create a podcast, what would it be about? It can't be Ecommerce, and who would your first guest be? Taylor: Right now it'd be about trading cards. I've become obsessed with baseball cards in the last few months. My guest would be God to the name of Evan Vandenberg, who's launching this company that I might potentially be an investor in called [CollectX 00:59:07], which is basically, think of it as Robinhood meets DraftKings, but it's basically the digitization and tokenization of physical cards into a market dynamic that I'm sort of obsessed with. That's a weird nerdy answer. I'm sorry. Stephanie: I know nothing about trading cards, but that sounds very intriguing. All right, and the last one, what favorite piece of tech or an Ecommerce tool are you trying out right now that is either making you more efficient or you're having a lot of success with? Taylor: It's one that we're building, which is our growth data tool, which is just all around cohort specific LTV data. I have this super fun position of being able to hire a rad developer and a rad product manager and just build something that I want.that is just so fun. To have ideas in your head and then for them to be able to manifest themselves into the world, it's magic. That's my real answer, but I'm an obsessive Evernote user. I believe a lot in creating an external hard-drive for your brain as a really, really powerful tool. I think we were already sort of bionic people more than we realize, and expanding your mental capacity by taking great notes, I think is a serious life hack. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree there. All right. Well, this has been an awesome interview, so many good insights and tips and things that people can actually implement, which I love interviews like that. Where can people find out more about Common Thread Collective and yourself? Taylor: So, commonthreadco.com is our website. Then, I would say follow me, Taylor Holiday on Twitter. Stephanie: You are a good Twitter follow. Yes. All right, thanks Taylor. Taylor: Awesome.

The first in a new monthly episode – CEO of Common Thread Collective, Taylor Holiday and host, Andrew Faris each bring one topic they've been wrestling with over the last month and talk it through. Shownote Resources: 1. QALO "Mark Of A Maker" Quality Campaign: https://bit.ly/2ZodSJZ 2. QALO "Mark Of A Maker" Quality Campaign Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5f7-ObdsvQ 3. Western Rise "Wear From Anywhere" Campaign: https://bit.ly/2Zk1dHN 4. "Mud Bogging" Facebook Group: https://business.facebook.com/theMudBog/?business_id=1514355852207761

Taylor Holiday is a leading expert on FB ads and eCommerce and managing partner at Common Thread Collective.Links MentionedTheBKShow.comCommonThreadCo.comYourAdmission.co — Learn FB Ads from Taylor and his teamFollow Taylor on TwitterFollow Ben on TwitterFollow The BK Show on FacebookFollow The BK Show on InstagramSubscribe to The BK Show YouTube ChannelNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin The BK Show's newsletterHelp the showLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Ben up to?Follow Ben on InstagramApply to work with Ben to grow your business.

What is the right percent profit margin you should target for your products? How do you get the most out of your Facebook ad buys? How much should you really pay attention to conversion rate? These are just a few of the questions that every small business and Ecommerce shop wants the answers to. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we picked the brain of Andrew Faris, the CEO of 4x400, a company that has helped grow numerous Ecommerce companies from less than 500,000 into the tens of millions. Today, Andrew spills some of his advertising secrets, including how to make Facebook your core driver for customer acquisition. Here’s a mini spoiler: human bias is leading you astray, but there is a simple way to correct course. Find out that, and more, on this episode! Main Takeaways: Conversion rate is so context-specific that it's not that helpful of a metric. Instead, analyze conversion rate relative to average order value and relative to the traffic sources the customer came from. Before you invest in anything else, you need to drive traffic to the top of the funnel. Currently, Facebook ads are the core driver of customer acquisition for online shopping. Andrew suggests that most Ecommerce brands should invest in the platform and then trust the algorithm to put you in front of the right audiences. You have to take big swings with your experiments. Don’t get hung up on micro-details like the color of your buttons or rewriting your copy. Instead, find big ways to make changes and then see how the outcomes stack up. Because we are all riddled with our own biases, we often cannot predict accurate models of the future on our own. Instead, use data as your guide as you peer into the future. 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 --- Transcript: Stephanie: Hey everyone. This is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host of Up Next in Commerce. Today on the show, we have the CEO of 4x400, Andrew Faris. Andrew, thanks for taking the time. Andrew: Stephanie, I am very glad to be able to do this. I have never been accused of not liking to talk about Ecommerce in particular, but just in general. So this is fun. Stephanie: Well, you're my perfect guest then. I was creeping as one does on your LinkedIn. I saw an interesting thing that you have a background in religion and theology. I was wondering how you transitioned into the world of business from that background. Andrew: Yeah. I can always tell when somebody has looked at my LinkedIn or not because that's maybe the only place where that's found anymore. Stephanie: You're welcome. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. No, I went to school for biblical studies, and then got a master's degree in New Testament. So that was my whole pathway, was to go into that and actually was a pastor for a while. Did that, and then about ... gosh, how long ago? Five and a half years ago stepped out of that not because anything in my faith changed per se, but just because I was just rethinking a bunch of stuff in my life and reworking a bunch of stuff in my life. So it's just total life change in all kinds of crazy ways. I didn't have a clue what I was going to do actually. Andrew: That educational pathway doesn't have a direct connection to almost anything that's not work in a church or academic setting or something like that in theology. So, I really loved that education a lot, but I was figuring it out. So I called a friend of mine named Taylor Holiday, who ... and I was talking to him about if there's any available work in his world of work. Just basically as an in between thing while I figured it out. I just thought I'll just go do something for a couple months to figure out what I want to do. He said, sure, and brought me to a company called QALO, Q-A-L-O. If you've seen the silicon wedding rings that are for- Stephanie: Oh, yeah. Andrew: .. on the internet a lot, QALO was the first big company of those. QALO went zero to 20 million in a year and a half and was not funded. So, I was bootstrapped. I went there and it was just growing super, super fast. Also, being not funded and being a bunch of people like that, it just meant that they just were, in those worlds probably some of your listeners probably know this story a little bit, which is like, you just find people who can do stuff in that setting. I literally started in the warehouse. At one point, I sat down with Taylor, who's now one of my partners. Taylor was running marketing for QALO at the time. His brother was one of the founders. Taylor said, "Hey, you've got a mind for numbers," which he knew because we were in a Fantasy Baseball League together and knew that I was a big baseball stat nerd. Andrew: May not be interesting to many of your listeners I'm sure, but I have a lot to say about the interplay of thinking about sports through statistical lens and thinking about Ecommerce. Anyway, so that was the origin. We had been in this fantasy baseball for a while, "I know you have a mind for numbers, why don't you learn Facebook ads and Google ads and learn digital marketing?" I said, sure, but still I was not really sure what I wanted to do in the longer term. But I was like, "All right, that sounds fun." So, did that and loved it. Andrew: I mean, I was so totally unaware of what was happening, but I still remember the first conversation I had with Taylor in a bank where he told me what I'd be doing. He's explaining to me how Facebook ads, Google ads worked and said, "Is it okay? Well, here's the deal. You get customers into the funnel with your ads and then you drive ..." and I stopped him in the middle of that sentence and said, "What's the funnel?" That was where my digital marketing knowledge was at. From there, that ended up being the pathway to the digital marketing and Ecommerce career growth. So I was at QALO for a while, went to CTC, the agency that owns our company, owns the majority of it and became the head of strategy there. And then now I run 4x400. Andrew: Yeah, it was a crazy set of circumstances with Taylor. We actually went to junior high together, but had not reconnected because of that. We reconnected outside of that. So, just weird circumstances. Stephanie: That's interesting. Andrew: This gets into my life philosophy a little bit. I'm a believer in divine providence and think there was some of that happening around. Stephanie: For sure. Yeah, that's awesome. Always good to be in business with someone who's willing to bet on you because you have that beginner's mindset and it's probably why you're doing so well. But I'd love for you to detail a little bit about the structure of CTC and 4x400 in the holding company structure because we haven't had anyone on the show quite like this. So, any details around what 4x400 is and how it's connected to CTC would be great. Andrew: Yeah, sure. Common Thread Collective, it grew out of ... Taylor was building the agency alongside the growth of QALO. Started really focusing on Facebook ads. CTC does a lot more in that now, but CTC is now a full service digital sales agency. We said digital sales sell digital marketing because what we're doing is selling things on the internet, it's consumer goods, really focusing on Ecommerce entrepreneurs. The mission of CTC is to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. So that's really what we're about. We're specifically really good taking people in somewhere in the journey from zero to 30 million. Andrew: I was a strategist there and then became the head of strategy there. CTC continues to grow and do well. Taylor Holiday, as I mentioned is the managing partner of CTC. Andrew: In the midst of that, we also were like ... I mean, we came from this background of starting QALO. Taylor also was early on with another one of our partners named Josh Rodarmel who founded Power Balance. If you don't know Power Balance, Power Balance was the really popular silicon bracelets that were worn by athletes for a long time, still are worn by some. Andrew: That company was another super crazy fast growth company. I think they were zero to 50 in a year and a half. Yeah, I think that was the number. But anyway, I did on the brand side selling consumer goods in those worlds. We're like, why don't we launch our own brands as well? So, that's how 4x400 started. Eventually I went over to that side of the business. We started with building our own brand from scratch. It totally saw giant failure called [inaudible] company, just a huge waste of money. It doesn't exist anymore. It was sports themed baby goods and it just ... there are a lot of reasons that didn't work Stephanie: Wait, sports themed baby goods, so- Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Stephanie: ... like onesies. Andrew: Yeah. Like onesies that look like football uniforms. They're adorable. I don't know why nobody bought them. Stephanie: Okay, that's super cute. I'll buy one from you. Andrew: Yeah. I think that you'd have to go find a flea market in Northern California somewhere. I had to go get it every day. Stephanie: I will find one, I actually need to for my twin. So, it'll be a long journey, but I'm going to do it. Andrew: Okay. You're in Northern California, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: Yeah, I think that's who we sold to, so [inaudible] don't worry. We did that, and then realized actually most of our skill at this point ... most last couple years that we have really been spent after we'd gotten out of the brand side so much growing brands, not so much building brands. So we thought, why don't we just do that? Now our model is, at 4x400, we work with entrepreneurs who are in early stages and feel a little stalled out. We provide them with a team around them that can help them grow it. 4x400 mission is also to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. We just do it in a different way than CTC. Andrew: CTC does that the traditional client relationship 4x400, takes the majority share of the brand. And then our goal is to make it so that by bringing us on as a partner and all of the expertise and resources we have around finance operations, marketing, growth customer service, even just really thinking through the whole system of what it means to be a great Ecommerce brand, we can help brands grow. We just closed actually our fifth brand that is currently in our portfolio. We're hoping to close another one soon. Who knows by the time it comes out, if that will happen? We're trying to work with brands who are doing less than half a million in revenue and saying like "We can try to grow you from there." CTC is the majority owner 4x400. 4x400 is the majority owner of these brands. So there's this giant web of relationships there. Stephanie: Yeah, okay. That helps me understand the landscape a bit more. How do you think about acquiring brands, how do you find brands that are willing to say, "Okay, we'll give you a majority share and come under your company"? Andrew: Yeah. Well, there's a few ways. CTC is a magnet for some of them. Sometimes brands will come to CTC and CTC will say, we're not the right partner for you. You're not a place where you can afford us. One piece of advice I have for a lot of it was like, if you are paying an agency not very much money you should really think about whether the agency is good because agency economics just require, for you to get great service, they typically require a pretty good investment. Just think about it. Agencies exist by marking up people's time. So, an agency works well if they are able to attract and train great talent by nature of access to large amounts of information. Andrew: The value of an agency is that they are spending millions and millions of dollars of other people's money on stuff. So, it's information arbitrage in that respect. You can come to an agency and get that information applied to your brand in a way that maybe an in house resource can't always do because they just are not going to have the visibility to as much of what's going on. For that to work, then you have to mark up that time of high quality, talented people who are probably not cheap. And then also for something like Facebook ads, Google ads, and then oftentimes there's a creative element of that and a writing element of that, and a strap gentleman have that, so that means you got to pay designers and other people like that too. And then there's web dev parts of it. You start to put that all together and if it's too cheap, then you have to be going like, wait a minute, what am I actually getting here? Andrew: Some brands in the early days, will come to ... they'll be stalled out or come to CTC for resources. CTC will say to them, actually you can't really afford this. What we actually think is a better solution for you is to talk about a deeper investment where we can really surround you with more stuff. What we find is a lot of entrepreneurs love product building and customer communication in certain ways. They love their customer, they love their product idea people, but they don't necessarily have all of the skills around everything else it takes to grow a brand. In fact, they don't want to do those things. Andrew: Most entrepreneurs don't start brands because they love finance, they don't. They don't even necessarily love tactical marketing. A lot of times what we can say to them is, "Let us take all that stuff that you hate doing anyway from you, you feel overwhelmed and stalled all the time anyway. You come with us, we'll pay you a consistent salary," which is also a big help to some people who are going like, I just don't even know if I can perform this anymore. We'll help you grow. Some entrepreneurs want to stay on, some don't, some just wants to take it. So it really depends on each entrepreneur, but that's basically a lot of how we think about it. Andrew: And then for us, we evaluate the brand by saying like, "Does it have basic product market fit and basic fundamentals to where we think as we bring in all of our tactical expertise and all of our specific expertise in various disciplines that we can then apply that to the brand and grow it?" A brand who comes to us who hasn't really invested much in paid media, but has done 100 to $300,000 in revenue, we look at that and say, "That's ..." Actually, we have a really high amount of respect for that. It's really hard to do that, it's hard to do $100,000 without being good at Facebook ads. It's not easy. So we look at that and say like, "Good job. We don't think you're a failure. If you come to us and want our help, we think we get it." We look at that and say, "That's very impressive. Let us surround you now with resources that we can scale this to 10, $20 million in revenue." Stephanie: Very cool. How are your brands performing now? Andrew: Yeah, good. They're doing good. Andrew: I think COVID really helped Ecommerce brands massively. Two things happen at the same time. One of them is that large corporations who have diversity of sales channels, but were spending lots of money on advertising, pulled their advertising budgets the way the heck back. Of course, lots of other companies couldn't produce products. So they couldn't sell products in retail settings, so they pulled a lot of the budget back. They couldn't produce products because of supply chain problems. And then at the same time ... So that meant that in large auction based advertising work universes like Facebook ads and Google ads, ads got suddenly way cheaper really fast. Andrew: The way that works is that because those are built on an auction, if a lot of people leave the auction everybody's prices get cheaper. We've looked at this data across CTC accounts. There was a giant plummeting of advertising CPMs in those worlds. And then at the same time in the last couple months, conversion rate on websites went up because the only place to capture demand was online. You couldn't go buy stuff in the store. So if you're selling things on the internet, that's where people are buying things from. And then of course, the stimulus checks it. As people have noted, that actually ended up being one of the largest increases in revenue to the average American family in history. So, all of a sudden, people have money to spend. Whether or not they should have spent it on consumer goods is a different question, I don't really know. But they had money to spend. Andrew: The less places for that demand to be captured mostly on Ecommerce stores. And then also, it got a lot cheaper to reach those people with ads. You put that all together and Ecommerce did really, really, really well for a couple months. So that really helped us. There's no question about it. We're still feeling some of the positive effects of that. It feels weird to be a winner in COVID, but there's no question that Ecommerce brands were .. To varying degrees depending on the category you're in, for sure. Andrew: We have three brands that are in the established stage and not in the start it up stage. Stephanie: What account is established, is it a revenue metric or- Andrew: Yeah, a good question. I'd say a million dollars during 12 months, or a million dollar run rate. We would look at and say, "Okay, we're growing at the pace that we want." I can just give you some numbers. We're projected this year to go to have one of our brains go to 8 million, that brand did 100,000 in 2017. Last year, we really took it over halfway through the year. I think we ended at 750 for the year. So, that's definitely our fastest growing brand right now. Stephanie: That's [crosstalk 00:16:47]. Andrew: Another one- Stephanie: ... some good growth right there. Andrew: Yeah. We feel good about that. That's profitable too, which is definitely in our model. We took on a little bit of funding early, but not a ton of funding. We function more like a bootstrapped company. And then another one went from ... just a little over two years ago, we acquired it. It was basically doing no revenue, it'll do 3 million this year. Yeah, that's a different story. And then another one went from 250 to a million to just under two, this year, we'll do four to four and a half probably. So those ones are all we feel established growing at the pace we want, we feel really good about. Stephanie: Yeah. That's some impressive number. How do you grow these brands? What are some of your tactics and strategies that you rely on those, what do you see success with? How can someone else learn from what y'all are doing to grow their Ecommerce companies? Andrew: Yeah. Facebook ads is the core driver of customer acquisition for us. I mean, selling consumer goods direct to consumer online, Facebook ads is still the most powerful tool in the world for reaching people. I'm hearing chatter about other things, YouTube, Snap, even Tik Tok, Google ads, product's changing. I just think still at this point, at scale, depending on what you mean by scale, people define that word differently. But for us, that's the core, top of the funnel way that we get traffic to our website. Andrew: I mean, you think about what Facebook ads is, it's not buying ads so much as buying traffic. I guess it's both really. But we look at that and say, "If we can make the traffic worth more than we're paying for it, worth enough more that we're paying for it to cover the cost of goods and things like that," I should say, "Then we can win." That's how we drive top of funnel traffic for us. And then after that, we try to do everything that we think great brands should do, which is like create a beautiful website that treats their customers great, has generous returns and shipping policies as much as we can afford to do it basically, which varies from brand to brand, depending on a number of factors. Do a great job with your retention email and other automated flow stuff. Constantly testing conversion rate optimization on our site in various ways. There's just a whole bunch of that kind of stuff that we're doing on the backend of that. Andrew: We are also certainly looking to invest in other top of the funnel type metrics, our traffic drivers as well. I would think of Google search as mid funnel and Google shopping as mid funnel. So, we're definitely investing there as well. I think we'll keep doing other stuff. That won't work forever. There's going to be a cap to how much Facebook ads does the driver work and we fully intend to add to our customer acquisition approach when we can. But our goal has been to grow profitably and we think that's one of the best ways to do it right now. Andrew: The other thing is it's not just one of the best ways to do it, it's just that we also have deep expertise in it. So, I'm just a believer that do the thing you do well as much as you can. I think it works for leadership and working with teams. Just as much as we can set up our team members to be doing the things that they love doing and they're good at. As long as the things that people love doing and are good at create value for the company, then you should pay them to do it. So that's the way we look at it too. Andrew: Just coming from the agency side, I personally have managed, I don't know, 25 ad accounts, that's probably more than that. Seen a lot more of that when I was the head of strategy and working with other strategists. I don't mean that to brag. It means that now I have some intellectual capital built up on what works. So, that's what we use from there. Stephanie: Cool. To drill in a little bit deeper then for the Facebook ads because I think a lot of companies probably have looked at Facebook ads, maybe they're using it. I haven't heard of anyone growing liked you guys are growing your brands consistently. So what tactics are you using specifically, or what do you see works well? Andrew: Yeah, there's a lot I can say about that. I think this is going to sound so fishy, but if you're getting serious about that, there's a couple of things ... The thing I would actually tell you to do, if you don't know where to start and you're getting serious about it, is to go visit your admission.co. I don't know, maybe I can give you a link to this, Stephanie, at some- Stephanie: Yeah, we can link it up. Andrew: Cool, yeah. So that is CTC's education program. It's not a course, it's different than every other education thing I know of in this world. It's actually a moderated community with access to ... Taylor, the CEO of CTC is in there doing webinars like our team members, our brand managers and people like that. Also, might jump in there and do webinars exclusively for that community. What we're doing is teaching all of the things that are ... what we believe are really the best practices for Facebook ads from the perspective of creative, from the perspective of targeting, bidding, all that kind of stuff. Bringing people through all of those things and then giving them continued support with access to the actual CTC teams who are doing that same thing that I was describing, which is spending millions of dollars of other people's money, so you can have access to that knowledge set. I think it's 500 bucks a month right now. Andrew: I even say sometimes there's even executive level people who will take their whole team through it. It's not like you're going to be in it for forever. The point is that you can do that and get access to what we believe works best. We're always evaluating that. There are certainly other things to do there, but that'll give you what we ... We try to be really honest and transparent where we can about what we're seeing. So that will give you mental ways to think about that problem. Andrew: I think one of the things that can go wrong is you could listen to me talk about this, and maybe you're an entrepreneur and you hear my numbers and you go like, I'm going to go do that. You just blow money because you make simple mistakes that somebody could help you not make, if you've just got some support. There is no way to learn besides doing it really. You're going to make mistakes, it's okay. In my view, creative needs to be really product focused in the sense that it's on Facebook ads and Instagram ads. You are driving high quality traffic by giving people a clear sense of what your product is right away. Clear wins over everything else first as a baseline. Andrew: Clear doesn't make you give you the best out in the world. They're clear plus some other things do that, but clear establishes a baseline of what you can expect and at least drives what I consider high quality traffic to your side. People who are interested in you because of your product. So that's probably the first basic principle I would say is focus on being clear in your creative before you focus on being clever or funny, or any of those kinds of things. You can drive a lot of very cheap traffic to your website with Clickbait tactics, but they won't buy anything. Ultimately, it won't matter how cheap the traffic is if they don't buy anything. So that's the kind of thing I would say. Andrew: And then the other big thing I'm a huge believer in is trust the algorithm. There was a world where people talk about Facebook ads as the value of micro-targeting that was one of the phrases people would talk about. This idea that you'd go find exactly your customer really specifically target them without everybody else. I think there was a time when that was part of how you did it. Those times are gone. What I would say is what you want to do is give Facebook as much information as possible and let Facebook's algorithm predict the future for you because humans are terrible at predicting the future. Algorithms are pretty good at it. So, algorithms do a really good job of looking at the data set of who's responding to your advertising. And then going and saying, here's some more people like that to put you out in front of. So, we believe in really broad targeting. Andrew: Let Facebook have as much freedom as you can to go and find the next person to put you out in front of. Over time, not even over that much time, Facebook's amazing in this regard much quicker than Google is at this. Facebook will find who those people are. So that's the broad principles I would say is trust the algorithm, be clear with your creative. There you go. There's just so much more I could say about the Stephanie, but I'm going to stop there. So I don't take up the entire rest of the podcast. Stephanie: Okay, cool. Yeah, we will definitely link that up. I think it's a really important point too to segment a piece of your ad budget for testing. I know we do that internally as I'll tell. Our team members are like, "Hey, you have this much money. If you spend it and you just learn from it, that's okay. Versus this amount let's actually protected and make sure we drive results with it." So I think it's good to go into a mindset being okay with using a portion of ads for an R&D type testing project. So, you feel like you can learn from it, but not blow your entire budget on it. Andrew: Okay, no question. Constantly testing is super crucial. What I'd say about that is, when I want to test on Facebook ads, the place I want to test most is take big swings with your tests. The common thing you hear people say with testing, you'll hear people like, I've seen so many articles trumpeting like, oh, we changed our CTC button color or we changed it from [inaudible] now and it was a 15% lift. Andrew: First of all, I just don't believe those studies anymore. Secondly, the reason you're writing about it is because it's exceptional. It doesn't happen all the time. I just think that's a waste of people's time. But most people need to do, if they're looking to go from not successful to successful, the larger the difference in outcome you want, the bigger the change you need to make. You can't just change the background color of your ad and expect that it give you wildly different results. That's once you have results you like and now you're just dialing in and trying to grab an extra 2% of value here and there. I just rarely see that thing work. Andrew: What I would say is much better to think to test is something like, what's the offer that you're giving people? What's the product you're starting with and leading with? That can create wildly different results. We just ran something for our jewelry company that we ... 31 Bits, which is our other most recent acquisition, our fourth brand. We started with a batch of ads focusing on one set of products were necklaces and bracelets and things like that. We were getting a dollar of 50 clicks, low click through rates, et cetera, and very poor conversion rate. Andrew: We changed the product set, same exact brand, similar styles of photography, but just different products to a whole different category of product and saw triple or more the performance suddenly CTC went way down. Click through rate, went way up, conversion went way up. The reason why is really obvious, it's jewelry, some people like some bracelets better than others. If you just use the same stuff all the time, people are going to respond to it the same way over time. There's no magic to that. That's how people shop for something that you wear. It's about what it looks like. So, by changing the products that we led with that made a huge difference. So that's what I'd say is for Ecommerce consumer good people, that's the kind of test you want to be running. Andrew: Give it a whole different products out, a whole different offer, a whole different way of framing the offer, don't just change little bits of the creative and copy if you want to change your outcome in a big way. Stephanie: Yeah. I love that. People I talk to sometimes are focused on those micro adjustments that you're talking about or just the minimal incremental pieces that they could change, whether it's button colors or all that. That's a good point too. Yeah. Focus on the higher level things. But how did you decide on what new products to show? Andrew: In that case, part of it was what new products ... there's a change in our product development, that's going to make it so, or in our manufacturing that was going to make it to that, we're phasing out some products anyway. We always start by looking at most products over various periods of time. This is a simple way to start. I mean, there's not a lot of science to it in that respect. I think we're just looking around- Stephanie: Just seeing what it's doing well in the market. Andrew: Yeah. And what's done well on our side. Honestly, part of it is for a place to start your testing just like make a hypothesis and test it. I mean, it's not- Stephanie: Yeah. What timeframe are you looking at? When you do the test, are you looking at 30 days? Let's see how it does and try something new, or is it like after a couple of days you'll know and try something different? Andrew: Yeah. I'd say budget is probably a bigger factor than time. So if you're spending thousands of dollars a day, it doesn't take very long good answers. If you're spending a couple $100 a day, it takes a little longer. It also changes relative to your average order value. What you need is a statistically significant number of responses and really a statistically significant number of conversions. You can think of conversions as micro conversions as well. For example, a click on an ad is a conversion in a sense. Clicks as a percentage of impressions is a conversion. Because it's pretty cheap to run Facebook ads, you can actually figure out a reliable statistically significant performance in a click through rate pretty fast without having to see how those clicks convert. Andrew: In that case, it took us, I mean, I think we're got 100 bucks, when we knew that this new round of ads was way, way better performing because the gap and click through rate was so significant between the two. That's another core principle here. The larger the gap and the outcome, or the larger the disparity in the outcome, the more likely it is that it's a reliable result, if that makes sense. In that case, I think we spent between the two products, that's a total of 1,500 bucks. The whole goal of that was to test those while we went and ordered new products to try and start scaling a little bit for a larger test in the future. I didn't really care what the actual result was. The goal is a bigger goal to win bigger over time. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. When talking about growing, I saw that you guys live by a central Ecommerce growth formula. I was hoping you could go into that a bit. Andrew: Yeah. This is changing a little bit in some ways. I'll give you the baseline version of it, which is visitors tasks conversion rate times average order value. This is actually really simple. Every business in the world only actually has three factors that make up the value that you get from a purchase, or that make up your revenue actually. The first factor is how many people come to your business. This could be people walk into your store, it doesn't have to be a website. But just never people who show up. And then you multiply that by the conversion rate. So, what percentage of those people buy something from you? And then you multiply that by how much they spend. Andrew: When you look at that, that will equal your revenue. If you just say, how many people get there, how many of those people buy and how much they spend when they do? That's the entirety that makes up the revenue. That's incredibly simple and intuitive in a lot of ways. But what I find is that in the fog of war, people lose sight of that very simple concept. So, they start making tests and changes without a really clear idea of which one or multiple of those variables they're actually trying to affect. Of course, those all relate to each other. For example, your average order value goes up, your conversion rate goes down, that's a general rule of thumb, it's true across everything. It's intuitive when you think about it. Andrew: A smaller percentage of people are going to buy a $1,000 item than a $10 item. As you drive more traffic, it's highly likely that you're driving lower and lower quality traffic. Everybody exists along in the world, exists along a continuum of people likely to buy your product and unlikely to buy your product from your mother, who's the most likely person in the world to buy your product to- Stephanie: That is number one. Andrew: Yes. To a subsistence farmer who doesn't have the internet is the least likely person. The farther you go from your mom to the subsistence farmer, the more expensive it is to acquire that customer. So as traffic grows, then your conversion rate is likely to go down. That's just another helpful concept, I think. These are rules of thumb to heuristics they're not always true, but that's a basic way of thinking about it. We think about those three levers in what we do and really try to understand when we test something at any point in our funnel, whether it's on the website or ad level or whatever, which one of those am I actually trying to affect? Where's the problem in my business? Andrew: I've talked with friends of mine who own CrossFit gyms, and I've said to them like ... I'm thinking of a friend in particular whose gym was struggling. I was trying to help him think this way, which of these is the problem for you? Are not enough people showing up to your gym? Or when they show up, do they not buy a membership? Or do they buy a cheap membership or you give them a month free and then they don't spend any money after that? Which one of these is the problem? That probably gets towards LTV as well, or CLV, Customer lifetime Value as something to think about in the midst of all this as well. This is where you can make it a little more complicated, but that basic principle is true. Across the gym, just like on my consumer goods websites, it's the same problem. You just have to figure out which one of those things has the highest upside at the lowest cost to fix next. That's where you should put your energy. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. Have you ever pitched a brand to be taken over by a 4x400 that you believed in where everyone else on your team didn't believe in it? Andrew: Oh yeah. This is where it helps to be coldly rational. Gosh, I don't mean rational like smart, I'm always right. I just mean my approach is unemotional to a lot of this stuff. To the probably emotional dysfunction in other ways in my life or something like that, I'm not saying you should emulate this necessarily. But that's why there's therap, so it's fine. So, sorry? I know there's some noise there. A lot of times, if we're tweeting about a new brand acquisition. People will say privately like, "I do believe in this," or "I don't believe in this." I just started think that's like ... I think without having the view that I have in the acquisition process, I just don't even know what somebody is judging that on. People just go by their general sense of what they believe about if it's a good brand or not. Andrew: First of all, other people are not like you. Your subjective sense of that may not reflect at all what I brought population to potential customers is. Secondly, to me, you can validate this pretty clearly by looking at simple product market fit, things like margin is a huge question, which makes businesses work and it makes other businesses fail, is one of the problems of opening day. We made a huge mistake by just giving ourselves away too little margin on the products. Stephanie: What's the little margin, what do you consider small? Andrew: Yeah. Well, I think if you're going to try and grow a brand with ... I'll just tell you, we target 70 points plus of margin for brands that we are trying to grow with our method of growth. And then that's really important. If you have other growth mechanisms that might not matter as much. But for us, we want 70 points plus landed margin. We can deal with a little less than that, but if you're going to try and grow a brand with Facebook ads, you're going to need to be able to exist at a two to one return on your money on ads probably. It's hard to really beat that number, if not withstanding something like coronavirus throwing those small. So we target that. That becomes a big question for us, if we think we can do that. Andrew: Sometimes actually it's part of the first thing we have to fix for a brand is, we see supply chain processes that are in our view broken and we would say like, "We love everything about this brand. It's convergent on site, is great relative to its average order value, relative to its traffic sources." We dig into all that stuff, and say, "But your margin is not good enough, but we think we can solve that. W can help with getting your shipping cost down by repackaging it differently, or thinking about what products to focus on or not, or changing your manufacturer or something like that." We don't want to ever do that at the expense of giving people a good product. We haven't compromised on that at this point, which I'm happy about. But yeah, those are all the things that we can look at as potentially something to fix. But in our view, 70 points plus, makes the game a lot easier for sure. Stephanie: Got it. I like that point too about, what would someone know when they're doubting a brand? Because that is definitely a human flaw thinking about ... even when I'm thinking about those rubber bracelets from a while back, for me to say, "Oh, that's dumb," I don't need to be balanced or anything, or I need help with that. It's funny because it's like, well, apparently a lot of other people did because look how many people bought it. Yeah, I think that's also a good lesson for anyone starting something up. If they hear someone say like, "Oh, that's dumb, you shouldn't do that." Probably good to take a step back and be like, well, that's just one person's opinion and not let it deter you from trying at least. Andrew: Yes, especially relative to the set of metrics I have in front of me, which are going to tell me something a little bit different. This is one of the things that's so great about data is that I'm just wrong, Stephanie, about so many things in life, I just know I am. So having some source outside of my own brain that I can look at. When my own eyes are lying to me, humans are just biased machines. We're just machines of bad thinking about stuff. So, finding ways to be aware of my priors going into something and my bias going into something, check those against some sorts of truths that exist outside myself. Of course, people can lie with data and data can be poorly collected. There's all kinds of ways that can go wrong too. But in light of all those things, I just think that it becomes really helpful to do that, to go and have a source like that to go check in. So that's what we do in our process. Andrew: There's various levels of excitement about brands even internally. But there's no question that ... We sincerely believe it can work based on the data set in front of us and a few other old principals. So that's what we do. Stephanie: That's cool. We're mentioning data, stick with the data when it comes to it and don't just listen to unfounded opinions. What kind of metrics do you look at that you think a lot of other brands aren't utilizing enough? There's obvious ones like conversions and click-through rates and all that kind of stuff and revenue obviously, but is there anything that you look at that you think enough people aren't paying attention to? Andrew: There's no magic here. After we acquired 31 Bits, this jewelry company ... really super cool brand. This brand was started by women who were anthropology majors in college and wanted to provide good quality jobs to people who could not access them by nature of where they lived in the world. So they started in Uganda after a trip there and had these women making these really cool beads. This started in 2009. These women were out to change the world with this brand. It's just totally authentic, beautiful brand story around all of this stuff. When we acquired that, I on my podcast, it's called- Stephanie: What is your podcast? Andrew: Yeah, yeah. I feel so lame doing this right now, but- Stephanie: Oh, sorry, Andrew. Andrew: I know. There's a tangent there. But anyway, if somebody really wants to hear how I think about this question, I spent about 45 minutes with Taylor, the head of our agency, talking about exactly why we acquired 31 Bits. We did an episode about that. I'll find it and send it to you for the show notes as well. And then we interviewed the ladies from the brand for the next episode after that, so people could kinda hear why they chose us as well. We tried to be really honest about why we think it'll work and why we think it could fail. I would say the metrics related to that, that I care about, it's not just conversion rate it's conversion rate relative to average order value and relative to traffic sources. That's a huge one for us. Andrew: Conversion rate itself is actually so context specific that it's not that helpful of a metric. I mean, think about the conversion rate of a direct click. Somebody comes to the website, types in 31bits.com, presses enter. Let's take a 45 year old female on a desktop computer direct versus a 25 year old male on their cellphone through a display ad on the internet, saying conversion rates to describe what both of those people are doing and getting a baseline is not going to be helpful at all because the baseline for those two different customers of what you'd expect, they're so different. I mean, just the device issue you're twice as likely to convert on desktop than you are as mobile before you talk about any of the rest of the demographic's software or anything like that. Andrew: We try to really give some specificity of the context of something like conversion rate. Even one thing you'll see there is like, sometimes the brand's conversion rate will look low, but it's actually not low. The reason it looks low is because they're getting a ton of blog traffic via organic search SEO essentially. That blog traffic is technically on their URL, but it's not at all related to their product and it's not people looking for their product. Therefore, that blog traffic will have an incredibly low conversion rate and will therefore negatively influenced the total conversion rate. If you bucket that blog traffic out, it turns out the conversion and the brand is fine and their website works great and you just didn't realize that. I don't know if that example made sense. But there's- Stephanie: It does make sense. Andrew: ... there's just all of these kinds of contexts, things like that, that I think are really crucial to look at all the way around. We look at some other stuff like we've looked at entire funnel on our site, so we'll look at not just the conversion rate thing. If somebody doesn't buy something on your website, there's a question of why did they not buy? Because they made it to your website, so what happened next? Did they never add anything to cart or did they add to cart and then drop off once they got to checkout or did they never even make it to checkout or what? We look at each of those things and try to understand what's going on. Andrew: If somebody adds to cart and makes them check out and then drops off, why? The answer to that question is probably because you're shipping cost is too much a lot of times, or it's going to get shipped slowly, or they're not confident in return policy or whatever. So we'll look at some of that stuff too. We have a value of 4x400, which is understanding before you act and paired with that is hard problems require deep focus, or require deep work. The basic concept is like, before I go and throw out a million solutions, I want to really understand as clear of terms as possible exactly what's wrong. Andrew: When I hear somebody say my Facebook ads are broken, the thing I want to say is, "What do you mean? What's happening? What broken- Stephanie: What are you doing? Andrew: Right, yeah. "Is the conversion rate broken? Are the clicks too expensive? Where is the problem? Are you not getting a high enough AOV? When you say it's broken, what do you mean?" To try to help people answer that question because then it can guide where to think about the next problem. Stephanie: Cool. I love that. Yeah, that was a really good example. Stephanie: Are there any things, technology or otherwise tools that you're using right now that are maybe new that you're excited about? Andrew: Well, I'll tell you what I think that is, it's not the answer you're looking for, but I think it's the answer that I get. Stephanie: Go for it. Andrew: My answer is no I don't. We will get there to where we'll need to do that, but I just think this is a massive distraction for a lot of people. I think people love to go chase the next new thing. They'll even say things like, "well, my customer is on Tik Tok." I don't really know what that means. Yes- Stephanie: I don't really know who's on Tik Tok right now. Andrew: I'm 36. First all, I'm 36, I'm too old and I don't get Tik Tok. I've never had Facebook on my phone, so I'm just the worst social media marketer ever in that respect. I do not understand what's happening in the world. I just don't always know what that kind of thing means. I think your customers probably also want Instagram because there's a lot of people on Instagram. So I could be wrong about that, I guess. I'd be so happy for somebody to correct me if that's the case and reach out and tell me, "You're not looking at this right." Anyway, I just think it becomes a huge distraction for people to go and try and find another new thing to go do instead of to get really good in one or two areas. Andrew: We will expand channels over time. I think we're really trying to build out more search and shopping as a next step for us, that is not a new channel at all. It's actually the oldest digital marketing channel, search in particular,. I'm playing around with some ideas from SEO, but really I'm just trying to make my customer more valuable at this point. So, just trying to really get better via email, post-purchase, via my unboxing experience, trying to think about how unboxing and product experience creates retention in word of mouth. I'm trying to dig deeper and get better at the things I'm already doing rather than adding a whole lot, I think. Stephanie: With everything happening in the world right now, it does seem like there, like you mentioned early on the show, there're a lot of changes happening, especially around Ecommerce. I know you're talking about focusing on what's working and all that, but is there anything you're preparing for over the next three to five years that you're anticipating around Ecommerce trends? Andrew: Yeah, all right. This is my coronavirus beat right non. This is a really fun question and is a great podcast fodder. I do not fault you for asking it and I don't want you to hear my answer to this as condescending. But there's no possible way in the world that I could predict the future that far out. Here's what I believe about predicting the future. The more complex the system you're project predicting with the more inputs that there are there, over the longer the timeline, the harder it is to project. So, I might be able to give you some sense of what's happening next week, but then also last week, all these companies started saying they're going to pull their Facebook ad spend. Stephanie: Yeah. I didn't why I mention that, but I'm like well, that seems like it's a good opportunity then, like you're mentioning to get on Facebook. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Stephanie: I think Zuckerberg even said they'll be back or something like that, which is just funny. Andrew: First of all, who could have predicted over that timeline, that kind of thing would happen? Before you even talk about Zuckerberg, who ... There's just so many elements. The system of macroeconomics in the U.S., before you even talk to the world, is so big with so many inputs and so complex that I just don't believe in anybody's ability to really predict that. So what I think is that it's not helpful generally to do that. I'll say three to five years, the one thing I feel broadly, fairly comfortable with though, I think even this has, there's some basic questions is that Ecommerce, as an industry, Ecommerce is a share of U.S. retail spending, will continue to grow. Andrew: I mean, I just have no possible way of predicting that. So I feel like it's a good place to be if you're in Ecom, I think you should be investing in Ecom broadly. I just don't think otherwise it's very possible to do that. I mean, just look at what we were all saying about coronavirus two months ago and the models that we were all looking at about what this thing could be. It's been devastating. I don't want to underplay that, but it has not been in the U.S. the millions of deaths at this point, at least. Who knows that people were predicting? I just look at that and go like, that's because predicting that many things for something with that much unknown is really, really hard. Andrew: My take on this is to go read Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise and to hone your skills thinking about what kinds of things you can and can't project, and even how to think about projecting things. And then to go from there, which means the way you win is not by predicting the future, but by honing your fundamentals and carving really good thought processes. This is what I really believe in the most. To think about this all like poker, which is that good poker players don't win by winning a hand, they win by playing lots of hands really well and by making the right move over and over. Understanding the game that there are going to be times when they're going to be in a big spot with a lot of money in the pot and the card will come up and go the wrong way. But if they play enough big pots and enough money in it, the law of large numbers says that they'll win over time. I think that's the way to think about it. Andrew: Get really good at understanding something like visitors and conversion rate times average order value and asking the right questions about that. Get really good at following your profit margins everywhere you can . Get as much clarity about them as you possibly can that way you know where your money is going and where you're making money and where you're not. If you can do those things over a long period of time and just get good at finding good people to work with and get good at those sorts of things, you will win. So ultimately, I bought into the partnership at CTC with my own money, I'm not rich. Andrew: The reason I put my money into that is because I believe in the humans that are the partner group there, and I believe that those people overall given enough chances will win. That's the way I think you should think about your brand and your business is find partners and find brands and businesses that you believe will play the right hand the most times and are people of high character. That is part of the right hand of what you're play, you're going to have a relationship with these people. Every part of your business, if you can do those things, then I think over the aggregate, you're going to win. Stephanie: That's great. That actually took a very nice spin because at first I'm like, okay, no one's going to disagree with you that Ecommerce is going to grow. But I like the spin that you just took on it about what you should focus on instead. So, good answer. Andrew: Thanks. Yeah, I know. It's a compound answer in some ways, but it's really what I believe is true about the world. It's so sexy to say, okay, over the next month, this is going to happen and this is going to happen. Next time somebody on the show gives you that answer, bring them back on in six months and ask them what happened and- Stephanie: I was just going to say that. I think the world is still missing a little bit of the accountability piece because I see people still on Twitter, even the people who are talking about the end of the world, no one's following up with these people, how come this guy has had a billboard out around California for a long time saying the end of the world was going to happen, I guess, a few weeks ago, and it didn't? What now, are we going to follow up with him and be like, "Hey, what happened?" Andrew: Yeah, that's a very California story. I like that. Stephanie: All right. We're going to shift now into something called the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a quick question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Andrew? Andrew: I am. But this is the ultimate challenge for me. Stephanie: This will be the hardest part of the interview. Andrew: Yeah, it probably are. All right, I'll do my best. Stephanie: I actually feel like you're going to have some great answers, that's why I've been excited to get to this. All right. If you were to have a podcast, who would your first guest be and what would the show be about? Other than the podcast that you're running now, you can't say that one. Andrew: Okay. I think it would be about exploring. Does it my guess have to be a live or can I pick anybody? Stephanie: No. Andrew: Okay. I think it would be about exploring big ideas about the world like theology, philosophy kind of stuff, but for the every man or woman. So, it would try not to be too much in the clouds, my guess would be C. S. Lewis, not because he's the most interesting thinker in the history of the world, although he's a really interesting thinker, but because he says things in really interesting ways. So, I think he would be a fascinating guy to just sit and talk with. When I think of a historical person I'd want to talk with most, would be that. Either that or a baseball ball guest. Stephanie: All right. Well, that's cool. That's a good answer. What's up next on your reading list? Andrew: Books I'm in the middle of or after? Stephanie: I'd say, you can do both, middle of and ones that you're looking back on like, that was a good book. Andrew: Okay. The Color of Law is the book I'm in the middle of right now. Richard Rothstein going through the history of government and forced racism in the U.S. incredibly helpful book for me so far. I'm three quarters away through. Highly recommended to try and get your head on straight about what's going on with race in the U.S. just pure history. It's really good. And then I am reading a Christian book called Money, Possessions and Eternity about how to use your money for compassion and care for people instead of for yourself. So, that's what I'm in the middle of right now. And a baseball book called Ball Four, which is a famous book. Stephanie: That's cool. If you were to pick a country to focus on to maybe buy a new brand from, what country would you look into? Andrew: A country? Stephanie: Yeah. If you were to bet big, I'm going to go for something in India, that's top of mind right now because I just read the whole thing between India and China and turning off Tik Tok in India. So, it's very interesting to me thinking about, if you were to bet on brands from a certain country or are you looking to go international, where would you go? Andrew: I think the answer is India. I think that's probably the right answer. The cost of reaching people in India is very cheap and India's economy seems to be growing very fast. But I'm just bullish on global economy in general. So, I think you could probably broadly pick out. In the last 50 years, massive amounts of extreme poverty have been alleviated in the world thanks to globalization and technology and all kinds of things like that. The world is a much better place than people make it sound. That's another book record recommendation, Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Go read that book- Stephanie: Factfulness. Andrew: ... it will help you look at the world totally different. Factfulness. Forget my other book my other book and finish reading that one. Stephanie: I'll link of that one. Yeah, no, I think that's where I would bet too because I think I just read that, it's a billion and a half people there only a third of them, I think have cell phones right now. They're coming online at a very quick rate. So, I think- Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it's incredible how much better life has gotten in the world for so many people. There's very hard life in the world for a lot of people, so to not to underplay that. But it's just crazy and it's going to keep happening. Stephanie: Yeah, I agree. What's up next in your travel destinations? Andrew: Anywhere- Stephanie: When you can travel. I think, just outside my neighborhood. Andrew: Yeah. I like Austin, Minnesota where my family is, hopefully in a couple of weeks, but we'll see. As far as other places, I love Boston. Would like to go with my wife there. I have a seven month old though, so the actual answer to this question is probably nowhere for a while. Stephanie: Yeah. That's my life too. I have four month old twin boys and a two year old. Someone asked me like, "Oh, where are you going to go on vacation?" I'm like, "Nowhere outside of 10 miles away." It's a mess to get into the car that would be- Andrew: Four-year-old twin boys? Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. Andrew: I think it's awesome. Congratulations. That's beautiful. Stephanie: Thanks. Yeah, it's a wild ride. All right, the last one ... Yeah, you know. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Andrew: I just watch the same shows over and over again with my wife. Stephanie: Does she get to choose? Andrew: She does most times, yeah. Stephanie: So you guys are watching Selling Sunset and things like that? Andrew: No. We watched Parks and Rec, 30 Rock and The Good Place- Stephanie: Okay, those are very ones. Andrew: ... over and over and over again. That's probably all we watch. I don't know. The decision fatigue I have on this particular issues, we just created a Slack channel that worked for media recommendations because I just don't know even what to do anymore about where to look next. So, I wish I had a better answer than that. It would- Stephanie: Let us know if you find something from your Slack channel. Andrew: Yeah. It's probably another episode of The Good place. My team is really hot on Yellowstone right now, so there you go. Stephanie: Okay. I don't know what that is, that just shows I am not with it either. So I'll have to check that out. Andrew: Kevin Costner intense ranching family season three. Stephanie: Okay. I'll have to dive into that one. All right, that was a good lightning round. Is there anything that you were hoping to cover, are there any last words of advice before we hop off? Andrew: I think just that in situations like this, I always just want to say that when somebody asks you for answers on a podcast, it's super easy to make it sound easy in some ways. But it's really hard actually to do these things and to grow business and to work in a team and all these things. So, I think the parting word for me is always just to say, it's not actually as easy as it maybe. I hope I didn't make it sound like that. It's just challenging at times. So, keep at it and surround herself with good people. Yeah, I think that's it. I think I just properly took all the wind out of the point that I was making by monitoring it at the end there. Maybe out of [inaudible 01:02:52]. That's the big piece for me, is just you can do it, it is harder than it sounds a lot of times. Stephanie: Yeah, I like it. Well, Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was a lot of fun and ... Yeah, thanks for taking the time. Andrew: Thanks, Stephanie, for having me. It's super fun.

Welcome to the Agency Founder podcast by Moonshine Marketing. Every single week, we interview successful founders of marketing agencies at different points in their journey to pass on their victories, defeats, challenges and lessons learned to help you take your agency to new heights. This week, we're speaking with Taylor Holiday of Common Thread Collective, a digital growth agency. Taylor, thanks so much for being here.

We acquired our fifth brand into the 4x400 ecosystem! Listen now to find out... Featuring: Taylor Holiday, CEO of Common Thread Collective

Taylor Holiday runs three successful ecommerce businesses and a thriving, ecommerce-focused ad agency. He's developed definitive views on acquiring customers and advertising performance, among other insights. We recently spoke with Holiday about his ventures, the state of ecommerce, and advertising dos and don'ts.

From founder story to the future, we cover all things brand acquisition today as we add a new business to the 4x400 ecosystem. + Special guest, Taylor Holiday, CEO of Common Thread Collective.

Today's episode is a rebroadcast of our Livestream conversation with SUMO Heavy Co-founder and CEO Bart Mroz, and his guest Taylor Holiday. Taylor is a former athlete and now managing partner at Common Thread Collective. Common Thread Collective is an Online Sales Agency. Their mission is to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams by focusing on helping consumer product eCommerce businesses scale from 0 - $20M Common Thread Collective https://commonthreadco.com/ This episode was streamed live on May 6, 2020. ________ About the Show: ‘In The Ring' is a weekly podcast about eCommerce hosted by John Suder, Bart Mroz and Brittany Blackman. The show combines interviews with eCommerce leaders together with the latest news and strategies to give listeners actionable ideas and inspiration for their eCommerce businesses. The show is a production of SUMO Heavy, an eCommerce Consulting firm located in Brooklyn NY and Philadelphia. Hosts: John Suder (@johnsuder) - Producer and Director of Marketing at SUMO Heavy https://twitter.com/johnsuder Bart Mroz (@bartmroz) - CEO/Co-founder of SUMO Heavy https://twitter.com/bartmroz Brittany Blackman - Writer and Junior Marketing Coordinator at SUMO Heavy Learn more about SUMO Heavy: http://www.sumoheavy.com Follow Us: Newsletter: SUMO Heavy Weekly https://www.getrevue.co/profile/sumoheavy Twitter: @sumoheavy Sponsorships: off for this episode --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/intheringwithsumoheavy/message

In this episode we talk with Taylor Holiday, CEO at Common Thread Collective. They're a growth agency that helps brands make a profit from their digital spend.We kick off by talking about Taylor's hiring approach for the digital marketer role. He's found a way to hire people with the right skillset from outside of marketing proper—within the fantasy sports community. His team has found a way to incorporate  fantasy into the hiring process. Interesting stuff.To make sure they're hiring well, the team at CTC has also written up good/bad documents to use in interviews. He's been very generous and shared them with us. Moving on, we talk about 4x400 and how that fits into the overall vision at Common Thread Collective, making entrepreneurs dreams come true. And of course we talk about how CTC itself is a dream that has come true for Taylor and team.At the heart of making dreams come true for brand owners is creative—that's one thing they hone in on at CTC. That's one of their secrets to success, and we talk about how good creative is available to anyone. At no other time in history has great creative been so readily available. Great quality doesn't always look like a polished and highly-produced asset, though. High-quality creative means that it sells. Content that engages, entertains, and educates is high-quality if it captures audience attention, regardless of the production value. We also talk about leadership, specifically, the shift from being measured as an individual contributor. Leadership is relinquishing the right to be measured based on your personal performance, says Taylor. I love the quote. And we dive a little here.If you want to learn more about Taylor, follow him @taylorholiday His DM's are open to connect with you.

eCommerce Growth, with Taylor Holiday of CommonThreadCo

I'm joined by Taylor Holiday to discuss the strange things happening with paid traffic in our current environment.  Traffic is relatively cheap but with plunging conversion rates is it actually a good time to double down on your ad spend?  We also discuss the encouraging top-line revenue trends we've seen over the last few weeks.

As a managing partner at Common Thread Collective, Taylor Holiday builds and consults for a huge range of successful brands. CTC has figured out a game-changing equation to help brands manage their cash flow. This week’s episode is loaded with hard-hitting tactics from one of the top agencies in the DTC space. It’s a deep dive on the metrics that brands can use to better understand and serve their customers. Kristen and Taylor talk sustainable growth, parsing data, maximizing ad returns, and a data-driven approach to the customer journey.

Why is retention so hard for DTC brands to focus on, despite knowing how powerful it is? I've been pounding my head against the desk asking this question again and again. Data proves it's one of the biggest growth levers, CAC is too high to keep chasing, and yet, ecommerce brands still aren't shifting enough focus and effort to this side of the equation. I couldn't figure it out, so I tapped the experts for this one. Hear from Web Smith, Reza Khadjavi, Jarid Lukin (KIND Snacks), Kaitlin Holliday (Four Sigmatic), Val Geisler, Jordan Gal, Aaron Orendorff, Taylor Holiday, Brandon Doyle, Matt Goldman, Ken Johnson (previously Manpacks) and more. Learn what's holding YOU back, and what you can do about it, b/c the brands brave enough to shift perspective will be the ones thriving in 3-5 years.

We discuss why corporate values should be considered a strategic asset. This month's interview features Taylor Holiday from Common Thread Collective, an online sales agency.

Taylor Holiday is a managing partner at Common Thread Collective, which was rated the best place to work by Glassdoor. Taylor is well-versed on how to run a business and keep your employees and clients happy, and today he is going to share with us his tips and tricks. We talk about what TMYD stands for and how you can implement it into your business to ensure your clients' needs are aligned with your work. Listen in to discover how Common Thread Collective is growing so quickly and the steps you can take to help your business do the same. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/2vqc0RA  Interested in our Private Community for 7-Figure Store Owners?  Learn more here.   Want to hear about new episodes and eCommerce news round-ups? Subscribe via email.  

There s nothing better than working with a creative team of people who are the best at what they do. It brings out the best in you and enables you to reach new heights you previously only dreamed of. Imagine for a moment, what might happen if you could build a company full of those kinds of people? It s likely, the growth and innovation your team experiences would be non-stop. That s what Taylor Holiday and the team at Common Thread Collective are experiencing – and as a result, they ve grown from zero to hero in a ridiculously short period of time (3 years). You’re about to hear a revealing conversation between real friends (as opposed to colleagues, and there is a difference). You re going to hear the process of growth Taylor and his team have gone through – and are still going through – in order to be the kind of team they truly want to be, not what others expect them to be. I feel confident selling our service because worst-case, our clients break even. Common Thread Collective is dedicated to helping product sales companies drive revenue through their eCommerce websites. Their clients spend $50K to $1 million per month on marketing and advertising that generates revenue for their brands. They do it by leveraging the new media purchasing economy that operates on daily budgets. That kind of attention enables them to keep close tabs on their client s campaigns because there s always a way to stop a failing effort and do something different. But they ve added another dimension to what they do – because they care about the start-up stage entrepreneurs, who they were finding more and more difficult to serve as the company scaled. Through their new platform, YourAdMission.co they have created a membership community that equips first-stage entrepreneurs to develop the skills they need at a price they can afford. Listen to learn more. To build a creative team made up of the best in the world, the mission had to change. Taylor s company started out with a very different mission than they have today. At first, they were seeking to Be the best in the world at selling products online. But they discovered that they weren t being consistent in carrying out the mission. That realization forced the team to evaluate whether they were willing to do what the mission required – and the answer was No – from everyone on the leadership team. That began the journey of discovering a new mission that the team was truly behind, to genuinely ask themselves what they wanted for themselves. Once they discovered that mission, it made the behaviors required to attain it much easier – and nobody was left feeling guilty for not hitting a target they felt they should accomplish, but weren t fully invested in. If I m going to ask you to work for me, I have to be invested in you as well. ~ Taylor Holiday Early on, Taylor and his partners asked themselves, Why would anyone come work for our little start-up? They were located in Orange County, California so appealing, world-class companies were just outside their door. The team came to the decision that they had to care about their employees more than anyone else was willing to do. Practically, that means that the trade of salary for time wasn t enough. They had to be invested in the employee at least as much as the employee was invested in the company. They had to ask, What would it mean to help our creative team get where they want to go, personally? As a result – and because of a desire to live consistently with their mission – they spend an inordinate amount of time and budget to empower employees to accomplish their own dreams. Ironically, many of those dreams wind up revolving around Common Thread Collective. Listen to learn how it all happened and how it s playing out day to day, on this episode of Converge. When you empower your creative team to fulfill their personal dreams, you might create your own competition… What happens if you work to help a person on your team achieve their personal dreams – and those dreams turn out to be competitive to what you re doing as a company? Taylor says that prospect isn t threatening to him because his goal is to empower entrepreneurs. It doesn t matter to him if it happens because what he sets up in the process is of much greater value than the risk it creates. Taylor also sees that sort of competition as a good thing for everyone involved. It forces everyone playing the game to improve in their own skills in order to rise to the top – or else they don t stay in the game at all. You ll be encouraged by the abundant, generous attitude Taylor has about equipping his team to be their best selves, and how it s paying off. Outline of this great episode [0:22] Why Taylor s story is great for anyone who wants to learn practical ways to make a difference [1:29] The state of real friends in a world of colleagues – and what Common Thread is about [4:00] How things have shifted when it comes to using media to promote services and products [7:40] Creating an economic model that makes sense for first-stage entrepreneurs [12:23] Taylor s empathy for team members and how it impacts his team dynamics [20:55] Implementing a mission the team was actually willing to accomplish [27:39] The current marketplace and the challenge of finding the best talent [31:52] How Taylor has created a company where only one employee has ever chosen to leave [34:47] Why Taylor believes entirely that those with dreams can accomplish them Resources & Links mentioned in this episode Gary Vaynerchuk: https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/ Marissa Meyer: https://www.marissameyer.com/ Taylor Holiday s Resources Common Thread Collective: https://commonthreadco.com/ http://YourAdmission.co Taylor on Twitter: https://twitter.com/taylorholiday Taylor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-holiday-a169b322/ Connect with the Converge team: Website: www.Fastermind.co Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followdane/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danesanders Twitter: https://twitter.com/danesanders Audio Production and Show notes by PODCAST FAST TRACK: http://www.podcastfasttrack.com The post S.4 Ep. 006 – How To Build A Creative Team That Never Wants To Leave, with Taylor Holiday appeared first on Fastermind.co.

Taylor Holiday knows business. After avoiding law school (which he calls a stroke of luck) he lived the glorified garage to glory story. Power Balance grew to over 100 employees and a $60 million valuation. Today, as the managing partner of Common Thread Collective, Taylor’s team empowers eCommerce companies to reach new levels. On the show, Taylor talks about three of the hottest topics on professional athletes and business persons minds: Startups & venture capital Balancing life & work Influencer marketing & networking Some highlights from today’s episode: The strike of luck that kept Taylor from attending law school and ended up with him founding a company How Taylor took Power Balance from 3 people in a garage, to a $60 million dollar company (and Kobe Bryant wearing their gear) The secret sauce behind the success of Common Thread Collective Balance: Is it a real thing? Taylor shares how he manages business, family, and health. What marketing strategy is more powerful? Influencers? Or actual users of the product? Should athletes reach out to brands they want to work with directly? The most powerful platforms for influencers How to get the attention of any brand or business you’d like to work with The investments that have been most impactful for Taylor   Quotes “The best influencers are actually power users of the product more than they are famous people.” – Taylor Holiday “If you’re an influencer, follow the advertising dollars and spend your time there.” – Taylor Holiday If you really like the product you’re promoting, it’s going to be more meaningful.” “Audit the things you’re deeply passionate about and figure out a way to tell people about it.” – Taylor Holiday “The relationships with influencers and brands that work best are the ones that are connected to your true passion.”  – Taylor Holiday   Resources: Power Balance Common Thread Collective Lean Luck 2plm Crunchbase Ryan Nece from Episode 16 How I Built This   Books Mentioned (Amazon links): The Hard Thing About Hard Things Watch now: Watch on YouTube Listen on iTunes Listen on Spotify Listen on Google Play Listen on Stitcher

On today's episode, you’ll learn why QALO's KC and Taylor Holiday joined several tight-knit communities to promote their products. Topics we cover: What it means to take a 'palms down approach.' Seeking affiliate partnerships with communities instead of individuals. Why you absolutely must over index on customer service when you're launching the dreaded MVP.