🏔 The Summit: Edition #1

Beginning the climb

I’ll be honest with you.

I debated not sending out any emails and shutting my newsletter down.

But I decided that I would send out my newsletter under a few conditions:

• Everything I share you pinky promise to keep to yourself

• Every edition will be deleted and not posted — so either you open and read it or it goes into the ether — we’re on this journey together!

• If there is something that is greyed and bolded like this, please send me a response. I’d love for this newsletter to be interactive.

The reason why I have debated in sending this newsletter or even beginning is that we have seen some strong numbers with our brand re-relaunched and I have been trying to decide what to share and what not to share. It’s easy to feel like you should keep things to yourself, but I think I realized that I would rather be as open as I can in the journey so others can learn from what I have learned from.

The problem with being very transparent when you’re winning is that others want to come in and win just like you. But I think this is a good first edition to share less about the progress of our brand (I’ll share in future editions), but more in what it takes to have a unique brand/product positioning to succeed.

If you’re a regular reader (from previous versions), then you know I like to share a monthly update on how things are going with our brands. I will share the monthly update in terms of revenue and spend, and then what I’ve been learning as we have been growing our brands.

Our current slate of brands

• Flewd

• Brand X (IYKYK - for now we keep the name under wraps)

• Kuma

Learnings from Re-Launch

For those who have been here, you know we made an attempt to launch Brand x last year. It didn’t go well. We were very close to shutting it down completely.

If you look at the brand now, we have increased our projections for the year and are likely on our way to get to 7 figures by EOY if we continue our pacing.

I want to share with you a little bit about what I did to get things on track and some lessons for you to take that could help you grow your own brands (or launch yours as well).

First off, our assumption when we launched the brand was that we would have a lot of people who are into fitness using the product. We unsuccessfully tried this concept for the first several months of the brand.

I did some deep research (which we do so for all of our client brands as well) and I realized that the angle that made the most sense based on competitor reviews was the concept of pain & inflammation. 

Our original angle was preventing and stopping soreness. But if you look at the level of desire between the two following Breakthrough Advertising, you realize that there is a much greater innate desire to stop pain & inflammation than there is to stop soreness.

The truth is, most gym bros love to feel sore! They enjoy the feeling of being sore after a super hard day at the gym. So our attempt at focusing on this angle was a bit funny looking back at it.

Once we adjusted this focus to pain & inflammation, we saw a dramatic shift in the buyer behavior.

Here was our main setup for testing initially:

• 10 static TOF assets

• 10 static brand-centric assets

• 2 landing pages (tested using Replo + Intelligems)

With this setup, we ran the initial tests in a basic CBO campaign and let Meta spend toward whatever it wanted to with an A/B/C split test between the Home Page + Advertorial + LP.

When launching a brand or even taking over marketing for a brand, the research element is super important along with proper testing to find winners early on to expand into. To me, this is one of the major jobs of a marketer. Even if a brand has had success in the past, you need to then find new winning angles/concepts to scale spend for the brand.

We’re now around $450/day in ad spend going into May and will continue to scale spend based on our inventory availability.

In terms of the stack that got us from 0 to 30k/month in revenue, here is what we’re currently running with:

Some of the biggest lessons I learned in this process:

• Test early and often

• Do your research — if you don’t have the time, make sure you find someone who can do it for you

• Figure out your highest % chance angles that you believe can help you win — this is super important

What’s working

• CBO 🔥 

• Editorial Whitelisting 🔥 🔥 (if you’re interested in getting help with this, reach out to me as we are doing this for our health & wellness brands)

• LLA (Lookalike audiences) 👀 

• ABO Creative Testing 🔥 

• ASC+ 🥲

Winning creative of the month

UGC Is Not Dead 💀 

For us, video is now taking over spend and creating an ability to scale spend pretty well.

What I believe is working with this is we have keyed in on another funnel that we will be expanding into which is how Flewd is better than epsom salt. It is actually 14x more effective, which means we are able to key in on this within the content and creative.

The creative here does a great job of displaying this, but we are just getting started and I believe we can find more iterations that can help us expand spend and grow performance over time.

How did we create this concept? Research. I was doing a deep dive and found out that 90% of search traffic on Amazon around competitor brands was concerning Epsom Salt. So this is clearly a top of mind product. We believe we have a better product and can display this through strong video creative.

I love what Jess from Fireteam shares in how they iterate on creative. It shows how much scale you can get behind strong creative if you have the ability.

Sponsored - Foxwell Founders

One thing that I’ve found about tactics is that I end up learning some really good insights in Slack communities. The one that I highly recommend is the Foxwell Founders group. Highly recommend checking them out if you’re looking for a solid community of marketers and brand owners that are amazing humans and also like growing brands. One tip that was shared recently was about implementing LLA in our ad accounts (are we in 2017 again??) and it’s been going really well.

Performance Update

April was actually pretty good for both brands. We learned a lot and tested a lot. One thing I’m realizing is that we have to be very proactive in hitting our growth goals as we scale.

It’s a very different animal to scale from 0 to 100k a month than it is to scale from 500k to 1M a month and beyond. There are levels to this, and we’re experiencing some growing pains with Flewd.

Here’s what we ended up at for the month of April:

Flewd

• Revenue - 595k

• MER - 2.85 MER

• Spend - 205k

Brand X

• Revenue - 28k

• MER - 2.66 MER

• Spend - 10.5k

Reviewing last months goals, and upcoming goals for May

Goals for May

• Find at least 4-6 new winners (preferably video creative) in May for Flewd. We had one video creative get a ton of ad spend at the end of March and carried most of April. Need to have a diverse amount of unicorns, winners, and supporting creative

• Get retention going for Brand X. We have been carried by new customer acquisition but it’s time to get some support from email/sms in May + we launched subscription with Loop Subscriptions for the brand, and I’m pretty happy so far.

• Hit our baseline revenue goals for both brands. 725k for Flewd + 37k for X. Missed our goals for April so I want to make sure we hit our goals for this month.

When others are spending less on Google, we believe there’s opportunity for scale there. We will be leaning into increasing spend on Google to support our Meta spend which has grown month over month. Right now we’re spending 10% of our budget on Google vs Meta and we want to see that increase.