We Acquired the Fastest-Growing TikTok Shop Agency.

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“Stick around to see how they are helping”

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I'm Lutic Austin, I'm the president here at CTC. I'm joined by Tyler and Alex, the co-founders of T-bar partners. And if you haven't heard the announcement already in some form of fashion on X or the Ecommerce round table or some other channel, we have officially acquired T-bar partners and partnered with them at CTC.

So Tyler and Alex are part of the CTC family, T-bar partners is a common thread collective company and we could be more stoked about where we're sitting at today. And so I'm sitting down with the guys today and what we're going to do is we're going to walk through a bit of the origin story, how we got here, why we ended up here. We're going to walk through how they think about growing to dock shop stores for

Ecommerce brands and then we're going to land with, we've got like two or three specific examples of brands that specific competitions, campaigns, chronic launches that are just blowing out of the water and what they've seen works specifically, that'll be some interesting stories from Ridge, Hex Cloud, and some other brands as well.

So got a lot packed in, how we doing, guys? Good, good, glad to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, we're, if anyone's watching, you'll see we're all in pretty athletic attire, we're cruising to a high rocks, work out about 45 minutes here all together.

A group of us here at the office at CTC are doing high rocks, doubles in Anaheim.

When Tyler and Alex are joining us, they're first at a high rocks, work out this afternoon.

“And I think they're both feeling really, really confident.”

No, no apprehension. So I don't know what that is. Yeah, we're washed up, basically. I was shaved, so I'm not allowed to say anything. Yeah, I'm not allowed to say anything. Especially with the, especially with the recent high rocks, high rocks news.

Yeah, what happened in one of the most recent women's pro contest. It's not for the faint hearted. Yes, it doesn't seem like that's for sure. Okay, so let's, let's dive in. I'm going to set some context for us.

These are things that you guys, you both do you guys know, but for CTC, we have been pursuing a thesis around Tiktok shop, but more specifically channel expansion to additional sales channels for, for a while now. And so what we, what we see, the sort of idea that we, that were arranged around and calling it the e-commerce demand cascade is that the fastest growing brands right now, and DTC

e-commerce are ones that have a combination of the core media channels driving growth. So they have meta Google, Apple oven is in the mix. The fastest growing net new channel have Tiktok YouTube on down the line. But then as a part of that make-up, the sales channel complexity is getting more and more nuances well.

So where dot com would previously be a lot more of where the demand creation and capture both live. Now, Tiktok shops and Amazon in particular, and then retail dot com or retail channels,

“are are a more important piece of the full picture for brands.”

It's more advanced to be capturing Amazon. And then Tiktok shops really unique because the, so the fastest growing brands, it is a sales channel where people are making purchases. But Tiktok shop actually serves as a net new demand creation channel as well. And that demand trickles down into dot com and into Amazon and then into retail as well.

So for CTC, this has been something that we've been pursuing for a while through a, a number of different modes and conversations with partners at their agencies leaders in the space around how do we bring the best Tiktok shop service offering to our customers, to partner with them in the growth of their brands. And after many, many months of exploration and conversations around this, Tiktok partners

was very clearly to us. We're doing it was just, it was just lightning in a bottle. And it was something that we knew we wanted to be a part of and bring to our customers as well. So that's the backdrop for CTC. That's like the impetus for how our here.

Why don't you guys start by maybe taking a step back, take, you know, year and a half,

How to keep our partners start and then walk us through some of the initial, like,

“some of the big milestones over the past year and a half, right?”

Like, the first, the first customer is the first big hits.

Like, what, what were some of these big milestones as you look back over the past year and a half that helped to get us to where we are today? Sure. So I'll give an order to story. To tell our ally, we met freshman year at Grace College.

We're both playing baseball actually living in the same dorm room or same dorm building, not the same room, but we knew each other. But like, we weren't super close at the time. We were playing baseball. I was like, you know, 50 guys in the team.

And we started to kind of talking and get them to know each other. And as a season ended, we were both going back to school. We're going back home from school, obviously, working at different agencies. So during the school year, during the baseball season, we were, you know, balancing school and working at different agencies.

We kind of both had an agency background and we went home, you know, for summer. And I basically said, hey, like, let's start around. And he was like, let me think about it. And like an hour later, he said, let's do it. So we started the agency in June of playing 25.

And I would say like two weeks later, I kind of took off on LinkedIn. And we didn't have any idea what was in the turn into. Uh, we just essentially just spent all day our computer sprouting away.

And then they just took off really quickly. Yeah. Yeah, I would say like, it was, I think the week one, I made a post on LinkedIn about David Protein.

I was like, how we'd scale them to a million dollars a month and 90 days.

And then the co-founder of Diego Protein Zach, commented on it. And then all of a sudden, it's just like that post instantly blew up. Like every CPG brand, every comp brand was commenting, like DMing us, like asking, I don't know if we had the county link at the time. Like we were just like, like we had no process.

No nothing, no clients. And then all of a sudden, it was like that first week. We had like three people won't missign.

“And then from there was like, that's how we got the initial kind of client”

out of trust us. And then almost instantly our first two clients. We had a great case study in like the first month. And so from that, we just kind of leveraged that. They got into some talks with like the groans of the world, like the corners.

And then so that's kind of how everything started. But even before we started agency, like I worked at a TikTok shop agency, Alex was more like the medicine.

And so we both kind of like were already familiar with agencies.

But not like at a point of like running our own or managing teams. And so there's a lot of growth that happened quickly as like leaders. And like managing people and operations and systemizing everything that happened over a very fast period of time because we ripped up so quickly. But like I think going into it, like I was expecting okay, maybe we can make a couple of

$50,000 a month each. And like I would be really, really happy. Because I had a supplement brand that started at the same time. And so the idea was to start the agency as a kind of which is a casual thing to kind of doing the sidewalls.

Wait, now I'm manufacturing to finish the supplement. And then I mean, it was just insane where it's like okay, we have something. And then the supplement's just like a thousand units sitting in a garage right now. Where it's like, I don't even care about that. Like I'm all in agency.

I love it. Like we get to work with some great clients. So it's been a really exciting ride.

“I mean, I think right now we're 15, 16 months in.”

So it all happened really, really fast. And we worked with some really, really cool clients. So we're really excited about and some great people. And you know, we've been blessed to manage a great team of people and be able to lead them and provide for them and provide cool opportunities for everyone involved.

That's right. So walk through, yeah, a bunch of things going on. You're at school, you're doing baseball, got supplement brand, got the agency work on on and then you got some of these initial customers that you were working with. What was the moment where it was okay, we're going all in, right?

Like this is going to be the focus. This is what we're going to, this is what we're going to do. And then what was the goal at that point? Well, you thought, okay, no, we're all in. This is the thing we're going to focus on.

Then you guys have something to mind in terms of, okay, this is the goal. We want to get to this many customers, we want to work with this size of brand. And we want to scale them to this size of an agency or seller. Like what was that like all in moment and goal vision for something at that point? So all in moment was August.

So we were, obviously we started in June and obviously we quit baseball. So that was okay, we're going all in agency only and then obviously we're still going back to school. But we barely went to class at that time, kind of in the summer. We're kind of just doing everything, seeing what worked. We're going to a bunch of different clients.

Pride, honestly, you shouldn't have took it on. But we were just trying to do anything we could to kind of get cases in our about we had two really good case studies, mythology and patch rx. We scale those two brands to talk shop from like 0 to 50k. And for us, that was like really good.

I, that was in July. We used that as leverage when all these new brands were coming in. And then August, we're like, okay, let's just, let's just stop playing baseball. What should we, you know, did our whole entire lives? That was kind of the moment where we were like, okay, this is serious.

And then we went back to school. And like I said, it was just trying to manage that. But we were really didn't go to class. It was just like in our dorm rooms all day, just in the back end of TikTok shop, so our center. Most paid social teams run dozens, hundreds, even thousands of ads.

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That's LUTIQ.com/cTC. Yeah, I wouldn't even say it's kind of a cruiser earlier than that. Like even earlier than we wanted to admit, like over the summer, we didn't practice space vote at all. No, I didn't even go in the back of our minds like we have something year and it's like,

we didn't want to say, we'd never talked about quitting baseball because it's like,

always been our life, our entire life, his entire life has been baseball. It's like summer was our identity for a long time.

“And so I think we just didn't want to admit it, but we knew like we have something year.”

We love what we were doing. It was just growing so fast. It was like, if we don't go all on this, we're business really stupid. And so, you know, I think both of our parents were like a little like bummed that we're quitting baseball because obviously that's like,

obviously loved watching a split baseball, but they also knew. And we're very supportive like, hey, this is like the right thing to do. Because this is like a rocket ship right now. And so I think it was just so early on, but I think really the turning point for us, where it's like even like just started to multiply really, really quickly.

Like we started off hot, and then we had those case studies where it's like, okay, we're still doing well, starting a lot of clients. But it was around August and September where we got connected to the CMO crew and Connor. And he just got us in that circle and we pretty much worked for them for free.

It was like barely anything, but we knew like the power of that logo. And we knew the power of just getting that circle doing great work for great people. And so when we did creator campaigns for them for TikTok shop, they were working with another TikTok shop agency. And so we were like, okay, we just went in the door, but it was just do some work.

And so we did that, we crushed it, we did great work. Me and Jordan us to Cody from Jim Ritz Beauty. And so that got us into that circle and into him and then he entered us to range. And then bridge and trust to heck's quiet. It's like, once you get into that circle, it just started to multiply.

Like we've been able to work with some really cool brands and really cool people because of that.

“And so like I think it was just so early on, we realized that the power of getting into great”

circles and networking doing great work for great people. And that's been like the core of everything. It's like we want to provide a really, really great service. And so, you know, like obviously you're not going to have a 100% success rate. But even the people that haven't had success with us, like we all leave on good terms.

Because we want to make sure everyone feels fair. We, you know, we worked as hard as we could on the account and make sure everyone feels. Yeah, that's a good reputation about T-bar partner. So, that's been like a big part of our entire offering of just like making sure we provide great work. Yeah, kind of at that time of September, we all more of the number on Christian clothing brand.

And that was like our best case study.

So, we took him from 250K a month to 1.2 million three months.

And that was kind of like the September October timeline. And then we just posted that all over. Laked it. And that was like, that was at the big case of the blew us up. And that was at the same time that we're going to connect to, you know, Connor Crunes,

Connor, a rich Connor, an ex-clad, yeah, that those two things come together, that was huge for us. Yeah, and I would say like, like, for the longest time, Laked in was where all of our leads came from, like, Laked in was great for us. But then, like, in the last six months, it's been like 90% referrals. Yeah. Like, we just, not to say we don't have time for Laked in, but like we don't post as much

and we don't need to because we have so many leads coming in where it's like, we have too many where we have to turn some away. And so it's just been awesome. Like, all, once you get into the circles, like, I can't say enough, like, they are great people, though we're for you. They want to see everyone win in that space. And so we just lean so hard into that and just providing great work for them. And so we're really thankful for all those brands

“and just trusting us with, because I mean, we're young. Like, why would they trust us?”

You know, we're 220 year olds that just run a TikTok shop, but we provide them with great results. And we have great case studies from that. So, yeah, it's been a, it's been a very fun ride and, and happened so quick. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's something for us, even, and in our early conversations and under and, and us being connected in, in, in this space and having conversations with those individuals and these brands is like the, there are a lot of, a lot of agencies and

service providers can have the, the big logos out there that they work with at one point or worked on a campaign. But it's a whole other thing when the main folks, main decision makers are referring to people in their close circle and say, no, I trust these guys and the guys in the operators podcast, like most of those brands, you guys are working with directly and they're all referring as well. That, that says more than anything really about the, about the results and trust and

what's having big for us. Like, in our initial conversations, it'd be like, oh, no, this, this, this signal is coming back from what Tyler and Alex are doing. This is, this is real,

this is happening everywhere and deep are willing to refer their close friends close connections

people they have. Deep relational equity with that, that's a, that's a, that's a very strong signal. So, so let's talk, shifting from the origin story bit, let's shift into like, what, what's, why, what you guys are doing is work, right? Like, how you approach take our job strategy that you mentioned, you mentioned earlier, Tyler, that like, you guys over the summer started to see like, oh, we have something. Like, there's like, there's a playbook,

there's a, there's an approach that is leading to these results and what you're seeing. Talk us through how you guys think about growing tick-toff shops for brands,

“widely key components, what works well, what doesn't work well, what are the key things”

focused on how do you think about delivery? Yeah, so I would say, like, for us, like, then all our sales calls and kind of when we start like, actual work, we tell a brand like, the outreach is pretty automated, right? We had to use it, go, we do the individual DMs, do the email campaigns, all that good stuff, pushing careers requires a sample, but every agency kind of does the same outreach, right? Well, it actually moves and needles, what happens after the

credibility product, which is what we do best? So for all our brands, we both have custom discord communities and the whole goal is anybody with product, we want to funnel all those creators inside the community and then we have to start to manage them because these craters, they're only required to push one video. That's all they're required to make, but like, one video is not enough. So it's like you're sending a thousand samples and you get, you know, one video

back, you're only getting, you know, a thousand videos back, our goal is to get at least three videos back per sample. We sent each crater, right? So that's just directing the output and we know on the back and up TikTok shop, video volume and GM be able to direct correlation. So like if we

“get as many videos back per sample, we sent, it just makes it more profitable for the brand,”

the more videos we get back, or those those are going to GMV Max, those are getting scale, then it just makes everything more profitable. So in these discord communities, we essentially hire ex-ticket shop affiliates, we call them content coaches, they're the ones that are leading the coaching, they're going to leading the scripting, the hooks, the inspiration, teaching is a affiliates of what's working, they don't content much better than myself, much

than Tyler, we never filmed a TikTok shop video, we're just on the back end and running the

brands, but like there are the ones that know the content, what actually works, what's both in the video. So we hire these affiliates, they're the ones in the to communities coaching and leading them. And then we run these contests that we've seen work extremely well. So essentially we push these, essentially, contests, they're open retainers in the mass outreach. So for example, it's hey, if you're a crater and you make ten videos, we'll give you a thousand dollars cash,

right? If you make twenty videos, we'll give you, you know, two thousand dollars cash. Now we make it. So the cash in the GMV minimum or one to one. So they have to at least drive, you know, if the cash is a thousand dollars, they had to at least drive a thousand and minimum GMV for the brand. We pushed that in the mass outreach and we pushed that inside the discord community. So we have two ways where acquiring new creators with that contest and then we're pushing inside our community.

We get thousands of videos back from that from those competitions and we know like I said earlier, video volume and GMV, it's a direct correlation. So we're reading so many videos going into GMV max and the big thing in these contests, any video in that timeframe, the brand gets full usage rights and perpetuity. So for rich, for example, we're in a contest in June for them. They got five thousand videos back. Five thousand videos that are not going to GMV max,

I was their biggest model. And I was like the month that they really, you know, blew the top off. But now, five thousand videos that have full usage rights to use. So we took those videos we gave them to their pay team. They told us how they took like a top 200 videos. We're taking up 25% of their meta budget from our TikTok creative. It's outperforming their other UGC. So obviously

they're doing a super wrong TikTok shop. They're going to about half a million dollars a month.

But like that's a drop in the bucket for another, you know, their DSE revenue. Now we're supplying them with a top ad content. So these contests were seeing work super well. And like I said earlier,

“the creator relationship side, the community management side, that's what actually moves in need”

on TikTok show. Yeah. And I also say like TikTok shop to have an internal team for that. It's just extremely hard. You need five different people. And most brands don't have the budget to do that. Or they want to see results before they ever like hire in the house. And so I think we're very, very competitive on pricing. And our structure has allowed us to do that. And so like all every single account that we manage has a, like a strategist is managing point on the account,

you know, the strategy behind the content, you know, the outreach, the competitions, the retainers, all that kind of stuff for the operations. And then we have people just managing sample quests. They affiliate center messages. Someone just managing to be max. We have a community manager in the content coach. And so it's like, you need like five people to do that in the house. And you can't do that. But we put a great system. We have great people. And so a big part of our strategy

is building these communities like Alex was saying, and it would be extremely hard to do that in the house. Because you need a top-to-do shop creator on on staff that's doing all the coaching. And so we have, you know, like four or five of those that we just have on staff doing all the coaching there. And so we're not only able to like manage creators really well. But we're also have a system that we've been able to build up. Let's say mid to your career. So these high to your

careers, I'll be your top performers. And so like whenever things that take dark shop, they think of like the comfort clothing in that playbook. And so our entire playbook is the same as comfort clothing. We just been able to do it at scale across many brands because we can build the team. But most

that in-house for a medium-sized brand. Unless you have massive budgets to put behind the platform.

And so I think that's been a great competitive advantage for us to just be able to really compete on price and make it a no-brainer for these brands to work with us. Yeah. Look, I'm curious to talk a little bit about the sort of creator, the creator and the creative economics as well, right? Because when you talk about it, so there's a big piece of this that's a volume oriented, right? Which is high volume outreach, thousands, tens of thousands, then building out the discord

communities with a volume of creators. And then on the creative side as well, when you get all the ads, run them in G&V Max, you run them in meta and your thousands of videos. So there's like this sort of volume at tier at the top that is like the starting point for all of this. But I think what we typically see right is that like a very small percentage of all those things is actually what's driving the most of the value. On the creator side, it's a very small percentage of the core

group people on the creative side. It's a few percentage of the of the actual ads you're launching

“here driving 70, 80% of the value. How do you guys think about going from you have to start here?”

We have to start with big numbers, big volume as it relates to outreach, bring creators building. But then we know that for brands, majority of the value, 70, 80% of the value is going to be driven by a much smaller cohort of the creators and the and the pieces. How do you think about building that for Brazilians? Well with the outreach, like you said, you have to cast a really wide net. But like you said, like look at any big TikTok shop brand 90% of the revenue comes

from their top 10 affiliates. So like with this big net, we're doing tons of outreach right sitting thousands of invites a day for creators request a sample. We're giving them into our CRM. We get over the discord. We coach them and we kind of weed out who's going to be our top 10 people. And then once we find most top 10 people inside the discord, we have a subsection. We call our VIP group. Those are the people we're hoping to call us one-on-one with every single day. Our content

coaches are super, super high touch with them. And like I said, like if you're going to be in any brand, most of the revenue, 90% of the revenue comes from those top 10 people. So it's how fast we find those top 10 affiliates for you guys. And then you get those affiliates over on other platforms. That's kind of like what will comforts doing all these big brands that are saying works super well.

“But in the beginning, you have to cast a wide net to find those people. Yeah. And I would say just”

in general, like you got to have a look at TikTok shop and like how you're thinking about the volume and creators and videos you're getting on the in the algorithm. And because it is an algorithm. So we really have no idea what goes into the algorithm, what makes a video go viral. But we do know the more shots you get up, the higher chance you have at something going viral. So it's kind of like a stop machine. The more times you spin it, it's a free stop machine. So the more times you

spin it, the higher chance you have it going viral and getting that video to pop off. And so that's kind of how we think about it. And then GMV Max as well. It's like everything in GMV Max runs off a video volume. And GMV Max is where 95% of your sales are going to come from. Everything's done through GMV Max. Now organic TikTok shop is dead. It's like can be a very, very small portion of your actual revenue. And so GMV Max, every single time you get a video in there, every single like it, let's say a video

goes viral. It will take whatever that hook was, whatever the angle was. Their AI algorithm system, which we don't know. It's like pretty much a black box. But we know that it takes that data point. And we'll start running across other videos very with very similar angles, very similar hooks.

And so really, it's like once you find that first video that starts to work, you just need to give it

as many videos into GMV Max with similar outputs and in similar angles. And so that's like the entire

“goal is just getting that first problem video. And you have to cast a very wide net for that.”

And so we just like, our kind of number that we just go of rule of thumb is like how fast do we get to a thousand videos a month as fast as possible? We see, I'm not to say that's the number that you're going to have success at. But a thousand videos a month, you're just getting a ton of volume where it's like a lot of brands will see you to that point. They might eventually find something that works. I will say like with the wide net, sometimes brands have a misconception where

they kind of think of that as a spray-prayer approach. But like our goal to do the opposite. So I was seeing we're having a wide net, but what we want to be very aware of how you touch with this creator. So like even before the discord, we sent every single creator after we checked their sample of creative breach. So in that brief, it's essentially all the things that they possibly can need to be successful. And obviously in that brief, there's discord links to

join. But like we want to have multiple touch 24, they even join the discord. So they have the creative brief, they have another message, they have the discord link after they post a video with giving a link to join again. So like it's not a spray-prayer approach. We're trying to, you know, just send so many samples, so many invites. And they make one video fall off. It's get these people into our CR and get them creative brief, get them the discord,

coach them by our top affiliates, so they can make tons of high quality videos. To find those top 10 people to then you don't get them on those, you know, for Tainers and the one-on-one chats and everything. Yeah, I also think I'm going to just like go deeper to achieve your max. It's like a lot of greats come to us and talk to us. It's like, because they're so used to meta and like, manual media buying and like, okay, better media

buyer is going to cause better results, but there's no such thing on TikTok, like it's it's pretty not say set and forget, but like really can only focus on the inputs. If you want GV Max to perform better, focus on the inputs and then GV Max will perform better. And so what those inputs are is

I think a lot of brands need to understand then shift their focus of like GV Max. It's just providing as much content as possible at a high quality content as possible. As fast as possible, the GV Max is feet up that learning and they get to start running efficiently.

“Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's there's something interesting about the relationship between”

consistently having more volume of options to be able to find winners and in what's you find the winners, how do you call Pound? Those those what is at the same time. And so even things like they they start doing with that VIP group of creators of the incentives around them, having their own community, getting them on tribe or other affiliate platforms. So they're also earning additional commission outside of what their normal rates are, right? Like these are all

because I think this the challenge that I think a lot of brands are already running through and and will will will continue is, you know, depending on the sort of creator supply demand economics is people are getting creators more and more in retainers to try to just bring

them to their brand and get their attention all them. Ultimately, people are going to pay attention

to wherever they're already the most the most money, right? Where they're being taken care of in that way. And so finding unique ways for creators to see, okay, I'm successful with this brand, and there's other ways, other avenues I'm earning from them is going to, is going to keep them around.

“Okay, so let's pivot now. You hinted at at the rich case of you earlier. So I think we have two or three”

examples. We want to talk to the rich. Hacks God and Naked Sundays and the others that come to mind. But give us, we talk sort of high level strategy. How you guys think about some of the core pillars? Let's talk through some specific examples. Some specific product launches, campaigns, competitions, some specifics around those that really blew up for brands. What work really well for brands you guys have worked with in terms of specific components that led to the outflows of

this off. Yeah, maybe I'll speak on Naked Sundays. You speak on Hacks God. So for Naked Sundays, and there's, you know, a smaller brand, seven figure brand, not, you know, a nine or 10 figure brand like rich in Hacks God. We essentially launched a two-tock exclusive bundle with them, and we had a blitz launch, so we call it. So we pre-seed product to a bunch of affiliates inside that discord community with a set essentially launched it. So we, you know, sent the suitcases

full of, you know, make a product to, you know, 100 affiliates. They got the product, and we basically

ran a competition around into blitz launch, essentially with the video volume goals in mind. They all posted on the same launched it, so it's spike to the algorithm, spike G&B Max. There were, you know, 1,000 plus videos going up on the same day. They're all going to G&B Max, and like the product blew up. We literally sold them out of all their inventory to the point we had to pause with them now. So that was like a really, really, you know, good case study for us,

and like, I know we weren't a lot of huge brands, but like there was a smaller figure brand, like it was like insane. The founder Sam, she was like, call me like just almost the tears. I go happy. She was like, yeah, she was like, you guys blew my business. It was insane. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah, that's the power of TikTok shop overnight. Like things can change. She'll hear about this unicorn stories where it's like a holy crap. Like once you get

creative posting and you get into the algorithms to dock and something goes viral. It gets pretty crazy,

“pretty fast. So that's a great case study. Then I think I'll touch on Ridge first. I think there's”

that important aspect of this and like the merchandising part of it. So like for Ridge, they're entire business as well. It's like 90% of their sales on on Meta is wallets. And so we launched those on TikTok shop. They did like 200k a month, but it really wasn't blowing up. Like it was, it wasn't going as expected. And so we started testing their other skews and their other products and tracker cards was one of the ones we tested, which is our worst seller. They're DDC site,

which are like, okay, this probably isn't going to work. Nobody really wants it. And then we launched it. And right away, when we launched it, it instantly blew up. It did like 400k as its own product

or something crazy. And that first it first two months. And so it instantly blew up in the

reason because of that. And we see this across a lot of brands. It's like, if you're product as a visual hook or some type of like value ad, that makes it unique. And so they're tracker card. When you click the button, you make this really love beeping sound. And so careers would post about it. They, you know, do skits or whatever, where they look, oh, I lost my wall. And the beeping would be going off. And it would stop someone in their scroll. And so I think it's very interesting because

like the merchandising part of TikTok shop isn't talked about a ton, but it's also really, really important. And you need a product that works. And that looks visually appealing or that has some type of something to stop someone in their scroll and TikTok shop, such a foreign part of the strategy. And so for them, like merchandising was an important part of the strategy and how it evolved over time. And it tried to figure out what products do work. And we've had that across a lot of

brands. You know, we had a deep company that instantly blew up because right when you've been into it, we just leaned into like, right when you've been in, like, there's peanut butter inside that was it was out. And so like really leaning into this visual aspect of the product and stopping someone in their scrolls, really important part of our strategy as well. It's not talked about a ton. But like for a rage, what really like really got it going and around that tracker card time was we were

launching competitions. And they were following based competitions. So going back to that video volume and gv of a direct correlation, we were just new. Okay. Instead of incentivizing creators on gnv in the beginning, because no one's making money right now, we need to incentivize them on volume,

sit down and grind it out. So it's like an effort based competition. And so that instantly blew up.

“We had, you know, I think it was like 7,000 videos in a single month from that just that competition.”

It's not including sample only creators that didn't participate. And so it instantly got pretty crazy. That was their best month. I think we did almost 600k that month. And we were scaling up really, really hard. And so that is really what moved the needle for them. And so I think up big part of our strategy across all of our brands is launching these volume based competitions. Because knowing that video volume and gv have a direct relation should impact the strategy behind that. And so everything

we do is on input basis. I'm just getting more shots up and we'll keep talking about they're just getting more and more shots up on the algorithm until eventually something hits. And that's where we obviously get strategic. Okay. Now that video hit. Now we had to make, you know, 100 variations of that video that make sure we're feeding gv max well. So that was the strategy for Rage's

competitions coaching those careers up in that discord community. And I'll clearly the same thing

for actually literally blew up exercise. We launched that competition. God I'm in a community. I did coaching with those creators. And so like a lot of our brands that I have had a lot of successes, these competitions. And then once we have something that works, it's just scaling up what's working with, you know, either doing retainers to retain top creators or just continuing to run competitions. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's let's land with this the last last couple of minutes here.

So what what are some of the things you guys are excited about as it relates to what to new things in TikTok shop, the broader e-commerce ecosystem, the interplay with the other channels. What are some of the things? Okay. We have this playbook. We have these things we're going to do. The platform is going to continue to change as a broader ecosystem at play. What are some of the guys that things you guys think about in terms of, okay, this is where I'm excited about what's

what's next. And the next brought to you for us in this next chapter. Obviously still a separate standard about like what we're doing on TikTok shop side. But or really is our new explorers TikTok live selling. So I know we're building that out at CTC right now. It's going to be a huge thing. I don't know China. I don't know what the status, but like maybe it's like 80% of all

“there. All their commerce came through. Yeah. I'm telling you that's what the UK, the UK CEO,”

it was somewhere on it was it's on Dying and right on TikTok. But on Dying for them. It's yeah, it's close to 80% of the business. It's on lives as well. And like there's a few live agencies out there and they're crushing it. But like there's so much market share to take. And obviously we've a ton of big brands on TikTok shop running running their shop alive. It goes hand in hand because right of somebody goes on a live. But they don't buy another and the bottle's another and see all the

ability videos and they'll convert there, hopefully. So super excited about TikTok lives. And you know, building that out at as we speak. But like I think like with CTC, like obviously you guys have all this proprietary software where you can actually start to see the halo of the spillover because like TikTok shop, we tell the brands on ourselves calls it's not the most profitable channel. You might run into break even, you know, you might be, you know, single-liter profit, but most likely break

even. But there is why brands do it. It's because of the spillover to Amazon, the spillover to, you know, dot com and shopify the spillover to retail and then forth the meta content like we've been talking about. But you guys like have that actual, you know, software to track that in a true way. So I'm super excited to kind of implement that across all our brands. Yeah. And I would even say like Alex and I were all the hats in the entire operation right now from sales marketing operations

“being our own HR accounting. Like we honestly don't like anything but TikTok shop and just”

running TikTok shop is what we're good at. And so obviously that comes with the responsibilities of running your agency. And so we're super glad to have a team that can handle them. We can just go all in on TikTok shop because we've got a point of scale where it's like, okay, this is a lot. It's taking a lot of our time and we just really want to focus on TikTok shop and providing great work to clients. And so that allows us to do that. And then also touching on like

the software, tracking the halo effect is such a such a big value out. And you know, we keep telling brands it's there. It's there. But it's like we can't put real numbers behind it, even though we know it's there. And so it just goes back to being able to like, which I know is a big part of the method all it's you behind, column threat collective is like putting real numbers by and stuff and like forecasting within a very accurate percentage. And so it's going to be really cool to be

one of the first agencies. If not the first to actually really be able to put numbers behind that stuff. And then also a big part of our strategies is this meta content pipeline. And so

we've never really had a good system for it. Like we had the competitions which gives us a lot of

content. But we've never had a really good system to upload it to meta for these brands because we all run med ads. We don't run any paid media besides G&B Max. And so CTC and their team is created that their best in class. And so now they have inside of statless their proprietary software, we're a way to automatically upload all this content, which is going to speed things up. It's going to 10x what we're doing on the content side. Because all of our brands are seeing a ton

of value from that. I would say probably like 50, 60% of our brands are right now like we're like one of the top five ads. And they're out of account from TikTok shop, which is insane to say. So we're just really excited. Just 10x that scale that up. So yeah, we're really excited. And then we can continue working with really cool brands. So that's going to be awesome. Brad, love it. Yeah, and we've got some exciting stuff. We'll share with you all in the coming weeks around some

of the stuff. They mentioned around integrations with additional sales channels and statless,

automate. You know, if we're getting 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 ads a month, being able to pull those in

and then an automated way, pull a couple of push-to-build stuff. So some exciting stuff. Well,

“we'll leave for the coming weeks and the conversations. But I think that about does it.”

You guys want to leave the people with anything? And you last final thoughts?

I guess if you're a brand out there, let's throw in a two-talk shop, hit us up.

“I'm going to be a bit help. Yeah, I would just say like I think there's, I think for”

T-bar partners, like we've had a great release to like reputation and we're excited to continue

to scale this up. And it's like our operations, Alex and I, this is our first time ever doing an agency.

“And so like I would say we're pretty naive and really don't know like how to scale an agency”

at scale and how to hire people while we've grown a ton. And so just being under great leaders, like Luke and Taylor and just being around a team like that, that it's been around in the space for 10 plus years. And so we're really excited to learn a ton and just level up as people and lead the lead a team and do a lot of cool things. So I would say that we're really excited about that as well. Cool. We're so happy, guys. Awesome. Thanks inside. Thanks everyone for

joining us. We'll catch you on the next episode.