Meta Ads Underperforming? Why + What To Do Right Now

Conner's got the cool hat on. It sounds like a number of us have made it to a world cup game this year. Which one did you make it to Connor? We wrote the USA Turkey game last Thursday and probably the most electric sporting event I've ever been to, just like a crazy energy

“that I think only comes from an event that happens once every four years and that the USA”

host, I mean what, it was in like 1992 or '94, I think the last time they hosted the World Cup.

So that all that together was pretty wild and then that was my first time at SoFi in that place

is like I felt like I was in like a alien spaceship or something. It's like just so like futuristic and like concrete that like whole scoreboard they have going around the the center of the fields and saying so it was a pretty cool experience and hoping they can bring home the round of 32 in tonight. Who did let's go? Um, yes, SoFi is awesome or either of you guys soccer fans outside of the World Cup? Not yet but I do. I'm turning into one like I could see myself become one a soccer fan

after this kind of the same way I became like a little bit into tennis when they rolled out that that Netflix stock. Yeah, totally. Um, you know, I will say I've got my qualms with soccer. I'm gonna take the, I'm gonna take like the, the crumudge in view here. Uh, soccer. Great sport.

“I get it at its best extremely entertaining. Um, what I think is funny is like there's so much”

not happening all the time. People are going to hate this take. There's so much not happening all the time except every single moment can be so important. So you can't look away for 90 minutes. Like I stood up last night. I had the Ecuador Mexico game on and I just had to throw something away in the trash. I'm like, all right, I'm good for, you know, 30 seconds or whatever, missed a goal. And it's like, and there's only, there might not be more than one in a game. There might not be

one at all. Uh, so I think that's an issue. And then we're in the knockout round now. So they're going to penalty kicks. And it's so ironic to me that penalty kicks are the exact opposite. Like for all the, the space in time and suspense and like the uncertainty that you get from the normal 90 minutes of soccer, uh, penalty kicks are the exact opposite. You know, exactly when they're kicking, you know, exactly that they may or may not score. Um, you get perfect visibility. And

what it reminded me of is it almost feels like the TikTok version of soccer. Like it's like, it's brain rot soccer is, is penalty kicks. Um, brain rot soccer. And, and that's my favorite part. Now, I'm like, dude, just, just let me just tune in for the penalty kicks at the end of the game. It's 15 minutes. It's high energy. It's high stakes. I know exactly what's happening. So that's my take on soccer. I'm, I'm anti-regulation pro penalty kicks. Fair enough. Dude,

the, the penalty kicks are so exciting now. Like it's swing so far in the other direction. Uh, you know what, you know what else is great about soccer? The games take like two hours. Like I was shocked at, I was shocked at how short those games are like, literally from

first to last whistle, two hours, you know, it's not like a baseball game where you're sitting

there forever. Um, even, like, nearly any professional sport. It's like, you know, usually three hour games. So I really appreciate that about a two, 45 minute pass with the extra time. Like, you're, you're in your out. It's quick and it happens fast and, and you move on. Um, so that, that thought that was very interesting. I was not expecting that. Have you guys followed that, they, uh, they introduced it. I guess in Qatar a couple of years ago, but the water breaks

because it was so hot and Qatar, they added in additional water breaks. So, so they keep the clock running, but like they stop for everybody to hydrate. Um, and they added it to the games here no matter what the temperature is. And a lot of people say it's just so that we can run more commercials. We just get an additional commercial break, which I think is hilarious. Great for advertisers.

“Yeah, I think that's what it is. No, I think that's what it is. There's been a lot of, like,”

feedback on people, like, so in MetLife and New Jersey, they're telling people not to park here because they're using, like, essentially all the ground, like, the parking lots for, like, commercial things for, like, brand activations and stuff like that. So I think they're just, yeah, I think they're just, you know, trying to, trying to milk it for all its worth. Look, you know, we're hosting it and largely in the U.S., let's make it the most capitals world cup possible.

Well, have you guys seen? I'm sure you have all of the content of, like, Europeans and, and, you know, non, non-Americans trying all of our food and ranch and, like, it's like, it's so whole, so

I'm in such a great content. It's amazing. I saw the ranch video. It's like, what are you taking

back with you from, from the U.S.? It was a ranch dressing. I put it on everything. It's, it's so good. It's like, there's, like, people from, like, there's Asian people trying BBQ and Texas for first time, just taking a bite of a giant rib and just being like, "I love America." That's something I noticed at the game and I've kind of gotten this vibe. Like, we have, we have some partners with, like, one screen is out of home vendor and they're based out of Boston.

And obviously Boston has a lot of, a lot of games being hosted there and they're like,

great vibes and everyone I've talked to said, it's awesome and it's, like, great energy.

And I noticed the same thing at the game I went to. Like, the, just the energy between the two different groups of fans was like, very, very, it was just good. There was no, like, you know, tension, like, that you might have it a football game. Like, everyone was getting along and it was

“just good vibes all around. It didn't really matter who won. So I think that's been cool to, like,”

it seems like that's happening across the board. Like, it's been fun to have all these different people from around the world coming to the US and it's just, like, seems like everyone's really getting along, which we'll see if that remains true and, like, the round of eight and the round of four and all that. But that's, that was cool to see. And I really much, I very much noticed it at the, with the Turkish fans at the USA Turkey game. I wanted to start, you know, I feel like we've had this

conversation on a developing basis over the last couple of months. Cody, you had a great tweet about it. But it's just like meta performance over the last few months, quick temperature check. We could talk about, I've got some examples from from inside of Ridge on how we've been identifying or addressing some of these things. But to take a quick step back, Brian Bumgarner at Northeastern, I think it's done a fantastic job sort of like, frankly, I think we've got this a bit of a tangent. Zane,

our good friend Zane, who runs a TikTok agency, doing fantastic job, like doing a round-up of who's succeeding on TikTok shop. I feel like he's, I just had the thought this morning. He's writing that X post. He's doing the podcast with with what's working. Great podcast. He's deviated

“from the shit post and he's like providing value and, and I'm supportive of that. I think it's really”

good. Oh, I though you're going to say you're like disappointed in him for it. No, no, no, no, no, well, you go either way with it. Yeah, we all, we all missed the just super low-tam posting for like the, the two dozen people on, on D to C Twitter. But, um, now he's doing a great job. Brian Bumgarner similarly. I feel like people are just in a fantastic job of putting out content that's valuable. I say all that because Brian posted an X article, and again, he's got access to like thousands

of Northeastern accounts, big data set, laying out trends. Um, and he identified some interesting ones that I wasn't quite sure what to make of. What I've heard anecdotally from a number of brands at this point is meta meta has really struggled with acquiring new customers to like maintain the performance that we've seen over the last couple of months. Um, what he laid out was

basically a 12-month trend of increasing CPMs, uh, click through rates increasing even further than that.

So dropping CPCs, dropping conversion rates, where if you look at it closely for a lot of that period, a one day click a seven day click, row is like maybe higher, but that the traffic and the way that

“we're driving it is fundamentally different year over year, and I think that is an extremely odd trend,”

and it seems highly correlated with people saying that their businesses are struggling. At least over the last couple of months. Um, so Cody, you had a response this week that got a lot of good engagement. Maybe you could just walk through like what the main points of that were and like what, you know, drove you to finally chime in on the discussion. Motion just dropped their 20, 26 creative benchmarks report, and it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn,

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I'm always scared to do it because you say like, oh, this, you know, let's talk about that this is struggling. And then you get like five people that are like, well, I'm having the best performance I've ever had. You know, and it's like, oh, there's one. So I think I think they're at least in their brands that are doing really well. It seems like we're just crushing it right now. There's, you know, health seems like it's doing really, really well for the majority. So it's

always challenging to figure out what's macro, what's vertical, meaning like, is it is beauty in a beauty recession. But, you know, maybe health is doing well because there's, you know, maybe some evidence there. And then also what's meta, right? Because that's the majority of it. And yes, you can compare other channels to see like, is meta hurting more than others. But I do think, and I'm hearing more of some of these issues. Now, some of them are beauty, beauty brands,

like oddity. So they're a public company, you know, usually one of the, they're actually like, usually one of the only really high performing like D to C brands that have gone public.

great advertisers. They're down, like 30% year over year. And in their last two earnings reports,

they have, I don't want to say, blame meta. But they have said, we think that there's an algorithm bug, or an algorithm change on our top spending ad channel, which is, which is obviously meta. And what they have shared, we haven't seen it as significant as them, but it's definitely been significant. Is they've seen balance rates just skyrocket. So traffic quality just, you know, skyrocket, right? Like, I don't know if they said anything about like cost of traffic and things like that.

But it just is a very similar thing. So what we are seeing, again, I used to talk about how we, we've had such a hard time reaching new audiences and things like that, it's been easy. And part of it is we've optimized for that. We've done things like IA and changing exclusions, whatever. But I also think that meta has, this is just my, this is my tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.

“I think that there's multiple factors here. But I think that meta has pushed really hard into”

trying to help brands reach new audiences, both on acquisition and then on, you know, incremental reach. And there's probably, this is like, yeah, and I don't really understand how the algorithms work, but there's, like, from a technical level, there's probably some trade-off between intent and, and, you know, or intent and reach, maybe it's exploration and exploitation, where, you know, the feedback last year was like meta is great at intent, but it just goes after the same people.

I don't know what you guys are saying. We used to see North Beam new visit rates,

40, I know, I know ours have always been worse, but 40s, 50s, stuff like that. Now, like, we're

easily 70s, 80s, like significant difference. And in the past, prior to maybe a few months back, we always had a really positive correlation between improving reach and improving at account performance and improving business health, improving incrementality, like validated with all those. For the first time now, several, several months back, we are, we're able to get new reach, we're able to improve new visit rate, and the traffic quality is just so much poorer than it was.

“I think meta's heart was in the right place. I know that they've tested a lot. I don't know that”

it has all been successful. There's probably other factors, but that's at least one of the factors and one of the big things that I'm seeing. Are you guys seeing what Brian laid out with the increasing click through rate, like click through rate at 12 month all time highs and getting looking at like an aggregate of a thousand advertisers, click through rate at 12 month all time highs, which is not how click through rate should work, right? Like, that's, we shouldn't be talking

about trends and click through rate and see it like dramatically shift just every month and increase over a year long period. But are you guys seeing that trend, the increase in click through rate, and then the decrease in conversion rate? Definitely seeing decrease in conversion rate. We're definitely seeing traffic quality here, but so probably, I mean, I don't think CPMs are down, like frequency is lower, so I'd have to pull it up, but I would say I would say probably. Yeah,

and then some interesting shifts of platforms and stuff like we're definitely driving more to and more to reels more to Instagram, like I think we're driving spend to places that are doing a good job reaching people, but maybe not the quality. We've had some audience network spikes that we've tried to get away from, but there's like factors external to meta, macro factors. People not wanting to spend more money than they used to, that's going to affect

advertiser performance. The trends in click through rate, the trends in CPM, I find a bit suspicious in a meta exclusive way, like the platform itself seems to be behaving different. And that's particularly true with some of the placement type stuff. And that's when I've talked to brands, it's like the first thing you want to be sort of doing some sort of diagnostic check on is like, make sure you're not spending a ton of money on audience network that doesn't make any sense.

If you've never done that in the past, but even dollars being shifted into reels and

“Facebook stories and things. It's like, oh yeah, that is something that you should be suspicious”

of. In my opinion, it's exactly how we do sort of analyses internally, a ridges like, if from a high level perspective, if performance is getting worse, let's look at what has shifted in that same time period. And then more often than not, it's like some sort of will often see demographic shifts, all of the sudden we'll start bidding on men more than women or more reels than feed. And like all of those things, I think, are a little bit odd. And at least we've been trying internally

to sort of counteract as much as we can. Yeah, so I have the data for you, pull it up with Claude while we're talking about. Click there. It is up 20% year of year. Yeah. And I don't think our ads are any better. CPMs are down 30%. Like down. Yeah. And granted, there's some shifts, like we are, I think we are too heavy on VO before. Now we're not heavy enough on it, but still, it's, yeah, it's, everything points to it's just much lower quality audiences that we're reaching.

about how maybe he'd recommend brands diagnose some of these issues, but my 10 full ill hat

is met is obviously trying to best optimize their ad platform to drive performance and then get more ad dollars from advertisers. When I hear things like, oh, yeah, click through it is up 20% year or year 30% year of year. But you're at the platform level. They seem to be prioritizing clicks. It feels to me that they say, hey, more and more advertisers, especially large ones, are optimizing towards click based outcomes. And you look at like an app loving who drives

in insane amount of clicks for every impression that they say, hey, our performance will look better if we can drive more clicks. And therefore, they can push it into placements where they

“drive more clicks. And that's why, like, like, another way to think about this, and I don't have”

this data pulled up, but like anybody could pull out would be relatively simple. If you get a, let's call it a 1x, 1 day click rows and you drove 100 clicks, like you'll see some sort of latent revenue get attributed to those ads. If you can drive, and that'll happen over seven days, 30 day, however you want to do it, but you'll see a lift between one day and whatever, like longer period of time you want to be comparing it to. Typically, and we've seen this across,

but basically all ad channels, if you drive more clicks, you can see a larger increase over time.

If I drive a one day click rows, but I drove 400 clicks, there's simply more people that clicked and if they can convert than on a longer period of time, I can see a larger lift between that one day and seven day period. And if advertisers are increasingly making budget decisions based on data like that, I as an ad platform, and now, and now incentivize to be driving more clicks. And that's part of my tinfoil had is like, they may be trying to, you know,

reshape the way their platform works and like the outcomes that they're trying to drive. And even when I say outcomes, I mean, the software outcomes, the impressions, the CTRs, the clicks to site, moving away from shops, things like that, let me reshape how my platform works, so it actually will look best in whatever lens that advertisers are looking at it through. That's my, that's my quick tinfoil had is they may be thinking about it from that perspective.

Some engineering, you know, VP on the meta team is thinking that that will be the most advantageous for winning over more ad dollars. That's my quick as my, as my, I'll take the tinfoil had off now. Most brands treat customer support as a cost, but with AI, every support conversation is now a chance to increase retention, recover revenue and grow your LTD. Rich panel doesn't just use AI to answer tickets, they allow operators to run revenue experiments inside your support.

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“I think lots of clicks, but I know that there was a big new customer focus for meta, you know,”

they pay. So AI on exclusions beyond improving acquisition and a lot of it was rich space. So it's very similar. It's probably all the same thing, but how do we get more traffic because of feedback is we're just we're kind of almost two bottom funnel. And you know, maybe maybe that was the wrong thing to do or maybe just the execution of it is I'm sure it's an extremely challenging, you know, problem. And I'd also say they probably have like a hundred different objectives

at any given time, like all the different people working on all the different parts of the had platform. So I think also many of these things can be true. Connor, let me get a bit of consulting from you here. Ridges identified like a meta-specific issue. We think we have a meta-specific issue. Do you have any hexclad? How do you how do you guys dive in around like diagnosing the issue? And what steps might you take to try to improve performance? We're seeing the same trends as

well, like our CTRs up, our CPMs, and I'm just looking at the month of June. So CTRs up, CVR is way down, like we're seeing like a 50% drop in CVR. CTR is double in the month of June as

where it was last year. CPMs are up like 20%. So we're basically seeing all the exact same trends

“that that you guys were calling out, which I think's going to just quickly go back to your”

tinfoil take here. Like, because it's it's only a matter of time now until advertisers are going to start saying, oh, meta-traffic sucks, right? CVRs down, way down on meta. So now what happens then does that mean all the that same VP of product at meta is now going to say, hey, we need to swing back the other way. And we actually need to drive less clicks, but more high intent clicks. And now we're like swinging back towards more of like the high intent audiences that

swinging back and forth back and forth. And I think for us, it's it's hard, like there's so much nuance here on here. Like, we are spending up a big amount on meta in June and here today, really. We're spending up quite a quite a good bit more, but so much is different in June than June last year. Right? Like, primed day was in June. We ran a little bit longer, summer sale in June. So like, it's hard to say all things being, well, how much revenue decrease we would have seen. Like,

we saw one day click row as basically flat year of year in June. But but I'm assuming it would have

been way down if we didn't have all the offer moments happening in June that we're not existing

“in June last year. I think for us, the tricky part is like going back to your point of like,”

one day click versus seven day click in growth. They're like, we're thinking about this on a much longer time horizon. You know, I'm happy with the traffic that meta's driving in the new users that meta's driving. But it's hard to tell, like, is this high quality and 10 traffic? That's new to our brand. That's going to convert in six months or in nine months or 12 months. Or is meta truly driving just low and 10 traffic to our site? Like, we use things like, you know,

server site analytics tools to help gauge this. Like, what's our, like, product view rate growth. What's our added cart rate growth? And then we can like filter that by UTM source as well.

It's like kind of back into whether or not this, this traffic is high quality or is meta driving,

you know, 50% higher, higher traffic. You're on your butt. The product view rates flat or the added cart rates fly. Like to me, that's a good signal that this traffic is not great. Overall, I couldn't speak to like what meta's that specifically right now. But like overall, we are seeing growth in, in our like product view rate and our added cart rate and all those, you know, downstream metrics. I'm feeling like somewhat confident in the quality of this traffic. But to your point,

like, what do you, what do you do? Like, I don't know. Do you do, do you diversify away from meta? Like, maybe, maybe that's the solution here. But I don't know about you guys. But like, we're seeing CPMs up across the board. Like, in June, our Google CPMs were up like 100%. YouTube was the only one that was down. But like, Amazon was up. Apple oven was up. Meta was up. Google was up the biggest.

So it's not like, it's not like meta's in a silo here where the competition is only growing

in meta. But it's not growing elsewhere. At least for us, it is growing elsewhere. I mean,

“I think there are some leverage you can pull, like going back to like, we know what, what”

targets a more middle bottom of funnel, right? It's like static images, product focused off. So maybe you start like leaning more into that and like specifically force meta into sending more ads to people that have already visited your website that should be a way to combat. Someone like the lower quality traffic. I think we already talked about the audience network stuff. I think most brands are seeing that that's driving low quality traffic. So I think there's some like manual

placements that can be done. But to an extent, like, how much can you really offset the back end changes that meta's making? Like, you can, but you can't fully offset it. So I think it's, I think those are some of the levers you can pull. You know, maybe you're introducing more DR offers to try to convert some of that traffic earlier and like pull some of that revenue forward. And I know that's something that we're starting to think more about, like, do we roll out a little

bit more, like, easier to entry, easier entry point offers in our funnel? And that's another lever brands can pull, but I know that kind of goes against some brand rules that people have. So I think there's a variety of things you can do, but the question is, like, how much can you truly offset the, the back end changes that meta's making? It's, no one really knows. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I do think, like, when it comes to people addressing these

issues, doing things like testing new offers, launching new sales, like kind of loosening the reins on some of those constraints you might have had previously make sense. I just talked with my team, because I do think I typically don't think we don't typically deviate from our like a media buying strategy. Like, we have a methodology where using these attribution settings, we set up our campaigns this way. We do this level of targeting, like, and we're more or less locked in on that

year-round. And we're making maybe slowly incremental changes that we're testing into. For us, we were seeing these declines in the share similar to the numbers that users actually closer to codies. We're seeing a decrease, decrease in rows, decrease in CPM, increase in CTR, just fundamentally different traffic in the EU and the UK. And my asked to the team was, there are a number of external factors that help explain worse performance year over year. We've

got, we didn't have asked for a product launch as year over year. We're just coming off the sale, all the point that you mentioned. But I do think we should put ourselves in the headspace of what media buying specific changes can we make to try to read address performance, because it does feel like an opportunity. And for us, that's like, make sure you're doing the placement

“exclusions. I think a super key audience network is a no-brainer. We're doing big decreases on like”

reels and stories. I don't know the exact like technical changes there that we can make, but you can

necessarily incremental. We shouldn't have a lower row as target for some of these like

short-form vertical video placements versus feed. So if we can start adjusting our bids a little

“bit more granularly there and pushing spend into feed. Like I think those are the small changes that”

might help just triage some of the issues that we're facing. Dolly sets been our approach. So that's what I got on. I think it's a solid meta segment if you just want to move on unless there's any other points on that. I got one too, but uh, things to say. But yeah, I think bid multiplier is such value rules like that's really smart because we're definitely seeing shifts there. Like again, why use to think that those were more incremental when we needed to improve reach that like

all right, let's, you know, let's let's push to reels a little bit and we'll be okay with that. And I think it made sense at the time. And now it's like we're seeing less Facebook delivery, right, in general, more Instagram delivery in these different places. And yeah, I think bid multipliers of value rules are a really good way to do that. One other very big adjustment, not a big adjustment put a big impact that my teammate is we switch our exclusions and just excluded less. We,

as we were chasing reach and found some tests, we added a lot more exclusions. And we pulled him back significantly better performance, like much better. So what are, what are you guys doing for exclusions, currently? Yeah, I was talking about excluding things like audience network

“placements and just being more aggressive there. Um, we just, I traffic. Are you just your customers?”

We do, we, so I mean, we do a mix. We have like our, our, the campaigns that we view as being more top of fun, where are excluding all engagers and side traffic. So let's just like be as aggressive as possible. And then we'll run like at 40% of the account with slightly less exclusions there. And at least recently, we haven't changed that approach. But that's the exact sort of thing that I would try, I'd be trying right now when I feel the platform itself, the meta platform itself

is behaving differently. It's like I'd begin sort of toggling some of those, those, you know, levers. Yeah, I need to, I, I would need to go back in and see what we're doing for exclusions right now. I think it's probably a mix of things. Um, but yeah, I need to, I would have to go back in and look at some of our top spending assets here. Yeah, like post post iOS really. We are like not excluding any site traffic, you know, visitors and it's just customer exclusions. And obviously like playing

around with different ones, whether it's like waste not or different meta stuff. But we started adding in, you know, site exclusions and you know, different, I've read the windows. But, but got a lot, you know, strict run exclusions. And we saw like the, you know, the audience breakdowns of your spend. Like we saw those get a lot better, right? And we had a lot more prospecting spend. And

“in the past that always was correlated with success. But I think maybe because of those other things,”

it kind of did too much so as soon as we changed that back. And so we saw our excluding site visitors. I think we're still excluding, but just like a much narrower period, much better performance. So now we're, I think we should rethink it, test no site exclusions at all. I still think we want the full

customer exclusions. But definitely like with how much is changing, my always biggest learning,

it's like, you just can't take anything for granted, really. And you kind of, yes, you, you want to like lock in on the, the big levers, right? But also like something like that, I had a really big impact actually. I totally agree. I totally agree. Yeah, we're mainly, we're mainly just excluding our, our purchase list now. I'm like looking at a lot of our top spending assets. And it's primarily like, yeah, pixel purchasers, Klaveo Lish, Shopify exports,

and keeping website visitors and engages out of there. Because we don't want to, we don't want to avoid those people too much. Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. I think that's the next step to try. Before Q4 hits, the smartest e-commerce operators aren't just asking, how do we spend more, they're asking, how do we make every visitor more profitable? That is where after self comes in. After self helps e-commerce brands increase revenue per visitor, contribution margin,

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you can make with after self. Go to aftersell.com/rock it, revenue forecast, put in your numbers, and see how much more profit your funnel will make before BFCM starts. Okay, so I wanted to ask, I wanted to ask Connor about, about one of their new categories they launched. We've talked a lot about Rich's wallet expansion strategy and how you guys are,

you've built, like, just an amazing system to turn out. So many new wallet patterns, monthly, weekly,

whatever. I mean, it feels like you guys are launching new ones every single week. And then we also talked a lot about how you've actually run holdout tests on ads, voting those wallouts, and you have

that color away, right? Some people are, of course, we are also finding that you launch this new color

way, this new design and ads, and it's reaching a new audience, and then they're coming into the website, the funnel, and they're buying your hero with three colors. But you're also doing a lot of chant of category expansion, which has been really fun to watch with the new one being chains. So I just wanted, like, give me the, give me the run through on, on everything, like, what, let's just start with, like, the why, like, what kind of where you're seeing that made you want to

expand into chains? Totally cool. I will say, I've advocated for chains for super long time,

“like probably two years where I'm like, I think we got to try chains through a couple of reasons.”

One is people purchase while, like I'm trying to like root it back to like who are customers,

or why people buy from us, because not even who are customers. It's like, what are the attributes

that people see in Ridge that might have some portability over to other categories, or other, you know, products? Chains was my thesis for chains, was I think people are buying our wallets for, like, a fashion reason that historically, like, people typically haven't bought wallets. The average guy was getting largely gifted some random leather wallet that he'd used forever. He didn't think about it as any sort of statement piece. And now we're selling carbon fiber and

forged ember and cool, like titanium and prints and colors. So I see that, like, behavioral change in how men are buying things. And if people are valuing, valuing us in any way as, like, a fashion brand, or, like, a way to make a fashion statement, then, like, we could be exploring

“other categories where they do that. So that's, like, one piece of it.”

The second one is it was when I was living in Utah, and I'd go to the gym, and there's just,

like, a bunch of dudes just wearing chains. And you see it, I feel at least this is very anecdotal. I feel like I've been seeing it more and more in, like, you know, I call it, like, fly over states. And I mean, that in a very, like, loving and deering way. But like the, the Utah's, the Montana's, the Ohio's, like, these guys that are, you know, grittier outdoor at the gym, blue collar, etc. I see them wearing chains more and more. My ex's dad was an electrician and wore, like, a cool,

like, little chain. That was just, like, a little style piece. I'm like, okay, that's, like, he's our guy. And I see those guys wearing chains more than they used to. So I felt like it was a trend that we could play into. And then the last one is chains are just a fantastic D to C product. A lot of the same attributes of the wallet, cheap to ship, cheap to store, high ALV, high margin. So I said, like, from that perspective, they're very similar to rings in that way. Rings,

wallets, chains, all very similar economically. So that for me was, like, the pitch as to what we could do. I think there's reason to believe that people would purchase this sort of product from ridge, the customer that we'd be appealing to, I think, is like, a growing market. And then three great economic product for, for D to C acquisition. So that's kind of how we, those my pitch to

“seeing that's how we backed into it. Were you seeing any, like, a lot of that is anecdotal just from”

your experience. And I think even in the game, long enough, we're often that's probably all you need to take a swing. But what, were you seeing any trends on, you know, Google search trends, you know, going into, like, a refs and, and, like, finding any, any positive trends and, and, like, the amount of search volume for chains, like, was that, was that part of it, or was it really, primarily off of, like, all the things you just said? Yeah, no, that's a, that's a good question. Um, not like,

not Google trends, not a refs. Um, this is similar to how we got into travel to where we looked at the travel category. And we said, um, you know, you look at Monos, July, Bayes away. Those are all nine figure D to C travel brands. Um, in the case of travel and luggage, like, we also said they're, they're maybe not targeting women, but they're gender neutral at best. And we felt like there's white space in the category to be, like, a more men's oriented outdoor rugged, hard shell luggage

brand. And, and, and the point being, it's not Google trends, but it's like, hey, there were many big brands succeeding in this category right now. Um, chains doesn't have nearly as many, like, large DR focus, D to C brands. Um, but if you look at Ajax and or a crafted, um, there are people who have built very solid D to C businesses in the chains category. So it's kind of proven out, um, and that was, like, signal enough for us to sort of at least begin exploring it. And again,

and this maybe comes down to, like, how do we think about category launches at Ridge? And I'll actually say something super just some mantics here. We don't think about this as a new category. It's really jewelry as the category. And we have wedding bands and chains within that now. Um, and it's the same way, like, I've brought up this. I've brought this up a little bit, but we have everyday carry category. And within that we have wallets and then a growing piece of that is like our,

our tracker card. Um, so like, we're beginning to move towards this future where we have multiple

the business. Yeah, I was kind of asked. You said something or maybe a kind of question. And that kind of answers it. But like, you said, like, hey, one of the things that we will do is like, do we think we have the, like, will people buy this from us? Like, not all like part of his part of your

“thought process is, is chains even a good category to get into, but then also how will they buy it for us?”

What's your thought process here? I think this one is like, you're having success with jewelry. So it seems like a next, a next bolt on, but like, how else do you think? Because I think that's one where like founders, entrepreneurs, like, can get really confident and maybe think that. And it's like, how do you do it? Like, actually critically. So you're, you're actually like sure that you have a really good chance or you have the credibility to play there. Totally. Yeah,

and, and it happens both ways because I think brands will say, you know, I hear this word a lot. Like, we don't have permission from our customers to get into this new category. And it's like, oh, you're actually like, being way too conservative about like what people will be willing to buy from you. Sean and I fight about this all the time. Sean ends up the CEO of Ridge ends up on the very other side of the spectrum where he says we could launch absolutely anything. And I'm like, I just

don't think we can launch soap. I'm like, I don't think people will buy soap from Ridge. And, and for change, it just lands somewhere in the middle. I said earlier, like, this point

“around people buying wallets for as a fashion statement, I think, like, is one thing that leads”

me to believe change might work. You bring up wedding bands, which is a great one aside from the fact that I do think our wedding band customers significantly different than our chain customer. Like, I, we end up, we end up skewing like a little bit older for wedding bands. And like, maybe not as they're thinking about it more as like a utility item. Like, I'm getting married. I need

to ring. I want the, I want the, um, never lost forever fit sort of warranty program that we have.

I want the silicone attachment and the box. Like, that's a utility play where they're not necessarily buying it because it's like the coolest ring or like, they're necessarily going to look so much cooler. So, I, and that's still a little bit TVD. Again, we're like 45 days into the launch. Um, we'll see what's cross over there is. I don't expect there to be much. The last thing that I'll say is, I could still see it as being a point for why it chains are worth

trying. And then really a lot of what we've seen work to like at worst a middleing degree is small metal items you carry with you every day. While it's knives, pens, rings, like we just continue to find like, hey, when we're operating in this space, like, there is enough demand. People are willing to purchase this product from us, especially if we can come in at a, if we can land at the right spot in the market. That's the, the other point that I had here was

around like pricing and positioning. The other mistake that we've made in the past was with watches,

which I've talked about a number of times. This was, I think, 2022. One of our first early

product expansions, we have every, we have the permission to sell watches. Um, like, people like buying small metal items that they carry every day from us like watches should work. We just came in it like a $400, $500 price point with the design that like didn't justify that. So we're like, just making sure we like nail the price and the offer and like the sort of the merchandise and

“component of it. I think it's really key. And that's where in the case of chains, we just landed”

much closer to where the market is. We didn't think or we decided to market. We want to be playing where a Jackson plays or a, or a crafted plays or even, you know, we want to be playing in a similar part of the market that we do with wedding bands where you have like rich and manly bands at these like premium yet accessible prices. And we didn't come in and say, hey, we're going to be, we're going to be David Irman. We're going to sell $2,000 chains and like be this high end fashion brand.

Like we definitely, we definitely approached it from a pricing perspective that we've seen work well in the past. Very much. I encourage me if I'm not here, but very much like your like your new wallet designs and colorways or driving incremental customers. I think you said in the past that all your different categories are incremental from one another. It's like you're not seeing a ton of spillover between the categories. It feels like a wallet customers, a wallet customer, a ring

customer's ring, a luggage is a luggage and so on and so forth. So I know you're early in here, 45 days in, but are you seeing a similar trend on, on change right now? Like is it primarily

first time revenue coming in on this product or are you seeing a lot of repeat revenue from

wallabires or luggage buyers or, you know, insert any category product category, already something. You know, the difference between hitting your numbers and missing them, clear signal on what's actually driving growth. It can get really, really noisy. There's so much noise. You got platform data. You got blended data. MMM, all the acronyms, MTA, experiments, all of it, all pointing in different directions. The more you're spending, the faster you move, the more the bad signal

can cost you. That's why we use house and we've been using it for years. That's why the other

incrementality. We talk about a lot on a podcast. What is the true impact of your advertising

“dollars on your business? We have causal MMM for channel level budget calls, causal attribution”

down to the ad level, and architect their AI agent tells you exactly where your next dollar should go. And the results speak for themselves. Stockhick saw a 41% lift in IRO, it's using house and you're not stuck with a help desk. You get an embedded measurement strategy to actually help your team make better decisions. Their whole team is great. We've worked with a lot of them. They are a world cluster. Go to house.io/operators. HAUs.io/operators and start backing your budget calls with real

causal data. The shape of the revenue that we see, and this is typically, I mean we don't have

like a ton of examples of this, but like this is the best sort of launch. We're the first like

week or 10 days. We saw 50, 67% of revenue come from existing customers. Because you want to see that just makes our lives easier. If like the customers wear acquiring elsewhere are going to be at some point interested in chains, then we have this sort of underlying base. What I will say by that is it's also definitely incremental. I don't know exactly how incremental it's hard to say, but like our business is not built on repeat purchases. So it's not as if that chain purchase

was cannibalizing someone's like second or third wallet order. So it can be returning customers and still be very incremental. And then the flip side of it is after that 7-10 day period, then all of a sudden we're scaling up ads. We have to be new customer oriented, especially if this is going to be a scalable category for us. And this is what I'm saying like within the company this entire time, where we're seven days and we're hitting like some really solid revenue

days. We're really excited about it. And I'm like, hey, we should just pump the brakes a little bit because 60% of revenue is coming from returning customers. Like we have to prove this out much further as an acquisition product. And then we see that split change and over the last 10 days it's 70% new customers and 30% returning. So that's kind of what we're looking for in

“the shape of revenue. I'd even say like I think something like wedding bands was like more”

immediately new customer revenue. So it's not to say like it has to look that way for a category to be successful. But like those are sort of the trends in new and returning customer revenue, of a new category that might indicate that it will be like a sustainable sort of tool for us. And then what look like let's get into the fun stuff, which is like channel, go to Mark. Yeah, I was curious you're going to market for this. Like how did you go with it?

I don't know. So I kind of you texted me this morning said you wanted to talk about this. So I was thinking about it a little bit more because some of our good markets like really not very sexy. Like this was we did a full video and photoshoot. This would be considered like a tier two launch for us. We did a video. We did a photo shoot. We activated across all the channels. We had multiple emails set up. We spent a lot of time on the performance creative front.

Like let's let's come into this with a number of different sort of concepts and angles and let's engage a number of creators. So we've got like a full tool box of ad creative. But like we're going to launch it on meta. We're going to launch it on YouTube. I guess one thing I'll add here because I brought this up on the podcast before. We continued to see success in layering in non-DR brand creative as a percentage of the budget, especially for these new launches. So like

some of the the good market strategy was like we've got this 15 second cut that's like

I said literally the point of this ad is not to like sell you on the features and benefits of the ring or even wider by the ring. I want the message to be original has rings and they look really sick and like that's it. We've got that in a 15 second cut and let's make sure we're layering that in in like really high value ad inventory like like YouTube and keeping that as a part of the launch. That was that was part of it. We built out a capsule page on the site. It got like a second tier

home page treatment. So it didn't even have like a home page take over anything like that. And that was basically our a go to market. And the idea was let's see how this looks for the first 30 days and then we'll build into it further from there. And there's where at the point now we're waiting on inventory for the next couple of weeks. But we'll build out dedicated flows, dedicated

pop-ups will make this less sort of an always on performance creative deliverable. So we're

we're including new ads and creatives. But that's kind of it. And I say that's on sexy because

“that is like it's just redundancy. That's what we do across everything else, just to a smaller”

degree so we can test it. And I don't know if in the future when we're doing these new hero launches if we shouldn't make it splash here. Is it worth trying to engage larger creators at first and making it more of a brand moment rather than like hey we're going to send a couple emails, start spending money on ads sort of slowly build this up from a DR perspective. But that is

are you are you running like YouTube ads? Is it like meta and then like search or what's the channel? Yeah. Yeah. We get search live. Change is not like a super high intent category. Like wedding bands are highest intent category. We're able to spend the largest percentage of our budget on Google search. Um, mostly meta YouTube. And then it depends on how it shifts over time. Like we did see, um, and this is where I'm really. This is maybe another reason that it's worth

“trying is I think chains could be a really great gifting product. We saw some of that over”

Father's Day wasn't on sale. And honestly, it might not even be like a we'll see Father's Day. We've got the holiday so coming up we'll have plenty of inventory for that. Um, so then all of a sudden that was a concept that we came into the launch with this could be great for gifting. Then as we identify those concepts, it's like, okay, maybe we're spending more time on an app love and or something like that. So depending on what signals we're seeing from a concept perspective, it'll

then help dictate channel strategy. And those channel strategies are things that we have observed across our other ones. We know gifting works great for wallets on app love and during Father's Day. So we can sort of quickly follow that with chains if we're seeing any sort of similar behavior. And are you seeing like competitive North Beam reported return on ads spend with with chains out

“of the gate or yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, totally. Um, and that's again, we're like, let's call”

this our fifth kind of like quote unquote category. Um, the ones that have worked to have almost

always like kind of worked off the bat. We don't have a great example. We launch some of our

failed ones watches, watches launched terribly and it got better over time. But we never got it so good that like we could actually scale it. And we tried like t-shirts briefly like we did a bunch of weird stuff in in 2022. Um, and those things that like didn't see that early traction like we never really got it there. But that's also, I'll just say like our launch strategy is built for us to react that way. Like it's not a huge inventory by even if we even if we didn't sell one chain,

the dollars that we spent on the inventory is like kind of a drop in the bucket. There was no scenario where it's like, oh my god, we have to go scramble all the jets and figure out how to like build this big acquisition funnel to move through all this inventory. This was deliberately like a very tempered launch. I saw Sean's tweet. I don't know three weeks ago, four weeks ago about growth via new products. I mean, it's not rocket science that launching new products can really help

“brands grow. I think it's something that we're not doing a good enough job of that we're really”

we're building a team around, we're really focused on it in the back end of this year and into 2027. How much how much of ridges growth can you attribute to the new chains launch? Like what however you want to think about that. Like if you didn't have chains like adding chains all the revenue from chains added x percentage points to your top buying growth and like since you launched, like is that a big chunk? No, it's not a big chunk. I mean, it it for a few weeks was very meaningful

for the jewelry category. Like I think jewelry as a category, it can probably increase our growth for 2027 by 40% or something because it'll be it'll be like totally incremental to the category. Something like that, but jewelry is relatively small subset of the ridge business, right? So it's like if the reason the reason the reason ridges having such a strong year is because we're able to get growth in EDC, we have luggage, we have you know things like power banks, things like that,

chains, chains from like a top-line growth perspective is going to be like a really relatively small contributor, but for us it's like getting more iron in the fire and having like, you know,

can chains do 40 million dollars in 2029 like maybe and it's like it'll be good to have that revenue

at that point. One of the reasons I'm excited about travel still is like travel is just a bigger category and can be a bigger line of business than something like chains. Like there's just I don't think there's any path to change doing $200 million a year. So the idea is it can remain a smaller subset of revenue, it can be high margin, it can help, you know, alleviate growth pressure on something like rings at some point, which I also don't think has $200 million potential. So it's just about

having like sizeable, you know, sizeable opportunities for wins without spreading ourselves too thin. Maybe shifting a little bit here into like what you said about where your growth is coming from. You said most of your growth's coming in EDC, if you could choose, I'm sure it's a lot

of things, right? I mean, you guys are always have a lot of irons in the fire, you're constantly improving

your funnels all of it. But like if there's one or two things that you had to say are driving most of the growth this year for a ridge in EDC, what would those things be? Is it is it product expansion

colors and and just more wallets that are reaching new audiences or what would you attribute the growth to? Totally. Yeah, and just like for what it's worth, it's not like we're getting massive

“growth in EDC, but 10% growth in EDC is multiple more than what we'll do in chains is here. Right?”

So it's like we only need like kind of small, small incremental growth for it to be like a relatively big, like nominal impact. Yeah, where's that growth coming from? Nunes is the big one, and that's been the case for us for like two years now is when we can get great colorways, great designs like that solves all problems. And I've talked about this before, but like far in a way, our most incremental ad dollars are spent on newness, where we are scraping by getting 1.2,

1.3x incremental row is on like our evergreen, if we're trying to sell a gun metal or a royal black wallet, and then we have a cool tattoo design that comes out, and I've talked about this one before this was last year, we can observe a 4x incremental row. It's like it is just so much more impactful. So we've had a couple of those wins, things like TikTok shot, we could be sorry, I can use, I missed that, I missed the difference in like the 1.2 I row as versus the 4x

I row is what's driving them a tire? The Nunes, 1.2 is on like our core evergreen stuff, the gun metal, the black, the carbon, the the wallet that we've had for 13 years, it's really hard to drive very incremental results with. It's when we launch something brand new that like we just continue

to observe significantly more incremental returns. The second point that I was going to hit there was

oh channel expansion, TikTok shop, we're spending way more on YouTube, you're over year, like just so standard like media buying wins, we've continued to like find opportunity in and are all it's like I don't know if the the the inverse of death by 1,000 lashes is, but like

“that's how we're getting to 10% growth, this is just coming from all across the board, really slow”

and sort of like you know these marginal improvements. Quick gut check for the operators listening, if you're spending on TV or CTV today, can you actually say what it's driving incrementally? This is exactly why we work and have worked with neon pixel and hexclad for the last three years. We've grown with them a lot over time in CTV has become one of our top growth channels, they help us treat premium living room TV like a real performance channel, it has smarter household

targeting, it has suppression of people who already know us, it has a very robust analytics back

end, so we feel really good about the measurement and ultimately and most importantly,

it is a strategy that is built around incremental growth, not just claimed attribution. We look at incrementality as the true North Star on measuring channels and they're a really measurement that agnostic, they don't force us into their own black box dashboard, they work inside the measurement

“systems, we already trust and help us understand what TV is actually doing. If you want to check it out,”

go to neonpixel.co and ask them to design a controlled CTV test on your numbers. What are you seeing on TikTok shop in terms of product mix AOV? Like is it a similar product mix as what's driving growth in revenue on Shopify or is it very different? Yeah, it's super different. I think we've talked about this a bit, but our hero product on TikTok shop is our tracker cart, which is like $30. And so that's another big thing. Again, we count the

tracker cart within our EDC category, it is ultimately like a wallet accessory and we've just found like that ends up being one of our top silhouettes and we've found it surprisingly to work extremely well on TikTok shop and then now we're trying to build out funnels on meta and Apple oven and seeing like maybe this is a new sort of beach head into the brand, which is still very TPD, but we think is potentially like a growth opportunity for us going into the next couple years.

Do you find that people are like buying tracker cards and they're not even buying a ridge wall? There's buying the tracker card and throwing it in there, the wall they already have. Oh, interesting. Okay, our top ad for OIO is like one that didn't have a ridge wall. They were using like a leather wallet. Wow, okay. I want to hit before we jump here, we're going to add a little bit of time. I want to hit over under with Cody. I love this one. I counter and I did it last week,

we had a blast. Oh, you did a 10 minutes. Yeah, same are these the same topics, same same ones. Okay, I removed the ones that we hit. I removed the ones that we hit last week. Okay, so you're familiar

with the game because you've got the really key thing here is you've got to assess how is it currently rated

and then figure out whether you think it's over under rated. So you want to let's say nation or just an answer. Answer and brief explanation. And then we kind of let it deviate quite a bit. We only hit like three of these last week and we ended up going deeper than I expected. Let's do the let's go straight to

or underrated. It's very, very, I would say hot right now. I still think it's underrated.

“Conorrade, you land on this. I think it's perfectly rated. Finally, I think it was underrated”

for like leading into this year. But I think brands are like you hear about groans has like a whole TikTok shop studio. I was with Wyatt from Mary Ruth Organics last week. He said that they're streaming

24/7. He said they're never not streaming on a TikTok shop live. They hired de-list actors

to run these these lives. And I think we're seeing more and more of that. I know at Hexclat, we're investing more and more and more in the platform. Even though our product price point doesn't lend itself as much to the platform. But yeah, I think it's like, I think it's pretty well rated right now. Well, well, I think it's still early. So what do you mean by that? You know, so like with investing people are like, oh man, it's like too late. I wish I got in the stock later. And it's like if you look

at the long-term trends of some of these stocks, it's like sometimes when you think it's still early. It's like, and like everyone has jumped in and you think you think it's too late and you've like missed it. If you zoom out in the grand scheme of things, it's probably early. It's obviously not as early as it was. It's like, it's like, you know, meta ads in 2019. You know, like, yes, you missed the five dollar packs, but you're still going to get a $30 pack that compared to the $100 pack that you're going

to get now. You know, so it's like, yes, it's not as good and there's not as much arbitrage as it was.

“But I think it's just still on a rapid growth trajectory and in the grand scheme of things,”

it's still early. I think to get success on TikTok shop, there are some brands at like our natural fits for it. Mary Ruth Organic is one. You know, the way that comfort does their like promos and their products. It's big tam. It's women oriented. It's impulse prices. It's like really well done. It feels to me at least the way that it will have to work at Ridge. And I spoke to another executive at another company, which she oversaw TikTok shop and she oversaw merchandising, which that was a

really interesting point because I do think many brands in order to win on TikTok shop will have to take a different merchandising approach. For us, we're seeing a $30 tracker card work and like if Ridge is going to be really big on TikTok shop two years from now, we'll probably need a lot more like small high utility impulse purchase price products. And like it will force us to like take a new merchandising strategy exclusively for that channel. And then the second one is and

I've talked about this quite a bit, but like the idea of TikTok shop being at its core just a way to activate affiliates at scale or just creators at scale. I shouldn't even say affiliates. The ability to mobilize dozens or hundreds or thousands of like people to begin creating content about your product. Those two things feel extremely underrated to me. Both of them can happen independent of TikTok shop and I think TikTok shop ends up getting credit

for both, where it's like all of a sudden like TikTok shop is the is synonymous with like great merchandising strategy. And I would just, if I could decouple those, I would say the underlying components, the merchandising and the creator activation is highly underrated right now. TikTok shop itself, maybe perfectly rated. I'd almost go slightly overrated because I don't think people are understanding the tactics that TikTok shop is forcing someone into and that, you know,

the shop itself is not necessarily the value. That is a great point. That is a like decoupling

“those things is because I actually think that's what we're doing really well with TikTok shop is”

this year amount of content that's getting produced in the creators that are producing it and the impressions we're getting from that. I think that we still have the opportunity to do better merchandising for TikTok shop. Can we create products that are sub $100 in still get good efficiency and volume on those products at some point potentially. But for now, we're like, hey, this is a great extension of our of our product seating program that is already pretty big and I fully agree

with that. Like that is the, at least for Hacks Cloud, that is the value. It's not driving. We're

not going to drive 50 million in revenue. We might not even drive 10 million in revenue on TikTok

shop this year. But I do think we'll drive tens of millions, maybe maybe hundreds of millions and impressions through those creators that are only flowing because we have the, that set up in, you know, creators can come and apply for it. We send it to them. They're creating content around it. We're starting to pull that into the out of count now. So we're getting that fly wheel going. I'd say like that is way more of a value at our business than actually driving revenue through

TikTok shop. All right. Let's, let's say I want to hit two more. The last one is more of a joke. I'm hiring for a director of retention right now. I've been thinking a lot about loyalty programs, loyalty programs over underrated. I'm going to ask you guys because we are actually looking into it.

And I've been, um, not super open to them. That's partly because it's just, I have never seen

do one. So I would say it's probably overrated, but I'm trying to be open-minded. Because I would also say like perceptions, they're not highly rated right now. Loyalty programs are not hot. It feels almost like a relic of like 20, you know, 2015 brands or something.

“I think they're properly rated because of that, that they're not hot right now. If you think about it,”

they were like, you know, I always think about like comb, combatoires, um, I think I was,

I don't know, but you're how to say it. But they had like a sick program. Maybe it was more of a referral program. But like brands like that, those like, you know, do you to see one point you know, like raise a lot of money? Like, and then, yeah, when brands need to be profitable and budgets get cut, I think that's like survival of the fittest. And you see what stays and what doesn't. And, you know, if brand, so that's probably why I think they got cut. So yeah, maybe, maybe they're,

maybe they're perfectly rated. I don't know. Have you ever seen success? Have you ever seen anybody publish a case study or anything? That's like, oh, there's actually drove real revenue, or it's like, hard to know. I don't mean to like, well, this is kind of the point of this

game. But like, I'll break this one apart again, because the out of the box loyalty programs do feel

overrated to me or like, maybe maybe properly rated just because people don't like them that much. Like, it feels like we're past that point. Um, you know, kith, like, they like made news with their loyalty program two years ago. And it's one of those things where it's like, if you fully commit to it and integrate it well, I think brands totally have the ability to 100% of a better customer experience. And I just, I don't, I don't have evidence of this

literally happening, but if you're providing a better customer experience, I do think you'll be driving incremental revenue at some point. So if you can fully commit and like, thoughtfully integrate a loyalty program, I, I think it can be beneficial. But those examples are really, really few and far between in my opinion. I agree. I think like, I, we, we were doing the exploration of this two years ago and kith is at the top of our list of like, they've just gamified it and it's like a

fun brand experience. I think that's where that's where the value is in a loyalty program. It's not, hey, for every $100 you spend, you get a hundred points in a, in a hundred points, equals $10 off. Like, I just, I don't think that that actually drives a lot of incremental orders. I mean, we've grown our, our like yearly cohort LTV, pretty consistently for the last four or five years and like, it's certainly not through loyalty programs. It's through better retention tactics

and new product. Go to market and I don't think having a loyalty program would have, would have made that any better. I think we're, but I think if it's like, I think loyalty programs need to be thought of as like a brand marketing exercise and not a, maybe not for every brand,

“but at least for a hex cloud that's how we were thinking about it. Like, if we ever roll out a loyalty”

program, it'll be a really cool brand plan play, right? We're like, you spend, like, we have three tiers. You spend $X dollars and if you get into like the black apron club, you get like a custom design, black apron, that says black apron club that no one else is getting, like a goal-plated, you know, hex mail or like, you know, a gift card to a really nice, like restaurant in your city. Like something like that, that's just kind of more brand oriented and just gives people a really

good touch point, but it will not be transactional. I think that's the decision we've made.

We're never going to have a little two program that says, hey, you have two thousand points in your

account, and that's worth $200. I just don't think, I just don't think that's the move. Like just, if you're going to give a people discount, just like run a sale and give them a discount, you know, totally, yeah, 100%. And it reminds me a little bit of the TikTok shop answer where it's like, what you just described is like really cool merchandising, developing products that you are going to like reward it like certain customers with in order to drive loyalty and it's like,

yeah, that sounds like a great loyalty program. All right, I got one more for you guys. You guys, both did it in the group chat this morning, sending voice notes over or underrated. So underrated. So underrated. Like, although what I will say is I feel that they've become with the, with the insertion of whisper flow, I think they've become slightly, maybe a little less valuable, less valuable than they used to be because now whisper flow,

you can just like, you know, speak to it. It'll, it'll write it out. But like for me, I can send a voice note in a fraction of the time that I can write it. But that we have people on our team that just hated like our, our chief info and admin officer, like I'll send him voice notes and he will freak out at me. He's like, well, you want me to open that and listen to it. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I do. Come on. Like what's wrong with that? So I think they're, I think they're underrated.

Though I love voice notes. I love getting them out of sending them. I was going to say,

“Connor McDonald, as the recipient of a few voice notes this morning, I think you should be the”

one that weighs in because it's not about, you know, is it good for sending, but how is it as a recipient?

And I see that because some people hate them. Like, it is like kind of mixed and I think that's

“like probably like the right approach. I didn't mind. You guys send a voice notes this morning.”

Olivia from House sent me one yesterday and started the voice note apologizing for sending a voice note. That's where I'm like, oh, it's like such a, such a, people are so split right now and whether they're good or not. I send them all the time. I'm more of a loom guy.

Like, I'm more often than not. I send looms even if like I really just want to be heard

saying something. Like, like 80% of the value of the loom will be like the audio portion of it, but like, you know, maybe I'm sharing a docker or something. So yeah, I'll go, I'll go properly rated. I don't mind receiving them. I often send them not too often. The only tricky thing is like, there will be times where I'll be out and I want like I want to get the message, oh, it's two things.

One, I'll be out and it's not always good to listen to something. That's a little bit trickier.

I'll listen to that. I'll read the transcript then. If I don't want to listen to it, but I want to know what they said. I'll just read the transcript and it usually works pretty well. This so that's good. So that makes it, that makes it much easier. The other one is Apple doesn't have two X. So you guys sent the voice. That's just morning. I'm like, dude, I'd love to listen to this on like 1.5, 1.7, like, like, let's speed this up a little bit.

So there's my lead two quams. But yeah, let's call it properly rated. You know, I found out Hayed's voice now. Taylor holiday apparently does not really have a fan of voice now. It's yeah. That surprised me. He strikes me as like, uh, I'll do all the efficiency gain things. So where do you land on a Cody? Oh, I'm a big fan. I'm a, uh, I like voice notes.

“Like receive and giving big whisper flow fan. I think the one thing, you know, you had to be careful”

of because I use whisper flow a lot is it's easy to go very, very long. And that now you're making the recipient just read like a novel. Um, so it's easy to do that. I am a huge whisper flow fan for, uh, for, for Claude for AI. And I've seen people start calling it Yapper strategy. It's like, they'll just, they'll just essentially Yapp whisper flow 10 minute brief, just like full brain dump and then just be like, all right, go do it. So I'm actually like a very big fan for that as well. But yeah,

“I think you just gotta be mindful of, you know, is this a good experience for you? So like, like, I,”

I struggle with that with loom. So I'm like, I am just going to do a short loom. And before I know, it's like a 12 minute thing. And like that's, like, I will, I will occasionally restart a loom. Because I'm like, I didn't need to say half that stuff. And that's like not, I don't want people, you know, having to sit through a 12 minute loom. I don't want to sit through a 12 minute loom.