One Packaging Tweak = $375K In Profit – Mehtab Bhogal transcript

Product may be the biggest single lever in your business for growing your business profitably and people say that kind of thing all the time but they never tell you how to actually do it except today May Tab Bogel is on the podcast to tell you his actual checklist for how to develop products across their invested companies and how to improve with value engineering a four step process [music] for how to value engineer product and get more margin out of your product that you're showing how to think about pricing.

This is a really really valuable episode from one of the very smartest people in e-commerce May Tab [music] Bogel who just brings a whole lot of thoughtfulness and clarity with laser focus on how to actually generate as he says distributable revenue in your business. Let's get into product pricing and how to create real value in the business with May Tab Bogel from Carta Ventures. Do you think many of the people on Twitter who are telling you about their big marketing wins particularly particularly the agency folks like me are actually great marketers?

Do they have alpha in the tactics at all? Or or is it just like a big illusion May Tab? >> I think a lot of them are actually better at picking really good clients with amazing product market fit where they know that what they do on the marketing side can drive even more value but they're kind of getting on a rocket ship and that's I mean honestly makes it way easier if you're in services and you're providing a service if the core brand is growing and doing well anyways so I think that's a lot of it.

I think sometimes when people on Twitter read about what some of these agencies are doing like oh why am I doing that? It's cuz well you're in a tiny town. You can't actually spend that much and you're in with the product that you have that you're selling so you need to fix that first. It's very it's very hard to tell why someone is successful and and I say that like for myself a lot of times too like you know you're trying to work back to first principles but sometimes there's this question of like why really did it work for a certain brand?

Um there's just a lot of like reverse engineering of stories of like oh we did this this and this and that's why it worked out. Um and I think it's very hard for people to sort of actually uh figure out uh why why something worked versus versus didn't, you know? Like and and I mean what you're what you're saying I think is makes sense which is like >> one of my favorite examples sorry is just like you know if you were a guy selling outdoor products in 2020 and 2021 or fitness you ripped, right?

Especially outdoor just ripped. It sold well. You probably felt like you were the biggest genius 300 IQ. And then ever since 2021, 2022 and on outdoor has done so poorly. Everyone's doing badly. The best marketers are not doing well. It's just a horrible space to be in. Um because really a lot of that demand is pulled forward with COVID and now the macro's tough. So it's like you you could be a 300 IQ but uh it doesn't really matter if the market's tough. >> I mean you just for reference two things there TAM and and product and they're obviously related.

Uh like how do you sort of think about the relationship to those? Cuz cuz if I'm listening to this and I'm going like wait a minute my TAM is telling me that like I'm I may be dead on arrival, you know? Uh that's that's kind of the implication of what you're saying, right? Is that like I might be dead on arrival or I might be starting with the wind at my back. Um like break down break down the wind there. What what is what is actually that? >> So I think that the big change in digital marketing marketing specifically in D2C over the last let's say five to six years has been that previously before that when you and I were strapping young lads it was okay to be niche and ad products were kind of built around like okay yeah you can dig in, you can be niche, you can win in paid search.

Honestly paid social could target better etc. before iOS. Ever since then having a product that's broad that can be advertised broadly just does better, right? Like the bigger the TAM the better the algorithms are going to work for you because they have more data to optimize off of. It's as simple as that. Um and it's completely changed the game. Like you're far better off picking something that's very dense, has lots of competitors, etc. where you have some sort of edge than you are pick playing in a pool where there's not many competitors and you know, honestly, it's for a reason, especially now.

Before, it could kind of work and you could drive you could build a really good business with a lot like a very high EBITDA margin, but now it's really hard. Like your your CAC's actually gone up and it's become way harder to compete because it's hard to sell niche products online now. >> My counterpoint to that is like then why I guess I guess maybe like I haven't looked at this as carefully, but maybe maybe what you're saying is true.

I just I feel like there's just so many more big brands today than there were. >> Oh, yeah. >> Than there were before. That like every time I hear any it used to be easier narrative, it stops me. I'm like, well, I then how come there's so many brands that are so much bigger than they used to be? And I think >> sorry, but it's it's easier. I mean, like the bottom was easier. So, let's say like doing below 30, 50 million was much easier.

Like you could be I was really stupid. I was just a stupid kid listing stuff online and you would do real revenue with real EBITDA and you could have no idea what you were doing. Now, you actually have to sort of have a brain, right? Like I meet these kids and they're 10, 15 times smarter than I was when I was a kid doing the same stuff. Um Like I I certainly was not buying ads based on LTV or anything like that. Um >> No, yeah.

It didn't You couldn't measure it. You could not measure it at the time. >> Yeah, I was about to say at the same time, the only way to pull your LTV was to build it out manually in Excel and if you had a company that had a lot of orders, it wouldn't really work. I remember being blown away about when my co-founder at the time like did all that in Excel to build out our LTV. Um and this is before like Alteryx or like something like that where you're like pretty easy ways to pull data on larger sets.

So, it was really cool to see. Um but there there was no like app you could plug into. There's no lifetime LTV, right? Um it was certainly not in the Shopify dashboard. So, but it it is cool seeing how much it's evolved. >> I I think there's maybe a combo here. Like one of them is is it having a product with a very large market that's a good product. Um definitely I think does have a real advantage. Um but the the sneaky thing about what that about that is that I also think the best ads right now are often ads that speak to hyper specific personas.

And so there's a weird thing where it's like this combo of having met like a very large TAM, but I think Zack Stuck said this on his Operators uh episode recently, but like if there's also lots of of um and I of category entrance points, that was the way that Tizen Drake put it on Twitter. Um like hat tip and credit where it's due, but like >> He called he had way cooler phrase, CEPs, you know, he's got an acronym. Yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CEPs, category entrance points, right? But like but the idea of like and I think this is the right principle though and it's something I've been thinking about, which is like if you can talk to a a very large number of people a lot of different ways, that tends that combo is really helpful. Um and then of course if you can do that also with great unit economics and LTV, then it's even more helpful, you know. Um but yeah. >> that a step back.

Um like we can dive into this a little bit later cuz we have like the what to think through when you launch a new product, but really um I think Jeremy put Jeremy from Catch is actually where I first heard this a long time ago, maybe four or three or four years ago on the Operators podcast, where he mentioned channel product fit or product market fit. >> And it's kind of the same idea as Zack said, but even expanded further out like okay, where in retail can I sell this?

Is it for convenience stores, big box retail, specialty retail, etc. Like where can this product actually live? And um that's what we look for a lot now, more than the digital side really is just how much retail not just retail, but other channels can we push into? Is this something that would work on TV, etc. >> If you've made it even this far into the episode, I promise you you're going to like more of my content. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you're you're or listening.

Like it, comment on it. I read every comment that comes through Uh every one of my videos and podcasts. So, do subscribe, do leave a comment, do like it. You know what to do. Go do those things. Helps me, helps you. That's great. Go do it. It's really interesting how much I I think I think this matters so much for brands. Like the uh the that's definitely the Simple Modern story as well. And like I tell the story a lot of times, but when you talk to Brian Porter there about their sort of initial launch, or they tested like five different products on Amazon, and the whole goal was how to win on Amazon.

And they landed on drinkware because they could they could on Amazon uh they they saw that the the competitors there were not built for Amazon first, right? And so they they what they did was like they said, "Okay, Yeti can only do so many colors or whatever it is for uh to make their Amazon business work, and also they're going to be priced really high, and Amazon loves low prices. So, what if we come in with low prices and a wide color assortment built for Amazon early on?" And they purposely made the decision to be low margin, which is why that is still not a very large D2C business, because it has it has no D2C economic advantage, but it has great Amazon economic advantage in a whole bunch of different ways.

Um and and I've always thought that was like that that at the strategy level was was like a lot of the genius in that brand. And then of course it also works at mass retail's expansion um in a bunch of for a bunch of different reasons, including being able to ship lots of them at once to one place, and and some of that stuff. So, um so yeah, I I think I think you're right. Like there's there's examples of that all the time.

And what people I think forget all the time about D2C, and it's so obvious, it's so obvious, but it's so easy to forget, is that uh you ship the product to the customer's door. And that that economic reality just makes a huge difference in what can and cannot be successful on D2C business because of the way that that changes the margin uh of of the business. Um so, yeah. Um >> Cool. Should we go through this top-down?

What do you think? >> Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I think it's interesting to think about this issue of product in general. Do Do um do you think uh like as as Ezra Firestone was on the podcast recently so evaluate this statement for me Maytep. Ezra was on my pod podcast recently. I love Ezra. Um and he just had this little phrase that has stuck with me since. He said like there's sort of two things in relation to marketing and your product and that's your product and your promise.

And he said um you know you want to have a great product whatever but the best product doesn't win in the marketplace the best promise does. Um what do you what do you I mean obviously like it's a simplified saying. But what do you like what do you think about that about that way of sort of looking at the the relationship of product to TAM and into all that to success? >> Yeah I think I think you hear a lot of people say oh just make a great product and everything else will take care of itself.

It's not really true. It's like you you have to make a product that has the things people want that you're specifically selling to if that makes sense right? Like I'm sure we've all used a famous D2C product like oh this isn't that good. Okay it's not that good for you but if you're someone buying like one of these supercharged deodorants that like is for really sweaty people if someone has that problem it's way more relevant to them and they're going to find more value in it right?

It's as simple as that. So it's like >> Yep. >> Is this product good for the niche that it's supposed or the specific problem that it's supposed to solve? And is it better than the other solutions there? I think that's all that really matters. >> And like you said the promise right? >> Does that work against your comment about TAM earlier? >> Uh not really because I think some of these are still huge huge issues right?

Like if you like that deodorant one is really good right? Um My Carpe I think is the they're they're really chunky. Have you heard of those guys? >> Carpe Carpe maybe is that >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Carpe Carpe yeah. >> Uh I've just seen it. Yeah. I don't I don't know them well but yeah. >> Yeah they rip. I know one of them fairly well. They they do a good job but um yeah huge huge TAM and obviously it's consumable so very sticky tail. >> Yeah yeah. >> Um and and I think the the other thing on product is like the entire system is basically built to commoditize you over time, right?

Like Amazon's built to put pressure on you and your margins over time and kind of crush you. Same with Meta really, right? Like it's it's an auction and you're bidding against everyone else. And and as new entrants enter, I mean they literally serve ads to people who've been on your website, right? Right. If you go and visit Lululemon and you go back to Facebook, you'll get ads from other leggings companies. Um >> Yeah. >> fairly quickly.

So uh I think like product's really important, building a moat around it specifically IP. I mean I IP is the best. I like IP as the moat a lot just because obviously the more of something that you make, the cost of that IP gets lower, right? Versus something manufacturing where there is that same incremental cost to manufacture product. Like you it doesn't kind of go to zero, right? Like the marginal cost. Um the operating leverage you get out of IP is much higher than out of manufacturing.

And manufacturing's a pain, right? If you're running it yourself, it's like it's a it's a doozy and it's not very fun. So >> Yeah. >> Uh the IP thing was one of our personal favorite moats, especially if it's very very defendable. >> But very hard to come up with the same time, right? Like which is which is probably what makes it a good moat is that it's really hard to come up with actual IP for for any product. Do you think of anything else >> Go on. >> I was going to say I think the guys at Ridge did a really good job with their wallet in defending the IP and building the kind of portfolio around it.

Um and protecting their margins. >> That's interesting. I I I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about this. Um do they have clear IP on that product? They do, huh? It's so funny and all the stories of success for Ridge, like you never hear anybody mention that. But uh to hear you tell it right now, Met up, do you think that's like a big part of their success? >> Uh I think it allowed them to kind of scale off the core product for much longer than they otherwise would have, for sure. >> Yeah.

Yeah, it's it's a great example, too, because now I think I think what this what that nicely illustrates is that I do think like Shawn is like a a brilliant econ thinker and I think Conor is a brilliant econ marketer. And so when you combine sort of business and tactical excellence uh with something like IP, you can build a very very large business, you know. Um and it's and it's and it's very present. So it's not to say that like it doesn't matter how good you are as long as you have IP or whatever, right?

If you're really It's just It's just a question like I like I said earlier like how much how much weight does that have? >> right? >> It's if you have like good IP that's again like easily defended, um you can build a pretty cool Like I have a friend who does 30 or 40 million at 30% EBITDA and they have no idea what they're doing here on their website. It's like it's crazy. It makes absolutely no sense. I don't mean in the cool artsy way where like oh wow, cool.

It's like you go there and you're like oh my god, what's going on? And it's just because the product the utility of the product is so good. If you're If you're a parent and you go to the website, you will order the product for sure. Like especially you. Your kids are exactly the right age for the product. Um but you go there and you're like oh my god, what is going on? Like why is it so hard to check out etc. Like everything that's wrong is wrong.

Uh and he knows this. He just doesn't care cuz he's print he's like a certified money printer that will print money forever. Um but very cool product innovations, though. >> It's so interesting cuz there's part of me that looks at brands that I I'm dealing with that are struggling and I and and I sometimes just think like is this what I should be telling them all the time? Like you Like we're going to keep doing the things we do, but like you really should spend all your time on product and just like just like stop stop doing every like just just fire everybody and stop doing everything else you're doing and just go make products that are better or more defensible or or whatever.

However you want to define better. Like Do you know what I mean? Like is it just like a waste of time and energy to do all of this other stuff? >> Uh it kind of feels like it is sometimes and I've definitely made that mistake before. So, for example, we had a brand where it's like semi-fashion related. I wouldn't say super fashion driven, but there's there's an aspect to that for sure. And um actually I can just say it was our it was our floral brand.

We have actually some product behind me. But it's kind of hidden. Uh it was our floral brand, but all of our bouquets were actually kind of outdated by two or three years and I was just scrolling through the a floral Reddit and I was like, "Oh, none of our shapes look nearly this modern." So, I talked to product team and I'm like, "Hey, what's going on? Why is this like this?" Except a lot less polite. And they're like, "Oh, you know, we felt these were fads." And I'm like, "These aren't fads.

They've been here for 2 years. Now we're behind. So, it's it's a trend. Like we need to get behind the trend and change that and our CAC will go down accordingly." And we've seen that happen before. We would launch a certain style that's more aligned with what trend is and even just tweaking the aesthetic behind it. It's Again, it's bridal, so the aesthetic's very important. We'll see CAC drop. So, um it's just something to consider, right? >> There is one thing you can do in your business that will make everything easier and that is having better pricing on your product.

Like better unit economics, more gross margin. There's a really clear way to get there, too. And you probably know it, which is to source additional vendors besides the one that you're currently working with right now and see if somebody else can make your product at a better price while maintaining the quality or just improve the quality or just have a backup supplier cuz you need redundancies in your supply chain like as we Firestone talked about on my show recently.

And maybe there's other things, too, that you want to pursue like shorter lead times, lower MOQs, better payment [music] terms, that kind of stuff. I know why you are not doing that even though it would like really, [music] really, really help your business. And the answer is that you have too much to do. It's hard to know where to [music] start. There's just a million vendors out there and how do you know which one to pick?

You don't have to because my friends at Move Supply Chain will do it for you and they'll do it at a really reasonable price. Like this is one of those things that frankly, I don't know why it is is the case that like not every single one of my listeners who runs a brand doesn't immediately listen to this ad and go get on a call with Laura and her team at Move Supply Chain. Move is based in the Philippines, which means they're a very short flight from China and Vietnam.

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See if they can help you. Just ask. Just get on a call. Ask them if they can help you. I bet they can. And that example is something where it's aesthetic, so it is like I think it's the kind of category where this where what you're saying makes a lot of sense, you know, cuz if you did that same thing with supplements, it wouldn't work the same way, right? Like it's like you can't just change the packaging and have it have it be a win because it's not an aesthetic consideration.

And I do think this is the case with a lot of brands that are that are in sort of jewelry or fashion or accessories or whatever, like where so much of it comes down to like being able to track the trend and and and develop product along those lines. But even outside of those categories, I do think there's an element here that what you're saying is right, which is like And and yeah. And I guess there's no one way to win, right?

There's a there's a number of ways to win. But I do think I do think that there that you're onto something here that's really important that is easy to miss. What I What I experience is that in the day-to-day realities of running an e-commerce business, it's very easy to become sort of comfortable with your product setup as it currently is and instead of to have an actual muscle build where you're like constantly efforting making the product better all the time.

And actually in point of fact, Ezra was talking about that when he was on my podcast after making that comment about promise versus product, he was also saying, "From day one on all every company that I work with or invest in or whatever it is, we are efforting the product all the time to make it better." That means at the supply chain level, that means to customer experience, that means at every level. We are always trying to make the product better cuz at the end of the day you're putting a product in somebody's hands. >> Yeah, and you need to keep the You need to keep the hopper full cuz there's such a long cycle behind getting new product out in most cases.

It's like 1 to 3 years depending on what you're selling, right? Especially if you have an engineering aspect behind what you're doing, it's a little bit more complicated. You can't let that hopper run out and you have to be okay with failing. Like the reality is most of the time someone launches a brand, they get lucky with PMF that it worked on that on that specific product. And we've all launched products that failed, right?

Or brands that failed and you finally have something and it hits. It doesn't mean you're actually good at product development. It just means you tried a bunch of stuff and it something stuck. So, you should keep that hopper full and you should keep trying until you refine and kind of figure out what ticks, what does your audience care about, what's what makes sense for your business, etc. Um and we've made that mistake of letting the hopper run too low.

And that's why it's one of the first things we do when we invest in a brand is we we build out like, okay, what do we want to test? What do we want to push into? What's more incremental, what's less incremental. And I can actually just walk through what we think through if that's helpful, like our framework. >> I I Yeah, yeah, I would I would love to hear that because I think brands really struggle to develop products and that's because, you know, I can tell you how to do meta ads, I can tell you how to do supply chain, I can or at least I know somebody who can tell you how to do all that stuff.

But you don't actually hear people talk about like how to go like you hear people say, "Go make your product better." But like, "Okay, well, how? What do you do? What should you look for, you know?" >> Yeah, give me the methodology. So, um when we're launching new SKUs, the first thing we think about is product channel fit. So, kind of like we were alluding to earlier, where will this product live? Why will it live >> is the margin structure specifically, like you're mentioning.

Like the margin structure and the unit economics per channel and think through where it can live. Like if I'm launching a $200 product, I probably can't sell that in convenience stores. It's not going to work. I want something that's like you know, $5.99, $9.99, $14.99, $19.99, etc. Um and I'm I was saying, we also want to make sure Can we address a business weakness at the same time? For us, that's awesome. The more of this I mean, you'll never have a SKU that covers all of these things in this framework, but >> Yeah. >> hopefully the more coverage you can get the better.

So, a good example is we had a women's apparel brand absolutely ripped uh in the winter. It was very, very heavy on women's shoes in the winter that were just like appropriate styles for that. And then in the summer, we had an awful time. It's like total cash crunch, etc. And then we launched like what I would call kind of conservative mom swimsuits where they were like >> Yeah. >> just more generous with coverage, but they didn't look old lady-ish, right?

They were just like, okay, you just had a kid, like you don't feel super confident. We can help with that. So, we launched that even though it wasn't really necessarily that related to core products that we sold, and it completely changed everything for us. Like summer became one of our stronger seasons, grew LTV, etc., fixed a lot of the core weaknesses in the business, and sometimes it's not something as obvious for whatever the business is that you're running, but there is something you could do to kind of fix structural weakness within the business.

It almost feels like a lot of the times if you take care of the core weaknesses in the business, and you make it easier to run, you'll just grow organically, and you'll produce more cash flow. >> Um >> Yeah. I think that's right. I uh fashion is a great category where this is sort of obviously the case, and I've had the same thing where there was a client of mine at one point who was like absolutely ripping in spring and maybe in fall, but then uh maybe it was a special spring out you know, I don't remember the exact timing.

Anyway, but yeah, you got to summer, and they just were like they were dead. They were just dead in the summer because they're they were just selling things that were uh that were too hot too hot to wear. >> Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? >> Like and so um uh yeah, so yeah, and uh but and I think this is true for for all kinds of brands, right? Like uh with massive seasonality, and you have to make a decision on the seasonal side for things like this, which is like, do you sort of lean into making your biggest seasons bigger or do you try to go solve the problem of your low seasons?

And the mistake brands make a lot is they they try to solve their lower seasonality with this comes back to the theme of this episode, but they they try to solve their lower seasonality with like marketing efforts and not with product. And that is like that is like a gigantic waste of your time and effort actually. What would you be you'd be much better off saying just like we're just going to accept that we're not going to make much money right now until we have different product assortments.

And what we're going to do is take all >> I think like I think too many people push on marketing for constant growth, but it's actually okay if okay we've reached the local maximum of what we can do with our existing product portfolio and now we can't say to marketing you need to push past it because it's not possible. Like you you need to launch you need new products that expand TAM and make it more and just grow the local maxima past what you can do effectively at the CAC that you want with the margins that you want. >> I yeah yeah I think that's right. >> And then that kind of goes into TAM, right?

A lot of times someone will come to us and say oh yeah, I have this idea TAM's a couple billion dollars like oh okay, cool. In which channels? It's like oh I actually turns out if you sell this product digitally like you know, over this over a website TAM for it shrinks by 95% and actually TAM's just tiny. It's just not going to work. So when you back it out, you say okay, now how many people are realistically in market at the right time and you go backwards and like oh okay.

TAM is actually only a couple million people. It's very very small and it's going to make it way harder for us to scale the business the way we want. Um so I think that's important to work backwards off of that. Um we already covered the IP part, but obviously great operating leverage. Um first to market is a really a moat. It can sort of be helpful. It could it could definitely be helpful to be first to market, but you will see your margins erode.

I'm sure you I mean you've seen this for sure over and over and over happens so often in e-commerce where someone's the first guy to do something online. Everyone rips off of them and their margins just drop, right? Um >> Yeah. >> And the the business literally becomes 10x harder to run effectively. >> Yeah, I have one client I can't mention who um has been really terrified of this for forever and therefore and that's why I can't mention him.

He's just like, "I want no publicity on this brand. I don't want anybody to know that it's that's gone well." It's actually yeah. Anyway, it's a friend of mine who who's who's brand is that way and I'm like, "Dude, I think that's pretty smart." because he doesn't have VIP to like to to really defend it. Um he has some other advantages, but yeah. Um Yeah, I I I like that a lot. So, you go through all of that process. Is there anything else on there? >> Oh, yeah, there's more.

Okay. Higher margin is more idiot-proof, which is good. Um and I'm not saying lower margins are necessarily a bad business. Like you you can build a really good business with structurally lower margins, but you have to be aware you're playing a different game. It requires way more rigor, especially in like operations and how tightly you run things, but I just like more margins cuz it makes things easier for me cuz I'm a stupid person.

Um And then we think through, will customers buy this as a standalone hero SKU? Will it cannibalize existing demand for anything? Is it more Is it like net new versus very small incremental tweak on the main product, like a V2, right? Is it a V2 or is it net new? Um We think through you know, how are we going to market it? We're We kind of talked about the channel market fit, but also just more broadly like the CEP stuff, the category entry points that Zach stock went over.

We have very similar dynamic that we think through as well. Um And then working capital dynamics, right? Like how much do I have to spend to validate my thesis? What is like a truly fair shot to where I feel good about saying, "Okay, I honestly gave this product a try and I can say confidently that it was the product and not our marketing that failed the product." Um And there's a lot of complexity behind that, right?

Especially now. I've seen all sorts of different setups work really well on meta. I'm not sure if you have two for for new products where sometimes they did a new pixel for a separate product. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Um I have tons of friends who launched um We have a mutual friend who launched a product alongside his hero that initially didn't work, set it up with a new pixel, and it just magically started printing money.

So, you need to feel good about having the budget carved out where you can rule out that it wasn't a marketing thing and it was more of a PMF issue. >> Yep. >> Um And lastly, obviously, timing. Like, you want to make sure when you're launching a product it makes sense. Don't launch Christmas product in July, right? >> Yep. >> Although, this is really funny. Home Shopping Network, they have a really big promotion called Christmas in July.

Uh sorry. Just totally ancillary to the answer here, but >> No, they they um uh yeah, the Did you just take that list that you just that you just mentioned and uh like just do a number of checkboxes and say like if it checks six of the boxes or whatever, it works? >> Yeah, exactly. We just need to make sure it makes sense to measure it with the investment that we're putting in, right? Like, if this is something that's going to take a ton of the team's time, I want it to be able to live in different channels, and I want For us, channel diversity is really, really important, cuz I I think it's easy for people to say, "Yeah, just keep doubling down on Meta." Which is true, it's cool when it works, but sometimes it does not work, and then you're in a really, really bad spot, like horrible spot.

Um and it's pretty easy to avoid that if you just put a little bit more thought into channel expansion and product and what works for you. Um I mean, we have our succulent business that we've owned since 2018. It used to be predominantly Amazon, became more crowded, we pushed into retail really hard, now the business is 90-95% retail, um like wholesale. Uh the other thing I wanted to go over is I We touched on this earlier, but Kitsch has done a really good job.

I think if you're looking for an excellent case study to go and research and learn from, they're the best in the business. Like, they started off with the hair uh they started off with the hair ties, and then as they've expanded, you can literally, when you're going through the website and you're and versus what they have in retail in store, like say Target or something, you can see how the assortment changes, you can see how they built out certain products to live in certain channels.

Um they're like a really good job of executing the kind of product channel playbook perfectly. >> Do you have really specific examples of that? Like any particular products? >> I mean I think the hair ties and scrunchies are honestly a great example, right? You see the merchandise much more aggressively retail. They've kind of pulled off of that on the D2C side as much. Like it is like their core thing they were known for, but you see them pushing some of their higher AOV products more on there.

Like it is hard to sell a cheap product D2C at the masses. It's just top of the funnel >> Yeah. Yeah. >> They've done a really good job. I just encourage anyone to spend a ton of time on their website and then go to a store like Target where you can see the product in person and just AB the the assortments and you'll kind of something will click in your brain and you'll be like, "Oh, wow." >> Yeah, they're different channels and they require different different setups.

Yeah. So to come back to your product development like checklist a little bit. Um I'm I'm curious to have you say something more about the thing you actually started with there, right? So you go through that whole checklist and you say You say um Okay, it checks all these boxes or whatever. Do you think even if you check all those boxes, let's say you let's say it's 10 boxes. I don't I don't know how many how many you listed, but let's say it's 10.

You check six of them, you launch the product. Do you think even if you check six boxes it's still most likely the product's going to fail? Cuz you said earlier that most product launches will fail. So is that most product launches fail because people don't plan them well or because even if you check all those boxes, it's just really hard? I just think it's really hard. And you never >> know what will work. It's kind of like I feel it's a lot like ad creative, right?

Where you're always shocked by what the If you go if you I showed you an ad account and asked you to like flag the top spenders, I would look at any data just just the creative itself. No. >> I wouldn't be able to get it. No. >> Yeah, exactly. So to me it's kind of the same thing where like I just want to get more in the hopper and I want to make sure the cost of each shot makes sense to the relative win that we can have in the business, right?

If this is something that can be sold across four channels really well, amazing PMF, um really good margin profile, unit economics are beautiful, etc. I'm okay at spending more money, and I'm okay if it takes a longer amount of time. But, what I don't want to do is have something that's like very small, barely incremental, and I'm spending a ton of time and money on it. Um >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um yeah, I I've actually started to come to this conclusion that the thing the sort of little thing I see everywhere is uh is just venture principles.

I I'm starting to see venture principle, venture math, basically everywhere in e-commerce. And uh that is like that is that is basically what you're describing for product, right? Which is like if most products don't don't work, but a big product win dramatically increases the value output of your business, then if you were thinking about this in bets, right, then you want to place as many bets as possible on product, uh even when most of them lose.

And I I I think that idea, for the people who really internalize that, is incredibly powerful, because they they have an amazing ability to um to keep pushing forward even when it feels like you're constantly losing. Uh because what they recognize is that eventually you'll win, and that win will will not only cover all those bets, but it will create outsized returns across the total portfolio, so that if you measure the whole series of bets, right, you win.

Um and that I just think that's everywhere. I think that's all over the place. That uh that like that that's true with creative, it's true with creative production, I think. Um I think like uh like like increasingly, this is a theory of mine that brands ought to be investing in lots of different kinds of creative production, and should just be spending lots and lots of money generating content. >> That's what we do, too.

It's like we're we just try to get a large variety at the lowest cost possible, basically. >> Yeah, and if you if you do that, like it it really works. And and it will work for all kinds of reasons. It's not to say you shouldn't care about quality, you should. You should care about your brand's message. You should care about all those things a lot in the process, but you should also just be comfortable with the fact that a lot of it is not going to work and what success looks like is different than that.

And um and if you if you find the venture principle, then you then the the rational thing to do is to invest across the entire thing, you know. >> Um and you know, for color like your business might end up looking quite different, right? Um >> Right. >> Ridge is another good example of this where now they have a ton of other categories that you wouldn't think like rings is really weird, right? Like the the guys that saw wallets went into rings, they crushed it, they're doing really well.

Um they just launched chains like men's chains >> Yeah. >> Uh I don't I I don't know how that one's doing. It's interesting though. And then luggage, too. Very interesting. I think that's a little bit more on point, but I mean, they just tried a bunch of stuff. Some of it stuck, some didn't. I think Shawn Kahlil was it knives or something? >> Yeah. >> Didn't really work. >> Yeah. >> And watches, maybe I think he was saying. >> Yeah. >> Um but everything else just, you know, ripping and it's cool to see.

But look, they're they're like the best in the business. You're not going to have a higher success rate than them. And their success >> Yeah. >> is not good, right? I mean, no one's success rate is good. It's like when you look at it that way, it's not going to be good. So, don't be discouraged if you fail eight out of 10 times. It's still That's a great outcome. Like eight out of 10 times, I'd take all day. And we have one brand that probably missed uh >> I'm just thinking. >> Probably missed like 20 22 times before they found something uh that kind of paid for the other bets.

So, don't >> Yep. >> don't worry about it. >> If you are building an e-commerce business and you are trying to be profit-minded, you care a lot about how much each click on your website drives value in your business. You should be using Intellimize. Intellimize is just one of those tools that my best clients are using all the time to test the outcomes of their split tests on their website. It's CRO beyond the basics.

Of course, they can do all the normal CRO stuff, simple split testing things, but they go way beyond that to be a really full and complete tool for revenue and profit optimization for your entire entire uh website experience and landing page experience and all those things. So, they can test price, they can test free shipping threshold, they can test how much you're charging for shipping, they can test offers, all kinds of different things that really move the needle in how your brand generates profit from visitors on your website.

They measure all of those outcomes, not just at the level of conversion rate or revenue per visitor, but at profit per visit because they tie into your COGS data on your website, and therefore they know how much not just revenue you're driving, but profit you're driving because they can they can see what your COGS are. On top of that, they're building in all kinds of other really cool features right now like in checkout upsell, post-purchase upsell, so you could theoretically actually get rid of your post-purchase upsell app and just have that be done with it by Intellifems on top of all the other stuff you're doing with them, all with that same goal, right?

Finding ways to test and [music] optimize to generate the most profit per visit. Just a really awesome piece of software. You can get 20% off your first 3 months. 20% off your first 3 months with the code Ferris 20, f a r i s 20. You should be testing your website. You should be finding out if it's working based on the actual value it's driving in the business, the level of profit. Go to Intellifems.io. Use that code Ferris 20 to go do it today. >> But that means that financially in the structure of your business, what it means is that you you should sort of think about how to allocate capital towards towards the areas of the business where where uh where that dynamic is in play, right?

Which means like which means like I you know, I love the low OPEX as a percentage of revenue approach to D2C. I think it's a really important part of it, but I also think you ought to allocate OPEX towards product development, you know, like part of the reason to have a disciplined OPEX across a lot of your business is precisely so that you have the margin space and the budget to go and reallocate that money towards something like product development or like I said, like creative production or something like that where there are these kind of outsized potential returns, and that's where the money should be going in the business, you know. >> That's how I feel as well. >> Yeah.

And if you do that, then then you're sort of organizing your P&L around uh around around those venture bets. Um and yeah, could be could be a really big deal. Um, what about uh what about product improvements and margin improvement? Once you have winning products, how do you think about that? And it's like I was like I feel like there's there's value here that people often don't think about as well. >> Yeah. Um, let's go through a few of the things that you can do.

The big one is value engineering. Um, that's a phrase people have probably heard before. Sometimes it doesn't have a good reputation, but it works and it works really really well. So, I'll just kind of walk through a few examples and we can take things from there. So, the first thing when you're developing product is obviously to focus about the focus on things and spend money on things that the customer cares about and don't spend money on anything else, right?

If you have a customer who I don't know, doesn't care. Like let's walk through the example of premium handbags or a lot of expensive women's clothing. >> Sure. >> quality is actually garbage. It's not very good. Um, it's almost it's all this always machine stitched. Um, versus if you go and look at high quality men's clothing, for example, a lot of that is hand stitched, right? Like if I buy if I spend $2,000 on a garment for men, that will probably probably three grand.

It'll be like hand stitched, but the female equivalent will not be. And that's just because those audiences typically care about different things. It's not like either one's better than the other, but what I probably don't want to do is run a a high-end women's brand where I'm focused on quality like that because it just doesn't matter. The audience probably would not care. Um, and and vice versa. So, that's a good example.

Um, you really want to run pre-purchase and post-purchase surveys to figure out what people are feel like they're paying for and what gets them to spend money, right? Like >> How would you question What questions would you ask in those? Yeah. >> Yeah, I'd ask them like what features were most important to you about the product and what did you care least about? Uh, you just be pretty transparent like that. We've gotten really good insights where we found out, oh, okay, maybe they didn't care about this thing that we thought mattered.

Um, a good example is we had we did something with our packaging one time at one brand and I'm just going to add here says a dollar 25 per unit in shipping savings. It was 200,000 units a year and then 375k straight to the bottom line. Just off of like one little tweak on one product. Another good example company was shipping it was like a craft kit you could get. One of the things that came with it was a glue stick.

Turns out nobody actually cared about the glue stick or wanted it or even noticed that it was there. So we stopped doing that. So we saved a little bit in our team's time like getting and putting these things together and then obviously the straight up cogs too and it makes the business much simpler, right? So there's stuff like that and then we can go through I think a great example is guitars. So with guitars if you ever see like a black fretboard like a dark fretboard usually it used to be traditionally more made out of ebony which is more expensive.

It's like a fairly expensive wood and it was replaced with rosewood. So now you see like this chocolaty brown more commonly that's much cheaper than Indian rosewood is fairly cheap. But what brands started doing is they realized oh people don't actually care that it's ebony wood and they don't care about the feel of ebony versus like the feel of ebony on your fingers versus the feel of rosewood. They just care about the dark colors.

They just started dying rosewood dark and no one cared and their cogs were dramatically lower, right? Another good example you know we went over the women's clothing with like stitch quality, fabric quality etc. But another good example is with watches like Patek Philippe, AP, Rolex etc. They don't hand finish their watches. Those were all very industrially made watches and people don't even realize that. But they also don't care.

Like they're buying those things as um they're buying those more as like they're buying them for the brand they're buying them more for the statement than they are necessarily the craftsmanship. Those brands realized that in like kind of the early 90s and they they've cut a lot of that out. Looks a lot of the extensive hand finishing is gone. It's not hard. These are industrially made watches right now. These brands are doing billions and billions of revenue.

Um So it's very interesting to see kind of how brands discover this, how it changes their ability to produce more volume and how it kind of makes them better. Um and not necessarily like from a pure quality standpoint that you you might think of. >> It's really interesting to think about. I'm trying to think about that from some of my clients just sort of ask the question like what in this do the where is the cost that I that the customer does not actually care about? >> And we can think about this as a four-step process, right?

So, step one, mapping out what the customers actually value. Surveys, calls, post-purchase questions. Most of us assume things and we're wrong. So, I I would just run through those. See where you land. What data can you collect? Then break down the BOM. Look at the bill of materials, packaging, shipping line by line. Just looking at everything as broken out as possible. Like, okay, why do we use cardboard here? Why do we use metal here?

Why do we use plastic here? Etc. in whatever the product is. And then redesign for perceived value, not the features that you love or you care about. You're like, "Oh, this feels so sturdy." And it's like, all right, maybe no one cares. >> Yeah. >> And then split test the change. It's very easy to do, right? Like, you you can ship out version A versus version B to customers for a long time and just see, "Hey, did it affect repurchase rate?" I mean, it's as perfect a split test as you get, so. >> Do you know what I'm going to do with this episode, uh Metab?

I'm writing it down right now while you're talking. I'm going to uh I'm going to export the transcript and I'm going to document the two things that you've done so far that are like clear lists like this. One of them is is the list of product features to look out for in the product development pathway, as well as the sort of framework of the ventral principle in product development, and put the package that all together.

I'm going to hand it to my clients, and then I'm going to hand them this interview. And then I'm going to do the same thing uh with um with the value engineering breakdown you just did, including that four-step process. Um because I and I think this is what one of the dangers actually something I would think about a lot. It's a bit of a tangent, but I think it matters. Um one of the things that happens right now is like, there's so much content about how to be better that it's actually easy to lose sight of how valuable something like this is.

But if you are listening to this and you are running an e-commerce brand, Mehtab and his team are doing this kind of stuff across a whole bunch of businesses. They developed these processes to give to their businesses to make them better. That is the whole point of them because they've watched it happen and they're trying to say like how do you operationalize the knowledge that we have here? And so the the mistake is to go like, "Oh, that was a really cool podcast episode.

I I learned learned a lot about product from that." You know, and then just kind of walk away and never implement any of it. Like the real value is finding ways to take that knowledge and like and actually put it somewhere in a way that can be replicated and usable and to just care about that so much. And this includes, by the way, if you're an agency person, like if if if what we started out by saying was right, that that uh that tailwinds on at the product level for a client makes your services better, then you have a really strong incentive as a service provider to to walk your customers through this kind of stuff and say, you know, "Hey, how are we actually developing serious product development uh like operations?

Are we actually developing um you know, are we actually value engineer our products in any kind of a way?" And if so, you can you could be a huge help, you know, at the operational level to your clients. And it's sort of beyond the scope in a lot of ways, but I you know, all I can think about is like this is what this is what people need help with. There it's it's hard to remember all the things to do at once and there's too much to do, etc.

So, yeah, so go grab the transcript if you're on YouTube or whatever or find something on iTunes and it'll do it for you. Pull the whole thing, operationalize it and go make it happen. And then after that, uh leave a comment here or email me at podcast@ajafgrowth.com and tell me that you did it so that I can know that this wasn't me just talking into the wind. And then at the same time, go reach out to Mehtab, uh go to cartofventures.com and get him to actually help you with this in in your uh in your business uh and he'll actually help implement uh either money or teams to help do this for you or some combination of the two.

It's probably a good point to mention this, Mahtab. Uh we don't have to wrap up quite yet, but tell people about Kart Ventures and sort of you know, if they're hearing this and they want your help, what kind of help do you give and and what should they be looking for? >> Yeah, I think at the end of the day what we're looking for is opportunities. We want to find businesses where we feel there's a lot of low-hanging fruit where we can drive value just past the dollar, right?

Um so sure, like yeah, we can write a check for like uh $2 million or something and then come in as a minority equity partner, but where can we help improve the business? And sometimes it's not really the case. Like we don't like food and bev cuz I don't know food and bev well at all. I'd probably make the business worse. I don't think we're great with subs. We've done some subs before, but I don't think we drive a ton of value.

So I just don't like it. Like I don't feel I drive much value beyond the check. Uh in some ways we do, but in other ways like I prefer different categories. So if you're doing something uh you know, apparel's very easy for us to add value in, jewelry, etc. All these are awesome for us. Anything that's a little bit off the beaten path is awesome for us, too. But what we really want is something where there's low-hanging fruit that we can kind of help come in, pick up, expand margins, help you get to a much better position with the brand and grow your distributable Our end goal is to grow your distributable net income as a percentage of revenues.

Like we're not that EBITDA focused. We're more focused on if you had to. I'm not saying you have to. You can keep reinvesting the cash flows, it's fine. But if you had to, what's the highest percentage you could pull out of the business on a yearly basis to pay yourself or reinvest in the business without impacting it too much or impairing it anyway. Uh and that's what we're laser-focused on. So we can do that across either we make equity investments, credit investments, some sort of mix of both, etc. >> Mhm.

Um k a r t a ventures.com. The link for that's in the show notes. You should follow up with Mahtab, take a call. That's it's just one of the smartest guys in e-commerce, despite all the self-deprecating comments about how he's dumb. Uh it's not true. Mahtab's a brilliant guy. >> uh last time you saw me looking at my phone, I was holding it upside down, and you're like, uh Don't [laughter] worry, I'm actually illiterate, so. >> Uh >> Um I mean >> Card carrying Card carrying member of the Illiterati. >> I don't know.

I don't know if anybody makes more jokes about themselves than you like this, but this is not true. You are just one of the smartest >> when I was a kid you shouldn't make jokes about other people. It's mean. So, I was like, you know what? I'll make jokes about myself, and no one will get mad, so. >> Well, you are the the thing about you that is great with the self-deprecating thing is that you are down-to-earth and an easy hang, so I appreciate that at least. >> Well, I I can say I got to eat fish tacos at your house, very good. >> Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Play with my kids. All that stuff. Do you want to go over pricing really quick? >> I do. >> I want to I I I don't want to I don't want to wrap up quite yet. We do have one more thing to talk about here, which is which is >> it. >> this element of this. And I I always say like the simplest elements of a of an offer are product and a price, just those two things together. Uh we've talked a lot about the product.

Let's talk about the price a little bit. So, um I'm a big big believer in pricing as both one of the things that is most irrationally chosen in e-commerce. Like people just sort of pick a number out of thin air, and they don't really have any think about it, but actually has an incredible impact on the way people interact with your business, and the margin profile of your business, obviously, etc. You can just claw and scrape to get five points of margin back with your uh with your manufacturer when maybe you could have just raised the price 10 bucks and and and done it that way, you know?

Um so, uh talk about talk about pricing a little bit. How do you How do you think about um pricing as as you think about product development, development engineering, and all that kind of stuff when you actually put it in front of the customer? How do you think about pricing? >> There's actually a really good book I want to mention, too, and I don't want to forget. Uh Okay, you know what? I'll have to send it over to you later, and you'll have to insert it.

But, it's very good, and it's it's talks about a lot of this stuff is pulled from it. >> The link will be in the show notes for that. >> Cool. Cool. Um but yeah, let's just go over pricing. Like you said, very undervalued lever. I think I've personally been surprised by what happens to post-purchase behavior based on the pricing lever. Like a lot of the times we've had something where in our front-end conversions didn't change much, but their likelihood of repurchasing did, and it completely changed the math.

Have you seen that play out before? >> Uh maybe. Keep talking. Tell me more about what you're Tell me more about what you're what you're saying. >> So, we had one business, for example, where we increased prices, and it looked like we were just more profitable, and oh well, cool, that worked out great. But, it turned out that it impacted repurchase rates quite a bit. Um they were actually 30 40% lower, and we saw our returning customer revenue drop, and we couldn't figure out why.

Then we noticed it specifically from this one category, cuz this was a large multi-category business where um like it was fairly distributed. Like we sold a lot of different SKUs across different categories every day. We noticed people who were entering in the category where we didn't increase prices, the repurchase rate went way down. Um so, it's very interesting to me what you can do. Like obviously that lever goes both ways, right?

Like could I Could I have dropped the price, increased my repurchase rate, and just built a better business, or or produced more contribution dollars over time? Possibly, and that's kind of how it worked out. Um so, I just want to call that out before I give the other advice. Um but just thinking through things like Okay, you can do straight-up price increases, but you can also do Some businesses take fees and price pack architecture better.

So, things like increasing or reducing quantity that you force people to buy. I think the best example ever is True Classic Tees. Uh you go to their website, you will feel morally obligated to buy 10 t-shirts. Like you It's like you can't check out without buying 10 t-shirts. And you just end up doing it. There's no way to avoid it. Um it's great. It's brilliant. And because of that, they can outbid everyone else trying to sell t-shirts online, even though they're sold at a relatively low um at a relatively low cost.

They're just They're playing a quantity game. They do a really amazing job of that. Um you can go the other way, too, right? Like you can unbundle freebies into upsells. One of our companies did this. They basically raised prices by 20% without any sort of drag. So, we just took out a lot of things we were doing for free and we started charging for them or putting them in as fees, and it worked really well. Um I've the fee thing versus straight price increase has varied a lot for us brand by brand.

Like, we have some brands where fees work beautifully, other times they backfire on us. So, I'd say just experiment, see what works for you, where the most yield is. And I think um you guys you guys have partnered with Intellijence, right? >> Absolutely. >> I think they're the easiest easiest way to do it nowadays in Shopify. They have a good team. Uh Drew and his co-founder are great. >> They're Yep. >> They're very easy to get a hold of. >> Yep. >> Um I I've had good experiences.

So, I just go download that, run a bunch of tests, see where you end up. And this is something that can totally transform your business, right? You might be able to get away with charging more um or you might find charging less drives way more volume. I know Simple Modern had something like that that Mike's talked about publicly before, where I think they lowered prices slightly and volume went up dramatically. Um >> Yeah. >> I'm sure you've seen some categories where the where the the customer is extremely price sensitive, and some of them where I was looking at a brand the other day where we're we're testing this, we'll see if this is works yet, but it we were like, "We think for this jewelry the difference between $60 actually doesn't matter to the customer." Like, they perceive it the exact same way.

Now, we might be wrong about that. We're not totally sure yet, but it's the it's a really good bet to take, right? Cuz if we actually have more range, then it's like, "Man, you can just shove all that money right back into CAC at more scale and and have a much bigger business, you know?" So, so who knows? >> I would really um the way I would approach this, too, is I would start with tests that are very big. Like, >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Yeah.

And then kind of narrow the band over time. Uh for example, we we basically tripled the free shipping cut off at one of our brands, and everyone's like, "Oh, now your ads are all wrong and stuff." Like, "Yeah, whatever, who cares?" So, we just do that. We're very um we're we'll just kind of do stuff, and then we'll worry about it. If it backfires, we'll revert it. I mean, it's very easy. >> Yeah. >> So, we'll just go ahead and change stuff, and we'll do very, very big changes in a business to try and drive improvement.

And then we'll from there we'll get more accurate over time. Then we'll start to properly AB it. Like, I will not AB a really, really big test. I'll just run it and just see what happens. And if I notice, oh, that didn't work out at all, then I'll go back to the drawing board. Maybe we'll try something more precise. We'll AB it something with IntelliJems, etc. But I would really recommend starting off extremely broad.

Like, if you haven't tested prices and you notice your competitors are much more highly priced, you might actually be hurting yourself. >> "Scott, double prices. See what happens." I I think people This is actually the thing that stops people from price testing is they're just nervous. They're like, "Oh, my customers are going to revolt, or it's going to like break my business." It's like, you can always change it back. >> And nobody cares about your business. >> Nobody cares.

Nobody cares about your business. >> have anything in this room that I can remember what I paid for. I mean, I don't Like, I mean, if I asked you like, "How much was the jersey in the back, or like the whiteboard?" You'd have no idea. >> The jersey in the back was is is priceless and limitless. That's my uncle's jersey from being DJ on Hawaii and playing a pickup basketball game of radio DJs, where he was Mr. Natural.

So, I think that was his street name. >> That's cool. >> That was his That was his call name on on the radio. Mr. Natural. Natural. Um but but so yeah, so that price No, that's not a great example. Um the um uh What was I going to say? Uh yes, IntelliJems is a sponsor actually of this episode. They actually just created a really cool tool that is probably worth mentioning here. If you go to IntelliJems.io >> IntelliJems' focus on actual contribution dollars and profit versus >> Big time.

Oh, yeah, revenue is bigger. >> That That used to drive me nuts. Like, I'm glad that they I feel like sometimes the core software that everyone uses changes slightly, and then it changes the way people talk about that thing. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And they've done a good job of that. Like, they're the cultural owner of AB testing in e-comm. >> I agree. Yeah, IntelliJems.io/audit, they have this really cool thing right now where it's like they'll sort of it's like a discover the headline of the page is discover what's worth testing next.

And and was you sort of say to them like, you know, here's my URL, here's the things I'm thinking about testing, use AI to give me some suggestions for things to do. So, it's a it's a fun little tool to go play with and is worth doing. Links for that's also in the show notes. Um and you probably heard it in the ad read as well. Uh Mayur, we could go on. We are out of time. Uh you I I hope you know you have the open invite.

Uh we should just schedule a recurring tri-monthly meeting or bi-monthly or whatever for you to come back anytime. Um Mayur, by the way, just for the people put in a lot of work to prepare and uh and write down thoughts and think about how to deliver value on these podcasts he always does, which means he always does. >> I ripped them I ripped them out of my book that I'll never finish. It's been 95% done for like a year and a half, so. >> Well, then you did put in you did put in a lot of work.

You just put it in a while ago. But, it's very helpful that you come prepared with things to share and that you value people's time like that. I appreciate it so much. It's why you have the open invite. Also cuz you're just a good hang. Um so, uh like I said, Carted Ventures, k r t a ventures, links in the show notes. Go work with uh Mayur and his team. Uh his his business partner right now while he's doing this is uh getting sweaty unloading boxes in a new facility in Indiana, I'm told.

So, uh >> Indianapolis? >> Indianapolis, yeah. They're willing to they're willing to put in the hard work to to make it happen. >> will. He will go and show up and he will uh he will help on the op side. He's the one who does all the work and then I get to do fun things like this, so. >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's a good way to do it. Um that's kind of like me and Patrick. Patrick actually goes and builds all the tools and I just like talk about >> you talking about it.

I was just laughing. I think you were like, "Fables is out, but I Patrick's a layer now, so I don't know what to do." >> Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Why am I going to look into that? Patrick's Patrick's all right. He'll tell me in a week or so when he's when he's back from Italy. >> Um all right. Uh thanks. Thanks, Mayur. Appreciate it, man. >> Thank you. All right. I'll talk to you soon. >> Bye. >> [music] >> Thanks so much for watching or for listening to this.

Links for everything that we talked about are in the show notes. Big thanks to Intelligems and to Move Supply Chain for sponsoring this episode. The links for both of them are also in the show notes. If you to work with me and my team, you can go to ajfgrowth.com, fill out the intake form, tell me a little bit about your business, and see if we are the right fit to help you grow your business with financially driven, profit driven approaches to your meta ads account, high volume creative output, all of the good stuff that you need to grow your business while really being focused on not wasting money with stupid media buying things.

So, ajfgrowth.com is the place to go do that, and you can also email me if it's easier for you podcast@ajfgrowth.com. I'm happy to talk to you there as well. Uh I've got a bunch of of great episodes coming up, so don't forget to subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Uh Brad Geddes is going to come on and talk about landing page testing, get into the details of that. So, yeah. Don't forget to do those things.

Thanks so much. I'll see you next time.