How Chris Kresser Used AI To Scale Past $10M In 2 Years transcript

I've got one of my very longest tenured clients we started working together in the low very low seven figures we are now over eight figures still growing still seeing spend increases it's been an incredible journey with a great brand called adapt Naturals with Chris creser Chris is on the show today to talk about why the business model that he has works why his product has been great and the tactics we use to support those things including something I think people will like a lot which is how we leverage AI to generate a huge volume of output of ads and other things without it being spammy nonsense like I think Chris has really the first person I ever worked with who integrated AI very carefully into his workflow and ways that really generated a huge impact on the business basically every part of the business including at the level of creative including at the level of meta ads without it turning into just like spam it's really really something and so if you've heard me talk about the way production costs are changing and those sorts of things you're going to like this conversation a lot really we've seen a ton of success in this business it's been really fun Chris is a great guy selling a great product and and so we're going to break it down here technically speaking this is a sponsored episode from my friends at fmat and if you've heard me talk about format before you might have heard me reference a client who had a 50% spend increase when they switched over to Vermont this is that client so we're going to actually break that down we actually only talk about Vermont for like a few minutes later in the call so it's not all about that it's really about the total business and things that we've seen work I can tell you for sure that Chris is not lying about what's working in this business because I have access to every number that he has talked to and I think it's there's a lot to learn from it so I'm really grateful to Chris for sharing very honestly about his business about what's going on and transparently I think you're gonna like this episode a whole bunch strap in let's do it it's the first time at least in a very long time that I've had one of my actual clients on the show Chris creser we have been working together for a while now we're like a year and a half into this thing how you doing man well has it been that long sometimes it feels like just the other day and sometimes it feels like 10 years but it's good to be here I'm honored to be the the first client on the show yeah yeah it's um yeah I think we started September 2023 um and yeah I need to I need to pull up like what the growth has been like since then um but uh it has gone well it's been it's been a great experience I think yeah I'm just pulling it up we started at um you know I'm looking now we won't go into all all the numbers but we started at 30 grand a month in spend uh and it's higher than that now yeah yeah I think the re Revenue tripled last year so a great year it was fun ride for sure yes and um spend has grown massively since then um and and not certainly not overnight this has been one of the those stories I think to contextualize this for people listening a little bit um where it's been some of the most like steady and consistent growth over time as opposed to like we launch an ad and everything changes I mean in the early days you know we got we got to n we got to S6 figure spend pretty fast but then um but then after that it's kind of more like pile one thing up after another and so what I want to actually do do um you know when we started you had in your first year you had done a little over seven figures like kind of on Pace to do that when we started uh now we've passed eight and we're growing like you said tripled last year like lots of good signs so what I want to do is just kind of talk through why your business is working um why it's going so good and what people can learn from it um we've worked together for a while I think it's been a place that a lot of the things I believe have have uh been reinforced frankly and then a couple little um things have been tweaked along the way too but maybe Chris you can just tell people um about you a little bit and your journey to starting adap Naturals and then tell them about adapt Naturals and what it is sure yeah I started out as a functional medicine clinician just treating patients oneon-one in the clinic and um I had started an online platform before I did that so I was fortunate to you know build a a full practice very quickly right out of school and quickly became apparent to me that like there's I was going to bump up against hard limit of how many people I could help and so a few years into my practice I launched the crer Institute to train uh other doctors and healthc care providers and functional medicine we ended up training it's still going actually but we've trained 650 doctors in 38 countries um then we launched a health coach training program in 2018 and ended up training almost 3,000 coaches in over 50 countries before we um decided to wind that down and my my perspective has always been like how can I make a bigger impact like how can I help more people it's always been frustrating to me that you know with in functional medicine in particular which is not really accessible through the Health Care system and you know it's is expensive and and diff and just inaccessible for so many people like how can I translate the clinical experience I've had and the lessons I've learned over the years into something that can um affect more people you know that can that can really help more people over time and and so that was where the idea for adapt Naturals came I obviously as a clinician worked with supplements for many many years um I had my own chronic illness um in my mid 20s to almost to the mid-30s like a decade long really serious chronic illness and supplements were a big part of my healing Journey so I had a lot of experience with them um and I you know I wanted to be able to again trans that experience into products that people could really trust and that would make a diff make a real difference in their lives where they could feel the results immediately and um they would actually address the root causes of their health problems rather than just kind of putting Band-Aids on so we launched in uh Late July of 2022 um and had some great success early you know right from the start and then just has been um a really fun process of of growth since then and I think the the products are work really well as evidenced by the reviews and and we seem to be you know making a great connection with our customers and that's what makes me the happiest like just to read the reviews like that one I sent you the other day Andrew like somebody you know like serious health problem for two years and started on the supplement and within like three or four days that problem is gone I me that's incredible that's like really what gets me up in the morning yeah it's uh it's it is crazy somebody if you're watching this go to adapt naturals.com you want to get sense for this brand go read some of the reviews it is crazy what people are saying and I think it speaks to something that is true you know when you first reached out to me about working together um you know you I my response to you was like in so many words like are you sure you're not slinging total BS because it's like supplement industry yeah and your response was was totally non-defensive which I really appreciated you were you were just like yeah you probably should ask that like there's a lot of BS and supplements and and all that but you know that's a helpful bit of context too because um that's the kind of business we're talking about here and just like I think there are a lot of principles that work across a lot of different types of Brands the um the supplement component of it is important because of course like one of the key things for us has been to to focus aggressively on subscriptions um and to think about that along the way way um and and then generally speaking supplements I would say uh you know I don't think it's news to say it's a great business model if you can make it work um so I what I want to do is take this in two steps I want to start by thinking about the bigger business and the ways that we think about the bigger business and then I want to move into some tactics that I think have helped us execute on what is already a really you know good model basically so we can start with a larger business model and then do tactics and support of that this fits with a lot of what I have been thinking about recently um which is just that like you have to have both of those and it is very easy for people to say it's all about a great business model it's all about great core economics but then they don't really ever get anywhere because their tactics stink and um and then on the other hand there is this other way of looking at it which is like you know people are just sort of tactical everything that's all the advice all the time here's how to set up your ad account and all that um but if you have a bad business model those are really going to be um Limited in how far they can get you and and so I want to kind of do both in this conversation and think about that um so let's start with the the core business model um and I actually think that starts with the product and what we just talked about a little bit which is the reviews so um I mean you just underplayed a little bit of your reputation in the space some people probably know you who are watching or listening to this because they've probably followed your health stuff but like you're like a world-renowned health functional health expert and so came into this with really really deep knowledge and maybe the place to start here is like what makes adapt natural adapt natural's products different than other supplements in the space um I'm actually curious how you're going to frame this quickly even after we work together for a year and a half yeah well I think the I know I know how I've framed it to other people when I've talked about it but I'm curious how you will yeah so um I think the the underlying factor that makes it different is is my experience um because the reality is there's a there's a lot that you learn after 15 years of treating thousands of patients and training hundreds of healthcare providers and Tra training them in protocols that they then go out and use with their patients and then come back with feedback for me about what worked and didn't work you cannot acquire that knowledge in any other way um even with AI and all the crazy tools that we have available to us now that's just you know Real World experience that taught me what works and doesn't work where the pitfalls and red flags are you know what form of a nutrient is best to use in what situation uh what dose actually Works versus just you know fairy dusting and including a bunch of ingredients so that you can list them on the label um how you combine nutrients together uh to to create a a hole that's more than the sum of the parts um you know what supportive nutrients you can add to a formula to make it work better along with the primary nutrients um I think that is is where it starts and then and from there we use evidence-based ingredients so we're you know we're not just chasing the latest Trend we use ingredients that are backed by science you know published peer-reviewed research we use premium quality ingredients so we're um as you know Andrew meticulous about sourcing I will you know test and and analyze 12 14 different versions of a particular ingredient until I find the one that I like um we are pretty obsessive with R&D and product devel we go through several different iterations of a formula before we land on the one that is going to work and then you know I have an approach that we've come to call at least Loosely internally supplements 3.0 which is um you know supplements 1.0 was just like take this one nutrient you know see what happens supplements 2.0 was um you know uh taking more nutrients combining them together but supplements 3.0 is a really carefully curated approach which uses um one key nutrient and then two more or three more that extend uh and complement the benefits of the first so those are our most successful products have leveraged that um hypothesis and yeah I'd say when you put those none of those things on their own are unique there's lots of supplement brands that are doing one or the other but I think we've been able to combine them together in a strategy that really uh really works yeah maybe if supplements 1.0 is like your basic multivitamin that kind of thing supplement 2.0 might be like expanding into more interesting types of things like the the proliferation of organ supplements or colostrum right something like that right but but if you look at like this the adopt Naturals colostrum supplement right it's colostrum plus which is like colostrum but then there's also like a couple of other things in there that are key ingredients to sort of maximizing the value of it because there's really no reason you have to take only one ingredient and supplement right so um so it can be done at the formulation level in this way that's really fascinating to sort of maximize the value and then with this like meticulous approach to things like dosing and all that which you you've talked about um and this is probably a good place for us to just mention briefly our first for into one of the things I think that you're great at which is you were one of the first people to really push me and uh around us on the use of AI um I just wonder if you can talk about how you've used AI to stay up on stay up on um studies that are coming out because this is actually one of the things that really strikes me about you that really goes into the product which is like I mean you personally formulate the products first of all but then secondly you know every week There's a new something in slack about like some new piece of research that comes out or some meta analysis or something uh supporting an ingredient we use or a dosing we use or something like that um and I I don't I know you've done that manually for a long time because you were doing this before you were starting to use AI for it but like can you talk about a little bit about how you use AI to do that and we'll talk more about AI in a little bit but there's there's a couple of these cases where AI as like an increasing leverage tool I think like you just do instead of like a magic box which does everything for you like you have done this incredibly well and so this is one of the areas I I love to think about this yeah there's there are a few different ways I mean one is in the past if I wanted to go find a study on a particular subject I would go to PubMed or Google Scholar and you know type in search term and then start just clicking through and reading the abstract if that was interesting then I would get the full text and read that and um that takes a long time as you can imagine and now there are tools like consensus. a which is basically an AI powered search engine for clinical research that unlike other AI engine engines it doesn't hallucinate studies it's it's it's just pulling from published databases of studies and so now I can do a search in consensus Ai and it will it will return a a a carefully curated list of studies based on criteria that I've entered and then it will give me all the key highlights of that study um is it was it a human trial was it an animal trial was it you know uh an RCT was it an observational study with uh you know I can get just go so granular and then I can just so I I probably like speeds up that part of my workflow by 80% or or you know let's say Cuts 80 or 90% of the time so then I can use the time to actually read the studies um which I still do um and then another piece would be then I've read the studies and I want to I want to summarize them in a way that I can easily refer back to them or use that document as as as a as a foundation for something I'm going to write then I can use either Claud or um now deep research chat gbt deep research or another tool like that to create a really intelligent highlevel research brief and then that brief can become the basis for like an email that I write or a social media post or a Met meta ad video script or something like that so that's one of the big ways we've we've used AI um another way it's not so much me but my team has been in data extraction and Analysis so my Ecom director is phenomenal at that he you know we can for example just take all of the customer reviews and put export them in a CSV format upload those to any of the llms and ask it to analyze the reviews and come back with actionable insights about our customers which is just phenomenally valuable useful uh tool tool to have and we've we've leveraged that in different ways as you know Andrew like everything from creating uh customer avatars instead of hiring a market research firm and and doing that based on qualitative research and phone call interviews to to a few customers you can create them based on actual reviews we've had even our ugc uh videos transcribed so we can include them in that process so I think it creates a much more realistic um profile of your customers and we have actual you can even have actual quotes from those reviews U as part of the Avatar so it's you know those are two examples that stand out but we're finding new ways to use AI every day both of those represent to me um AI as a tool for getting a mass amount of information into a uh into something that you can actually sink your teeth into like and that's that I think is is some of the like it's sort of under talked about in in DDC Ecom everybody wants to make AI ads and look I've got other clients who are doing some of that in certain ways we certainly are leveraging AI on our ad creation process in meaningful ways in adapt but um but we're really using it especially to take a whole lot of complicated medical scientific information and turn it into something that's digestible um it in different kind of formats both internally and then customer facing ways and I think it's sort of one of the most compelling uses of AI that I can think of because it it is doing something that's extremely labor intensive for humans to do and there's really not a lot of like sort of value to doing it yourself you know like it's like it's it's actually just you miss things and it's clunky right in this case it actually allows you to get that faster um and I think that does show up go ahead another example of that is like I I'm you know I have a research background and I've I've tend to write in a way that is pretty technical you know yeah like any domain expert right you know you can sometimes it's hard to remember that oh yeah people like even the term like bioavailable like that it's not you you know sometimes I've had conversations with people and they're like what does that actually mean I'm like oh yeah I forget that's not just like a kitchen table term necessarily but there there are lots of other examples of even you know more unfamiliar terms sometimes I'll I'll upload something that I've already written to chat GPT and just say you know pretend you're like totally unfamiliar with health and wellness stuff like what what doesn't make sense or like how would you change this in a way to make it a little easier to understand and that's been super helpful too so yeah it's like it's really great for gaining Insight that's that's what it's a superpower for that in in ways that yeah if you spend enough time you could do it yourself but this is like a cheat code yeah that notion of pulling together like a bunch of reviews and then turning it into actually an avatar like Jess Bachman talked about this on my Show recently as well the notion that you would you would do that and and be able to talk to your customers basically like to these avatars it's just really cool um I the the other thing is I think this stuff shows up in the product and I think it's just really important to put this on like I'll say adapt has the best customer LTV of any brand I've ever looked at Bar None including by the standards of like supplement measurement so just like there's just no I've looked at other supplement Brands like a subscriber and a Dap is worth so much money to the brand um in revenue and because the retention rate is so high and now that's really important because it's very expensive to acquire supplement customers right like um it just is and that that's just the reality of basically every supplement brand no matter how good your advertising is it's just it's just a hard especially subscribers it's like those are the most valuable customers lots of people want them so there it's expensive to require them so they have to be worth a lot of money but it makes the game so much easier and allows us to be so much more aggressive because of that fact and the thing about that is that's that is a reality because of the product quality I think like that it's if it wasn't if people didn't like it so much if people if people weren't getting so much benefit from the product they would not come back so often you know um and and so that combined with of course the unit economics of supplements which are very good um you know make it a like incredible D Toc business and so like at that is sort of the core driver of it but crucially I think um we have also um you you are also the most religious of any client I've ever ever had about sticking to um like keeping an updated forecast uh both at the level of sort of pnl cohort forecast and then especially at the level of cash because um in this business it makes no sense to be profitable on first purchase we acquire at a loss we do that very much on purpose um but that creates cash challenges because now your money's going out the door um I'm just curious like to hear you this actually something I've never asked you to hear you talk about um you know I I the cohort forecast to the business and by the way if you're watching or listening to this you want the cohort forecast for yourself um you can get the foundation of it the template of it for free on my site so just go to AJF growth.com drop your email either in the footer or in the popup there um that'll opt you into my newsletter and it'll it'll all send you automatically um the the basically the exact document that I use to build goart forecast so um so if you hear this and want to use that um you should do that but um but you know I brought that and then you tied the cash forecast to it with some help from your friend of mine bill dandro um I'm just curious to hear you reflect on that like you have been so meticulous about that is that just kind of like who you are or like you know what happened yeah so um you know I have this is not my first business I I ran a a busy um functional medicine clinic for many years one of the biggest functional medicine clinic on the west coast and then I had crer Institute which is a big educational training institute both of those businesses had significant cash flow challenges because because they they had strong seasonality you know uh people for example don't tend to go to see functional medicine clinicians much in the summer they're just like traveling or hanging out with their family or whatever you know uh they still have health problems but they just you know they just don't go to the clinic as much in the summer and then they don't go as much in December uh for our training programs we did uh two enrollments a year so we had basically you know this is like feast or famine right we'd have you know big influx of cash when we launched the program you know when we did it launched a new cohort in the spring and then another in the fall and then but we you know and we would plan and and work um for the next cohort but we never we didn't know what our numbers were going to be until we actually launched the cohort we had projections um but it was always a question of whether we would meet those so I had to be very I learned to be very careful about cash flow forecasting and cash planning and I learned that the hard way as you often do um and so when we started this business I brought that into you know that that previous experience in and then as you said I realized pretty early on that we were not going to be acquiring customers profitably um and that then the the key therefore to Our Success was going to be managing cash in such a way that we were able to acquire customers at a loss without losing our shirt um and in order to do that you have to be meticulous about cash flow planning and forecasting and it has saved us so so many times many where we we were like look forward like three months in advance okay wow we're going to go into the red there because we've got two you know an estimated tax payment four different inventory posos coming due this payment coming due and so I'm going to go out to my comand and ask for exended terms I'm going to go get a line of credit I'm going to do what you know whatever it is that we need to do to address that and those are things you can't do right at the last minute you know we've all heard stories of of Ecom businesses going bankrupt because they couldn't pay pay their tax bill or or you know because they had too many POS outstanding or whatever so it's not only helped us to avoid um problems like that it's also helped us to make Intelligent Decisions about growth you know if we say we see oh look we're we're starting to accumulate cash here we're we're solidly profitable we're we're at or above our net margin Target we don't need to be accumulating more cash here so let's see if how we can deploy it um to grow more which is what the recent conversations that you and I have had you know how can we spend this wisely so it's it's an unbelievably valuable tool I couldn't imagine running a business without it it's just that important yeah especially as we've moved more and more towards like really building the business focus around acquiring subscribers and getting our best customers like that means you're even acquiring more at a loss right we used to not do that and and sort of took subscribers as part of it acquire customers at sort of like a very small loss to start but not a big deal but now we're like we're yeah we're it it hurts on first purchase right um when when we're try to I try not to look at it but but the reason I the reason I don't need to look at it and I still sleep well at night is this forecasting because and it's actually even even the thing that allowed that enabled me to get to the point where I said yes let's let's focus on acquiring customers and spend that much because I can see from the cash forecast that this works out very well in the end and I also know that if anything is going to change we will have advanced notice of it because of this forecast I'm not going to caught totally surprised yeah and um and I know another thing we did because in the beginning we did didn't acquire it a loss right in the beginning it was like no we really want to make sure we don't run out of cash so we got especially bootstrap business we we've slowly gotten more aggressive over time as cash has allowed um and I think that's been a good move I think I think actually more bootstrap Founders or more Founders ought to think that way about the stages of business because even if they don't have your LTV Dynamics LTV does build slowly over time like on day one of your Ecom business you have zero dollar in returning customer revenue and so whatever your CAC is that is that is the percentage of ads uh on your p&l on that day right like yeah now over time if you're if you're a self 100% self-funded brand like me that's very important if you're a venture funded brand that's just like burning money to grow as fast as you can that's a different story but even then I would argue that you you could make an argument for trying to be profitable at that early stage as just a healthier way to run the business yeah and and and what I think also it allowed us to do right was like it it also allowed us to um you know when I built that forecast initially the mentality around it that I saw you we didn't know how true it would hold you know you're building these forecasts these cohorts six months 12 months in advance or whatever and they're built off of very small initial cohorts right people who came because they listen to your podcast and they love you and so it's like well are these future customers G be the same as those and what about Facebook customers versus others and you got all these questions you know what about product a versus product B what about offer a versus offer B all of these things right and so in the early days we actually had to prove out the forecast was reliable we did make changes to it at different times right in terms of what the cor expectations were and then as we did that it allowed us to go okay now we're in a spot where like we are actually hitting our returning customer Revenue numbers over and over and over again these actually are pretty reliable now we feel pretty comfortable taking a risk going like we can be a little more aggressive here because we're very confident that at no point has our gos changed and I I think that that exercise in the first six months to a year of getting aggressive about ad spend in particular it doesn't matter as much if you're not spending much on ads but if you're spending on ads and you want to think about what kind of CAC you should exist at that period of time where you are sort of again like religious about it like you've been updating cash flow updating connecting the cash forecast directly to the coh forecast like it is just it is just um a really really helpful and important thing and then you can kind of make longer term decisions from there like you said to where now we're going like okay how do we deploy cash more effectively to keep growing the business you know yes yeah um okay so uh I that to me if I think about the big picture of why this business has been successful and this is it really has been like kind of at every step of the way you know not without challenges at times but been really successful along the way um you know that to me is the starting point of it as I was thinking about this conversation I was thinking like what what would I want somebody to hear from having like worked with you for a year and a half it's like incredible product good core business model which is supplements sold and subscription of course um and then um and then meticulous cash planning I think those three things have been really core at sort of The Big Picture level um I do want to talk a little bit about the tactics as well that have been part of that um and actually I mean there's a lot of things that I could think of here but I'm curious where your mind goes first just having work together for a while and some of that on sort of like key things as we've invested in meta ads that you have um I don't know I wonder if there's anything that you had expectations for coming in versus what we did I mean you had worked with other agencies ahead of time um and so I'm just I'm sort of curious sort of like what stands out to you about the way we do things tactically um and and maybe that you've come to see or believe or change Minds on or whatever it is yeah I mean I I have to say I'm still I don't have very much expertise on the media buying side I just um trust have trusted you and and Daniel with that and I you've done a phenomenal job and I understand what's going on but I I don't I'm not intelligent enough about that to really like analyze that piece of things but I would so I would just there are a few things I would say in general the first first of all is your attention and meticulous uh approach to cohort forecasting and um looking at the numbers like I I having worked with other um media buyers in in in the past that's has not been the case you know people had varying levels of attention to it but it was I was always a little felt like I was a little bit in the dark and not knowing what you know what what was going on and what I could expect in the future and given what I just said about how much attention we pay to cash flow planning and forecasting that's been really important part of things for me is just to know what your economics are know um you know know what the LTV is know what you can afford to spend know how long it's going to take you to get paid back know you know think think um carefully about I mean this has been part of our recent conversations and um I know this is a topic of conversation in Ecom in general it's like incrementality and and halo effect like oh we spend a lot on meta and then we see a big lift on Amazon but that's actually not factored into our Roi calculations you know so maybe we should do that maybe we should because maybe it will lead to us spending more money and and growing faster um in in a way that we wouldn't if we weren't considering that and so I think like really paying attention at that level of detail and getting super granular has been a big part of it um on the creative side I think it's it's been um I I guess I'm a little bit surprised you know because when I was coming into the meta world I always heard like you can nothing can be more than 30 seconds long if it's a video it's got to be like super you know attention grabbing and thumb stopping and and I'm like oh I I mean that's not me that's like not if I'm going to be in the videos it's really not my personality is anyone who's watching this or you may even listening this can probably tell I'm I'm I like to geek out on this stuff and I just I want to like talk about the products in a way that really educates people and helps them learn something even if they're not going to buy it and like I I just trust I you know I want I want I trust that people generally want that too like they want to understand what they're doing and so I think that's been one of the bigger surprises for me is that we've got ads that are four minutes with me talking you know in pretty considerable detail about the products and they're working like they you know we have also different ads static images and stuff like that but just a just a like really Relentless kind of creative iteration process that has been part of our success yeah and certainly you've tried I mean account has tried a lot of things right you've tried like sort of 30 second to a minute um sort of ugc style uh you know like I don't know young female like thing that you see exactly right yeah and and then we've tried plenty of Statics and plenty of things like that um we've tried at one point we went and tried like what happens if we really up the like um production value right and we P super you know and then at other times we've just like launch launch launch so we've really tried it all in this account and that's been interesting too right because there's certain definitely I had beliefs about what would work and what would not work in this account um but um one of the things I found in client relationships in general is that like I remember at some point you know Chris you were like what if we did add some point we installed and so it's like okay what do we need what what assumptions do we need to revisit and that happens right I this a probably important note like it has not been like every time we launch something new it's just like works great like we've had we've hit plateaus multiple times you know it's it's it's hard like you you're convincing people to spend good amount of money on something they're going to ingest into their body and they're going to try and fix real problems with so it's it's not an easy sell I think and and also like you have integrity so we don't overpromise too much um we we abide by the FDA rules about what we claim and stuff like that right so um so you sort of take some of those uh maybe black hat things out of the Playbook and it there's a challenge there um but as we've done that like you know one of the things that we definitely or one of the things I've learned is like you you had an instinct at some point to go like well what if we have the production value and it's like and my my thought was like probably won't work could be wrong maybe in this category where maybe you've got an we've got an older customer mostly like maybe we try that you know and so we tried it and it didn't work and it's like okay so now you kind of go back and revisit assumptions and eventually we land on this place of just like no all the core assumptions we've had for a while seem to kind of hold which is like manual bids creative iteration give people the information they need to make a purchase um worry a lot about that create a lot of variations and then and then we've just sought endlessly to do creative output and creative expansion right that's like been a um a crucial thing here so we've run a lot of stuff through you and specifically through your page actually um you know you you again have influence in the space so having your page has been a really big help whitelisting with you um but then also like again using AI to um generate scripts not like you know from the ground up necessarily right but to sort of um take all of this information that you have access to and to turn it into things like a little bit more quickly that and you can read you've also done lots of you know public speaking and recording you got a podcast for a long time those things so you're really comfortable with a microphone and Camera you just turn it on it's just amazing sometimes I'll just I'll like I'll wake up one day check slack and there's 20 new videos you sent or something like that you know because you just are you're just a machine with pumping that kind of stuff but it it really has been this sort of thing the kind of stuff that we talk about all the time or that I talk about all the time has just kind of slowly and steadily keeping after it for a very long time along with the product development and all the things that we talked about before which is like you're releasing new products that are um that are unique in the in the space supplements 3.0 you sort of combine those things together and we've just seen like consistent consistent consistent growth and so at the level of tactics like I just think it's one of those things that's it's helpful even for me as I'm like sort of preaching this stuff all the time to see examples where it's like man it works like you just it's it's not easy it's not easy like it's been a lot of video output it's been a lot of IM you know but it works you know you give it enough time and it keeps going yeah and I would say we've had recent a lot of recent success with ugc not the earlier kind that we were doing where you go out and you just pay a firm who then has a stable of creators who has not really any relationship with your brand or your products um and I think that shows and I think especially now as we go into the world of like AI avatars and all of this like humans are hardwired to trust and relate to other humans and we've got like this six cents of BS detector right you know it's and and so our ugc that's performing well now is is from our customers and our and our um you know we've got like because I train so many Healthcare Providers over the years we have lots of health coaches nutritionists um you know naturopath I doctors doctors clinicians in our audience and these are people who are taking the products they're they're getting great results themselves and then they will make a video and it's really authentic and you can really feel how authentic it is and that performs very well for us too um but again that goes back to the products being good in the first place and then just taking the time to cultivate those relationships which is still a manual process that requires human input I'll always remember a campaign that I worked on with an influencer it was for like an athletic uh like uh athletic goods company right so they they they they made things for high level athletes to use okay and um and I always remember a campaign we did with an athlete who they brought in Signed to be an athlete of theirs but the athlete had never used the product before and started using the product on the shoot day um and clearly didn't like it and like and it was just like I understand why the athlete took the deal like the athlete existed on endorsement deals basically like they didn't they weren't making tons and tons of money but even there just their space didn't wasn't super you know lucrative for getting salaries or whatever I understood why the brand did the deal but like along the way I remember sitting there and like having somebody say like you know feed feed the athlete lines to say like and it's just like this is all terrible and of course like none of the none of the none of the odds made a real dent in the business right that we ended up producing and and it's it's precisely because of that it's just like it just wasn't there just was no authenticity in it and that was like a really really big deal I think I think this is like undervalued a lot in these kinds of things it's part of what I really like like I know the kinship guys have talked a lot about their method of influence receding where it's like they just send the product as a gift no payment no ask for anything because what happens is you can actually form relationships out of that um that are much better and deeper when the when the person who actually posts about it or makes content um actually uses and likes the product it just it it just comes through you can feel it it makes a big difference and I it's a slower build for sure um and maybe at some kind of scale you go for a big enough name and it just doesn't matter anymore but like for most of us it's just like um it's just it's just I think a big deal to get that right especially in the earlier stages and you know I think for you it's like a perfect example where these people like you can just tell these people are clearly like oh my gosh I started taking this and it was I was already taking these other things from you because I already believed in you I've been following your stuff for a long time I've been talking about it for a long time I love it here's how it changed you know my body or my behaviors or whatever and um it just really really comes through I think I think it's just really underrated if you do that though you can actually generate a ton of content that's usable and reusable in all kinds of ways you can launch all of it in the ad account with manual bids like it's just you can get a lot of content and it can really really matter you know can be Whit listing too depending on the person if they if they're an influencer themselves and have an audience which we're exploring yeah um we should probably talk about email a little bit too cuz I think that's that's something else that um let's actually let's do this let's talk just on the out account one more thing people have heard me do all this U this is probably a good chance for me to drop in the format comment really fast this was a big moment for us we switched this is the thing that we did right with this testing mentality is um people have listen to me for a while have heard me do formal ad reads um I talked I've talked about a client that like had saw like a 50% spend increase when we switched to fromont uh well this is that client uh and so like I I think that's fair to say at this point and so um that's why when I was talking with formont about doing this episode I was very happy to do it because it's true story like we switched to firmont we started doing that especially to drive these subscription focused um funnels uh we were able to like measure the percentage of subscribers on every page so as we as we have an offer of a subscription offer versus a full price or or a you know a one-time payment offer um as you go side by side in forat we could not only like promote that offer in a way that was effective but also see very clearly on the back end measurement wise what percentage of people were taking the subscription offer versus not so if you're running anything like that where you really want a customer to take offer a instead of B it's just like it's easy to see the analytics um yeah it's it's been a it's been a important part of how we have grown and and like I said it was a was a major thing so the fak guys don't even want me to go like too crazy on this or anything you know they they said people wanted to hear about it but like uh but I don't know if there's anything on your side that stands out to you Chris about how we've done that yeah I mean I can speak to some of the specifics too like one is is what you mentioned just offer testing like we we had some hypotheses that turned out to be right and we had some that turned out to be wrong but we were able to test them very quickly and effectively using the format Pages which would have been onerous if we were building all that stuff ourselves and even impossible in some cases if you're just sending traffic to the PDP you know you're not you're not really going to be able to do those kinds of tests I mentioned email just now and and you know that's also tied forat now and that's actually was a huge unlock for us because we were up until recently we were sending when we would send out email we would link just to the PDP um if we were talking about a product and then we were like oh wait a sec we should probably be making the same offer to our email uh subscribers is we are on paid social that 30% discount on the first subscription and in order to do that we need to use the firmont you know we're going to send the traffic to the same formont landing pages well we we tripled the number of weekly subscriptions we are acquiring in February compared to our six-month average before that and we doubled the number of net new subscribers that we're acquiring that's not just because of email there's been a big increase in ad span recently because of a product we launched which we can you know talk about if you want but um it just makes it so easy and then we're and we're about to relaunch our affiliate program and I know we're going to be using fromont Landers for that we can easily create uh customized Lander for like a high- performing affiliate which is a great thing to be able to offer and you know we can do that in like 10 seconds you know or whatever not have to like code that thing ourselves or even use one of the other landing page software so I've been super impressed with that and and as you said there there's been a few major unlocks along the way that that led to nonlinear increases in our ad span and that that's definitely been you know one of the more recent ones the way I'd frame it for us is that that because the funnels for this business like again supplements right like supplement a let's just take our multivitamin somebody could be taking two people could be taking our multivitamin for very different reasons from one another right because the it has numerous benefits okay um and or or you know our colostrum product right like it's the same deal there's like there's maybe the person who's thinking about Digestive Health gut health like bloating that kind of thing there's maybe somebody else is thinking about like recovery performance recovery that kind of stuff maybe even somebody else about skin hair and nails and and sort of like that kind of um the way that sort of inside out inner beauty uh not inner beauty inside out uh Beauty Focus right um and and those are three different claims and three different funnels with the same product the ability to spin out variations of those Landers extremely fast and then and then uh test them and have like very clear measurability um and then to do it like you said across multiple channels as well um to me like that it's sort of that combination of speed measurability um has been like really crucial for us and and focus like that's what you're getting at here is now we have an ad so for biome protect we have you know it's our probiotic Prebiotic postbiotic polyphenol some people take it for gut health some people take it for skin Health some people take it to reduce bloating and we can have an ad that's about bloating that goes to a landing page about bloating and the offer everything is consistent all the way through whereas you know that would have been so so much so time yeah intensive to to do before for so yeah yeah just wait we have like three we just passed what was it like we have like 320 funnels now that we've created I remember we passed the 300 Market that was Concepts that was Concepts yeah yeah that was ad Concepts three over 300 it was like 320 ad Concepts and that's before you talk about sort of all the influencer content and all that kind of stuff right it's it's like and and the thing is like the other thing we do a lot of right is is like an ad starts spending sending it to like one for m page and we'll be okay well what happens if we like create a custom for mod page just for this one ad and again the ease and speed with which you can do that just makes it a much more palatable thing to do with like we don't have a big team right so um has been has been really crucial so like I said this episode is brought to you by format and I'm so glad to represent Vermont on this show because everything I just said in that exchange is completely true so go to formont commerce.com if you want to look into it today Vermont commerce.com let's get back to it um the other thing about this is is AI um and I I think to come back to this a little bit I'm you know the speed of output that we've been able to do with um taking you know building the sort of combo of AI tools um into add Lander with firmont and then email has been crucial we talked about this a little bit but like um I'm just curious to hear sort of anything else you you you want to say maybe some of this you want to keep closer to the vest I don't know but about how how we um about how we've sort of been able to do that to generate all of this content with a team that is not that big well I'll give you a recent example so I mentioned that we created uh AI AV avatars using um product reviews and transcripts from ugc and then of course the the PD you know the PDP so like with chat gbt deep research which is the the most it's based on the the 03 model from open AI which is the most advanced model out there or you know it's changes weekly so probably by the time this podcast comes out it won't be the case anymore but um you can you know it can crawl the web too so you can give it links you can link it to the to the product page and then upload that other stuff and say you know you're you're a digital marketing expert I want to create you know three avatars customer avatars based on all this information go and it will ask you some clarifying questions and it will come back with a shockingly good result and then you then we I then I fed each Avatar into an AI image generation tool and asked it to generate an image of each for each Avatar uh which was actually almost kind of perfectly matched what my internal imagining of what that Avatar looked like was it did a phenomenal job and then we I took those avatars and you can take those avatars into one of the AL and say you know uh these are our avatars for this particular product come up with you know generate a list of 10 Concepts or angles that you think would appeal actually I think the way I did it was five angles or concepts for each Avatar uh for for for a particular product and then it comes back with these ideas and of course not all of them are going to be good and a lot of them are ones we've already tried ourselves but there were a few that were legitimately good and then you can say okay well let's expand on idea number two for Avatar number three and then it will you know come spit out some content and be like okay I'm I'm GNA take that now and just like in in five or 10 minutes with my own voice and editing change that into an ad script um or turn that into an email which again if you that entire process that I just described would have been days if not weeks of work you know qualitative calling customers on the phone doing surveys blah blah blah and then coming up with a list of brainstorming a list of Concepts and then writing doing the initial writing Etc that literally took me that whole process that I just described took me like an hour or less for one one of our products you know you woke up that day and saw I had two two of two of i' done it for two of our products oh and then the other thing is what you can do is you can build a custom GPT um this is within chat GPT you feed it these i' I've done this for each product so you put the Avatar info in there you put all the product info in there and then you can querry the GP you can ask the GPT questions about the Avatar you can or you can even ask it to assume the Persona of one of the avatars and then you can ask it questions like what were your biggest fears before you started to take this product you know what feelings were you experiencing like what and and the responses are incredible like it's like you're talking to that person so um that's the most recent example and it's just it's been a game changer yeah it I mean I recently released some some content about um how I think I I I mentioned that I have a um a video editor who in one day shipped 237 videos um and look that editor that probably represented a few days of work in certain ways the the editor does not do that every day we're not shipping 237 videos a day at AJF growth okay uh it was just a compelling social media way to make a point that the point is 100% true and it's this the ability of AI to speed up and therefore um uh reduce the price of creative production is unbelievable and uh and that is the big point that I have tried to make to people and and I've made that point with reference to a number of things that I think about and do including sort of the way we do creative testing which is that like we could not test all of this creative if we had to actually deploy actual dollars to test each piece of creative right we would not be able to do this thing that we're doing um because it would it would be it would cost too much money on the distribution side um for us to like actually put testing dollars towards every ad at meaningful scale so there's that what people have responded to me with about that is two things one of them is they're like wowed and they're going okay how do I do that in my experience like you know that's yeah there's a lot of reasons why that is a very very short-term concern I think but um but people want to know how to do it but the other thing people have said to me is they've said well if you're just spamming the internet with crappy AI ads and like and what I want somebody to hear when they hear you talk about what you just described is to combine that with what you said earlier which is that you're you're doing this as a as a way to speed up the generation of extremely information-rich advertising it is not BS spam it is not that it is like really high quality stuff that comes from the fact that it's leveraged by you with all of your knowledge and some of those things um and so this is the point is that like by getting really good with those tools and then doing that in support of of a of a business model that fundamentally Works you're able to generate so much output so fast and so much easier than you would have been able to do before that now you can take tools like you know manual bids on meta ads or forat or you know your clavio flows or whatever it is which these are all just tools that help you reach people right and leverage them so much more aggressively um with really really good content because you're able to just like speed up the output of those things so it's not about creating stuff that's bad at scale that's not the that's not the idea at all it's it's the opposite like I mean yeah I don't know I mean I think one of the things that most impresses you about AI even when you read it still and you pass stuff along use it still and you pass stuff along it's just how good it is you know it's like it's like you all this knowled to compare it to it's also there's been a big learning curve as you know like you've seen the the iterations I've gone through and one of the things that i' I've learned about how to use it is is is having is curating the input to some degree especially with scientific Stu research like there is still a hallucination problem outside of like using something like consensus AI which is purpose-built for for research but if you if you go right now and ask chat gbt to like prepare a report on the effects of kirkin on bone health and and you know you put citations in in there you it's gonna at least half of those citations are going to be completely fabricated and and the other half if you click through to look at the what it says the citation is about you'll see a physics study or something completely random that has nothing to do with it so like a better way to use it is to do the research with consensus AI to get the real studies for example then upload those and and tell J chat GPT to limit its response to only information that's in those studies and and so then you're you're putting a constraint on it and it will do much better and it will be much more reliable in that situation and I think it's it's kind of the same as what you just said like we're not using AI to just generate fluff like we're using it as a tool to streamline a process that ordinarily would be very time and and labor intensive and I did it before like before I had when I at creser Institute I had a team of six research assistants you know I had you know master's degree and PhD level research assistants who were essentially performing this same task they would do the initial broad wave of research they would read the papers they would annotate them and summarize them they would then bring them to me present them to me and then I would take that information and share it with my audience you know and often times end up reading the original paper myself if it was really interesting um now I have a 200 you know a $20 a month uh Team of of researchers to do that so it's it's just leveraging it in a way that extends what we would have already been doing anyway and this is a specific use case with supplements so there's this medical scientific component right but the point is there are places in every production process where this can be useful right whatever your product category or whatever else and and that's I think that's I think the key idea that I I've tried to get across for people is like this is where if you think of it as a magic as a magic machine it's it has some use for sure to do that you can just Spam Stu whatever um but the place I'm most impressed with it isn't isn't the kind of thing that you're talking about here where it's like you know you you're using it to massively speed up research and quality output and some of that and then you can plug that in and and the thing is like you said too it's getting better at a break neck pace and so um whatever we say right now will be outdated by the time this is released and and gbt 4.5 literally came out like a minute before we got on here so and I was like oh shoot I got to do this podcast with Andrea I can't go play around with 4.5 but I'll I'll be doing that as soon as we get out for sure right amazing all right well let's do that let's get off um Chris the number one way people um can follow you and what you're doing is probably by um going to adap naturals.com and buying some supplements and getting and checking out um checking out what you're doing there yeah.com is is is my like uh base you know that's where the lots of free articles and content my podcasts Etc yes if you want to take a deep dive into Functional Health which you should do by the way uh as well that would be good for you as well and um yeah Chris thanks for your time thanks for your openness about things that are working um in the business and um let's uh let's keep after it yeah you're welcome Andrew it's a pleasure thanks so much for watching or listening to this episode I hope it was helpful to you I'd love your feedback podcast a jf.com like I said if you want that cohort forecast um I that's one of the free e-commerce resources I send you at my website if you sign up for my newsletter there AJF growth.com go do that you can also subscribe wherever you're watching listening of course like I said and uh and don't forget to follow up with formont firmont has been a great partner for this business in pretty much every possible way I recommend them very joyfully and very gladly to you um if you heard us talk and your business sounds anything like um our business or not necessarily the same category but if there's ways in which you think it could be useful to you um I'm really happy to recommend from out to you I think they're awesome I have continued to push on making sure that I maintain a a sponsorship relationship with them because I really believe in them I think it's a great product so check it out fromont commerce.com is the place to go get that fromont commerce.com go check it out today uh thanks so much and I'll talk to you next time [Music]