He Went From $5M to $100M In 2 Years By Building A Brand Intelligently transcript

Bill ROMs brand baseball lifestyle went from about $5 million in 2023 to in the next year they will cross the nine figure Mark that is a 2year Edition what is it like 20x growth in two years something like that insane numbers past the mid eight figures this year ridiculous growth ridiculous D Toc growth ridiculous wholesale growth all of it bill is a counterintuitive countercultural thinker we'll talk to you in this episode all about brand building for a brand that is durable fast growing and has Major Impact in the market that they care about really really cool story with a ton to learn here it's different than I think a lot of what you've heard in this space before let's get into it with Bill ROM nice to meet you guys happy to be on I'm really excited to do this I was telling I we were saying before like last time we talked you were possibly you were running an agency on the side of your seven figure e-commerce business and we were talking about you doing some email work for another baseball client of mine actually um and we we we m said no about that because we thought it wasn't the right fit and I am so glad that happened because you would have had to fire us so fast because your brand is growing your brand is growing really really really quickly tell people quickly what baseball lifestyle is so they have a sense of that you you are the co-founder and chief strategy officer there so people have some context for you um but give people a little sense of what baseball lifestyle is yeah so baseball lifestyle is uh Apparel in clothing to represent the game off the field right A lot of people were making clothes about this is my favorite team this is my favorite this but not just the the sport itself so in uh in Surf culture in Street Wear culture you have you know the Supremes of the world you have Hurley you have Quicks Silvers you have all these other brands but you didn't have anything for baseball uh so we are the Lifestyle brand for baseball and uh really really blown up in the last 12 months I really wondered when somebody was going to do that I'm obviously a huge baseball fan um and I've seen a few people try I have my FC Goods hat on right now we we I mean dip our toes in the water at FC Goods is is even that is probably Stadium we made a few hats really that's it um we we had no expectation of it becoming a huge thing I'm also wearing my classic grit um hoodie and you've sent me some stuff of yours as well I probably should be wearing it in this episode um Classics another just small small local um La Orange County kind of uh baseball brand with some guys that I had some interaction with back in the day so I have some of their stuff too but none of those is really taken off like baseball lifestyle has um and I really don't know another brand in the space and so it becomes this really interesting um test case or or picture of like how did you guys crack that code I mean you guys are the the numbers are unbelievable you're getting huge Wholesale Doors you told me before the call that on top of your e-commerce growth which was like you said 600% or something like that year-over-year that you at the same time also started this year with like 30 some odd total retail Wholesale Doors and and you'll start this next year over a thousand with a bunch more probably on the way you've got major major retailers it's it's an incredible story um and obviously you're selling through you recently told me you turned off your ads for D Toc because the growth is so good so let's kind of like walk through this when when did you say baseball lifestyle was founded uh so in 2016 uh we started to sell things for the first time but really 2013 uh Josh was a you know 13 14-year-old kid and I was actually a strength and conditioning coach and uh I had gone to school for marketing and my first thing I was like I have this side hustle business that's kind of become more than just a side hustle let me train my athletes so I trained a whole bunch of MLB guys like people people know uh all stars who are in the game now I've trained and I've worked with and Josh was an undersized baseball player and he's like hey I want to start a business like like you have how do I do some of the things and uh the account had a thousand followers and then 5,000 followers Josh was like all right let's sell clothes and I'm like no you know this conversions this is everything else uh and I was like let's just focus on building the account uh get a following make people know who we are make sure that was it an Instagram account just an Instagram account yeah okay so and so the so what what was the what what did the account talk about like what was it so Josh uh so I told him he he had already picked the name right baseball lifestyle 101 the fundamentals of being a baseball player and living a baseball lifestyle so I said to him at the time I'm like cool that's got to be everything that you do so focus on clothes shoes fashion cars off field on field everything that's a baseball I style um and at the time volume was absolutely the game so Josh posted every hour on the hour from noon to midnight uh for years so if you go to our Instagram account now I'm pretty we're closing in on 40,000 posts all time stories everything else so yeah we were the first ever baseball influencer uh so companies like New Balance Adidas uh Nike MLB players a whole slew of people pretty much everybody in the space uh Rawlings Wilson everybody sent us free stuff um and then again Josh was a young kid and I was like hey uh if you want this to be a business you can't keep it we got to give it away and it'll grow the account so everything people sent to us like follow tag we pretty much invented like follow tag for the entire influencer industry um because again this 2013 2014 yeah right uh grew the account to you know hundreds of thousands of followers now I think we're at on our IG we have like 760 770,000 followers uh Tik Tok around 300K YouTube about 40 something and Facebook other platforms and things that were're on so you know over a million we have other Instagram accounts we also own um but then we pivoted in 2018 we went to the College World Series we set up a popup store um and when we were there every kid who was at the event wanted to come to our space and we realized then by doing the inperson stuff how big the brand really was and that there was a lot more carry and a lot more representation of what kids wanted uh you know we were doing at the time five figure days worth the sales in person and we're like all right the clothing is a lot bigger and we had we were doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing um by doing sponsored posts things like that and then that just transitioned into you know the clothing really took off uh and we were like hey we have to make a choice today 2018 are we going to be a clothing brand or are we going to be this hybrid um we were like okay we'll always have a Content side of what we do because we believe in that but we're going to focus on our clothes and make that the priority and now we do both uh but clothing is where we're making all of our impact yeah that's wild I just checked Rosen blat stadium in Omaha cge World Series gets played there capacity 23,000 so if you're doing five figure days with only that many people and of course like you know a packed out Stadium for the Cure World Series like that just means like a lot of people are coming to your booth and buying something oh yeah and now uh when we now we do six figures in seven days yeah yeah yeah see that's crazy uh I mean and I assume you know if you if you're going to the College World Series you're a deep baseball fan you have to you care a lot to to care about college baseball because it's just a smaller following than some other C Sports so um growing I think the following seems to be growing but yeah um the um uh that's really fascinating so okay so you you guys started posting just sort of baseball lifestyle stuff as the name implies right all that kind of stuff posting all the time um started really seriously selling in 2018 um and let me ask you a question does that still work uh for Brands like before we get into anything else I one of the things I hear in that is that that was a while ago like it means you started selling in 2018 but you got seven figures in 2023 and now in the last couple years it's really blown up it's not surprising to me that people would show up to your booth knowing who you were at that stage of things at Rosen blat and at colge World Series and um and being excited to buy stuff for you guys and to go oh this is cool I've love this you know I've loved your account for a while that kind of thing and like you said there's not much else like you in the space that's a long time line to success which I actually think is one of the things like it sounds like two years from Seven figures to nine figures but that's sort of a lie right it's actually 10 years in some ways you know like um but like yeah so let's start with that should people still do that build organic accounts and 100% And I I think that most of my belief and again it's it's it's very counterculture to what everybody is kind of saying uh all all of the money that people are thinking about like hey I need more creative diversity I need more creative volume I think that it would be better spent making original organic content that you put out yourself uh run that content see that content and then use those learnings and those opportunities to then make ads that convert on that so for me my top funnel is the fact that people find us through our content um we get on a weekly basis uh anywhere between 8 and 12 million impressions a week from organic uh just on Instagram so if I'm if I'm seeing my demographic with the content that we're making that for me is that brand development it's that side of things but I like you you said I had an I I was in an agency before this and up until June of this year we were still functionally running the agency and I had up to you know 11 brands in 2023 uh and then this year we were down to six just because other ones got bigger um all of them organic social is still a huge part every single one of them for their size uh 25% of their sales are coming from organic and that comes down to you know guys like mini Katana and how you lean into how you can do that I think where you build an audience has changed but everybody's seeing it with Tik Tok shops the the ability to go viral with a piece that uh having organic content 100% makes sense uh and if you listen like Taylor says now Taylor builds out all these big content pieces and he teaching all of these different sides of what he's doing but now he's making money off of his lead generation stuff and we do the exact same thing now and I think most people who are thinking hey I want to start this side hustle I want to grow my brand cool grow the brand and build an audience and build an MVP that's you know the literally an MVP of what you think your brand is about and focus on that one thing that one audience the culture the people the community and then once you have that seed audience it makes it much easier to do all the other things so yes organic to me still huge and we've seen it time and time again and I can show you more numbers and things that we have yeah yeah yeah you guys sell ad space on your organic content still so no what we do now from a bigger uh side is you know next month you're going to watch MLB Network and you're G to see my golf tournament that John Smoltz and Fred McGriff and a whole bunch of other guys played in and we had a big piece in that and that content then goes to MLB Network they pay to have it because they need content we've developed out some other shows some other pieces that we're now s to Netflix so you you make the content so you're a media company at that point you're making the content and Licensing it to others basically right I don't know why at this point you would not be considering working with my friends at more Staffing to add talent to your business no matter what role you need to hire for if you're hiring for any role in your business and I'm thinking Way Beyond just the $5 an hour virtual assistant role okay think Way Beyond that like manager director exe even executive level Talent you should be considering hiring in the Philippines with my friends at more Staffing more Staffing helps you uh identify recruit train onboard coach provide um continuing support to all of the amazing people available to work on your business in the Philippines and the value proposition here is really simple as a starting place which is this you can hire at top of Market rates in the Philippines which attracts the best quality Talent possible I mean you know how much it matters to pay high salaries relative to the talent pool available to you you pay at top of Market rates in the Philippines and still have uh and still have that rate be meaningfully lower than what it would be in the US which means you save money and attract the best possible talent in your business and that's why I honest to goodness don't know why people wouldn't do this as they're growing their business at least pick up a phone at least send an email and explore whether or not this might be a fit for you there's really no downside to doing it especially because if you hire in the Philippines uh via more Staffing uh and your uh your hire doesn't last for a year in your company they will help you replace that person for no additional recruiting fee so um so it's uh it's really no risk to you and it's all kinds of opportunity because there is incredible talent in the Philippines people with deep e-commerce resumés across every part of the business um I personally in every business that I am working on right now that I have some meaningful ownership in or anything like that um I am working with more Staffing I've worked with them for over a year I absolutely love them they are great people really high quality just like really really good great Partners so go check out Mor staffing.com moraing coaf is a place to get connected with them so that you can explore whether or not hiring in the Philippines is a good fit for your business look at some resumés get the conversation started just see if there's something there for you if there is is it will be an incredible value in your business the combination of incredible Talent at the right price is unbeatable go check it out right now okay you used to sell ads on the content itself I assume yeah got it so I mean because either way I think what like the question I'm really getting at is like you know one way to monetize your content is to sell apparel based off of your following right um and so that's that but what I'm really asking is that is that the only way you're doing that and I think um that's that's that makes it a much higher margin business if you can take that content make it so that you can sell apparel on it but then also make it so the content actually creates value of its own I think that's especially especially everybody thinks about and this is where I do agree from a branding standpoint uh if you look at like the one of the companies that I model and I think is an amazing brand in general is Keith right but kith drops product all the time that's the focus is somebody else's brand right and it's Batman right it's it's uh the Grinch it's BMW right it's those associations with that but that in itself is marketing for a lot of smaller Brands when you have an audience and you have things there's companies that'll pay you for access to that and you can make it look really organic and you can make it look like it's really connected but in reality that those people are paying for the access to the community that you built yeah and you're then leveraging the association with them and the dollars in right so perfect example that's that's exactly what we were doing early when we were taking and saying okay you know Adidas you're going to send us uh 20 pairs of cleats great right we're going to pick and choose them curate them and then we're going to give them away to the community they were paying for that exposure but we were building value with the community we got followers people attention focus and an association with a with a brand that then leveled us up because people were like hey if they're doing stuff with them then inherently it's good for us and those opportunities still exist it might not being Adidas but look around the space of a place where you're not going to sell a product in the future you don't have maybe inroads to that and how do you align with those people and say hey we we have a similar person but selling completely different things uh I have this audience do you want to jump in right or I'm gonna sell it to your competitor and it's a it's a great way to you know make some money off the content You're Building when you're a smaller brand I mean that took you guys a long time to get there so part of part of what I think is like do we need to tell people the hard truth in this episode that this that the the reason people don't do this is because it takes a long time essentially now I mean you mentioned Isaac mados earlier you know he had he did an episode with me a long time ago actually before I was on YouTube so if you're watching this on YouTube you have to search my podcast and Isaac's name on Spotify and apple podcasts like but you know zero to 10 million in Revenue with zero dollars ad spend he got there pretty fast and he is a an organic content wizard I think uh with a process that is really impressive um I like do you think that Brands um need to think about this in terms of a very long timeline the way that you if they're going to do this thing that you guys did I think depends on the brand I think for us the the bigger unlock for for us was as we better understood the financial side of what we were doing right 28 so 2017 we just did shy of a million dollars online we did we did a million dollars when you account for all the advertising that we did um but we spent zero doar in any advertising right so we did a million dollars with Organic in 2017 um in 2018 we did over and we started to launch ads and that was really my first exposure of I'm running the ads I'm doing all of these things and I was getting like a five row as on things but I was like is that good I don't know because I didn't come from that world necessarily we were kind of building it as we were going along it's like we all were self-taught self-built self-made in that regard so uh the reason why it took us longer was because we were consciously going slow and making sure we didn't overexpose ourselves but if if you come with a background in some aspect of what you're doing whether it's running ads whether it's product development whether it's something if you have more guts than we had you 100% could have moved faster and we could have moved a lot quicker 2022 we hired a fractional CFO and we really understood exactly our economics our math our equations how we could acquire a customer where we're at that's really when the unlock of we we jumped up 100% that year then we jumped up big this year now we're going to jump up again you know 5 600% next year and the the reason that's happening is just we understand our economics better and it's less to do with we didn't have enough audience earlier so I would say that today you could grow a 100,000 200,000 follower you know YouTube channel uh in under a year if you're committed to it you understand and you you you find the right uh you know consultants and people you pay a little bit in uh you can absolutely do it in less than a year and then if you have that mechanism you you immediately create a massive organic machine that has direct carry that you can attribute that marketing directly through through different platforms um but then you can also the just general lift to your brand awareness also just Cascades the other thing that people don't think about when you think about like your YouTube channel is you also get some monetization so ultimately once you get a monetization and you're getting enough things you might be producing enough Revenue to pay for your videographer yeah then why wouldn't you have a full-time content creation team and now it just becomes this ever this self-fulfilling prophecy you get enough money from that from YouTube to pay for people um so you you can make this move a lot faster I think why we went slow you know we were at 500,000 followers we probably could were a way bigger business we just didn't understand how to push ourselves um and get enough inventory and those were really the constraints it was never that we didn't have the ability to scale the marketing and and now while we're having all this incredible growth is probably we should have been bigger two three years ago we just weren't prepared we didn't know what to do right so it's part of it is also I think that everybody's got to be honest with themselves what level are you at as an entrepreneur what level are you at as a marketer what level you are as a person if you're you know more novice and you don't have as much experience go slower you should but if you're somebody with enough enough guts in other areas there's nothing that stops you to under a year you know make seven figures through your organic I think that is a great answer to that question I think it is chronically underrated that like the the sticking point for these things is not something inherent to the platform it's basically to the entrepreneur and to their skill set and is a good reminder that one of the things that people ought to do is try to leverage the things that they are already good at basically that that sort that notion of Leverage is is a really helpful analogy for this right the idea that you would be able to apply less effort to generate a larger amount of force that that is the analogy of Leverage um of course like for you guys right you applied a lot of effort for a long time to build the organic social muscles but now you probably don't it probably requires much less effort for you to keep that kind of thing going because you just know how to do it um whereas what you needed to learn was how to create that same skill set um in another area of the business correct and this is where I would say two things one of them is people chronically underrate experiential Capital it is a really big deal like you mentioned hiring an external CFO is a way to sort of speed up is this is another leverage move it's a way to speed up your own knowledge base bring in somebody who knows what they're doing um I I actually saw I think Mr Beast talking about how much he uses consultants in his business and how much he appreciates it because of exactly this it allows him to close knowledge gaps at some kind of cost but much faster and on the opportunity cost side way cheaper than if you Tred do it all himself um and one thing I'll throw in on that is it's it's worth it to spend more money on the right consultant yeah then hire a consultant that you can afford but won't have as much of a return right like there's a value especially when you do the marginal cost math because the difference between their prices is actually usually not that high once you go to 10 grand for something 15's actually not that much more or whatever you know y exactly that but like to to find the person who's the best person in the world of growing on a platform or doing anything a YouTuber who's built a huge following to go and say Hey can I have an hour of your time for $5,000 you know that that that plays for them because the editing process the everything is way longer for for them so $55,000 is a great return on that hour of their time and they could probably look at content things tips tricks the basics and then the fact that you can just text message them after that they're going to those people always have that reciprocation of hey if I can answer some other questions i''d be happy to you you just jump years ahead of a time and the the the return is crazy as long as you know you're a person who can execute if you don't know that you're going to be able to execute on that information right then then that's where you get tricky but we we same thing we always are overly asking questions early so that we have the right person in our bucket before we needed the other thing I was gonna say about this is that you uh it's also easy to under I just I just did an episode about why I'm bullish on e-commerce going forward and one of my primary reasons that I believe that e-commerce is it is now the best time to start an e-commerce business that it ever has been and it will only get better um is because of like the way that I've beg framing this is the um the collective the the EXP the intellectual capital on the collective DDC balance sheet so like you mentioned Taylor a second ago in the content he puts out right like he is now paid to put out content that is World leading and you can get it for free and that is there's from when I started 10 years ago it people are so so much smarter and more sophisticated so the thing that you just described which is like you just didn't know what to do at the time imagine if you had started this stuff back then now maybe you would have gone down some different routes but like you know you you would have had access in 2015 to a whole different knowledge set if you would if that same exact timeline would have happened except that it all would have started in 2021 instead of 2013 or whatever you know so um so there that knowledge is out there it's why I talk about admission all the time if you're on the ad side um it's why I put out content is to see if it can be helpful for people and and even you coming on here right you're running a business it's about to cross nine figures and here you are in my podcast I'm not paying you to be here right you do this for free and I think it's just this thing where people like to talk about it and they learn things and they make connections and people will go follow you on X which they should do subscribe to me on my podcast which you should do right now if you're listening to this watching this like um uh the link by the way to follow bill on X he's great great great follow there uh is in the show notes uh for this so you should go do that but just keep building that knowledge base basically um which is which is all available for free I seriously believe that if you are actually going to care about delivering value to your customers at scale and communicating that effectively for many Brands there is no better tool to doing that than by building incredible tight well-considered funnels with format you can go to formont commerce.com the link is in the show notes of course but format is a mix of the best software in the game for building full funnels the same way that you build ads that means if you are uh running some creative angle on your ad and you want to communicate that creative angle all the way through the funnel then you should want to do that right if you're listening to and enjoying this episode then you uh you should want to do that right you can build custom landing pages and then custom pdps attached to those landing pages and then custom carts with custom upsells attached to that same flow all with massive speed on the fastest loading software I've ever used incredibly easy built-in testing it is way easier to build different offers different bundles things like that because they've built the software to make it as easy and fast as possible for you to do exactly this kind of marketing that I'm talking about plus it is not just software it is a service there's an agency component to what format does which is that they give you an account manager who will build these things out for you direct you towards where the best opportunities are for your business relative to the data set they have work with a lot of successful businesses it is really the very best software of which I am aware and the very best service of which I am aware for brands that are serious about building their marketing all the way through their funnel communicating value all the way through their funnel to customers exactly in the ways I'm talking about on this episode go check it out right now for mcommerce /af let's go back into your story a little bit more um let's actually talk more about the distinction between brand building and and like Performance Marketing which is kind of a hot spot a Hot Topic you guys have an interesting thing here right you you you told me you shut off your ad spend on December 3D we are recording this on December 18th your me oh December okay okay uh and you your me is through the roof you're still making money on your site because you have some organic content at the same time you're shifting because what really matters to you more this side and scale now is supporting retail sell through because that's where actually much more scale is possible for you guys um and so so you're kind of pushing there because it becomes a more central part of the business that means that you have to think about your spend pretty differently um but this is still true I think even for more DTC Focus Brands who trying to build something more durable and long-lasting they have to think about this trade-off between brand and performance so um so let's actually start on a on a really simple question here which is like what is the difference between brand and performance Market marketing does that distinction even exist um and sort of how do you think about that question yeah so I I think this is where I look at it differently and and to give some context right we we shut our ads off on the 6th we're up 157% year-over-year for the month of December with our ads off my new customer cost per acquisition is $12.30 that's only because I am still spending on brand awareness videos things like that because I I just to me again that's brand building uh so I I have my brand still out there we still have some stuff on the site but uh we have eight total products on our website right now that you can get to if you actually get to our homepage right the second it tells you to shop our other vendors it tells you you can't even shop us so here are eight products it's all you can buy uh so with eight products uh from December 6th to December 17th we did $638,500 hundreds of new customers coming in every day uh better than half of that revenue is still new customer Revenue so how are they finding us what's coming through it's that they had this builtup pressure across all of the different ways that we Market to them so uh where I go is brand marketing different than Performance Marketing I believe so not in necessarily distinct execution but in the belief of what your dollars are doing for you uh and that's where to me like I was saying before everybody talking about hey get a creative agency run more ads let's do more ads more ads more ads and I I think a better use of some of those dollars is do more original content and do things that are about your brand and talk about yourself and talk about things right you you it's easy for everybody to go and look at Elon today and say okay Elon Musk obviously is famous and he makes all this stuff well Tesla went public at 110 million right so like functionally sometime next year we'll be bigger than when Tesla went public so he was still famous then to some degree if you look at Gary vanderchuck Gary's built a huge audience a huge thing almost everything that Gary's done is built off of brand right his YouTube channel everything else talking about Wine Library that it was entirely to build himself up which ultimately sold more things so I think it just comes down to how you look at marketing and and what you're really doing and to me original content creation is going to be more and more important uh because with what what happened with the FTC and now that you have to have way harder disclosures on if you have an influencer doing a product drop has to say add on the content in in the bottom they have to talk about it they have to disclose all these different things and there's people still skirting that but it's not going to last long as soon as there's penalties that start getting dropped so your your ads you know whitelisted ads all these things that's going to change so what is the thing that everybody can control to me it's organic content and that's brand building the second thing that I think is brand building that not enough brands do and I've tweeted this in the past is not enough people are going out and selling in person um and uh again Isaac I just saw was posting that hey we're out and we're doing sampling and again I go to the College World Series but we also used to pop up at Big tournaments big events put a tent up talk to the kids let people touch it feel it but now I'm getting real life feedback I used to like and we joke around about it our entire executive team my wife is our CMO um and we would talk to thousands of kids and parents and we would say the same marketing message over and over and over again to the point that everybody used to make fun of me when we had like people would come in the booth they're like we know exactly what bill says because it's the same thing every time how did you hear about us Did You Know About Us yes you get this answer no you get this answer and I had this whole system down but I needed to make sure in 60 seconds everybody knew who we were and it's those things that I now look at our our uh our co-host the people that we acquire in Omaha every year come back every single year and buy from Us online so our LTV for some of the people that we acquired back in 2018 is you know $22,000 and that's that brand because they now associate me with it because I'm the founder we opened up our our first store back in on uh late September it's actually funny my wife's water broke during the store opening um and she she sat down on a bench in the mall waited for me because we had 350 people on line and I was saying hi to each one and inviting them into the store uh and I got done with the line she walks over she's like Hey we're having a baby I was like now he was like yeah so we drove directly to the hospital from the store opening um that is that is Bill that is that is such an entrepreneur story i' I've like I've heard I've heard this story told you know 10 different ways people racing through airports to catch up to somebody and what you know just um it's one of the things that reminds me that I'm not the true entrepreneurs entrepreneur is that I have no story like that my risks have all been much smaller and my yeah I just don't have any that's so funny and it just a surreal moment to go through but me saying hi to every single one of those people at the door right like R aov is in our store twice what are they are online and of course yeah I'm taking pictures with kids I'm signing autographs like I am not famous right in in in any regard but like people believe it because we've we've built the brand to the point that like everybody like they see me I see kids I'm walking in the mall I see them start whispering because they know I'm gonna I'm the owner and then I I I get there and parents are like hi and they're waving at me and it's like I'm not even in a ton of our content right Josh is in more than I am our video our main content guy he's in everything he can't walk in airports at events right like we can tweet if we're at a game now hey come down we'll give you free stuff and 60 kids will show up um yeah you that all of those touch points that were out with our our core demographic consistently that's brand and that's brand marketing and it's not it's not me running awareness ads it's me actually doing o brand marketing yeah the way you should do it I think events particularly for anybody who is in any kind of a niche space what what the reason people don't do them is because they're time intensive and they feel like they're they're cost intensive by the time you do travel you have a popup you have to build a booth booths are expensive you get somebody to design it you have to staff it there's it's not a very high margin thing typically for the moment of the event um and so and it's a bunch of work and it feels like you could do these things that have more scale quote unquote right the problem um the problem with that calculation is that the people who show up to events in Niche communities and baseball is a big Niche but it is a niche you know it's it's a it's a subculture and you guys are at the center of it you know um the uh the people who show up to those um are the most core customers and the thing is those people are going to leave your event and they're going to go back to their baseball teams and they're going to wear your stuff on those teams and people are going to see it and they're going to engage with your content and all those things and it's it's the influencer curve it's just that people don't think of like the the hardest throwing kid on a on a 12u baseball team or whatever the number is right as an influencer but he is and um and and and that that same Dynamic exists in almost every subculture the best dirt bike rider in some group of dirt bike riders is an influencer the best you know what I mean like and so uh and maybe you want to make a distinction here between influencer and early adopter and then there's sort of a curve down from there but you get the idea like um and they have they have influence in these things and that I think is the place events show uh show up it also signals to those people who are the most core into a demographic that you are really for them when you show up to their events it means you actually care about them and I actually think it's very hard to do the thing that you're doing if you don't actually care about the customer if you just are trying to extract value from them you have to show up to that thing and really enjoy the joy that the customer gets out of it you have to think that it's cool man they get to experience they love baseball and every time they put on your shirt and every time they put on your jacket they get to tap into their love for baseball a little bit and that has to matter to you and when you show up to events it's really hard for it not to matter for you you you you end up loving the community more I I've talked about this example a lot but when I was at Kao we did this with Crossfit and and it was exactly that kind of thing you know we we definitely made our money back going to the CrossFit Games and going to CrossFit regionals and some of those things at least you know or if we didn't make our money back it was really close you know so it wasn't like and we might have even made money on those events I don't remember but if you just calculated the value of the event itself it wasn't worth the time um but if you calculated the way it allowed us to to then be core to the community it really really really was worth the time and so some Brands you know are trying to do something a little bit broader and and therefore may or may not have quite the same place I think for event marketing as um as what you're describing here but any brand that is talking to a specific subculture and that's most brands truthfully go to where those people are are are gathering um and then you can also find all these other things this is what I also think of brand building is like you sponsor the events you like you said you license you're in your case you're licensing content to MLB Network that's you know a real it's a way to be where baseball people are you know if you're watching MLB Network you're a hardcore baseball fan and so you are in that space now or you um are I don't know if you guys do any give backs or anything like that but if you find some baseball related charity you know you do you do that like um you know you support baseball influencers obviously that's really hard in your case you've got MPA to deal with and all that stuff it creates a different challenge but there's probably people outside of that like you know so yeah so again I think that that comes back to if you care about the community you get opportunities to do things that people don't uh Evan uh I won't say his last name people can look it up if they want to um but Evan who runs the MLB players Association is a good friend of ours um he he doesn't live far away uh he he we have lunch with him on a semi-regular basis like yeah there's ways to get MLB players to do things where you don't have to uh an mlbp license there's just some small stuff that you have to do with but inherently what's changed also is that's not even the person who moves the needle as much it's the highest level it's the highest level high school player so I don't know if you know who Max Clark is but um yeah right ma Max when we Max has been wearing our stuff since he's 12 and then his first interview he ever did he was wearing one of our short sleeve hoodies so when we were going to launch new colorways everything else and he was get going into his senior year we did a deal with him and he was ecstatic to do it because it was actual fan and then it resonated and then he went from 100,000 followers to $500,000 followers overnight and every kid who wants to be him wants to be in our stuff and it's about this is such an underrated part of seing Bill is that like is that like getting an influencer or or influencer relationships is just that like getting an influencer who actually likes your product it it shines through content people can feel it they represent it differently and better and it ises obvious like yeah I I I love that what you're saying about that I'm sorry to interrupt you no no no you're you're good that and that that's that's what I would say with most like yes you were saying before like every brand to me is already catering to a niche they just don't realize it yet and there there's this still this idea of not not getting the product Market fit soon enough and I think too many companies too many people who were getting in started right now they don't have product Market fit but the memory of how to grow on the internet was just spend on meta and you can grow a brand and I think that if everybody took an approach where hey I'm G to actually go out find product Market fit I'm G to find my community I'm G to find products that they really want I'm going to do things that they enjoy I'm G to be on platforms and work with influencers who really matter to them you you you inherently create that durability to your brand because it's a genuine you are part of the community where everybody else is trying to buy it by forcing it down everybody's throat with ads and I just don't think that that's the way to do it and yes can you do it sure if you have enough money to waste if you have a long enough time window excellent but our event now like I don't want to make any money when I go to Omaha so my budget that I spend the following year is everything I made the year before plus 20% and that means that I'm going to spend on my space and Extras I'm going to spend six figures for a seven to 10 day window that I'm there and the reason why I'm doing that at this point is every person who buys at College World Series is buying six weeks before back to school shopping starts and for my key demographic that's exactly where we are so if we're starting to talk about 60 and 90day ltvs and when you hit the window those people are putting themselves in my funnel just before they're going to need to come back and Shop bigger so I drop new products they get to touch and feel it they get to meet me they get to meet our team they get to get this huge brand affinity for us just before key buying moment and then they buy for us for back to school which for us again is 90 days before black Friday saber Monday right so we inherently are then also filling the hopper for back to school for our next big key moment and and it's all comes from some of the things that we key in where we we drop we hide products at our location that we haven't dropped yet that everybody can see and touch and people want to buy so we had slides in Omaha last year and we haven't even dropped them yet and people were offering like hey can I buy these I'll give you guys $100 and we're going to sell them for 30 bucks and we're like no you can't have them but now it's just when they do drop we know that we'll sell you know 10,000 units of them in in 45 minutes and it's because we've been introducing it to our core demo making them want it and they can't get it yet because we haven't allowed it to happen and then once we do it creates this this gush but yeah it's years of making to do it at our size but for for people today who are listening to this if if you're somebody who's you know six figure business or you're a seven fig business you should be investing in your organic machine because the the paid to playay thing is only going to get more expensive and the the alpha to me is still go out to your core community and make content and and do that now you also said I I'll end it on this that yeah setting up and and building out the space and doing all of that that those are all expensive yeah but go back to your content machine are you recording building out the location are you recording the setup are you recording the takedown we do you guys can go on our YouTube channel you can see us setting up and breaking down for every Omaha since 2018 and we have a a flash through video of people putting everything on the shelves going through the process us shaking people's hands talking to people how many people walk through the space that's part of the content machine now right so it it's not just that people who are at the event see that we were cool it's that if you couldn't make the event we give you the behind the scenes of how it went and that then has that that you have more than the sum of that individual's Parts yeah I love that I think the idea of like taking everything like that and turning it into content is one of the ways you get value out of it in this like massive way that people sort of underrate that you you sort of look for the hidden places in your business that look like cost where you can actually create value instead um and obviously content is one of the core ways to do that I think that's awesome um I want to ask you something really tactical which is that you told me that you have a disagreement or you have an agreement with Taylor about ugly ads and I always like to disagree with Taylor whenever I can and so I'm sad to hear that you have an agreement with him but uh but uh but you know ugly ads is something I've talked about and thought about what do you what what's your what's your take on this so I I I think what what inherently an ugly ad does that it does accidentally is it just break at one point in time now it's probably getting to the point that it's lost efficacy to to just put a Post-It note right but an ugly ad the idea was it was Breaking Free from the norm right if we actually go back to Dollar Shave Club the first right right the first ever Dollar Shave Club commercial Broke Free from everybody else was doing and because it was novel and unique right it it it became signal it wasn't just noise and in trying to copy it no one can copy it anymore because we've seen it now a thousand times the thing that always will resonate is if you are putting out ads that look like your content that look like your branding that look like yourself consistently and you show up looking away all the time people know and recognize your branding in other ways that you do it when you make an ugly ad or you make things that that that that rattle away from your your your your core look I think that especially in a paid environment you're Force feeding something that no one's going to remember because you look like somebody else and if I'm paying to be in front of you when my organic comes out and it looks like me and it acts like me and it smells like me you're going to remember and then when you see the next ad that's when it's going to resonate and hit home and I'm going to move you through the process faster and I have talked you know routinely I am I am a a lazy Facebook ads manager right um I still have a a Dabba ad set that I have not shut off since 2018 it's the same one and during the holidays it was spending $20,000 a day and I got a I got I got better than a two uh uh row as on new customer with that with that thing at 20K a day all it is is my product right it's it's Dynamic vision of my product showing up in somebody's feed but why it works is all of my other content has been showing off my organic my photos my posts my videos my brand in a cool fun exciting way and it's built that somebody wants to buy it and the other thing for us that's unique is my customer and my consumer are two different people right my consumer is usually not buying the product 60% of our consumers don't buy it somebody has to buy it for them because they're too young to buy it themselves yeah so I have to get that they already know about me because I've gotten my consumer to be excited about it with my organic right and then I'm getting the customer to want to do with it because I look clean appropriate they can see that their kids wearing it and it shows up consistently all the time and yeah you know we we did eight figures in November like yeah on a lot of spend and I am not doing a lot of the things a lot of people have said hey you have to do yeah I so I'm mixed on this I I think there's a real point that you're making and I think for especially the game plan that you guys are rolling out it makes sense I think the other thing the the other side of that is that you have to make an incredibly compelling argument to tell people to turn off extremely high performing ads that are very cheap to make um and and so like that's the I think the fundamental tradeoff and and I think the ugly ad to be fair especially I think of Barry hot here who's sort of champion this idea um you know as he would tell you it's way more than just the post of not ad right part of what he's saying is just making things that feel native to the platform and so just to sort of stra me or to steal me on him a little bit on that point and to be fair to him but I um I I think so I think one of the things I would call out there is that yeah I mean we make some of the posted kind of stuff for sure because it's so cheap and it's so easy and if you can you know get it at a high enough margin the actual deepest touch point I can have with a customer is when they get my product delivered to their to their door and they open up a package and they see it if that experience is all really good then then you actually still do have a really deep touch point with them and they also have to after they click the ad they go to your website and so they have that there they're going to get seeing your organic stuff in their social feed like it that can be the intro the entry point to a brand I think in a way that is cost effective and at the same time allows them to go step into all the other stuff you're doing especially for all these other reasons what I what I think you're say what I hear in what you're saying though that I think you're right about um is that is that you um you want you do want to optimize for durability in some way and for depth um I remember asking Gary V this question one time actually I said like if you could get uh you know your target row ass on ads by getting by reaching a thousand people for cheap or or 100 people for more expensive but with a deeper influence which one would you take you get the same exact outcome but you just get there into two really different ways um and and he thought about it for a second he said I'm not sure and then and then after thought he said I would take the second one I would go deeper with with people with a smaller group of people right because you're trying to have a larger impact and I think that's sort of the question here you know part of my answer here is like take both like I mean nobody should be taking should only be making Post-it and I think actually nobody thinks that everybody should be doing that um and I think for you guys at your scale I could see why you would say like we're actually just G to stay away from that we don't need it we we make content other ways we those organic stuff and it's really important to us that the brand is something especially an apparel and lifestyle apparel you really have to make sure the brand resonates with people um but yeah so I I think I think I I think I think the mistake that a lot of people make I mean one one way to frame what you're saying also is people don't just click and buy on your ad they click and then they go away and then they get served your ad again the next time and so maybe on the short term your rows would improve in one way but in the long term by having more touch points the right way you you actually you actually do better at the level of growth by by uh generating deeper touch points along the journey I think is listening to you say it back to me I think what I what I actually believe is your your ugly your ugly ads should be done organically because Tik Tock and reals and everything if you make the right piece of content are going to reach millions of people right you'll have you'll have 1.8 million people watch a a 20 second reel that you make if you if you do a good piece of content that piece of content is doing what you're paying with those fast cheap ads you can just do that but you should be pushing it out organically consistently and that's where I think you you you Prospect when you're paying for the ads that's where I just think that you cycle through ugly ads you have to make them so often because their lifetime is is often not very long they don't resonate for an extended window you're constantly trying to find the next Hook and the next thing thing and I think that should be an organic content belief and more people should invest in organic content that way and not ads and and and and that just means that the marketing team Whoever has is in charge of marketing at a brand has to have a commitment to we are making Fast cheap content that we can put out regularly find home runs once you've hit a home run with a piece of content make that style of cont content as often as you can and your follower base will grow and then you're doing the same thing and then you see the numbers come down and again like I I'm I'm saying like a lot of people listening to this if if I told you in the last 10 days that you made 600 plus thousand dollar on your site a lot of people would be happy especially considering that in that time period I spent less than 60 Grand like the thing that I've kept doing is we we put out three to 10 pieces of content every single day right and some of that stuff gets seen 350,000 times to a person for the very first time they go what's this brand what's this thing and they find me and then the rest of my ecosystem takes care of building that they should want and desire me and and and I think that that's just where I look at it a little different is moving that content to an organic function not a paid function yeah I I think that's perfectly reasonable um the last little thing I'll say about this is I sometimes also wonder if consumers actually approach us the same way as professional mark marketers if they they have anything like the same perception I always wonder what consumer perception of those kinds of ads is and versus like I see a million of them all the time because I'm on Twitter so who knows um but um okay Bill we're out of time uh I want to respect your time so uh b101.com if you want to get a deeper look at baseball lifestyle as a brand um and do follow bill on X like I said he a really good follow shares all this kinds of stuff um in really good ways so uh x.com thebill ROM ROM that link is in the show notes like I said um bill thanks so much man I appreciate your time appreciate you thanks so much for watching or listening make sure to subscribe wherever you're doing that and please do also reach out to me at podcast aaf.com if you have any thoughts or questions I'd love to hear from you you can see everything I'm doing at AJF growth.com and uh also please do follow up with my sponsors they're great I I have them because I actually use them that's formont it's formont commerce.com and more 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