Drive and Convert

Speaker 1:
You're listening to Drive & Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Hey Ryan, it is holiday week here as we're recording. I'm excited.

Ryan:
And it's cold.

Jon:
Yeah, if anybody's watching the video of this, Ryan has his nice holiday beanie on. I'm in a hoodie all trying to get warmed up. I also sound like I have a cold because I have for three weeks. So we're in the thick of it here with holidays. But I know there's an interesting topic you wanted to chat about today around startups and driving traffic, but a lot of our days between the two of us are spent talking about referrals and two referrals.
I mean, we send a lot of business to each other and a lot of other partners in the e-commerce space. And it really seems like there's been more and more small businesses needing help. And I assume that a lot of these have started because during the pandemic a lot of people decide to start side hustles and they turned into businesses and also money was free to start a business basically for quite some time.
And I think a lot of people are starting to have challenges and I'm glad that a lot of the partners think of you and I for these conversations, but quite often they just aren't able to afford us. And that's not us or me really saying we have an ego about this. I'm just saying they're not in the financial position where it makes sense to be spending money to drive traffic or optimize or they need to find other ways to do that.
So I'd like to hear how you're guiding new businesses because for us at The Good I've had to... We invented a product that was a lower price point and a scale down service for SMBs and companies just starting out. It's been pretty popular, but even for The Good, driving traffic, it's like, hey, if I'm going to put a handful of thousands of dollars to this a month, is that going to give us a return or do we need to just say, "Hey, we're going to dump tens of thousands to this a month to really get a return." I know the traffic space is constantly evolving and I'm sure there's a lot of things I don't know. So I'm hoping you'll educate me. Let's just start with, there's so many places to get traffic. How do you help us start filter that list for potential traffic drivers?

Ryan:
It's rough. I mean a lot of my conversations are not the happy rainbows and unicorn conversations around startups and how they need to grow.

Jon:
I'm glad it's not just me.

Ryan:
Yeah, I mean, I've done it myself. I've seen it work and it's a slog and it's not easy. So a lot of times I have to set those expectations initially just because we know how to drive traffic doesn't mean it's going to work the same way for your brand or it's going to be, spend $1,000 on Google and print $200,000, it just generally doesn't work that way. So I usually have to start with, all right, your business that you're starting up or in now, is it a new product or vertical that hasn't really existed before, or are you a new competitor in an existing space? Because those two things will really dictate how you're going to be driving the traffic and some of your even pricing strategies to a degree across different platforms.

Jon:
Does that help if there's a competitor out there, you can look at how they're driving traffic and that would inform your plan or... Our team prefers not to do competitive analysis right off the bat because it can skew the data, the view of the data. What's your point of view on that?

Ryan:
Well I think it's an easier process generally if you're entering an existing marketplace with an obvious advantage, even just visually or pricing wise. If you're creating a product that's never existed before, there's a lot more things you could or should be doing and you really have to get laser focused on how you're going to do that. And for somebody that's been able to create a product that's never existed and create searches that have never done, often their brain is all over the place and getting them to focus becomes difficult. But it's also difficult to see if nobody is searching for your product, there's no demand to capture. So 100% of what you're doing is creating demand. And when you're creating demand, your returns are terrible. You're not going to go create demand for something that nobody's thought of before. It'd be like...

Jon:
Yeah. The worst place to educate is in an ad, right?

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
You don't want to educate somebody that you exist in an ad. I mean, I get brand awarenesses out there, but if you're trying to educate somebody that you can solve their problem and you're doing that through an ad and you're also trying to generate pain in that ad, you're asking a lot from something that they're going to spend a second or maybe two looking at.

Ryan:
Exactly. So there's two buckets we'll talk through today. So I guess if you're creating a new product that's never exist or there's not a lot of people searching a search engine for that pain point or for that problem, you've got to find a way to get people's attention and that becomes more old school. I call old school because maybe through mad men where you're like articles or PR things become more important where you're actually getting press out there trying to create this problem that maybe people don't know they have. So it's a much different thing that I personally don't have a lot of experience in from driving traffic. So you're going to have to find a company that can create an ecosystem or a branding and those generally are not cheap by the way. This is where you can do some things though with influencers.
So we've had a brand that launched with Kim Kardashian, and it was one where they were somewhat in this space. It's a company called Summer Fridays where they created a cream you put on when you're flying because when you get off the plane and everybody's taking your picture, when you step down that little stairway off your private jet, you don't want to look like you're tired and it's evidently it's very important for people doing this. But it's like nobody had thought about the fact that they would need to put on some type of cream while they're flying. It's never been something I've done. My wife who has a lot, I'll say, I won't say a disgusting amount, but a lot of creams in her drawers in the bathroom and I've never-

Jon:
She does have a lot of kids to handle on a daily basis.

Ryan:
She does.

Jon:
So I can understand this.

Ryan:
Yeah. There's stress relief cream, there's all kinds of great things. So essentially, face cream was not an interesting new product. There's face creams all over the place. But a face cream specifically for flights, you were creating that demand because nobody was searching Google, airplane face cream because that wasn't something that people worried about at that point before they launched. So being able to launch with Kim Kardashian and saying, and because it was her friend that started it. So it was an easy entree into that. Obviously that's a good starting off point to create some demand. So an influencer that you can leverage.
And at that point it was years ago, there wasn't anything like dark posting on Facebook or Instagram. But if it happened now, I would say great, you have a relationship with an influencer that's going to put you out there initially. Most influencers are not going to post a lot of times around this to really build that into their followers, because on social media, if you post ballpark numbers, 10% of your followers are going to see the post and you've got 90% out there that didn't even see the organic post.
So being able to go behind the scenes and say, all right, I connect, I'm in a dark post or you'd whitelist depending on the vernacular you're using, but you're using your money as the brand to boost the post to the followers of that influencer and using that to create lookalike audiences as well based on the success you're seeing. For new verticals, new products that's probably the only way online I would be spending money directly in a platform. And I guess you have to cover your brand searches on Google to actually get the search volume of it.

Jon:
What kind of budget would they need to put behind that, do you think?

Ryan:
Some of it probably comes down to the size of your influencer. I mean if you've got an influencer that's got 10,000 followers, you probably can't spend $50,000 to push something in front of their followers, they would just probably hate you at the end of the day. You're probably going to spend a couple hundred bucks to push that post to your followers and then you've got to spend a lot more time likely to find more influencers to help push it.

Jon:
Got it.

Ryan:
Because your initial one of 10,000 followers is probably not going to move the needle massively for your brand. I also challenge a lot of online brands going through that process that you are likely going to need some retailers. Depending on your vertical, in the beauty space, it would be very difficult to launch a beauty brand in a new space. I don't even know if that exists in beauty much anymore. But I wouldn't have thought about airplane face creams. So there's people smarter than me coming up with products.
But in the beauty space, retail is extremely important. Without retail presence in an Ulta or Sephora or even small local boutique beauty stores, there's a lot of trial. People want to smell it. If it's got a scent that you just don't like, that's a risk you're taking online. So depending on your price point, is it risk enough? If you're over $50 in the face cream space, there's going to be a buried entry on that target, that first purchase. If you're at 15, 20 bucks, there may be much less. If it smells bad, I throw it away and don't worry about it because it was 15 or 20 bucks. But retail space is a tough one. If you don't have a relationship with a distributor that's going to get you or you have access to a Sephora buyer or Nordstrom buyer, that's tough.
So you'll have to look at something like a Fair can be a good one. I really a big advocate of Fair for small businesses that are trying to get into retail footprints. We've used it. Joyful Dirt and I think it's a great platform. There's a few other ones alike that getting hands in front of people is great. And the thing I like about retail as well, it's profitable marketing. I see retail as marketing. You're getting something in front of people. At the end of the day, as a startup, you're not going to make, for most companies out there, you're not going to make your millions of dollars on the retail side of it.

Jon:
Yeah, the volume's not there.

Ryan:
Yeah, but hey, if I'm selling to you at wholesale, I hope that's profitable as the brand. So you're making money but you're getting it into the hands of people, and that's where Fair makes it easier because you don't have to do collections as a small brand, because Fair guarantees that you're going to get paid.

Jon:
And there's also, I think Shopify has one now, has a marketplace now that you can go to that allows online brands to just say, "Hey, I want to add this product to my store." And it almost drop-ships it more or less from you. But it's a new platform they came out with last year. So I don't know how popular it is yet, but there are a lot of brands on there that I've seen. I just don't know how much it's getting used from retailers.

Ryan:
Shopify is doing a really good job at helping small startup businesses. I'll give a lot of credit to them and I mean they've had a massive focus on the small business side of it of.

Jon:
I mean it is something like 85% of their revenue.

Ryan:
It is. I mean they do the process I mean, it's just an easy button for startup businesses. I think it's a great one. In fact, recently BigCommerce took a big move in the last week to basically move out of that space and concede a lot of it saying, "Hey, Shopify you take the small ones, we're going to move upstream a little more." Which I think was probably a good move but it did hurt some people at BigCommerce so I have a lot of empathy for that.
But speaking of Shopify, I was going to bring that up a little later, but Shopify has another program that I think is really cool. It's called Collab. Any of your clients brought up Collab? Okay. Shopify bought a company I think called Dovetale a couple of years ago. And essentially what they're creating inside Shopify on the backend is a affiliate program and it's going to be free. They have no plans at least at this point to monetize it, which I think is amazing. So they're really investing in helping influencers connect to brands and create an affiliate program.
It's not fully built out yet. So as of time you hear this, it's Collab is not its final stages, but it's still got some really cool things. I know that in Q1 they're going to finalize the gifting within Shopify. So if you've got an influencer that wants to come in and get a product, you just get to use your Shopify inventory and send it to them or you can easily give out, "Hey I'm willing to give you $100 of product. Go pick what you want and then you'll be able to put that out on there and here's the rev share and all that stuff." As of now, I believe the contracts are done outside of Collab with the influencer, but you'll be able to do that eventually within the platform.

Jon:
Wow. Okay.

Ryan:
So influencer discovery through Collab, if you're on Shopify, I think is going to be great. And you should for sure look at that as a startup, regardless of if you are in the new vertical, no demand yet for your product or problem you're solving, versus I'm a new product in an existing group of businesses that have the same type of product. I think Collab is going to be a massive help for startups.

Jon:
I would imagine.

Ryan:
Finding good traffic, especially free, which most startups are going to like.

Jon:
Who doesn't?

Ryan:
But you do have to probably get a little more aggressive than you're comfortable with to start up too, to generate some of those eyeballs.

Jon:
That's a great way to drive traffic and create demand. You've talked about influencers, noticeably absent is social in terms of direct posting on social or ads. I didn't hear anything about Google Ads. What are the best ways to create demand? What else should people be thinking about?

Ryan:
Well, I mean you have to have social profiles as a starter just to prove your validity that I am a real business. Have your contact info in there. Be posting semi-regularly on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok is, yes, you probably should have a profile there and be doing something. TikTok, I always see swings around, the US Government is going to kick them out and some states don't like them but so far it's been popular enough that I don't think anybody wants to take that step.
But it is a little more complicated or difficult to get regular content on TikTok as a brand because it's video and it's not that video's difficult, but if you're the brand owner and you don't want to be the visible presence of that, you've almost got to have a human on your team that's willing to be that video presence to draw those people in.

Jon:
You can't just create a generic video that you're also going to upload to all these other places. You really need to focus on TikTok style content. So that's where I think a lot of people struggle is the ads I've seen on there that have been horrible have been, okay, clearly this is not a TikTok ad, it's not native for the platform. They took an ad, they run elsewhere on YouTube, et cetera, and they just put it over on TikTok and it's like, that doesn't work because in the middle of my feed it just stands out as like, "Oh, this is horrible compared to everything else I'm looking at."

Ryan:
And I think I brought up before some of the brands that have seen success, and I still go back to one of the more successful ones we've seen at Logical Position has been the USB blender, BlendJet. And they invested in content very early on so they went through their learnings when it was a smaller platform, which helped. But they landed on a strategy that is extremely simple and they initially were one of the first USB blenders.
So they were in this space of creating demand that didn't exist because I didn't know that I needed to be able to plug a blender into my computer at work, was just something I'd never thought of. So you're creating this USB blender that nobody searched before. Their strategy wasn't an attractive woman in various bright sports bras matching the blender or the fruit going into it being like, "Oh, there's an attractive woman that's very fit and healthy and she's blending fruit anywhere she goes," what a deal.
So they kept going on it and they've got a couple 100,000 followers on TikTok now. It became very easy for them to generate revenue. They've spent some money on TikTok and there was some revenue, not profitable revenue from it that I've seen. It's just there to get eyeballs and continue to build the brand. But when you're starting up, it's likely you don't have a budget to be able to spend $10,000 to generate $5,000 in revenue. Most startups aren't anyway. And even if you have the money, investors don't get excited about that. So that's where you generally are doing more of the brand awareness. How do we get people aware of it without lighting money on fire to a degree.

Speaker 1:
You're listening to Drive & Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering paper click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
I always tell startups that come to me and say, you know what, before you spend any time optimizing, focus on driving some traffic and they're like, "Well, I don't have a lot of money to drive traffic. I want to make sure the money I spend is effective." What's your take on that? What do you feel? Because yeah, obviously you need a site that's going to be able to facilitate a transaction. But I'm of belief that don't optimize your site or do the basics, but don't really focus on optimizing your site until you've spent money driving traffic, because it's just not going to get you the return on your investment. What's your thought on that?

Ryan:
Fully agree with that. And I would tell most startups, just go with a Shopify template. Don't spend a lot of money on it. It's going to work, conversion wise, from the basic standpoint and make sure that you're not... Because you have the option to create an account before you check out on Shopify. Don't do that. Just be, make it as simple as possible to check out. Don't spend a bunch of time or money trying to come up with a color palette and branding because it's not that important at the end of the day. White backgrounds will work just fine and it's probably what Job would tell you after you pay him a bunch of money long term anyway. Why do you have this purple background? It's just distracting people.

Jon:
Yeah. If you're trying to be fancy, just don't, it's not going to work.

Ryan:
Stop. You're in startup at this point. Just make it simple and easy to check out. And Shopify will generally out of the box take care of that for you.

Jon:
Great.

Ryan:
Once you hit a million dollars, then you start getting more complicated and look at other platforms potentially and get more of that conversary optimization done. So yes, just make it simple on the platform. You want to drive some traffic and understand that if you are focusing on top of funnel awareness traffic, the conversion rate's going to be bad. I talked to a startup a couple days ago that, well startup online, they have an existing brand. They've done a lot of manufacturing. They were very excited about their 4% conversion rate. So they're like AOV, conversion rate and traffic. I'm lacking the traffic so to send more traffic and everything else will take care of it.
I'm like incorrect. Because as you start driving traffic, right now you're capturing with no marketing people that look for you and know you already. That repeat business so conversion rates are higher. But I said as you start spending money and driving traffic on non-brand terms, people looking for your product but don't know if they're buying it from you, conversion rates go down, not because the site's not working well, not because the conversion process is complicated, it's because they don't know you yet and they're not willing to give you the money until they've tested you or seen you elsewhere and you've built the brand around it.
So just sending traffic, don't expect your 4% conversion rate to continue off into infinity. As you fill that top of funnel, conversion rates go down as you move up the funnel away from people that have your brand. So that's a fallacy of a lot of startups just assuming like, "Oh, here's my conversion rate, I just need more traffic." No, not going to work that way.
So the strategies will be a little bit different though if you are breaking into a market that already has existing demand. This is where a lot of times I'll do a screen share with a startup and we'll look at Google. For example, I just had this conversation with a wine subscription company, and they thought they had something just amazing and unique I'm like, "Okay, I like wine. I have a wine business so I understand it a lot. We work with a lot of wine makers and wine brands that do subscriptions as well." So conceptually a lot of knowledge. He's like, "Okay great. You want to break into the Big Reds Cabernet subscription world, let's do some searches and see how people are going to find you."
So we did it. We did a search on, we knew his price points on the site. There's a lot of competition with people looking for wine subscription, red wine subscription and the price points are lower in Google Shopping. So the Wall Street Journal has one, there's a countless subscription wine clubs at this point. And when you are coming in at a higher price point, because he was giving better wine and I knew the wines he was giving away, I was like, "That's a good value. You've got some good stuff." Because he's able to buy it a different way than I can. So he gets really good pricing.

Jon:
I'll take an introduction.

Ryan:
I said, but... Yeah, easy. So he started to see Google Shopping's not going to be a way to get traffic. There's demand, but Google Shopping is price sensitive and they had two options whereas these other existing subscription companies had multiple options, get a bottle to test, really low barrier to entry on the first order. Lifetime value can be very good though in the subscription business. But then I looked at, okay, look at the top rankings organically. You're not going to be able to SEO your way to the top very quickly. It's going to be expensive to do that.
So Google is not going to be a great way to capture demand on a budget. And in the subscription space generally, you lose money on the first couple orders, because you're buying the customer and you've got to have a really solid flow for lifetime value to bring them back into the brand because your competitors are doing the same thing. And then I actually, I don't know if you've heard of Winc, but they're a massive wine subscription company.

Jon:
Well I think, didn't they just go out of business or?

Ryan:
They just went bankrupt. And they had hundreds of millions. They had done a lot of raises in money and they were in a subscription space. So as an investor you'd be like, heck yeah, they've got this AI that's going to generate like once we see what people like and they tell us they like it, then we go create a brand around that. Get into retail store. I mean they had a whole business plan that was really cool, detailed, got a lot of really smart people to invest.

Jon:
And for those who don't know you, they basically sent you a tasting kit and then you said what you liked out of that kit and then they would start sending you wine that matched your profile. That was my understanding of Winc.

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
And then they would go say, hey, there's a lot of people that like this particular version of a Pinot Noir. It's got a very unique flavor profile, whatever it happened to be like, let's go build that brand, get it into retail, hide behind the scenes and it would be great. I mean they had R&D. I mean it was great model and a lot of people believed in it and they just driving that demand, capturing it, building that lifetime value, a lot of people learn through those, the wine side of business is it, a lot of times it's an impulse buy.
You're going to the store or you're in your shopping cart online buying your meal. We pick up almost our groceries now I don't even go to the stores. But it's an impulse like, great I need wine to go with that. Let's pick up this bottle. I'm a little unique in that I have a lot of wine already so I don't need to buy at the store. But most people impulse it.

Jon:
I have that same problem. It's less of an impulse and more of a, "Man, we got to drink something because we got more wine coming."

Ryan:
Yeah. So I need to go get a meal to match my wine I have to drink, before it goes bad. But we're unique in that. So most people buy wine as they're walking through the store like, "Oh yeah, I need a bottle of wine for the night or I'm going to this party, let me get a bottle of wine." They're not planning ahead and have a bunch of bottles sitting at the house to use whenever. And then the most wine subscriptions are very short.
So as you're looking at your starting up and you want to get in the subscription space, like most brands I talked to, I don't care what you're selling, they want to look at subscriptions for lifetime value. So you've got to think about, and I did this at Joyful Dinner, we do it, subscriptions are great, but what we don't know is what the usage is going to be. Some people might buy it for one plant and they're not going to need a shaker for another year.
Some people have 20 plants and they're going to use a shaker every month, and they might not know until they get the product. So these people that are getting your product and are going to rebuy it, you have to create a plan for that. But capturing existing demand requires that conversation and plan for lifetime value. And a lot of businesses outside of the wine subscription space haven't really thought through what's that first purchase going to be, and then how am I going to get them to make subsequent purchases because that first purchase capturing demand on Google, likely is not going to generate profit. Hopefully it's a breakeven, but as an existing brand, it's going to be difficult, sorry, as a new brand into that space, it's going to be difficult to build profit on that. So Joyful Dinner can be a great example.
We had five or so SKUs entering the market and we're competing with a Miracle-Gro that had, I don't even know how many, probably 50 plus SKUs and everything. So if somebody's looking for plant food as a general search term on Google, there's a lot of demand. A lot of existing things use Google trends to see that they could convert because I could be looking for plant food, but I don't know if I want organic plant food. I don't know if I want outdoor plant food. I don't know if I might need shrub. I just said plant because it's a plant.
Miracle-Gro had a product for that. We did not. So our conversion rate was generally going to be lower than some of the bigger, more established brands. Plus, you had Home Depot competing, plus you had Amazon competing that have massive trust already. I know if I buy from Amazon and I don't like it, I can return it, even if I've used some of it.
So you have to understand that game and that's where you start having conversations around marketplaces. Need to be on marketplaces as a demand. Like where can we be where there's less competition? Walmart, Amazon, younger brands can't generally get on target.com but if you have the ability as build up to that or you know people at Target, they can get you there, do it.
So it's understanding the lifetime value, knowing you're going to lose money on that first order. And new brands hate to hear that. What they're hoping to hear from me is, "Oh, my gosh, I know exactly how to do this." You're going to spend $1,000 and I'm going to spit out $5,000 and your investors are going to be so happy, you're going to scale it and you're going to spend $100,000 to make $500,000 in two months.

Jon:
Well and I think unfortunately there's enough people selling that if you will on the internet, that it really becomes a problem. There's enough people who say, "I'll manage your ads for several hundred dollars a month and you'll be just fine and I can guarantee your return." I hear that nonsense all the time. And it's interesting. I think that as a startup, unless you have done this previously, meaning you have experience in the industry, it is so easy to get taken advantage of around driving traffic, because a lot of it is self serve so people try to do it themselves.
But I think the dark underbelly of Facebook for years was that small businesses were fueling it because they would overspend because they didn't know what they were doing. So a lot of the money that was being spent on ads on Facebook were people who didn't know how to use it but wanted to drive traffic and they would just overspend or spend in a way that is not going to give them a return on ads spend.
So I find that interesting and it is also something to be cautious about. I think what I'm hearing from you is there's a lot to consider here and it still makes sense to work with a professional if you can validate that they are legit. But it still makes sense as a startup to pay somebody to manage your ads for you. Just understand you need to have reasonable expectations about what you're going to give back. Is that fair?

Ryan:
Yes. And if you're talking to an agency as a startup, talk to another one because you want to get two people point of views because they're probably going to be slightly different. And if all they do is tell you about how awesome you are and how amazing it's going to be and how it's going to be so easy to build this business, that would throw up red flags for me. It's not easy and anybody that tells you it's going to be, hasn't done this before.
I would say 95% plus the startups I talk to, I don't take any money from them. I'm like, you're not going to pay us to do anything because it doesn't make any sense yet. Because what I can do from a marketing standpoint is not what you need at this point. You're going to lose money and that's not where you are from a financial standpoint yet. That wine company was like, "Yeah, I want to spend about $1,000 a month." I'm like, "You're not going to do it with me." You could do some other things.
And one thing I hadn't touched on yet is email. Email can be a very good way to launch, but most startups don't have email lists. So finding an opportunity to partner almost in an affiliate type space to say, "Hey, I want to find a company that has my target market and we don't compete and there's a good cross-sell opportunity."
So that wine business, for example, he had a massive resume in the restaurant world and he currently was working with a restaurant that had a large following in Southern California. I was like, what I would do if I were you, I would go to the executives of that restaurant and restaurant group and say, "Look, I want to compliment what you're doing. I want to give an exclusive deal to your customers to be able to get just a stupid deal that they wouldn't be able to say no to." I'm going to give them wine at cost essentially, to build this up, get some reviews and be able to get them in my loyalty program and email program with this brand and make you look really good as a restaurant saying, "Hey, try some of the wines you've had at the restaurant, but get it a great deal to drink at home when you're not at the restaurant."

Jon:
Great idea.

Ryan:
And people that are cooking, for example, may have great email lists around that. So an influencer or a blogger in the cooking space may be a great-

Jon:
Or even people travel who likes to go to Napa. You find people who are marketing trips to Napa and get their list and send it to them. I mean, I think there's a lot of angles to be thinking about there. And that partnership or affiliate can work extremely well and it's free, right?

Ryan:
Yeah. And you're just giving away revenue when they sell something. It's what you want to do. So I think, thinking outside the box and I'm like, what else do my target consumers do or want or use that I can reach out and make that partner look really good and even send... If I was going to be in the wine space and ask for an email, I'd be like, "I'm going to give you a subscription for free from doing this personally and then your followers are going to get this amazing deal, you're going to look awesome because of."

Jon:
Yeah. That's awesome. I think that's the best way to create demand right now, out of everything I've heard from you. So that's great.

Ryan:
It's just it's not going to be easy to do because you've got to do some of the grunt work to find those and you're going to have to probably approach 50 to 100 potential partners for that email list or influencers to get something. So it's a time, money conversation. You could hire somebody to go do that for you, or most likely you're going to have to take your time to do it. It's a side hustle. Allocate that time to every day. I'm going to spend an hour doing this, this and this to try to get this brand off the ground because there's not an easy button by going to Ryan or Jon to increase your conversion rates or increase your traffic, let's just get it work across the board, it's likely not.

Jon:
Likely not.

Ryan:
Don't pay us in your startup world.

Jon:
But I think, last point I just want to make here is, I think that I actually just had yesterday somebody come back to me on email and say, "Hey, I talked to you nine months ago and you said we were too small to work together. I've been investing in traffic. I think we're at that point now. I'd love to work with you." And I think that's what builds long-term relationships is just being honest with people. Insane.
We're not going to be able to help you. I mean, you're not going to get a return on this. Let's chat when you grow. And you're right though. It's not what they want to hear in most cases, but they do remember that and they do understand in the long term and they come back, and that reputation, and it's why we do a podcast together. I know it's the same for you, but that reputation makes a big difference and it's why we do it as opposed to the good and logical wisdom could both be a lot bigger if we just took everyone's money. But it's not sustainable and it's not how we do business. So I do agree, talk to multiple agencies, talk to multiple providers, and find the ones that are going to be a good fit and not just blow smoke the entire time, right?

Ryan:
Yeah. And it's honestly one of the sweetest conversations when somebody comes back nine months later and says, "Oh, I didn't waste my money. I did it the right way and now I'm coming back because I'm at the size that makes sense." I'm like, "Yes," somebody listened and they didn't take somebody stealing your money and telling you it was going to be rainbows and unicorns.

Jon:
That is the best free advice that I love to give. I'm like, you know what, I'm going to give you free advice because I know you can't afford to work with us anyways, and I want to see you succeed and you'll remember that. So I know that's why you do it too.

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
Awesome. Well, thank you, Ryan. This was great.

Ryan:
Yeah. Thank you, Jon.

Jon:
I appreciate your insights on this and have a wonderful year. We'll talk soon.

Ryan:
We will. Cheers.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to Drive & Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.