Scaling Ecommerce Brands From 7 to 8 Figures With Zach Stuck

Zach, my man, what's up, dude? Chase, what's going on? How are you? Good, man. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you, too. So we're here for episode three of the e-commerce opportunity. And Zach, I actually wanted to kind of jump in before I introduce you and kind of let you introduce yourself on how we actually first met. I want to say this is probably maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago. We both were on a client and I had actually been on an account for about six months. They had gone through multiple Facebook agencies. So I thought you coming in was just another Facebook agency that we weren't going to have to spend too much time with. So we kind of got thrown in the crossfires where I feel like they were pegging us head to head and trying to get you to pitch email and try to audit the stuff that we are doing and trying to get us to do the reverse. And it was just like this really uncomfortable thing. So that same type of thing had happened before with the other agencies. And it kind of was left like that. But you had actually pinged me after. It's like, hey, man, like we don't know each other. But that was really, really weird. Like not trying to step on your toes. You know, everything is all good. We're not going to pitch email. We had a really great call. I hit up Nick Shackelford and I was like, you know, Nick, you know, this guy, Zach, just had a really great call with him. Super kind. Like, what are your thoughts? Nick confirmed what I had thought. You're a great dude. And ever since, like you've been so respectful, like when you're coming onto an account that we're also on on the email side about saying, yo, we're we're not pitching email because we know you're on it. You know, just wanted to give you a heads up. How do we work together? So I just wanted to throw that out there. These aren't the things that people ever talk about. And I really respected that about you, how transparent you were and just the fact that we both had this weird taste in our mouth and you wanted to resolve it. So. So thank you. And I'm excited that you're here. Of course, man. Yeah, it's it's funny to see e-coms, a small world. So I feel like, you know, building a bad reputation, being rude, like trying to like take other people's business isn't the way to go, right? It's not the way to go, because at the end of the day, like it's small from the on our side, right? But from like on the outside, there's tons of DTC brands. There's tons of e-commerce companies. So like you can find other good founders, other, you know, people that are doing really good work. Why try and fight for that business when there's a ton out there for you to go get outside of that? So, yeah, I mean, I'm glad that I'm glad I got off on the good start from from your perspective. But yeah, it's it's how we try and run things over here. So. No, I love that, man. It's a Midwest charm, right? It is. Yeah. Midwest. Nice guy. Totally. I love it, dude. Well, thank you for being here. Now that we've kicked off, obviously, you've mentioned a little bit that you have an agency, but do you mind sharing with me and everyone listening? Like, what are you working on right now? Sure. So I run Homestead Studio. We're a growth marketing agency focused on DTC e-com, mostly physical goods. Now we work with brands usually between, you know, a million in annual revenue to 20, 30 million in annual revenue. We've worked with some brands that are a bit bigger than that, which has been a lot of fun. But our sweet spot is kind of that, you know, just getting off the ground, have some product market fit and are looking to to scale. Now, our model is pretty unique. It's not it's not what a lot of other agencies run off of. So we run under a revenue share model. And on this model, we're doing a lot of growth marketing services. So call it paid search, paid social, some email automation, some SMS automation. In some cases, we'll even do email and SMS campaign work. If it makes sense, creative for paid where we're doing like UGC creative studio photos. We have a studio in Wisconsin, which is where my home base is. And majority of our team is based. And then we're doing landing page design and dev. So think of it as like a lot of the main growth services outside of affiliate SEO and not a ton of email or SMS campaign work like one off campaign work. But we're doing that for percentage revenue. So it's much different than, you know, your percentage of spend model, which a lot of the traditional paid agencies started with. I started with this this model from day one. I was a partner at another agency prior to starting Homestead, took on a couple of freelance clients on this model, and it just worked like I was incentivized by the same goal that my clients were growing top line profitably. And as a one man show, I wasn't able to do all those services right. I wasn't shooting creative and designing emails and all that stuff. But as we started to build out our team, we've added more. So now, like the package becomes more comprehensive as we build out our team more. But yeah, we work with 20 brands currently on that kind of DTC e-commerce space. Yeah, I love that. That's that's killer, right? It seems like you could be really high touch, right? I think we talked before and you have like 15 or 20 people on your team and you have 20 clients. So you're really able to be like a great partner, which is super important. And you can make more money by doing less clients than the other model. Right. We're we're flat retainers. So we do need a lot of clients to to make decent revenue. That's awesome. So question for you when you were starting Homestead then and even now, do you ever face imposter syndrome? Oh, man, this is like the realest question ever. Totally. Totally. I mean, I'll give you some more background to that. So, you know, when I when I decided to start Homestead, I was actually freelancing for a couple other agencies. After I left the previous agency that I was a partner at, I met Andrew Foxwell and David Herman and a couple other, you know, well-known media buyers in the space. And they were able to kind of take me under their wing, make sure that I could run ads. And my goal on working with them was to like run ads to see if I could work like at their level. Right. And going into it, I was a bit more optimistic, I think, than what what I was actually capable of at the time. But after spending, call it like six months, working with with some of those guys pretty closely, I was able to learn, you know, I can hang in this space and I can build a real business around this. But yeah, I mean, imposter syndrome is like one of the realest things. I think that as a as a founder, as a, you know, an entrepreneur, like it's never probably going to go away. Right. I mean, I think that as your business grows, you kind of meet the next level of entrepreneur that you're aspiring to be. And you're always feeling like there's stuff that you're not doing. So, yeah, I mean, I would be completely lying if I said that I'd never had imposter syndrome starting Homestead or even today. I mean, I think what's changed is, you know, when I started Homestead, I think the people that I was looking at and really looking up to were running agencies. And now the people that I'm really looking up to are the people that are running like holding companies that manage, you know, Taylor Saccard, who runs Wynn Brands and people like that that have built, you know, these, you know, not just seven figure brands, but these nine figure holding companies. Because it's pretty, pretty impressive to actually be able to get to that level. So totally, totally. No, it's a great answer. I love the holding co-model as well. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit later. One thing I want to ask you about is you actually posted, I think, on Twitter somewhat recently about how like gone are the days of DTC brands scaling from, you know, seven to eight figures solely on media buying tactics. What does it come down to now? Like, can we talk about each of the things that you think has to go into going from, let's say, a million dollars to 10 million, 20 million dollars and beyond? Totally. I mean, I think at the end of the day, good media buyers are, you know, still super valuable. By all known means, it might like taking that off the table. That being said, I think that with with more advertisers in the platform, more people, you know, more brands spinning up every day. I think that the competition is higher than it's ever been, which is true. Right. We're seeing CPMs higher than they've ever been. But I think the big thing is that it just doesn't come down to like, hey, I'm running this like super finite targeting strategy with 100 different, you know, ad sets running under one campaign and, you know, really refined things. I think really what it's coming down to now is everything that's happening outside of Facebook. And I think that comes down to landing pages, building systems for like developing just constant creative like flowing through. May that be UGC? May that be studio creative? May that be, you know, motion graphics? I think it's, yeah, the cranking out more creative finding systems and building systems for that building, landing page testing tools and, you know, having the ability to run tests outside of just driving traffic to a product page or to a collection page. Email and SMS flows are huge. Like, I think that, you know, I'm sure you see this every day, but like we when we audit brands, we're auditing the full scope of what they're doing, not just Facebook. We're auditing email, Google. They're creative. Their website, their landing pages, the whole the whole thing. And none of them are putting enough energy into the automations, in my opinion. Like, I think a lot of brands kind of set it and forget it. And they're not really digging deeper beyond that. They're they're building their welcome series or abandoned cart. But they're not building all these flows post-purchase. You know, you put in all this energy from Facebook to acquire a customer. What are you doing to get them back? Right. Ideally, you're not spending money on Facebook and to get them back. You're you're building these optimizations and flows to, you know, re get them to rebuy that and then just be more creative with with offers. I mean, the the standard 25 percent off offer like consumers are used to it now. I think trying to do cool things with offers is like another compelling thing that we've seen move the needle. So I think those four are like some of the main ones that we're focused on right now. Awesome. So talking about the offers, that was great. Where does coming up with the offers lie? Does that come to the client? Is that up to them and their discretion? Is that you guys as a back and forth, like who at the end of the day, like the size on the offer is coming up with the strategy behind the offer? Usually it's us. And then usually we're probably being a little bit too ambitious and then our clients kind of reel us back a little bit. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, building custom bundles that they might not have thought of before to increase AOV, which gives us a little more room on Facebook doing that, which a lot of people have heard. That's nothing new. One big thing that we're running now is like buying X product and getting Y product free. Now, that's a great way to kind of build in selling the system versus just selling like one off products. If you can get someone to not just buy the toothpaste, but to buy the floss and the toothbrush also, it's going to get them more bought into your brand, more bought into your product. So and usually, you know, gives them a little more in a lifetime value if they come back and buy multiple products versus just one. So, yeah, usually it's on us bringing those to the table and then on our clients to, you know, shut down a lot of them. And then, you know, we're optimistic about the ones that we get approved. But yeah, that's usually how it works. Cool. That's helpful. Thank you. I know you also talked recently about like the importance of product market fit. And I know that obviously sounds obvious, but where does product market fit typically play into the mix of what you mentioned or like even in general? Like what's the importance of that? So, I mean, the way that I think about this kind of comes down to the way that we even look at brands that we want to work with. Now, we've you know, since we started Homestead, it's been a year, year and a half since I started Homestead. We've audited 250 brands that have wanted to work with us. And, you know, we've worked with a lot less than that. And one of the big things that we do in the beginning is honestly determine like, you know, what are what are what are what's a product's margin? You know, what type of room do we have to play with? Who else is in this ecosystem that they're trying to sell to? Is there something really unique about the product that they're selling? These are the things that lead to product market fit, in my opinion. Now, if you're going to try and launch a DTC brand today and you're like, hey, I want to launch this toothpaste brand, I'm just keep using toothpaste because that's what we're talking about before. If you can't come to the table with something really unique, there's already so many players in the DTC ecosystem running Facebook, Instagram ads, Snapchat ads. It's going to be really hard to stand out. So trying to define and find that product market fit, I think really comes down to the few things that I mentioned. Having really good margins, you can actually spend to learn having something that's really unique, that no one else has really done or at least able to position a product in a unique way. Like those, those are huge, huge, huge variables for that. And I think that if a brand can have kind of have those checkmarks, they'll usually be able to start Facebook ads at a basic level, do email flows at a basic level, have a site that's nothing crazy, just using a Shopify theme and probably get to 50K, 100K a month. But if you're going to try and do the same thing that everyone else is doing, it's going to be much harder. So the brands that we try and identify that we want to work with are the ones that have already found that product market fit, that have gotten that traction because of those those things. That's awesome. And then internally, when you're looking at these 100, 200 brands that you're considering working with, who does that fall on to actually bet that? Is that you? Is it a kind of a group of people on your team? I guess it's a set person. Like who makes that decision at the end of the day? Sure. So gut, like final decision is usually on me. You know, a lot of the so we do audits for all these brands. So like we're going to audit, like I shared before, Facebook, Google, you know, what they're running, what they ran on YouTube, what they're doing in email, their websites, what's happening behind the scenes of Shopify. What they're doing from a creative perspective, landers on stuff. Now, our team does that. Like, you know, we've got a leadership team and kind of like the core individual within the company that does each piece of that audit, who's like the expert in that in that phase. But then when it comes down to choosing a brand that we actually want to work with, that's usually me. And again, like it comes down to those few factors. Do they have the margin to play at scale? Do they have something unique that we can actually spend six, seven figures a month on ad spend for and move the needle for them for in, you know, are they in a in a market that's too saturated or not? Because I think the biggest thing that agencies, you know, that are inexperienced make, make, you know, make guarantees or say that they're going to do really well on is when they don't look at those things right when they don't take into consideration how much room do I actually have to acquire customers? How big is this market size and how competitive is it already? You know, they're saying, yeah, we can crush whatever this previous agency was doing with numbers wise, but they're not looking at the whole ecosystem that they're trying to play in. So that's kind of how we do it. So we have individual people on the team do the audits and then I kind of get the final say, decide if we do want to work with them or not. Nice. And knowing what you know, right? Obviously, your model is a little bit unique compared to traditional, you know, percentage of spend or traditional retainer. Do you think if you had a different model, you would be spending as much time and effort auditing brands the same exact way? Like, are you betting any kind of brands the way that you are because you're only focused on taking a small amount because a small amount of clients will lead to a decent amount of revenue? Like, would you basically do things the same way, even if you had a different model? Good question. I mean, I think that the in-depth level of like how deep we go in the audits, we would still do, even if we were just a Facebook shop, just an email or just a creative shop. We would because I think obviously the biggest thing that you can do as an agency to win is retention. Right. So if you're still taking on everybody, you're not going in as deep. Your chances of something not working is probably much higher. Right. So we're trying to find partners that we can actually hit their goals. Like we turn down a lot of business just because people come to us with with their goal return on ad spend or their goal M.E.R. that they're trying to hit. And we just don't feel comfortable that we can hit that at scale. So, you know, for us, I think it would still be a big, big piece. Cool. That's helpful. I figured, but I wasn't sure. That makes sense. So for you as like the agency CEO, agency owner, agency lead, whatever you kind of view yourself as, how do you view your role? What is your day to day look like? Totally. So, you know, I've actually brought on three junior partners in the company now to kind of take on more of what you'd consider the day to day. Right. A lot more of the like, hey, there's a problem in this account or with this client. Those issues go to now my leadership team first before they even come to me. So that's been great. That's been a good experience. Big learning opportunity. Good, big learning experience to try and like a step away from from handling all the problems and issues that come up when running an agency. But yeah, so my day to day mostly consists of, you know, doing these audits, new business development calls, coaching with the team. Like a lot of it is just like just coaching, trying to get everything out of my head into our team's head. May that be media buying thoughts? May that be the way that I look at creative, the types of ads that we want to make? But a lot of it is honestly just like looking at the whole ecosystem, studying brands, studying what people are up to, talking about on Twitter, reading articles, you know, just trying to learn as much as I can to stay ahead so that I can take that knowledge and like, you know, simplify what the most valuable pieces of it is and then pass that off to the team. So it's like half of it is that and the other half is, you know, actually, you know, doing biz dev and then coaching, coaching the team. Awesome. Yeah, it makes sense. So for you, in terms of like hiring new team members and like what's like the most important one or maybe even a few things that you're considering, like, is it culture? Is it skill set? Is it something else? Like what's like the number one or number two, you know, most important thing that you actually care about? Yeah. I mean, we hired for culture first, like without a doubt. I mean, we've hired people that have had little to no Facebook ad experience that are now our lead, lead buyers on our team. These are people that, you know, we knew friend of a friend or just knew of this person, saw them on LinkedIn. They looked interesting and they were posting relevant content, but they didn't have a job. Like we, you know, we brought on a gentleman. His name is Connor. He was a medical sales and he was doing some freelance Facebook ad stuff. It's very, very small scale. Super awesome guy, really good fit, super nice, ambitious, really wanted to get into e-comm. We brought him on as a junior buyer and now he runs some of our biggest accounts. So making sure that they're people that I feel like I could go get a beer with or go get the coffee with at any time without feeling like there's going to be, you know, some clashing there is like super important. So yeah, I mean that's, we're actually a team of 15 and not a team of 30 right now, probably because we're like very particular about who we bring on. Hiring is probably the hardest thing. Like if you were to ask me what's the hardest thing right now to do is hire not just like talented people, but talented people that are also like good nice people that I can get along with daily. Yeah, dude. Amen there. That's our biggest struggle as well. So we'll totally hear you. Everyone loves tools. So let's talk about tools. Like what tools are you using day to day to manage the business? Like what are you using project management and communication, you know, for email, for SMS? Like can we talk about just some of the tools that you guys are using that help facilitate your business? Sure. Yeah. I mean we're pretty, pretty simple. We use Asana for project management. Everyone on the team uses Asana to kind of manage their day to day tasks. We've got some cool like Asana forms built out. So like if a media buyer wants to request creative from our creative team there's just like Asana forms built where they can just punch in their requests that gets kicked into Asana. We have a studio manager. His name is Matt who like manages the requests and kind of moves them along. So that's pretty cool. Obviously Asana is a pretty well known tool outside of that. I mean we do a lot of stuff in Google sheets. We use like super metrics and a couple other tools to pull data out of call it Facebook, Klaviyo, other like marketing, you know, tools and build out, you know, dynamic sheets. We even do that off of like our revenue. So like because we're a percentage of revenue for our clients, we can actually pull like day to day Shopify revenues for our clients and then we can calculate like our percentage of revenue so we can see on a day to day basis like how much are we as Homestead making, not only our clients, which is pretty cool. So that way we can kind of track like forecast what we're doing and kind of see the trends, see trends per brand if there's dips, stuff like that. We do a ton with Google sheets and then, yeah, I mean outside of that, I mean we use Figma for design. That's been a huge shift. We went from like just your standard Adobe stuff over to Figma for landing page design, creative design. That's really sped stuff up. So I mean outside of that, nothing else kind of crazy. A lot of the Google suite stuff, super metrics. Yeah, that's the majority of them. Nice. That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I've got two or three more questions personally and then there's some questions from Twitter that I want to ask you before I have a random kind of topic to talk about at the very end of this. So these are kind of more just like personal questions about, you know, you to get to know you. What are some things that you've personally been thinking about lately or researching either personally or professionally? What are things that have been top of mind for you that you catch yourself, I don't know, spending a half hour researching and you're like, oh my God, why did I spend my time on that? Or, oh wow, that was really interesting. Does anything come to mind? Yeah, I mean, I personally, I can answer that first. I mean, like health is really interesting to me. I mean, I just bought an infrared sauna that we have in our house now, which is pretty awesome. You know, longevity, all that good stuff. Like I spend a decent amount of time researching it. And, you know, I think I'm going to continue to spend more and more time of just like my day to day doing more of that, trying to stay healthy. I think staying healthy is like the most important thing. And if you're healthy, you like usually have a healthy business, too. So you've got the energy to give to your team and to your clients and all that good stuff. So that's like on a personal side, what's been really interesting, I think this is like business slash personal, but I've been doing a lot of time just researching like how private equity works, how these bigger holding companies work, how, you know, when a company gets acquired, then raises money and how that all works and how, you know, that can be beneficial in some cases, like understanding like the next scale of business is what I've been spending a lot of time on. That's been pretty interesting and learning some pretty cool things about that, too. You know, I have a couple of friends that just had their businesses acquired and then once they're acquired, they're raising money. And essentially, like the concept here is this like private equity thought process where, you know, this this firm will buy your company for ten million dollars, then they'll go raise ten million dollars on one hundred million dollar valuation. They'll get their capital back and they still have their own capital then to allocate to growing the business. Right. So it's like just like smart financial stuff like that to grow a business. Kind of the next stage has been what I've been spending more more time just like digging into and learning more about, because prior to this, I haven't really gotten to that stage yet. So I don't know a ton about it. Yeah, I love that. That's fascinating. And the last question for me before we open up the questions from Twitter, how do you do things that you don't want to do? Oh, man, that's what I how do I do things that I don't want to do, the bad habit answer is like slam too much caffeine, have too much coffee and just like force myself to do it. I think what I've learned more lately is to like delegate more things that I that I'm not good at. I brought on in a part time assistant this last year who's been a lifesaver on a lot of things. Call that like even just QA and contracts or like helping do that type of work that is super draining to me. So I think finding the sweet balance of like, you know, still having, you know, the ability to do hard work, I think is still important. I think if you don't do any hard work, it's it doesn't show you like the stuff that you're really good at, that you enjoy. But then the other side of it is like delegation is huge. And I think that if you can find the right person that you can trust to do work to to your quality or even better, like for the things that you don't want to do, totally worth it to hand it off. So those are my two, those are my two options. But I mean, I think when I started Homestead, it was definitely in the like, let's slam a bunch of coffee and like just force brute force my way through this thing, which obviously isn't isn't the best way to handle it. Yeah, that's awesome. I appreciate that. All right. So now some questions from Twitter. Looks like we have three questions. You actually, I think, answered the first one, which was love to know more about your rev share model and how you vet clients. I think you covered that one pretty in depth. Do you have anything to add? I think you did a good job of that one already. Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing is that we do, you know, a percentage of revenue that tears down over time. It's not just like a flat percentage. I think that that's one question that I get a lot. So in most cases, we're starting closer to like five percent of of gross Shopify revenue. And then, you know, it tears down. The bigger the brand that comes to work with us, the lower that percentage will be to start. The smaller the brand, a little bit higher. So we've got a little bit more incentive with brands that are a little bit smaller because we can take a little bit bigger piece of the small pie to start. Obviously, the goal is to grow bigger. So that's how we do it. That's that's pretty much all I have to add, though. Yeah. One follow up question there. Do you do contracts with clients in terms of it's a three month, six month, nine month, 12 month commitment or is it all month to month? Yes, we do three month and then month to month in some rare cases with like a, you know, a brand that we've been working with for a while. You might try and lock them in a little bit longer, you know, after we have like a year track record or maybe even just like a little bit more. I mean, we're pretty, pretty new still as an agency. But if the few that we have, like a year's worth of, you know, really solid work for we'll try and see if we can get them in a little bit longer just to kind of guarantee our revenue, knowing that we've already got a great relationship, results are really good. So it shouldn't be a problem for the client, but it's more of a safety net. But yeah, we think that 90 days is a good time period to kind of test that test out an agency. I think less than that is, you know, you're kind of just winging it based on, you know, trying to get something to work within 90 days at scale is tough. Right. Or less than 90 days is tough. But I think within that, that's a good amount of time for a brand to say, hey, it's not working. You're not hitting our goals. It's not a good fit. And then we're cool letting them go. Yeah. And I think I think you would probably agree with this that it's almost also the opposite, too, where it's like not only the brand vetting you for 90 days, but your brand vetting the brand. Right. And that's just as important. So for you to be able to have the out after 90 days, if it's not a good fit. Totally. Also, you know, really important question I got. I think you also answered this one to some degree, but I'd like to kind of go a little bit further on this one. What looks like the biggest obstacle or barrier for agency? And I know you mentioned hiring. Right. So can we talk about that? So 15 people, what percentage of those people are in Wisconsin versus which percentage are remote? Sure, two thirds of our team are in Wisconsin, a third is remote. I think that, you know, the the thing about the Wisconsin team is most of them are on like the creative side or on like the leadership side. We found that obviously to do creative from a studio standpoint, you can't really have people in Denver shooting in your studio in Wisconsin. Right. So that's part of it. I'm not opposed to hiring remote. I think that find, you know, it opens up the book to find a lot more talent and cool people that resonate with what you're trying to build. So definitely not opposed to it. Some of our, you know, two of our junior partners are actually remote. They're both in Spokane, Washington. So, yeah, I think, you know, there's that. And then there was a second question to it instead of. Yeah, basically just like the biggest challenge and barriers. And I was asking about remote versus, you know, in-house. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, challenges in the agency. I mean, new business luckily hasn't been the issue. I've been really fortunate that we, you know, never had to do any outbound work or anything like that. It's just been inbound or referral. Super grateful for that. But I mean, I think it's finding really, you know, really smart people that are also just like nice at the end of the day, like I met some really talented people in the interview process, but they just like don't resonate with my core values and our team's core values. So that's been tough for sure. And then, I mean, outside of that, I think it's just like always setting perfect client expectations is really, really hard. I think that, you know, setting them as best as you can from the beginning is great. But then, like, obviously having to do that all the time and continuing to like reset expectations is really important. I think that we've we've definitely gone through a couple lost a few clients because we've either gotten stagnant with we set expectations at the beginning, we hit those expectations. We felt like we were still aligned with those expectations. And then they came back to us and said, hey, you're doing something completely different than what we wanted you to do. Even though results are good, we're going to go a different direction. So I think that's the other thing that we've been leaning more into now is trying to like build systems around setting expectations because that that's that's tough to do. Yeah, the only thing I'll add is like the expectation needs to be set in the prospecting phase. Right. If a client becomes a client and then you trust expectations, it's too late. So I think that's been a huge learning for us is like it actually starts earlier than you would think, like in the very first time they make contact with you. For us, right. We have a waitlist right now. So it's setting the expectation of, hey, we can work together in two to three months. This is what we're planning to do. This is how we work. These are the systems that we use. Right. So we really open kind of the envelope of what we're doing so they could see early on whether we are or not going to be a great fit. So I think that's super, super important. And then the last question I have before I want to talk about just some random topic I was looking at. The other question was like how you started and scaled. We already talked about that. But really, the question here was client getting lead generation and most profitable service. So you kind of just alluded to most of your business or all your business has been inbound. So is that primarily been referrals of existing clients and stuff that you're doing on Twitter or what does that look like? Yeah, Twitter, man. Twitter's crazy. Bill, I'd say probably half of the agency of business just from Twitter. You know, I think the thing that I've tried to do from the beginning to share as much of is I kind of our process and my thought process of like doing the things outside of just media buying and how that can move the needle for some of these small RTC brands. And by posting those kind of case study threads, we will generate 20, 30 leads per thread, which is kind of crazy. And that's led us in a really good direction. And then outside of that, yeah, just finding brands that we resonate with, the founders and the team and, you know, they've got a good product and we do really good work for them. I mean, they're happy to introduce us to other colleagues. So I'd say the other half is just just referrals. So it's I'd say half from from Twitter and the other half, yeah, from from referrals from our current clients. That's one more question that I'll ask. The last part of that question was of the 20 clients you work with, how many of them are owned by the same entrepreneur? Like you have one entrepreneur that has two or three brands with you or they all have one business with you? These are all individual brands. Yeah. So these are all all separate companies. We have we do work with a private to private equity firms that we work on, like one of their brands. Each each firm, we work on one brand with, you know, plans here in the near future to take on more of their brands. But yeah, otherwise, all individual individual companies. Nice. And the last part of this question, I'm not asking for like margins or numbers or anything you don't want to share, but what's the most profitable service that you sell? And I guess maybe for you, it's a little bit different just because you're getting a rev share on the whole thing. But do you have any thoughts on like profitable services? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, at the end of the day, the majority of the growth from the brands that we do still comes from paid like I think paid still drives the majority of the top line revenue for these brands, which is then we get a piece of that. So call that Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Google, YouTube, like that kind of sweet. Now, of those, like still Facebook, Instagram are kind of the bread and butter. They're still moving the needle more than even like the Snapchats of the world. But I mean, the most profitable for us is when we're able to take a brand on right when they're launching. And in those cases, we'll sometimes even be able to negotiate like a 10 percent of growth Shopify that tears down over time. Once we hit kind of like 100k a month, then it tears down 500k a month, it tears down a million a month, it tears down. The brands that we've been able to bring on that way that we we believe in the product, they hit, they check those boxes, right? Great margin, unique product, haven't really seen anyone else do this in the like Facebook ads ecosystem. They've got nothing else figured out yet from the marketing side, just have a great product. Those are the brands that we we make the most money off of because those are the ones that we're able to take from five, 10 grand a month in revenue to half a million a month in revenue in three to six months. And we'll pull, you know, 10 to 5 percent in that range of that revenue. So those are kind of our sweet spot. Those are really hard to find. We've definitely found a few of them. But yeah, other than that, I mean, single product brands are are really like what, you know, we specialize in. If there was like one way to describe the homestead brands that we crush for is we've got a single product that might have some like accessory skews to it, but like one hero product versus like a huge catalog of products, we're usually able to scale those much faster. Right. I mean, I think it's it's kind of once you start to understand like why it's less, it's less work to explain that one product in 50 million ways. Right. If you're trying to sell T-shirts and pants and jackets and hats and, you know, as an apparel brand, it's going to be a different positioning for each product where this is just one product. You know, we can put more emphasis into figuring out what's it going to take to sell it. So, yeah, that's that's our best, most profitable way to to to grow brands. That's killer. No, I appreciate that. The last thing I want to end with. So I had Nick on last week. We talked about drunk purchases and e-commerce and whatnot. But today I was researching and looking at another topic I want to talk to you about. This is a dumb question, but in Wisconsin, are there Trader Joe's or Trader Joe's? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's some like South Wisconsin. Not up by me, but yeah, I know Trader Joe's for sure. Yeah, cool, cool. So Trader Joe's, I guess they have this thing called two buck chuck where they sell wines from anywhere from like two dollars, like three dollars and 80 cents. Right. It's like this Charles Shaw's brand, two dollar beers or two dollar wines. Any sense of how many bottles since 2002 they've sold of this wine? Oh, man. Since what year? Since 2002. How many bottles do you think they've sold? So call it 20 years. In 20 years, they're selling two dollar bottles. Oh, man. I don't know how many stores there are. Maybe there's like five hundred. I'm trying to do rough math in my head here. A million, a million bottles would be my guess. They've actually sold over a billion bottles since two. Oh, my. In this article, that's it. It's mind blowing, right? Yeah, that's mind blowing in this article from 2018. So I'm sure it's even more than that. But at one point in some locations, they're selling as many as six thousand bottles per day or about 16 percent of the average store's daily sales was coming from this one product. Just insane. So the next question I have is like on a two dollar bottle of wine, like you have any sense of like how they actually make money, like what things they do from logistics, from. I mean, my my guess would be that they're not making any money off of those bottles of wine, they're like the way to get people in the store. Right. That would be my assumption. But I don't know, otherwise, this wine is probably pretty trash, I've never had it before, but I can't imagine making anything decent, any decent wine for two dollars a bottle, unless it's like a tiny bottle of wine that I haven't seen. Yeah, I mean, I think it's no, I don't know. I have no idea. My assumption is they're losing money on it to get people to come to the store to buy snacks, to buy chips and salsa with it, to buy whatever charcuterie board, all that kind of stuff. That'd be my guess. And I don't have the exact margins on it. Somewhere on here it said like the the cost. I think it was somewhere on here was the cost. But the way that they're trying to make this break even or profitable is by cutting costs. So they have really, really cheap corks and really cheap bottles. It sounds like I haven't tried this either. They have really cheap land, which I thought was kind of interesting. So in California, we've got like Napa Valley, which is like the premier, right, really expensive. They actually have stuff in Central Valley. So just like the location is also like what's been helpful. And then just like the economies of scales and through bulk buying of grapes, it's like how they're actually able to make money. And it actually says that like they're like a 500 million dollar a year company now, which is just absurd. Yeah, that's that's mental. That's crazy. I that billion number threw me off big time. I definitely wouldn't have anticipated that. That's super cool, though, I thought. So my gut was like, I'm going to come headspace right now. My gut is like you're going to tell me that they lost like five dollars on it, but it was a good way to get people in in the door. And so you were like, hey, brand should be doing something like this. Right. What can you sell for two dollars that maybe cost you five? But get someone in the door to spend 30. That's where like that's where my head went with it right away. But that's funny. Yeah, it's super interesting, though, I just actually found the number. So it's saying, according to this article, that the cost about a dollar 50 per per bottle. Right. So it looks like they have like a 50, maybe 50 cents, like a dollar, depending on how much it's selling for, where that accounts for like processing, packaging, labor, shipping and the wine itself actually makes up 30 to 40 percent of that cost. So, again, didn't expect you to know any of this. I didn't know any of this, but I'm trying to make a point for like this podcast just to end on something so random. I appreciate you entertaining that. We're going to wrap up. What's the best place for people to connect? I'm assuming it's your probably your Twitter. Yeah, Twitter's great. Zach, I'm stuck on there. Obviously, feel free to DM me. DMs are open. Try to hit everybody back on there as much as I can. So, yeah, that's great. It's a great place. Cool. So, Zach, Z-A-C-H, and not with a K, so Z-A-C-H-M, as in Mary, the letter, and then the last name, which is S-T-U-C-K. So I'll link that so people can have it. But Zach, I'm stuck. Zach, thanks so much for being your brother. Thanks, Chase. Great chat. See ya.