Scaling 3 Businesses With Nick Shackelford Whose Spent $100m+ on Facebook Ads & Instagram Ads

Hey guys, we're here for episode two of the e-commerce opportunity. I've got my longtime friend and business partner and overall great guy, Nick Shackelford. What's going on, brother? Hey brother, it's good to see you. I know it's been, it's been a while since we've been able to actually talk. I think this is the first time in, let's say, two weeks we're actually gonna get an hour to kind of shoot the ---- or 30 minutes to shoot the ----. So I'm excited, man. I'm pumped and people are both gonna be watching this and also listening to it. If you're listening to it, Nick's got a killer mustache on right now. So maybe worth watching on YouTube just for a few seconds to do that. But Nick, I know a lot of people obviously know you. Do you mind just starting like with what you're working on? I know you obviously have a lot. What are you working on right now? Three things, three things specifically. Structured, which I refer to as the mothership. All things that make all other things possible. And then we have Geek Out, which I'll dug right into that because we just got back from our very first in-person event. So Geek Outs are, for lack of a better term, high-level mastermind or education team. The core purpose is for those that can afford to come to an event like this. On the back end, James, which James and I also worked as a partner on this one. We have an academy called Clicks Academy where we're able to take those that are in halfway houses or getting back on their feet and teaching them online marketing because the thesis or the ethos that we say is the internet doesn't discriminate. Like it's just green or red. It doesn't care who you are, what race you are, what knowledge base you are. It's if you can put the extra work in, kind of like what you, myself, and James. If you earn it and it's green and positive and up to the right, you're gonna get more opportunities. And the final one is Constant Creative, which was a wild, wild bet that we made end of last year. And now it's just kind of coming to fruition. That's where the market, that's where the trend is going is content creation as fast as possible. Awesome, yeah, I appreciate that. We're gonna dive into all those in one second, but with those three businesses, with home life, with personal brand, how do you think about like splitting your time and how do you actually split your time across everything that you're working on? I think this is gonna change in, so we're doing this on March 25th. I think this will change middle of April because I'm in the process of actually hiring a full-time assistant. And it's not to run grocery errands or do those things because I actually enjoy the mundane tasks, kind of takes away from the life that we live of like we have to have a decision and have to have an answer on 99.9% of the things that we do like that's our job is to have answers. But it's more so if there's an organization of inbox or organization of who to communicate with or people can have the answers that I don't have to necessarily give them, but there's a place for them to find it. I want that assistant to be able to be an extra brain for me for lack of a better term. Right now, I think my planning and operation is literally live and die by my calendar. Mondays and Tuesdays is internal team, whether it's the geek out structured or constant creative collaboration. Wednesday, Thursday is outbound, who am I meeting with, other new businesses, new brands. And then Friday is usually like a reflection and me time. My time in a calendar, which I mean, you obviously have access to this, 530 to 845, that's thought work. Like that's Monday through Friday, even sometimes Saturday and Sunday, that's a lot of my heavy thought works. And weekends aren't necessarily for work, but it's like ideation around concepts or ideation around, we have an event coming up in Miami, right? Like I want new structures of speakers with sponsors to do a joint talk. That's never done before. How does that kind of look? So I get to get through some of those fun things on the weekend. That's awesome. So was your calendar, the way that you've mapped it out, has it always been like this, or is this something that you are AB testing? Is this something that's recent? Like, how did you get from the point of being like, no organization to very organized where each day and each window of time has its own thing? What I realized was I was getting mad at myself because I wasn't getting stuff done. And I was like, why am I not getting this done? And then I go look at the calendar and I go, someone put that on my calendar, and I never got to do what I necessarily thought was the highest impact thing. It was just, oh, it was on my calendar, so I did it. So now I'm having to book my own time to remind myself, hey, go to the dentist. Actually go take care of yourself. Go take the dogs to the dog park. Those things, I need that space or else you and I both enjoy the act of working. And that's a good thing and a bad thing. But I, as a shackle for it is my mom has this, my sister has this, my brother, we like output. We just like to continue to do. And it's not always healthy because you're super intrigued rather than like looking at the forest. I think that's the most cliche, but it's like, that is what it is. That is why and how I'm making my decisions. So the calendar right now is really going to be where I make my decision. If it's not there, then I'm not doing it. In my mind, I can justify if it didn't get done because if it was important for me, I would have put it on that calendar. For instance, this meeting, today I had 14 calls. This is 15. And it's like the most important thing that I had all day. So this morning was planning going through all your notes you sent me. Dude, I love that. I appreciate that. This next session is really to me like what this podcast is really all about. Like I really want to dive into like the opportunities in e-commerce. And for you, I think there's three different opportunities that you're focused on, right? And each of the business has a different opportunity, right? It's the structured, which is the agency, right? 50, 55 people working towards helping clients. You've got constant, which is helping people with edits of assets for ads and for other channels and then geek out events. So I want to go one by one. On the structured side, on the agency side, like what's the opportunity there? Why an agency? What are some of the learnings? You know, if people wanted to start an agency, would you recommend them to start like you did in paid social? I know there's a lot there, but there's a lot of questions I want to talk about picking your brain and around why and what. Sure. No, these are, I haven't reflected on this in a while. So this is gonna be fun. Why an agency? So I've built or been a part of building multiple agencies before this that weren't necessarily like mine. And I, what I really, really like is I, I like the problem solving and spending money. I get that it's core problem solving and spending money is what I really, really love. And I never, ever enjoyed product development, product iteration, packaging, design. Like that, that doesn't get me excited. I know it's important now being in the game for eight years. Like I get why that's important, but it isn't something that I wake up and go like, oh, I can't wait. Can't wait to deal with this. Well, if you don't know what direction you want to be, remember I was, I was an athlete. I was a soccer player. And I thought I was going to be a high school coach at modern day in Ville Park. Like that thought was my job was I'm going to coach kids and make 50 grand a year. And so I wake up every day going, I get to choose who I want to work with. I get to be who I want to be. And I can create this persona that is thankfully rooted in who I really am. And on the agency side, if you don't know what you want to do, it's a perfect place to go. And what I mean by this is like, I don't have a product that I'm fully in love with that I want to pour my heart into. Like some of these brand owners that want to build that. I don't know if there's a specific traffic source or a thing about agency work or marketing in general that I'm just in love with. I just enjoy all of it, right? For me, I'm an acquisition guy. I like being the person that's the most expensive bill at the end of the month, because I have to justify that. I have to eat what I kill. And for me on the agency side, you get to work with a lot of different people and it's EQ and IQ. EQ of how we're collaborating, of how we're communicating, of how we're having to lead someone towards an answer that we know it's in their best interest, but we can't outright say it to them because they're not going to get it unless I like play it and lay it out for them. That's an art in itself. Plus the IQ is I got to be smart enough to figure this out. I got to understand who I need to go to if I need help. That never, you don't really get to learn that if you're on an internal team or if you're in any other industry, because you kind of have to stay in your lane. You and I both know is I don't touch anything on email. You don't touch anything on acquisition, but when we do come together and discuss those things, it helps both of them. It helps my game, it helps your game. And so I think on agency, if you're looking to start one, first, you're the one that posts most of the content. Up until $10,000, it's how do we get more clients? And then after $10,000, how do we not lose these clients? Because it's half onboarding, it's half acquisition, but it's way more retention, which is not necessarily from all performance. I always used to joke, you can have performance and you can have a relationship. If performance goes down, relationship will hold you up. If relationship goes down, but performance keeps you up, you'll be good. If you lose relationship and lose performance, you're never going to win. Yeah, no, I love that. So over the past year, right, obviously the coming together, before you were just doing paid social, now you're overseeing and you have email, SMS, paid social and content. Knowing what you know now about all four of the things, right, you have a look underneath the hood in each department, everything from profitability to resources needed to the number of clients you can take on. Knowing what you know, if you were to start an agency right now, which service would you start with? Would you do paid social all over again, in 2021? Would you do email? Would you do SMS? What do you think you would start right now? Yeah, this is a huge, huge question. So as the CEO and having to be across all of them, you and I both have very similar beliefs around, based upon our upbringing, based upon single parent life, based upon being with our mothers and understanding that talking about money was very taboo and for a good and a bad reason. I'm 30 years old and I'm just understanding cash is something that you need to accumulate, to deploy, to make you more, right? It took me 30 years to realize this and it's not my mom's fault, it's not my dad's fault, but I just always had this weird disrespect towards, no, no, no, money will be there, like, oh, I'll go find if I need it. Right now, if I were to do this, I think they're all, there's a weird, weird, weird structure because I have understanding of the margins and I have understanding of like overhead and I have understanding of like retention and upside downside. On the content side, why I love it, why teams like VisCap Media and Chamber Media, why content is so profitable is because you can kind of allocate the same designers across multiple projects and you can kind of charge a premium if you're really good at it, right? So you can do a 30, 40, $60,000 package at a 60 plus percent margin if you manage variable costs, right? We're learning that through Josh that's supporting us. Well, on social, you have infinite upside if you crack something and it really does pop, meaning you can have that same media buyer for our team. Like we do about a four to one, five to one, depending on the need of the brands. That means that's one media buyer and if he has his portfolio or his like book of business and they're able to crack at a massive scale and we take upside in percentage of spend or we take upside of site-wide revenue, huge upside, right? But the volatility of if you don't do that and if you don't crack it, margins are a little bit lower and the brands are a little bit more stressed because we oftentimes are driving majority of revenue for their company. So as you and I both understand on social, they want the new hack, right? They want the next best thing and we've actually lost brands that we love from people that we love saying, hey, you didn't prepare us best for iOS 14.5 or iOS change and I'm like, listen, I don't know what's gonna happen. I'm not gonna make you go sign up for a service or pay for something that I don't know what the outcome is going to be. So there are, we get a lot of inbound there, more inbound than most, but the retention at times kind of drops if it's not the right fit. Then you have email and SMS and for the lack of, for right now, I'll probably group those together because I don't know a full SMS firm. I think more SMS is more like a bolt on play. Email, it's really difficult to fire a team that does great design, great copy and is understanding your planning because email is almost, and this is probably where I would start in hindsight, I launched an email team because if you can understand those core things, you're not gonna lose anybody, especially if you can start putting in some really cool retention bonuses or you can put in a couple of like revenue bonuses from email-driven, man, I would go in that direction quickly. Yeah, I think the thing that you just ended with right there, right, also too on the retention side, the way that we bill is on a monthly retainer, right? So every single month, they know what they're in for, right? It's pretty easy to say, we paid these guys $5,000 and they generated us 50,000, they generated us 100,000, right? Or with social and these things, it's like the more you make, the more that you take, right? Which is good and bad. Some people kind of get a little bit greedy at times and other people are okay with it because that's what they sign. So, no, that makes sense, that's helpful. On the, I wanna talk about Geek Out in one sec, so not yet, but at Geek Out, I know the common theme is everyone was talking about content in their presentations. Can you elaborate on like, why did you launch a content studio? You know, what does that team look like? Like, what's the solve there? Like, can you talk about the content in particular? Because that's something everyone's talking about, that's something that's pretty new for the business. Yeah, no, that's good questions today. So, Chandler Welling and the Welling media team had a really, really large exit. I won't go into numbers because I found them out a little bit recently. And it was on a multiple that was larger than a multiple that we would have gotten if we were just performance team. Like, we just managed the media and it just sent the campaigns. It was a lot different, okay? And then talking through potential acquisitions, talking through those that gave us a couple LOIs, they all kept bringing up content. And this was back, obviously our studio's in Playa and we have decent overhead because we have a full studio. We have a small team, team of four, not including any editors that we pull in from whether email or social, team of four that's able to crank out a good amount of revenue on that smaller team. And we always kept getting these questions of like, hey, we're requesting this style of content consistently. And it got to the point where Jake and I looked at each other and go, we have this unbelievable, talented kid named Joe. He lives in Buffalo, New York. He doesn't know how to build a company. He doesn't know how to build a team, but he's ******* raw and he has a good ability. He has a good eye, right? And I looked at him and I was like, you're a franchise quarterback. Like you, I definitely can't put you in yet, but I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna work with you. And we're almost at it coming up on a year on him. The department's pushing, finally pushing profitability. He's leading some of the decision-making. He's leading a designer, he's leading a project manager. And he's starting to see this person develop and the content that we're producing. Now I'm learning this because I have insights to Chamber. I have insights to Welling, I have insights to VizCap. I have insights to bacon and eggs. Everybody has a different style and we're trying to figure out where do we land within this? We're not super performance, but we're not super branded. Branded is like a Harmon Brothers Chamber Media anchor video, right? Performance is like VizCap Media where they have like the pops and the shebangs and it's really like, whoa, caught your eye, driving home USPs. We're like somewhere in the middle, meaning we can go some really nice UGC or we can go highly produced in studio feel. And I don't know what our true identity is just yet other than we're not full brand or not full performance. We're right somewhere in the middle and that really changes and depends on the type of brands we have because we don't have a full direct response brand. And we do have some really beautiful brands that need to be more direct response. So it's kind of like edging them closer to be completely honest, when you're able to build content, have social acquisition and have retention, those are the three most extensive pieces that at that point, you have your own giant marketing department, which our goal at Structured is we wanna own our brands, right? We wanna partner and be able to manage top, bottom and middle of funnel. I love that. It's a great way to round out Structured. I now wanna talk about Constant. Like what is Constant? What's the opportunity there? What are some of the big learnings? I know it's a harder business to run than it looks like on the surface. Yes, it is. Because we saw this space and I'll do a shout out to the team at No Limit Creatives. These guys, they're the big dogs in the space, right? They're the biggest dogs in our space. And what Jeff has built is a behemoth, meaning like when you have so many brands, so many designers and it's working around the world and you're delivering a subjective thing, like, oh, is this pretty? Everyone views it or everyone sees that content and they're like, oh, that looks really good. Rather than saying like, okay, thank you so much. I'll let you know how it performs. That's difficult, right? That's what we have as the agency because we understand because we're performance people, it's an iterative process, not a perfection process. And so we sit here and go Constant Creative is made for a marketer or an agency or a brand that needs more output of what's already working or a different perspective on what performance media looks like. Because this is selfishly built for our own. This wasn't a service until we go like, hey, we need to pay for all these designers that we don't want to put on overhead or unstructured. It was our own thing that we're using. And Jake was like, I think we can make this into something where people would pay for it. And we were the cheapest solution, just try to get people on board. And now we're slowly like incrementally raising our prices on it. But it's a unique reason why we're doing this. And it used to be tactics and it used to be media buying skills in platform. I still think there's a little bit element to that, but it really comes down to the name is clear structures of testing content that highlights angles and USPs of brands so that we can have directional data to make decisions on a bigger scale. Constant just gives me more bullets in the chamber. That's all I want is like, hey, I have four ads that are working. I'm gonna take these four ads, can I get iterations on first two seconds, three seconds? That's what I want. That's what I want that tool to continue to be it because you can look at the ad world talk we did in 2020 or our current presentations. And everyone's like, hey, your thought work of making these into content bricks is exactly what we've been trying to do for years. I just never had to articulate it. Well, that's constant, right? We get on average about 100 to 200 uploads a month. And when we take these uploads, we get to see everything. So now I'm seeing what industry's cracking. I'm seeing when somebody maybe is submitting more projects than the most. Maybe he's scaling a little bit harder. What niche is that in? What type of creative is that? What platform is he spending on? We get all this data that we get to take on the agency. And now we can see like, holy moly, all these uploads and all these types of content, I can start building off templates or I can start building off reasons why we need to test it with our own brands. And that's the true data factors. We get full insight to these because when you upload and see it, we all have to see it and we have to make edits against it. So constant was the smartest thing we ever did. It's just been the hardest thing we've ever built. Yeah, no, I think you nailed it. I think data really is the currency, right? Obviously you're getting US dollars. Maybe you're getting Bitcoin. Who knows what you're collecting? But data is the currency, right? So that's awesome. You mentioned No Limit. You guys, obviously there's other marketplaces or other platforms out there. Is there an opportunity for what you guys are doing for people that don't wanna build a platform but wanna do this on like a freelance basis? Is this a viable opportunity for someone to just be a freelancer and kick back and manage five or 10 clients a month and do this type of thing regularly? Or do you think it has to be done through a platform like you guys? No, no, no, no. I think this is, I mean, look at Savannah Sanchez and Lauren. Savannah and Lauren make UGC-focused content and it's like small packages, couple hundred bucks here and there. And I'm sure that will stack up because everybody always wants content as much as possible and they never wanna pay for it, which is fine. You have to show the value and then once they see the value, they come back for it because you're literally, I don't wanna be like super Russell Brunsony and this is something that John said at Geek Out. I don't wanna be Russell Brunsony where you're one funnel away but you really are one ad away. Specifically, Exter, we launched one ad that Joe and Thomas shot jokingly on their phone and that was $1.7 million in profit from one single ad during Q4. And that wasn't like hours and ideation. It was just literally, oh, this is a cool concept showing the product bond. And we're going like, they paid us a grand for this and we made them all this money. So that is the beauty and the downside of I gotta get better deal structures for performance on content. But it really does make me sit here and go, if we can build a project like this and if we can have people talking about systematizing creativity, that the way that James put it, you're going to win. It's the same thing with email. You have various templates that you're gonna send out for various flows. It's an optimizing the template. Social is that way, except it's a little bit more, a little bit more cold because of the audiences that you're going after. So it depends on the audience, depends on the date, depends on the platform. Email is like, everybody already knows and loves a brand depending on how they came in, if they purchased or they haven't purchased just yet. So you have some more structure around what you can or can't test. And it's probably my favorite business right now because it's so subjective. It just depends on the positioning. Yeah, I love that. I actually think we're about to talk about your actual favorite business, which is Geek Out. Why Geek Out? What's the opportunity there? I know you just had your event in Austin. How did it go? What does it mean to you to bring people together, especially during a pandemic? Like what was the reactions? Can you kind of walk me through Geek Out, why you're doing Geek Out? Everyone else is running towards online. Why are you so adamant about in person? What does it all mean to you? Yeah, and it's funny you said it's my favorite business because I think I've said it to multiple people, like this is my favorite business. The phrase was those who teach can't do and those who know how to do should teach. Like if you know how to do it very, very well, then you should be unselfishly giving that back so that other people can replicate it because there's truly enough for everyone to win, truly enough for everyone to eat. Geek Out has been around for four years. We never made money until this first event because of sponsorships. That's three years of money, planning, traveling the world, traveling the States and hosting something that's really, really cool because James and I thought it was cool. And now all of a sudden we're like, it's a real business. I mean, we have Thrasio, which is the largest acquisition company in the entire world as our sponsor. We have to perform. What do they want from us? They want deal flow. They want the people in the room. We have 70 founders or agencies or marketers that have access to businesses. They want access to that. Then we have VizCap who pays us a great amount of money to get on stage and continue to pitch because they know their content works. So like, hey, I want to be in the room with these guys. Then we have Gorgeous, which is a great platform. We have all these different sponsors that come to us. And so our business went from like, hey, this is pretty cool to, oh man, we better sell some tickets because we got to get these people in the seats. So when you get it, and I saw at this last one in Austin, Austin lifted the mask mandate and we took a gamble on not canceling any of our events when nobody's running events. Nobody's doing a gathering over 20 people anywhere right now. And James, I looked at each other and go like, brother, we can pull this off. Like we're that gap from where we thought we were doing a great job, but that gap got a lot larger because nobody's doing an in-person play here, which is cool, which is like to know like, hey, maybe this turns into something bigger. We started getting those people that were on the fence of coming. Yes, obviously we have to take precautions. Yes, we have to choose the right location. Yes, it's a little bit more expensive, but it's worth it to see people come face-to-face and hug. I was joking, but it wasn't a joke. When we started doing talks on stage and the people were having to come back in the room to have a conversation, it was almost like I was interrupting them and I was annoying them. I'm like, hey, the guy's about to talk. Well, you want to come see this? And they were kind of like, and I was like, come on, come on. I had to like rally and herd them in because they didn't want to leave their conversations. And so I think this year we called ourselves the Acquisition Tour because of, obviously Thrastio and user acquisition and getting customers and selling your business. But it's really like the unmasking of America for lack of a better term, because we're not doing abroad anymore. We were going to do Puerto Rico and Barcelona. And if that opens, great. But right now there's like this weird buzz in the States where people are like starting to loosen up. The vaccine is rolling out. People are feeling more comfortable and leaving their home. And we want to be the team where they go, I want to meet other founders. I've been locked in my house. And for our industry, last year has been really good, right? Like we've had on the agency side, businesses that were all like offline, needing to come online. So we've been able to grow. Marketers, freelancers, we know we're close friends with Chris Toy and MarkerHire. Their adoption rate went through the roof on their last investor report. So we know freelancers are winning. And obviously the brands as dollars flood online. So you look at our cohort of people that are winning, they have the money, they have surplus money and they want to be connecting because like, what do we do now? What happens post COVID? How do we plan against that? How do we do, how do we get back into big box? So things like this are wild to see. Like we had an incredible discussion around structuring agendas for meetings. Who does that? Who has conversations about that? We had a great conversation around what happens when someone is trying to poach your client or what happens if someone's trying to take one of your employees? Like you don't get that on a forum. Like you have to sit with someone and have a discussion around that. And those are the things that matter the most to me. I love that, man. Let's shift gears a little bit. Let's talk about tools, right? So what tools are you using at the agency, at Constant, at Geek Out? And what are the business tools that you're using? Like what are any personal tools? Like for example, I think at least lately you told me that you ended up having some email inbox thing where you only have emails delivered to you at certain times or maybe you just did that manually. But can you talk about some of the tools that have facilitated a proper workflow, management, so on and so forth? Absolutely. So we have two dogs. You can probably hear them snoring on this. Talking about alarm clocks, 4 a.m., 5 a.m., they're up and needing to pee. And I'm not a second sleeper by any means. Shanice will sleep through an earthquake and a meteor. But as soon as I hear it and they're up and crying, I'm up about 5, 5.30. So that to me already gives me advantage because I already feel behind because East Coast is already awake three hours ahead. So I already feel like I'm walking into conversations that I barely missed or I'm already behind on. The tool that we're using, for me specifically on email, is Superhuman. Superhuman has been something that's been really, really big for me. And it isn't necessarily a tool that helps with productivity. But what I did to give myself and buy myself some time is I put this response at the bottom of my email that says, and I'll read it verbatim because I thought it was pretty good. It says, in an attempt to be present and ensure that we have support for our team and partners, I'll be limiting email communication during the day from 6 a.m. during the day, between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. EastJet. If there's an emergency, please text me. So I'm already just letting them know as soon as they email me while we're in communication back, they know that, hey, he's probably not gonna get back to me until later in the day, which is fine. It's what I want. And if I choose to get back, and if it is something important, I usually get a text for it. So on the email front, since the majority of what I'm doing is deal flow, is conversating with partners, is making sure that we're giving updates to our team, then we're Slack. Slack is the number one tool that we're using. That's where majority of my conversations happen. Outside of that, we're pretty much Google Suite, Slack, and we do have a couple of click-up automations for inbound deal flow that sets off a bunch of triggers. But I would say if we wanted to get a little bit smarter, which I have tons of conversations with what happens on inbound, since we are digital, I wanna do something where they sign up to our website, they get a video between you and me, or me on the social, or you on email, talking about welcome to Structured, here's what we're about. If this is something that you think you and your brand could be about, go ahead and click that link below. So we can start trying to filter out specifically, and then put them into their respective takers. I love that. The answer is yes, let's do that. That's awesome. iOS 14, I don't wanna get into the weeds here. I don't want this to take over the rest of the time here, but I wanna discuss it for like one or two minutes. What is iOS 14? Has it started? And what are you seeing? Yeah, so it's definitely started. I don't know if we can be like 100% with certain that it has started. Why I believe it started is because we have access to 100 brands, right? Like I'm looking at 100 plus ad accounts. I'm talking to these people in this space. We have very, very smart people in our circle. And there's just this like lack of reporting that is not coming all the way through on Facebook and Snapchat and Google. So if we're seeing such a large discrepancy and we're seeing such a large changes on platform, there's two things that are happening. One, these platforms are trying to prepare for the worst. And two, it really is affecting the people that are currently opting out in various regions. We're already starting to see like sample sizes rolling out on Facebook of trying to get a prompt as they get their prompt, which is the AT&T or ATT. That's saying that all apps are gonna give us, the consumers, us, the users, the ability to say, don't track me. Well, the aggressive wording that iOS or Apple specifically is trying to communicate saying, do you want this X to track you? Why? Why does it have to be so aggressive? Well, selfishly and from my research and a little bit of tinfoil hat, I think Apple builds their own ad network. And I think Apple builds their own service where they're the only team that can have access to this. They're the only team that's gonna see this user data because there's this identifier that goes against your iOS and your OS systems that Android doesn't have, but it'll eventually get there. And it's an issue because for brands that are very new and they're very, very overly dependent on platforms for revenue and growth, if you start to get a delay, which they claim that there will be a randomized data upload or I guess your metrics are fulfilling between a 48 and 72 hour window. What this means is I'm not gonna know what had happened within the last 24, 48, 72 hours. And how do I make decisions upon that in real time? That's the beauty of social because it's real time information back to you to make decisions the day of. Well, if I'm looking in the ad account or if I'm looking at any of the platform on Thursday, am I looking and seeing Thursday data or am I looking at seeing Thursday with Wednesday and Tuesday data mixed together? It's difficult, right? It's really difficult to get judgment and decisions on there. Now, what that means is, okay, email has to start cranking. SMS has to be more involved at the top of funnel rather than just bottom of funnel. Optimizing on platform is a thing that is important but it isn't like it was. Like you're not gonna be sitting there playing $2 bids or $2 changes or some sort of weird strategy. That might be an incremental win but it's not a major lever that like an investment in content is or investment or retention program or loyalty program. So I think it gets back to where it used to be, meaning old school affiliates and businesses were built on good marketing, good copy and good pages. Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, these brands or these businesses made brands into businesses that never should have made it that far. It's okay, right? Like somebody, it's survival of the fittest when it gets down to it. But iOS 14, I mean, iOS 14 point whatever, before it drops, I can go on this for days. Yeah, no, I'm sure you can. And we'll have to do another segment, another episode outside of this specifically on that. And we'll for sure do part two, part three. I have one more question for me and then I have a couple of questions that some users have submitted. So the last question for me, can we talk about the importance of a personal brand? You know, what's worked for you here? What hasn't worked? How much of your book of business comes from having a personal brand versus, you know, running ads to get clients or SEO to get clients or whatever other mechanisms are available? No, I think you've seen this from the inside and you've seen this because you and I talked about this often. The personal brand allows you to be a little bit more memorable than most and allows someone that wants to be really with you or really against you, which being polarizing is nothing nice. I'm not striving to be polarizing. I'm just trying to be myself at all times. But there are people that are going like, I'm with that, I'm really with that. Other people go, I'm really not with that, which is just as important as those are saying I'm with it. Because if I know for a fact they're not a part of it and they're not down with it, they don't wanna be in any involved in my area, I'm not gonna waste my time that way, right? And that comes from business partners, that comes from employees, that comes from opportunities, that comes from partnerships. If you can't let people know what you're about, like if you don't communicate how you are, no one's gonna be able to judge you. Like, where's he coming from? How's he gonna act about this stuff? Where's his personality? And so I can honestly tell you, Geek Out being built off a personal brand, 100%, the partnership with the founder, where they came to me because of the way I'm able to teach and talk and discuss, 100% was around the personal brand built. And then a lot of the employees that come, and you know this too, is because of how much we're spewing at the mouth and communicating what it is that we're trying to do or currently doing, people are like, hey, I saw you. Closed mouths don't get fed. And that means so much to me in the sense of if you aren't asking for something, you're never gonna get it. And if you aren't communicating what you're doing, no one's ever gonna know what you're doing, right? If you aren't your biggest advocate, it is really, really, really hard for other people to try to get in there and support you. So if I'm looking at businesses that come from the personal brand, it's not, it maybe isn't directly because of the brand, but it's because of the partnerships that the personal brand has allowed me to have is what happened. I mean, you and I both know that the first time you jumped on the stage was Geek Out LA a year ago, right? And seeing where that went all the way to Twitter, all the way to the newsletter, all the way to us getting on our merge was because of like, hey, I'm gonna lean 100% into who I am. And to see the amount of love you get on your content and people are probably, your content might be okay, but they like you personally, they're like, oh, you're good. I want you, man. It's just like having a good product with great marketing, right? So that's a job done. One more question on the personal brand side, and it's a two part question. Maybe the answer is the same. What is the platform that you think you have the best reach in or what platform do you like creating content for the most? And then what content or what platform do you think has the best reach? So for example, I think I know the answer. I think you like Instagram or Facebook the best and that's where most of your people are. And I think you wanna grow on Twitter because you see the opportunity, but I'll let you answer that. No, you're spot on. So I'll say I'm active on four places, Instagram and Facebook, just because of where I was from the beginning. And that's the sandbox I like to play within. Twitter, because you and I are chasing each other. And I just said like, all right, I'll take number two. Twitter gives you wild access and distribution that I never really thought. Like I've been sleeping on Twitter. You were sleeping on Twitter. And as soon as we jumped on, I'm like, you can get anyone, anyone you want. As soon as that happened, I was convinced. I was like, okay, gotta make content there. And I think the way that you're approaching it with the team that you're building around the content distribution is absolutely genius. And then right now what I'm really, really happy about is Clubhouse. Now, I wish I always had the time to be in Clubhouse because you can't be a passive learner or passive participant in Clubhouse. You actually have to be engaged to what? Speak on time, speak clearly, be heard. Be clever, because it is very, very real time. So I like Clubhouse. I think I'm closing in on about 7,000 followers on Clubhouse, which that's a huge W. Let me check my email. And then- That's huge. And then two more questions I have. I have a lot of questions submitted from people. I'm sorry for those listening that I can't get to them all. We will bring Nick back to answer all those questions and more. But I have two questions for you. The first one's a really hard question. How much do you spend annually on beard oil? Okay. I know who asked this. You're ridiculous. So on, this is again, the beauty, if you were to see right here, is I have all the brands that are sending me. Because I have a big beard, and usually I have a bigger beard, now I have just a giant mustache, people are sending me products, so I don't have to actually buy it myself. But I would say the average dollars I spend on haircuts and being beard trimmed, I get a haircut every two weeks. I get a haircut, and I get a trim on the neck, and I get a trim on the beard. And I joke around with Shanice, if I can get paid to grow hair, I'd be so rich I wouldn't have to play with any of this. Dude, I love that. All right, well, thank you for answering that one. Last question I have, and then I have one last random thing is, I'm dying, and this is from someone, I forgot who asked this, so apologies, but I'm dying to hear more about his run with Fidget Lee. Did he create the fidget spinner trend? And I think that actually might have been Mason from our team that asked this. Can you talk about your experience early on with Fidget Lee? Yeah, that was actually, that was the pop. So this is the very first product. So Fidget Lee, this was the big box play. So our partner, my great, great friend, Jake Schmidt, 2016, 2017, I forgot what it was, one of those two dates, we were running bot Instagram growth, which you know that game very well. And somebody added us on Instagram, and I was like, Fidget something, Fidget 180, Fidget 360. And we're looking like, what the hell is this thing? And at that time, I just left playing soccer. I was working at Apple, and I was not super happy. I was driving my Prius back and forth from Orange County to play at Vista. And it's funny, because our studio now, we share a wall at Apple, so there's a lot of memories. And Jake was like, yo, I think I'm gonna do this thing. And I knew Facebook, I was running Facebook there. And I was like, yeah, I think I can take this on Facebook. And Jake found a manufacturer on Alibaba. It wasn't on Alibaba, it was like through a third party on Alibaba, and found this fidget spinner. And Fidgetly went from a good idea, we did one influencer post, it was the stupidest thing. This guy sat down with a, kind of a jacked younger dude, sat down with a weight on his leg, and he's like, can I out-squat a Fidgetly? And the smartest thing that Schmidt ever did, was he named it, everyone was calling it Fidget Spinner, get a Fidget Spinner, we just branded it. We just said, it's a Fidgetly. And so people started confusing, because we were selling the same thing that everybody else was selling. And so we were getting comments, and people are blowing us up on the DMs, they're going like, this is faulty, this is terrible. Well, yeah, because we were selling the same product, we just branded it super well. And we realized that Facebook was the right place to scale it, and we were selling these bad boys for I think $32. We were definitely not getting it for $32, the margin was incredible. But we didn't know business, like we didn't know what we're gonna do, we didn't know how to win. But what this allowed me to do is, I was able to message Jake Hassan, we sent a giant shipment to the movement guys really early on, we were getting into conversations that we were not able to be in. And that was like, you hit a stage and like, oh, by the way, like, I brought the Fidget Spinner with one other individual to the market. It's a conversation starter, and it's something that I'm really, really proud of. And if it wasn't for that, I don't think we'd be on this trajectory personally, because it's been basically eight years of just hopping to the right. Dude, I love that. And the last, last thing, I was reading an article today from The Hustle about this concept of drunk shopping. And I kinda wanna ask you a couple random and fun questions about this topic. I don't know that you would have these answers, but I'm looking at this sheet. So The Hustle ran an article or kind of a survey on a couple thousand American adults that consume alcohol. How big do you think the estimated industry is every year of people being drunk and buying stuff online? How many billions of dollars do you think it is? You know, this is, I haven't actually thought about this stuff, but it does make sense. So you can see, like, in Shopify, there's like trends of shopping. And you can start seeing the morning, it picks up a little bit. Back when everyone was working and you had to drive a commute, like, you'd see a spike in the morning, which is usually East Coast picking up. We're on the West Coast. And you see it kind of like taper off around lunch or during work hours, and then it picks back up during lunchtime. And then towards the end of the night, like you kind of like this lingering effect because purchases are happening from, I guess, 9 p.m. East, 9 p.m. West Coast, which is midnight East Coast. And it kind of trickles into the morning. And I'm like, who's buying like makeup and gadgets at this late? And it's gotta be those people that are just hammered off their ass. And it makes, because now they're just, America loves buying on credit. So we don't really care if we have any money. So we're kind of just gonna spend it anyway. So I think this is an interesting concept that maybe if you built a brand around like regret, like, why did I buy this? Like, why did I buy this.com? It might scale. If someone does this, please let Chase and I know. We'll run your media and do your email for free. Just cut us in. Dude, I love that. So this study says that it's estimated there's $45 billion spent per year from people that are drunk shopping. And a couple of other stats I wanna ask you about, and then I'll share the answer. What percentage of alcohol consumers have made at least one drunk purchase? So what percentage of people while they're drunk have made some kind of purchase in their life? I would say at least 35%, like minimum 35, but nothing more than 65. Okay, it's saying 79% of people drinking alcohol have at least made one drunk purchase. And guess how much they spend annually on drunk shopping. Like while they're drunk, guess how much they spend annually? Dude, I might be so, cause I don't consume alcohol, but this might be why I can't get in that frame of mind. How much do they spend annually? I'm gonna do some math real quick. Yeah, and again, this is just research from the hospital. I'm just reading straight off of one of their pages, but I thought this was hilarious. So I wanted just to quiz you on it. I would not know these answers either. No, I think it's interesting. So let's say, let's assume disposable income of like 300 bucks a month times 12 months, less than $4,000 a year on drunk shopping. Yeah, so the answer that they have is about $444 is the average that people will spend while they're drunk shopping, like across the whole year. Oh, what? So I'm assuming people are alcoholics and drinking and hammering everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is this metric? That's not even like 400 bucks on average AOB of like $40. Yeah, about one purchase a month for 10 months out of the year. I don't know, maybe they're doing it in one month. I don't know. We need to check in with these stats. I don't know about that one. Yeah, I don't know either. These are just random questions. And then last two I have is, one is like, what do you think the most common drunk purchase is? Like what category or what items are people buying? Okay, I got two guesses. For what? Bikinis for one, and then, oh man. I think I'm just gonna go straight with bikinis. Okay, yeah, it's clothing and shoes are the most common drunk purchases. Interesting, oh my God. Okay, I get shoes. That's funny. I wonder if Amazon did a report. And also, I don't know how you even test this. Like, hey, when you bought this from my store, were you A, intoxicated or B, sober? I don't know. You don't do that on email post purchases, do you? Not yet. I'm probably missing this though. And by the way, you actually just answered the last question. So the last question was, what platform is the drunk shopping platform of choice? And it is Amazon. I believe, it's so easy, man. And maybe if you have ShopPay now, which I really, really like, you're able to check out very quickly, but Amazon's like two clicks or you can even swipe to shop now. So that makes sense. So I guess a bigger question would be, how drunk proof can you, or drunk, not drunk proof, how drunk purchase, how easy can a drunk person buy? That might be good split testing. How many drunk people can buy from your store might be the W now. Yeah, Nick, for our next team meeting, we'll have to ask, we'll have to take a poll of how many people purchased drunk and we'll kind of see how that stacks up to this. But Nick, dude, this was fun. This was the first official episode with a guest. This is episode two of the e-commerce opportunity. I mean, we covered a lot of ground in 40, 45 minutes about the opportunity in agencies, the opportunity in creative, the opportunity in events. So sincerely appreciate you being here. This was a lot of fun. For people that want to connect with you, I know we're going to try to boost your Twitter. So that way it's some kind of competition between us. Is that the best place for people to go follow you right now on Twitter? It is to get me, help me get my stats back up. And I am, it should be, I am shop report on IG and Twitter, but I miss you, buddy. I hope to see you soon. And I'm thankful for this. I'm very happy for you. I'm very proud of this, man. Awesome, man. Love you, brother. If you're listening to this, please give us feedback. Please shoot Nick a follow. I will drop his handles and thank you guys, everyone for the time. Thanks, man. Take care.