When business owners think about acquiring customers, most go straight to ads. John Roman from Battlbox thinks a bit differently. In this episode, John breaks down the important role that community and content plays in retaining and acquiring new subscription box customers.
00:00 Intro
01:53 Short Background Of John's Battlbox Journey
09:42 Battlbox's 2023 Numbers
12:21 Battlbox's Paid Customer Acquisition
19:15 How Big Of A Role Does Community and Content Play For Battlbox?
28:40 Breaking Down How The Facebook Community Works
34:10 Josh's Final 3 Questions
Transcript from video:
Intro
0:00 uh I mean you guys have 750,000 plus subscribers on YouTube your content is everywhere um you're active
0:07 on this on social platforms so like how big of a how important and you have a
0:12 Facebook Community I know we talked briefly about that last time so like how important is that do you feel in new
0:19 customer acquisition and then also retention like how do you feel that plays a role in in that so I I think
0:25 it's wildly important for both um I you know content and Community I've said it
0:31 before there there are these these two pillars for us that all business decisions we we take content and
0:38 community in consideration I have the honor to bring
0:44 on um John Roman and this is actually a second time that I've brought you on John because you're an interesting guy
0:50 and last time I remember we're on and John by the way we I'm going to give him a little Spiel here in a moment so you
0:56 know who he is but John and I were on and I remember we were diving so deep and we ran out of time and I'm like we have to have another session to come in
1:02 and like talk nerdy stuff around marketing because last time was like higher level and now we're going to like get further down a little bit for
1:09 everybody here um but John Roman is actually one of the co-founders of Battlbox and Battl
1:17 box if you've never heard of it in subscription brand that is uh a subscription box it's like a super cool
1:23 subscription box too and one of the largest that I personally know now I have luxury we we're officially friends
1:30 John CU we're on Instagram and I get to see all of you you growing plants and all kinds of other stuff in your life um
1:35 but John's a really intelligent dude this guy knows his stuff he has grown Battlbox along with his Compadres of
1:41 his team like crazy and so man man thanks for joining me a second time here I appreciate it no excited to be back
1:47 here thanks for having me so if you if you could just to give um just before we dive in uh could you just give us a
Short Background Of John's Battlbox Journey
1:54 rundown like what's your background of launching getting to the point of box
2:00 and then kind of The quick summary version of getting to today if you could sure um all right we'll go we'll go
2:06 super quick uh parents super proud after I graduated college decided to be a professional
2:13 poker player um did that that was Career One for four and a half yearsing um tldr
2:20 I I was good I was not great I wasn't um an A+ player I was probably a B+ um
2:27 ironically got to go to the one time I've been to a Australia was um in that in that time when uh the aie millions it
2:34 was a tournament um that was there so Career One career Two um was B2B sales
2:42 um so started off as an individual contributor by the end of it um I had had a lot of success and I was building
2:50 and managing um B2B sales teams um that were focused on um probably you know
2:57 Fortune called Fortune 2000 large Enterprise type um prospects and clients
3:04 and somehow along the way of that I started investing in in companies I had
3:10 built a network of friends and somehow you know they all had ideas and
3:18 in uh in 2015 early I made uh about six
3:24 Investments and just to be clear like these are not um you know large
3:30 Investments they were large to me at the time um but you know $2,000 here uh
3:35 $88,000 here so it was it was a it was a lot of money to me but I was taking that and trying to invest in in startups um
3:44 Battlbox um the two friends or I guess three one friend um came up with the
3:52 idea I had gone to school with him and he had brought in another friend and
3:57 another person so I guess there were three of them I found out about it shortly after launch invested in it um
4:05 the concept was limited capacity couple hours a month you know seat on the board
4:10 just try to kind of assist in in in challenges that they might not know how
4:15 to navigate and you know that quickly changed into um I was in charge of
4:22 marketing was in charge of sales I was in charge of customer experience and um
4:27 you know I'm working up 50 to 60 hour a week normal job Building Sales teams and
4:33 then you know but before that and after that every night I have a 50 60 hours um
4:38 doing Battlbox so uh 120 hours a week
4:43 for close to a year we launched in February 15 I was involved by the second
4:49 week of launch and then wasn't until April of 2016 that I jumped in
4:54 fulltime um soon as I came in some of the the things I since I had bandwidth
5:01 to do in tackle um we got rid of bought out one of the partners that wasn't
5:06 providing value so it was just down to three of us that were the principles um
5:11 we started leaning in on content we had uh a gentleman that was um doing reviews
5:18 for us his name is Brandon if you watch a Battlbox video now you're going to see him he's the face of the brand um
5:24 but he was a paying customer and we had converted him to to a free box comp box for reviews and we quickly um negotiated
5:31 and got him and his family down to Georgia so that they could be he could be full-time and and just really Double
5:38 Down triple down on content um at the same time of that we just we just really
5:44 started focusing on customer experience and building a community um it was a Reddit style Forum originally now it's a
5:51 Facebook uh private group where you have to be an active member to be in but just leaning in and engaging with the
5:58 community while focusing on content fast forward this you know concentration on
6:03 content led to a Netflix TV show in 2020 um that was an amazing amazing point it
6:10 was basically it was a Netflix original series and still on there you can search Battlbox and it comes up but it was
6:16 basically a commercial for us so we saw some exponential growth at that point um in 2021 we decided that it was the end
6:25 and it was time to have that exit we were all building for so we sold in October
6:30 2021 um I think the deal size it was around 18 million um which was which was
6:37 phenomenal it was you know we were all going to um out of the three of us um Daniel who um had come up with the idea
6:46 he he was done he had been kind of burned out for a couple years wanted to retire so he left um Patrick and I and
6:54 our CFO who's now one of the the principles um the three of us stayed on
6:59 we're going to stay on for a couple years um get these earn outs these these seven figure paydays for sticking around
7:06 and the nuances of being with a publicly traded company and having the um the the
7:12 O the constant reporting it just wasn't a fit for us uh we were making short ter
7:17 forced to kind of make short-term decisions that were good for a quarter that were not good for the longevity of the business um turmoil of of the market
7:26 during that time too um it was a spa so it lost a lot of of value we saw an
7:31 opportunity to buy it back um so we bought it back in April 2023 so a year
7:37 ago this month and now we're back back in the driver seat we were in the driver seat then but we had a you know a a
7:45 backy driver that was um very opinionated so just us now in the car
7:52 and we're going you kicked them out like KCK him on the side of the road they needed some cash and and we gave them
7:58 some cash so it was it was m beneficial yeah yeah you kicked them out but you gave them money so you're nice about it
8:04 I like that hey that's technically own the keys so we had to like figure it out yeah wow
8:12 so that's amazing so like uh what a crazy like story I think there's a lot of timing value there um 2015 getting
8:20 into subscription and like even get to the point of like the Netflix deal in 2020 when that is the pivotal Peak of
8:29 online viewership coming off of Tiger King which was like a couple months prior so it was like the peak yeah it it
8:36 was called uh Southern survival is that right okay Southern survival everyone go check it out I had to go watch it after of course um I interviewed you last time
8:44 um but uh so get on Netflix you then sell at the end of 2021 which I almost
8:50 feel like was this like time to Market you time you're like that example of
8:56 everyone that says you can't time the market you have to dollar cost average you can't can't time the market and you guys like Ed the market which is kind of
9:02 a amazing but you're strategic it was it was strategic but I mean I'm not going
9:08 to sugarcoat it there was some luck in there we sold it the right time yeah know I mean that that's awesome it's a
9:14 really cool cool story to hear you buy it back so you're now a year into running it are you glad that you bought it back um absolutely it was uh you know
9:22 the the fact that it was even being considered um you know there's emotional
9:27 attachment right this is our this is our BAS um we love the customers we love what we're building we're passionate about it
9:34 work doesn't feel like work and um yeah I'm super super pumped that we that we
9:39 have it back so bring me to now so like you buy it back last year um would you be uh
Battlbox's 2023 Numbers
9:47 would you mind sharing any numbers like any Revenue like ad spend what did that look like for all the marketing nerds out there yeah so um in
9:55 2023 um we did Total a little over 21 million and then in ad spend um it was it was
10:03 2.5 million let me uh uh give me two seconds I'll give you an exact number
10:09 but I'm pretty sure I'm pretty close uh yeah 2 point yeah 2,
10:14 58,000 $995 so yeah so 2.5 million in ad spent so you guys um what's interesting
10:21 is like so I would say my observation from most businesses they spend between 15 and 30% of their uh revenue on ad SP
10:29 B and you guys if I'm just doing quick math here I mean you're sitting at maybe just a little over 10 so you guys are
10:34 our budget's 12 your budget's 12 I was about to say it's probably like 12 13 so 12% is what you're allocating um toward
10:43 ads that's pretty that's pretty powerful so I'm going to bet you have a pretty high or pretty low churn rate high stick
10:50 rate is that right yeah um so you know churn isn't as good as we would like um
10:56 okay but the the average order value um you know average order values um north
11:02 of $130 um LTV on the subscription alone is
11:09 um over 600 and when you lay in the ancillary in one-time products ltvs at a
11:15 thousand um so so because of that um our turns currently kind of high it's in the
11:21 low teens um which you know we would prefer it not be that high but I think with the
11:28 econom um climate I think and us being discretionary income for most it's
11:35 understandable it being that high but but even though it's that high with with you know knowing what the LTV is um you
11:42 can kind of get a little bit aggressive with your customer acquisition costs so I would love to press into that a little
11:49 bit because we work with subscription boxes and it's hard um it's hard to
11:55 think and I would say even outside of the subscription boxes it it it's sometimes challeng alling emotionally to
12:00 think about action cost and how aggressive you can be with it by understanding your 60-day 90-day
12:05 lifetime value or even lifetime value as a whole um because sometimes you're upside down on the front end or uh or
12:12 you're barely break even so I'd be curious to know for you so uh LTV 600
12:18 thrown the one time stuff it pushes to about a th um if you were could you
Battlbox's Paid Customer Acquisition
12:23 speak a little bit to like how do you view new customer acquisition like how
12:29 like how aggressive do you decide to be like are you okay being upside down on day one or do you have to be to break even a profitable um so my answers
12:38 changed Through The Years okay as you know in a in a pre pandemic we would
12:45 want to be profitable on on the first purchase um in a um post pandemic um
12:53 buzz of you know when e-commerce was just booming it uh it you know we still
12:59 tried to do that um in a in a post iOS World in a economic um challenging world
13:06 that we're in today where we saw the normalization after the boom um you know
13:12 we Beggars can't be choosers um so we have to be a little bit more aggressive
13:17 um typically and we we track when we go with aggressive offers we track the
13:25 cohort um intensely we are watching them
13:30 updating spreadsheets knowing exactly how that cohort's behaving um which is not easy because it's a a several month
13:37 thing so so now we're we're okay with not being profitable off the first order
13:43 um I want to say uh the last aggressive offer we did um was towards the end of
13:50 last year beginning I think we ran it December 26 through January 3D and um
13:58 it's we we weren't profitable until the third order um which which is a while
14:05 it's for us that's that's um greater greater than uh greater than 90 days
14:11 pretty close to 100 with the the way the schedule of the subscription billing goes so it took us about a 100 days to
14:18 be profitable on that cohort um but now you know we're just it's pure profit at
14:24 this point Minus cost of good sold but it's uh yeah that's not ideal um just
14:29 because when you are trying to scale there's there's cash flow concerns there yeah um and it's not just cash flow
14:35 concerns in the short term of okay we know we're not profitable yet there's
14:40 the ramifications of that so because we're scaling and we're scaling in a way that's not instantly profitable we have
14:46 to wait 100 days but we're also having to then order additional product um that
14:52 you know with lead times of call it on average five six months we're having a
14:59 offset and and and put that cash up front or at least a portion of it so
15:05 it's it's not ideal um but it's manageable and it you know with
15:10 economies of scale and with the existing base of the the subscription billing it's possible but um that's not fine
15:19 there I love I love talking about this stuff this stuff gets me jazzed because like math the the We Trust math over
15:28 emot in marketing we're always like marketing is mathematical equation not an emotional decision and I think that it's so important to know these numbers
15:34 like you're like subscription box LTV boom 600 uh if you factor on all the one-offs and things like that pushes to
15:40 about a th and you we know our profit we know our break even I think it's such an important thing for every business owner
15:47 to know because it equips you with knowledge for confident decision- making
15:52 um I am qu so it sounds like you ran something a little bit more aggressive about 100 day break even what what your
15:59 um and this is I know any subscription box listener right now is is asking this question like how long are you outside
16:06 of that promo cycle period that push you to 100 what's your typical Break Even time frame you aim
16:12 for um it's realistic realistically ideally in in the current scenario um
16:19 this the second renewal would be would be a
16:24 conservative goal um just because you know you don't know how a cohort is
16:31 going to um behave to a certain degree especially when you are varying offers
16:39 and varying positioning and copy it can you know and and you know better than I do um the audience that that you're
16:46 getting them on on meta Facebook Instagram or or anywhere else you know
16:52 you're kind of dependent at this point a little bit on the platform serving you the right people and there's Sometimes
16:59 some inconsistencies of that cohort Behavior so I'd say going to trying to
17:06 be profitable by the second um is is a good move because it probably limits some risk H okay no that's that that's
17:14 great um now so that's Facebook Facebook is only 12% of what you're allocating
17:20 toward marketing so like what would you say your your like your top marketing channels are that produce the most
17:27 customers so 12 12% is our total advertising budget um you know I I don't
17:33 so if we're if we're breaking down that 2.5 million um I don't like what I see
17:39 2023 um 1393 almost 1.4 million of it was
17:45 meta um which I I don't like being that dependent on a on a single platform if
17:52 I'm being honest um TikTok was 130k um Google ads
18:01 260k so you know those are the those are the the biggest um yeah so
18:08 Google was our second and TikTok was was our biggest if you look at a previous year um you know TikTok was a
18:15 little bit higher if I'm being honest I think 2024 we're going to see probably some more shift and and have TikTok
18:22 take a bigger bigger chunk away from meta um but yeah I don't like being so
18:29 on a single platform but you know it still works even though it doesn't work great and there's hiccups like the
18:35 hiccups from March um I saw you chatting in um on a post someone was asking about
18:40 it it's like yeah there were some issues um but I mean still it's it performs
18:46 really well yeah um so sounds like you're you're continuing to diversify a
18:52 lot of eggs in the Facebook basket um but if I look at so looking at
18:57 everything though I mean you you you guys are very there are two things that I and I would love to kind of centralize
19:03 around this if that's okay some conversation because like you're both you have a huge emphasis on community
19:09 and content and I look at I I look at Battlbox and I'm like how do I be like
19:14 Battlbox in our industry uh I mean you guys have 750,000 plus subscribers on YouTube your
How Big Of A Role Does Community and Content Play For Battlbox?
19:21 content is everywhere um you're active on this on social platforms so like how
19:27 big of a how and you have a Facebook Community I know we talked briefly about that last time so like how important is
19:34 that do you feel in new customer acquisition and then also retention like how do you feel it plays a role in in
19:40 that so I I think it's wildly important for both um I you know content and
19:46 Community I've said it before there there are these these two pillars for us that all business decisions we we take
19:54 content and Community into consideration um so you know I was looking um I we
20:01 were trying to extrapolate some data in a different way um a couple of months ago and it was it was some interesting
20:08 validation so on on meta we we we're not repr prospecting
20:15 much we are but the majority of the campaigns are prospecting and um we kind of dug into
20:21 this when we were um we had started a trial on some connected TV and we're
20:26 just trying to figure out what the Right Mix of prospecting versus repr prospecting should be on that so we're
20:32 looking at Facebook for some learnings and um it it made us go down this Rabbit
20:37 Hole so our post-p purchase survey we added um or we changed what the second question was so the first question is
20:44 where did you first hear about us um which is just another interesting data
20:49 point to then compare against um all your other data points on attribution um
20:55 but the second question is how long did you know about us before your first
21:00 purchase that's good um and what was wild is more than
21:07 50% know about is for greater than six
21:12 months which is a mindblowing number um especially when
21:19 we're not Repro the repr prospecting part of the Facebook budget is not very high um it's it's by all means probably
21:25 lower than than probably best practices but the reality is it's yes it says it's
21:31 prospecting but a lot of it's repr prospecting just we hadn't pixeled them previously but they're aware because
21:37 they're watching us on Tik Tok they're watching us on YouTube they're ingesting our content um and it's it's a slow it's
21:45 a slow build right um which which you and I have had um similar discussions
21:50 about that in general for other aspects of business wow that's pause I want to
21:56 pause real fast I think anybody needs to um that's listening needs to write this down you know if you're not surveying
22:01 your customers and by the way I don't ask our customers this and I'm going to start doing this right now um so John
22:10 said two things number one where did you get or where did you hear first hear about us and then number two how long
22:16 did you know about us um that's interesting to see more than 50% were more than 6 months so it definitely um
22:24 speaks to the fact that you're organic and this the content you're creating is is pulling in stuff um is just long
22:32 in the tooth yeah that that that's amazing so you have this huge focus on um I'd love to as someone say double
22:39 click into the content side here so I just want to double click in here um what is the con like how when you say
22:46 you you two two pillars content Community what does the content look like for you like not like we do this
22:52 many posts and this many but like what channels are you doing that you're seeing the greatest return and just
22:58 value in in in being on over time yeah so so ironically we're seeing the the
23:04 greatest engagement and the greatest return on the platforms we spend the
23:09 least on um which is just weird like we we Instagram and and Facebook we see
23:15 some success um with with content and and we'll hit some you know some brity
23:21 and videos and and we'll be able to kind of correlate and cross reference that to understand traffic um but it's a we're
23:28 we're often times more times than not getting that same reality on the other channels
23:33 because it's the same it's a similar piece of content at the same time um Tik Tok and
23:39 YouTube um are where we're seeing the biggest biggest
23:44 organic um success and ironically you know those are our two largest channels
23:50 um from a subscriber follower account but it's we're you know we're going on
23:57 some of the platforms like there's some content we do exclusively for a specific
24:02 platform because we just know how that platform Works per se but a lot of the
24:07 content even if it's a slight variation is very similar across across the board
24:13 so you're saying um you like you take your short form content and you're just repurposing that across the board but you see the greatest uh virality or just
24:21 reach and in value in TikTok and YouTube yeah and and to be be clear on
24:28 YouTube it is the short form video content as well Ah that's that's getting you the
24:33 most value as far as platform goes yeah so we do long form um and you know we
24:39 have typically two to three sometimes four or five long form um you know
24:45 decently long videos a month but they just don't we have our Battlbox
24:50 loyalist that are going to watch it um but it doesn't move the needle like the
24:55 short form video content does and to be to be fair you know we're not
25:00 we're not making this content about Battlbox we're making it about our industry about outdoor gear about
25:07 testing gear um doing funny stuff it's it's genuine right it's not it's not
25:13 saying okay time to buy your Battlbox like that's not the content anybody want nobody wants to be sold to yeah so did
25:21 you guys um did you do YouTube from like day one we did you did okay yeah so we
25:27 did YouTube you know we launched when we launched in February 2015 YouTube was one of our
25:33 channels um we weren't really coming up with our own content um in the beginning
25:39 um when Brandon was still um not a part of the team we had permission to take
25:45 his video that he had posted on his channel post it on ours um when he came on full-time that was the one video we
25:51 were doing a month um and we you know we grew we were growing maybe four or five
25:58 00 subscribers a month um over time in
26:03 the latter part of 2020 one 2021 yeah the latter part of
26:11 2021 um we had had we had been having for almost the whole year a lot of
26:16 success on TikTok we had gone from you know zero to a few hundred thousand at
26:23 that point I think we had two or 300,000 followers on there and that was the
26:28 moment where it was apparent that um both meta and and Google were going to
26:35 treat short form content a little bit better than they should on the algorithm um because they were in fear of TikTok
26:42 taking their lunch so they quickly treated short form video content like
26:48 gold we took you know the last eight months we had of TikTok content and we
26:54 started repurposing it for YouTube shorts nice and and we immedi mediately went from the 55,000 subscribers we had
27:02 within within weeks and months you know we went from 500 uh new subscribers in a month to
27:10 okay we're getting a couple thousand um to a few thousand to you know uh oh my
27:15 God we we're over 100,000 and it's just been a a slow climb and now we're at you
27:20 know 3/4 of a million trying to figure out how to get we've got that that silver one we really want the gold one
27:27 that's not that it means anything it's just vanity but I still want it yeah it's so cool that's that no that's
27:33 really awesome um I I think it also just speaks to like the value of consistency like um you were doing it for over 5
27:42 years like just regular long form and other content for over 5 years until you're Mo getting to 50 something
27:48 thousand only for your moment of opportunity to arise and you'd be prepared to just annihilate it and you
27:55 just dude you just hit that no results yeah that's little little
28:01 results that's that that's that's pretty uh welld deserved I would say I don't think you know if the opportunity came
28:07 along and you had not been doing what you had been doing you would not have been able to seize the opportunity so um
28:13 it was a five plus year venture to now getting almost a million subscribers on
28:19 YouTube that's pretty cool um now I'd love to kind of jump over to the community side if we could um because
28:26 last time we spoke you talk about how you have do you have a free Facebook Community or is it only for your members
28:33 it's only for members only for members okay perfect so somebody subscribes to Battlbox and they're able to join the
28:38 Facebook Community um can you just talk through like what's the what do you do
Breaking Down How The Facebook Community Works
28:43 in the community what's the value of the community sure um so so the the value at the the highest level is just connecting
28:51 like-minded individuals right so you like camping gear you like hiking gear you like prepping um you're going to
28:58 find some some friends and some similar people in in the group um in you know
29:05 the superficial benefits you know we do giveaways every week right so it's only
29:10 for active members you know we get thousands of dollars delivered to us
29:15 every single day of samples and and product hey I want to be in Battlbox um
29:21 and for you know all of our sanity we can't hold on to all of it we can't
29:26 hoard um but you know who would appreciate it just as much our customers
29:32 our members um so we'll give we give samples away every week um there's some exclusive giveaways too um uh Brandon
29:41 will go live most weeks in there um and and and just talk to the community um do
29:48 giveaways to live but also just answer questions um we're talking about when the Box drops which Dro this morning um
29:56 several team members will be in the Facebook group answering questions about product that they just that everyone just received um you know we're sometime
30:04 dropping teasers about the upcoming box it's just um it's a way to touch you
30:11 know not everyone's in there but a large amount of our customers are it's just a unique way to touch them and interact
30:16 with them um you know you know we're not the biggest company in the world but we're we're some decent size now and the
30:25 the I think there's a coolness factor that um the the the CEO the CFO um the
30:32 head of marketing um brand in the face of our brand head of procurement Shay
30:37 that we're all in this group inter interacting you can you can tag me on a Facebook post asking me a question and
30:45 nine times out of 10 I'm going to answer um wow and it's it's a cool it's a cool approach we have our CS team in there
30:52 too so if there's ever any issue we can kind of streamline it it's just it's a good experience h and uh I have to ask
31:01 if someone cancels their subscription do you search them in there and boot them out yes you do wow that's a lot of work
31:09 so we do it in in batches um it's the only part of the the current setup of it
31:16 being a members only Facebook group that um that is not automated which is kind of frustrating um because we can't we
31:22 can't figure out how to automate it the um but we have a we have a MK master
31:28 sheet if you will so when anybody gets um brought in and approved to go and
31:33 they go on this master sheet where the moderator team does track them um so
31:38 we'll occasionally do Audits and go through and if if if someone isn't isn't
31:44 active anymore um it's not as simple as okay they just canceled mean if they just canel they still just recently paid
31:50 likely so there's a little bit of a window got we're not going to say oh you can you paid today but and you canceled
31:56 your subscription you're out you just paid so you should get should get some benefit of this group before yeah um
32:03 before you're removed but you do have to you will be removed okay so that's
32:08 pretty so two big pillars of Battlbox we have other than ads we have content and Community um just to recap some
32:16 things here short form is really crushing for you guys TikTok YouTube a lot of value sitting in there right now
32:23 and then you've been doing this community thing you actually build a a community for all of your customers
32:28 which I think is is pretty amazing that you do that might be a little bit of manual work when people are canceling
32:34 but even at the size of company you are I think that will tell most people listening that under that size that it's
32:39 not too manual like I think a lot of people listening might be like well that's a lot of work I can't do all that
32:45 and you guys did 21 million last year and you're still manually removing people because you clearly see value in
32:50 that yeah um and you know as as we grew the group the members group I it's a
32:56 little over 10,000 people people in it right now oh um we have five five moderators in the group and these
33:02 moderators were uh they were Battlbox customers I mean they still are Battlbox customers um members and they
33:10 were super engaged in the group and they were they were you know they always say
33:16 act uh or dress for the part you you want um they were leaders they were
33:21 showing leadership and um it became abundantly clear you should be a moderator so we're going to give you
33:27 your box for free moving forward but at the same level just continue moderating and continue making sure it's a it's a
33:33 positive environment and and they they manage and maintain the the master sheet they let people in they welcome new
33:40 people um when someone gets out of control they they you know depending on how bad it is they either just remove
33:47 them or they Loop Us in so we can make a decision if they need to be removed um
33:52 but it's you know it's a it's a non-paid role but it's of huge value and it's an you you you likely have customers that
33:59 would want to do this um you know I'm passionate about Brands and I would it's a cool thing right you get to be even
34:06 closer to a brand that you you respect and want to be a part of yeah I love
Josh's Final 3 Questions
34:11 that um well I do have three final closing questions for you if that's all right John okay three things number one
34:19 um what percent of your new customers do you do you think comes from advertising um if you were to just R
34:27 ballpark a percentage of new customers that comes from ads
34:32 so I would say 70% um but it comes from ads as in like
34:39 the ads are putting them over they they came top of funnel through something else and then the ad
34:47 just pushed them pushed them into into signing up okay so 70
34:54 80% okay and what's a book that's changed your life what's a book that changed my life yeah
35:02 don't have one you don't have one you're not a book guy huh I'm not I've uh that's all right let's see what book is
35:08 this just give me the closest book you see on your bookshelf and we'll just take
35:13 that the daily dad the daily Dad okay I
35:19 think that's suting cuz John just had a uh John just had a baby like two months ago all right I'm trying to see what
35:25 other books we have here find the smartest book you can find um he just reads the
35:34 thesaurus last question for you John if you could so if you can go back this is 2015 if you can go all the way back in
35:41 time when you started like what's one thing that you would do differently to get to where you are
35:47 now a lot faster what's something you would do differently than knowing what you know now that would get you here a lot quicker
35:54 um moving moving faster and never never
35:59 slowing down sales um so I mean it's on Apples to
36:04 Apples vers now because you know it's tough to get the customer acquisition cost you can get back in the day but um
36:12 you know I think that it it still presents itself where often times we' be
36:17 like okay we've got to pause ads because we're selling too much and like we need
36:22 to figure that out um I think it's just no you go you keep scaling the ads and
36:28 it's a good problem to have and you can figure it out you can get more product and if there's a delay just be
36:35 transparent and honest with your customers like we oversold we're waiting on some additional stuff and I think
36:42 customers for the most part if you're honest with them and tell them you know I'm sure some will want a refund but
36:47 like just go and and don't don't wait if you find something and I think it's even more true now in in a post iOS world
36:55 where when you find something that's scaling and work working like keep scaling and working if that means you
37:01 oversell that means you oversell unless your model is is sell to a part you know kind of a supply and demand drop model
37:08 um but if if if it's not then just go because because it might not work in
37:14 a couple weeks right you might find a campaign that for whatever reason is is is scaling and skyrocketing and you know
37:22 meta might make a change in their algorithm and all of a sudden it's not performing and it's not getting the CPA
37:27 or CS you want that's good so 70 to 80% touch ads
37:34 in some capacity for new customers you read the thesaurus and continue moving
37:40 faster don't slow down the sales and just keep the pedal going yeah keep the gas pouring on I love that the thesaurus
37:47 exactly yes John hey thanks for joining me I appreciate you everyone here appreciates you uh you're rocking it
37:54 over there at Battlbox and uh I'll keep watching uh from Instagram watching you water your indoor plants and all that
38:00 cool stuff and also um I'm sure we'll have you back on we we be talking about the next level of growth that you guys
38:06 are having so appreciate you and uh everyone listening this is the ecommer Alle podcast produced by the legendary
38:12 Dylan counts behind the scenes and from John and myself we want to say thank you for listening and we will see you in the
38:19 next episode [Music]