The D2Z Podcast
Gen Z entrepreneur and DTC agency leader Brandon Amoroso talks with some of the best in the marketing world. Brandon and guests reveal their top business-growth strategies for anyone in the online space–whether you are a brick-and-mortar business looking to scale or an established online business trying to grow. Consumer marketing is under constant and dramatic change, so Brandon aims to tackle new problems with a fresh Gen Z mindset. The D2Z Podcast delivers insights, strategies, and tactics that you can use and aims to shift how you think about business and your relationships with your teams, partners, and customers.
The D2Z Podcast
Exploring the Journey of NoonBrew: Combating Afternoon Slumps, Nighttime Tea Successes, and the Role of AI in E-commerce - 69
Andrew Case, co-founder of Noonbrew, joins me to talk about its growth into a diverse brand offering popular products like their nighttime tea, Andrew shares an exclusive behind-the-scenes perspective. We talk about everything from the critical role of customer surveys in validating product effectiveness, to how the unexpected success of their nighttime tea has caused a stir in their sales charts.
We also take you through the intricate process of product development. Hear about the pitfalls to avoid, and the significance of testing your product before heavy investment in branding. Andrew highlights the potential of cross-store selling apps and Shopify's shop app for a unified customer experience. But there's more; we dive into the art of delegation, scaling your team, and the thrills of entrepreneurship that come with its unique challenges.
Finally, Andrew and I delve into the cutting-edge world of AI in e-commerce operations. Learn how AI is revolutionizing creative iteration, video production, and content creation at scale. Andrew offers his insights on Amazon's role in a business' channel mix, its impact on customer data and relationships, along with the importance of ideation. Stay tuned for our chat about effective retention strategies for e-commerce brands, including loyalty programs and 'surprise and delight' through merch kits.
I'm Brandon Amoroso and this is the D2Z podcast Building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in to the D2Z podcast, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of Retention as a Surface Agency Electric. Today, I'm joined by Andrew Case, the co-founder of Nunebrew, super excited to have you on and get the chat about all the things you've got going on right now. Yeah, excited.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of stuff going on, so happy to dive into a lot of it.
Speaker 1:You've also got the coolest background of any podcast guest I've had so far when are you?
Speaker 2:I'm in the city of Brooklyn in New. York. That's where the office is and where the employees work out of.
Speaker 1:Nice. My flight back from New York after Gro got cancelled and they revoked me three days later. I had to add an additional three nights in Brooklyn and the rooftops were sweet looking back at the city.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's beautiful here. We are excited to dive in and jump in at Retention. We are very much focused on Retention, so happy to talk about that too.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, before we dive into some of the specific topics we want to cover today, can you give everybody just a quick background on you, and then also Nunebrew.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a quick background on Nunebrew. We started Nunebrew back in March of 2021, launched in September 2021. So it took us about six months to formulate Nunebrew to get the packaging branding, everything of that sort.
Speaker 2:The problem originally with Nunebrew and we have another product called Nunebrew which I'll go into, but with Nunebrew it was a tea for the afternoon slump. So my co-founder, Alan, and I always got tired in the afternoons and wanted something besides coffee or energy drinks to give us that energy and focus and productivity to get through to dinner time. In the rest of the evening, Coffee would provide jitters and make us really anxious. The first cup of coffee was great, but the second or third cup always felt a little bit forced. So I started talking to a lot of people and everyone said that they had the exact same problem, but no one really had a solution for it. My mom would go and take a nap, my cousin would drink green tea, but it didn't really help him as much as he wanted to. So we developed this really, really good tea formula with Oolong tea and 19 different superfoods that help with focus and productivity, and it really is effective.
Speaker 2:We actually did customer survey just last month of over 500 of our customers and the amount of people that feel the effects almost immediately were about 75%. So that was really interesting to see and that's something that we're starting to do a lot more now, which is like post-purchase surveys and attribution. But in any case, we grew Nunebrew all throughout 2022. We launched superfood Honey in May of 2022, which was good. It wasn't like a hero product. Our tea was Nunebrew, but it was a really good complimentary product. And then in October so on Halloween we launched Nunebrew, which is our nighttime tea. A lot of people have trouble sleeping. They have insomnia or sleeping disorders, especially as you get older. It really impacts you and we saw that as like a natural extension for our product line. So we launched that and, on Halloween, basically sold out of that immediately. It was a really big hit with our customer base. That actually is starting to overtake sales of Nunebrew, which is really interesting. We didn't really expect that to happen, but yeah we've been growing.
Speaker 2:Nunebrew for the past. Call it a little bit over two years now and it's been going really well.
Speaker 1:I mean, I literally was just having this conversation yesterday with my girlfriend. I was like I don't sleep enough. Then I wake up and I drink coffee because I didn't sleep enough. Then I get to the nighttime and because I had too much coffee, I can't sleep, and then I wake up again and I have more coffee because I'm tired, because I didn't sleep enough. And so it's like this, this vicious cycle Sounds like I could hear your perfect, ideal customer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know a lot of people have trouble sleeping and there's different stages of having trouble sleeping. They'll get a lot of anxiety before they go to bed and they can't turn off for that. A lot of people, a ton of people, have trouble with they wake up in the middle of the night and they can't go back to sleep and then, just as you had mentioned, a lot of people also wake up groggy and they need caffeine to get them up and they have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how did you think about product development? Where did the nighttime version come from? Was it just, hey, we need to think about how to increase AOV, or increase the lifetime value of a customer? This makes a lot of sense. Or was it sort of sourced from customer feedback? Like, how did you actually come to deciding that that was going to be the product that you invested time and resources and bringing to market?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so at first we had no idea how to do a lot of this different product development. So the real story is that after we launched Nimbrew, I was out to drinks with one of my buddies and he's like, hey, you know what your second product is going to be? And I was like so burnt out from launching Nimbrew I had no idea.
Speaker 2:And he's like moon group the nighttime tea and I was like that's a genius idea, I need to go and trademark that name ASAP. And that's what we did. So we trademarked moon brew and we thought we're going to launch it a lot sooner than we did. But it takes a while to launch these different products. You always think that you're going to launch it earlier, but there's always some types of delay. So we had the idea for moon brew almost immediately after we started moon brew as a natural line extension.
Speaker 1:Now we're a lot more methodical.
Speaker 2:So we do post purchase attribution surveys or post purchase surveys that will say what types of flavors are you interested in us introducing or which types of flavors would you like to try, and we give customers a host of different options and we just use no commerce for that. So that's been really good. And then we have a lot of different type form service that we're asking.
Speaker 2:And we also you can see within customer reviews, too, what people want. But, yeah, being very proactive in terms of what the next stage of product development is is really important and, just like as you mentioned, it's a great tool to boost your lifetime revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I see you've got a bunch of different like merchandising sort of strategies on site as well, with various like kits and bundles and then some some packs. Are you? What solution are you using to put those all together?
Speaker 2:That's just Replo. So we use Replo as a website builder and then we just make the SKUs within Shopify, and for subscription we use stateai.
Speaker 1:Got it, got it, and it's always interesting to see brands that start with like one hero product sort of evolve, because, for the most part, unless you're like athletic greens I guess though I'm sure they probably have some like accessories and other products as well Like you can't survive off of one product alone, and so how do you think about logical extension into other adjacent product lines, or maybe just completely different as well, to be able to increase that AOV? Have you looked or have you considered or do you use any of the cross store, like selling apps and I know, with additions coming out yesterday, like Shopify has their own version as well now, have you thought about that?
Speaker 2:I wish thought about it, but it's something that you know. You want to control the customer journey, so do you want to be selling another product that's complimentary from a different storefront post purchase? Maybe some people might want to do that. There's also Carrow as well. That allows you to sell other you know companies products on your website, which is interesting. But I think that the way that we think about it is that we want to control the customer journey and you know we segment out based on if you're a subscription or if you're a one-time purchase.
Speaker 2:If you're a one-time purchase, you get a totally different flow than if you're a subscriber. So Trevor's obviously more about retention and trying to get them into month two and month three.
Speaker 2:Whereas one-time purchase we are normally trying to upsell you into like a subscription or a bundle post purchase. So in terms of like product extension, what we're thinking about is more so internally versus. You know we do different partnerships, but those are more like transactional, I would say, and not necessarily too much long-term. We're thinking about it more of like similar to how Moon Brew and Moon Brew and like the honey. It's like can we build another product that is complimentary and like adds a nice? You know, say like a creamer, so a lot of people will use cream within.
Speaker 1:Moon.
Speaker 2:Brew, to you know, accentuate its flavor. So can we build our own creamer, instead of having our customers go out and buy a creamer to utilize for Moon Brew, for instance.
Speaker 1:So what are our customers already doing?
Speaker 2:and how do we like supplement that with some of our own products?
Speaker 1:And with NoCommerce, do you ask customers like what would be a product that you would create almost we don't have any open-ended questions like that.
Speaker 2:That's a good one that we should probably ask at the end. Within there we ask more. So it's like here are the selection of products that we're thinking about. Which one of these would you like to try?
Speaker 1:Got it. It's a little bit more targeted. Yeah, something that was interesting that we did with Soylents is they have this like innovation lab, so it's basically an opt-in that customers can select right after checkout and in some other places as well, but I think there's like 400 or 500 of them now at this point. But they're basically like signing up to do things like that, like provide ideas and support around potential new product ideas, either brought by them or by others in the market as well, and it's been interesting to see some of the some of the things.
Speaker 1:Some of them are just wild, but others are, like, actually pretty relevant and could potentially be interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you have no idea where ideas are going to come from and I think that being open to just customer feedback, even like Moon Boost. So Moon Boost is another one of our products. That is like an extra strength version of Moon Brew. But I just got that idea from one of my friends who was like hey, I've been using Moon Brew a lot, but I put placing within there to help with like a little bit more but knockout effect, and they're like oh, we can just do that ourselves and market that as a new product and that's what we did.
Speaker 2:And that's been a really, really great product for us.
Speaker 1:How long does it take from like product ideation to actually product in market and what are some of the hiccups that you've had to go through? Because I have no product development experience whatsoever and I don't envy brand owners who have to go through that process. Yeah, curious, curious, what that actually looks like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my co founder does all of it, so he's definitely the one that is like really the the scientists within the lab, I would say. But it takes about 90 to 120 days, so three to four months, from ideation to formulation, getting the packaging done. Then you have to order the different ingredients, make sure it's formulated, then it goes to the co packer. The co packer is the one that puts the powder packaging and like that could take time because you have to schedule line time within that, especially as you get bigger, you're using a lot more, a lot more standardized co packers, which you know they just have a lot more regulation and scheduling and then you have to send it to your 3PL. So all those take a lot more time than you originally budget for. So I would say like four months Got it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that is probably the one of the few. I guess one of the value props to one of those cross store selling apps is that you can kind of test into something before necessarily like putting the capital outlay into actually going out and building your own. But I think ultimately having it as your own is a better customer experience and having one shipment and all that good stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've tested it out. So like we did a test where we did a collaboration with Hydrant so Hydrant's a hydration, water hydration but like they also have flavor packets and we saw that a lot of our customers wanted flavor in group.
Speaker 2:So John the founder of Hydrant is a good buddy of mine and we tested that out and saw that a lot of customers wanted more products like that. But it was a way that like, instead of us having to wait four months to do the formulation and to do our own packaging everything that's work we can do that within a few weeks.
Speaker 1:And it was a little bit of an in between.
Speaker 2:It's not like we were like upselling Hydrant from a Hydrant store or like driving traffic to Hydrant store for customers to check out. It was still like a unified experience and we had a collaboration where we had our own landing page for it and like we bundled it and we ordered you know X amount of Hydrant, delivered that to our 3PL and our 3PL was bundling and kidding Hydrant in Nunebrew.
Speaker 2:And it was also a great way for us to liquidate some of our inventory of Nunebrew as well, but it's just. It's along the same type of thinking, though. You know, how do you understand what your customers want and do? Product development.
Speaker 1:Well, it'll be interesting. As Shopify makes more investment into the shop app, it feels like, you know, in a future state a customer would be able to go into the shop app like add products from Nunebrew, add products from Hydrant, maybe add products from another brand, and it's all going to come in sort of one order out of the same fulfillment center. If you wanted to be able to rival an experience that you get with something like an Amazon, I mean, they still have a lot of limitations in place, like they don't have split cart functionality, so right now you still have to do a separate checkout for every brand that you're shopping from and some sort of table stake stuff that needs to be taken care of.
Speaker 2:But I feel like they're gonna have their own, like fulfillment by Shopify where you send in product, and then I mean I think that was the whole idea around their acquisition of Deliveroo.
Speaker 1:But now they've sort of off. They've offloaded that to Flexport, I believe is the name of the company, and yeah, but everything's sort of moving towards consolidation. So we'll, we'll see.
Speaker 2:I just want one page checkout and you're saying that it's. Do you have clients that are using it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you, if you go to the Shopify checkout landing page and I can send it to you. I got the bottom you just put in your email and they'll put you in the queue for access. I believe, because I don't think it's general release at this moment, Though with additions getting released yesterday. It might be, because now you can preview the one page checkout in your like Shopify theme editor as well. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's pretty slick. I have it on my like. My personal website is on Shopify, even though I don't sell anything. It's just easier with our development team and whatnot, so I mess around with things like that and the one page checkout is is pretty slick. I mean, Shoppay is still like a better and faster converting experience, but for customers who don't have Shoppay, it's a it's better, Okay, cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm gonna have to check that out because we're always in different ways that we can improve our conversion rate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then all of your like standard checkout extensibility plugins like CrossCells or loyalty point embed, whatever. It's all. It all functions the same way but it's on one page, so it makes it easier to to get conversion, I think, because right now, like with CrossCells on the standard checkout, you're only seeing it on one of the three screens when you're going through the process, versus seeing it on just that one singular checkout page.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah that's exactly what we want. We were always doing Google Optimize and actually that's a quick question for you when are you going to be using post-Google Optimize?
Speaker 1:What are we using? Post-google Optimize?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know there's a couple of native solutions to Shopify. I don't know if they actually provide I don't know if they provide AP testing for the checkout itself, though, but your standard is like Optimize-ly and then Clev-u, clev-u I don't know how you actually say it K-L-E-V-U. We typically have used Optimize-ly, but I actually just started talking to Clev-u, clev-u. However, you say it about two weeks ago, and I have a product demo with them next week, so TBD on that. But that's a feature that I'm at sort of a proponent of Shopify just internalizing, and it feels like it would be so much easier to not have to use a third-party app for that. And you see it, with the release of things like Shopify bundles or Shopify Collective, there's certain things that might just make more sense to be a Shopify product, so that's my hope is that you could just toggle between variations, just like you can in Gladia or anything else for AP testing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:No I definitely agree.
Speaker 2:I think that's something that just makes more sense because they're going to be able to get more revenue as well.
Speaker 1:Shopify get the payment processing fees they would want to do that If you look at half of their additions, updates, it's all around how to help merchants acquire more customers, because more customers means more GMV, which means more payment processing, and obviously that's where they make all their money. Are you using all of the shop products? Do you use Shoppay? Are you on the Shop app? Are you trying Shopcash offers and things like that? Shopify audio.
Speaker 2:We do have Shop.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have.
Speaker 2:Shoppay and we have Shopcash and all these different ones. But yeah, it's one of those things where it gets tough with a lot of these new products, especially when you're trying to just do everything else with running the business and everything internally. There's always different fires to put out. I see a lot of that stuff being introduced, but until someone is like, hey, you need to use this, I generally am not one of those people that are the absolute first adopter within there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. How is speaking of first adopters? How are you leveraging or not leveraging AI in your day-to-day operations and business right now?
Speaker 2:We utilize ChatGBT a little bit for email campaigns as well as scripts for ESLs, some video sales letters, but we don't really utilize it too much, I would say. But we want to start using it a lot more, especially voice overs too, so we can pump out a lot of video ads, and 11 Labs is really interesting for that. So we're going to be testing that a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the features and functionality that it provides for creative iteration, and maybe you only have to do one photo shoot and then you're just layering in different backgrounds, you're moving products around you. Basically, you can do whatever you want. Some of the stuff from Google is really fascinating, and there's some debate now around what's a photo versus a picture. I forget what it was, but it's like. When does it stop becoming a picture? Because you've edited it so much that you can literally change entire sceneries or remove people from photos. It's pretty crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, in the future, you're just going to be able to deep fake a lot of these different videos and be able to test out tons of different videos at one time to see which one has the highest conversion and be able to scale that. So I think that's really interesting. But we're not there just yet. But a lot of the different technology that people are putting in place, even just with the AI voice overs, are making it so content is becoming cheaper to produce at scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the updates was you can basically create a blog post in five seconds Because you just add tone to it, you add in a couple of topics and then you let it just create and obviously you have to make edits to it. And it's not a replacement but it's an augmentation. So maybe a copywriter who could do eight blog posts a month can now do 30. Because they don't have to do the basic blocking and tackling and also ideation, at least for me, is half the battle. Once I have the idea and I know what I'm doing, then you can really start to crank on it. But getting that framework to start is the most challenging for me, or what are the actual ideas to have here? And I just would rather prefer AI run with that versus me having to do it myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think the prompt engineering is going to be very, very valuable. It already is very valuable, but how do you make sure that you have all these different prompts set up for success?
Speaker 1:That's the hardest thing I would say.
Speaker 2:Once you have that, you can easily recreate blog posts or articles, and I think content is going to become a lot cheaper. And that's what the Screen Actors Guild is basically fighting for, right now too.
Speaker 1:Are you purely e-commerce at this moment?
Speaker 2:Yes, In terms of what DTC or wholesale retail?
Speaker 1:Yeah, are you in any brick and mortar locations?
Speaker 2:We are, but it hasn't been the biggest focus of the company. The biggest focus has been how to acquire customer cohorts that are really good efficiency and get a drive down our payback period. So that's the main focus right now, which is what is our payback period based off of our contribution margin with certain customer cohorts? And then how do we get that customer payback period by month two and month three so that we can scale.
Speaker 1:What are your most successful channels and tactics right now? I'm sure it shifted a lot since when you started to now, with all the various changes that rolled out with iOS and whatnot.
Speaker 2:Well, we started after iOS happened, so we've always been on Facebook and we've always been battling CPAs that are not easy to really control, especially from Facebook or heavily leveraged on Facebook, and we're actually getting set up with SuperFilliot right now. So we're going to be trying to really scale our customer referral program as well as our Affiliated Influencer program. But for right now it's been very much on Facebook and then also on Amazon Got it.
Speaker 1:What are your thoughts around Amazon in the channel mix for you? I hear a lot of different things from CPG founders. What do they say From? I mean, it depends on the product. So, like for Kombucha Amazon makes, or like a poppy or something, amazon makes a lot of sense because it's a heavier product, low price per unit, just like. The margins are not fantastic for e-commerce to begin with, and so we've even had some brands just stop selling on Shopify entirely, and I think poppy does that as well. Like, poppy has a website, but they don't fulfill anything. It's all FBA and they drive everything through Amazon.
Speaker 1:But then you have others who are like Amazon's going to not give us customer data. We're not going to have that like actual relationship with the customer. It's much harder to measure and have an impact on the purchase rate in LTV, so they prefer to try and be as Shopify heavy as possible. But I think, like yeah, I think it's.
Speaker 2:It's tough to say. I think that, like customers are going to be looking for you on Amazon.
Speaker 2:Amazon's also very reckless in terms of reviews and like hard to control. The Amazon shoppers are very critical. I would say so like you need to have a really good product and if you don't, then it's going to really it could also like negatively impact your DC sales, because if someone goes from your DC website to Amazon sees that you have two stars and a ton of different like unhappy customers, then that's going to negatively impact your DC storefront. So like you have to weigh that too and Amazon's not. I mean Amazon's not easy. I would say Like there's a lot of different types of guardrails that you have to really watch out for, as well as like just shipping into FBA or if you're going to do FBM.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of different decisions within that. It's also very competitive. But I think in some ways, like you kind of have to be on Amazon for the right product. If you're poppy or if you're, like, ready to drink RTD brand, like already DTC is going to be tough for you because your margins are just going to be awful Like. I don't think that you can be.
Speaker 2:I think, that's really tough to be only DTC. If you're ready to drink just because the shipping costs are so high, or if you're anything frozen, like that's really tough as well to be DTC. So you have to look at other channels. You know, obviously we have powder or tea so it's very cheap to ship. So like, obviously DTC makes sense for us. But also we are on Amazon. Not like a huge amount of our sales come from Amazon each day, but it's enough and it's also a profitable channel. So like, yeah, we definitely lean into Amazon and we see that as being a bigger and bigger channel as we go through.
Speaker 1:Do you have a different product assortment on Amazon versus Shopify? And then, have you thought about any of these other marketplaces, whether it's like Walmart or spinning up like a TikTok shop, things like that?
Speaker 2:We have thought about that to answer your second question. But I think that also, like, when you're such a small team, you need to focus and like if you expand too far out like you're going to do nothing well. So like we see the most volume right now from Facebook and Facebook shop. So how do we optimize that experience for our customers and make sure that, like our product rating and everything like that is really good? And then for Amazon, we have a similar product assortment but we don't have bundles on Amazon just yet.
Speaker 2:So, we'll probably introduce bundles in Q4, but for the most part it's a 30 serving pack or a 10 serving travel pack. And that was actually one thing where Amazon customers, you want to have a 10 serving travel pack on there because they're not always going to be as likely to purchase a 30 serving for $48.
Speaker 2:You need to get them for like a smaller price point. So this could be more of a transactional type of buyer that wants to try it first, versus a customer that's going onto your website and you can control a lot of the different information that you provide to them and do upsells and cross sells, everything of that sort.
Speaker 1:I feel like Amazon would actually lend itself better to that style of product offering, because you just have it in, like FBA or whatever, and you don't have to Cheap to ship. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But Amazon you also want to go wide in some cases too. So you want to have, like, different flavors and that's really important to build out, like to scale on Amazon. A lot of the different agencies that you'll talk with they say to scale horizontally with your product mix, got it?
Speaker 1:So let's say you have like a list of customers. They've been on your Klavia list for three months still haven't purchased on your website. Are you like trying to send them to Amazon, to that 10 day trial pack?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, we definitely need to do a better job of that. But yeah, like I think that and it's not even just the people that are uncomverted, but also we're thinking about that from just people that have purchased hey, do you want this in two days? Versus, you know, not to say that we have like a really long shipping time because we don't, but it's like you can say like hey, if you're a prime member, get this, get Numbrew or Numbrew in two days, and that could be a very big value probably, especially for someone that's growing low.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. So, going more on like the starting your own business side of things, what has been sort of the most rewarding part of it? And then what is? What are some of the not so glamorous things that you know you maybe didn't think about before embarking upon this, this journey?
Speaker 2:So a rewarding part is one like a lot of the reviews that come in. So, alan and I so I'm my co-founder and I we just wanted to create a tea that would help us with energy to get through the afternoons. But some of the reviews that you get are like this has been life changing. It's been helping my sleep. It's the only thing that like allows me to work late at night. Or, to you know, for nurses to get through their shifts, which they have like 16 hour shifts or 12 hour shifts. So hearing about the stories from customers is always the most rewarding part. Also, like seeing your product packaging at stores we were a pop-up grocer, so like that has been really cool to see. Or just like seeing your friends enjoy it as well.
Speaker 1:You know I was in.
Speaker 2:B2B Tech before and I was selling health insurance at a company called Xenophids.
Speaker 2:None of my friends were my clients, and even if they were, they probably wouldn't have had a great experience because the software wasn't that great back then Not to say anything about Xenophids, because it was a great company. But yeah, like having like friends that enjoy your product is something that's really special, and a lot of my friends are big customers, and even my mom my mom's like our biggest fan, so like that's been really great. There's so many tough parts, though, of running the business.
Speaker 2:I think like the biggest thing cash flow management, having to learn a lot on the fly, learning things and then being like, wow, I really wish I would have known that a year ago, because I would have ran my business totally differently had I been focusing in on customer cohorts and contribution margin and like profitability and all these different things, versus just like being very, very much focused on NCPA. But I think that's all part of the journey. So it's very difficult, very, very rewarding, and you have those different moments. There's like a lot of highs and lows and they happen throughout the day, so it makes for you have to like really keep your head on straight. I would say.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like it's a bit of a roller coaster.
Speaker 2:It's a very big roller coaster, but you know it's very, it's great. I wouldn't want to be doing anything else, and the people that you meet along the way, I think, are really, really awesome too. The e-comcommunity is super supportive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would agree. I think I mean, most of my, most of my friends are work related at this point, and I think that just sort of lends itself to the fact that if you are an entrepreneur, like building your own business, inherently you're going to be spending a lot of time on it and within that, like ecosystem, and then you meet others who are similar like passions or similar motivation and drive to accomplish or achieve something in that, in that vein, and it just makes, for you know, friendships that expand beyond just the confines of work, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 2:And you meet a ton of people too. There's always people being introduced and a lot of different events and dinners and conferences, like you mentioned with bro. So it's really it's a good community. Everyone's like fighting the same battle.
Speaker 1:I think this issue has been, like you know, saying no, because there's this mindset that you should say yes to everything. But then I read something the other day. It was like you should actually say no to absolutely everything unless it's like absolutely yes, like I need to do this or I need to be there and I get that for sure Because I've gone to some events or things, and not that, like you know, my time is just so valuable and sort of like an egotistical way, but like there's only so much time in a day and if you go, waste it for four hours at like some event that wasn't didn't really accomplish anything for you. Now like you're set back those four hours and have to make it up somehow in terms of work for the business that day or whatever. So it's like balance.
Speaker 2:And I think that that's like the only. I mean, everyone has the same amount of time and I think that you have to be ruthless with understanding. Hey, like this intro. It actually is not good for me, and I think that as you you start to grow the company or whatever it might be, you're always going to be getting a lot of cool emails. You're getting a lot of unsolicited intros, which are the absolute worst.
Speaker 1:And my biggest beef is the unsolicited intro. And then I feel bad if it doesn't, if it doesn't line up, then I just feel bad because I'm like I don't, I'm sorry, Like this just doesn't make sense at this time.
Speaker 2:I mean, you have to protect your time, so it has to be. It's good to get better at saying no and saying okay, sorry. Like you know, I need to focus on this because this is actually way more important than like an intro call. You know, you start to really understand what were the main drivers of the business and we're to prioritize, and I think that that like starts to over time. You know it compounds yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, based on that, one of my last questions for you. You obviously have finite resources and time. How have you thought about growing and scaling the team and and you know starting to delegate maybe some of the things that you used to be doing that now somebody else has to do, like what does that look like for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that you know we're going to be hiring a head of acquisition, we're going to be moving someone from product and ops into retention. They're going to be hiring someone for for operations, and the way that I see a lot of new group growing. You know, obviously there's the marketing retention side and there's the product and operation side, and being able to understand which we need full time employees for internally, which we need agencies for, which I think is a big, big question, because you don't want to just like have a bloated full time employee staff because it becomes harder to harder to manage and like cable, obviously you don't want that to to really inflate, but then again, like, some employees are really important to have internally.
Speaker 2:So you know, with scaling, scaling obviously for a TTC brand it's different from from like a service based one.
Speaker 2:We're like service based you, you scale via employees, but like TTC you can have a five person team that's doing a lot of revenue just by like efficient ad spend and some of these efficient types of processes.
Speaker 2:So, like, we're not looking at scaling too much on the team side. We're looking at, like, where are the different efficient channels that we can use for acquisition to scale? And like how do we get better at post purchase? And then, in terms of, yeah, scaling, it's understanding what are some good channels that you can get a good positive row as off of, or like a row as that makes sense, and invest within there that also have scale, while not losing sight of Facebook ads being able to, you know, really scale to where you want it to be with the right type of creative and content. I mean, there's different companies that are doing tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars on Facebook, just Facebook alone. So, like, unless you're at that scale, like in a lot of cases it's not going to like. Keep your eye out, take your eye off the ball Right.
Speaker 1:That's like you know, if you're building a social presence, don't post on LinkedIn, twitter, tiktok, instagram and like I don't know whatever, because you only. You need to focus on one first and then expand. You see the same thing with creators like maybe they were YouTube creators and now they're starting to get into TikTok, or they were TikTok creators and now they're starting to get into YouTube, but it's very difficult to do all of them all at once unless you have some sort of a team behind you Exactly, and if you try and do all of them all at once, you're probably going to be over.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like seeing that time and time again. Well, those were really. I got like a thousand other questions, but you know time is a valuable resource here, so I want to turn it over to you. If you've got any any questions and want to be the interview interviewer for a second, here's, I guess you know your misretention.
Speaker 2:So, like what are some of the best retention types of strategies? Or also, what companies are you seeing within the field that are doing retention very well?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think for me, the best retention strategy is not using a traditional loyalty program and just having you know, because if you interact with like Uber or your airline companies, you don't actually have to like do anything in terms of unlocking certain status or receiving certain rewards or benefits, like with Uber. You know, you have certain tiers and it just happens, and the only thing that I'm responsible for as the end customer or user is just using the product more. And I like to think of retention for e-commerce brands in the same way, like for NuneBrew. Why would you have some sort of complex like points based system that the customers are going to have to log in to see how many points they have, like figure out what it can be redeemed for? They'll have to add the code into checkout, like there's so many hoops that they have to jump through when, at the end of the day, all you really want is for them to keep purchasing. So why not just lay out to them from the get go hey, like we've got three tiers, so make this up silver, gold, like platinum, and once you hit this certain spend threshold, here's all the things that happen for you. And so you start hitting them with that communication even before their first purchase.
Speaker 1:You showcase it in the order confirmation emails, you highlight it before they come back to place their second order. Like where they are on that, on that progress, like, hey, after this order you're going to get a free this and you're going to get percentage off forever and I don't know. Free shipping or something Like those are the best ways to drive retention, because it's frictionless for the customer and you're just automatically rewarding them for what you want them to be doing, which is which is buying more products. So I think it gets over complicated a lot and for for companies like yourself who have subscription programs with a limited set of SKUs, you can even do it based off of like order tier. So like, let's say, you make it to your fifth order, like that fifth order always includes some sort of crazy ambassador like merch kit or something that's included in the order. Things like that will generate far more surprise and delight and then it'll show up on social media and you'll get more UGC from it and it's just sort of has a flywheel effect.
Speaker 2:So I like that a lot. That gives me a lot of good ideas.
Speaker 1:That's my. That's my long-winded rant around the loyalty programs. Well, I got to.
Speaker 2:I got a. I got an IDA with my head of retention, but I liked it a lot, you know, because we've been focusing a lot on activation and emails and like how people get people to use the product, but also there's like the incentive based one as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think both can play hand in hand. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Before we hop off here, can you just let everybody know where they can find Nunebrew online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, don't go to Amazon, Go to nunebrewco so you can get your customer data. But yeah, nunebrewco. And then try it out. I think that's great. I use it every single day, but, yeah, nunebrewco Awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for coming on, as always for everybody listening. This is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom or electricmarketingcom, and we'll see you next time.