What makes your ad creatives special? Anvar Jabirov, Aistis Matulaitis & Nojus Putna @ 360 Scale By Kandy

Speaker A: Welcome to 360 Scale, a podcast for

Speaker B: a level entrepreneurs looking to scale their business beyond seven figures.

Speaker A: Learn from those that have actually made

Speaker B: it in the world of E commerce with actionable steps.

Speaker A: You can apply right now.

Speaker B: Hey guys. Welcome to 360 scale, powered by candy. And today we have Anwar, who is a E commerce person. E commerce person basically runs an agency, uh, using the main thing is creatives as I understand and yeah. So welcome to the podcast. Uh, welcome to the podcast. And how are you?

Speaker A: Good man, good. Didn't get enough sleep just like you guys.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean like last night it was 3am, we got back, uh, we got in straight into bed, no shower, no nothing.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And ah, right now we just, yeah, like woke up, had a coffee and.

Speaker A: Did you drink anything by the way?

Speaker C: No, it was like gin, tonic. It's nothing.

Speaker A: Okay, okay.

Speaker C: Uh, but um, yeah, we went into Cigar Lounge. What about you? You went into like, we did hookah,

Speaker A: uh, with some guys at jbr. I don't drink, so.

Speaker C: Yeah, but it's not too bad. I mean like we had a double espresso right now in the morning. So it's like, it's very good.

Speaker A: Same.

Speaker C: But yeah, man, we were setting up the whole thing and uh, you saw the software, you saw the mics and you were like, oh, I was in music. I was like, no, that's my kind of background. So let's just jump into that part. Music, how you got in, you know, was the whole thing, how that connected you with the ecom, uh, side. And just quickly walk us through, you know, the whole story of yours.

Speaker A: Yeah, so like the whole story, it has so many matching dots. There's a really good speech by Steve Jobs. He was talking in front of some of the university graduates and talking about that. But so it all started back in 2011 I think, when I was like 13 years old and my parents gifted me a guitar. And I didn't have a teacher, like a guitar teacher. So I really wanted to learn how to play it. Uh, and at that time YouTube was in its infancy, um, especially like the Russian YouTube. So there were not like any tutorials or like guitar lessons in Russian. So I literally had to type in, you know, how to play Nirvana Smells like Tinspirk. Learn from that.

Speaker B: Everybody starts from Nirvana. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: Green day as well, Fun days. And I was really into music. I actually used the exact same, um, how do you call it? Audio card.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And at the age of 14 I started playing at a rock band. I got invited to join One, um, we did that for about, like, three years. We had some fans. Um, and the cool thing, we used to write songs in English and we'll put out them on YouTube and Facebook. Uh, and that's what opened my eyes at that time, because I was like, what, 16, 17 years old, and I realized, hold on, I live in Moscow, but we have fans from United States.

Speaker B: Okay, so you already had fans from other countries? Internationally. Cool.

Speaker A: That was like a paradigm shift.

Speaker B: Yeah. So you basically. You had the channel. YouTube channel. Yeah, basically where you uploaded, uh, your video clips. Did you produce any video clips? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: I'll show you afterwards.

Speaker B: Okay. Okay. That's nice.

Speaker A: That was fun.

Speaker C: That's what's improved your English as well as. I guess.

Speaker A: So the reason why I told you, like, about the YouTube thing is, like, I've never, ever learned English purposefully, but because from the early age, everything that I was interested in, uh, I've learned through the Internet.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Naturally immersed myself with a lot of English content, you know, so everyone I was following on YouTube, on Instagram, like, none of them were from Russia, you know, just, like, when I was interested in music, I used to follow, like, music influences from United States, you know? And then, yeah, basically in 2017, uh, I was like, 19 years old, I moved out of my parents, and I realized I'm not making any money. Like, we're not making any money at all. We're broke as fuck. Can I curse about that?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure.

Speaker A: Uh, we were making, like, our royalties were doing, I don't know, like, $300 a year. Nothing. Peanuts.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: So. And yeah, and the time it took to produce something, like, to produce a hit that, you know, will potentially make you millionaires, like, the music business is really, really hard. The actual business is hard. Right. Like, selling B2B services, like, becoming a millionaire at that is hard. Imagine selling something like. That's not like selling music.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker A: So, yeah, I, uh. Oh, what happened is, like, I ran some ads for us.

Speaker B: Oh, really?

Speaker A: Our band?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: It's like, to promote one of our

Speaker B: clips, the YouTube or Facebook.

Speaker A: Facebook ads.

Speaker B: Facebook ads, yeah.

Speaker A: And then I thought, hold on. What if. I'll do the same thing.

Speaker B: Yeah. For the clients.

Speaker A: For the clients. Let me try that. I started, like, doing some research, watching YouTube videos. So to begin with, I used to freelance in Russia. Um, that didn't really make a lot of money because Russian businesses are. Are not good. Uh, but then I realized, hold on. I actually know a bit of English. What if. I'll try to provide the same services to the foreign market. So I started getting a few clients for Facebook groups. Um, and I was very active on Facebook making some. I uh, had a blog, like my personal profile blog. And then I got noticed by one New Zealand agency. Uh, the founder of it, his name is Simon Phillips, uh, you guys might know him from Twitter. And yeah, one of his teammates was also Russian. Reached out to me and said, hey, I just moved to New Zealand. We have this e commerce agency, it's growing really fast. Do you want to join? And I just said yes straight away.

Speaker B: That's a good opportunity. I mean, yeah, uh, at that time, yeah.

Speaker A: And I honestly believe like that for anyone who's like interested in marketing, who wants to get into it working for an agency, 100% it's the best thing.

Speaker B: Either you work in the agency or you, I don't know, have enough courage and start by yourself. Because that was the same case for us. Actually I worked in uh, one of the agencies in Lithuania. It was not like E commerce agency,

Speaker C: it's more like overall marketing.

Speaker B: Marketing agencies with TV ads, you know, all the whole like content production houses and stuff. Yeah, old school stuff, uh, like traditional marketing. But it's kind of similar story. I mean we started to do a drop shipping by ourselves and we got in debt to my dad because we didn't have any money for ad spend. But I just connected his PayPal and I thought okay, I think we're going to be definitely making a lot of money in two weeks. So we can, in silence, we can basically connect his PayPal, run a couple of campaigns. In a couple of weeks we'll be breaking even. I'll be able to uh, bring him back the ad spend and we're going to be basically rolling up on our own money, on our own cash flow.

Speaker C: But it's way more like uh, smart. If you just get into agency, you spend their money, you just learn, you

Speaker A: get acquired the skills on their own time.

Speaker C: So you work with different clients like in different niche and different markets and all that.

Speaker B: So yeah, so we got, we uh, borrowed 5k euros and we needed to get back to him. And that's actually where the agency started because we started to do cold calling in Lithuania. Yeah, so cold calling in Lithuania and uh, it's really easy, it was really easy to cold call because it's not a Saturday thing as United States give

Speaker C: like five cold calls and you get the meet. Yeah, yeah, it's a live meeting. You know, you went and you just, you know like uh, bitch, you know like standardly like you know all those guys do in serious.

Speaker B: Uh.

Speaker C: And then, uh. Yeah, I mean uh, that's how we got in. Um, and that's where we started. And those ecom brands in Lithuania, it's like easy. I mean it's like just locally.

Speaker B: Just in the. Yeah, locally.

Speaker C: It was like uh, well like 2017, 18, something like that. Uh, so it's like uh, at the time you just bring in what works from us, uh, into Lithuania. Like you apply those basics. Uh, not even like ugc, not even like static. It's just like plain. Like uh. I don't like it was carousels, like all that kind of stuff. So we just bring in and it works. And even right now these days, like guys, uh, from Lithuania, they just take what works in the US they produce that in Lithuania. They launch

Speaker B: general stores that were trending in USA in 2017. So they are doing 100ks of revenue in Lithuania right now.

Speaker A: The people who pay with credit cards in the funny.

Speaker B: Yeah, they paid, they pay with the credit card. Of course there are like specific payment providers, pseuda, which is like people can pay not with the car but straight, uh, through his bank. So basically you go to the website and you sign in your bank and it just basically takes money straight pretty well.

Speaker C: Cash on delivery is still popular.

Speaker B: Yeah, cash on delivery is also very popular.

Speaker A: That's why I see like in general in the Eastern Europe. That's why I ask you about credit cards. Because in Russia people are just getting into it. They're very skeptical about putting their credit card deals online.

Speaker B: Well yeah, if you introduce cash in delivery, your conversion rate will increase by 2%. Maybe that's something like if you have 2% conversion rate with cash and lure, you have 4. So that's really powerful. But I uh, really don't like the whole thing. How. I mean, um, for us there's like a DPD company so they take a lot of fees when. Because they, they maintain and they operate that cash and delivery. They collect cash.

Speaker C: Like that's how we know like we were selling masks, uh, in like 2020. So we start and uh, our. We spend like 50 bucks uh, that day, like first day and uh, we wake up and the revenue is like. Well like 2 5K.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So yeah, that's, that's how we did it. Um. But uh, yeah, let's get back to that agency. You got in. You started the whole thing. What's the.

Speaker A: I got noticed by that New Zealand agency, by Simon Phillips. They made me an offer to work for them I wasn't still in Moscow. Um, I still remember that was November 2019. So I started working remotely for them waking up at 5am M. Because we have a 13 hour difference. My 5am was like 4pm on there to do the meeting. So, yeah, that was like really, really hectic for me because I was working literally from 5am till 8 or 9pm

Speaker B: did you get an offer to go to New Zealand?

Speaker A: Uh, yes. But like, it wasn't easy for me because again, Russian password is fucked. Uh, and the visa process took way too long because that was literally when the COVID thing has started. And uh, I remember the date. I have a really good memory for dates, by the way. I applied for a visa on the 3rd of January and they told me it will take about 20 days to get a decision. So a month and a half passes. It's like almost the end of February and I still don't have it. I called, uh, the visa center multiple times and told me, uh, it's because of the COVID We have these delays and whatnot. But I'm already burnt out. I'm working from 5am to 9pm and I said, fuck it. And I just, uh, bought a ticket to Bali and flew there. That was on the 23rd of February.

Speaker C: I remember that.

Speaker A: The funny thing is, the morning I wake up on the 24th, I open up my email and I see that I got the visa to New Zealand. I still stayed in Bali for like two weeks, uh, had some good time there, and then moved to New Zealand literally one week before the whole world went on pandemic.

Speaker B: Oh, okay.

Speaker A: I literally got hopped into the last bandwagon.

Speaker B: Okay. So you basically get into New Zealand and you stay there for a while. Yeah. Or 10 months.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: How is New Zealand? I mean, I mean, I'm always curious about their culture because it seems like they're different. Like they're living in a different planet

Speaker A: a bit, you know, Uh, I mean, geographically.

Speaker B: Yes, geographically. Yeah, yeah. Uh, but like people like their work, uh, mentality, how work culture, they're.

Speaker A: They're very chill. You know what's funny? Like me coming from Russia, for the first time in my life, I witnessed what is a middle class. Because in Russia there are like absolute brokies and like oligarchs.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Nothing in between.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, and that's like a common trade for third world countries.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: But when I came there, I was surprised that like, you know, bosses, executives and like, yeah, they all kind of can afford somewhat of a same lifestyle. They go to the same bars, to the same, um, whatever, like, shopping centers. There's no, like a strict division between like, poor people and rich people.

Speaker C: They can afford whatever. I mean, they just kind of.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Live the good life.

Speaker A: Yeah. But that to me was like something new because, like, you know, in Russia it's like you're either that broke or you're bald.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Is it the same with the 20th?

Speaker B: I mean, right now. Not. I mean, especially like last year. Decade, I think. Last decade, yeah. After the 2008, uh, crisis, I mean, uh, and a lot of our fintech started to increase. A lot of companies from finances, basically brought their offices. So our whole economy is kind of really growing fast, especially real estate. I mean, it's getting more and more expensive. I mean, still cheap in comparison with Dubai or something else. But real estate is really, really growing. And I can say that middle class is, uh. There is like a middle class section. Yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, I would say one of the biggest parts, especially in like big cities, like, uh, capital. Like, uh, probably the biggest part of the whole population is like middle class because like a lot of managers, a lot of people that are working, you know, those like, uh, mid type of jobs. So they kind of like, they go out, they go into clubs, like bars, restaurants, all that they spend.

Speaker B: But yeah, if you go to the lower, like smaller cities, especially like a countryside somewhere also there are like a huge separation. Like, there are like oligarchs who have. I don't mention houses and I don't know from where. And there are like poor people who are uh, living in the. I don't know, the house that was built straight after World War II. You know, I mean, everything like that. So. But yeah, Vilnius is really nice. I mean, in terms of, um, middle class and there's no big separation.

Speaker C: And then, you know, like a lot of econ people, uh, in Lithuania.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah, man.

Speaker C: A lot of like overall tech people.

Speaker A: I was talking about this yesterday.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean like, uh, it's just like the whole thing, like one company starts. I remember I had this discussion with, um, that guy Irene is from, um, Latvia. And he's like, bro, in Lithuania you have such a good guys. I mean, here in Latvia we do like shit. I mean like, we don't have any kind of ecom guys. We are just me, my business partner, and then a few more guys and that's it. And uh, we came up with the whole thing that, let's say, uh, whenever you start the first company you get in, uh, then they hire people, they train them, they Raise money, they bring in capital. Then the second one starts and then the snowball effect just happens. So I feel like we were in the good spot after the crisis in 2008, where all those companies, they came in, they took the money in, uh, they exited. Uh, as an example, that company Shopify, uh, bought them out. Oberlo.

Speaker A: Okay. They're from Lithuanian.

Speaker C: Lithuanian. Uh, that was one of the earliest one. Uh, and then they exited and then, you know, like, uh, Omnisend. Uh, then Killer Health. Then, um, NordVPN.

Speaker A: Oh, uh, NordVPN as well.

Speaker C: Uh, minted, uh, another like, uh, big one. So those guys, they just came in and then they started hiring like crazy. And then whenever you want to hire, of course you're looking at like Lithuanians just because it's easy, you know, you can get them in house. And uh, at that time it was like such a popular thing to study, like, programming. Everyone was going to programming. Like, everyone was going into like, you know, working from home, you know, on a laptop. And that's how the whole like, snowball effect happened, in my opinion.

Speaker B: Now we are at the same time, I mean, drop shipping started really early in our country too. Like there. I mean, in YouTube, it's easy to pop up, you know, in the business niche. In the business niche. Like if you're doing videos in Lithuania, in the business niche, talking about drop shipping, E commerce, it's really too easy to pop up. I don't know if you know David, uh, from Sugar 10 M. Kachan. It's like, you know him. Yeah.

Speaker A: So he, he knows me too.

Speaker B: Yeah. So in 2017, I remember he did several interviews about he started how he started a dropship and how he started an E commerce. And those two videos really blew up. Because no was. No one was like, no one was knowing that you can make money online, do Facebook ads and have international clients. And then a lot of people just started to learn Facebook ads.

Speaker C: So it's him as well. Like, he got in like a lot of, A lot of ecom people.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, and so it's easy. It's very easy in Lithuania to have that snowball effect when one thing, ah, like, starts, uh, and you speak about it and you have the right audience to speak, then everybody starts doing that. And I think due to like several people such as David, such as, uh, I don't know, um, I mean, the whole Sugar Hunt will work. Like a whole bunch of people who work in Sugar Hunt now. The whole bunch of people who work in Kilo Health and like, speak publicly Then there's like a big snowball effect. Actually, for example, like as we have an agency, we are constantly getting. I don't know, I am constantly getting from the high school, uh, from my high school because I ended high school like three years ago. Uh, can you give me a job? Can you give me a job? I want to learn E commerce. I want to learn E commerce. So it's like a trendy thing in Lithuania to be in the E commerce. Yeah. So that's why I think, um, you

Speaker C: can run ads and then you will get like hundreds of applicants and then you can just, you know, filter them down. So yeah, like I said yesterday, it's like so easy to hire in Lithuania.

Speaker A: Interesting. Something's in the water. You guys are different breed.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: But uh, let's continue with the whole thing. So you got in in New Zealand, you like there for like what, 10 months?

Speaker A: Lived there for 10 months.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That was a great experience. Acquired a bunch of skills. I felt pretty confident. Um, I became, I've switched to multiple roles. I became. At first I was just a media buyer, Stan. I was like the account manager. And at the end, I think for the last six months I was like a chief copywriter and I built a small team under myself for writing uh, creative riffs and whatnot. Which is, which is funny because like I was the only non native speaking person at the company. But I felt good about it. Yeah.

Speaker B: So it was cool.

Speaker C: Your like expertise was like in copy.

Speaker A: Copy. Yeah.

Speaker B: So we made a transition from meta buying to copy. So it became a marketer basically. Exactly. Everybody who knows how to write copy, they're like real marketers. I think that's copywriting is number one trait in marketing, I believe.

Speaker A: Absolutely, man. M and I've made a funny analogy on Twitter the other day is like when I used to be a musician, I actually never wanted to be a famous artist. I was just passionate about sitting in front of my laptop, using logic, uh, uh, with my focusrite card, uh, and just recording songs. That's what I was a passion. Just like a music producer producing songs. And my dream was to, to produce bankers absolute hits that brief charts.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I sort of became one just in the marketing niche.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: I sit down and I write an ad. Just like get in my zone, get locked in focus and that ad scales. Client makes money and we make money.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: Uh, it's the same thing.

Speaker A: Exactly. It's the same skill, same passion, you know, it's also like very, very creative. But yeah, I did that for about 10, 10 months in New Zealand and then I felt pretty confident about myself starting my own agency for some reason, I don't know. But that's good.

Speaker C: So you got into the creative wheel, uh, back then, uh, at that time

Speaker A: it was uh, advertising. Yeah, I've renamed it just in uh, September.

Speaker B: Uh, but did you start your personal brand before starting an agency when you were already working in the New Zealand agent?

Speaker A: No, no, that wasn't really smart what I did because if you're like, I'm not very risk averse, which I'm working on.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But you know, I should have started something before I resigned. But uh, what I did is I resigned. I moved back to Russia. 36 hour flight, by the way. That was painful. Yeah, I've spent basically first three months procrastinating, just doing nothing. I had a little bit of savings and I've just been just burning that money. And then one day I had a breakthrough. I said, fuck that, I'm launching a funnel and I'll get some clients. Uh, so I created a VSL Funnel in like three days. Uh, ran some ads, spent like 1k and got three clients. Made a little over 10k off of that. I was like, yes, we live in.

Speaker B: Was it with the Facebook traffic or. Facebook?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, my ad account got shut down pretty quickly but I managed to close a few deals so I was good. Um, and yeah, that was in 2021. I wasn't doing have any ambitions to scale that, which is like freelancing, making 5 to 10k a month. Um, but at the end of 2021 I thought, all right, let's take this serious. Recreated the website, repositioned because at that time was doing everything for anyone, just abroad, E. Comm. But then I decided to focus on health and beauty and uh, start posting on Twitter. That was the breakthrough moment.

Speaker B: Okay, how fast did you uh, blow uh, up in Twitter? I mean, how, like how much time it took.

Speaker C: What was the first like uh, thread,

Speaker A: that post that I remember that that was in. I uh, told you I have a good memory for dates. 22nd of January, uh, last year when I made a thread about a creative that I've produced. So because I didn't have any UGC clients at the moment, what I did is I um, saw a product in my feed. I bought it because I came up with this genius angles. I'll show you an ad afterwards. Um, and I've produced an ad and I tried to pitch it to the founders on LinkedIn.

Speaker B: Uh, we did the same. So it's like A cold outreach when you produce it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And, um, they said, oh, thank you. And it was a great ad. And then they told me, oh, we've actually downloaded, we've tested it and it didn't work. So we don't want to work with you. I'm like, okay. I don't know what they've done with the, uh, with media buying side. The ad was really cool, but maybe actually didn't work anyway, I thought it was a really cool piece of content. So I created like a, uh, creative breakdown on Twitter. And I had like 20 followers at that time. But the whole DTC Twitter thing was kind of like on the rise. And the topic of ugc, uh, was huge.

Speaker B: It was number one topic.

Speaker A: Buzzword.

Speaker B: Yeah, buzzword.

Speaker A: And yeah, I remember with like 20, only 20 followers. I dropped that thread and within a week I got like eight calls with seven and eight figure brands. And then it kind of went from there. I started constantly posting there, started doing cold email.

Speaker C: So from 20 followers, like where you went and what kind of range.

Speaker A: I think I got my first 500 in the first month. By March, I was at a thousand. Yeah. And then my, actually my very first Twitter account got shut down for no reason. They've never explained it. I have a, have an assumption.

Speaker B: Why?

Speaker A: Because I got, I had a beef with one feminist.

Speaker B: Uh, okay, I think I sold some

Speaker A: shit, maybe because of that. Uh, but yeah, that was in November. I had like 5k followers. I've shut it down. I've already created a new one, have 3k followers on it. But the cool thing about Twitter, it's like, you know, 3 or 5k followers doesn't sound like a lot. But what I've noticed about it is like the quality of followers is different because what is like 5k followers on Instagram? That's like your classmate.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Ex girlfriend.

Speaker B: Well, I mean, I wouldn't compare Twitter to Instagram right now. I would Compare Twitter to LinkedIn. Because a lot of people like, uh, from the business perspective, they either, especially in Europe, I don't know, in the United States, they either create Twitter and they focus on Twitter personal branding, or either they create LinkedIn. So that's what we started to do and we actually, uh, hire a specific person for the LinkedIn personal branding. And after this trip, like I spoke with you, I spoke with, uh, Sufian, I spoke with other people and I just saw everybody is like having their Twitter account. Yeah. Like their business is built almost on Twitter because the, all the leads come from Twitter.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And we didn't have the same in LinkedIn. I mean we don't have the same LinkedIn. I mean we posted regularly. Of course we have, I have 2000 followers, but those followers are nothing. And the other platform is like everyone

Speaker C: is like uh, sucking dicks to each other. Like it's just commenting like you know, talking shit. Like no community.

Speaker B: And there's no E commerce owners, which is our target audience, uh, who are seven figures. No, eight figures. Yeah, because they're looking for hiring, they're looking for human resources.

Speaker C: But then they have HRS in place.

Speaker B: Yeah, but for example, like six seven figure owners who are like our target audience, uh, from our agency. They're not.

Speaker A: Well again, that's the cool thing about Twitter. It's like back in the day, I think it was Facebook groups.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker A: What was it like the big one created by Timber. Forgot the name of it. Facebook ad buying.

Speaker C: Adleaks.

Speaker A: Uh, no M. Yeah, adleaks was a cool one, but now it's all like kind of moving to Twitter. And what I was about to say is like the quality of followers are different because like amongst my whatever 3k followers I have so many 8 even 9 figure brand owners, 7 figure brand owners, investors, VCs. And if you think about it, um, Twitter rewards intelligence in a way because like what kind of content does Instagram favor? It's lifestyle. Yeah, right. Travel, whatever. Luxury and whatnot. Naked girls. What is it on Twitter? I'm noticing basically just like two topics which are business and politics. Right. And business splits into like general business.

Speaker B: Crypto. Crypto is also. Yeah, uh, crypto, yeah, you can put um, basically making money online and uh, politics.

Speaker A: Right. So like if you're smart, you'll start getting followers if you're putting out something like insightful value. Right.

Speaker B: Actually yesterday I had the talk with the Chen. He has uh. Yeah, ah, he has 7 or 8k. He said basically that with all of your posts you have to provide one different unique insight.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And then everyone is looking for that one little improvement thing. You know, it's like uh, they're looking for that one thing that they can apply and then change the whole game for now.

Speaker B: Yeah. So that really brought. Because he said that even though if you, for example, if you do not have any type of unique strategies, but you are just, I don't know, like for us, why we usually scale brands because we can provide the really huge volume of creatives and we do things really, really fast, you know, like within the month we can test a lot of different things and then double down on the winning ones. And he said, even though it's nothing unique or. But you just gotta come up to find that unique insight and then just play, like, double down on it and, um, create content.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, you gotta form your own angle. Like with ad creatives, you just, you know, you take the whole thing and then you repurpose. You just, uh, switch the angle, switch the way you turn it.

Speaker A: What I love about Twitter is like the fast feedback loop, because you can just put out thoughts out there and get feedback from it instantly. And actually, by the way, the way I formed the whole UGC offer on, like, the landing page, it was purely derived from my Twitter research. I just went into, like, the search bar and I just typed in like a bunch of keywords like, you're buying ugc. And I just started just, like, digesting and understanding what people think about these topics. What do they believe in? What do they not believe in?

Speaker B: What do they pass?

Speaker A: Right? Who are the heroes? Who are the enemies? What kind of agencies do they hate?

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Uh, and then just like, with what we do for our e commerce clients, right. Then you craft your whole argument and offer around this, right?

Speaker C: And the Twitter community is super, super strong. Like a lot of. A lot of guys, cool guys there.

Speaker B: Like right now you manage your personal account by yourself or do you have a ghostwriter or something?

Speaker A: No, I have had a ghostwriter. I'm not really that active on it right now. Um, yeah, because, yeah, we'll be doing a pivot and I'm not like, actively searching for new agency clients.

Speaker C: You're getting into. Let's start the whole thing about SaaS.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So SaaS thing, ah, the way I came up with it is, um, basically I looked at the landscape that was back in August last year. Looked at the agency landscape, especially, like, creative agencies, because now there are even, like, courses on how to start your TikTok agency, UGC agency.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: This motherfuckers are breeding. How. How do we ensure. Because, like, if you think about it, we all have access to the same resources, same platforms, same software, same tools, same information, right? And basically the ones, whatever agencies and brands, whatever businesses that win are the ones who create a system using all of these tools and information and execute it fast and consistently. That's the name of the game.

Speaker B: Yeah, right. You create your unique mechanism that you sort of.

Speaker A: Yeah, but again, what you guys know the same, I don't know, like a beginner agency owner can get access to that. Maybe we'll take that guy like our

Speaker C: podcasts and get out of like you

Speaker A: know, all the levels. Like what will prevent them from getting to your level is actually turning that into your system and being consistent. Just like, I don't know with the getting jacked. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Any 15 year old knows that you just need to eat, sleep, train, be consistent with it.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Nobody does that. But still the way I looked at it is like if every agency has access to the same kind of resources and tools and software, the only way for us to kind of get a competitive and unfair advantage is by creating the software that will basically put all of those resources and tools on steroids.

Speaker C: So it's really cool just because let's say from um, my understanding the biggest opportunities are in markets that you are turning from creative into mechanics. So let's say you have like ah, Photoshop, right? What canva did they turn that creative market into mechanic and made like creatives and all the design work super like mechanic. And that's what you're trying to do is like you just take on uh, what's creative, which is creating content, doing all that shit and then you turn it with uh, all your SaaS and all the software that you're developing, you're turning that into mechanic so that you have the system, you have the whole process, you help them out and um, by doing that you just uh, make the whole thing, like you said, easier. Um, and the thing that they can follow M. So yeah, I mean it's definitely smart. Uh, so what's uh, getting into the SaaS? What's your thing, what you'll be doing? Uh, let's dive deep.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So we're finishing the MVP right now, working on UI ux and um, we'll be just mainly to begin with for the first probably three months. We'll um, be only testing it with our existing clients and then we'll get their feedback, improve the product and I think probably by the end of summer, maybe during summer we'll roll it out publicly. Um, and yeah, as I told you, we're planning to just use it as an internal tool, serve our own clients. Um, but then I realized that we've actually built a solution for other agencies. Right. And yeah, I will say the biggest benefit of it will be is just like a, having a system that you just follow like a rinse and repeat and that will be way faster. So say if it. Right now it takes us like four weeks to deliver like a round of creators. Our standard package with this software it can take like two, two and a half weeks you know, and that alone

Speaker C: is significant, you know, overall, how you see like the ugc, uh, delivery. I mean like uh, right now for us it probably takes like around two, three weeks. Uh, but in your experience, like um, what moves the needle when it comes to delivery times? It's like uh, working with creators. Is it like, I don't know, like some kind of like script work? Like what's the needle over there? How to ensure that.

Speaker A: I'm um. See that's the thing and that's one of the reasons why I want to really want to move into SaaS. Because with the agency space there are so many like moving pieces that we have no control over. Such as, like creators are not the most, you know, responsible and reliable people on transparency. Like sometimes we ship them the product. Even if we work with them in the past, they can ghost us for a week or two or just completely disappear. That has happened a few times. You can't control it, you know, or like if we, because we write scripts for creators that don't just like come up with stuff on their own and we need clients to approve those scripts right before we should send them to creators. Clients can spend a week without replying to us. You know, these things get in the way. Um, or like even the product shipment. Like we had a few European clients that would send the product to uk, it would take them like two weeks.

Speaker C: So you just gotta deal with it.

Speaker A: Kinda, kinda. And that's also like the reason why right now, uh, while we're still running the agency, I'm trying to move towards mobile apps. Because with them you don't need to ship the product and that simplifies a lot of things. Once the client approves the content creators, we'll just tell them, hey, download this app and just follow our guidelines. Boom. Ah, we've just saved a week.

Speaker C: The problem with those, we've tried couple, it's just like, um, those are not too stable whenever you want to get on yourself. So let's say you start an app, you run ads and all that stuff and one day you can be hero. Another day you can wake up at like, you know, a loss, big loss. So, and then you can.

Speaker A: You mean running your own apps?

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Oh, uh, so that's probably the main, main thing we found out about apps.

Speaker B: The biggest difference between physical and any type of digital product, if you for example, start testing one and want to start scaling one, is the sustainability. I mean, because you still are, you are selling something intangible, you know, so the whole selling process, uh, Is way different because physical product, it's easy. If they see the pain point, they see that, okay, this physical product will most probably solve this problem. But when we started the digital product, we were uh, in the procrastination niche. I mean if the people. The one I'm thinking about, yeah, we were in that niche and we tested out and we saw, okay, we can hit 1.2 extra oil, which is good for us know, because digital product, but the next day you can get 0.3 extra 1. Uh, and because it's a digital and they are like selling an air, you know, you're selling like uh, promises and that's it.

Speaker C: And the thing that makes products unstable, in my opinion is just like they don't need it. Whenever people, like whenever there's a need, you'll still find buyers and then they will still, you know, buy at least like at your break even anyways. Especially if you have data, especially if you have winning ads and all that stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, whenever they, they have lower needs, you know, you gotta make them, um, want it. Well, you gotta make them need it then. Or the unstability comes in.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's a bit harder like on the product side of things. But what you're, I mean with mobile apps you're basically, it's, it's info business. If you think. Yeah, it's just like packaged differently.

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker A: So I told you about that fasting company that we're in talks, did I, by the way?

Speaker C: Yeah, I believe so.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're about to start working with this fasting company which is just an app to help people like do intermittent fasting.

Speaker B: Well, it's trendy thing right now. You know, everybody's like, especially on TikTok. Um, my algorithm kind of started to show a lot of girls who are like, I'm doing fasting because it like cleans myself, uh, yada yada. So that's a new M. Like, majority of your creators are from Tiks. Okay.

Speaker A: No, not really. Not really.

Speaker B: From backstage mainly.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, a lot of backstage, uh, people. But also like we did some uh, outreach through Twitter and Instagram because again, most of our clients are in health and beauty and a lot, I would say 80% of them want 40 plus women or men, even like 15, 60 plus. And that's really hard to solve, really. Especially like if you want them to produce quality. Oh man.

Speaker C: And then the beauty, beauty, uh, part, let's say you have skincare, then it's not only like the face, but also the Skin type, You know the.

Speaker B: Yeah, man, yeah.

Speaker C: It's like uh, tons of moving parts.

Speaker B: But why health and beauty? Why you, uh, why you have selected the health and beauty to focus on it?

Speaker A: Good question. Mainly because I thought that creative like solves a big problem for health and beauty brands. So like say you're selling phone cases, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's static. Yeah. Well, I mean you can do it

Speaker A: if it looks good, people buy it visually, if it looks good, you can just show it in the and that's it sold. Right. You can't do that with a supplement product or think your product, the copy that goes into it. The creative part, which I'm also like really passionate about, is a lot more sophisticated and very, very few people can solve that. You know, it's really easy to produce creatives for like a phone case brand or I don't know, sunglasses brand, whatever clothing brand. But if it's a health product, that it's actually really good and has a unique mechanism to it and then you can come up with so many angles to it as well.

Speaker C: So you wanted that complexity to be solved. Basically.

Speaker A: I just saw an unsolved pain point in the market because when I was doing my research, I remember I've manually found 300 health and beauty brand, just analyzer ad library and all of them had just like the most basic static images with a vague headline. Just like learn more.

Speaker B: Because they don't know the market. I mean, yeah, a lot of, a lot of skincare brands I've seen in the industry, their marketing is very poor. I mean and they are doing good.

Speaker A: Award winning skincare brand.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean they're doing kind of good because they push usually through influencers, you know, and they localize it. So that's kind of easy. But in terms of Facebook ads, what type of creatives, what type of funnels, what type of blog posts, Everybody just copied from each other, especially a lot of brands. Took Averaglow back in the day, it was scaling way like really, really fast. Everybody was just copy pasting the averaglue. Actually we have one content client that came to me and he said, well we run basically the same as Everglow, everything.

Speaker C: Yeah, you ask about angles and he's like, yeah, we're running the same, we

Speaker B: are running everglue angles. Uh, that's it.

Speaker C: And whenever you ask like David, what's the thing, what's the key, why it's scaling? Then he's like, it's product, it's how we position it. And he's going deep he knows the why.

Speaker B: He knows the why.

Speaker C: He knows the why, why it's happening and then he can manage it. And then those guys, they just jump in on a mechanism and then they don't understand.

Speaker A: When I lived in New Zealand we used to have board, boardroom meetings, like 20 people in it analyzing the Everglow ad library. Literally.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's the thing. Like uh, all the like uh, funnel hacking, analyzing and you know going through ad libraries. Of course it helps but a lot of people, they still use it for like, not for inspiration but for like you know, stealing the whole thing. Which is like you uh, won't understand why it's happening, like why this hook is working, why it's not working. Like maybe they are just ab testing, you know, certain thing and then you're like launching as your main creative. Uh, so you never know those details and that's why you need to come up with your own.

Speaker A: That's where spy tools come in handy actually. And some of them are really advanced. Do you guys use any of them?

Speaker B: I spy tools. I use ADD Spy I think but I don't like it. I don't know why. I mean I'm looking for a better spy tool. So maybe if you have any to recommend then it will be great because I want to integrate our team. But adspy, I know I was like ads library, like the Facebook native one is doing a better job than adspy.

Speaker A: I mean you can just like see how long they've been running it and get an estimate of the ad spend.

Speaker B: Yeah, but I mean I took several brands who were running 500 active ads and you for example type their advertiser name into adspy and they only show like six ads.

Speaker A: And I haven't compared.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I'm um, compared it with the ads library and I know that they're like spending I don't know, 50k daily. So they're really really big nine figure brand. Then I go to the ad spot to see, okay, I want to see engagement, what is working and for how long they've been running, running it and it shows only seven ads in the lifetime. That's the thing I didn't like I had premium access. I mean it's not, it was not a free ad spy or something. But I'm looking for the, I'm looking for the solution and actually I think whoever will came up with a very, very good solution for spy spying and basically getting, it's not like directly probably

Speaker C: spying but getting the mechanism into spying at spy. They just, you have to do, uh, the whole thing yourself. Uh, but then, uh, whoever comes up with, okay, uh, here's the ad. You can put that ad into, like, a swipebook. That swipebook you can use for briefs. Those briefs you can use for it, like you said. So I guess it's just a thing for you. You got to add spy tool in your SAS tool, and you will have it, man.

Speaker A: I think we already have a lot of too many features, but we'll see. We might have that. I actually wanted to drop some free game on creatives, especially health and beauty ones.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Um, so, like, we're talking about that one thing that make them work and, like, people trying to copy other brands like Everglow and, you know, without putting any thought into it, just, like mindlessly copying other stuff. But I would say what I've noticed so far, three pillars that can increase the likelihood of a creative, you know, actually winning are one, storytelling. Number two, having a very clear before and after. Number three, offer. Again, basic. I didn't say anything new, but, like. But you can always kind of rank how good is your story, how good is, how clear is your before and after, and how strong is your offer. And that quite often correlates with the success of the creative as well, I'm noticing.

Speaker C: Can we take, like, uh, the practical and be like, okay, you have the product, let's say, is the, you know, skincare. Yeah. And, uh, like, how you would, you know, start the whole thing off, how you would do the research, how you would come up, like, which parts of the product you will look at, how you are coming up with an angle.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Then, uh, you know, are you creating the mechanism yourself? Are you research, you know, going deep in that 100%. And then, uh, how you are writing script, uh, which parts of script you are most careful on, and, you know, like, maybe all details on the hooks and all that. And then, uh, how you're executing the actual script, so making sure that, you know, it's done the right way, uh, right creator, right face, you know, market, you know, like, accent and all that kind of shit, and then, uh, how you launch it and then where you take a look at it. So basically the whole thing, from, you know, having a product coming up the whole thing to launching it and then optimizing it moving from there. So just let's make it practical.

Speaker A: Okay. There's a lot to unpack here. Let's start with research. Right. Um, nothing special here, to be honest. My favorite source. You can get really in depth with it. Do message Mining and then rank each message on how often do you come across these keywords? But if you want to do like a rapid uh, fire research. My favorite source, especially again for health and M beauty brands is Reddit because uh, people share the most intimate stories there that they would never share, you know, publicly. Uh, and then are you looking for

Speaker C: patterns or are you looking for certain things that you can take off?

Speaker A: So yeah, I'm just trying to understand the audience, get under their nails and understand like their whole belief system around the topic. So like yeah, with skincare, women are. I even noticed that with my wife like whenever she like she has on, on days when her skin is not good, she's in a bad mood.

Speaker B: Yeah, exact day is gone ahead through it. It's fuck. But you've mentioned Reddit and uh, I think the other platform which is also increasing in terms of getting feedback on skincare, on beauty products, it's TikTok. I mean especially my girl. He's not, she's not like familiar with Reddit or whatever, but she like she goes to Sephora as an example, she sees an interesting product and the first thing she do is she goes to the TikTok.

Speaker C: I guess it depends on the name.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that depends on the age. But I mean the feedback that you can get on TikTok, like for example, if you, yeah. If you write this product reviews. Mhm. A lot of girls are like doing honest reviews and can do really, really good audiences.

Speaker C: So basically you're using like Reddit, uh, uh, Reddit, all those.

Speaker A: I don't really use TikTok directly. I use a spy tool called FlowSpy. Yeah, amazing tool. I like it a lot more than PB ads.

Speaker C: And basically it's just to. So people understand, it's just to get the language, just to get the whole like you know, understanding audience beliefs, you know, like uh, what they care about, how they talk, how they behave, what

Speaker A: they are looking for and maybe like look for some hook and angle ideas because you know they will be. So I remember we've produced one skinky ad not that recently. And um, the story part was like about a girl that gets um, acne right before her period. Right. So like. Yeah, that's, that's what I was talking about when I said storytelling. Like you, you need to get at the one level deeper, you know, that's not really on the surface like saying stuff. I always get breakouts right before my period. So yeah, you can find that stuff on Reddit and TikTok. But back to the process You've done your research. So we're talking about UGC right now. If you have a content creator now, you need to write a script. So there are so many structures that you can go with, but obviously you need to have a really strong hook. And we try to create hooks that appeal on three levels. The copy itself, like the headline, the visual stuff that's happening in it, and the audio.

Speaker C: Ideally, like, what do you see working these days? Like how you would, uh, combine those three in the best possible way. If that's, you know, like the skincare, let's say X. Like you know that product, you know how you would do it.

Speaker A: For example, you can have like a headline, a catchy headline, and then the visual can be, uh, something satisfying, maybe like just using that skincare product and maybe just like add some ASMR on top of it with the voiceover reading the headline. Okay, sounds basic, but you'll get a full credit of like 50% on that.

Speaker C: Okay, but the key here, uh, as I understand, is just make something relatable for them on the, on the text

Speaker A: side, on the copy side. Yeah. And then the visual and the audio just like captures the attention and draws

Speaker C: them into the, uh, connecting with each other.

Speaker B: Mm.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: Mm. Okay, let's move forward then after the hook. Um, my favorite part is to tell a relatable story. This is where you can like have you know, six to even 15 seconds sharing the story. Um, for example, like if you're selling skincare products for women in their teens and twenties, you can like, you know, leverage story about the pre period breakouts.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Share a story. Uh, like that you are getting the

Speaker C: story from your side as a scriptwriter. Or are you going to like trust the creator to.

Speaker A: No, no, no, no. We give precise scripts for creators and we don't even allow them to.

Speaker C: Word.

Speaker A: Yeah. Word by word. Yeah. Uh, I mean it's also like a skill to like, if you've been writing direct response copy for quite some time for Facebook ads or email, writing copy for scripts is a bit different because it needs to sound like, humanized. You know what I mean? Like it can't be.

Speaker B: Exactly. And now a lot of people will be just generating UGC scripts with the ChatGPT.

Speaker A: No, it's far from it. Like everyone's asking me, they just. Literally yesterday I had a few people come up to me, you think ChatGPT is going to put you out of the business? Like, come on.

Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no. I mean, actually, like, I've seen our guys tested out the ChatGPT, in terms of the script writing, it's not human, as you said. It's like, it's. I mean, the content that they produce, you can really take an inspiration from that, what to put into that script.

Speaker A: Research tool.

Speaker B: Yeah, research tool, exactly. Not execution tool, but, uh, all of that. Did you see that they produce it's crash. I mean, scratch. Even though if you play around with it, even though if you ask to make it more punchy or me or something like that, still it's a far perfect. Yeah, yeah, Far, far from it.

Speaker C: Okay. And in that script writing, let's say, like, where you look at like, what's your, what's your, like, you know, uh, spice on this.

Speaker A: As I said, you need to have a really relatable story, uh, with some details that can only, you know, that only the target audience can relate to. And then the second block is you need to show some sort of before and after, which is much easier to do with skincare products. If the creator, uh, if we work with the skincare product, we look for creators that actually have some sort of skin, uh, problems. Um, but like, to give you an example, we had a client that was selling a, uh, sleep supplement. How do you show a before and after sleep supplement? You guys have any ideas ordering?

Speaker C: Whoop.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, you guys are smart, but typically people don't know that. So what we did is we had a creator to, uh, with the TikTok green screen effect. Let's say here. This was my sleep before I started using the product. It was like inconsistent. Three, four hours a night. And I was like, switch. And this is like when I started using it. Eight to nine hours.

Speaker C: Yeah, we did that with energy product just because it's uh, quite similar. And what we did was like, uh, that's first day using the product. You know, here's how it goes. Then he of course changes the T shirt, you know, puts on the cap. Then second day using the product, and then he keeps going like that for like 14, uh, days. And then he's like, uh, genuine about it. Of course, you know, not like, you know, as an example, third day, he's like, I'm not feeling the difference yet. You know, I'm quite skeptical, but let's see what happens next. Yeah, so those kind of details. And then 14, uh, of day, he's like, okay, guys, it's definitely better than coffee. That's, you know, the whole storyline involved, the whole before and after.

Speaker A: Yeah, you can actually do that in a legitimate way. I know there's one Brand, forgot the name of it. It's like an at home CrossFit app. Uh, and they have ads, you might have seen them as well, where they just. It's like a two or three minute ad and it shows you how a guy, uh, went, how he has lost weight in like six months. And it's legitimate, like docu series, you know.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Like, yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: That's probably like the best way to do it.

Speaker A: Absolutely. You just need to invest some time.

Speaker C: There's extra mile you got to get in.

Speaker A: We did that with one of our hair loss clients. Uh, we've proposed them. We said, hey, what if we will source actual 12 actors that have some sort of hair problem, their hair is falling out, and we'll do like a 12 week trial with them. They'll actually use it consistently. We'll also give them some tips about their diet and whatnot and we'll just document the whole process. We've done it with a hair loss product, performed really good. And the other one was my favorite one. Uh, it's a weight loss product for dogs.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, that's a good product. That's a Blue ocean, I think. Yeah. Blocean type of stuff.

Speaker A: Also did like 12 weeks with them. And basically content creators weighed their dogs on the scale before using product and after. And so on average was like, they've lost 10 to 15 pounds, you know, and you can't.

Speaker B: That's a good problem.

Speaker A: It's kind of hard to fake that. Right.

Speaker C: It is pretty good for dogs that want to, like dog owners that want to get their dogs on the flight, as an example.

Speaker A: Yeah. And the cool thing, like in the ads, you would not only see the change in the weight, but they would actually be more active and playful and whatnot.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: That's the thing you're looking at as a dog owner.

Speaker A: And when that kind of proof is presented to you in the ad, you don't even question it. It's like, okay, legit.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, I guess it's just like, as you said, you get a story, then, uh, you get a before and after. But then you got to get some details. Just because it's like, for listeners is not that, you know, you just, uh, here's a story, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then, uh, right before and after, you know, you gotta put in some high, like, uh, bridges. Yeah, like bridges. You can put in some high seats before, uh, you know, presenting. Let's say before and after. You can show like before and after visually. And then when you get into before and after, then it's like okay, they already aware of it. So then you can you know, present it in a different way. So then they are m, you know, more trusting it. So yeah, I mean it's like all about the details. Not only like you know, here's a story, here's before and after and you're done.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like you know, as far as the pillars go, I would say the storytelling and um, the before and after are very important. And the final one is the offer which again it sounds so basic. You guys all know this but so many brands just like don't they put shop now. Yeah, add like your offer in there, you know, even if it's like 10% off with subscription, add it in there, you get a higher click through rate, guaranteed, tested multiple times.

Speaker C: What's uh, what is the best offer you have seen at the end of the ad?

Speaker A: The best ones are actually if you have after pay, shop now, pay later and if you can get you know, created with it. Like for skincare product can be glow now, pay later or like start today for as low as like $7. Stuff like that.

Speaker C: Start now risk free.

Speaker A: Mhm. But it's not enough. Not just like crispr, but give some details like if it's a percentage or if it's like dollar value discount. Definitely help.

Speaker C: Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker A: That's true.

Speaker C: Uh, okay, and then uh, let's say you launch it. Let's say you get up with uh, the whole video. Um, let's uh say you did like I don't know like you switched the hook. Uh, you did like, let's say four variations. I'm not sure how you are with the variations.

Speaker A: Yeah, we do like three to six

Speaker C: and it's like hook or mainly hooks.

Speaker B: Okay, so let's say you launch that

Speaker C: batch with the angle. You have few angles, you get up with free, four light variations, whatever you launch and then uh, you get in some data. Uh, what do you do next? Let's say we can.

Speaker A: Do we have a winner?

Speaker C: Yeah, we have a winner. Let's say one like not like their direct winner but then you know like that one where it's like well I should maybe keep it running for more like few more days.

Speaker B: Break even cpa. You're not doing profit but it's break

Speaker C: even cpa, but it's getting uh, most of the ad spend. You know, it's getting, getting better. So like I already keep running it for a few more days. Like let's start from there. Let's, let's take that you know, like break even ad from the batch and what you do next.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, so you said it's been three days?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's, it's. Let's say it's been three or four days.

Speaker A: I wouldn't expect that CPA roas to jump from break even to, you know, even increase by like 20, 30%. I don't see that happening unless you put it into like a different campaign structure with a different audience or like a cost cap bid cap. If you leave it in same kind of ad set, typically nothing won't happen. So the metrics that I love to look at are the hook rate and the hold rate. You guys use them?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. So most of the time, hook rate, like I don't even remember when we failed with it typically gets like 40, 50, even 60%.

Speaker B: Yeah, same here.

Speaker A: But the hold rate, this is where we can, you know, a lot of times improve. Right. It's the ratio between your 52nd place and your three second place. Um, if it's anywhere below like 15 seconds, we can definitely improve that part.

Speaker B: Yeah. But I see that the hold rate really depends on the hook.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker B: And I mean, you can generate a really high hook rate, but if it is clickbait ish, you know, your hold rate will be low.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: Ah. So I mean, I have one case where people like, um, strategists ask me to shoot a UGC personally because he wanted to do ugc. And it is like a perfect brand. It's supplements, uh, for focus. And I'm like a perfect person because I'm really into focus supplements and stuff. And I got the script. I said, this script is shit. I'll do off script by myself. But I'm the marketer for three years. I know how the UGC should work. So I've put the script in my head. What are, uh, the main pain points? And I've generated this hook totally off script, totally randomly, like just basically almost rapping to the camera, you know, about like, which was, I'm not an addict, but those pills are really, really good. It has 50 hook rate and the whole rate is insane. So. Okay. And we took. Okay. So I thought maybe the video converged, you know. Yeah. Ah. And we just took the same hook and we were used with four different videos. Old winners. Boom. All of them working, all of them working. So I've noticed that that hook is really important, but that hook needs to be relevant at the same time.

Speaker A: Needs to be congruent with the body of.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. I've analyzed our creative Team work. And I've seen that sometimes creative directors goes really more to the clickbait part. You know, just to generate as much as we can in the hook rate. And it still needs to be honest, good, relevant and it needs to be

Speaker C: clicked to do, you know, whole funnel. Uh, that's what we talked yesterday in the cigar lounge. It's like we talked about the whole funnel, like how we can uh, move people directly from the first second they see an ad all the way to the thank you page in the right way, with the right expectation, with the right um, uh, desires and all that. Just because let's say if you open up the clickbaity stuff and then uh, that typically happens uh, when people have let's say media bar CRO and then uh, let's say email and then let's say media buyers, they aim for cheap cost per clicks. But then CRO they are aiming for obviously higher conversion rates and the whole thing is unmet here. So uh, the gap between them is super huge. And then they run clickbaity stuff, uh, they land those people in the website and then they convert shit. So yeah, uh, I feel like for 2023 is going to be the whole funnel making sure that right from your first second, uh, you got to set the right expectation and you move them in the right way and at the same time so that those guys like media buyers and conversion exports, whatever, they talk to each other. So actually the thing I always wanted to test is like uh, taking on let's say conversion rate optimization, um, department and put them on the KPI. Instead of putting them a KPI of let's say conversion rate, put a KPI of CPC or cpa.

Speaker A: Cpc, cpc.

Speaker C: So uh, you would make them uh, talk to media buyers and then you would make them look at what type of traffic we land. And let's say just because we had uh, one of the experiences with um, a digital product we were talking about and let's say on that one we were running some stories, uh, story ads and it was bringing like uh, the CPC was around 90, 90 cents, something like that. Uh, and then we had a feed ads. The CPC was like what, like five bucks?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: But we turn it off, the story as we turn it off and the conversion rate, the AOV, everything went dramatically up just by turning off that 90 cent like you know, ad set.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker B: So the traffic, traffic quality is different

Speaker A: so we're noticing that as well.

Speaker C: So it's just like the CPC is like not direct KPI. It's just a way to make CRO, ah, talk to media buyers.

Speaker A: Basically, I think, um, if you're looking just at the cpc, you cannot judge it without looking at the rest of the funnel. Because just a few days ago for one of our offers, we've switched the landing page. It used to be just a product page and now it's long. Long form. Sales letter. CPM went up, but we've reduced the overall CPA by like 40%.

Speaker B: Yeah, it depends on the audience. If the audience like to read the long form. If it's a bit older demos still, everything goes to the understanding the marketing, understanding the audience, as I said, doing the research.

Speaker A: But I don't necessarily agree that, uh, I was thinking the same thing, that like Gen Z would never read, like we would never read a long form. Sales.

Speaker B: Yeah, but you said it's an offer. Yeah, it's an info product or info product. So it's most probably for Bizop.

Speaker A: No, it's in a relationship niche for women.

Speaker B: Relationship. Oh. So it's really painful, you know, it's a really painful, um, problem. So that's why the way I think

Speaker A: about it, say, say you would see a sales letter with a headline. Um, this is for whatever Lithuanian agency owners.

Speaker C: Super direct.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Like if you see that it's really appealing to you, like this is for whatever Lithuanian agency owners that want to break into. What do you guys want to do?

Speaker C: I'd say eight figures.

Speaker A: Yeah. That want to scale into eight figures. Case study. Oh, are you guys hooked up?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, maybe.

Speaker C: Or you are scrolling through Twitter and then you see the good thread and then you're like, okay, let's read it. And then you, you know, like in the Twitter, the game right now, it's like you put up the tweet the thread and then you have another thread into the thread and then you click. Then you went into that one. It's pretty interesting as well. And then you. Yeah, it's like you skip like, you know, an hour just reading that one.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: I think Gen Z invests into reading and acknowledging like what they care about. Yeah. About what they care about. So for example, for men, usually men, it's all about status. I mean their main concern is status. Yeah. So for the status, you gotta earn money. So for me, like everything that relates in business, about business, I like to read it. I like to collect information. Talking about women. For women, it's security. So they want to be secure, they want to have a good relationship, they want to find a good man. So that's also the most important Currency for like, for women. So that's why they read that long form landing page. If that would be, I don't know, for something uh, for phone cases as an example. Like a long form copy for phone cases. Why this phone case is better than. Yeah, then it's who gives a fuck. So that's my two cents on that. I want to ask really one simple question about ugc. So did you see like as you said it became a buzzword last year.

Speaker A: Almost like a bubble.

Speaker B: Yeah, almost like a bubble. And actually just see like the whole trend like we started with the Evera Glow brand scaling. So it's a couple of years ago, I mean everybody started to doing it because before that it was Buzzfeed videos, those. So how do you see evolving ugc? Because ugc, it's very general. I mean I'm not seeing that it will go out, out of the game, but it will become a bubble, a very saturated one. Because if we look two years ago the bunch of UGCs were mostly off script. Everybody was just sending a product and do a review, do a simple testimonial, video testimonial. Now it's a uh, everything goes with

Speaker C: the script and even like uh, guys uh, that reach out to m. Me. Let's say I had one guy uh, on LinkedIn. Maybe it's just because of LinkedIn but uh, he's like uh, oh, UGCs are not working for us at all. Like we have tried like you know, multiple different scripts, you know, all the stories and all that shit but you know, nothing worked. So uh, you know, I start you know, seeing people that are complaining about it. But as you know, I said as well, it's like, you know what's coming next.

Speaker B: Yeah. How do you see evolving this part? Or we will find a new format. Totally.

Speaker A: Yeah. I think that UGC is just a medium to be honest. Because like if you look at UGC, VSLs and even image ads, those are old formats. If you think about it like if we even go back to 30, 40 years back.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's old arm. Yeah, totally.

Speaker A: It's like you remember when you had those infomercials on TV where actors like say busy mods would use like kitchen products.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a BGC in a sense.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: In a sense, yeah.

Speaker A: Like that's a UGC mashup.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Different instances like using the kitchen product. There you go. And there's an offer at the end. Super direct response. So yeah, I don't see just like dying out. Same as vsl. Same as image ads. It's just like. But definitely, you know what um, I'm observing is whenever marketers find like a new tactic, they start abusing it. Just milking.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Gets on it and then the market

Speaker B: gets skeptical, they get jaded. Exactly.

Speaker C: Yeah. Like everyone is landing on the private page now it's landing on the advertorial. Now after a few days they are landing on the listing.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker C: But you know what, uh, I can answer this question real quick. I feel like that's based on technological level just because whenever you take a look, as you said, um, it's like old coming from TVS like uh, those TV shows like uh, Good Morning America is like UGC and uh, and all that is the structure, the format and it works. M. But I feel like how it's adapting is based on technological level. So let's say whenever we had a TikTok introduced all the UGCs, like you know, uh, content creators doing like, you know, selfie video type of shit, it

Speaker B: just blew up with the TikTok subtitles

Speaker C: then subtitles then Instagram reels, then you know before that it was stories. So it was like you know uh, you know those bubbles and you know shooting uh, shooting fingers like that. So it's like um, I feel like uh, right now the next technology stuff is going to be AI and I feel like AI will bring us something new into the whole. Not in the format but in the way how format can be represented. So it could be like next TikTok which is like, I don't know, uh, text based stuff just because it's easy to generate text through AI and then you're going to be like okay, uh, so it's the new stuff, new way, how to present UGC and then you'll be okay, let's try that.

Speaker A: I agree and disagree with you because yes it all comes down to tech. But tech is dictated by the market itself. Right? Because tech will only react once the market becomes skeptical to the old tactics. And only once that happens they will start introducing new techniques to grab the attention and convert.

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. When you're looking at social media like back then it was like uh, you know, feed, you're just scrolling, you're getting information like that. Then it went into uh, stories just because people were starting to get skeptical, you know, not so into like the whole scrolling thing. Then they went into stories where it's like um, behaviors like swiping, you know in like different, you know, you guys

Speaker A: swipe or do you tap, what do

Speaker C: you do I tap, I tap. Yeah. And then um, and then after that it's like video like TikTok. It's different uh, behaviors like uh, zombies again. Yeah. Like swiping. But then it's different just because it's the video. And then you know, it's like ah, sound and all that. So yeah, I feel like um, it's changing definitely like you said, changing based on those little details. And then tech like follows the people

Speaker A: obviously because all those tech companies, they have access to so much data.

Speaker B: Oh yeah. Um, you know, especially China. Yeah man.

Speaker A: So they know where people are at, what are they reacting to, what are they not reacting to. And they always got to adapt real fast.

Speaker B: It's interesting Emil, if we take a look, uh, for example YouTube once started in early 2000s. So long format content, 5, 10 minutes. And people love to watch, uh, me m personally I love to watch YouTube when I was a teenager because it was the main video platform for me. Then Instagram introduced stories and reels and videos. Your attention span gets lower and now it's like fucking nothing. You're like majority of the population, their attention span of younger people is like three, five seconds. So where will we go from that? It's going to be one second or what? So that's, I mean like if I.

Speaker A: It's crazy.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's crazy. So if we take a look, our attention span is getting lower by decades. So.

Speaker C: And then there's like AI which makes the whole content production even easier. So we are stepping into overproduction of content. And you know like uh, YouTube is paying money like uh, Twitter, you know like awards, uh, us for like putting up uh, threads and things like that. Then TikTok, uh, rewards us on organic stuff. You can get up with a completely new product and sell that just by putting up videos. So everyone rewards us just to create that fucking content. To create like long form to get people in. But then people, they are right now as I see it's like ah, too much of the content for them to consume. So yeah, I feel like it's going to be some kind of bubble collapse. It should be at least, yeah it

Speaker B: should be totally some kind of bubble or at least uh, filtering out the content that you want to watch. You know, maybe people will become self aware and they will basically try to avoid spending so much time. But yeah, it's difficult.

Speaker A: Most likely the other way.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's the other way. But still like as I said there's going to be, there's too much content to consume and some kind of bubble should happen.

Speaker C: I feel like it's going to be like, uh, you know, we had Andrew Tate speaking about things, I feel like podcast, I mean, like, uh, everything, uh, you know, all that stuff. So I feel like we're going to have some kind of next trend just because, uh, if you're looking at all those guys speaking about certain things, they just set certain trend. So I feel like we'll have a new wave of someone speaking about something, uh, probably about content and how it's consumed and all that. And, uh, I feel like this change, like bubble collapse should be not from the, a technical point of view, but more from like, you know, people speaking and setting trends. And then the new trend could be like, stop watching like fucking YouTube and you know, be like more into reading books.

Speaker B: People will be just will become divided to the communities because, I mean, Andrew Tate communities or the fans of the Andrew Tate, there's going to be a bunch of different dudes or girls who are doing this.

Speaker A: Could not record a podcast without mentioning him.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. I mean, there's going to be a lot of different people who are taking the same principle as he did and basically building the hype, building the community, switching fans. And I think, yeah, maybe that's the way to go. Like those online fan bases and uh, just basically sticking to it. Yeah.

Speaker C: Little communities.

Speaker B: Okay. So, yeah, I don't know. I think we got enough. It's over an hour. It was a pleasure.

Speaker A: Likewise.

Speaker B: Likewise. Yeah. Uh, and yeah, let's go to the affiliate world at least. Your pleasure. Pleasure. Yeah, let's do it. Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you, guys.