Integrator Hiring, Meta Issues & Staying Sane Through a Revenue Slump

Speaker A: Hey, it's Andrew here and welcome to the Ecom Fuel podcast. The show dedicated to helping seven and eight figure brand owners build incredible businesses and amazing lives. And joining me today on the show is the co founder and co owner of boardwalk.com that's B O R E D walk.com Matt Snow. He runs this business and founded along with his wife Meredith. Uh, unfortunately she was not able to join for this episode but Matt and I had a great time. We really focused on two different things. Matt and Meredith, both longtime ECF members, the chance to get to know them over the years and we dive pretty deep into hiring an integrator slash director of operations. That's man, it's something that so many people have tried to take on and tackle over the years. It's a tough role to hire, hire for. They've been, they were trying for years and finally, finally found a great fit. So we dive into that process. What worked, what didn't. And then secondly, man, if you're big in the meta, if you use meta, which most people are probably doing, it's been a little bumpy spring slash early summer, big changes this spring. They're frustrating a lot of people and that's been hard on their business. We talk about what happened, how they're dealing with that and also how they, you know, how you mentally deal with business when things are tough. I uh, really give Matt props for kind of opening up about this. Happens with a lot of people. Not everyone is bold or brave enough to talk about it. Get into that and a bunch more on the show. So hope you enjoy this one and it's helpful. Real quick before we start running, a seven or eight figure ecom business can feel pretty isolating. You don't always know if your margins are great or just okay. You don't know if your growth rate is strong for your size or if everyone else at your level is just crushing you and lapping you. You don't know if you should stay in on Friday night and keep cranking or if you should close the laptop and go out and celebrate big with your family and friends. And that is exactly why we publish the annual Econ Fuel Trends report. We pull data from over 300 stores representing three and a half billion dollars in combined revenue from members of our Econ Fuel private community. Every important metric is broken down by revenue cohort so you can benchmark your numbers for your store against operators and owners who are genuinely at your stage for an apples to apples comparison. And most importantly, know where you should spend the time. To improve. It's free. It's@e commercefuel.com blueprint and it will take you 10 minutes to figure out exactly where you should be focusing. Check it out. All right, let's get into it. Matt. Most important question out of the gates is what everyone wants to know. It's the World Series. The Orioles are playing the Dodgers. Who do you root for?

Speaker B: The Orioles, Absolutely. Just because. Just because I live on the other side of the country doesn't mean I stopped being an O's fan. Last time that, uh, we met in the series, it worked out pretty well for Baltimore.

Speaker A: So when. When was the last time that they met?

Speaker B: 66. It was the first Orioles, uh, World Series win.

Speaker A: 1966. You remember the last. You remember? Man, you are a vampire.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm basically a vampire. No, I was not alive for that. Um, but I'm a huge fan of the Baltimore Orioles. I have been since I was a kid.

Speaker A: Well, even if you're in la, I think, like, probably close to half LA is probably tired of the Dodgers winning anyway. So even if you weren't an Orioles fan, I will say last. Last World Series, they're a great team. You know, they're playing Toronto and I was, I was on the fence. I was like, who do I cheer for? You know, like, I stick with my country, but it's the Dodgers and was cheering. I think the last World Series was one of the best World Series I've ever seen in my life. Like, just phenomenal.

Speaker B: It was classic. And I rooted for the Blue Jays because, uh, really, really just. Because even though they are a division rival of the Orioles and I typically don't like them, I thought it would be hilarious for the Canadian, the one Canadian team to win the World Series the same year that our country decided to, like, treat our neighbors to the north like dirt. So I thought it would be like, like, like hilarious karmic retribution.

Speaker A: It was a good. Yeah, seven games. I, you know, I also was thinking about that a little bit. It was. It was one for the age. Anyway, enough. We probably lost half. People who don't care about baseball can't dwell here too long, but had to mention it. So, Matt, you. You and your. Your wife, slash, co founder in. In partner crime. Meredith. It's always so fun seeing some of the themes. Sometimes fun, sometimes hard seeing the themes of different members in the community and like, things are working through and for. I would correct me if I'm wrong, but probably for years, you guys have been trying to find a great head of operations you guys love the creative side of business. That's your passion. You despise the operational side of business. And it has been a struggle. And it seems like you finally have landed on someone who is working out really well.

Speaker B: I'd love to hear.

Speaker A: I feel like this is one of those roles. So many people go through that same path, walk that same path that you have. It's very difficult to hire well, for tell everyone your secrets. What made the difference? How were you able to get this done?

Speaker B: Okay, so for years, yes, we have been trying to delegate a lot of the day to day operations of the company. Um, making sure that orders go out on time, making sure that customer service tickets get replied to in a timely manner, um, making sure that, uh, people adhere to our QC process before stuff leaves the building. We started trying to hire a more senior person to fill that role in late 2020, so six years ago. And ah, it took until April of this year for us to find someone that we think could be the person that we've been looking for this whole time. We had two failed hires. One in late 2020, another one in mid 2021.

Speaker A: But between the two, what would you change? What lessons did you learn in terms of the hiring process, where to find people? Like, sometimes you just don't know until they actually show up on the job and you start getting some reps. But then sometimes in retrospect, like I had this before, you look back and you're like, oh, these, this part of my process was flawed, or these red flags I ignored. What were some of the things you learned from in those two failed hires?

Speaker B: Vibes don't work. Uh, I mean, they can work in some way, but what we did this time is we decided to just be kind of corporate about it. People for years on ECF have been talking about this book. Who? It can be tricky to Google it, but if you type who and then the subtitle, which is, I think a hiring methodology, I think like 450 pages, was written by basically a couple of guys that ran a recruiting agency that was successful at placing, um, high performing executives in corporate positions. And we were like, all right, we hate management books and management framework books. We barely made it through Traction and all the other EOS stuff. And it made sense. But we also hated every second of reading these books. But we were like, we got to do something different. And we knew we had to make a change. And the main takeaway we came away with from that book is we have to follow this script exactly. We can't deviate from it. We can't add any kind of color on the sides of these questions. We need to come up with the this same. We need to follow the same outline. We can ask questions that are specifically relevant to this role within our organization, but we cannot like go off on side quests conversationally with the candidates that we end up wanting to have conversations with.

Speaker A: And for people who aren't familiar with it, what is when you say follow the script, do you mean just the process? Do you mean the actual like questions you're asking? What is the theme that who really tries to drive home?

Speaker B: There's a real rigid structure to how they approach every touch point with a potential candidate. The first thing that we had to do was we had to figure out what are the core competencies that we want this person to have that are going to need to be exemplified in their day to day. What is the underlying mission going to be for this role that all of those core competencies kind of support? So just have your, like bulleted list of these things. Have your list of questions that you're going to ask on your phone screen. Keep the phone screen to no more than, you know, 30 minutes tops, but usually you can probably do it in 15. And that's really like when the vibes come in. Like there's a little bit of a vibe check component to that. And then if you feel like the conversation was a good one, then you can progress to. And I ended up doing just uh, like a zoom call. Basically. If I liked the zoom call, I would then tell the recruiter, okay, we would like to meet with this person, with this individual in person. Again, uh, this conversation is mostly to get a sense of the candidate's past work history. Like, tell us about what you did at this company. And then a bunch of underlying questions. Like, can you tell us what it was like working for your direct supervisor or boss? Can you tell us about, uh, instances where you had to learn a new system and how did you go about doing that? What roadblocks did you come across? Can you tell us about difficulty navigating interpersonal relationships with either coworkers or direct reports and how you accomplish that? So the first conversation in person was, uh, I think it was like 90 minutes and it was in person. I gave them a tour of the facility and everything, uh, after the convo, and then we confer afterwards and be like, do we want to have another conversation with this person? Because the second in person interview is when you talk about your company, this role, how it fits in what our Pain points are what we're hoping to achieve by bringing this person on board and really talk more about the present and the future. Future as opposed to just the past, which was the first conversation was. And then after that second conversation, if that goes well, then you do your reference checks.

Speaker A: I always wonder about the reference checks because in my past they sound great on paper.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: But what decent applicant is going to give you people who are not going to say glowing things about somebody, they have much more loyalty to that person than the other people. So not that they can't work, but I feel like I have become less. Put less weight in the reference checks just because it's. It's really difficult to get real candid feedback. I love the numbering that you mentioned though, because sometimes you can read between the lines a little bit. Like if someone's like, you know, someone's like, oh, hey, this person is a 10 out of 10, 10 out of 10. And they're like, oh, this person's an 8 out of 10 out of this. You can kind of read between the lines and be like, okay, this is their relative weakness. And they can say 8 out of 10. They don't feel like they're trashing their friend or colleague. But that gives you the data point.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. And I agree with you. Like, I do think that sometimes the reference check can feel like perfunctory, where it's not really providing any ins. Because there have been times, especially with, uh, I think two failed attempts to hire for this role previously, where with how badly that went, we were like, did they just like make up people and have friends like, you know, act as like a former employer or manager or something like that, so you never know. But again, this was like part of who. And we were just like, we're going to just follow everything to the letter, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense to us. And I think that being more methodologically rigorous about the process helped just quick little rapid fire.

Speaker A: Do you think, do you think the hiring side of this thing, do you think it was something you did really systemically different in the process? Do you think it was just finding a good recruiter or do you think it was just sometimes hiring is hard and you have to go through reps to find kiss about to frogs to find who actually works once you get them in your org?

Speaker B: What it laid bare to us was not so much that they were a mismatch, uh, which they were. It was that our process was flawed in terms of like the kinds of questions we Were asking and being a little more loosey goosey and relying a little bit more on our gut, uh, impression rather than being a little bit more methodical. I mean just being able to have something where it was like, just do this, like you can color out, you can color in the lines by like modifying the questions and modifying the mission statement, modifying the core competencies that in such a way that it fits what you're trying to do, but you're still coloring within the lines. You're not just being Jackson Pollock up there. Having that framework really I think was help. It was almost sort of pass fail as opposed to a, uh, more subjective analysis. I mean there was still elements of that, but having that more structured framework I think was really helpful.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've definitely moved much more toward either work from higher from referrals or from recruiting people in the market that you identify as opposed to just trying to, trying to just pick and pray kind of private strategy for that burned me. Speaking of revenue, I gotta thank you for being able to come on and talk about kind of this next topic. Like last year, 2025 was an awesome year for you guys. Found a great person kind of coming in 2026, revenue was up like 150%. Things were firing on all cylinders, feeling great, poised for like another, you know, 2x in 2026. And then it's been a, uh, challenging spring for you guys, specifically with Facebook and what happened in February. So yeah, maybe could you talk just a little bit about what happened in February, the impact that had and how you're trying to counteract that? Because I'm sure you are, you know, you are not alone in this. Other people listening are going through similar stuff and I think there's a lot that, that would be helpful for them to hear.

Speaker B: Like you said, we were up, uh, over 150% year over year last year from 2024. Uh, January started off really strong with us as well. We were up two, uh, hundred percent year over year from January last year. And we do have a little bit of a historical habit of having even numbered year regressions from odd numbered year growth. And so I was a little bit apprehensive about going into 2026. But with January being so strong, I was just like, oh, maybe we broke the curse. But uh, that was not the case. A it has to do with we make good products and we make compelling, uh, ad creative. However, a lot of advertisers pulled back their spend in the wake of the Liberation Day tariff announcement. I think we benefited from that, uh, in the auctions, I think that we were also in the later test groups that were getting pushed a lot of the UX and UI changes. And so as a result, by the time we got access to things like serving ads to threads placements, we were like the last 10%. And so as a result, all of the most glaring bugs had been identified and resolved. Whereas this year, I think we were like the canary in the coal mine, where I started seeing this stuff almost immediately. There was a major outage on February 9th, and it just threw our entire account into a tailspin. And we're still trying to kind of come out of that right now. I think that there are a few things that they've done that have contributed to this. There was the Manus acquisition that was announced at the end of December. I think they rushed to integrate it very deeply, um, into their systems. I think the first hint of that started to trickle in at the end of January and beginning of February. Then they, my account manager and his boss had the, uh, please don't shoot the messenger convo with me at the end of February where they told me, we're taking away your ability to pay for your ad spend with credit cards. Which was. I could tell. I was just like, you had this conversation because we had a call on a Thursday. I was just like, how many people have you had to have this conversation with so far this week? And they said, too many. But I was just like, well, there's nothing I can do about it.

Speaker A: That might be the grumpiest. I mean, that might be the most, uh, ill received. I mean, think about COVID Think about tariffs, all this stuff. Credit cards might be the thorniest issue. I mean, people just saw those beautiful rewards disappearing and rightfully so. Like, it's a hard thing to give up.

Speaker B: Well, especially if you're like having a down year. Like, you're still trying to, like you're still sitting at the Zuck slot machine pumping and you're like, uh, many years, if you're having a down year, like you're converting a lot of those points into cash back and that can be like the majority of your net income for the year. So like, yeah, it is really impactful. But like when they told me it was right after the announcement about the AMD partnership and investment came out, like days after, I said, well, all those AMD chips aren't going to pay for themselves. And they just laughed and they were like, you're not wrong. So I think that played a role. And then there was also the Announcement in early March that effective March 17, they were going to be fundamentally changing how they measured click based actions on ads. Previously, any click on an ad unit, whether it was clicking the CTA button that says shop now or see more or whatever, clicking the reaction button to like, like or love or laugh at a post, clicking the button to leave a comment, clicking the share button, all of that was included in what was measured as a ad click. They decided from March 17th forward, the only click that they were going to measure in click based attribution, whether it was one day or seven day, was going to be the CTA button slash link click, which I don't think is a huge deal if you have kind of boring ad creative we don't like. We go out of our way to make every single ad that we put out compelling, interesting and engaging. Sometimes that can be a little bit more serious, like depending on the product because we have a pretty broad range, uh, in our assortment. And we have been told for years that like, the more engaging you can make your organic, create your organic posts or your organic content, the more engaging you can make your ads, the better. Because meta's absorbing all of this signal and they're using that to either inform better targeting or on the organic side, if you're demonstrating an ability to keep users on the platform consuming content, meta is going to reward you on the ad side with lower CPMs.

Speaker A: Quick, if I may. Matt, quick question and clarify. I am not a great, well, I'm not a paid as guy, so this is maybe an ignorant question. When you say that, when you say the meta, they changed it and now they're only looking at a, uh, narrower scope of what counts as a click for attribution. Isn't that good on a cost basis? Because you're still getting the benefit of people sitting and watching. You're getting the benefit of people reacting to it in terms of likes or hearts, you're getting charged less for the same behavior. Isn't that a net positive or is it, are you saying it's a net negative? Because it's not. It's not incorporating those signals into the, into the black box that determines who wants to see your ads.

Speaker B: Exactly. Because someone might see an ad and it's part, it's just one touch point and then they see a different ad. And maybe in both cases, maybe, maybe they clicked ad number one, the CTA link, or maybe they didn't. Maybe they just clicked a like or maybe they just commented and then they see ad number two and they actually click a link and they come to the website and then they see ad number three and they maybe laugh, react to it but they don't click through because they have this other tab open and they end up converting. But because ad number three that they didn't touch that CTA button for is their most recent interaction and it may be outside of 7 day click window, all of a sudden they converted. It came from Meta. But Meta doesn't know that. We know that because we're using triple whale and we can see the customer journey, we can kind of see all these different touch points. But because Meta is only doing stuff based on clicks that's not ideal. For the last two years we haven't been doing just click based. We had for a long time after the iOS 14.6 update because that made the most sense because of the data loss. But as we started having more and more success with video ads it made sense for us to incorporate their what used to be called one day Engaged view, now it's called engaged through. But that was a way to leverage the fact that we have ad uh, creative that does tend to have like a higher hook rate and higher watch time and lend itself to comment to a lot of comments and a lot of likes and stuff like that. So that, that way if they saw the ad converted but they didn't click the ad, maybe they just googled us or something like that. Meta is still going to get credit for that as they should. And that means that we get a better sense directionally of is this particular campaign that this ad is in performing. But I think that a lot of people started seeing this overnight where if they were on just click based attribution in Meta, all of a sudden the volume of purchases that were being reported by Meta went way down even if their revenue maybe stayed the same. My concern is that okay, if you're not incorporating these other engagement actions within that same seven day window and now it's narrowed to a one day window that it's being attributed to, that does mean that there's going to be less possibility for other click based engagement to be counted towards whether or not that ad drove uh, a conversion. And so I do think that that was pretty significantly impactful, particularly if you are an advertiser that does have very engaging ad creative. So I think that that is also a contributing factor. But then also it's just I saw the same thing in 2024 when they were like first overhauling their entire background infrastructure with Andromeda and Gem and Lattice. You um, had these rolling Outages or delivery disruptions every like five to ten days for like five straight months. And the way I always try to describe it to people is like, if you think about Meta's ad algorithm as a human brain, every time that this happens, it's like it's having a stroke. And a human stroke victim, if they have a stroke, depending on the severity of it, how long it lasts, like how many systems it takes out, it's going to take them a while to like, learn how to like lose the paralysis, relearn how to like walk, talk as they did before the stroke. And if you have a bunch of these strokes in quick succession, it's just never having a chance for stability to come in and allow it to like, relearn how to do stuff. And so I think that that's happening too. But unfortunately they've kind of given up on updating their status page. So even when everyone that I talk to and that I follow on Twitter or that I talk to in foxwell founders or that I communicate with over diem on ECF was like, this status page should be red, but it's been green pretty much for months with very few acknowledgments that what they're doing is breaking stuff. And I think that the gaslighting coming out of Meta and certain possibly meta affiliated people that aren't disclosing that has been really, really frustrating for me and a lot of other advertisers because we do feel like they're not being honest with us. And I think that that lack of transparency is really frustrating.

Speaker A: How are you guys kind of thinking about and responding? And maybe two different ways, like on the tactical side, are you just cutting spend? Are you trying to do different strategies? And then, uh, on the larger business side as well too, like, are you thinking about. I mean, obviously, I'm sure it's something like this. You start thinking real heavily about investing in other channels. But then there's the mental aspect, which is hard, right? I think all entrepreneurs, myself included, walk around with continually in the back of your mind, kind of expecting to wake up in the morning and having your business just turn into a smoldering pile of burnt ash. And, uh, it's not always rational, but it's always there. Sometimes you get these things which make it more real and scarier. So how are you reacting to all this?

Speaker B: Which is hard A few different ways. I mean, we are. And you're right, it is hard. I think that a lot of us get into this, into the whole entrepreneurial game, because we Crave a certain sense of control

Speaker A: or all of us, 100% of us.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100% of us. And then, and you think that you have control but like the reality is that all of us are relying on someone else's infrastructure, whether it's Amazon, whether it's Meta, whether it's Google. Like if you're heavy into like SEO and you're really relying on Google, if you're really relying on marketplaces like Amazon or ebay or Etsy or some mix thereof, if you are really reliant on paid social because you have a really demand gen heavy brand like we do where people uh, don't realize how much they need the product until they see it. It's not the kind of thing where we're selling these like really commoditized things where people there's like built in search intent. So yeah, we're all building on someone else's property to some degree. But we've been testing other paid social channels but the reality is that like meta's still the 900 pound gorilla in the space. None of the others can touch them. Mostly I'm trying to make a go of it uh, with Snap, but I also am going into it clear eyed about the very limited scale. It's a much smaller platform, much less mature algorithm. Ah. And targeting like my feeling is like I just want to get to where I can spend like 250 to 500 a day profitably on a consistent basis on there and then if I can do that on TikTok, try that and so on and so forth. And then the other thing that happened in May was they decided to autonomously change all purchase based audiences that you built from 180 days, which was the previous limit to 730 days. So you went from six months to two years and now all of a sudden it's showing our ads to people that churned two plus years ago. And so it's just like uh, I get the thinking but it was like right thought, wrong execution. I think at the core a lot of the biggest advertisers, including friends on the operators, no shade have been complaining a lot about Net new customer acquisition on Meta and also incrementality. This was all anyone was talking about from 2023, 2024, 2025 and Meta's like here we've got incremental attribution setting. Now here we're going to extend the past purchaser pixel based audiences from six months to two years. We're going to make everything based on the CTA Click. As opposed to all this other stuff. And it's just like, I think that they were basically trying to appease this very small sliver of their advertiser, which makes sense because those companies do spend a lot. But I think that now we're all dealing with the fallout of that. So because of that, we're testing into these other channels with the expectation they're not going to be able to replace Meta. We are releasing new products and generating new ad creative both for those new products and existing products. Unfortunately, none of it is hitting. And something I've observed recently is that I think it's because Meta is. Even though I'm not telling it to optimize for new customer roas or new customer cpa. If the new customer CPA is well below what my target is, it's just not spending as much as it should. Even though I don't care about new customer acquisition because I just care for me, revenue is revenue. I don't care where it comes from. We're just trying to figure out how do we put these new products that our existing customers would like in front of them. So, um, now I'm testing, removing exclusions entirely just to make sure that our ads are getting in front of the most relevant people who have not churned years earlier. Because a lot of the people that churn, they still love the brand, but they loved us because of our T shirts. And we're not releasing any new T shirts because of all the IP infringement. So we're really focused on continuing to expand, like the books, the games, the card decks, all that stuff. And then the other thing that we just started doing is we're testing this really DIY out of home scheme. 15 years ago with our first brand, we would sometimes do these like, um, marketing pranks. And you're a prank guy, so maybe you'll appreciate this.

Speaker A: No, never.

Speaker B: But, uh, we were walking around our neighborhood in Baltimore one day and we saw a flyer up on a light post advertising purebred, I think bichon fries, puppies for sale. Meredith and I were big animal lovers. We were fosters for years for the Maryland spca. And now that we live out here, we foster for a local cat rescue. And we were just so disgusted by this. So she's like, I've got an idea. She had me come up with a really intentionally crappy looking flyer for purebred baby pterodactyls from this hatchery out in like western Maryland. And then we spent a weekend just spinning up a website for dinosaurbreeders.com it's still there if you want to go. So we then posted a bunch of those around our neighborhood. And what we did is, you know, we did this typical flyer thing where you've got the body of the flyer and at the bottom you've got the URL for the website printed like 20 times. And then you just get some scissors and slice like cut up the bottom of the paper so that people just tear it away and take it with them and visit it that way. And so what we did was we sent 25 copies of this flyer to friends in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Chicago, I think Philly and D.C. and we were like, will you guys do us a huge favor and just put these up around your neighborhood, in your cities? And what we did was we made all the banner ads on this website, just basically old school banner ads for our first brand ex boyfriend. And then eventually we changed it to Boardwalk. After we had launched Boardwalk, someone took a picture of this and somehow it ended up in the hands of, um, Smosh. They are, they were very early successful YouTube comedy channel doing sketch comedy. And they had posted it to their Facebook page and it got like 25,000 likes in the first 24 hours and drove a lot of traffic and some decent sales. And so we were like, maybe we can do that again, but just with a little more scale and a little more intentionality. And so what we did was Meredith came up with these, uh, ideas for these three flyers and we had like 1300 copies of each flyer printed and sent to us by an outside vendor. And we just launched this to our email list and our SMS list on Friday. But we were like, if you order one of these, they're free. We're going to send you six flyers and we're going to include a free sticker. And we're going to mail these to you and you put them up and you send us a picture either over email or you tag us on social. You post it to social and tag us and we will send you a 30% discount code, which we never do something that deep. Like usually the deepest we get is like 20% for BFCM. And that's if you're spending like 150 or $200 or something like that. So we don't usually do something that generous. But when we did the math, we were like, well, the way that our, you know, meta's CAC is trending this year, it's still going to be cheaper to give our customers a 30% discount and hopefully try and drive People that aren't extremely online to our website as a way to a goose revenue, but B, hopefully feed new data into the algorithm from people that don't normally convert from Facebook ads or Instagram ads. So ended up with like, I think 652 of these packets. We were going to start shipping them yesterday. We sent out this email On Friday, I did a plain text email because I wanted to maximize deliverability. Sent the sms also just a regular SMS I didn't even include. I didn't do an MMS because I wanted to like get in everyone's, you know, SMS inbox. And we again, it's a free item, but we sold out by like, I don't know, 4pm on Friday. We thought that we would get maybe 100 people. But the thing is, uh, there were a lot of people that were ordering 2, 6 because they just think that they can put them up everywhere. And we have this really loyal, engaged segment of our customers who might not be your typical high LTV person. They buy from us when they have a little extra disposable income, but they really want to help the brand. And so like, one of these people actually just emailed us after ordering the flyers and she was just like, I love this idea. I love you guys. I want to support you guys. I don't have the disposable income to buy stuff, but I can do this. And then the 30% discount is like basically just a thank you to them for helping us kind of weather this storm, uh, that we're in and we'll see, you know, how it goes. People start receiving their flyers probably towards the end of this week and hopefully they'll start posting them like this coming weekend. And I did reorder another like 4,000 of these, uh, on Saturday when I saw how quickly they were flying. But we can't do this indefinitely on a recurring basis because then it loses its luster. It's no longer a special thing. So once that batch is like out the door, we'll deactivate that listing on the Shopify site. But if it does drive like meaningful sales, we could see doing this like one or two times a quarter as just like another way. It's like a much cheaper way for us to test out of home to people that would appreciate the brand's sense of humor in a way that I think a billboard might feel a little too glitzy and not really boardwalk Y.

Speaker A: One of the cool things too is the. I recently was driving. I just did a podcast episode about this marketing campaign. So Uh, I don't want to totally spill the beans, but the sense of curiosity, I think that. That a good marketing campaign evokes. And if you see dinosaurbreeders.com on a flyer, like, what is this about? Like, I went to your website. I was checking, checking it out. Super funny and interesting, and it just, it makes people. Yeah. I think that sense of curiosity and pulling people in is, Is something that marketers don't do enough. I need to mimic more. I think it's cool. I'm excited to hear how it goes.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah. And I mean, I think what we're going to try and do, I mean, again, anything that's not pixeled is hard to track. But what we did was created a different lander page, just a collection page for each flyer. Meredith secured the URL. I think one of them is cursed. Four, less like the number four. And the flyer is about cursed objects for sale. Um, another one is a demon seeking a host body. But it's, like, written like a. But it's written like a Craigslist ad looking for a roommate. And then another one is about traveling to the void, uh, as like a vacation destination. And each of those has its own dedicated lander, which is just a redirect to our Shopify store. And each flyer has the URL on it, but it also has a QR code. Both of them will take you to that thing, and we can then see how much traffic is entering the website through that as their first landing page. And then we can probably fairly easily, uh, extrapolate the conversions that emanate from those sessions where that's the first touch point. And that will give us, uh, at least a directional idea of how much lift this overall scheme is.

Speaker A: Matt, we almost out of time, but last question for you. How do you, on the personal side and just the mental side, kind of work through something like this? Because, I mean, every founder deals with something like this if they stick around for more than just a hot minute in their business. So what are you guys doing to help. Yeah. Get through and kind of keep some balance and some sanity in the middle of something? That's really hard.

Speaker B: It is hard. You know, we try to do things. I can tell you what I do. I can't really speak for Meredith because she and I approach this kind of stuff very differently. I lean on my network. You know, people aren't talking about the meta stuff very much on ECF in the forum threads. We're talking about a lot in the DMs. Like, a lot of people have been reaching out to me and we've been talking to each other and the same thing, you know, people are talking about a little more openly, uh, in Foxwell founders. But again, like a lot of stuff is happening privately over DMs. So like knowing that you're not alone, seeing other people talk about it and kind of validating what you're seeing because like a lot of times if you there are those relentless optimists out there who are also very fortunate and lucky and are just like that is always crushing. What are you talking about? Blah, blah, blah. And so it can feel very like maybe I'm the crazy person what's wrong or maybe it's just us, uh, what are we specifically doing wrong. So knowing that lots of other people are experiencing this right now is really helpful. It doesn't solve the problem, but it at least lets us know we are not the only one that's experiencing this. So it is larger than just our brand or our ad account or ad accounts. I also get a lot of value out of my conversations with my Vistage group chair and with my other Vistage members. And for me I really try to, I mean part of the reason that I work here at the office five days a week and right now seven days a week because I'm working on this next activity book and weekends and holidays are really the only time, uh, I can string together like long and uninterrupted blocks to work on new product. When I get home, I try to leave everything work related at home. This is difficult because my wife is my co founder and she works remotely four days a week. So I get home now, I just want to cook dinner and I want to have a drink, smoke a bowl, whatever, watch the late night monologues, watch a horror movie and just kind of dissociate a little bit from the stress of the day. And she's still keyed up because there is no line. She's still in work mode 247 so that can be a little bit challenging. And then trying to take advantage of obvious moments to not do work related stuff. Like this was her Sunday was her birthday. So we went out to this um, pastry shop that she really, that we both really love. And they were doing like a cake decorating event. So we did that. We'll get together. Uh, so like uh, Isaac from Mini Katana and Content Forge, he and his fiance Karina are really big horror fans. They live in Hollywood so they're only about 30, 40 minutes from us. We usually get together with them like once a month to go to see a movie with them. And that is helpful. I mean unfortunately we do still end up talking about work because of the nature of how we met. But you know, trying to do that kind of stuff. And then also like I really love cooking and so usually I try to have at least one big project meal a week, usually on a weekend where I get to spend a couple of hours just like trying not to cut myself. And that has the same kind of meditative quality that you know, traditional like meditation does, I find. So like just little things like that. And then one of the biggest pervasive and um, probably permanent problem that I see in business, whether it's E. Comm or anything else, is no one wants to ever show signs of weakness. Maybe because they're hoping to have like a huge like life changing exit at some point or you know, or that's just not how they're wired. And ah, whereas I'm like, I don't like that whole like radical honesty thing or radical candor thing because I think that that can be sometimes used as cover to hurt people's feelings. But I do think that there is a lot of value in being willing to be open and vulnerable with both people that you trust, but also sometimes randos. Most of the people on D2C Twitter that I follow, I don't know them personally, we just chat with each other either on foxwell or in the comments on Twitter or something like that. But being willing to be vulnerable I think helps me because it kind of creates a permission structure for people that I would like support from to feel like they can let their guard down and do that. And so all of a sudden now I'm getting check in calls from people or DMs or something like that. And it's just like, it's not like I'm fishing for attention when I talk about what's happening. I think it's good. I think that there is this uh, unfortunate tendency where people just want to talk about the wins and not the losses. And I'm like yeah, but nothing is up and to the right all the time.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's. And I mean that's, that's one of the precision reasons. I really appreciate you coming on talking about this. A lot of people are going through it, not a lot of people are chatting about it. Matt, thank you for coming on man, for being so, so transparent about everything. And you already mentioned I gave it a shout at the top but boardwalk.com that spelled B O R E D walk.com really fun, snarky, interesting creative sites. I'm looking at your site right now. You've got sinister affirmations. You've got uh, you've got your grievance journal, which I know is a really popular product and a lot of other fun journals, games, cool shirts and clothing, man, people check it out. And Matt, appreciate you coming. Also for you both you and Meredith being part of ecf, you guys have been members forever and are always chiming in with good stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary.

Speaker A: That's crazy. Has it been 10 years?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think we joined in like July or August of uh, 2016, man.

Speaker A: Well, thank you for sticking around uh, the whole time and dealing with some of us optimists. I know we get annoying.

Speaker B: No, no, it's fine. You know, right now I'm just like trying to make it through. Everyone having AI Tourette's. We didn't touch on AI but uh, one thing I will say nothing on our website, none of our content, none of our ad creative is made with AI. So you know it is still possible to do that in 2026.

Speaker A: We'll have to carve out another three or four hour slot so we can do an AI episode and uh, have you back on for it. So Matt, appreciate it man. Thanks so much. Before you go, here's a number that stuck with me from my research this year. Store owners who rate their financial knowledge a 5 out of 5 has almost 50% higher net margins than owners who rate themselves a 4. Same businesses, same industries. Industries. But uh, going from pretty good to confident was worth almost 50% more money in their pocket. If you want to close that gap, uh, check out our Financial Mastery Series course. It's a free course built specifically for e comm owners like you that you can download ecommercefuel.com mastery and if you're a seven or eight figure store owner who wants to be around other operators taking this stuff seriously, make sure to check out our community at Ecom Fuel. Work hard Adventure often. I'm looking forward to see you again next Friday.