Ash Melwani (00:00:00):

Because we're in a very competitive market. If you like click on our ads, you'll see like five to 10 different brands of collagen, right. And they're all running offers 20%, 30% off free gifts, this and that. And like, we have to be competitive. We didn't run offers the entire, like last two years because we were, we were using like influencers and they were pushing, you know, the product and people, you know, that, that mentality is a little bit different than coming from the brand. But because we're pushing from the brand, now we have to be competitive. And what we, what we've been doing is focusing on, okay, what discounts can we offer? What, uh, free gifts can we offer? Right. So we've invested heavily in like shaker cups, draw sharing bags, this and that, like, stuff like that. We could just value, add that one. You are gonna stand out right. Besides your, your competitor. And that's pretty much the only way to really do that.

Rabah Rahil (00:01:00):

All right. Folks, episode four of APIN, the boys are back together. We're actually all in the same continent, which is fantastic. Uh, I am not dead, which is fantastic. Ash is now, uh, engaged. Congrats. Cody doesn't have a mic, but he does have his water. So if people get water, stop

Cody Plofker (00:01:17):

About that. Got the water.

Rabah Rahil (00:01:20):

Oh, sorry. If you guys just drop the comments below to tell them how annoying that is. Um, but we're gonna be going over a few things today. So, uh, first we'll talk about some kind of creative processes, landing pages and things of that nature in terms of, um, how to drive that forward, how to drive performance, how to measure performance. Um, and then we'll get into kind of, uh, speaking of performance, a little bit of the doldrums, um, make sure that, um, you guys know that it's not just, you, that's been a, it's been a tough couple weeks out there and we're gonna talk about kind of, what's been working, what's not working and then, um, just kind of jam on that. So, uh, without further ado, Ash, do you wanna jump into your creative awesomeness?

Ash Melwani (00:01:55):

Absolutely. Um, I think what would be good and Cody correct me if I'm wrong. Um, cause we kind of had this conversation and I think the answer to most of the problems we were both having is creative. Right. Um, so do you wanna give like a, kind of like a background of what you saw in the last four weeks and then, you know, we'll kind of tidy it up with like, okay, maybe the answer is creative and then I can kind of go into what we've been doing with like our processes for that.

Cody Plofker (00:02:25):

Yeah. So why don't we do this? I'm gonna tell people what not to do. I'm gonna tell people what my mistakes are and then you'll tell us and teach us what to do.

Ash Melwani (00:02:32):

All right. Perfect.

Cody Plofker (00:02:33):

All right. So obviously everyone talks about creative being the biggest lever and all that. We're obviously overhearing that, but it, it is a cliche, but it's totally true. And my biggest lesson in the last week, two weeks troubleshooting all of our performance. We scaled our ad. We essentially doubled our ad spend in the last few months without doubling our creative production. And it's like, we have, you know, obviously we went viral and TikTok, I've talked about it a lot. Like we, we, we essentially doubled our, our business' revenue overnight without doubling our head count. And, and with that being said, without doubling our creative production. So we're just burning through creatives so much faster. I think there's a lot of variables. Uh, obviously the war is, is, you know, a terrible thing. And, you know, with that being said, we have to zoom out and realize that there's people on the other ends of the ads that we're serving and macroeconomic conditions play.

Cody Plofker (00:03:25):

But also, you know, you are battling for attention and most of what we're selling is not necessary necessarily necessity. So when people, a attention is shifted and the people's focus is not on what we want it to be on what we're selling, but also with gas prices up and economic concerns and even just kind of global uncertainty, people are gonna be less likely to buy. Um, so you're gonna see decreased conversion rates. Um, totally that's one thing, but again, our biggest lesson in, in trying to control, at least what we can is creative, what we've seen and, and Ash and I have talked about it our first time impression ratio. I know, you know, David Herman and Charlie were going back and forth on Twitter about it. And everyone probably has a different opinion, but if first time impression ratio is important right now, there's some kind of a bug I, David thinks it's a bug.

Cody Plofker (00:04:15):

I think it's a bug cuz I've never seen it as slow. We're like a 20% first time impression ratio, which means we're, we are essentially retargeting with our prospecting right now, even though we're on broad. So it's a giant audience. So there's two things we can just sit back and blame everything going on. And we can blame Facebook for a bug, which obviously is a lot more fun to do or we can try to troubleshoot it. And I think after talking to, you know, our rep and some people at Facebook and some people I respect creative is really the way to go. Everyone talks about you do your targeting with your creative so we can kind of get into that and talk about it. Um, but that's why I think the best way to troubleshoot this performance right now is at least what you can control, which is creative testing and, and processes. So Ash, I'll turn that over to you. That's my mistake. That's what we're struggling with. Uh, I know you've got some really good stuff going on, so I'd love to learn from you.

Ash Melwani (00:05:03):

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And I just wanna like reiterate what you were saying is, um, we saw this problem end of last year. Okay. Um, I kind of, I spoke to you guys a little bit about it and we were working with some, you know, pretty big influencers on Facebook. Um, and we were like relying on their content heavily. Okay. Like these, these creatives were lasting for like months on end. Like I'm talking like six, seven figures behind single ads. Um, and like around November to December, things started to stop performing and we just, we weren't ready for that. Right. We didn't have that creative process to like back up, you know, when these kind of stopped running out of Jews, we didn't have anything to replace it with. So we really had to bring back spend, um, I think January is when we said, okay, we can't rely on influencers to constantly get us content. We have to make sure that we have stuff ready to go at all times. Right. So I think one of the biggest things that people need to have, right. Whether it's like an in-house designer, videographer video editor, or some of these agencies, right? Like, um, no limit creative or constant creative, um, being able to produce at least, you know, at, at least for us, like we're spending 20,000 a day. I want to be able to test like 40 creatives a week. Okay. So, um, so hold on.

Cody Plofker (00:06:30):

When you say, when you say, I just wanna be clear, like working definitions, like 40 creatives is that that's not 40 net new and that's not 40 different concepts. That's 40 total individual assets, but there's probably some net new, some iterations, not 40 concepts. Right. That's probably like 10 concepts or something,

Ash Melwani (00:06:48):

Correct? Yes, exactly. Um, and there'll be weeks where they might all be net new. It depends on how much time we have to really, you know, dive into it. Right. So I'll give you, I'll give you the overall what we do, right. Here's the process Monday. Okay. Everybody's in the office. We have three graphic designers. Okay. What we decide on our end fulltime basically. Sorry.

Cody Plofker (00:07:12):

Full time on your stuff.

Ash Melwani (00:07:13):

Yeah. Yeah. Full time. So two or full-time and ones, ones room remote. Um, just purely working on just like ads. So what we'll do is on our end, we're analyzing on, you know, the ad front, which angles are working. Right. So now I'm gonna put it into perspective of how like for us, right. Our main product is our collagen. Okay. We went through so many different angles, right? Hair, skin, nails, within skin. It was like wrinkles, um, cellulite, um, you know, within hair it's like regrow hair, receding, hairline, this and that. Right. So there's so many different pockets that can be attacked and we need creative for each one of those. Right. So what we do is we'll come up with four to five different angles that we wanna hit. Okay. Whether that's within hair and we have five different, you know, uh, goodbye, hair loss, stop receiving hair loss, uh, stop receiving hairline, uh, regrow hair fast.

Ash Melwani (00:08:10):

Like these types of like headlines and angles. What we'll do is I will allocate each designer to be like, okay, well I need two creatives per angle. Okay. So now each angle itself is gonna have six creatives. And then we have our videographer, who's doing a video of whatever it is. Like, you know, he'll take some of the PSDs that the designers make and then like animate them. Right. Or he'll create mashups of whatever we have. So we'll have around six to seven unique creatives per angle. Okay. And we'll have four to five different angles. So that could be like, it'll be like 30 to 40 creatives a week. Okay. Then what we'll do is on Monday. Oh. And by the way, each angle has its own landing page. Okay. The landing page is very, very similar. Interesting. Yeah. Very, very, so can I

Rabah Rahil (00:09:01):

Stop you real quick though? Yeah. When you say angle or is this, so each angle literally, or like each vertical, like hair has its own Lander or like literally hair and then regrow has its own Lander and then hair. And then does that make sense?

Ash Melwani (00:09:14):

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so what we'll, what we did was let me, let me back up a little bit. Right. Landing pages. Okay. We had tested probably three to four different types, entirely different types. Okay. They're not like different changes, like, okay. The buttons green on this one button blue on this one, right. I'm talking about entirely different concepts. Okay. We took the winner that had the highest conversion rate and we're basically like, okay, let's start pushing these out. And the only thing that will change is the main banner. Okay. Yep. That will kind of correspond to what angle that we're running on the ad. So if the ad says goodbye, hair loss, the main banner says goodbye, hair loss. If it says stop preceding hairline. That's what it says on the banner, on the other one. Okay. So like it's basically the same landing page, but it's just the initial, like when you land, it just has that congruency. Um, then it kind of goes into all the benefits, right? Hair, skin, nails, this way, everybody knows what collagen does and you know, all of the other benefits too. So with that being said, each one of these angles has its own landing page. And what we'll do is I'm gonna get, I'm gonna go a little bit into like structure too. Right. Right. Now our testing structure is one CBO, um, at about $2,000 a day and your testing budget could be whatever you guys,

Cody Plofker (00:10:30):

So we're saying 10, 10% of daily budget.

Ash Melwani (00:10:33):

Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah. Um, so quick

Rabah Rahil (00:10:36):

Math Cody.

Ash Melwani (00:10:37):

Exactly. Yeah.

Cody Plofker (00:10:38):

Made it easy.

Ash Melwani (00:10:39):

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that number for us just, I think 10% is good. It's not, it's not gonna

Rabah Rahil (00:10:44):

The same

Ash Melwani (00:10:45):

Be too much. Right. And it's not too little where you don't get enough data that, so let's say we have five angles that we have creatives for one CBO, five ad assets. Each ad set is its own angle. All those creatives are within there going to the, the specific landing page. Um, no minimum budgets, no, nothing. All I'm doing is excluding is excluding customers sending it to female 18 plus broad and letting it rip the reason we're doing that exclusions, uh, just customers

Rabah Rahil (00:11:16):

Past 30 or past 180,

Ash Melwani (00:11:18):

Uh, Clavio list, upload of all customers.

Rabah Rahil (00:11:20):

Beautiful. How, uh, how do you, or that's uh, dynamic and linked then, right?

Ash Melwani (00:11:25):

Yeah. Yeah. So that that's constantly being refreshed. So I let that start on Sunday and I let it run all the way to the following Sunday, no matter what. Okay. No

Cody Plofker (00:11:35):

Matter what, even if performance is awful,

Ash Melwani (00:11:37):

No matter what, no matter

Rabah Rahil (00:11:38):

What, there's no, there's no red line where you'll pull the plug.

Ash Melwani (00:11:41):

No, no matter what, I gotta give it

Cody Plofker (00:11:44):

Of that. Everything else that you're saying is the same. We, we both, which I wanna talk about testing in a CBO, cuz that's a little controversial, you know, a lot of people, people say ABO for testing, I wanna get, I don't wanna cut you off, but that's, we'll talk about it later. That's the only thing I do differently is I'll cut stuff. If it's clearly not winning

Ash Melwani (00:12:01):

That that's totally fair. And I, I think, and maybe, and I don't know, it really comes down to like the performance in itself, the last like 45 days, the tests haven't been that bad where we've had to really cut. So like knock on wood. We've been lucky enough where it hasn't for sure. You know, terrible, there are weeks where like we just don't have a clear winner where like, it just broke even, or just lost like a little bit where it's like, okay, I'm not gonna take any of these and we'll move to the next week. Right. Okay. Um, but, and to address that CBO thing, the reason I like using CBO is because I'm giving Facebook the angles and it's basically picking which angle it thinks it's gonna, you know, put the spend towards. And then within that, it's gonna push towards whatever creative it thinks. Right. And if that creative is performing then great. That's probably the winner. And that's the winner that Facebook thinks is the winner. And I'm just gonna take that and, and move it. Right.

Rabah Rahil (00:12:58):

Can I

Ash Melwani (00:12:58):

Get, I don't want,

Rabah Rahil (00:12:59):

Yeah. Ask the question. Do you ever force spend, um, with like ad set limits where you'll say, Hey, you have to spend X amount or anything like that. You, you just keep every, let you let the CBO decide everything.

Ash Melwani (00:13:11):

I've I I've gone through like, like I'm talking about over the last four or five years where like the way to run ads was hacking your way. Right? Like manual bids, the bully method, every like all this shit that like, you know, like that was the way to do it. I've I have now, like I've lost sleepover it. Right. Like I don't, I don't want to do it anymore. I want to set it up and look at it in seven days and just like, okay, was there a winner? Great. Let's move that into the scaling campaign the next day. And if there isn't, then we have 40 more pieces of creative coming. So

Cody Plofker (00:13:45):

Can I say something on that Ash? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like about the CBO. So I, I always, I, a hundred percent agree with you. We have the same exact structure. Like again, we don't have the team and the process built out to get 40 creatives a week, but we're, we're testing five to 10 and we're testing landing pages in a CBO. No men in max. Cuz the everyone's like, oh yeah, I do ABO cause you gotta control the spend. You gotta make sure you're getting scientific, you know, statistical significance. And, but it's like nonsense, you should be practicing how you play. Right. It's like, I'm make a golf analogy. But like so many people hit the ball well on the driving range and then they go on the course and they play terribly. And it's like, well, yes, of course you're practicing in a completely different environment than you play. And it's the same thing. It's like, you know, everyone's familiar with the breakdown effect, right? Where it's like Facebook is, is one of the things that Facebook is telling you. It's not just efficiency and ROS, but it's volume and spend behind a creative is actually Facebook telling you that they think they've got a winner and they can get better expected outcomes. So it's kind of cheating to put it in an ABO because especially if you're using CBO for your evergreen campaigns, like practice, how you play,

Ash Melwani (00:14:49):

That analogy was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Cody Plofker (00:14:52):

Not Bob. And

Ash Melwani (00:14:53):

I hate that. No it you're <laugh>, which is why I think this is why I tweeted the other day. Do you test video separately than images? Right. And I was kind of struggling with this because I used to have like a separate ad set within that CBO for just videos. Um, but I'm thinking like if, if my tests are to decide an angle, yeah. Why am I splitting video up? Right.

Cody Plofker (00:15:19):

So then that was my thought. It was like, it's gotta be the same angle if they're different angles. No, I know people that'll run one angle. They'll pick like a, a hair falling out angle and they'll run one video, one static, one carousel, like one stop motion. Cause like, then they're truly testing it versus like exactly what if it was a good angle, but you only put video in there and, and I'm, this is hypocritical. Cause I pretty much only run video, but hypothetically, what if that angle worked, but you only put video in there. What, when even you only

Rabah Rahil (00:15:49):

Run video Cody.

Cody Plofker (00:15:50):

No, no retargeting. We, we a lot more static. Yeah. But yeah. So Ash, I think that's, again, Twitter. It depends if it's the same angle and you have a, you just have to have a reason for grouping things together. It can't be random. You have to have a thought process and a reason for tightly grouping things.

Ash Melwani (00:16:06):

Yeah. No. And what's

Rabah Rahil (00:16:07):

Your control, right? That's the control.

Ash Melwani (00:16:09):

Yeah. A hundred percent. I think it's always been, I think now for us, it's like totally just angle based mm-hmm <affirmative> and like which style creative within that angle is probably gonna perform. Right. And what's really crazy is what we found has been the complete opposite of like our brand is like product white background text instead of like product bright colors, which is our branding. Right. And like we're so dumbfounded as to why like a white background or like a gray background and, and maybe it's because of color pops. Right. And maybe that helps the packaging pop a little bit, but that has like, if you don't test that shit, then you're not gonna know. Right. Like that would've been the last thing I would test until one of our, you know, graphic designers. Like I just wanna try it and let's see. Right. So literally like you're, you're almost throwing shit at the wall, but in a very controlled, you know yeah.

Ash Melwani (00:17:07):

Campaign structure that like Facebook is doing the heavy lifting. You, you can't, you can't out like you can't beat the algorithm. Like you're, you're not smart in the algorithm. Let it do its thing. If it produces a winner, great. Then you have more ammo for the next week. Right. So that's, I mean, that's one of the biggest things that have helped us at least find more stability. Right? So like, you know, the last couple weeks have been tough where our NCPA is definitely higher, but it's not as bad as it was back in November, December where we were just like trying to get shit to work better, like, or we were, we were trying to get things to continuously work from the same creative and then the other thing, and it really comes down to like, if your brand allows for it is like, because we're in a very competitive market, right.

Ash Melwani (00:17:52):

If you, if you like click on our ads, you'll see like five to 10 different brands of collagen. Right. And they're all running offers 20%, 30% off free gifts, this and that. And like, we have to be competitive. We didn't run offers the entire, like last two years because we were, we were using like influencers and they were pushing, you know, the product and people, you know, that, that mentality is a little bit different than coming from the brand. But because we're pushing from the brand, now we have to be competitive. And what we, what we've been doing is focusing on, okay, what discounts can we offer? What, uh, free gifts can we offer. Right. So we've invested heavily in like shaker cups, draw string bags, this and that like stuff like that. We could just value, add that one. You are gonna stand out right. Besides your, your competitor. And that's pretty much the only way to really do that. And you know, so yeah. I think if you guys only question, I, I kind of a lot, but yeah, go ahead.

Rabah Rahil (00:18:49):

Let me jump in Cody, cuz you're gonna have longer questions than I. So one Ash, uh, your, uh, upsells and kind of offers were actually the talk of the town in Dubai. We had a, uh, kind of little mastermind group. Um, and uh, everybody was talking about the, the draw strings and the shaker cup. So, um, they have been getting around the lots of love there for that. Um, the other only other question I had, cuz one, I think you're absolutely right. The, the kind of mental model I use is like your, ultimately your ads are, uh, a nice analogies like sales people. And so you're just sending these sales people out into the world. And then the better that salesperson is, you can cultivate that. And especially if your assets are normalized, you basically have the same manager across all these sales people. And so if these sales people work, you're gonna have a, you know, a hit or salesperson. Then if you move that manager, especially too, um, if you're at broad, it's gonna be, I mean, when you get to kind of your level spend, you start to get that, but at Cody's level spend, you'll really start to get, um, kind of some more knock on edge case effects where you can actually run through audiences, um, a lot faster. Um, but I think you're absolutely spot on. So two questions, one, do you ever, when you do find a video that hits or a video, that's interesting. Do you ever test the thumbnail?

Ash Melwani (00:20:03):

Yeah, so I think the biggest thing that we've tried to now do is if we find a winning video, we'll replace the thumbnail with like the different angles that we're testing.

Rabah Rahil (00:20:15):

Interesting.

Ash Melwani (00:20:16):

Yeah. So for example, what we've been doing recently is, and you guys can try this. It's like, it's really cool. Um, what we do is in house, we'll do like a, a quick recipe, like, like a to style, like here's how you, you know, fill up the protein, put on the shake cup, blah, blah, blah. Right. And then what we'll do is we'll replace the first three seconds with like our different, um, content team, like the girls. Yeah. And like, we'll have like four or five different girls who are just like smiling in the beginning of the video and like pointing and the angles at the top, it's the same fucking video, but the first three seconds are different and that's, and, and the only difference is the girl and the angle that they're pointing at. Right. And like this like helps elongate that piece of content for so long. Cuz all we have to do now is like, if it starts to fatigue, we just go and make another mixing video in a different setting. And that's about it.

Rabah Rahil (00:21:09):

Now, do you, um, adhere to your previous kind of schema of aligning that angle to different LPs?

Ash Melwani (00:21:17):

Yeah,

Rabah Rahil (00:21:18):

Always. So that that thumbnail will be aligned to X and then thumbnail, Y will be aligned to Laney page Y and et cetera. Fantastic. Okay. One more question. And then I'll, I'll let you get into it, Cody. Um, do you ever use dynamic creative at all to test

Ash Melwani (00:21:31):

So that technically the, it would be like a better way of setting things up. I personally have not found, like I just feel like it doesn't work as well when we set it up versus just same here. It's it's literally the same thing. The only difference is the like the ad copy is the same. The links are the same within that ad set. The only difference is the, the actual image. Um, again, it's almost the same thing. To be honest, it's just an easier way to probably set it up, but I haven't seen it perform well for us. So I just keep it that's it.

Rabah Rahil (00:22:05):

Let me see. Yeah.

Cody Plofker (00:22:06):

I got a few questions, but yeah. Good. Just one thing to add, to kind of piggyback off, ask why I was actually chatting this morning with somebody at Facebook and we were talking about the first time impression ratio and they gave me three things to test that are really similar. So one is, they told me thumbnail, they said, change the thumbnail change the first three seconds. You know, they gave me kind of some brands that are doing it, crushing it like obviously. And obviously it works in terms of refreshing creative, but what it, again, everyone talks about face, uh, creative being the targeting we're we're dealing with the first time impression ratio where, where Facebook is just showing the same stuff to the same people over and over. And they recommended that kind of as a hack, but a as a way to actually get Facebook to, to deliver these assets, to other people find new people, new people, cause it'll recognize it as a new ad if you have a new creative ID, but then also, so again, same ad, just three seconds are different.

Cody Plofker (00:22:53):

Re-upload it obviously cuz you're editing it and then put a new thumbnail. So again, if anybody's struggling and you're, you're looking at your first time impression ratio and your frequency and prospecting's getting high and you, you are on broad. So it's not like I can, I can target a different audience. You know, that's one way that you can do it. Uh, the other way they recommended influencer whitelisting. Now we do a lot of influencer whitelist and retargeting, but what they recommended is one of the things that it's looking at is even though you're targeting your audiences, you're actually going to reach different pockets of that, you know, even in your broad audience doing that because part of what Facebook's, you know, creating as a creative idea is also the page that it's coming from you're right, right. So there's gonna be all that on platform data.

Cody Plofker (00:23:31):

So that's just another way where I think like part of the, you know, the creative testing and, and the angles is it's for scale and it's also for, you know, all right, we hit that audience really hard for two weeks. Let's go hit this audience. Like I'll give an example what my first company was a physical therapy company. We, we ran a lot of newspaper ads and they were like advertorial, very direct response. We'd run back pain for a month. Calls would slow down, we'll run knee for a month and then we'll go back to back and you, you just have to do it to give it kind of some time. And I think if you can have your product and this is what Zach was talking about a few weeks ago, but like, if you can have your product but have different angles of your product. Yeah, yeah. See it works too well. So take, take this to the grain of salt, you know, but then Ash, is that something you see where you'll like, you'll have an angle that, that crushes for a few weeks and then that dies down. You'll do another one and it goes back and forth.

Ash Melwani (00:24:20):

Yeah. So I think what in the last six weeks we've tested maybe like 24 different versions of like a hair angle. Cause that's been the winner for most cases. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> literally just swapping out like instead of goodbye hair loss, it's like regrow hair. Right. And it could be the same creative, but just different approach on the angle

Cody Plofker (00:24:40):

You find positive or negative works better, like negative, like, like good. You know, do you hate hair hair falling out versus positive would be like grow stronger hair. What do you find? You get a better response on

Ash Melwani (00:24:52):

No, it's a, it's a good question. I haven't actually, um, looked at that. Um, but I'll, I'll, I'll text you after, but that's a great, it's a good idea to, it's a good idea to, uh, look at, cause it is actually funny cuz like we're about to start, we're gonna launch like top of the funnel ads for our superfoods formula. And like I have this conversation with my, with my partner. Right. I think the first headline it's like one out of every 10 Americans doesn't get enough fruits of vegetables. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, or no, sorry. One out of 10 Americans gets enough fruits of vegetables. And my partner's like, well, why don't you say nine out of 10? Don't get it. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so it's like,

Cody Plofker (00:25:29):

You can test

Ash Melwani (00:25:30):

Too. You know what I mean? Like you can have that positive or it's like that negative mm-hmm <affirmative> and you never know what's gonna work. Like there's no rhyme or reason for any of the shit that's just working. It's like just does um, yeah,

Cody Plofker (00:25:41):

A hundred percent.

Rabah Rahil (00:25:42):

I also think of it in terms of almost like fear or aspiration, right? Like

Cody Plofker (00:25:47):

Exactly. That's

Rabah Rahil (00:25:47):

Fearful of this condition or are you aspiring to this condition?

Ash Melwani (00:25:52):

And one thing I will say real quick is that when we got very specific about the single angle or benefit that we're pushing, whereas before we were talking about like take college and it's good for this, this, this and this. And when we just focused on this, the engagement increased because now everybody in the comments we're talking about the same exact thing mm-hmm <affirmative> so just something that I noticed recently,

Rabah Rahil (00:26:14):

I think it's also just a higher cognitive load, right? Like it is like, and there's other kind of thing too, where there's a certain aspect of a too good to be true. Like you're gonna fix all this, come on where it's like, oh I can fix your hair. That's it, you know, hair, or I'm gonna fix your skin or I'm gonna fix your nails. Or like there's, there's just a much more, uh, uh, just a cleaner value prop that gets straight to something versus like, oh, I'm gonna do this, this, this, this, this, and this is why it works. And that's just, uh, it starts to convolute the, the buyer's process. And I, I'm just a true believer that people, people are people buying a no regret strategy and people would rather make no choice than make a bad choice.

Cody Plofker (00:26:49):

Oh yeah. Totally. No, you don't. Sometimes you don't want to over promise cuz you, you wanna make it believable. Like believability is one of the most important things. But also I think it depends on the awareness level, right? Like that's a fair point

Rabah Rahil (00:26:59):

If you have

Cody Plofker (00:27:00):

Very a aware market. Yeah, yeah, totally. But if we go like awareness for this one, like I can say, cuz beauty is a very aware market. People are very into it. They've bought make a product three years. I can lead with a product so I can lead with solution and then talk about how it fixes certain problems or brings about desires. But I can also test that against leading with problem, go into desire and then lead bringing to our solution. It's like, like it's something I was caught on talking to our, you know, head of retention yesterday about, um, and it's like, that's something that you should test. I think that's a good test. Is do I start with solution or do I start with problem? Yeah. And I would say most scenarios problem will, will went out, but you should definitely test it cuz there's no one right or wrong.

Rabah Rahil (00:27:41):

And it's into your point too. I think it might matter at what point they're at in the funnel where like, oh yeah. If, if they're in retargeting or they're very, very familiar, you can just smash 'em with the solution cuz they are, they already know what their problem is.

Cody Plofker (00:27:52):

And that's when you're talking about sophistication, that's when you're trying to talk about like mechanisms and believability and, and social proof

Rabah Rahil (00:27:59):

Thousand percent. Yeah, totally.

Cody Plofker (00:28:01):

Yeah. It totally depends. I mean, again, I'm, I'm going through a breakthrough advertising for a second time. Like definitely recommend everybody read that. Um, totally eyeopening. And

Rabah Rahil (00:28:08):

Aren't you getting, uh, if you follow or give somebody your first born or something like that, you get uh, show notes, right? Or notion notes.

Cody Plofker (00:28:15):

Yeah. I'm I'm taking notes on it. Shit.

Rabah Rahil (00:28:17):

I gave, I gave you a little bit of a rub when

Cody Plofker (00:28:19):

You gave yeah. Well you didn't want it, man. I was just sick of being heckle it all over on Twitter man. This guy, every time I post this guy just comes out with like a Jeff and he is like trying to make fun of me. Like damn, let me drink my water. All right. <laugh> <laugh> um, but yeah, if anyone wants a show notes, just hit me up DME I'm I'm just gonna make it a lead magnet. So, uh, trying to just do it as I go. Do you guys think I should wait until I have the whole book done or kind of send it out as I go?

Rabah Rahil (00:28:47):

I would wait for the final product in my opinion, but I would defer to

Cody Plofker (00:28:50):

Ash, so. Alright cool. So we'll wait. So Ash question for you. Um, and this is kind of what we're struggling with, but, but process like who's your, who plays a role of creative strategist and project manager? Tell me, like, obviously now that we know how you're thinking about doing this stuff, that's great. The strategy, but what's the process look like and what's the team look like for, for you guys?

Rabah Rahil (00:29:09):

Yeah. And if you can elaborate even more on that, what do they own? So like as a creative strategist, like what does that creative strategist on the hook for?

Ash Melwani (00:29:17):

Absolutely. So the, the way that I have it set up is I'm kind of overseeing everything and like the scale campaign, right? Like I'm deciding what to piece where okay. And like budget and this and that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, I have somebody that I'm training right now who started as kind of like our like director of like, like influencer management, but I'm kind, I'm kind of teaching her like how to set up ads, what to look for and like, you know, uh, you know, patterns and data and analyzing all that kind of type of stuff. So that when she's looking at these testing campaigns, she's coming back and be like, okay, well this angle worked. Let's maybe do her iteration and give it to the designers to, you know, create for the next week. So I have, I have, you know, somebody under me, um, you know, she like sets up all the testing.

Ash Melwani (00:30:08):

She does all of that and then launches everything. So like, all I have to do is kind of just look at it and if there's winners, you know, move 'em over. Um, so then we have three graphic designers. One is our, my other founder who designed everything. Um, then we have, you know, our other graphic designer who, you know, that we hired that kind of helps with everything. Right. You know, ads, you know, pitch decks, this and that, the website. And then we have a freelancer who literally just does like ad hoc stuff, which is mostly ads and different stuff. Now in terms of like the strategy and what direction we want to go in, I'm leaving it totally to them to come up with what the ad will look like, because we don't know what what's gonna work. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so I want them to like do their own research or if they think of like something on their own, this way, we have different stuff to test.

Ash Melwani (00:31:04):

The only thing that I'm giving them is the angle to focus on and what like key elements they need to have on the ad. Right? So like they need to have that specific angle. They also need to show X amount of reviews or, you know, 10, 10 grams of college, like those small things that need to be on the ad. I'm, you know, supplying that. But the actual, like the actual like design of it, I'm letting them do because who am I to say, this is gonna work or not work. Right. Um, so that's why like, it's literally like throwing shit at the wall and then whatever's working reiterate. And what I'll do is on like Monday I'll pull out what was working and put it in an notion so that they, they can see like, okay, well this style graphic work, this won't work, this won't work. And then they have more ideas to, you know, create more designs from

Cody Plofker (00:31:53):

That was my question. Okay. So weekly you'll, you'll take data and you'll kind of communicate that to them. Hey, here's what work, here's what didn't work. Yeah. Here's what I think we should test next. Are you giving them some of that?

Ash Melwani (00:32:05):

Yeah. So if, if there's like, if we're like scrolling and we see an ad, we have like a group chat where like we'll screenshot and toss it in there and they can use that as inspiration mm-hmm <affirmative>, but you know, I'm literally giving them like, here's, what's working. If you wanna make an iteration of this. Great. If you wanna do something completely different, do it too, because then that could be just another winner. Right. So I think it's split between reiterating the winners and like coming up with entirely different concepts. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, cuz I think that's the only way you can win right now.

Cody Plofker (00:32:34):

Okay. So it's a, it's a, it's a team thing. I mean you're, you're training somebody to be media buyer right now you're playing media buyer and creative strategist. You're kind of definitely being creative strategist, but then you're also giving your designers a good amount of autonomy in terms of creative, not necessarily strategy you're coming up with angles and, and hooks. Yeah. But in terms of actually the design you're leaving a lot of that up to them.

Ash Melwani (00:32:55):

Yeah. No, I mean that, that's the reason we hired these like their graphic designer, you know what I mean? They should have that like idea of what you know, to create, you know, and it it's,

Cody Plofker (00:33:09):

But, but they also, again, unless you've hired people that have a lot of experience with agencies or, or paid social, you can have an amazing, amazingly talented designer who doesn't necessarily a know what works on paid social, but also just even if they might, they, they need the feedback as well. They need the, they're not a data person, but they do need everyone's different. But I do think they need some information on, Hey, here's what worked. Here's what didn't work. Here's my hypothesis for, for why it worked. And here's what I think we should test next. Is that, are you kind of getting, getting that to them on a weekly basis?

Ash Melwani (00:33:43):

Yeah. So I'll give you a very clear example, right? The graphic designer that we hired, um, the first two weeks, I think out of the three of them, none of his made it to like the winner, right? Yeah.

Cody Plofker (00:33:56):

And you were like, get outta here

Ash Melwani (00:33:58):

<laugh> no, it was, it was like, okay, so now I had two weeks worth of data that I could actually show them, which creatives were working. He flipped, you know, the way that he was designing stuff. And now all of his stuff is like winning mm-hmm <affirmative>. So it's like, you know, it's not, I don't think it has anything to do with, I mean, like you said, right, you need to have some idea of like what's working for social, this and that. I think you should have that like basis of like, can I like create an idea and like put it to, you know, create on Photoshop and like, you know, try and test it and run it. Cause like, for me, I always thought like bright, you know, colors, this and that eye catching shit is gonna be the one that wins. But like, you know, he was the one that put something on a white background and it like outperformed everything. And so it's like, you know, let them do what they want to do. Because again, like I said, like, I've been saying, who am I to say what's gonna work on Facebook? Cause we don't know. Right. Like at this point we have no idea. So let them create, and then whatever comes back as a winner, I'll show them if this week didn't have any winners, I'll tell them that and then they'll know like, okay, this didn't perform so that they can avoid it and then, you know, kind of totally, totally rework it. Scrap that.

Cody Plofker (00:35:10):

Yeah.

Ash Melwani (00:35:10):

All cool.

Cody Plofker (00:35:11):

Totally. Do you say you're using notion or motion for this

Ash Melwani (00:35:13):

Notion

Cody Plofker (00:35:14):

Notion. Okay, cool. Yeah. Cool. We use, I, I use notion, but we also use motion, which is like the creative analysis up. Um okay. Full transparency investor in it. But to me, like we wouldn't be able to do it without this. Like it's, it's pretty amazing, you know, it kind of aggregates all of the data in one place and you can kind of just like create a report and kind of send it over your, to your designer and are using like ADA. Is that what you guys use or what metrics are you looking at for creative analysis? Uh,

Rabah Rahil (00:35:41):

For the folks that dunno coding, give, give people what the ADA framework is.

Cody Plofker (00:35:45):

So ADA is essentially like the, the typical sales funnel, right. Is awareness, interest desire, action. So you can kind of look at an ad, especially a or only a video ad and you can kind of break it down with some metrics and some custom metrics on Facebook. Um, so a would be your, your awareness would be thumb stop ratio. So that's three second views divided by impressions. Right? I dunno what you guys look at. We're at, we're looking for like a 35 plus thumb stop. I mean 30 to 35 plus, um, average watch time again. That's kind of your, your interest like, Hey, am I keeping people engaged? You know, we're looking at five, six plus seconds. Okay. Click through rate.

Rabah Rahil (00:36:24):

So not percentage. So not percentage of video consumed. You're actually looking at

Cody Plofker (00:36:27):

Seconds. No, we look at, yeah. And, and that's the one I probably look at the least like, that's the least important, but again, it tells you, are you video

Ash Melwani (00:36:34):

Is the same length though.

Rabah Rahil (00:36:35):

That's what I was saying. No, they're not that. So cause percentage that's to normalize it.

Cody Plofker (00:36:39):

And I don't look at that, that a ton. And then, you know, um, interestingly you have desire, which is your click, the rate, you know, how, what in my ad is making people want to click. So like outbound click the rate. And then obviously you have action, which is, you can look at ROAS, but there's so many variables I look at usually click to purchase ratio. Yep. Um, I, I, I will say, I like to simplify it just the way I think about it. I think, you know, and again, if you say what you, you want about him and ClickFunnels, but Russell Brunson, I think every ad, every piece of content is just hook story offer. So I really just look at it that way. What's your hook? Are you getting people to stop? What's your story? Are you giving a compelling message? And then what's your, what's your offer? Are people actually buying? And so that's how I look at it. Your hook would be your thumb stop, right? Your, your story. You can look at those two metrics. You can look at click to rate and then your final one, you can, you can look at, um, your, your click to purchase. The other reason I like that hook story offer is because a, what you guys talked about videos are different length, but also you don't have any watch time on aesthetic hook story offer. You can still look at a static.

Rabah Rahil (00:37:41):

Interesting. Do you ever use, uh, the custom metric of revenue per click?

Cody Plofker (00:37:47):

Yes, definitely.

Rabah Rahil (00:37:48):

Yeah. You don't like it?

Cody Plofker (00:37:50):

No, I do

Rabah Rahil (00:37:51):

To it. No,

Cody Plofker (00:37:51):

No, no, no. I look at it a ton, but I think I'm looking more on like for creative analysis, like the soft metrics kinda on platform,

Rabah Rahil (00:37:59):

But for your yeah. But you're looking for the conversion, right? So that's kind of a, it's almost a function of the conversion, right?

Cody Plofker (00:38:05):

For sure. Cause you

Rabah Rahil (00:38:06):

Said definitely you said click to purchase. So you could look at, you know, how much, how much are my clicks driving in terms of sales. So you can look at sales for click.

Cody Plofker (00:38:13):

Yeah. You can look at that. You can look at ROS. Like again, there's a bunch of factors, but that's at least something that's telling you, Hey, are people actually acting on what I'm trying to get to do thing. But the important thing is yes, ROS is the most important thing. We're not optimizing for a click through rate, right? Like we're not trying to, you know, do click baby stuff, but there just, no, there are so many other factors in this, this ecosystem you have CPMs, you have all this other stuff you have seasonality. So if you're just looking at creative analysis, you do have to look at kind of those softer, upper, upper, upper funnel metrics of it.

Rabah Rahil (00:38:46):

I love that. That's

Ash Melwani (00:38:47):

So I I'll be honest with you. I don't look at those as much as maybe you do. Okay. I'm looking purely at, uh, CAC. Like, I love that this ad and, and this is also on triple well, not even like

Rabah Rahil (00:39:02):

In specific new customer crack.

Ash Melwani (00:39:04):

Yeah. Specifically new customer. Yeah. And CPA, if it falls within the threshold that I'm okay with, then I am considering that a winner. Right. Okay. Love that. Um, like, and we can get into like click through rates and CPMs and all that, or rather not, but like it's, I, I, I think the, the biggest indicator for us is always gonna be like, did you get a customer? Right. So that's kind of the way that I've been approaching at least.

Cody Plofker (00:39:35):

And you wanna winner is only cuz we promise not to argue on this show. I'll say I agree.

Rabah Rahil (00:39:41):

<laugh> wow. He is, you take the microphone away from him. He's on the AirPods and now he's tame. What's going on here? What's going on

Cody Plofker (00:39:49):

Man? It's

Ash Melwani (00:39:50):

No, I agree. I think there's a lot of other, like there's, there's reasons for like these metrics to see like, okay, click through rate this and that. But like, I feel like Cody, like if you, if, for example, the, the creators that you were running right before that were working, but are not, have you seen like a decline in those like click through rates?

Cody Plofker (00:40:08):

Yeah, definitely.

Ash Melwani (00:40:09):

Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

Cody Plofker (00:40:11):

Definitely. Again, I think again, my, my, my, and will be very brief about this, but you know, terms of like brand first performance. Like I think that the biggest effect that we get from our Facebook advertising is actually kind of on the brand and awareness play of people that will buy later. So like a, those metrics, those upper funnel metrics do matter because no matter how good your conversion rate is, if you're paying six bucks a click, it's really hard to convert. So like challenge, I do need to get my thumb stop better. I do need to get, you know, cuz CPAs are just an effect of what's upstream a funnel of it. You know, if all else is equal, that's the other thing, all else being equal. We're not doing click baby. Stuff's, we're not optimizing for, for traffic, but if I get same conversion rate, but I get my thumb stop ratio better, right?

Cody Plofker (00:40:59):

I'm gonna then feed that lower funnel quite a bit better. Also it's telling me that the awareness levels that people are at when I'm reaching them with my ad, something is resonating better. It might not be that they're a, like if you get a high click, the rate, it might not be that they're a bad customer. Who's click baby. It might just be that when I reach them in their buyer journey was early and I engage with them where they were at. And then I'm willing to kind of play that long term. So obviously I'm not doing just to throw it other, I'm not doing that at the expense of CPA. If I have two things and I'm looking at scaling an ad and putting it to evergreen or not, I want CPA to, to be good. I'm not gonna pick a high, higher CPA with a better clickthrough rate, but we have found a correlation. Usually it's hard to get a really good CPA with a terrible clickthrough rate

Rabah Rahil (00:41:47):

Ish cause I to Ashe's point. So, uh, at my previous agency, not, not my own shop, my, uh, I used to work at an agency in New York. Um, we ran, uh, ads for wag. I don't know if you guys are familiar, it's a, a dog walking app anyways. Um, and what we found was we would run like cute little puppies and stuff and to Ashe's point, like it would kind of do well. And then the performance on the back end in terms of, so this was an app. So like the app installs and then the signups would fall off a cliff, but our engagement would stay the exact same. And so we had to stay away from these kind of angles because Facebook would just, you, you would just spend so much money because Facebook's driving all these engagement and everybody's still engaging with this ad, but they're engaging. Cause like, oh my God, look at the cute puppy, blah, blah, blah. And not because of like, oh, I need to get my dog walked. I'm gonna sign up for this app. Yada Y yada. Um, so I, I take both of your points. So I'm,

Cody Plofker (00:42:38):

You can, yo you can a hundred percent. I am not saying we are optimizing for it. Right. We are not picking which ones are winning based on the clickthrough.

Rabah Rahil (00:42:46):

Sure, sure. Yeah. I'm

Ash Melwani (00:42:48):

Not saying you're metrics to help with decide what creative. Exactly. I, I think within a specific test. Yeah. They're great. Like for example, like within our like angle test to see which creatives had a higher click through rate, even though they're all the same angles that I feel like would be good to look at, but like, to your point, like some of, some of our creatives have like less than 1% click through rate, but they're still generating like a good amount. And like, I don't, I don't know. You

Cody Plofker (00:43:16):

Think that's cuz viewed through conversions?

Ash Melwani (00:43:18):

No, no, definitely not. Are you

Rabah Rahil (00:43:20):

Baiting?

Ash Melwani (00:43:20):

<laugh> you've BA but like some of these will have like some of these will have higher

Cody Plofker (00:43:24):

Damn we almost made it an hour.

Ash Melwani (00:43:27):

Right. Some of these will have higher CPCs, but we'll also have higher conversion rates. I think the way that we're like, yeah. It's just better people. And think you'll only see this with Facebook. I can, I will hundred percent agree with you on looking at these high level metrics on TikTok a hundred percent interesting.

Rabah Rahil (00:43:46):

Yeah. That's an interesting,

Ash Melwani (00:43:47):

I don't, I just don't think it, it there's a correlation on Facebook at all.

Rabah Rahil (00:43:52):

Interesting. Um, can I ask you Ash, why do you care about N C CPA or new customer CPA more than new customer rows?

Ash Melwani (00:44:01):

Um, I think because we're at a, a,

Rabah Rahil (00:44:05):

The, AOVs kind of the same for, for most of the, the products that you're, you're pushing.

Ash Melwani (00:44:09):

So, so we've done a study on like which products have higher LTV based on product, right? Yep. Um, you know, we had a weight loss product that was a top seller by volume, but LTV was super low because like people wanted quick weight loss,

Rabah Rahil (00:44:27):

Right? Yeah. Retention. So

Ash Melwani (00:44:28):

Like we moved away from that and, and like, even though it was a top seller and like lowest CPA, like yep. Just it's just a cash play. Right. So like we won't get those customers back unless we're able to cross sell them into the other products that we have. Yep. Then we've moved onto like our collagen protein, which has the highest LTV because they're flavor based and people like the flavors and you know, they actually taste good. So what we, what we ended up doing is like, okay, well we've, we've figured out what our LTV is for that specific product, with the, with the retention,

Rabah Rahil (00:45:01):

Like I'm tracking now I'm tracking. Yeah.

Ash Melwani (00:45:03):

Yeah. And then to be like, okay, if I fall within this, like, you know, CPA for this product, I'm love

Rabah Rahil (00:45:08):

That. Good.

Cody Plofker (00:45:09):

Yeah. I would, I definitely prefer optimizing off of a CPA target than a, than a ROS target.

Rabah Rahil (00:45:14):

Yeah. Yeah. I guess my point being so customer value manifests in either AOV or LTV. Right. But if that one LTV is pegged or you have a very good view of that LTV, then it turns into a CPA ultimately. Um, so yeah, I'm tracking what you're saying.

Ash Melwani (00:45:28):

It depends on the life of your business. I think how old it is. Like in the beginning we were like, okay, well we need to be at three X to be profitable. Right. Right. Though, that at that stage is like, okay, well we need cash now because like we're a little bit more mature and you know, we can just more capitalized acquire. We have a little bit more capital. And then if we do need capital down the line, we can go raise. But like now there's just a acquire at this number and like let LTB kind of. Yeah, exactly. So I think it depends on the, the age of the business.

Rabah Rahil (00:45:58):

Yeah. That's a great explanation. Um, do you guys wanna move in the second segment? Talk about all the shit that's broke or what do you feel? Yeah.

Cody Plofker (00:46:06):

Yeah. I think, I think we did this pretty, pretty good. That was helpful Ash though.

Rabah Rahil (00:46:10):

Yeah. It's fantastic, man. That's really, really well thought out. I love it.

Ash Melwani (00:46:14):

Oh, good. Glad, glad I could help a little bit.

Rabah Rahil (00:46:17):

<laugh> and the hair looks fabulous by the way. Fabulous. Thank yeah. Get hype <laugh> um, how so what's been working. What's not been working. How do you guys wanna approach this? Or just, just happiness. Just, just sending good vibes out to people.

Cody Plofker (00:46:35):

Yeah. I mean people, no, but it it's, it's hard. I think again, we talked about this right before we came on, but like, it's pretty tough. We've had a, a tough week. We were riding a high, you know, it's, it's been a tough few weeks and I think it's super important just to remember that, like, there are people on the other side of our ads that we're serving and there's a few things, first of all, let's just zoom out. Right. Obviously we got Facebook bugs, CPMs data stuff going on, but really there's, there's some terrible stuff happening in the world and I don't wanna make this a political thing at all, but I, you know, my heart definitely goes out for everyone that's affected by this. And we just have to remember that like a you're always fighting for attention. Right. And you know, like we're a brand that gets a lot of PR and publications are trying to get their views as high as possible so they can get revenue.

Cody Plofker (00:47:21):

What's gonna get more right now. Right. What's on people's minds. And what's really all people wanna talk about or beauty products. Right. So there's that like our referral traffic, our PR traffic is way down. Right. And we also have to remember if we're serving ads to people on Facebook, they don't care about that at all. You know, their, their minds are in a million places. So we just a have to zoom out one week, one bad week is not gonna kill anything, you know, try to focus out. And this is what I'm reminding myself, cuz this is, you know, not trying to be hypocritical, but this is advice to myself like zoom out. Like we, you still probably have a good business. One bad day, one bad week is, is really, does not make or break a business. Um, and focus there's really only so much we can do right now.

Cody Plofker (00:48:03):

Unfortunately control what you can. The biggest thing you can control is probably how much you're spending and your creative testing. Right? Yeah. So like Ash talked about like, I think that's super important and relevant, but, but also just kind of zoom out a little bit, work on projects that, you know, Hey, when the economy is great. When, when, when things are back to normal like guess what you're gonna wish you worked on those creatives or those landing pages or reworking that email flow or redoing your brand positioning now. So, or the systems are, or the systems hiring people, whatever it is, you know, just take that longer term view and kind of zoom out. That's at least advice to myself that I'm working on.

Rabah Rahil (00:48:37):

Yeah, I would, I would, I'd piggyback off of that too, is people gotta remember, like you're feed isn't just ads. And so like, you have a crazy, you know, video of a bomb dropping on a hospital of kids. And then right below that as your ad, like people might not be in the same head space to buy like that. They were, you know, a month ago when that was a stupid puppy video or something like that. So there there's to your point, Cody, I think you're right on where, um, there's people like numbers, aren't buying your products. People are. And so like people are affected

Cody Plofker (00:49:07):

By this. And that's one thing they're affected, obviously, you know, attention is affected, but also finances are, are, are affected. I mean, hundred. All anybody wants to talk about right now is gas prices. And for good reason, you know, I don't know the stats on it, but the majority of Americans do live paycheck to paycheck. And yeah, what we are selling a lot of times is, is a luxury. It's not a necessity. People don't necessarily need collagen or they don't need beauty products. They like it. It makes 'em feel good emotionally. It fixes a problem. But if they've only got so much cash to go around, like they've gotta get to work. They've gotta drive their kids to school. And even if it's not truly paycheck to paycheck, I think that at least the concern of it is like, Hey, let me save up. Like, I don't need to,

Rabah Rahil (00:49:45):

That was just gonna nail that. Like a lot of times it's not necessarily the hardships. Um, like when people are broke, they'll buy stuff. It's uncertainty that is a killer to the business where people are like, they're gonna hoard. Like, I don't know what's gonna happen. Like our gas price is gonna go to 40 bucks or like, are we gonna go to war? And then that's gonna change everything. Like, there's all these, these, that's a nice time piece, Cody, man, I gotta step up haircuts time pieces, Jesus guys, you gotta fucking lap in me here. Um, but yeah, I think there's a lot of like user user psychology here in that where, um, you know what I'm saying? Like the uncertainty is, if there's anything that kills a business, it's uncertainty, where if you just tell me it's gonna be bad, then I can build a system around that and I can start to build preferences around the bad. But if I don't know, know what the bad is, you often suffer more in your mind than in reality.

Cody Plofker (00:50:31):

Totally. A hundred percent people, just an uncertain mind, doesn't buy and humans are essentially hard, hard to be, to be great

Rabah Rahil (00:50:39):

Mind. Yeah, that's great.

Cody Plofker (00:50:40):

And I've seen again, like my, my original businesses kind of, you know, selling kind of face to face and stuff like that, selling in the middle, the beginning of COVID like was, was really difficult. People weren't buying stuff. And then as soon as people, you know, government started printing money, we had a little bit more certainty and it became normal. Like that's when I think the market kind of took off, you know? Yep. So that's another thing is, and I know we've talked about it. I don't have any data on this, but my hypothesis I'd be super curious if there is a correlation between like overall industry ROAS or Mer and like the S and P 500, cuz like when people are worried about the economy, they're not shopping as much and they're not gonna buy our, again, most DTC products, pretty much every DTC product is a luxury.

Rabah Rahil (00:51:22):

Yeah. For the most part. Yeah. That it is interesting. I'll see if I can do, uh, cause I, uh, the high level data I'll I'll see if I can map that out. Cuz uh, Ash, when we were talking about that had a good point where when the market got wrecked by COVID, um, the DTCs kind of, uh, space was screaming. Um, but it, it is interesting that you say that though. Cause the other thing is like that trickles down. I mean, I don't believe in trickle down economics, so I'm gonna give don't put me on that. But um, there is some knock on effects. Like the capital markets are affected, right? I mean, look at Facebook, look at Twilio, look at like these huge growth stocks have been taking Shopifys down 60, some 63%, all time highs like that is significant. That's proper money, dude. That is a real haircut. You're talking almost two thirds of your business or, or of your market cap gone like overnight, essentially in like six months that's that's absolute anarchy. And so there there's definitely a, uh, a knock on effect with that in my opinion,

Cody Plofker (00:52:24):

Ash, you got anything?

Ash Melwani (00:52:25):

No, I, I, I kind of wanna go off of what you were saying. It's like you can't control these things. Right. I think what the, the whole basis of this podcast was like, here are the things you can control. Right? So talk about like creatives and landing page and this and that. But like, like take the like Cody, like you said, like take the time to like, okay, if you need to like pull back a little bit, pull back, but like focus on the areas that you can. Right. So like for us, we're like focusing on like retention, right? Like you said, rewriting, some of these flows, um, you know, we, we are officially launching in vitamin shop this week. Like how do we support that? Right. So like, congrats take, thank you. Thank you. So like figuring out those other elements to your business, like this will, this will fix itself in time, right? Like, like knock on wood. Things will get better and they always have gotten better. Just focus on other things. Like if you wanna like come up with a creative project, like you said, right. Like focus on that. Um, you know, if you wanna like start a podcast, start a podcast, like just do something that's like kind of outside of the ad account, cuz you're gonna drive yourself insane. Um,

Rabah Rahil (00:53:29):

That's a good podcast name, damnit what? Which is outside the ad account.

Ash Melwani (00:53:34):

Ooh.

Rabah Rahil (00:53:35):

<laugh> that's a good podcast name. Jesus. You guys are spin fire today. It feels good to, it feels good to have the boys back together. The Trinity of awesomeness. We're back again, baby.

Cody Plofker (00:53:44):

And we're all getting along today. I

Rabah Rahil (00:53:46):

Know it's it's like one big happy. Family's fantastic. Three

Ash Melwani (00:53:50):

Years happy.

Rabah Rahil (00:53:51):

All right, boys. We're bump bumping up against about 50 some minutes. Um, do you wanna wrap it up or is there anything else we wanted to jam on?

Ash Melwani (00:54:01):

Um,

Cody Plofker (00:54:01):

What's your let's let's end it on this. What is your biggest learning lesson from this past week? Each of you?

Rabah Rahil (00:54:11):

Ooh, that's a great question. Why don't you go first since you asked it,

Cody Plofker (00:54:14):

That was all right. I mean, cop out that was mine was don't scale ad spend without scaling creative production.

Rabah Rahil (00:54:19):

Yeah. So with that, let me ask you one thing. Are you trying to build a ratio?

Cody Plofker (00:54:24):

So I posted on Twitter. I don't know if you guys saw that, but it's pretty interesting. Just I kind of seeing what people think about like, yes, we've talked about oh 10 to 15% of your total spend budget should be into creative testing campaigns.

Rabah Rahil (00:54:36):

No, no, no, no, no, not that. Yeah,

Cody Plofker (00:54:38):

No, I hear you. Oh, you're getting, but, but in terms of, but in terms of creative production, I think I, I was just curious. So I posted a, you know, a tweet in a question on Twitter and it seems like there's no one answer, but yeah. I mean about 10% of total budget should be spent on, you know, so we're spending a hundred thousand a month on, on ads. You should be spending 10,000 a month on just a creative, not even testing behind it, but just a creative.

Rabah Rahil (00:55:00):

Yeah, no, no. I meant so that I'm a hundred percent in line with that.

Cody Plofker (00:55:04):

Okay.

Rabah Rahil (00:55:04):

In terms of your scale. So like, do you wanna have X amount of creative pieces for like every $10, $10,000 that you scale? Cause you said you doubled up and that kind of broke the system. Yeah. Does that make sense? What I'm saying? Like for, yeah. For every amount I scale, should I have at least another 40 creatives for every $10,000 or for every X amount of tranches that I hit, if I get to $50,000 in spend a day, I want to have at least X or Y amount of creatives. Does that make sense?

Cody Plofker (00:55:30):

Yes. That's a great question. Sorry. Um, I didn't totally understand the first mind by, but yeah. Let me think about that a little bit. I don't totally know. I mean, what we are trying to do is five a week. The thing is we were getting by, cause I think we had good creative. We had, you know, a, a product and a brand people wanted like we are getting by with not enough creative, you know? Yeah. I don't think we were really doing it properly. We had amazing performance, but I think that's partly why versus if we had the right amount, we, we wouldn't be hit so hard. I think at our scale, at our size we're, you know, we, we got up to spending on Facebook 30 K a day. We pulled back a little bit. Like we definitely need 10 a week. Yeah. We definitely need 10 a week. We, we were at five

Ash Melwani (00:56:09):

A week before like static images.

Cody Plofker (00:56:12):

Yeah. We were on a little bit of static. Um,

Ash Melwani (00:56:14):

At top of the funnel, does it do well,

Cody Plofker (00:56:18):

This is kind of a, a subjective thing, kind of a brand thing. I, I prefer video. Yeah. Um, just, just for kind of, you know, recall and, and awareness. Um, video's done, done a lot better for us, so

Ash Melwani (00:56:30):

No, I agree. I mean, for us static is like just crushed. So like, I think it's easier for us to pump out 40 pieces of creative where you need to film, you know, for more and more. So

Cody Plofker (00:56:41):

We, we just got, we have a shoot with a company on Monday, super excited about them. Um, and they're kind of gonna give us a ton and, and do all these concepts. So hopefully that we, we just couldn't hire people internally fast enough. So we finally found, you know, an agency who we think can do a really good job of this and get us the assets we need.

Rabah Rahil (00:57:00):

No. And speaking of hiring, uh, congrats on the, get the CX goat, Eli wise, that's a fantastic hire. That's a beautiful hire

Cody Plofker (00:57:09):

That's amazing's let's plug that, that podcast was great that he was on. You're not your ROS.

Rabah Rahil (00:57:13):

Oh, well thank you. He's a gem man. That's he's a gem. Yeah. Look at that little house here. Little

Cody Plofker (00:57:18):

House that enough about me. What, what would you guys say to finish it up and see your biggest lesson past week?

Rabah Rahil (00:57:24):

Um, what was my biggest lesson this past week? I think for me ultimately getting to the root and then understanding, I mean, you took all the good answers. I mean, really, I think it is controlling what you can control and then making sure that you're working on a creative activities, like, like there's always gonna be something that you can do to improve. And then if it's not actually building, you can do building on the internals, like you can build better SOPs, you can build better systems, you can build better ways that you document things you can build, like all these things that like, it sounds boring, but at the same time, like that, that's really gonna be helpful to building a better and more RBO business. Cuz like I think Ash is on top of it where, um, there will be a bounce back. Like I, I would never bet against America, like there the, this economy just really, always people love to spend money here.

Rabah Rahil (00:58:12):

Um, and so I, I think ultimately having that and then being able to, you know, have those nets ready to, to deploy, to catch all that money when things do bounce back is gonna be something that, um, you're gonna regret rather than kind of bitching or worrying about things that you can't control. And um, so it is kind of a cop out answer cuz it was the one that you gave. But I, I think it's very precious. I think that's really not only in ad buy, but in life like control what you can control. And ironically, when you do that, your circle will control actually expands and you can actually impact more things.

Cody Plofker (00:58:43):

And you're kind of saying V ready too, like control what you can control test now so that when things rebound, like you'll be ready.

Ash Melwani (00:58:49):

Yep. Percent.

Cody Plofker (00:58:51):

What about like mentally? Like do you guys like, does it affect you kind of mentally and personally when things are down, like for me it totally does and it's not healthy. Like I think that's like the growth paradox is like, we're probably in this industry cuz we love growth, but when we don't have it, it's like, I take it way more personally than I should.

Ash Melwani (00:59:09):

So let me answer that because I was, I was where you were last year, like, like that October, November area, um, when things started to like kind of slow down and I couldn't figure it out. Right. Like the, the answer was there, it's creative, but I just wasn't wrapping my head around it. Um, cuz it's like, we we've been using this for the last two years. Things have been good. And then all of a sudden like, is it just Facebook? Like, am I just not a good marketer? This and that? Mm-hmm <affirmative> I was where you were. Yeah, I was where you were like in that time, like I literally looked at my founders in the face and I was like, I can't do this anymore. We need to hire like another media buyer. I need to hire an agency, whatever it is. So we like, we tested a few different people and like we're all doing the same shit like that.

Ash Melwani (00:59:55):

Like there there's nobody that's like infinitely better. Like whatever, like everyone's doing the same exact thing everybody's facing the same exact issues. So you have to constantly remember that it's not you, you know what you like, you know what the answer is, right? You're you're, you're set it to us. It's creative. You need to up the testing, this and that. You have the answer, work on that. Right. And that should give you peace of mind because it's like, it's not, you it's, it could be the platform. It's all these macroeconomics, you know, for a fact it's not, you you've gotten the company to this point. It has never been you and it won't be you. So just constantly remember yourself for that. Remind yourself

Cody Plofker (01:00:33):

Of that. Thanks for the therapy session, man. I appreciate it.

Rabah Rahil (01:00:35):

Yeah know, right. Yeah. That's what I needed.

Cody Plofker (01:00:38):

I know. Right. Yo invoice me. That's

Rabah Rahil (01:00:41):

Amazing. I appreciate

Cody Plofker (01:00:43):

That. Yeah. You're a hundred percent. Right. And I'm, it helps me, I hope anybody listening to this that that's helpful for as well, cuz I've been going through it this week.

Rabah Rahil (01:00:50):

Yeah. And, and I think too, there there's a certain aspect of like, in my opinion, this life's about building deep connections with humans. You care about like at the end of the day, we're just sling ads and we're lucky to live in the states and like we have to be fighting for our freedom and all this stuff. So I think having gratitude and then also there's a, a stoic saying that I repeat to myself whenever I get stressed out that it's not important. It's not personal. It's not forever. And I just tell myself that over and over and over again, because it's hard. And like, like you said, Cody, like all of us in these positions, we're, you know, we're high performers and when we're not performing, it's a challenge to, to understand why. But um, you don't wanna throw the baby out with the bath water and then use that anxiety, um, to get better. And that's, that's really what like to go back to sports analogies. I mean, tiger was like one of the great at all time, right? Like when he would have a bad day, like it, it's not like he would go cry and lick his wounds. He'd say, okay, dissect what I did wrong. And then he is right back out on the range or on the course trying to figure

Cody Plofker (01:01:44):

Out you also did some other stuff.

Rabah Rahil (01:01:46):

Well, Hey, you know, you had to do it. Did you had to go there? I tried to step in your golf world and give you the golf analogy and this is how you do me. And this is how you do me. Incredible, incredible. But anyways, you get what I'm saying? That like there there's two ways to take it. You can get mad about it or you can make yourself better. And I, I think that the ladder is always, uh, the better choice.

Cody Plofker (01:02:10):

It's crazy how quickly you forget though. It's like two weeks ago, you're crushing it. You know? And it's like, oh they're great. I'm a great marketer. And then it's like, oh man, like I better go find a new job,

Ash Melwani (01:02:20):

Picking out the keys to the Lambo and everything. Yeah.

Cody Plofker (01:02:22):

<laugh> buy my course.

Rabah Rahil (01:02:25):

Yes, exactly. Yeah. You haven't seen the course buying out of late, have you? Yeah, it's definitely, uh, usually only bull markets for that. But uh, yeah, I think that there's, there's a plethora of wisdom here for you all to pull from. So, um, I'm glad you guys joined us for over an hour. Over an hour boys. It felt, felt like 20 minutes. It's good to have the gang back again. Love Cody. Tell us where everybody can find you

Cody Plofker (01:02:49):

Find me on Twitter at Cody plot, uh, subscribe to the newsletter link Lincoln bio. Just fantastic newsletter. Appreciate that. Send a newsletter every Monday or Tuesday. Just about what I'm learning and what I'm going through this week. So we just launched some new PDPs. I'm gonna talk about kind of the results from that and why I think we're, you know, how, how we kind of approach it, what, what we learn. So if you wanna learn about that, um, sign up.

Rabah Rahil (01:03:12):

I love it. Yeah. It's it's absolute heat. And for people that aren't in the know what's a PDP Cody

Cody Plofker (01:03:16):

Product page.

Rabah Rahil (01:03:18):

Beautiful, beautiful Ash. Where, where do the people follow you at?

Ash Melwani (01:03:21):

Follow me? Ashman Milani on Twitter. If you need some collage in your life, we just launched a vitamin shop. So if you have one around you, please go

Cody Plofker (01:03:30):

In, go support the homey.

Ash Melwani (01:03:32):

See I'm trying

Cody Plofker (01:03:32):

To make it

Ash Melwani (01:03:33):

This weekend. Just go in, talk to them and be like, Hey, do you guys have Avi collagen? They're probably gonna be like, oh, we just got it in. We don't know let's check. Right. Just if you can take a picture and tweet me, that'd be great.

Cody Plofker (01:03:43):

I'm gonna go

Rabah Rahil (01:03:43):

This weekend. Oh yeah.

Ash Melwani (01:03:45):

You don't have to buy anything. Just, just send me a picture so we can see that it's there. Um, and just talk to the rep and be like, you know, this is awesome, but um, yeah. That's, that's all for me.

Rabah Rahil (01:03:56):

Congrats again on the engagement in London. Beautiful pictures, right by right by everything. Yeah, that was fantastic. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. Thank you. Uh, alright folks, that's it add spend number four in the books. If you wanna get more involved with triple well it's tri triple well.com. We're on the bird app at triple well. Um, and then we also have a publication called whale mail that goes out every Tuesday, Thursday, Cody has been a, uh, frequent guest in there, um, with his beautiful pros. And then, yeah, I think that's all we got. Thanks so much. You beautiful people, Cody Ash, it's always a pleasure. My friends, uh, we'll see everyone on the flip. We still need, I still need to sign off. I still gotta get there, but we're, we're flowing. So the, the vibes are good. Everything is just money and no

Cody Plofker (01:04:39):

One listens to the end anyways.

Rabah Rahil (01:04:41):

Yeah. Yeah. You know, if you comment on the, when we post this comment, if you listen to the end, uh, orcas are not whales and we'll know that you listened all the way to the end.

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