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This is FERMAT Fridays, your backstage pass to what’s going on at FERMAT.
Join us every Friday as we chat about what we're cooking up, the strategy behind it all, and of course our general musings.
Expect juicy insights on new features, our latest experiment results, and whatever else is making waves in our world. Whether you're an existing customer or just a little FERMAT curious, this podcast will keep you up to date and entertained.
Alex McEachern (00:01.556)
Welcome to Fermat Fridays, y 'all, where we're talking about everything that's happening at Fermat, as well as just our general musings, just what's going on, what's going down. Today, I've got Rabah. I don't know if he needs an introduction, if you've been following with our content, but Rabah, you want to give a quick intro to anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the Fermat socials?
Rabah (00:22.808)
Yeah, so Rabba previously, the CMO over at Triple, done agency life, done big company life, done D2C really pretty much my whole life, direct response. Then I came to the dark side, B2B SaaS, and haven't looked back ever since. And it's been wonderful because I get to work with beautiful humans like yourself.
Alex McEachern (00:43.668)
Oh, well, thank you. But all right, you and I, we've been talking a lot recently, especially this week, about this concept of hub and spoke. We've been talking about satellites, we've been talking about physics and earth. So I want to bring all of that together today. But I think the best way to illustrate why we've been talking about this is we got an email this morning. And someone said, I am from not curious. And I thought this was hilarious. It just
Rabah (00:49.656)
Yes. Yes.
Rabah (00:53.976)
Yep.
Rabah (01:03.928)
Yes.
Rabah (01:07.928)
Yes, which I loved.
Alex McEachern (01:10.9)
just amazing. I think I feel like there are a ton of people out there who are Fermat curious. They look at they look at us and like, Oh, you guys, I'm into it. But like, what is it exactly? So like, I want to hit on I want to hit a bit on that today. So I want you to quickly give your satellite, Earth analogy, and why that is important to for Mott.
Rabah (01:15.16)
Yes.
Rabah (01:20.408)
Yes.
Rabah (01:32.632)
Yeah, and I don't even think it's important to Fermat per se as much as I think it's just a better framework to think of acquisition or retention in the world that we live in today. So if you think of basically a funnel, people think of a funnel, awareness, consideration, conversion, top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, blah, blah, blah.
I think that's just a little bit of an archaic way to think now when all these transactions and consumer journeys are happening in so many different places. And there's so many consumer journeys that can happen, especially at certain price points, in one fail swoop. It basically can happen in perpetuity versus having these disjointed experiences. And so instead of that funnel model, like we talk about offline all the time, where your website has to be averaged because you want your website to appeal to everybody. And there's nothing wrong with that. Your website is incredible. You should have.
your website set up for the best returning revenue, organic presence, direct search, like get out of these people's way. We kind of call this internally the connoisseur and the explorer paradox where when people are a connoisseur and they know the drink they like at the bar they want to go to, they know where the jukebox is, they know where they want to sit, like friction in that place is a bad. Whereas when you're in more of that explorer where you're putzing around the streets of Tokyo, you don't know what you want, you're very open to being influenced in an ethical way,
That's when you really want acquisition and retention and teams to be able to really highlight either the job to be done, the value prop, where that person is in their customer journey, things of that nature. And when you have a funnel, you just can't really do that. And so where I think a better mental model and where I think a lot of people are going is something called star fishing, or more people get on board with the hub and spoke model, where the hub is essentially your conversion. And then you're plotting all these spokes or acquisition paths, AKA customer
journeys from the ad to the landing page to the product page to the cart to the checkout. And now I can make this really cohesive, awesome journey to really get closer to sales than marketing. Because the way I think of sales and marketing, marketing is one to many. Sales is one to one. And so now we can get you closer to this one to one. And previously, one, you didn't really need to do that because your website was essentially the aggregator. And so when you're the pretty girl, you don't have to be pretty. Or the pretty boy, you don't have to be pretty. People just come to you.
Rabah (03:53.21)
But now that world has changed where like your website isn't really the center of your gravity like some people's center of gravity is Instagram or tick -tock or These things that you don't own and so being able to control and plot all these little acquisition paths and make smaller bets That then you can go heavier on I think it's just a faster better way to print money Especially on the acquisition and retention side like I'm not saying I think for me the long too long didn't read is the website is gonna get abstracted away to a system of
of record. So it's there for your brand equity. It's there for your returning customer revenue. It's there for your organic and your direct search and everything else that sits outside of that. There should be unique strategies fitted for that unique customer journeys made for that. And yeah, that's kind of the pitch. And obviously, I'm very biased because that's the big thesis here at FERMAT is being that connective tissue between the content and the commerce. But yeah, so going back to the original question after I just used all those words, it's
Another way to think of it is your earth your website is earth and earth is bound by the physics of earth You can't change those physics no matter what you do But if you launch these constellation sites aka FERMAT at shops you basically are uninhibited to try and do whatever you want and the reason for that is without getting super technical we essentially sit on a subdomain so like shop Alex's best products calm and so now we don't have any real interaction with quote unquote earth and these satellite
sites, you can try whatever you want, whether that's offer testing, whether that's new messaging, whether that's free shipping thresholds, different cart upsells, whatever you want. And you won't have any impact on the returning revenue or the brand equity of the business.
Alex McEachern (05:36.372)
I love so much about what you're saying here. Like the physics for me, like I think it's a really interesting way to be talking about this because like when we talk to Shopify people specifically, like the physics is these are the things that are so rooted and integrated into the Shopify experience that when I send people there, they potentially just get in the way. Like I was talking to someone earlier and they're like, Oh, I want to run these ads where I'm doing X, but then they end up on a page. And then all of a sudden someone else in my team has a pop -up going and I'm like 15 % off. They hit this landing page that is just on the site. And now.
Rabah (05:48.76)
Yes.
Rabah (05:53.752)
Yes.
Alex McEachern (06:06.196)
it's hitting a pop -up that says 25 % and everyone's like, what's going on? Like there's no cohesion to it whatsoever. Like the physics we're talking about on earth are like all those things that are just so deeply rooted into Shopify that it makes doing these like tests and like sending people down specific journeys, like if not impossible, very difficult.
Rabah (06:13.08)
Yes.
Rabah (06:28.728)
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And that was one of the things that I had a hard time getting my head around when I first started here. It was like, so are we just a landing page builder? What's going on? And then finally it clicked with me where the real magic comes in being able to really experiment with the offer. So obviously, the landing pages is great. You can have one -to -one landing pages if you want. To your point, you have this really nice, cohesive user experience and customer journey. But now we get to this offer stage, and all these landing page builders are just going to take
terminate on either your PDP or your collection page. And what happens there is you don't have any flexibility to test things. And so, for example, if you have a customer, because we'll be, spoiler alert, we'll be penetrating SMS and email very shortly and rolling out to that. And when you have a huge high spending cohort, you don't want to send them a 30 % off coupon. You want to get more money from them and get more value from them, because these are your top customers. So you never want to give away margin. However, they're very expensive.
might have been people that have made two or three purchases in the past that have went dormant for six months. Like, yeah, send them a 30 % off coupon. But having the ability to really.
Customize the offer to the people using these custom PDPs and these custom carts I think it's really interesting really quickly and that was to me kind of another little thesis We thought of here in format is essentially there's like five fundamental building blocks to a landing page You have your messaging you have your content you have your strategy you have your structure and you have your offers and so Usually most brands have their head around the offer or they can play around with that offer The strategy is ultimately
what do I want to increase AOV, first order subscription rate, LTV, items per purchase, things of that nature, AOV, what have you. And then the structure is going to be a function of pretty much the messaging, the content, the offers, and then how am I structuring, putting what orders to these modules. And.
Rabah (08:28.824)
When we find out all these people giving people access to the ability to pull on all five of these levers, you can just spend more money more efficiently, and you just get better data and learnings faster and cheaper.
Alex McEachern (08:41.363)
Yeah, faster and cheaper. Great combo. The I think like one of the so I had a very interesting conversation with a brand today and they were talking about like all of the investment they're putting in on the acquisition front. And then they're like, oh, but now we've tailored our site to like these first time customers and have all these returning customers coming back to my site that are looking for multipacks like could potentially be way higher LTV way higher AOV. But it's hard to maximize the site for that when like, say I'm dropping 500 K a month in Facebook ads.
Rabah (09:04.984)
Exactly right.
Alex McEachern (09:11.571)
I'm never going to change the experience of the site to be for anything other than that because like I have to be as efficient as I possibly can. And having these like mic, like these micro experiences and to your point, like, oh, you guys get clumped in as a landing page builder. Like I came to like, it took me a few weeks, but I came to the same realization of you that it's like, no, we're not a landing page builder. The landing page builder is like, when we were talking about dropping everyone into a single funnel, when you just are,
Rabah (09:21.72)
That's exactly right.
Alex McEachern (09:39.603)
changing the landing pages, you're just creating multifunnels and you're still just dropping people into the same thing. You just moved the bottleneck one step further away. Instead of it being at the site, it is now at the individual page that you've put them on, but you're still constrained by how you display the products. How are you talking about the products, the offers that you put in there? Like you're not actually taking it fully from click to conversion. You've just moved it one step past click, but you didn't take it all the way to conversion. So like,
Rabah (09:43.256)
Yes.
Rabah (09:54.68)
Yes.
Alex McEachern (10:09.843)
you don't have the flexibility you think you have when you're just messing with landing pages.
Rabah (10:15.448)
Yeah, I mean, again, no notes. And obviously, we're a little biased because we work at the same company. But no, you're absolutely right. And again, this isn't to say there isn't a time and place to use a landing page builder or whatever. There's nothing wrong with that. Everybody's going to be on different journeys, at different journeys in their business lifecycle. And so just for us, what we've seen is you get to $20, $30 million a year. The.
it's just harder to make ads and retention work at a really high level. And so being able to unleash your retention and your acquisition teams by giving them the flexibility to, as you eloquently put, control everything from the click to the conversion. And you can do it in a way that's really economical. I don't know. It just seems like the show. And it just seems like a better part in the crude analogy. But I see the ad almost as a hit line. And then the landing page or the post -click experience is the date.
And if you have great hit lines, but you're terrible on the date, you smell, you listen to Nickelback, you pay with your Discover card, that's not the show. But if you have this great hit line, and then you have an incredible time on the date, that's the path. And then even furthermore, shout out to your first product launch was our Firm App Forever links, where now you can actually put that link in your ad and not lose any social proof. So if that ad starts to crush it, but then you see some bottle funnel metrics kind of drop off where that's conversion.
AOV, whatever you're caring about and monitoring, bottom of funnel, you can actually just change that without having to change the ad. So the ultimate thing is, I think, whether you like it or not, the lifeblood of many businesses is acquisition and retention. And if you aren't looking for secret weapons or edges or ways to empower those teams, it's going to be a long road ahead.
Alex McEachern (12:08.692)
empower each of them, but also bring them together, right? Like I think a line that I keep on coming back to is own the outcome. Like how many, how many people do you talk to who are on like the media buying side of things and they're being comped based on the amount of sales that they generate. But to your point, it's like they're party promoters, but they're being comped on how long people stay at the party. There's only so much you can do to get someone to stay at the party by adjusting the invitation. At some point you actually need to mess with the party to get people to stay.
And like on the acquisition side of things, like you don't have people owning the outcome all the way through, but then you also have the retention side of things. Like generally speaking, those people are the ones who are messing with the site, messing with email, messing with SMS. And like, they're also not owning the outcome either. It's like, you can bridge this in both ways. Like if you allow for, allow to mess with click to conversion, you're essentially allowing that person who's going backwards on the retention side or the person on the acquisition side going forward to own the entire outcome and actually see what's going on and be able to control their own destiny.
Rabah (13:07.416)
DONE
And I love that analogy because the extension for Firm -Odd is instead of throwing one big amazing party, now I can throw the party that you've always wanted to go to that is specific to you. It's going to be the music you like. Whether you like Nickelback or not, that's fine because this party was totally catered for you. Exactly. And so there's nothing wrong with that. And I think that's the thing is being able to service these long tales as well as being able to experiment at scale.
Alex McEachern (13:25.235)
I want the Nickelback party.
Rabah (13:38.394)
with a really strong amount of surface area. For me, at...
like the TLDR, growth is going to equal essentially optimizations times experimentation. How much are you experimenting? What are you getting from those experiments? What learnings are you then integrating into the optimizations of whether it be your firm at shops, whether it be your main site, whether it be your messaging on social? Like now you build this nice cohesive feedback loop of like, this is what's resonating with people, this is what's resonating with these people that are at this place of their journey that have bought X, Y, or Z. And so you just start to level up the sufficient
And candidly, there hasn't been something that has allowed you to do this in a way that made sense in terms of economics. Like, yeah, maybe if you were a bazillion dollar company and you had your own custom tech stack and infrastructure, you could do this. And you're hacking together all this testing. But it's just not feasible for a lot of people, where it's like, I know I need it, but I can't pay for it. Where now, I think the technology is democratizing a lot of these services that would otherwise be untenable.
or just economically irresponsible for smaller brands to get, or smallish brands.
Alex McEachern (14:49.235)
You said something in there too, like the experimentation and how much you can do that and like making this available to everyone and like optimization and experimentation. I think like a lot of people know they need to be experimenting and there's just like, go on Twitter, go on anywhere and everyone's like, test, test, test, make as much, make as much of this as you can. And I think like, that's one thing that we talk a lot about here is like this concept of there's testing.
And there's experimentation. Like you can find optimizations in a test. Go A, B test something. Change one word, change one color. But unless you're at insane volume, massive scale, like those little one -ers, two -ers don't get you to a billion. You don't get to a billion adding by ones. Where we see experimentation as like, there's the 10X piece of this, right? And like, to be clear, I'm not saying don't go and do optimizations. Like...
Rabah (15:34.04)
Yep. Yes.
Alex McEachern (15:43.251)
10 times zero is still zero. We need, we need some ones here to like actually be able to multiply by, but like that experimentation, like have a big hypothesis. Like I think like, I'd love, I know you've been messing with some brands too, and like building. So I'd love to get kind of like how you put this into practice, like for yourself with like jobs to be done personas and like how you can like experiment like that. But like we're giving so much surface area that you can make a big bet and be like, I'm going to change the entire thing and see what happens instead of.
Rabah (15:45.656)
Yes.
Rabah (16:10.52)
Yes.
Alex McEachern (16:12.371)
I'm gonna change a word.
Rabah (16:15.064)
One, I'm getting the producer in my ear. We need to turn up the heat, because we have so much agreement. But I couldn't agree with you more. And I think the biggest part of that is,
Those experiments previously were really expensive. And so what we allow you to do is make way more bets at smaller scale and then scale the winners, where before, it's just really challenging. We're saying, I'm going to spend $10 ,000 on a landing page. Here's all the assumptions I'm going to make, blah, blah, blah. And then the landing page doesn't hit. And then you get into these weird quagmires of cost fallacy, of I need to put good money behind bad, even though this thing isn't working. So that, for me, is really a big part of it.
Alex McEachern (16:30.163)
Yes.
Rabah (16:57.176)
Yeah, I mean, for us, the people that are seeing the most success are people that have that kind of scientific method mentality. And they have essentially cohort of their customers in some sort of framework, again, whether that be jobs to be done, personas. So we were working with Haven. They have a big launch coming up. And they essentially have three types or personas of customers. I'm not a big personas guy. Definitely use whatever works with your framework. I'm more of a jobs to be done. But they're the same, same, but different. Anyways, we won't go down the.
path, but think of the personas. They essentially have the basically performance person. And for people that don't know, sorry. Haven is like this really awesome, basically crossfit centric bag, more like working out, but very heavily geared towards crossfitters that have a lot of gear. So if you haven't crossfitted before, it's a very gear head heavy sport where you get wraps, you get lifters, you get shop flat shoes, you have chalk, you have your supplements. There's just a lot of stuff in it.
So he realized that all these backpacks are terrible. It's actually, if anybody is watching and not listening, there's one right behind me. And so his.
buckets of customers, there's basically four reasons why people are hiring the Haven Bag. One, they're very, very performance oriented. So these are people that are crossfitters, aspiring crossfitters, or people that are already at 95 % of their potential, and they want to get that extra 5%. Then they have the basically OCD organized person. And so that's kind of quasi me, where it's somebody that just wants everything, has a place for everything, doesn't want to think about anything. All they do is they want the organization of the just top tier organization for all their
of gear so they can just grab their bag and go work out. And then they have the everyday devotee, which is essentially like soccer mom, business person that just needs something that will take the anxiety away from packing their bags, things of that nature. They don't really care about organization as much as reducing anxiety, because they only get an hour of their day to be theirs. And that's their basically prayer time at the gym, doing, you know, worshiping the iron gods type of thing. And so they're like, oh, I'm going to do this.
Rabah (19:06.426)
So those are the three big cohorts. And then the fourth one that they actually realized opened up was travel. And so the reason I'm laying all this groundwork is this is how we approached building all of their Firmat shops. And so we essentially built a big base shop. And then we would clone that shop and then change either the header videos, the testimonials, or whatever to really highlight that vector. So if it was crossfitters or that performance, we leaned heavily into crossfit, both male and female. He has a bunch of.
really great crossfitters that he works with as influencers and sponsors. So that is littered in there. Here's how to increase your squat. Everything is geared towards performance. And then you have on the other end of the spectrum these everyday duvotes where it's more of showing the product, showing regular people that are going to be more like themselves, whether it's an older man, older woman, a mom, things like that. And then the OCD organized is just basically a ton of time lapses of these bags getting unpacked and packed. And here's what happens.
Here's what I put in my bag. Here's how I put it in my bag. Here's how much it can fit, things of that nature. And so being able to have all these vectors that you can build out, and I built pretty much, and this was me just fucking around the platform. I built 20 landers, 25 landers in maybe an hour. But really, it was more like 30 minutes. I was just poking in, prodding, looking under covers type of thing. But that is what we start to enable, this thinking of, OK, cool. Here's an acquisition path, whether it's travel, whether it's performance, whether it's organization.
the value props, and then you just bring in the assets and the messaging around those products. And we're selling the exact same product, but these landers don't even have any relation to each other. And so I think that's really where the magic clicked for me. And it's almost, and we're working on making this better right now, but when you have all of your content in there, it almost becomes like an addicting kind of type of exercise, because you're basically, yeah, you're just dropping new stuff in, you're like, oh my gosh, I got a brand new lander.
Alex McEachern (21:00.147)
Playground it's amazing
Rabah (21:06.043)
So anyways, there was a whole bunch of words to say very little, but I think that's the people that are doing the best right now on our platform. And there's definitely an education vector, which is obviously in your domain of helping people understand or move more towards that type of framework and thought process. But it's really interesting. And honestly, it's really fun. I used to, like I said earlier, work at a really big agency. And one of our clients was a publicly traded Australian company, a really big
app doing real money and honestly outside of I don't know if anybody else is listening to this out there has ever been known this but I was the only person outside of that room because I was in Austin and then obviously these people were in Australia well actually they're in LA but anyways companies out of Australia but it's very weird to be the only person on the meeting that isn't in the room so aside from that it was really fun because basically we have champions and then we think of a new concept that week review that launch it and then every week we would try and dethrone the
champion and so this is essentially that but like Battle Royale style.
Alex McEachern (22:11.475)
it and everything you were saying well one every day devotee is like such a fire name for a persona that is like unreal to bring this back to what we were talking about the beginning though like that hub and spoke methodology to experimentation the starfish like hey we now have all these personas that are out on the points and to your point well points on points before is like yeah you can build these up with
Rabah (22:20.057)
Let's shout out Caleb and Haven.
Alex McEachern (22:40.275)
landers but I think like one of the coolest things when I was talking about that playground is like yeah you build the lander up and like hey if this person's all about hardcore fitness like you can use that type of imagery on the lander but like even adjust the product shots like that that's what we're saying with Fermat is like take it all the way through like yeah have this great landing experience that matches the ad but like think about again the physics of the Shopify store if like you're just pulling product shots from an existing PDP and you've got the everyday devotee seeing
I don't know, muscle head in the gym, like it just, it doesn't resonate. Like even if the landing page was, was built for me, when I start clicking around and exploring a bit more, and then it's all of a sudden like, Oh, that was just a facade. It was just, I got a little bit deeper here and like, this is just for the muscle guys.
Rabah (23:28.537)
That's a perfect call. I actually have an anecdotal story around this. Some rando on Twitter just pinged me randomly. I actually read my DMs for once. Really nice kid, absolutely crushing it. The supplement brand doing super numbers. They're doing actually really well. But one of the challenges they're having is they've essentially tapped out their beachhead was bodybuilding.
Alex McEachern (23:38.867)
Wow.
Rabah (23:51.801)
They sell creatine, things like that. And their beachhead was bodybuilding. He was like, dude, we're tapping this out. And we found this whole other market around basically guys that are just under supplementing creatine. But the challenge is, to your point, we have this incredible ad of this Everyday Joe doing this. The ad is killing it. And then they go to the website, and it's just all these fucking.
prison jack dudes on the site where they're just monsters. And they're like, hey, that's not me. And as humans, we're very mimetic. And so when I don't see a reflection in me in the product, you're usually not going to convert. And so this allows you to kind of explore those different TAMs without off -putting your current customers. Like if I join for this and then I'm a big bodybuilder, they're like, don't change the side on me tomorrow. And now I'm using the soft creatine that all these other softies
Alex McEachern (24:15.763)
I'm sorry.
Alex McEachern (24:19.571)
It's not me.
Rabah (24:44.411)
are using, but then now you can expand into these markets and you really in a lot of ways can have your cake and eat it too.
Alex McEachern (24:51.059)
That's a really good point because like through the course of this conversation, we've been talking about a lot of the ways that you can win. And we're saying like experiment, win big, find like that next thing. But the other great thing about doing it this way is like you win and lose in a vacuum. Like if you, if you went to go try something new and it didn't land, you didn't waste all the time adjusting the site. You didn't waste all the time, like putting it into something that's more concrete. It's I figured it out quick and I threw it away.
Rabah (25:17.209)
Well, and I would add even worse is you try it, and then you lose some returning revenue or brand equity, where this is pretty much completely de -risked, where it's like, if I'm this brand, and I'm this huge brand proponent, and then you just change everything on me. I was talking about this at the South by Southwest talk we did last month where,
I have yet to be involved. I've been involved in probably 10 to 12 redesigns with really high level companies. None of them have ever, ever, ever increased conversion rate. They just don't. At best, you have a little drop off. But I've seen at worst, I've seen two points drop off because these people just have, again, that connoisseur explorer paradox. They had so many returning revenue customers come back that couldn't find the thing, didn't know where it was, got put off because it was just, you moved my house around and didn't tell me. And so that's for me.
to say like you shouldn't redesign your site or whatever. You just understand that there's cost implications with that and make sure that you're willing to pay that credit card bill when it comes due. Or just play around on the side until you do build out this nice cohort. And then you can find, again, that average between that branding that everybody kind of vibes with but nobody loves. And then you have those peripheries where you can get people to love you. Your website is the person you take home to mom. It's not the person at Coachella.
Alex McEachern (26:39.795)
We actually shameless plug here. There's gonna be a new series dropping soon called the laboratory where we're gonna be talking about like all the experiments that we're doing here and we had one Oh, yeah getting just wait till you see what I'm wearing in the laboratory You guys are you guys are gonna love it. But we have a team here of CRO experts we are testing stuff all the time and we're applying those learnings to the product and like you and I get to just kind of like see all these experiments as they come through and
Rabah (26:48.793)
Getting real nerdy.
Rabah (26:53.753)
Ha ha!
Rabah (27:08.377)
Yep.
Alex McEachern (27:09.395)
And one of my favorite ones that has come through so far was basically like, we did a lot of tests on whether like the branding of this is going to do anything. And we have determined that it did not. It didn't matter like how we changed like the branding or like the colors or the elements like that. It just had zero impact on the actual conversion. And this is not like, I'm a brand guy. This is not me saying don't do that, but like,
You build all that up when you have the winner, like go find, go find what's winning and then invest in it. Don't invest trying to figure it out.
Rabah (27:40.889)
Dude, I have the perfect analog to this story. So going back to that big publicly traded company where I was running their marketing, and we would spend real money. We were spending a ticket a month kind of thing, like not nothing. And I remember being pulled into a meeting and literally was talking to their marketing team for like 45 minutes about whether we should have a logo at the final screen or no logo at the end screen. And I'm just sitting there looking and like, dude, this is like a 30 second video.
and like literally 80 % drop off by 66 % of the video watch. And you're just like, what are we arguing about here, guys? Kind of going back to your point of like, yes, you can get wins, but the real people that win are the people that take the big bets and then know how to put even more money behind winning bets that they can compound versus trying to find this quarter percent lift that costs five. The way I joke about it is it's picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. It's like, what are you doing? Like, why?
doesn't like what's the point you can get rolled over for what?
Alex McEachern (28:45.075)
You have all those people in the room discussing spending an hour talking about where the logo is gonna go. That's gonna have zero impact on any dollars generated, but how much money was wasted by having those 20 people with those high salaries debate that for an hour. You're not gonna make it up.
Rabah (28:54.105)
Zero.
Rabah (29:00.153)
Oh, that's the peripheral cost. There was literal direct costs. We ran a $10 ,000 experiment, two cells, putting five grand behind one, five grand behind the other. And it was just like.
What are we doing here? I don't know. At the end of the day, it's their money to spend. But I think that there's smarter ways to experiment to your point that you can have much bigger impact. The way I kind of put it in language is you have lever pullers and you have knob turners. And there's nothing wrong with either of them. But the knob turners are really only impactful when you're at just such scale. And even then, you still want to have the lever pullers. And you just want to make sure that you're not making existential bets.
Alex McEachern (29:42.451)
I feel like you should give a shameless plug to one of your new content pieces here where you're talking about all the frameworks that you use.
Rabah (29:48.665)
Oh, yeah. We're cooking in some content over here. We got a little kind of garytanwish .com of me doing basically just talking head videos around a lot of meta stuff, not meta in the specific, but meta in the abstract of frameworks I use, hiring techniques, how to build a team, just macro strategy structure, mostly for B2B SaaS. But there's definitely a lot of spillover into D2C. The challenge with the alignment of B2B SaaS
in DTC is just the business models are so orthogonal that it's just, it's like a baseball swing and a golf swing. They look similar, but they're so far apart in terms of the mechanics that makes a successful one.
And then, yeah, as always, we have the DTC Hunter, where I go shopping. I light up the rampies and do a whole, basically, analysis of the pre -purchase to the acquisition, to the shipping, to delivery, and then an unboxing. And then we just do a fun little rating. And then lastly, we got the equation of excellence, where I just talk to other brilliant marketing leaders, men and women across the industry, that are just absolute cooks. And then we break down how they cook.
what they're cooking and what ingredients to use.
Alex McEachern (31:04.467)
All of these right now, go hit from our commerce on YouTube. You can see absolutely all of these. And depending on when you're listening to this, another shameless plug, you might be seeing something else that we've been cooking up to house all this content depending on when you're listening. So I think they do. All right, this has been for my Fridays y 'all peace out.
Rabah (31:10.297)
smash the subscribe button.
Rabah (31:18.393)
Uh -oh, uh -oh. I think the kids call that foreshadowing.
Rabah (31:28.441)
Dude, you didn't even, how are the folks gonna follow you? You're making your resurgence, you're a phoenix on the Bird app, and you're not even gonna drop a handle? Come on, get in there.
Alex McEachern (31:36.019)
I don't have it on the bird. All right, fine. Okay. You can follow me on Twitter, AlexMCEA. You can hit me up on LinkedIn as well and be sure to subscribe to this podcast because you're not only going to get Rabba and I, you're going to get all sorts of people from across Vermont coming and telling us about what's going on. And again, our general musings.
Rabah (31:57.721)
Let's go. Great stuff. Great stuff. Thanks for tuning in, everybody.