2X eCommerce Podcast

On today’s episode, Kunle is joined by Leonardo Caracas, Partner at Jump Ventures, an incubator and VC holistically supporting companies to scale from $1 million to $10 million in revenue.

  • (06:20) - Leonardo’s Backstory
  • (15:23) - What is Jump Ventures?
  • (21:26) - The Growth of Gocase
  • (23:19) - Growth Methodology
  • (30:10) - Content from UGC to Brands to IGC
  • (33:53) - Pricing and Merchandising
  • (37:56) - On P&L and Growth Plan
  • (41:42) - Points on Financial Health
  • (44:52) - Gross Margins on a Product Level
  • (46:48) - Growth Strategy from Jump’s POV
  • (52:12) - Resources for Organic Building
  • (55:07) - Jump’s Data and Tech Stack Overview
  • (01:00:11) - Leonardo’s Advice to Entrepreneurs for 2023
 
When Leonardo got tired of working in the corporate world, he turned his attention to entrepreneurship. He contacted his university friend, Rafael, who was working then in Brazil with a startup called Gocase. Leonardo’s love for adventure carried on to his career. Fast forward to five years, Gocase already is in the international market and in addition to it, they also have Jump Ventures.
 
Jump Ventures is a mix of incubator and venture capital which sets them apart from other similar companies. They help companies from start to planning and achieving their growth plan which is a sustainable strategy for growth. While there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for brands, Leonardo shares how Jump Ventures were able to achieve growth for every company they work with.
 
It’s an insightful episode as you’d hear Kunle and Leonardo talk more about what Jump Ventures is and does, growth methodology, demand generation, the importance of testing, and what a magic number means.

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SPONSORS:
 
This episode is brought to you by:
 
Tidio
 
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Creators & Guests

Host
Kunle Campbell
Host of the 2X eCommerce Podcast and Co-Founder at OCTILLION
Guest
Leonardo Caracas
Leonardo is an entrepreneur that has structured and scaled over 50 companies worldwide in the telecommunications and eCommerce space. He is now a partner at Jump Ventures looking for ambitious entrepreneurs to take it to the next level.

What is 2X eCommerce Podcast?

Hosted by Kunle Campbell, who is an operator of a portfolio of consumer brands, 2X eCommerce is a weekly podcast for ecommerce operators by ecommerce operators. We interview remarkable ecommerce founders and leading enablers of ecommerce growth, with every episode promising to give you at least one growth hypothesis or idea you can test.

Our focus is growing your ecommerce revenues from a cross-functional perspective, be it marketing, your tech stack, operations, finance, or customer experience. We believe that by bringing together insights from a variety of experts, we can help you double the throughput of key ecommerce functions.

2X your eCommerce growth with insights from Kunle and handpicked experts.

Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram: @2XeCommerce

Kunle Campbell:
Hey Leo, welcome to the 2X Ecommerce podcast.

Leonardo:
Hi, Conleth. Nice to be here.

Kunle Campbell:
It's a pleasure. I'd come across, you know, John Fentcher's a number of times and I was like, you know, who are the two geniuses behind this? I realized it was you and Raphael. And this conversation just had to happen. And for good, for a good case, that is. Right. So where were you based?

Leonardo:
I'm actually based in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam.

Kunle Campbell:
How's the weather? Ha ha ha.

Leonardo:
The weather here is bipolar. Some days you have

Kunle Campbell:
Fair

Leonardo:
amazing

Kunle Campbell:
enough, fair

Leonardo:
weather,

Kunle Campbell:
enough.

Leonardo:
other

Kunle Campbell:
It's the

Leonardo:
days

Kunle Campbell:
same

Leonardo:
you have

Kunle Campbell:
like

Leonardo:
a

Kunle Campbell:
in England.

Leonardo:
very

Kunle Campbell:
Okay,

Leonardo:
rainy outlook.

Kunle Campbell:
so you guys, you have quite an interesting background in the sense that you have an agent or you used to have an agency and now you have a growth vehicle. You have almost like an investment, a growth investment venture. Do you want to take us back to... how you got started, your childhood, your uni days, that sort of thing. What were the fundamental building blocks to where you are now? How far would you go to attribute your current state and success to? How far back would you want to pick on that?

Leonardo:
Okay, great. Let me go far back and accelerate the story. So I'm a guy, I'm a person who always loved adventures. Since I'm 14, 15, I've lived in different countries, either as an exchange student or from the university, from high school level to university level, and I traveled a lot. So I always like to push myself and be... really exposed to new things, new people, new outlooks, and have basically a lot of adventure in my life. That took me to different countries and also took me to a job in the corporate world for around five years where I basically traveled the whole world, Middle East, Europe, Africa, as a consultant. And I got to... really play around a lot in the business life, as well as in the personal life, to be exposed to a lot of different things. So that is my true nature, is I'm a person who likes challenges and I'm a person who likes adventure and both the personal and the business side. Well, I got to a point in my consulting life after five years that I got basically tired of it. I wanted to have a different type of experience. I wanted to maybe taste a little bit of the entrepreneurship life. That entrepreneur bug was starting to hit very hard on me. And one of my best friends from university, Rafael, which is now one of my partners at Jump, he went straight away after university, he started his startup life. So I went the corporate way, he went the startup way. But we always kept in touch, we always kept checking up on each other, what are you doing, what are the interesting things that you are up to. And when these five years hit, I basically said, okay, let's do something together because I have really reached my limits in the corporate world and I really like to try and do something new for myself. And he basically said, well, we have this project. that is working really well. And this was just three months of launch, which is GoCase. And GoCase actually, fast forward, is the market leader in Brazil and one of the top brands worldwide in the tech space for electronics. But at that time, it was just a startup that was still validating its value proposition. But the challenge was, we started in Brazil, we think it has a lot of potential, why don't you open an international office? So basically we started the company and we internationalized within one year. So it was already a huge challenge to try to make an e-commerce company and a brand work in a lot of

Kunle Campbell:
What

Leonardo:
different

Kunle Campbell:
did you

Leonardo:
countries.

Kunle Campbell:
sell at Gold Case?

Leonardo:
So basically we started this journey of entrepreneurship with Go Case, which was back in 2015. So we sell basically phone accessories. We started with phone cases, and then we quickly expanded to a bunch of other products, like power banks, airport cases, cables, wireless car chargers. But the main value proposition is design and customization. So if you go to the website, you're going to see thousands of designs. You're going to see several ways to customize it. You don't see any other e-com website putting your avatar, your name. picture using filters, using even AI, so even integrating AI engines to create differentiated products there. And this was our ground to play and to play the entrepreneurship life, right? Having an experience as an entrepreneur to try to grow a brand for the first time online, basically focused on the D2C part. So this was back in 2015. Fast forward, we had gone through a very accelerated journey of growing this brand. We basically grew it bootstrapped, totally self-investment, making our own mistakes throughout the eight years.

Kunle Campbell:
How many yes?

Leonardo:
And within, I think, a time frame of

Kunle Campbell:
3S

Leonardo:
three

Kunle Campbell:
as

Leonardo:
years,

Kunle Campbell:
well.

Leonardo:
we had already hit eight figures. So it was a very accelerated growth path. Within three years, I think we already hit the eight figures. So it was a very accelerated growth path. It was a growth path that we had a lot of help along the way of mentors and coaches. But a path that allowed us to have the experience and commit all the mistakes that could be done to actually try to grow a brand and a company from scratch. So after eight years, basically after seven years, I started having another bug. that I wanted to have another challenge. I was starting to understand how can I get a new challenge in my professional life and get exposed to something new. So what I really took with me was the way we Google case was we were able to jump a lot of obstacles by the help of mentors and coaches. So we were really helpful to get into networks, different networks, business, entrepreneurship, e-commerce networks. where we could have conversations with people that were five, six, seven steps ahead of us and just understand, okay, how to think about cash flow, how to think about hiring, how to think about content creation, how to think about diversification of channels. So we got a lot of help there. And basically what I proposed to do one and a half to two years ago was do the same to companies that were in their nascent stage. So they were in the six figures. So I basically went in my networks and I said, which is still in the six figures, and you would like to have coaching and mentoring sessions to help you unlock some certain things or just think along. I'm here and we will do this pro bono. So this was an experience I had one and a half, two years ago, which I basically helped more than 30, 40 companies along the way now, but within one year was already 20 companies and It got me really inspired. I got a lot of energy from it. And we were able to actually, I was able to actually help quite a few of these companies to scale and some to significantly scale. And others, if they were not ready for scale yet, or we could not really help them scale, at least structure them, structure them financially, structure their thinking, their prioritization methods. So I really got a lot of energy from this exercise. And I thought, maybe there's something here. And that's when we actually came up with the idea for Jump. to actually help companies that are in the six figures to go all the way to eight and possibly nine figures if they have the potential and we have the resources and assets to do so. We created this company which is a mix of incubator and a venture capital where we go along the

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah,

Leonardo:
entrepreneurs and we actually execute

Kunle Campbell:
yeah, yeah,

Leonardo:
their growth path.

Kunle Campbell:
yeah, it makes sense. So, jump is a combination of an incubator

Leonardo:
I hope this was

Kunle Campbell:
and

Leonardo:
summarized

Kunle Campbell:
a VC

Leonardo:
enough, but...

Kunle Campbell:
incubator, meaning that you're putting these six figure businesses in which you identify certain potential, I would think, and you're investing initially your time, and then you actually then have an equity stake through an investment. And then the goal is to scale them from under one million to over 10 million in revenue over a time horizon of about maybe two to three years. interesting.

Leonardo:
Yeah, actually we have the track record that we've been able to do so in one year. So companies that are within one million average yearly revenues, we're getting to 10X them to get to 10 million within one year. Yes, we are a mixture between an incubator and a VC because we don't just help them in the beginning stages, product validation, product market fit, and then leave. No, we are there for the full ride. And we're not someone that just will invest a time or money or anything and just start demanding results and just leave the operation completely up to them. So we are there for the full time. We are actually bringing our teams, our resource, our network to support the growth. And we are executing the growth of these companies in several layers, be it advertisement, content creation,

Kunle Campbell:
Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of

Leonardo:
and

Kunle Campbell:
sense.

Leonardo:
other

Kunle Campbell:
So

Leonardo:
things

Kunle Campbell:
going back

Leonardo:
as

Kunle Campbell:
to

Leonardo:
well.

Kunle Campbell:
GoCase, because

Leonardo:
but we're basically along working

Kunle Campbell:
before

Leonardo:
together

Kunle Campbell:
we even

Leonardo:
with

Kunle Campbell:
get

Leonardo:
the entrepreneurs

Kunle Campbell:
to GoCase,

Leonardo:
to help them

Kunle Campbell:
so

Leonardo:
scale

Kunle Campbell:
how many

Leonardo:
from

Kunle Campbell:
companies

Leonardo:
six figures to

Kunle Campbell:
have

Leonardo:
eight figures.

Kunle Campbell:
you worked with with this under Jump Ventures?

Leonardo:
So in the mentoring space, mentoring and coaching, which we do a lot, basically we do an average of three to four companies per month now helping out mentoring. So

Kunle Campbell:
So

Leonardo:
over

Kunle Campbell:
you're

Leonardo:
this

Kunle Campbell:
essentially

Leonardo:
last

Kunle Campbell:
formalizing

Leonardo:
two years, I've

Kunle Campbell:
that

Leonardo:
been over

Kunle Campbell:
now

Leonardo:
50 companies

Kunle Campbell:
in

Leonardo:
that

Kunle Campbell:
Jump

Leonardo:
we have mentored

Kunle Campbell:
Ventures.

Leonardo:
yeah, right now. And we... Yeah, and we accelerate a very small portfolio of companies throughout the year because this is the focus that we can have. So we can definitely not accelerate at the moment 10 to 15 companies at the same time because it's not really, we don't see that our focus is going to go the right way. But we have a very limited amount of companies, which we truly believe have a very scalable business and we truly believe have a very eager and with the Harait

Kunle Campbell:
That's a very,

Leonardo:
Work

Kunle Campbell:
very

Leonardo:
Ethic

Kunle Campbell:
important

Leonardo:
founders.

Kunle Campbell:
point you made

Leonardo:
Yeah, so

Kunle Campbell:
where

Leonardo:
when

Kunle Campbell:
you're

Leonardo:
we

Kunle Campbell:
talking

Leonardo:
have this

Kunle Campbell:
about

Leonardo:
combination,

Kunle Campbell:
the fact that the founder has

Leonardo:
we really

Kunle Campbell:
that

Leonardo:
think

Kunle Campbell:
focus

Leonardo:
we have

Kunle Campbell:
on product

Leonardo:
something very powerful

Kunle Campbell:
and the

Leonardo:
to

Kunle Campbell:
customer,

Leonardo:
go

Kunle Campbell:
which

Leonardo:
fast. And then

Kunle Campbell:
in

Leonardo:
when we

Kunle Campbell:
itself

Leonardo:
put together

Kunle Campbell:
is a customer experience.

Leonardo:
the

Kunle Campbell:
And then,

Leonardo:
founders'

Kunle Campbell:
you know,

Leonardo:
expertise on the

Kunle Campbell:
that

Leonardo:
product,

Kunle Campbell:
is separate,

Leonardo:
on the customer

Kunle Campbell:
but should be

Leonardo:
and the

Kunle Campbell:
integrated

Leonardo:
experience with

Kunle Campbell:
with growth,

Leonardo:
our expertise

Kunle Campbell:
which is

Leonardo:
on

Kunle Campbell:
what

Leonardo:
the growth

Kunle Campbell:
you bring.

Leonardo:
and how to

Kunle Campbell:
I've

Leonardo:
really

Kunle Campbell:
not really seen anyone articulate

Leonardo:
push the

Kunle Campbell:
it

Leonardo:
product

Kunle Campbell:
that way.

Leonardo:
to

Kunle Campbell:
So

Leonardo:
a next

Kunle Campbell:
you do

Leonardo:
level,

Kunle Campbell:
all of

Leonardo:
we

Kunle Campbell:
this

Leonardo:
get something powerful.

Kunle Campbell:
while also running Go Case. Now. To give people some context of the size of GoCase, you're over 200 employees there. Do you wanna sort of speak to the growth trajectory to where GoCase is as a company and how you sort of built it to what it is?

Leonardo:
Yeah, we are in the mid eight figures. We have almost 200 employees or a little bit over 200 employees at the moment. We have completely grown the company and as a full-fledged company at the moment, having a production facility, having production employees, having finance departments, development and engineering departments, design. growth, marketing. So it's a full-fledged company that we grew from scratch. This was the company that we had a lot of experience on what really is necessary to have in-house and what we should try to outsource. And this was also a company that we got to play with the full scope of an e-comm ecosystem from supply chain and production all the way to to sales and marketing. we were able to build the company and all its departments and people from scratch. So this is the scale of the company, which doesn't operate only in Brazil, but is worldwide. So it's a company that sells to the whole world with a bigger focus in the North American market, European markets and Brazil. Yeah, 30-40 million. Yes. Yeah, for sure. We have a framework to see how to work and consistently improve the brand. And what we really understand, we'll try to understand from the beginning is, do we have a validated product? Do we have product market fit here in this brand? And does this brand has the assets to actually scale over time? We see this with KPIs. So, first of all, we look at the product reviews. This is the first KPI that is going to tell us the level of product market fit that the brand currently has. So if it has above 4.6, 4.7 out of five stars, it's a product that has been validated by its customers. If we see that the retention rate, repurchase rate is above 30%, meaning that people are really coming back to the brand to actually repurchase new products or the same product, depends on what the brand actually sells. The AOV, if we see that the AOV is around $75 or has the potential to continuously increase over time. So we see brands that have an AOV of $20, $30, $40. But if there is the potential to continuously increase this AOV, or also to continuously increase the repurchase rate, we see a path for growth. Yeah. This is just important because at the state of digital marketing at the moment, it is really tough to make a profit if you have a low repurchase or if you have products that are below $50, 50 euros AOV. And last but not least, depending on the context as well, you need to have a really high conversion rate. So, meaning that depending on the traffic sources you use, how much organic traffic is coming along and what is the AOV, Generally speaking, if you have a conversion rate of about 5% and you have AOV around $50 to $75, and you haven't pushed that hard on paid media, you are in a good space to continuously grow. So we have to contextualize a lot, not to say this is the defining metric and figure for each brand. But it's when we are able to contextualize all of that, then we start our framework for growth. You'll be amazed at how many companies are sitting with that conversion rate and don't know the power they have on their hands. You'll be amazed. And I mean, I talk about 5% just to give people an anchor. If you are at $50 and you have 5%, what does it mean to have $150 AOV? What does it mean the conversion rate? It can be way lower, right? But it just means it's still powerful. At the same, if you have a $20, $10 product, and your conversion rate is 8%, you can also be comparable. But I'm pretty confident that if you're around the same proportions, once you start pumping in paid media traffic, this is going to severely go down. So this is a safe state. It's not a rule. It has to be like this. We have seen different cases, of course. But this is a state that you're in a very comfortable situation to scale. Yeah, so in the framework wise, the first thing we try to analyze, what is the growth strategy that we put in place here? Which channels are available? Which kind of technology can be behind the brand? Which type of revenue buckets it can have? Subscriptions, one-off? So we try to really lay down, is this a product, is this a brand that can grow through Meta, through TikTok as well, to Snapchat? How big is the CRM pie that can... that we can unleash here. So we try to really understand on a bigger level where the brand is, what is the size of the market, and then how can we push this on paid media. So this is the growth strategy and basically e-comm channel level, right? Second step is the content strategy. Like for us, there is no growth without content. It's really a crazy amount of effort, but pays off on the content side. So how can we actually enable content creation, build machines behind content creation, bring a lot of UGC, a lot of influencers, and have a system to constantly test new content? If we can really build a content machine for these brands, then they have the fuel to burn for the scale. If they don't have, for us, it's like, forget about it. We cannot scale it. amount of content is not part of our playbook on how to scale this brand. Yeah, so content is a big part of the playbook. Look, we really work with brands that are shipping at least 15 to 20 creatives a week to be tested. Because we know that to get that really outlier content, that content that can be scaled to crazy levels, they're not showing up one time out of three or four. It's really once out of 50, out of 100 sometimes. But if you don't have this consistent method to test, you're never going to find it. You're never going to find the diamond in the rough. So we're looking for the diamond in the rough, not the average content. We're looking for the outlier. So 15 to 20 content to test per week for us is a good level to actually find the diamond in the rough. And it's a big part of the Playbook. That's a good question. We believe every brand has a formula and there's not one size fits all. And our job is also to get to that formula. So there are brands that have a lot of UGC. There are brands that the product itself just brings a lot of attention from the customers and it's very natural for customers to be posting, sharing, etc. And there are other brands that is really not. And you really need to rely a lot on studio type of of footage, I mean, studio, I mean, self-made, internally created content. And you also need a healthy mix of influencer, yeah, clips, influencer creatives. So for every brand, we believe there's a formula to sell that product the right way and in the converting way. Yeah. But there is not a right amount of dosage for every single element of the formula. It's not like it has to be. 30% UGC, 30% Influencer, 30% Studio. Sometimes it's 100% customer base. Sometimes we see the outliers are really on the ways that the customer are talking about the product and selling the product in the US piece to everyone else. We have seen a brand that relies completely on just customer testimonials, completely on how the customer is doing it. And then you can edit this in a. customer does a testimony of two minutes, you edit a 30 second version, a 15 second version, you add a little bit there, a little bit here, a little bit there. But overall, it can be 80% UGC and 20% Studio. But there's a formula, you know, getting to that formula is one of the biggest challenge, of course. Yeah, so after the growth strategy and the content strategy, we go to the commercial plan. So the commercial plan is really thinking along, what is the pricing of the products? What is the merchandising? What is the type of bundling? What is the repurchase plan? What are the types of upsells and cross-sells we can have? So thinking along with the with the entrepreneur to see, okay, what do you have in terms of portfolio? How can we price it? How can we bundle it? How can we... proposed at different times and in different customer journeys, this is key to actually constantly increase AOV and constantly increase conversion rate. So this is the third part that we work very heavy on. Absolutely. It's one of the most important things an entrepreneur have in terms of power to constantly play with. We've seen increases of 100% month over month, 50% on AOV, just from playing with pricing, bundling strategies. So first concept I would like to share is the magic number. There's a magic number for every product. A lot of you, so many interpreters don't think about that. They put a number for the product that is completely broken. There's a lot of psychology behind product pricing, right? And I actually had read some books on that. It's enlightening how you have to think about product pricing. But overall, if I have to summarize it, there's a magic number. There's a number that you put there. It's a round number. It's a number that it's close to something that is... understandable to the customer and he's going to make a quick decision. If he has to think and interpret that number, what does that number mean to me? What is this number compared to what I usually buy? When it starts to get too difficult and the customer has to interpret the number to make the decision, then you're in the wrong place. It's almost like saying this and that's why there's a lot of 99. So this is 49.99. Okay, it's just 50. It's just below 50. Oh, 50 for me is a night out. It's a dinner. It's OK. And this is going to give me this much more. So you have to constantly test and find what is the magic number for the product. So just trying to find that magic number is super important. And the second point is the AOV for the bundling. So if you don't constantly try to bundle products, bundle offers to get to a higher state AOV, you're just not really setting yourself up for success in terms of profitability. Because we know when the paid media way is very tough to make a nice profitable order, if you're not in the right AOV state. So playing around with how can you do merchandising of one for this, three for that. If you buy above the threshold, you get free shipping. If you buy this one, you get a free gift. If you buy this one, you get a surprise. So if you're not playing around with the merchandising and the bundling, you're just missing out on a huge opportunity to immediately increase your AOV. So we saw companies last year, we had a case that, well, basically completely changed the company's scenario from a $35, $38 AOV to an immediate $60 AOV from one day to the other just because we added bundled products on the mix. And that just changed the balance of the AOV of the company and the profit of it. Well, we believe that the bundles that there's two basic machineries that we use to increase the AOV. You have the upsells in the product page, right? That is just a checkbox and that's a very quick and easy growth of AOV. But we don't believe this is the most impactful one. The most impactful one is actually coming up with bundled products, which are very visible in the pages that people are landing. If that's the home page, if that's a category page, if that's a specific landing page, you need to give visibility, high visibility, to a bundled product. That's it. If that's going to be the category, or the landing, or the home, it doesn't matter. It's just a... Yeah, I will... Can I speak about the last point of the framework? Yeah, just to finalize the story. It's the financial structure because it's super important for entrepreneurs as well. So one of the things we, after we do all of this, we have to really think about how is the company set up for success in terms of finances, right? How are they thinking about cashflow? How they're thinking about the P&L? Where do we have room to optimize? Where we see things are unsustainable? Because overall, if you have to scale, you need to set profitability targets, you need to set revenue growth targets, but overall it needs to be sustainable. You need to be able to afford your own growth. So we come in and we really try to understand the P&L. We have a very clear picture of what a good e-commerce company P&L should look like in terms of percentages and in terms of growth levers. And we try to see and match where's the company at the moment and also how they're thinking about financing, how they're thinking about cashflow forecasts. So this is a super important piece of the framework. And last but not least, the data and tech stack. So we take a lot of decisions based on the data. We use a lot of different apps and have a tech stack to support analysis on the customers, on the channels, on the AOV, on the products, because this is the everyday insight that we're going to take to fuel our activities. So overall, if you have the growth strategy, the content strategy, the commercial plan, the financial structuring, and then the data and tech stack, then we have all that we need to really take the company to the next level. Great. So we talk about a couple of figures here that are key for entrepreneurs to get. Let's start with the gross margin. Yeah. Basically, we do a differentiation in the start of the P&L. Companies that have a product that have 70% and above gross margin. These are companies that we can place in the demand generation sector. These are companies that they have so much more room left in the P&L to spend on advertisement. that they actually can afford paid media and they can afford playing the demand generation game, the game of Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, so on and so forth. Companies that have 60% and below, 50% and below gross margins, they're in a very tough space to actually play the demand generation game. So they should be ideally in the demand capture game, which is the Google part, which is really people, the demand is coming, you're not really generating that demand, the product has to sell itself. So we separate there. If you're in a 70% your demand generation, if you're 50% below your demand capture. And of course, you should always try to understand how can you optimize there so you have more room for advertisement. This is basically how we think. If you don't have enough gross margins yet, well, let's think about the pricing. Let's think about the production costs you currently have, the import costs you currently have, so you have more room to actually advertise. Because if you cannot, it's going to be tough to systematically grow. For sure. All the three important points we try to stabilize or work with the entrepreneurs are the following. First, MER, so paid media costs. We believe that going up to 25% at the start should be the maximum to find a stable, profitable operation. If you're already going 30%, 35%, and you're not making that much revenue yet, you're just getting to a very high level. no man's land because you haven't found a profitable way to actually operate and you're already going above a threshold. So when you're able to go maximum 25 and consistently go with profitability, this is what you should aim for. So the, the MIR side paid media side. A second point is logistics. So B2C logistics to the end customer. We try to work with a maximum 15%, but a target at a 10%. So if you are between 10 and 15% of your cost structure is your shipping cost to the end customer, then you're at the okay level. If you are 15% above, then it's a tricky situation to actually be profitable. You're really losing too much money on shipping and you should find a new pricing structure, yeah? Or renegotiate with your couriers. And the third one is the payroll side of things. So we really aim at a 10%, maximum 10%. If you're going way above 10%, it's just complicated to scale. We just have you putting a lot of weight in the payroll and you should find a way to get more lean, to be more lean, to work more with freelancers, with agencies or whatever it may be that is a variable cost and is not so heavy to carry month over month. So... When you work with a 10% maximum payroll cost, then you are a link company that can achieve profitability by the end of the month. So if you just start deducting those swings, you see already you're not left with that much profitability, right? So these are just the baselines and borders that we tell entrepreneurs to think about. If you think about the demand capture business, there's not much left, right? It's almost nothing. And if you think about the demand, yeah. P&L level, look at the P&L level, because overall you're going to look at consolidated figures. In the end what you want is to have a good profitable business, it's not a good profitable one purchase, right? So when you look at the whole picture, how you bring traffic, how much does this traffic cost, what is your AOV, then you start to mix the right or play the right buttons to actually get to the net profitability. If you're going very nitty-gritty and making a calculation of how much gross margin I have on this product. And then you cannot even sell the product itself. You just waste the time. You just waste time. Like you need to think. And even if this product that you're actually able to advertise, because our formula is really thinking about what is the hero product that we have and how can we create hit content with this hero product. This is the baseline. If you can get that to work, you can get traffic to the website. If you can get traffic to the website, now it's working on the e-comm site. So what is the pricing? What is the bundling? To make sure that overall you're gonna get the right AOV to get the right profitability. So I wouldn't go very nitty-gritty. Of course you need to get boundaries to not have something that is not making money at all. But having that comparison for us, it doesn't do any good. Yeah, so from looking at several companies, we understand what is the potential first of a CRM channel. Because one of the things people overlook a lot is how much power and how much good does email and SMS do for your bottom line and your repurchase, right? So we try to look at the growth strategy. First, looking at how they acquire traffic. how much has been paid, how much has been organic, and then how much are they actually monetizing from their CRM channels. We believe a good company has at least on last click 30% of their revenues coming from email and SMS. That's a healthy level to be at and constantly evolve to make sure that you're profitable at the end of the day because you have fixed costs with Collabia or whatever email provider you might have. And this is pure profit afterwards. So we think about how is the traffic currently acquired and how we're making use of your CRM. So thinking about how much room there's still to grow there, and depending on the product, how much room for repurchase, how much room for subscription, so on and so forth. So this is the first thing we look immediately. Then the second, we try to think about which paid media channels are available. Of course, the initial suspect is always a meta. So it's always possible to sell something with Meta or, well, depending on the product, given violations of policies or so on, you cannot really advertise on Meta. But we work with products that really can be advertised on all platforms, right? So the initial suspect is always Meta. And how can you actually grow on Meta? Is it with videos? Is it with pictures? which channels, what is the actual potential that you have to grow on meta. So after we investigate and we try to make initial tests with meta, we understand what is the cap that we're gonna have there with meta channels. And then after we have the cap, we really double down on meta, okay, what's the next best channel that we have to start diversifying. This is also something entrepreneurs get a lot. lose track a lot is they try to diversify into way too many channels or try way too many things at the same time without even having kept out of their first and initial good channel, right? So we start with meta, we start to understand what are the levels we can get with the meta, understanding how to get better at content with meta, and then we try to diversify to a second channel, which usually nowadays is TikTok. We're getting amazing results with TikTok, we're seeing the platform. getting better and better. It is volatile. It is volatile quarter over quarter and sometimes even month over month. But if you keep your eyes open and you're always testing something there, you're going to find the gold in some months. There are months that it's performing crazy good and there are months that it's really terrible. But if you constantly keep your eyes open and test, it can be a really good platform to advertise. And then there are brands that do work on other channels, Pinterest and Snapchat, for instance. We have seen cases and we have cases that are working actually pretty good with Snapchat. But I have to say with Pinterest, I haven't touched any business that worked pretty well with Pinterest advertisement, and that's the only thing I can say about that. Now, that's the whole paid side. That's the whole paid side, right? Now... organic sites, we have seen amazing results with other entrepreneurs that have run business completely organic and they made it work on TikTok, they made it work on Instagram because they build communities on Facebook because they build communities. But the organic play is not really our play. So we're not we're not really focused on consistently growing brands via organic growth strategies. So it's more thinking. how to double down on the initial platforms that you have, how to extract the maximum there, and then start diversifying and testing on other platforms that your product for whatever reason might be a fit. So we haven't, I have to say it very honestly, we haven't found out why a product really works on Snapchat and it doesn't, or it doesn't work on Snapchat, but we're just testing, it's a constant test and iteration. business and as long as you constantly test, you might find a new platform to work for the business. The Brent? Look, I would love to know who can teach the formula for organic because we just have seen and we played this game over the last years and it's just a constant changing game because of the algorithms and the platforms. We're in the era that Instagram was great organic and then it was not. And it was just off the face that Facebook was great organic because they changed the algorithm and then it was not. And then came Instagram. for a period of time and then was not. And now it's TikTok and Pinterest was also a good at some point. But overall, I don't have a resource that you can really look at and say, this is an expert on organic growth. I do have brands that I have worked in the past and they are doing a fantastic job, either community building with Facebook groups or actually the channels themselves. TikTok and Instagram. Lumetria, yeah, we definitely use it. It's one of our preferred, yeah. Well, Clayville is that type of platform that gives you integration of everything, right? It's the Shopify of CRM. So it's an easy plug and play. A lot of people use it. So if you want to collaborate with other people from the industry, it's a very easy software. But Ometrier, we see as the specialized type of software to really get a lot of CRM. So there's a lot of data analytics from Ometrier that we can extract. I mean, we're using Ometria for customer data analysis with tools that we try to find standardized tools to do the same, but they can't. And Ometria goes there and analyzes the customer really well. So we're able to segment and understand better about customer analytics just because of Ometria. So definitely we use Ometria as our main channel for GoCase, for instance, because GoCase is a custom platform. It's not on Shopify. And we see it as a fantastic tool that has very specialized features. Yeah, so we can segment in a couple of topics, right? We need the right tool for attribution. We need the right tool for reporting. And we also need the right apps to amplify certain features or certain actions we want in the website. So when we think about attribution, we've played a lot with different software, and we've played a lot of different attribution windows. We are comfortable right now with Triple Whale. We really love how the product is built and how is it helping us not to have analysis paralysis. So we really like the attribution of Triple Whale and how it's aligning after you, because we'd run this test as well. After we spent a certain amount of money, we see the alignment between the Facebook data and the Triple Whale data. So we are very... confident that TripleWave for attribution is good because then we can actually put all the channels together and have the right ways to compare them all. When we look about reporting, I have to say this is still, we had to build a lot of internal reporting via Data Studio. So I don't know if you have ever heard of Google Data Studio, but we built several ways to create customizable reports, integrating different data sources. and have a really good reporting outlook on different dimensions of the website. So we connect Google Analytics. We connect different tools to Data Studio. And we are able to have really quick snapshots of the most important dimensions to analyze in the website and on the customer. So reporting, we use Data Studio. And then application-wise, there are so many different apps that are complementary. to understand a store. When you're on Shopify, it's so much easier. But for instance, apps like Lifetime.ly, it's a very simple app. Like, it costs, I don't know, $50. And it gives you very good actionable insights about repurchase, cohorts, so on and so forth. When we think about pop-ups, one very easy one that we always use is OptinMonster as well. We use this one to, it gives a lot of flexibility to try out different pop-ups and strategies. So basically there's a lot of small apps that are complementary to run the business and that give a lot of value for very low cost. For sure. It's really, really, really important to implement post-purchase surveys to have constant flows to gather data and insights from the customers, and also as a validation for your attribution. So one of the things we had to learn over the years as new players came in, like TikTok, and we couldn't really figure out from the attribution side if they were really working, a simple where have you met us post-purchase survey. clearly identifying which channel people found us, we could really pinpoint the amount of spend we had in a day or the amount of spend we had in a week in a certain platform. And the percentage of customers who said that they have met us through TikTok, through Snapchat, or to Facebook. So the simple things like this are super important to be implemented. Plus, of course, open direct feedback from customers to say, why have you chose us? Why, what do you like about us? What should we change? How did you hear about us? would you recommend our product to other people? So having the star ratings and the NPS is super important to have as a feedback loop to constantly improve the product and the experience. But I cannot emphasize enough how many interpreters are not really thinking about getting a constant flow or a constant loop of information from the customers with post-purchase surveys. against this fear. Thanks. You know, for us every year is the same thing. Every year there's something that happens, you know? If it's not Facebook increasing the prices, then it's Apple releasing iOS updates, then it's Corona, then it's this. There's always something. Like with e-com, there's always something changing the game and it almost feels like every quarter there's some big event that changes the game. But overall, if you are paranoid about... what can happen later on throughout the year. So you keep yourself always alert. What are we testing? What are the new things? What are people talking about? Which podcasts can we hear and get more experts knowledge? Which blogs? Which Twitter threads? Like if you're paranoid about that, you're constantly testing new things. You're constantly having a new concept to work on. And then you're just more prepared whenever a new... possible death threating event happens in ECOM, you're in a better state. That's the only thing you can do because you cannot control the big tech companies and what decision making they have. You just have to deal with what's going to happen, but you can be more or less prepared, right? That's how we think about it. What was the meaning for... Well, it's my partner, Rafael. He's the... Yes, I have to say so, yeah. I like mornings. Oh, it's my way to get zen. I spend at least one hour, I wake up a little bit earlier and I spend at least one hour playing with my kids. I have twins of two years old and this is my time to focus on them and having a relaxed start of the day. Yeah, I love football, soccer, or sorry, we are in a British podcast, right? So it's football. favorite athlete? There have been so many inspiring idols, but one that really strikes me after I'm not even a basketball fan, but after seeing that Michael Jordan documentary and I went through a lot of time trying to investigate more and it's just the winning mentality is such. such inspiring that I have to say that from everything I've seen, that was the most impactful personality and sports that I could think of. Two things I cannot live without. my kids, and my wife. Yeah, so this is one I'm actually rereading. I love to reread this one every time you're in a different situation. The hard thing about hard things. So I think I've reread this book several times, but it's always when you're in different months or phases throughout the years, it's a nice book to reread. Hiring poorly. So hiring has taught me a lot of how to try to find A players. So that's the biggest insight. It's not about hiring. It's not about hiring just intelligent people. It's about hiring A players that have a culture fit with you. Yes, well, mostly on LinkedIn. So you're free to connect with us on LinkedIn, drop us a message. And for every, every interpreter that listens to the podcast, they are in the six figure range. They would like to grow. They don't know how, and they love to have a second opinion. We are there in jumpventures.co. Just have to fill in the intake form and come and talk to us. And that's totally. Pro Bono, free of charge, we're taking a look at your business, maybe helping you with a coaching program later on. But yeah, just go to the website and come talk to us. Thanks, thanks, Kunle. Happy to be here.