Don't Be Arrogant; Think Again

Hey there and welcome back for another Wednesday Lunch Bite to Chew On.

This week - we're not talking…

We're thinking… (out loud)

More specifically, we're thinking about the concept of thinking again (stick with us here)

Why?

Because so often, you'll see one of two things happening in the DTC space.

1) Founders and Marketers directly copy what everybody else is doing or what's trendy at the moment - and they don't use their own brains to come up with creative ideas of their own (Check out this tweet if you wanna see proof )

2) Founders and marketers never question their own beliefs and just continue doing what they always do, which gives them the results they always get, and thus they never move forward.

In this newsletter, we will go through why it's important to think twice, do things differently, and how our thoughts have changed over time…

Let's get it

First of all - humble yourself.

We're sorry to break it to you, but you're not as smart as you think.

And we aren't either.

But we recognize the areas we're not smart in, and then we try to fill those gaps by learning or hiring people to help us.

The problem is that most founders think they can do everything, know everything, AND are the absolute BEST at everything.

But fortunately, reality also teaches them that it's not the case (at some point, at least)

Okay, let's take another case and say that YOU ARE quite good at a given subject, know a lot, and can do a lot.

For example, Ash considers himself good at marketing and can do a lot of good marketing. But what do you think happens if he starts to think:

1) That he's the best in the world and knows everything

2) Never questions what he's doing

3) Doesn't learn new things from other people who are smarter than him in other areas

Guess what?

Soon enough - he won't be good anymore.

That's just how the world works. The world is moving SO FAST that if you don't continuously un-learn and re-learn, you're gonna fall behind.

And un-learning really takes some humility.

So first tip of the day: Humble yourself

Quick break to say a big thank you to our sponsors who keep this newsletter free to the reader

If you haven’t been asleep the last year or so, you’ve probably heard that your brand needs a Mobile App

But what’s all the hype about?!

It’s simple. A Mobile App helps you create a stronger relationship with your customers, give them a better shopping experience - and ultimately lead to a higher LTV (A lot higher. In fact 2x higher for Obvi)

Which is what we all want, right?

Stop beating around the bush. The first step of a good retention strategy starts with a Mobile App.

Our preferred provider is TapCart, who’s offering you up to 2 months free if you mention that we sent you

PS: All sponsors that we recommend are companies we use ourselves at Obvi, and companies who we’ve seen great results with. We will never, and have never recommended a company we haven’t used ourselves

Now back to the newsletter

Question everything

There's a saying that "We question all of our beliefs except those we truly believe and those we never think to question."

And there's a ton of truth in that…

Especially for those of us working in marketing - we tend to have a belief about how certain ads will perform and whether or not something will work or not.

Although some of it comes from experience and pattern recognition - we still need to keep questioning EVERYTHING we do and believe.

Some things may have worked in the past but may not work now. Likewise, some things may not have worked in the past but work well now. That's why it's not only important to test but also to re-test once in a while.

For the longest time, we thought that we needed to test 40-50 creatives per week. And although it worked for a period of time, it's a hustle to keep on producing 40-50 creatives per week.

So instead of producing 40-50 new creatives per week, we tried to test just doing 20 new creatives per week and then a bunch of iterations on the existing ads we had.

Mind you; this only works if you're using a modular ad creative framework, which we talk about here

Another thing that we had to unlearn is that it's not about the number of creators you can push content through. It's about the quality.

Once we started to focus on quality over quantity, our results started to improve significantly.

To do this, we had to partner with Insense, an all-in-one platform for finding, sourcing, and briefing content creators.

For us, the two most important things when choosing our creator-platform were A) the Width and depth of content creators (i.e. wide range of different people, and a lot of them) and B) that they had some briefing tool integrated into their platform

And Insense has delivered on both of these parameters - which has been great for us.

Learn every day

You don't need to be on the grounds, working ALL the time.

Sometimes, it's okay to step out of the day-to-day…

Learn some new things…

Calibrate your thinking…

And then go back to implement what you just learned.

We can't stress this enough, but learning new things from people ahead of you will forever be one of the best investments you can make.

Whether that's through books, mentorships, courses, coaching, masterminds, whatever - it doesn't really matter.

People learn in different ways and people have access to different amounts of money - so regardless of which way you prefer to learn.

Just make sure to carve out some time in your calendar and learn from other people's mistakes.

Don't make ALL the mistakes yourself

Do yourself a favor and give this episode a listen

Speaking of learning from people who are ahead of you…

One of THE BEST founders to learn from in the DTC space right now is, the one and only Ryan Babenzien from Jolie Skin Co.

This guy is incredibly smart and has built a phenomenal brand (twice) simply by being able to think differently.

The next podcast guest we’ve had the honor to talk to is Alex Beller. Also a incredibly smart guy, who is maybe one of the smartest people we’ve spoken to about everything SMS, Retention, and Operations (PS: We love nerds)

Stay tuned for that one too. There’s a ton of golden nuggets in there.

Thank you for reading along

Thank you for reading along. We hope you enjoyed this newsletter and we hope to see you again on Sunday.

If you enjoyed this one, then feel free to reply back to this email and let us know if you want us to write about more topics similar to this (call it: General business & life advice)

If you didn’t enjoyed it, then please also reply to this email and let us know what you’d like us to write about next

Till we see you next time

Yours truly

Ron & Ash