Don't Try To Run Before You Can Walk

Hey there, and welcome back for another bite to chew on.

We hope you've had a productive week thus far and are ready to spend the next 3 minutes with us as we dive into some of the learnings we've gotten from talking to Ryan Babenzien from Jolie Skin Co

We know you're on the clock, so let's get into it!

The importance of starting with the fundamentals

We talk A LOT about different strategies and tactics you can use to improve your conversion rate, LTV, AOV, CAC, etc.

… and while that's all cool - we also want to underline that none of the advanced tactics matters if you don't have a strong foundation.

So if you've started a new DTC brand, or you're just struggling to find success with your current brand - go back to the basics and dial in on these things.

Step 0) Product experience, wow factor, and "refer-ability"

When building your product, some of the things you want to think about from the get-go is:

1) What is the unboxing experience of getting this product?

2) Is this product something people would want to put in their homes (like, is the design of the product aesthetically pleasing?) Bonus point: Is it something they would show off?

3) What is the WOW-Factor of the product and experience?

To elaborate on the WOW factor, we normally think of two ways you can increase this.

A) Do something that the customer doesn't expect. For example - writing a hand-written card, sending them a video from the founder, etc

And B) Decreasing the Time-To-Value from using the product. For example - if you're selling a Jolie Showerhead, and your customers can FEEL their hair is getting smoother after just a day or a week - then you increase your wow factor and refer-ability significantly

Step 1) Your positioning, brand story, why you exist, and who you're trying to serve

When we ask people who their target demo is, most people just give us a vague answer such as, "uhhm, we sell to women aged 20-50".

Well - sorry to break it to you, but that's not a target demo.

Start by understanding who you're selling to, their problems in their day-to-day life, and what they're dreaming about.

Then figure out how your product fits into those problems and dreams and why they should care to buy from you instead of any other brand.

That's step 1

The great Mr. Sharma also said it quite well here.

Step 2) Focus on testing your offers and pricing.

Everything starts with your offer.

You can have a strong offer and mediocre ads - and still make tons of money.

Likewise, you can have a weak offer and the best ads - and make nada.

So start out by testing different offers and how it resonates with your target demo

After that, experiment with your prices from the beginning. Many founders leave A TON of money on the table, simply because they are charging too little or too much. The only way to find out which bucket you fall in, is by testing it.

Does everything have to be measured?

Marketers of today have gotten indoctrinated to track ROI on everything.

If something doesn't give an immediate ROI or if you can't track the ROI of it - they won't do it.

Now the million-dollar question is… is that really the right way to go about it?

If you ask Ryan Babenzien, the founder of Jolie Skin Co - he'll give you dozens of arguments for why you don't need to be able to measure EVERY marketing initiative you run.

Initiatives like OOH advertisement, influencer seeding, Connected TV, etc. - may not have a clear and measurable ROI - but they can still be very powerful.

We've experienced the same thing recently with the truck campaigns we've run at Obvi through On The Go Advertising (you can run some types of cohort analysis on brand recognition after people have seen the trucks - that's how we've measured the success of it)

So the question to chew on for this week's newsletter is: Do we really need to measure everything, or should we sometimes forget about the measuring and just focus on making impactful bets and getting our name out there?

What are your thoughts on this?

If you want to hear Ryan's thoughts, you must wait until Season 2 of Chew On This drops on June 1st. It's (probably) one of the best episodes we've ever done, so you have something to be excited about.

That was all we had for today.

Now get back to building. We hope you enjoyed this Wednesday’s newsletter and look forward to serving you again on Sunday.

All the best,
Ron & Ash