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Performance Marketing: Why Human Expertise Outperforms Automation with Ben Faw · The Growth Class with Phil Masiello

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Growth Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Phil Massiello, your host, and my guest today is a guy named Ben Fah, West Point graduate, U.S.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Army veteran, seasoned tech founder and investor.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And after early operational roles at Tesla, LinkedIn, he co-founded Best Reviews, scaling it to a major acquisition valued at over$160 million.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Today, he's the co-founder of Advon Commerce and a partner at Dynamism Capital, where he focuses on scaling next generation e-com platforms and investing in high-growth consumer technology.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Ben, welcome to the show.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you taking the time to come on.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Phil, super grateful.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for um thank you for taking time out and um for for listeners for tuning in as well.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my pleasure.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: So why don't you why don't you give us a little bit of a of a flavor of your background, your history, and and what you've done.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: I sort of glanced over it, but why don't you spend a couple of minutes giving people a licks into that?
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks, Phil.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: So started out as you mentioned, uh at West Point, served about four and a half years active military, and fortunate to have met another uh veteran.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: In this case, it was an Air Force veteran who was in investment banking and um was able to work for him while still on active duty.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: So my first real, I would call it transition from military to business was um investment banking in New York City for UBS circa 2011.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that really opened the door of the private sector to me in a in a new way and the world of finance.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um while I got an offer there, I used that kind of to parlay into working at Tesla Motors, um, which was at the time desperately trying to launch the Model S and an incredibly challenging moment for the business.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: For those that you know see the business today at hundreds of billions in market cap, it can be forgotten that 2011 wasn't that long ago, and the business was right on the edges until summer 12 when we got the Model S out into production.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was a real all hands-on-deck stretch of time.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I was fortunate enough to be there for that launch, and then from there went to Harvard Business School.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um great learning experience, interned, and then went full-time with LinkedIn.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: But while I was um kind of preparing to go full-time at LinkedIn was when I started working on the the best reviews project.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so um had to give a little bit of the founding thread around that, if it's okay.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we um we in that case was um I had a a classmate, Momshol Filov, and then um a third co-founder, um, Dennis, who he had known from his time at Google.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, Dennis very, very, very sharp mind, and and also a guy who's really good at picking up on a consumer observation and realizing where the pain might have scale.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: So he himself was struggling to buy um a cordless drill.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And kind of the insight was threefold.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: One, you know, consumer reports was this incredible print platform for many years, but it it was struggling to innovate into the digital age.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's one insight.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: The second insight was there are so many more cordless drills today than there were, and this is circa 2013, 2014.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many more cordless drills.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: The proliferation of product is meaningful versus even 10 years prior.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so consumer reports' ability to adapt and cover all the drills is become nearly impossible.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then the last is there's models now, um, one being Amazon's affiliate program, another being Walmart's affiliate program, where you as a reviewer or review site can um basically review product categories, render some recommendations on what might be best quality or best affordability, and then drive that traffic to a retail platform and get a revenue share effectively on the sale, which in theory kind of aligns incentives versus you know other models that you know were more prevalent in the past.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: So those different kinds of, I would call compounding insights were really what drove us to um to start the company.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um, for me, I tested the model that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, this kind of like moonlight entrepreneur.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I was full-time at LinkedIn working.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: Normally I did like I didn't work much on Saturdays, but I worked a pretty hard six days a week.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Generally like for first one in, last one out on the weekdays, and then I did a pretty, pretty decent amount of time in the office on Sundays to to prep.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then outside of that, I would do this work with um with moms and Dennis on on Best Reviews.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was a real exciting time, a lot of learning, and and at a certain point, we kind of reached a uh enough scale at best reviews to where it was like, you know, maybe it's time to to join full-time.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: So joined full-time in the fall of 2015.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, from my perspective and and checking in with mentors and advisors, like, look, this might be a lifestyle business.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's grown quickly, but as everyone knows, hitting hitting a million, hitting 10 million, hitting 20 million, every one of these goals is like kind of harder and harder to reach in many cases, particularly when you're um, you know, we were internally funded, no outside capital.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you're you're funding that growth.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we um, you know, we were just fortunate.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're able to continue at a a growth trajectory that it kind of exceeded maybe base case.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And um then it was uh basically later in 2017 as um we're kind of seeing this collision course of others kind of waking up to the concept.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um we had some interest from some strategic acquirers and um ended up working with a group to kind of see if there was a buyer in in market, and then actually sold the business early in 2018 to um a public company.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: At the time it was called Tronc, later renamed to Tribune Publishing, then later sold to uh a hedge fund.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it was quite a journey.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: But that initial sale was a$110 million valuation and was kind of based on predominantly trailing and for eBitDuck because we were we were profitable and growing pretty quickly.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then um the the second sale we had that you'd alluded to in the intro was actually about two years later.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: We sold um, so we'd sold 60% effectively at that um 110 valuation.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: We sold 100% at a 160 million valuation in the second transaction to another public company called Nextstar.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And um, yeah, the real evolutions of the of the whole journey were um, you know, thinking about how to lead and and manage the complexity of a business and a startup as it gets from like, you know, in the case of the early days, it's like momshell and I in the AWS loft in downtown San Francisco.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you've ever heard of this space, but it was insanity.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: The um the cost, you know, we were clearly using AWS platform.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the cost for us to use that office space was zero dollars.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: But on on, and it's right there in kind of the Market Street corridor, which is uh um a very vibrant, but also um, I'd say there's just a large range of characters there.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't uncommon to have someone who look, maybe they were unhoused, maybe they were real tired, but they're basically sleeping on a couch while you're working at a desk.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it was a it was an interesting range, but real grateful for you know the Amazon AWS team for giving us that space.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: But going from that and and no employees, you know, contractors only, to, you know, later had had an office in San Francisco, multiple employees.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was a it was a real um a real incredible learning experience.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then kind of managing the business through shifts, you know, we did paid search, so there's like dynamics in the Google paid um industry and and ecosystem.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so there's a lot, a lot to um to go through and experience.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there were a ton of powerful learnings around um, I'd say one central one is um, you know, Google's always kind of bringing what I'd call like automated um solutions to the advertiser in the hopes that you don't need to kind of have hands-on keyboard as much.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, some of these, right?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: You got P Max, PROAS.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's always a new tool.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's there's that's one quadrant.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's a whole other quadrant in my mind of like the vendor partner ecosystem that will come in with an analytics tool and say, hey, we're gonna make your ads, you know, five times more efficient, whatever it is, right?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Increase your ROAS.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: We piloted or tested almost what felt like was everything under the sun over the period 2015 to 2018, even into 2019, frankly.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um we never found a tool that was better than a really sharp person running manual CPC with really good data inputs and data workflows to ensure that you're truly taking advantage of a year-over-year trend, product shortages, out of stocks, all these different things.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in some industries, PMAX and PMA PROs may just really work.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: But um the surprising insight to us was every time we would get deep into this, hey, Google's got a new thing to test, or hey, you know, vendor X, we just never found anything that would um surpass that human in the loop.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, human can use technology, AI, all these different things.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't a Ludite perspective, as much as a human in the loop with manual CPC and some really sophisticated in-house tools or even basic sophistication in data can oftentimes be incredibly effective, um, even versus some really, really powerful things.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it gets into this challenge where I think Google is trying to make money for Google and you're trying to make money for your own P ⁇ L.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there's just somewhere where that always did has a disconnect, I think.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you've seen some of these things in your own work, Phil.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, Google is an advertising platform, so the goal is to get you to spend more advertising dollars, but we've never, to your point about you know, third-party plug-in tools, we've tested, you know, we I've been doing this for 25 years.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: I have tested every single product that's out there, and uh because they all promise that it's gonna be better.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I've never been able to get one that outperformed what we can do manually.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's just never happened.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, PMAX The only time PMAX that I've found really works is if you've got a robust e-com platform, if you're doing other things, uh trying to generate leads, trying to, you know, generate uh uh phone calls, things like that, it it's just not gonna work.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: You have to do it manually.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: But even even when we have products, sometimes so here's the thing that I one of the biggest things I learned about advertising online is that we were in the shaving business.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: We had a five-blade, a f a three-blade, a single blade, you know, we had all these, but the reality is you don't want to be out there trying to advertise all of them.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: What you do is you try and pick the one that everybody is looking for and try and drive that in uh to your business because then you're gonna get all those other sales.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna get the three-blade, you're gonna get the you know.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we just focused on the five-blade because 75% of the male audience was looking for a five-blade razor.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So um, and and that helped us tremendously, but it took us it took us a while.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: But but I think the thing that people miss with um advertising is that when you get to a certain volume level of spend, say$30,000 a month or$40,000 a month, there are other tools out there like demand side platforms and things where you can be a little bit more efficient and effective with your spend um that people just don't know about and they stick to Google or Meta.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's not the the the best opportunity.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: So 100%.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And and and I will add to that, um, and look, this, you know, want to be sensitive because I have deep respect for for Google, um, deep respect for everything they've built.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um there there is there is something to be said for incremental spend and both support from Google as well as I would call it like an inclusion in a beta.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't I don't want to say that Google's stacking the deck per se for larger advertisers, but I I won't say that they don't support larger advertisers.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so to your point, there's something in the 30 to 40k probably where you might end up getting some managed account support, maybe.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's something else at probably like four or five hundred K.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then once you're up in the mini millions per month.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think your point is valid on on how you can think about diversifying on on the one hand, but there's also a story of just Google, I think traditionally has um found ways to be helpful to those very scaled advertisers.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's look, it's like only makes sense.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: But the some of these betas and stuff you can get into, you'll just get a big advantage on how you operate in a new product suite or a new analytic capability that will will can persist for doesn't mean you're gonna make more money than everyone else forever, but you might for 12 months or or longer.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I think there's there's something real there.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um another insight from um from best reviews, I think, at least from my perspective looking back now, is um this challenge that you started to allude to of like how do you find alternate traffic sources?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And um we tested a lot of different things, you know.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, being in Yahoo were were factors, but I think we we struggled to ever get, and it's an idiot circle place.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: When you brought up the razor, it's like, are you selling to a person who's already in market for a product or are you trying to pull them into the market for something?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: We did a lot more of a person's already looking for a steam iron.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're already in market for the air purifier or the air mattress.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's one type of marketing in my mind that's you know, a whole place where you can get a master's degree and PhD in it because it's hard and requires reps and learning.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a completely other part where it's like, look, I'm going out to fill today with this incredible, you know, whatever it might be.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: It might be a hat, it might be a t-shirt, it might be socks, but it's a product category we know every consumer broadly has some need for at some point.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I may not end it today, but we're gonna try to basically move Phil from I was gonna walk down the street and go to just on a walk to I'm now going to buy these socks.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a special, special place when you can make it work.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's also a nuanced place because it's it's you know, it's effectively, it's not that it's a considered versus unconsidered purchase.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: You're trying to drive a purchase that wasn't there initially.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: There wasn't the intent, there wasn't consideration, you're creating demand.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: And those um those marketers that really figure that out in a repeatable, scalable way, and look, that often leans towards, you know, you think about today, it's a TikTok shop, it's a it's a meta, it's an Instagram reel.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: You you have to think about the platform, the channel, the content, all these things.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a part of marketing that I think in in hindsight, I don't think we would, being honest with ourselves, say we cracked.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think, you know, we certainly tested at it and looked at it, but I think that was one of the reasons we couldn't really take the business um to the level we would have probably loved to, which would be like going after this huge market of both audience and product categories that were just tough.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: Tough for us in the in in the way we operated at the time.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's sort of more of what we do versus what you know what what you do.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: But like what you know, what we have done over the last 25 years, like we were in the I owned a beauty brand.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And women in that world, women are always looking for results.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: They're always looking for a better result.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: So if if you can show results with a product, you have a better chance of converting, right?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than you're not trying to convince them they need beauty products because they already know it.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but they're not stuck with one thing.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you can say, hey, this eye cream is better for you and it's going to uh you know have a significant reduction in fine lines and wrinkles, it's great.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Shaving, you know, the average guy, the average man has seven different razors.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: So they're always looking for the next best shave.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the second part of that is they're always looking to save money on on cartridges.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: So those two things we use the sh but but for us, to be honest, we were I wasn't interested in uh we our partner in that was Chick.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: They private labeled it razor for us.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: They had never done it before and they did it for us.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, but our goal was we came out of the beauty business, so we wanted to be in the skincare business for men and women.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we came up with like a great uh uh lotion-y shave cream, right?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like a cream o type thing.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then um, you know, aftershave lotions and things like that.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: My goal with the razors was just as a tripwire to get people to recognize the value, give them extreme value, get them to buy it, um, and then m make that purchase higher by selling them other other products, which we did.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Our average sale, you know, we we were selling uh a a handle of 12 cartridges entry level for$24.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: But our average sale was$67, if I remember correctly, and our long-term value was you know$300 and you know, whatever.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we were extremely efficient, but we didn't, you know, I'm I I I believe advertising is a um is is not the driver of everything you do.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Advertising is sort of your is is is an add-on.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um but what you have to do, you have to use other things.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: You there's there's tools today that we have.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: We have social media where we can do videos and tell stories and communicate with people uh in a different way.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: We have, you know, we have places like you know, the Gromit or Discovery Channels where we can put product, and then we we have uh PR, which we can use to get, which we've used effectively to get um you know, to get awareness.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so once you do that, then you're you can be much more efficient with your advertising.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: But uh if you I think people sometimes rely too heavily on advertising dollars, and that's where you you wind up sort of in a lopsided uh position where you have to really worry about you know what that ROAS is, try and drive that ROAS down and things like that.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Your your point on PR is one that I think is worth another minute if if you're okay discussing it.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I can tell you a great story about that.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: I know you have to, but I've I've got um it's a it's just kind of a story within a story.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: We had done um almost no PR.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the PR budget at best of us was effectively zero, but we did one piece of PR um that really just focused a little bit on the founding story.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I believe it was in um it may have been Forbes.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'd have to go find the article now.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: But it was basically the only piece of content about us that exists on the internet by and large.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And um the idea was kind of hey, we don't need to go shout from a mountaintop where our scale is and invite competitors for no good reason.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, we do want to build some credibility with, you know, the enterprise customer, with future talent we want to recruit, with kind of all these various stakeholders.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think this idea of like strategic PR, that was clearly what you were alluding to, that actually creates net enterprise value, that creates sales, it creates customers, is definitely an art and a science on the one hand.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's got another level now.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you I know enough people in PR to know they're experiencing this wave.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think with AI, you've got uh a whole nother kind of like consideration, which used to be we'd think about the SEO implication, which is meaningful and I think persists.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: But now there's this hey, if you really get presented in a certain way in an article in Fortran or Forbes or or the New York Times, that can impact how the large language models showcase your company.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the number of consumers now that have that as a part of their research journey and preparation process, or the enterprise counterparty if you're B2B, is pretty meaningful.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think there's still this opportunity, potentially, to take lessons from the past and and of course take into consideration new platforms and traffic sources and make PR.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Frankly, even more strategic, maybe than it was before.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it was already strategic as you alluded to.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm I'm curious to hear your story because mine is it worked, I think, ish.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: We, it's hard to quantify, but like we we certainly saw it build credibility, open some doors on the B2B side, certainly helped put us on the map to recruit certain talent.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: I would say it invited some competition, but because we didn't get too specific and we weren't up on a grandstand preaching about our numbers, I don't think it brought meaningful competition.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it helped later with like strategic MA.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: If if you think of a buyer of a company, well, they don't want to get fired for doing a purchase.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so every little um data point that that de-risks it for them is something they care about.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: What what did you what have you seen or experienced?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, there were a couple of things.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: One, we had early on, we had we had built stores in the Washington, D.C.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: market, and we got a ton of press and and it helped drive traffic into the stores and people recognized us, and that's sort of where I learned the power of using the press.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: We went when we were in uh the beauty business with Carol, uh, we were on the shopping channels, which I think is to me is just nothing but a uh a PR machine, really.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh uh and so you know, we did a tremendous amount of press around Carol and around what we were doing that we did we didn't really have to spend a lot of money on advertising.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the real kicker was when we were in the shaving business, um, we've struggled.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: The first year was horrible.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was horrible.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we were doing everything that we knew how to do.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: We were running ads, we were doing things on social, we were doing everything we knew how to do, and we were getting orders and they were trickling in, and I was getting frustrated on how I couldn't break break in to what I needed to break with the messaging.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: But we had a PR firm, we're trying to drop articles about what we were doing, dropping the price of shaving, etc.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And um I'm a sports fan.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: I woke up one morning and I was reading on my phone, I was reading that Brian Wilson, who used to pitch for the San Francisco Dodge uh San Francisco Giants, had this epic beard.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, Major League Baseball hated it because it didn't fit their profile, and they always wanted to get him to shave it.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh anyway, he had gotten injured, had Tommy John surgery, didn't pitch for a year.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: They traded him to the Dodgers.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's the first time he was going to pitch in a year, and it was big news.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I saw it and I looked at that beard and I thought, I am going to do something with this.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I sent a message to his people that morning and I said, I will pay Brian Wilson a million dollars to shave with our razor and shave cream.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And and they they sent me back a thing saying we will run that by Brian.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's all I needed.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now I can legally say I'm in discussions with Brian Wilson to shave with our product.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Gave that to the PR firm.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: They ran with it, and it just exploded.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we were on every single sports channel, which is directly who we wanted to talk to.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: We were on every single news channel for for about a week, and everybody wanted to know what uh what kind of insanity we we we we were using to pay somebody.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a stunt, right?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not general PR, but it was a stunt, but it got the PR that we wanted.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, and order started flowing in because we built awareness with it and people wanted to know.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: But people were pissed off at us.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like the people were we were just getting negative comments on social for people like, how could you pay a millionaire, a million dollars?
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: What's wrong with you people?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then we were getting pictures of p from people for every single body part you can imagine, some not safe for work, with a price tag on it.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'll shave this for 10 grand, I'll shave this for five grand, I'll shave this, I'll shave this.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it and and so social blew up, and then this went on for about two weeks.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, everybody, we were we we were getting interviews in Japan, we were getting interviews in France, people were just all over the place with it.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then um it started to die down after about you know 10 days or so.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: And TMZ caught Brian Wilson coming out of a gym in LA and they said, Are you gonna shave your beard and take the million dollars?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he's you know, he dropped the F-bomb and said, I'm not shaving my F and beard for anybody.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it just blew up again.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And people were like, Oh my God, how could he turn down the million dollars?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: What is wrong with you?
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it just became like this thing.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it granted it was a stunt, uh, but it was it was an effective stunt.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't harm anybody.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: We weren't lying, we weren't misrepresenting or anything.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: We were just saying, here's where we were, we offered it to him.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that launched us.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: Without that, we would have uh we probably would not have have made it because uh in that first year I just couldn't see the pathway to break through with the messaging in a traditional uh sort of way.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: So that was that, and then you know I've I've helped other brands uh you know ideate on how to do that type of thing to get to get sort of break through the clutter, so to speak, because there's just a lot out there.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, a lot of them have done it, a lot of them have done different things and gotten the PR that they wanted, and and it's helped get so in that respect, you can directly tie all that PR to orders because we could see it.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so that that sort of got us rolling.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think you're did you track anything?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because sometimes those you can almost track like, hey, these are the total impression estimates, so that you can kind of say if we'd paid for ads, what you would have had to pay.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the PR can just be so much more organic and and higher conversion.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's really that's a cool story.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And did you you didn't have to pay in the million bucks, so your total costs in it were just PR fees, I assume.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: Just PR fees.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a stunt.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was PR fees and time.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, we did we did figure that out.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember the number on top of my head, but I can tell you.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: I bet it was stunning.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was it was very, very, it was very strong.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but here's the other thing I learned about doing that is that, you know, look, we we help people with SEO, we automated it, we have agents that that we help get get you into you know LLMs, we do different things.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: The reality is the more PR you get, the more heavily you're weighted on the SEO side.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when when you look at a brand like Grazza when they launched or or Truff when they launched, um, yeah, I'm sure they had somebody doing SEO for them.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: The reality is they were in the top of search because of all the PR that they got.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the same thing with us, we just climbed the the search ranking, and for a period of time, we were, I think for a period of about a month and a half, we were beating Gillette in in the search term for five blade razor.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so, um, and that didn't cost us really anything.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we were okay with SEO, but we weren't, you know, stellar.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: So um I I do believe that PR is an effective form of getting your message out, breaking through the clutter if you do it correctly, but you have to have something to talk about.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants to hear, you know, I just I just created another agency of agents, and I've got this AI agent, and we're doing this.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's no story there.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be a story.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: I completely agree.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the and then the creative angle of like having this insight on, hey, Brian Wilson's got this beard, we've got a razor company, like that those insights, uh look, maybe AI can bring those to bear at some point in time, but I have yet to have crossed paths, having done a lot of work around AI, I haven't seen anyone bring that sort of insight from AI yet.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's much more of you know, reverse looking.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Is there an instance of this happening sort of thing?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: Which still has merit and value.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it it feels like AI solving a problem that can be solved real quantitatively is is probably really getting there, but maybe difficult to solve it as it leans more qualitative or requires like original thinking.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's an original insight you have, which which which was brilliant, right?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: And you just you've got to be grateful when you get those.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Every uh even a blind squirrel gets a nut every once in a while.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're not wrong about that.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I I think you're right.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, now look at I love AI.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: We've been using it in in a million different ways for about six or seven years, you know, agentic for about three, but we built agents to do all kinds of things.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is, you know, even with uh uh you know search, chat GPT search primarily, you you really have to you have to figure out how you're gonna approach the intent side of of eco of uh consumerism, right?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you're trying to crack because that's how the LLMs are looking at things.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: What's the intent of that person that's in in what they're searching for?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just about keywords and search terms anymore.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm trying to think of the other like parts of the journey that are that are most interesting because um there's there's more, but uh the the shorthand version, just walking through the rest of of my own journey, is um we we um I moved to an advisory role in 2019 and started working on a new project.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of that project moved moved pretty quickly.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the way it all kind of played out is we actually sold that final stake in invest reviews, the 100% sale to Nextstar was um the very end of 2020.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um we kind of benefited from a lot of the COVID um you know, push to to e-commerce a very, very good year for the business, top line and even the new business I started, Advon Commerce, which you you alluded to at the beginning, saw good growth through COVID as well.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: So we actually sold that in the summer of 21, um, and then moved to the current split that that you also kind of touched on, where I'm now, um, helped the um helped get Dynamism Capital started, which is a venture capital fund focused on these commerce enablement type companies, um, still helping work um with with Advon Commerce and in in real time, um, and this is much, much more, more of like a last 12 months things, sit on um a few public company boards, all still tied back to these same threads of um commerce, um, digital, clearly AI, now uh a big vector in in each of these things.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um, yeah, it's been a been a fascinating journey to kind of see where some of these things have evolved.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, there's just no world where we would probably build best reviews the same way today.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's really only been about 13 years.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and and Advon, you know, launched really in kind of 2019 era.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: No way we'd build that the same way today.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: And in that case, it's been seven years.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you see the the kind of pace is pretty, pretty relentless in this kind of whole corner of industry I'd call digital related kind of commerce and marketing.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I don't see that pace really slowing down.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's one of the most challenging kind of, I would call it, conundrums of of the modern era.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: What is it that you're gonna do to properly leverage AI in ways that create kind of sustainable moat?
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because that's not necessarily a an a basic problem at this point.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, the pr the the the problem I have with uh what's going on with AI is not really a problem, but I mean certainly having an impact on our industry, right?
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: The agency side of it, marketing, advertising, you know, AI, we've been you know, we've been fortunate in that.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: We saw it coming and we we made a lot of changes and we've been using it effectively to get our our work done and for our clients, but there's just so much crap out there.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: And from a client side, they just don't know what to think or what to do because everybody's got a story and 90% of them don't work.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, some kid in a basement says, I I created this I created this agent and it will run your ads for you and get you a better ROAS than you've ever seen.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: Give me$10,000 and I'll get you$100,000 worth of sales, you know, that kind of stuff.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it just doesn't ever come true.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh you you wind up with a product walking into them with a product that does work and they're and they're skeptical, you know.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: 100% it just becomes uh you you've always got to break through that because we do have products that actually work.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: We've been building them for three years, but we've been we started out using them for ourselves because like, for example, SEO.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: SEO is very costly for brands, right?
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're either gonna have somebody internally doing it, or you're gonna have a partner like us doing it, right?
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: At which point, either way, you're paying a lot of money to get it done.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not between the corner of expensive and really expensive.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: And there's not it's not something that you can say every day, oh, like ads, you can say, okay, my ROAS today was this, it drove this many sales, this many conversions, blah, blah, blah.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: With SEO, it's a little bit longer term, and people always have have a problem with it.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we built an agent about three years ago that we started testing and started refining, and uh it works, and and people can use it for about you know a thousand dollars a month, and it uh it does its job.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: We've moved people from you know page five to page two to page one and uh in a matter of you know three or four months.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: So um, you know, those types of things is what we we see, and you know, for a lot of reasons, our whole industry is is is changing.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we've been able to we don't use, and I don't believe in using, because we work in the world of consumer products, we don't use AI to generate content, generate images and videos.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's just you can't say that you're an authentic company and you're selling an authentic product, but then use AI to generate your your content.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't work.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Consumers, especially under 40, reject it and then you have a chance of destroying your brand.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think it works for things like real estate, industrial, that type of stuff can work really great, but not for consumer products.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: But we do we use it for everything else, like all around it.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: We can use it for editing, we do ideation, uh all that.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: But and uh and obviously um um you know analysis and uh big data analysis is it's is always great.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I hundred percent agree.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: The the point I would add that is uh less known um, you know, you get involved with these different kind of public companies and you see some things through different lens.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I had an interesting conversation with a public company CEO about AI, and um you know, it's not to demonize anyone, but he but he effectively said my board, particularly I think a couple of board members send him some, hey, there's this AI business sort of idea, like more he gets a few per week, and he effectively, I think, just set up an executive whose job is to like basically quickly look at them, and to your point, 99% of the time it's like, no, this is like a waste of time and money.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and appreciate your support, but I think that's like a at a at a board level and senior management level, you know, you're you're raising valid point.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: There is a whole lot of questionable products that either they may work in like one niche case.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: What what I what my take is on on some of the industry is you see a demo, the demo is incredible, and and what isn't fully told is like we spent like$100,000 making this demo, and the demo is incredible.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: But that like that, unless you're doing the exact same thing and we can copy and paste the format for you, it won't work.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: And um that seems like a trend line that you can kind of dot dot your way through.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so I think for a lot of it board members down to senior managers and executives, there's a lot of time going into kind of product vendor research that ends up being pretty, pretty fruitless.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I I wonder, you know, you keep you you'll see articles saying there's very limited productivity gains to me uh maybe my my guess is there's really strong gains in in pockets, and then there's also huge waste where you have hundreds of people spending thousands and tens of thousands of hours testing out things that don't work because they're not well built or they're selling them into the wrong um, you know, ideal customer profile, and so on and so forth.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: But you'd you'd think that your point is valid.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna figure out the use cases, and there'll be more and more vendors with those specific insights who sell into the right target demographic.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's funny you should talk about that with the on the board level.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: It takes me back.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: We had retail stores in in Washington, D.C.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we built uh the f I had this brilliant idea.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: The stores weren't enough for me.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: I we were doing great top-line sales, we had profit, and uh, but it wasn't enough for me.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: I I thought to myself, well, yeah, why not set up a website where we can sell food uh at a time when nobody was doing it, uh, it was uh uh 2,000 somewhere on there, and uh and we set up this website that cost us money, and we we did about a million in sales the first year, and we lost, I was losing about$10,000 a month.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: The supply chain wasn't ready to be shipping food, it was a disaster.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we were raising capital because we wanted to do an acquisition to grow.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: And uh everybody that came, venture capital, private equity, they all wanted to talk about the website.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I I was like, I'm ready to shut the website down.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's garbage, it's losing money.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: You I want to talk to you about these stores, uh stores.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody wanted to talk about that.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: We and long story short, you've got it, we'd get acquired by a supermarket chain.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they the reason was they wanted the website, they wanted to turn that into their home shopping piece.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: The reason was, and they were a large supermarket chain based out of North Carolina, based out of Charlotte.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the reason was they had somebody on the board who was pushing Webvan.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: Webvan had just come out, and they were like, this is gonna change.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: You guys are behind, you're gonna lose, Web Van is gonna take over, Web Van is gonna take over.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they they had said something to me about it because I had to go down and and help transition to this home shopping.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Web van.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Web van's never gonna make it.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: I said, You can't scale.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a billion dollar, you know, it's not gonna happen.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, we have this board member, they're insistent and they're very smart.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're I'm like, okay, and and we started doing it, and uh, I put this whole thing together to to do their home shopping.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, a year later, web van, billion dollars gone down the drain, it's over.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: Kroger's picking up the warehouses for like$100,000, these fully automated warehouses that cost like a half a billion dollars to build.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and I said, Are you gonna walk into your board meeting and look at that person and say, So what do you think now?
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because I said, I drew up a whole different plan and I said, This is how you win with e-commerce, because you don't people aren't gonna stop coming to the store.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: The store is experiential.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they'll supplement, maybe you'll deliver.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is nobody wants you to pick out the peaches for them.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants you to pick out the steak for them, right?
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: They want to see the marbling themselves.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: They may buy cans, they may buy bottles, they may buy stock-up goods, but people still want to, you know, that perishable experience.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, that's my my story about uh intrusion from uh board members when they don't know anything about, you know, sort of the industry.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a it's a I think it's a valid point.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's great to have an outside perspective.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to have someone push you, but yeah, it's a whole nother topic.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: But I think as a board member, you've got to be really, really careful because the example you brought up, I I don't think is is is is in of one where you're in a position of authority, but you don't have necessarily the like operational insights that are going on and driving the business day to day, and you mention something and it might get acted upon in a way that can really destroy enterprise value.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's a uniquely precarious seat where I think you you want to create value, but those paths are are are um are are not without peril from what I can see.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Ben, it's a great conversation.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: We went a little bit long, but that's okay.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you taking the time and coming on and and talking.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody wants to get in touch with you, somebody wants to see what you're doing, where can they find you?
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm pretty pretty present on on LinkedIn, not not too hard to find.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think my email address is listed there as well.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: So um feel free to to reach out.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: And um yeah, thanks a ton, Phil.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a real treat.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh for everybody else, we will see you uh in the next one.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: Bye-bye.