Nik Sharma - The 2 Paths When Scaling a Brand

Happy Sunday! It's a heavy Sunday as Russia tries to carve a violent path to taking over Ukraine. One of our best development teams is based out of Ukraine and I haven't stopped thinking about them and their families since seeing the first news on Twitter.

If you are able to donate to help Ukraine, please do. Jesse Pujji tweeted 5 great spots to donate here. If you want to send a larger amount directly to the Ukrainian bank, you can do so by clicking here, and then clicking "EN" at the top right to see everything in English.

It's crazy to see a war happen in the modern-day, where soldiers are live-streaming their day on TikTok and we get updates faster than major news networks through Twitter. Organizations like Anonymous (a famous hacktivist collective) have even declared cyber war against Russia. There are so many pieces to this war that must have been underestimated given how connected the world now is, in real-time.

As weird as this feels to write about commerce during this time, I want to make sure that I still share some thoughts on my mind from this past week.

Over the last 6 months, I've seen or been a part of a good amount of brand launches and there's something so critical in the beginning stages that happen, which really determines whether the brand is going to be a success 4 years later, or if they're going to struggle to stay afloat (before hopefully correcting themselves) — it's all around the customer experience.

When you think about the modern-day marketing funnel, you probably think of AIDA. It stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. It was created in 1898 by Elias St. Elmo Lewis. For context, back then, advertising was all about earning a sale, and that was pretty much it. Today, the marketing funnel extends much further than that. It includes customer experience, customer service, retention marketing, loyalty & evangelism, and more. If a brand sells you a meal kit and the experience stops at the sale, you won't continue.

Part of that is our own ego and what we think we deserve, but the smart brands understand that and know to continue serving you, even after becoming a customer.

Most brands today launch with a direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform. They build their website on Shopify, the suite of apps to plug-in for email, reviews, analytics, subscription, etc. all exist there, and they can be up and running in a matter of weeks, depending on how complicated that website is. Now that the site is launched, items are for sale, and you're seeing a few sales start to come in, you think to yourself, "What now?"

Here are the two paths:

1. Start paying for traffic

2. Hunt for your first customers

When you start paying for traffic, you immediately start spending money to figure out what works and what doesn't work. It might be a faster way to learn, but you're burning money doing it.

When you start hunting for customers, you're scrappy. You start by building relationships with creators who have an audience, with people who come to your site because they understand you solve a problem for them, and you're able to see each individual customer come through. Focusing on a launch this way helps you learn what problems you solve for customers that you hadn't even thought about before, and best of all, you build an army of advocates from day 1.

There's a special bow on the relationship when someone is an early customer and there's genuine interaction around "How did it work out for you?" or "Thank you so much for being our 73rd customer. How was the unboxing experience?"

More than just this, it almost shapes the DNA of the team, the intentions as a brand, and how high you hold yourself to give the best customer experience. Brands like Feastables and Jolie focused their post-launch windows entirely on solving problems, learning from customers, collecting UGC content, getting reviews in, looking for bugs, optimizing the website, planning new moments for customers, etc.

On the other hand, the brands who wanted to launch and run ads are sitting with a few reviews on their pages, entirely focused on "How do we get lower CPAs?" (CPA is "Cost per Acquisition" aka customer acquisition costs).

Actually, if you went to the Jolie website when it launched late last year, and you go back to Jolie’s site now, you'll see the difference. From Wayback machine, click here to see the old product page, and click here to see the current product page.

The intention is to focus on customer education, collecting reviews, finding issues within the supply chain, understanding customer benefits, and ensuring that the experience from unboxing to installing to replacing these shower heads is what will set this company apart from its future competitors.

Getting the highest click-through rates, lowest CPCs, or highest conversion rate is just one piece of the equation, it's not how you build a brand. This thread by Nayut Sitachitt does an incredible job at phrasing the difference between a high-quality business and a low-quality business that aims to acquire customers.

The punchline: focus on educating people, not just your paying customers, and for those who become customers, make sure they have the best possible experience with you. Your CPA, LTV, AOV, and all the other acronyms play out in the long run when you deliver an exceptional experience.

My favorite place to take inspiration from for building a long-term business is the hospitality industry. Think of your favorite hotel or restaurant. Why is it your favorite? What do they think about that makes you go, "Wow, they even thought of this!" Implement THAT in your business.

On to some fun stuff... 

This is the last newsletter that I will be sending myself. Beginning next week, my newsletter will come from a media company I've admired for a while now and I couldn't be more excited to announce that later this week!

As a part of that transition, I promise that my content will always stay written by me (100% by me), brands, vendors, events, jobs, etc will all still be highly, highly, vetted. There will be absolutely zero input from the media company in terms of who I mention, what I write about, what I talk about, etc. That was a huge part of this decision for me was to make sure that nothing around this email gets touched by anyone else. 

The only thing that might get tweaked is my grammar, but mostly because I don't have an editor or someone to correct my many misspellings xD. I can't thank you enough, yes you, for reading this on Sundays, and I hope you know that I plan to see you at dinner, an event, or something hosted by me very soon!

Vendor of the Week:

MarketerHire — The "Where do I find a Head of Marketing" Platform for Fast-Growing Brands

As a founder, you're usually great at brand marketing or performance marketing — right brain or left brain. But then, how do you find the right person to help with what you're not good at? That's where MarketerHire comes in.

When Brian Berger, the founder of Mack Weldon, texted me a few months ago needing a growth person, I sent him to MarketerHire. Now he has hired multiple people from them. Why? Because MarketerHire does the hard work of vetting marketers to ensure you don't get bamboozled.

When COVEY Skin needed a new agency, my recommendation was, "You should find a growth marketer from MarketerHire, instead." As a result, all aspects of growth (paid media, creative, website, etc) have gotten much more dialed in. 

Whether it's as complicated as building growth funnels, planning promotions and site merchandising, or putting together an entirely new campaign from scratch that will run across out-of-home and digital, MarketerHire talent will have you covered. It's harder for a marketer to become verified MarketerHire talent than it is to get into Harvard. You'll never get bad talent.

If you're looking to hire a marketer, take 5 minutes to fill out this form, and just see what you get back. You won't be disappointed. If one of the largest technology companies relies on MarketerHire to execute their global marketing campaigns, they'll deliver for you too.

Fill out this form and see what MarketerHire can do for you!

Event of the Week:

A few weeks ago I wrote a deep dive into organic TikTok with JT Barnett, who helps tons of brands with their TikTok strategy. Now, #paid and JT are hosting a virtual event where JT will use what he talked about to build a TikTok strategy for three brands in real-time.

If I had to guess what all JT would go through, it would include:

1. Launching the account

2. Writing out audience personas & how to narrow that down

3. Mapping your content ideas

4. Shooting, editing, and posting your content

5. How to analyze what works well and what doesn't in order to maximize views

You can join the session for free by signing up on this link. It's in collaboration with #paid, which is a tool we use often to whitelist creators and run paid media behind.

Brand of the Week:

Snif — The "OMG, how have I never had these before" Scents your Bathroom Needs

At this point, my apartment has an Instant Karma candle in every corner. On Friday, I went to see Phil, the co-founder, and he gave me their new release of scents. They. Are. Magical.

Burning Bridges, one of the new scents, puts all of Le Labo to shame. Oh, and because they use TryNow for checkout, you can try it all for free on their website!

That's all for this week!

I hope that you enjoyed this email. It's the last one I'll ever send (myself). Get a great sleep tonight (green ring for my Whoop gang!), and watch out for the big announcement of this newsletter on my Twitter.

Happy Monday Eve!

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