Here’s what I learned this week

Ecommerce distribution is broken, CACs are way too high for most brands.

Everyone needs an audience BUT we don’t build audiences correctly anymore

We’ve flipped incentives to customers giving them discounts without anything real of value being provided back to us.

I think about this a lot really.

It was the basis of why we created software to collect more data from people during signup, can we fix the value exchange to get something that is more valuable than we’re currently getting.

I saw a great demo the other day of what a community is linking social proof with unlocking a discount for brands through a discovery engine.

The problem was the social proof was just an upvote. It’s a positive step but I feel like there could be more.

I still think it’s really smart.

I’ve been friends with the founder for a few years and watched this come to life.

Honestly, it’s one of the best implementations I’ve seen of taking a community and rewarding it in a smart way. Right now they are in beta with an email list north of 2m people running entirely free.

It’s something that I was considering looking into a while back, but without an existing audience, it’s really tough to compete, which brings me back to how do you quickly scale a brand and reach mass spread?

Amazing Opportunity or Offer + People willing to share across networks.

It’s a larger scale version of the first test we’re going to start running that I mentioned around automated UGC a few weeks back.

I do see there being an opportunity in entering this market though by acquiring audiences form businesses that are shutting down, cleaning them, adding data, then combining them again around a lifestyle segment.

I just think that’s building rather than changing the narrative and changing the thought process on how to make things happen.

I think I figured out what’s missing, for the past few months we’ve been working on putting together a flow that does rebates for product feedback, while building in protections to minimize abuse of the program.

We tried a bunch of platforms, worked through a bunch of flows, in truth there isn’t one program that does all the parts, so it’s all cobbled together. But my conversation from last week taught me something, there’s a bigger world out there albeit a bit more complicated, but definitely an opportunity to build something in this space.

Good example came up yesterday when I was writing a post.

The quickest most affordable way to grow a brand from $2m to $10m isn’t ads.

It’s finding complementary products, running gated sales for other partner companies and opening up to their email lists all password protected.

You don’t even need to change things up, you can have the same password used across multiple companies for the offers.

The quick and dirty would just be to show a coupon code in a banner targeted to the UTM of the email, so when someone clicks on the email the banner shows up and offers the discount, you could create different banners based on the different UTMs if you really wanted to.

In fact, I’m willing to bet there’s room for an agency just to manage this part of the business, it’s that niche but impactful.

in a world of agency offerings there’s so much stuff that brands should be doing but isn’t being done and leads to massive gaps that really move the needle.

The problem we have is that there is no framework for a lot of these things instead you have to build them from scratch.

I’m going to spend the next 6 months building out frameworks that I wish people offered as services.

The Takeaway

The services of tomorrow haven’t been built yet. As differentiation becomes more important focus on time consuming tasks and work towards building systems to automate them.

Have a great week!

-Jon

P.S. got a topic you want me to cover? Let me know.