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What's up, DTC.

Pod?

Today we're joined by Zawar Khan, who's the founder of Rel brand. So, Zawar, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in the CPG space, how you work with creators, and some of the things that you're up to with Rel brands.

Totally. Blaine Ramon, thanks for having me today. Yeah. So I'm a CPG guy through and through, and for those who don't know consumer packaged goods, I started off my career as one of the youngest brand managers at Procter Gamble, where I was on the Ole women's skincare brand, and I absolutely fell in love with building and developing new product innovation. So, like, what's something that's really just a pain point or attention for my consumer? And how can we build new products to go solve those issues? But over at P G, we have such a great R D team that's whipping up Tidepods and Swiffer and Fabrize and all these other great products that we all know and love that, as a brand manager, I didn't get much ownership over our product innovation pipeline and solving those consumers tensions. So I ended up at PepsiCo, where I was in the frito lay division. So think like, 60% of what you see when you go in the salty snacks aisle of your grocery store. And there I was, co leading innovation for our Doritos and Cheetos brands.

So the challenge there was really simple Zawar. Like, what are the new flavors and the new forms and the new packagings that are going to reignite some excitement for these brands, both with our consumers and our retailers had a slow 2010 decades. But how can we just get these brands back to where they need to be relevant for our Gen Z consumer and firing on all cylinders? So, while I was there, I launched over 25 new products, some of which are launching still today. This month. Cheetos pretzels. Find them at your local grocery store and did four Super Bowl ads with great talents like Lil, Nas X and Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, which tied really well into the second half of my career. And yes, I was just absolutely having a blast there. And while I was there, I had a few friends who were saying, hey, Zawar, do you know how to build and operate these products? Like, can you maybe help us out? And I was like, man, why do you guys want to watch CPG products? I don't even know what CPG is.

And they started explaining to me, like, hey, we are doing all these brand deals, and so we know these brands are making money through our audiences, and what if we just owned our audiences directly and sold directly to them? And it was an exciting thesis. This was a couple of years ago, and so I started doing a little bit of consulting and advising on the side, which led to kind of a two year career of consulting with creators, mostly with YouTubers, between two and 20 million. I would say that there's kind of three steps to launching a brand. Kind of the ideation, the build process, and the operate and where I was able to drive the most value was with the ideation and the build process. So what are the design thinking exercises we're going to do to find out what the right brand is for you, as well as who are the right suppliers, who are the right partners to go bring this whole project to life? So that's kind of me in a nutshell. So now I'm just kind of the creator brand guy. When creator says, listen, I want to launch a brand, I don't know where to start, I'm usually there to either help or guide them in the right direction.

So, zoar two questions. One, the first question is about the difference between the scale that you guys were at at like PNG or Pepsi, right, and working with brands, because when you're starting a brand from scratch, even if you do have an audience, it's a whole different can of worms, right? So how did you catch yourself up to speed there and how did you become proficient there? And the second question was, what was your background before you started as a brand manager with PNG? Is this something that always excited you? How did you even end up in that world to begin with?

What was the first question?

The first question was about the difference between launching a brand when you have the scale and the distribution partners like a PNG. So you're starting up from scratch by yourself with creators. And the second one was and maybe you could flip them, but more about just how you got even into is this something you studied in school or maybe your internships in college where'd you go to college? Like personal background, I guess.

Yeah. Great. Okay, so let me start with the second one. So this is really going to be left field. I studied mechanical engineering, and it was your stereotypical over involved kid in school, did all the internships, did all the student orgs, did homecoming court, all that stuff. And I found out through my first internship. I got my dream internship. I was at Honda doing research and development.

So I was working on their next generation lines of Hondas and Acuras that weren't going to be released for three or four years. And I got the coolest job, which was we were doing crash and safety testing. So all those ads you see on TV where they put the dummies in, they got the little stickers on there, they crash them into the walls. I was that guy. I was hitting the button. I was putting the million dollar dummies in the cars and analyzing the high speed videos. I thought it was my dream job to make cars, but through that hands on experience, I learned whoa, whoa, whoa. This is way too technical for me.

Like, I am a people's person. I love diving into psychology and why people want to buy things and what their problems are and how I can solve them. I was way too far removed from the business and the consumer in that role. So I ended up at I wanted to switch kind of something more into business. So I ended up at procter Gamble, actually for an internship. But this was in a supply chain innovation role. While I was still kind of not the right fit for, you know, just being kind of a personable individual was networking with anyone and everyone I could, people who were all the modders of my university, I started reaching out to them and I stumbled across someone who had the Brand Manager title on the bounty. Brand bounty and charmin.

And I was like, hey, whoa, this is really cool. This is super exciting. They're kind of the hub of the wheel of this billion dollar brand. They're having strategic problems, they have analytical problems, they're marketing, but they're also strategy. This is so exciting. And so I was like, okay, how do I apply? And they were like, you don't. And I was like, why not? And they were like, well, this is a job that's reserved for MBA students, right? Like, go do a job for four or five years, get an MBA, drop 200K on that, and then come back and talk to us. And I was like, come on.

And so I just kept fighting and fighting and fighting. Eventually that following semester, they came for our career fairs, and I obviously knew everyone that was there. And I was like, I saw that they were doing a case competition for our MBA school at my university. And I begged and pleaded. I said, give me a shot. You know me, you've known me over the summer. I was already at a PNG badge. Give me a shot.

And they're like, all right, don't tell you on, but we'll let you in. Just don't make a big mess. Act like you're an NBA student, right? And I did it, and I got there. And amongst the seven teams, the team that I was in ended up winning, which got me my shot to end up applying. So they ended up eventually telling me that every year they pick about 35 new brand managers to come into their pipeline and three of them are undergraduate students. So I saw this light where I was like, I could potentially get in. And then six or seven competition. The competition was it was about Puffs.

You know, the tissues puffs. So they're kind of second in the market. The number one leader is Kleenex, right? You refer to facial tissues as Kleenex. They kind of have the brand name. So the challenge was, here's a whole bunch of data and information insights on Puffs. Develop a one year strategy of what you're going to do to reignite excitement for this brand. And so I think my strategy ended up leveraging the Puff pals, those little animated characters with little red noses. I was like, how do we lean heavier into this brand asset and execute on this? And how do we queue up more occasions for Puffs? How do we lean into our we've got a VIX line of medicated tissues.

How do we lean into those occasions and build those moments? So it's kind of balancing strategic, the analytical and the creative skill sets that are required to make great brain manager. So that's a little bit about my background. That's kind of how I stumbled into this. So was the kid who didn't have any no marketing classes, let alone an MBA, but still ended up doing it had the tenacity, that's for sure. And then I would say that building and scaling products that you launch on a larger scale on these billion dollar brands, ole, Doritos and Cheetos, come with benefits and challenges, but so does building with creators, right? I wouldn't say that one is necessarily easier than the other. The nice thing about PNG is or PepsiCo is that we have existing relationships with these retailers. So with a couple of meetings, a couple of good sales pitches, we're able to get our products guaranteed in 99% of Targets or 99% of CVSS or local grocery stores or what have you, which is beautiful because then we're not relying as much on marketing, right? The product is already there on the shelf. When you need a tissue, there's only 1015 products there.

We're going to be in your consideration set. That's great. But the retailer ends up taking a pretty significant margin out of that product, which is like and you don't know who your customer is. Right. You're removed your third party data, right? You're no longer first party data. On the flip side, you've got a creator, and this creator is they don't have access to that sort of distribution, physical distribution. But what they do have access to is digital distribution. They've got these audience of millions that are of engaged individuals who are coming to them usually because they have some sort of problem that they need to solve, right? Like, I follow this fitness creator because I want to get stronger.

I follow this home DIYer because I want to do some home projects, right? I trust you, and I come to you for advice. And so when you end up launching a product that's relevant to your audience, you have just kind of immediate velocities. Really great example of this would be Litus Tech Tips, a small electronics YouTuber who in August launched a screwdriver. Actually, I have it right here. He launched a screwdriver, right? And this thing was $70, and he said, when you buy it, I can't even ship it to you for four months. He sold $5 million worth of that screwdriver in the course of five days, and I think he's at upwards of 9 million now. So it's absolutely bonkers. So that's that distribution.

That's really exciting. He also has a very forgiving audience, right? If he messed up on this and he said, actually, I told you you're going to get in December, but now you're going to get in February, he has the opportunity to own up for that because he's a human. He's not a corporation, right? So he can tell you, hey, listen, I messed up. These orders are going to be delayed. Like, this is what happened. I'm learning how to be business like entrepreneur. I'll throw in like, eight extra screwdriver bits for every single order that was delayed. So what will actually end up happening is that parasocial relationship between me as an audience member and a consumer and him actually strengthens through his mistakes versus people aren't as forgiving for the billion dollar companies, the billion dollar brands, if you mess up, sorry, buddy, that's an L.

Also culture. Exactly.

How can you gauge about how trustworthy these creators are? All you have is the data of their engagement rates, their follower rates. If you just stumble across a creator, how can you know whether their audience actually trusts them? I mean, many creators launch products that totally flop. And maybe it was a byproduct of the fact that they just did influencer posts because they had to generate revenue to get off the ground, and they promoted every single product that came through their way. They deleted those posts from their feed. So you don't know what is the engagement and the trust from their audience. How do you gauge that? If you would have looked at this creator with this screwdriver before he did this, how could you have known that this was going to be like, this successful versus how could you have anticipated this could have been a total flop?

So there's a few things. Let me start off with a framework that I use here. When I analyze creators, there are three types of creators, and this is just my current framework. This framework is always evolving. I'll say that there's three types of creators. For me, there is an idea based creator. There is a lifestyle based creator, and there's an expert based creator. And each of these have different levels of, let's say, right to win or right to play.

In launching commerce products. First you have the idea based creators, especially DTC and CPG products. First you have the idea based creators. So this is someone whose entire content is around sharing an idea with you. So this might be like a comedian on like this might be Mr. Beast, right? The idea is want to take their hands off the plane, like wins. So it's not as much focus on who the individual is that's delivering the idea. I don't care if it's Mr.

Beast giving away a Blaine. I don't care if it's Zawar. All I want to see is someone win a plane and go through this intense scenario, right? Or I don't care if it's Zawar giving this joke or it's Ramon, all I want to hear is a funny joke. So there's very limited parasocial relationship there that's kind of this idea based creator. The second is a lifestyle based creator. Two great examples. Casey Neistat lifestyle YouTuber in New York showing you his life as a tech entrepreneur living in the city and balancing his life and his responsibilities and speaking engagements. Or even Emma Chamberlain, who was kind of the older sister I always wanted for like the twelve to 16 year old girls of America.

There's a real relationship that's founding there. And these viewers, they might even pause videos at certain times. What jacket is that? See wearing? Right? Or like, oh wait, what is Emma what restaurant did Emma just go to? Or maybe I should save that on my Google Maps, right? There's this parasocial relationship that starts to form that just even without them selling to you, you start saying, whoa, I like them. And I do kind of want to emulate them because there's parts there of personality that I really like that's that parasocial relationship found developing. And then lastly, you have these expert based creators, right? So like Linus Tech Tips with a screwdriver is a really good example. Or maybe a beauty YouTuber or maybe a home DIY expert, right? Or maybe someone who runs Triathlons and gives you like triathlon training content. These are folks who and you touch on this. I think in your question you said credibility for a second.

These expert YouTubers or expert creators are the ones who probably have the highest level of credibility to go launch a product. They're the creators who when they end up launching something, people won't be coming at them being like, why should you do this? Is your product even going to be any good? Because they've already developed themselves as being credible in that particular niche. Lifestyle creators, right? I go launch a coffee, I go launch a food. And it's like, yeah, you eat food, you drink coffee. But why is yours going to be any better than this other brand or that brand? And lastly, you got the idea based creator where it's like, dude, I was coming to you for jokes. Why are you trying to sell me a beverage that doesn't make any sense? That's just really confusing. So that's the first step. The second step, I would say, which is definitely much more of the science, is really talking with the creator understanding.

Is this really something that excites them? Is it something they're passionate about? Do they even have time in their work schedule right now to afford to be thinking about a CPG brand or a direct to consumer brand? Sometimes it's just like their life is just a blur. They're barely able to get their head above water to think about these greater projects. But they see big sexy announcements and launches and exits and they're like, maybe I should be doing that. And that's where oftentimes I have to come in and give them advice to say, listen, I know this is the flashy thing right now, but I want to help you as the creator, save money and save time. Don't do this right. Like, here are seven other options of where you can drive value to your audience and make money that don't involve you having to do suppliers and samplings and building teams and building brand identities and websites sometimes work smarter, not harder, and you'll drive more value to your audience and make more money. So it's a little bit of a balance, right? I wish that I had like a secret sauce to all of this, but it's a side.

Yeah, I love that because it starts with the creator. It doesn't start whether beverage has the best margin or whatever other product is trendy at the time. I'm surprised Logan Paul's Prime worked that well because I couldn't find in KSI such a strong alignment with the product. I think they are also the 1% and maybe Logan Paul just had really good understanding of the business side. And I think you probably also want to evaluate the creators strengths and weaknesses. Some might be really good on the business front, others might just want to create content and then the others might want to experiment more with the business side. So I want to unpack that a little bit more. But before we do that, how does that compare launching a brand with a creator like that than doing the collabs that you did with Pepsi and Big creators? So you did Cooler Ranch with Lil Nas and Doritos.

And how is that evaluation process different when you're working at that scale with already established brand, already established creator versus just helping a brand?

It's the same, but it's so different at the same time. And I would say for the sake of this conversation, let's talk about how the two are actually quite different. So the problem to solve for us when we're like for example, Cool Ranch. We were like, listen, people aren't buying it as much. Let's just increase the seasoning level. And we need to make a big announcement about the fact that we increase seasoning level significantly so that people start coming back to the snack they know and love. And so how do we get excitement over this? We're like, let's do a Super Bowl ad. What's trendy right now? I believe this was 2020, I think, that year.

So TikTok was just starting to get a little bit popular. Like Old Town Road was really blowing up. It's the only thing people were listening to was on the charts for 40, 50 weeks. And so we were thinking, everyone knows what doritos is. We have 99% household penetration, 99% household awareness. So we're not like introducing this concept for the first time. All we're trying to do is remind people that we exist so that the next time they go to the grocery shopping over the next week or two, they'll maybe venture down the chips aisle that they've maybe skipped past for the last few weeks. And so we take a topic and individual and a song that's highly relevant and tie it into a conversation that's super buzzworthy, right? Super bowl ads.

And people are talking about it that day, and they're talking about the next day at work and at school to create that moment of doritos has always been something you've been known about. And all of a sudden it's frontal lobe. It's like top of mind, everyone's talking about doritos, doritos, doritos, lil Nas X, lil Nas X. And what that leads to is obviously it leads to a lift in our sales, right? People all of a sudden we're talking about doritos. Now I'm planning my party and I'm like, oh, we should get some doritos. That'd be nice. Everyone loves Doritos or got to try those new Cooler Ranch products. So that's what we're doing there is we're leaning just for a second on a celebrity or a talent's relevance in broad gen pop culture for just a moment to remind people that we exist.

And I would say that is pretty different from what I've described so far around creators lodging brands. But there will always be this relationship between media and media entities and entertainment with commerce, and these two will always find unique and interesting ways to partner together. And that's kind of what we're talking about here in this conversation, right, is like, how does media come together with commerce? And what are all the crazy ways that they can find to partner and collab?

One point that you made that I think is really important was when you said you'll sometimes talk to creators and be like, yo, you really don't have the bandwidth to be launching a brand right now. And if they're not really in it, they actually shouldn't do it because it's going to be more effort and harm than it is going to be good. So why don't you talk us through a little, like what the landscape is for creators to pursue opportunities, right? Because there are certain creators where rather than having to have their own brand, might make sense to work on collaborations or maybe a merch partnership or some of these other things. So why don't you just walk us through the landscape of different ways that creators can make money. And when you get really excited about like, yeah, you should really launch this as your own brand versus, oh, you should collaborate, think about other ways to generate revenue.

First and foremost, creators should be thinking about how they can drive the most value to their audience. Read your comments, read your DMs. Why are people even showing up to your content in the first, right? Like, there's a lot of people who are training people for triathlons on TikTok and YouTube, but why are they coming to you in like, tease out? That why? Why? Because we always want to start off with a why and a problem without jumping straight to a solution, which is what a lot of the creators do when they reach out to me. They're like, Zor, I want to launch a brand. What should I do? And I'm like, Why? What's the problem we're solving for know? Just because you want to have this moment. I think that's not a good rationale. So we want to start off with why is our audience showing up to this content in the first place? And then what are those unsolved tensions that still exist? Right? So if I was at Ole, right, maybe I would say something like, hey, listen, she wants something really strong to tackle her forehead wrinkles. So now what is the right product to go talk to R and D? How are we going to go make it happen? Or maybe I'm a Triathlon creator and I'm a female and my audience is mostly female, and I realize, wait a minute, I've always struggled with finding good women's deodorant.

And my audience always jokes about the fact that none of the women's deodorants are actually effective or smell good. Maybe there's something there. Maybe that's something that bonds us all together and there's an opportunity now for me to sell to my audience. It's like, relevant to them. It's an actual problem that they joke to me about. And as me being the expert fitness gal, why can't I go do that? So starting off with a problem to solve, always be thinking about what's the value that you're actually driving to your audience. Now, this might end up being a direct to consumer product, a CPG product. It might end up being like, hey, listen, someone is saying, I love your content so much, I would take my money.

I want you to give me one on one digital coaching, right? Then it might be like, hey, maybe we need to make a course. Maybe we need to make one on one calls only for the most dedicated and premium followers. That's also a great way to drive value and also make money. So you can end up in a variety of different kind of elements or different types of businesses that you can build. And I kind of look at it like, kind of like a quadrant or a spectrum, right? So you can go into the media side, build media businesses, or you can build commerce businesses, right? So medias are usually kind of ad supported, digital kind of video content. And then you got commerce, which is more like your audience is giving you direct dollars. And then kind of to layer on top of that, kind of on the y axis, you've got physical businesses, so things that are kind of IRL in person, things you can touch. And then you've got digital.

And so this can include everything from, like, seminars, speaking presets, mobile apps, gaming marketplaces, meet and greets, tours, merch there's so books and art and paywall content. Ramon, there's so many things you can go do here, but it's best not to start by saying, okay, which one of these do I want to do? It's best by starting by thinking, like, hey, what does my audience need from you? What does my audience want from me? I hope that answers your question.

No, that answers it really well. And then I think just to piggyback off that, maybe taking the other side on the brand side, right. What activations have you seen work really well with creators in terms of partnerships where maybe it's like a longer term partnership than just a sponsored post, for example, but it's not quite like the creator actually having equity in the business or whatever. So what are some successful, more traditional promotions and collaborations and partnerships that you see?

So this is one of my big bets for 2023, is that I hope to see more creators and brands finding unique ways to partner more than just kind of a sponsorship or an affiliate link, but saying, like, hey, can we co create a product together? Can we co create a brand together? Do a limited edition flavor that you developed? Can we license your name, image and likeness? What are those kind of middle ground steps? Because a lot of creators jump towards, I want to launch a company. I want a team. I want to pay salaries. And it's like, no, you don't. No one wants that. Don't do that. And so we've seen a couple of examples from some top tier creators of, like, they've started to explore these partnerships. And I think a really good example is actually the Demilios with their brand, Social Tourists.

So they have partnered with Abercrombie and Fitch Company, and they've created a subsidiary. So Abercrombie and Fitch Company owns Hollister, and they've created, I think it's a subsidiary company of Hollister, which is called Social Tourists. And this is a really. Good example of, like, you've got a brand that was kind of starting to age away, was starting to lose a little bit of relevance with this new generation. And they, hey, look, let's create a subline called Social Tourists available at all of our Hollister stores at all the malls in America. And we'll partner with these generational icons, and we'll co create the product with them. Now, I'm not sure about all the deal details, right? Like around royalties and equity and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but they found a relationship that's working, and it's turned into a multi year partnership. And so not only do you see foot traffic and Hollisters going up, but you also see the like, the social tourist line is being really successful.

So it ends up being a really big win for Abercrombie and also ends up being a big win for the D'Amelios, right? They end up making they get a nice, pretty check off of it, and they're putting in minimal work, right? They're not saying, oh, gosh, the shipment know, east Asia got delayed and POS. And employees, they're showing up for product shoots. They're showing up for product development. They're having a blast. So there is this happy medium, and you can see how the brand wins, and so does the creator. And I'd love to see more challenger brands doing similar strategies, right? You may have an influencer marketing campaign that's happening now across 1015 influencers, but you see that two or three of them are leading to the greatest conversions, leading to the greatest site traffic or sales or their affiliate links are just absolutely on fire. You might start to say, well, why stop there? What comes next? Maybe what comes next is you do a limited edition flavor or you do a limited edition product, or you ask them and say, hey, have you thought about launching a brand like this? Maybe we can kind of ghost kitchen this brand for you, right? Let us run all the operations we'll run as, like, a subsidiary of our company. We've already got customer service.

We've already got fulfillment. We've already got the manufacturers. We'll kind of white label something for you, and we can go from there. Let's see what happens. So there's a lot of really creative ways. As you start going deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole, you realize there's a lot of unexplored avenues and opportunities. So something I would just say to your audience of founders is challenge yourself here and say, what does the next phase of influencer marketing look like for your company and for your brand?

Yeah, I think that's a really important point about where does infrastructure exist that you can leverage and piggyback on and maybe move faster? I think a good example of that might be like, Mr. Beast and Mr. Beast Burger. It wasn't like he was building out a bunch of restaurants all over the place. He needed to be able to bring the audience. And he needed everything in these ghost kitchens to be able to put out burgers to his specs. But it wasn't like he was building out a thousand different restaurants to be able to launch his burgers at the same time all over the US. And I think the same could go for specific product lines.

Maybe we'll see more and more brands that incubate almost like sub product lines or something with creators. So the creator, like you're saying, doesn't have to put together their whole payroll, doesn't have to take on the responsibilities of all the things. And maybe they don't want to be a founder, but we've had creator led founders that come on where part of their creative mantra and what gets them going is being able to run a business. Talk about running the business. And they want to be a founder, creator. So in that sense, I don't think you take away anything from those people because, like you said, it fits the audience. Part of their whole deal is building the business, building it in public. So I think that's a really good call out.

Are there any other good examples that the next question I wanted to get into is maybe more if we see all this stuff happening in the creator space, right. Like, clearly there's more and more audiences you've got attribution coming from more and more places. What do you see happening in affiliate? How do you think about the affiliate market and what might happen in the next couple of years?

Yeah, when we start talking about affiliates, we start really leaning into tech. And that's just now my expertise. But this is an area that I feel like is just extremely untapped. There's a lot of sales that are happening. For example, I give you that Chamberlain example where I'm watching Emma Chamberlain and she's got this cute top on. I pause, right? I'm like, zooming in. I'm being a little private detective, or I'm commenting, saying like, hey, where'd you get this top from? Maybe she responds to me. So there's a lot of instances, like small moments like that where creators are actually driving traffic and conversions to these brands, but they're not being credited for that.

So it's like this whole mini economy that's not being accounted for. And it's like, Wait, hold on. Creators should be rewarded for these sorts of conversions. They're doing actual business. They're helping these folks. But how do we capture those moments and how do we record those moments and track them effectively? I don't know what the right answer is, but just the fact that we're still stuck on the Zawar 20 code links, right, or like the UTM links, it's just so antiquated. And that's not how these buying moments happen. These buying moments happen in the split of a second or maybe after I've seen a brand after seven times, I'm actually going to go off and buy it.

So it's like, man, if I was a founder right now, and I want a lot of these other SaaS creator economy startups coming up, and they're solving problems that no one actually has. This is a real problem where you can go to a creator and say, listen, you drove $3,000 worth of sales to Forever 21 last week, but no one's actually paying you for that. I can help you get paid for those sorts of moments. So I would love to see just a little bit more development there. And I think if we grow that part of the economy, like that part of the influencer marketing campaign, you got sponsored posts, you got affiliates, and then you've got building brands. If we can grow that middle region, I think there's a lot of creators who would start saying, actually, I don't need to build a brand. I've got a really nice business here just doing influencer marketing and affiliate work. And I think I like being a media company.

Why jump into commerce when that's not what I'm good at? So there is that middle ground that just always irks me, where even sometimes I buy products, I was influenced by a creator and I was like, shoot, they should have gotten paid for this. But they're not.

Yeah, no, go for it.

Ramon I was going to say that in the affiliate space, the challenge is when the brands do the spray and pray method, and it's like, all right, well, if you say no to this Zawar 20 code, I have 300 other people that are going to want it. But the challenge without the initial commitment of payment to a creator is that creating content can cost money and it can cost time. And so that's the effort level of the content you're going to get back from that creator. I mean, Mr. Beast is saying he's spending I don't know, how much money is he spending per video he makes like hundred thousand, hundreds of thousands of dollars or so per piece of content. So I just think that the affiliate could be good testing waters for the creators to know what is it that they're driving? More like the data side of things than a long term play. But yeah, I don't know how that Attribution could get solved. What do you think, Blaine?

Well, I mean, one thing that jumps out is kind of like what we saw happen with Facebook or Meta shutting down their kind of commerce operations. I think one thing that they do really well is they enable the platform layer for affiliate to happen. Maybe that's somewhere that they'll be pivoting into instead of managing and being a true storefront, maybe they can just lean into being more of an affiliate layer. I don't know. We'll see if they're able to develop there or someone else pops up. But definitely I agree with you. Zawar and I do think we've seen a couple of different solutions that are up and coming in the affiliate space, especially on the creator side where people are, you know, be able to make create their own storefronts and get attribution that way, where it's like they're like custom PDPs based on the creator and all that sort of stuff. So I think there will be exciting, maybe point solutions to it but I haven't seen anything yet where it's like just like the whole infrastructure sort of.

Covered for affiliate for sure. I think it's not going to be brands that are going to be pushing for this, right? It's going to be people who are going to stand up for creators that are going to push for this and I hope to see something cool soon.

You mentioned media. You prefer to go into media than commerce. Can you expand on that? What is a media alternative to commerce? That are examples that you've seen work really well rather than the traditional commerce launcher brand.

So you're thinking like direct to commerce being more like the direct to consumer, the CPG, the merch? Yeah, media. There's a lot of different and there's examples of media just being alone. This is a media business and there's also examples of combination of media and so media alone would be things like brand deals, right? Like you're taking sponsorships for making your media, right? That is, you getting paid for creating great content AdSense and creator funds as well as doing sponsored content specifically for different brands and distributors. But where things get really interesting is when you end up in media that can be commerce, right? How can you have people pay for content? And that could be like a course that could be things like paywall content, right? That could be like Patreon. That's where things also get really interesting. Where you can say like hey, actually I am taking a step back. And I know what I am best at is I am a great podcaster, I'm a great YouTuber and I know there is a small percentage of my fans 5% 2% half a percent who love my content so much. That they would be willing to give me money to get twice the content or they want to get better content and they want to get a little bit more content.

So how can I maybe sell that feature to them? So then essentially it becomes kind of like a marketing funnel. People find my channel, they love the content, they subscribe, they become a daily or weekly viewer. And that last step of the funnel is I say hey, head on over to my Patreon or head on over to this website built by Fourth Wall and you pay me $3 a month and I will give you 2 hours worth of entertainment. That's a pretty good proposition for a lot of audiences as well as for a lot of creators and that adds up to a lot of money. So that's kind of where media gets really interesting, I think, for creators as well. Yeah.

And I think another space that is getting exciting. I know this is something you had mentioned to Zawar is like, different ways to monetize, even. We're starting to see creators get into b to b. Right. I know Nas, he was like a classmate with me in Undergrad, but he started the YouTube channel Nas Daily, and I think he just launched his own community SaaS platform. Right. And I know the traditional things for creators to do with that sort of audience is go into all these other things. But I was like, that might be the first creator led b, two b SaaS tool that I've seen.

Yeah, I mean, that's where things get really exciting because then you're talking about higher margins and higher cost per higher revenue per customer you're bringing in. Another really good example of that is a friend of mine, Nick Sharma, on Twitter who's kind of like the D to C guy. And he launched Hooks. And the guy is a B to B influence. He's got, I think, over 100,000 followers on Twitter. He talks about building direct to consumer companies. And then he launches this product, this website called Hooks Hoox. And the whole idea is that they are selling you landing pages.

They will understand your business, I'll understand your problem to solve, and they'll make you killer landing pages that will increase your conversion rates. And I'm like, Bro, this is a creator brand. You have an audience, they have a pain point. You've solved the pain point. They trust you. You're the expert, and you're giving them additional services. Like, this is awesome. I love this.

Another one that just kind of really random. When I first 1st started this two years ago, I think it was spring of 2021, I was working with a creator, and we were really early in the ideation stage, and their content was all around creating special moments of happiness. And I was like, man, what could we do here? Maybe we can do like a gift giving box. Like encourage more gifting occasions. Don't just give someone a gift on their birthday. Just like, I'm thinking of you. And we'll curate the box and we'll set it for them. And as I started just diving deeper into this whole curated box gifting industry, I realized that a majority of this industry is made up by corporate gifting.

Right? Like, end of the year is coming around. I want to remind my clients I'm still here. I want to remind them how much I love their business. So I want to give them a nice gift. Right? My budget is pretty big. A few hundred dollars, maybe a few thousand dollars. And I was like, Whoa, that'd be really interesting. What if we took this creator's audience of consumers and then over time, we built out this b to b platform where the consumers would see it as they were on the website, if it wasn't relevant to them, they just kind of zoomed by.

But if it was relevant to them and they were like, oh, shit, hold on. You can give me a custom branded box for my business, or you can give me cool merch, or you can give me awesome stuff and special gifts for my customers. Okay, count me in. Here's a purchase order for ten grand, right? That's where things get really interesting, exciting when you can say, like, oh, we started with a direct to consumer business, but there was like a B to B opportunity that we stumbled into. This kind of stuff excites me.

Can you let us walk into a meeting of yours and break down the framework of what that looks like? What is the ideation process really like, and where do you take it from ideation to launch?

Yeah, sure. So a creator comes to me and says, so I want to launch brand, right? So the first thing I'm going to ask you and say, like, hey, do you have a brand? Do you have any ideas? Do you have any kind of concepts? Have you seen anything in your comments? Hopefully you do. So we'll add that to our list, right? That'll be the first thing on our list. After that, I'm going to start doing a deep dive into your content. I'm watching all of your videos. I'm watching Instagram, Twitter. I'm looking to see kind of weird people are showing up. I'm reading all of the comments.

Oftentimes the answers are just sitting in the comments. I'm looking to see kind of what were those viral moments that maybe you've had that we can lean into? And I'm looking for problems to solve, right? I'm just like, what's a problem? Maybe you're a cooking creator. And everyone's like, hey, Zawar, what's the best chef's knife for beginners? And I go, shoot, there's a problem. There's something there. Why don't we try to tackle that? So we'll just kind of come up with the small list of ideas to just kind of begin with, hey, here are some problems that we can go off and solve after that. It's really just really basic, like design thinking exercises where we'll lean into those ideas, we'll iterate on those ideas. We'll come up with more ideas by diverging, and then we'll refine those ideas by converging a lot of the basic principles that are honestly taught at the Stanford D School as well as IDEO. Those are kind of the gold standards for me.

Kind of where a lot of the inspiration comes from. All these ideation sessions. Once we start to land on kind of a concept, we start or maybe a handful of concepts, like our kind of final set. We start scoring these on a three pronged system viability, feasibility and desirability. So the viability is, okay, great ideas, or you want to launch, I don't know, a beginner's chef site. How viable is it? That we can actually make this. Where are these manufacturers? Are they in the US. Are they abroad? What's? Their MOQ? What's the cost going to be? Are we going to have to get custom dye lines made or dies made? And how much is going to be the cost just to enter? Right? Or is this going to just be way too big for us to handle? Second one is feasibility, right? Financially, is this viable? Is this going to just be a profitable item or not? And lastly, it's desirability.

How excited is our audience about this? And that's a really easy one to gauge, right? We can just quick instagram poll just sending something in the DMs. We can just get a quick quant or qualitative analysis of how the creator's audience is reacting to this. Then we'll jump into the build phase. And I don't want to bore your audience with this. I'm sure they're all too familiar with how you build a direct to consumer or SAPG business. You get the suppliers, you get the samples, you get the brand identity, you piece it all together, right? And so that's kind of the role that I'm playing for these creators is kind of acting as like their own personal operator to piece together this puzzle. And then that's kind of how we start tripping and stumbling our way to a launch. That's awesome.

And I think those are the really important questions to ask because it's not just about the product. Obviously, the product needs to be good, but like you said, it needs to solve a problem and needs to resonate with the audience. So when you're actually thinking about building these brands with creators in mind, it's about getting the product right, but also making sure the problem is right, making sure the audience right, making sure the solution is right, and also the margins check out and the logistics and everything else like that. So I think it is really important to be thinking that way because when you're putting this much time and effort and really building your own brand, you want to make sure all of that stuff checks out. You don't want to be like, oh, a couple of things checked out and then audience didn't want it, or a couple of things checked out, but there's no way we can actually source or create this product at a margin that is profitable. So what are we doing here? Right. That's I think really important to think about. And the last thing before we wrap up here is just like, what other projects are you thinking about for the next year in 2023? What's exciting to you as we look forward to the next year?

So give it away. Some of my secrets here is I'm always thinking really big picture about my career. And the way I look at my career with creators is probably in three phases. The first phase was doing a lot of the advising and consulting, right? So getting a seat at the table and understanding what problems these creators are having, how to work with managers and agents and had a blast doing that for the last couple of years. But I'm now starting to stumble into phase two of my career, which looks like, hey, it was really fun to have my hand in like seven different exciting projects with seven different creators all at once. But what it kind of robbed from me was focus. And so the theme of 2023 for me is focus. And I'm stepping away from a lot of these consulting and advisor roles and taking a lot of time to think about I have a moderate understanding of creators and creator brands.

I have a strong understanding of CBG. How can I start to fit those two puzzle pieces together and identify real opportunities where not only is there a huge white space amongst the category and the product, but also there is a hungry niche of content, an audience that's like, give me the best product records here, I have problems to solve. So 2023 in this phase two is going to be spent kind of solving those problems and actually launching my own owned brands in partnership with creators. So it's kind of saying phase one was creator first and then build out the idea. Now phase two is kind of like, let's start with the idea and then figure out who the right creators are to tag along with this and when is the right time to bring them in. Then I would say probably what phase three starts to look like, which is probably a long ways away. Is what's the second brand and what's the third brand? How do these brands interact with one another? How do they benefit each other? Are they all maybe in the same category and they're just targeting different audiences? So we have a lot of synergies with our supply chain or maybe it's that they're in different categories but they're targeting the same consumer. So our marketing funnel is really optimized.

You just have to acquire one consumer and then you start introducing them to the other brands and now your LTV starts going up because they're buying from all your different brands at once and they start kind of cross promoting one another. So that's probably a longer ways away. But my goodness, this last couple of years of advising and consulting with creators has been one of the most exciting of my life. I've gotten to just see a very new and fresh and exciting way to bring to do these kind of go to market strategies for these CPG and consumer brands. And I'm excited to see where this is going to continue to go.

I love that. I think that last one is going to be really interesting too. I wouldn't be surprised if private equity comes along and tries to acquire a bunch of these creator led brands within the same vertical and stuff, if that's already happening. But before we wrap up, I just have one question, which is what are your thoughts on faceless creators and faceless brands? I mean, you have, for example, Dave Portnoy built Bardstool. Now you have Barstool partnering with commerce. So a media company started by a creator partnering with a commerce company. And everything that's happening with AI, et cetera, people are building accounts without their faces involved in it. Have you started seeing some of that trickling into commerce? And is that going to build enough trust for audiences of that background of creator faceless accounts be able to transact with their audience?

For sure. I mean, like, this is exciting stuff. You touched on two different examples. One is like, a media company, like Barstool diving into commerce. And then you also touched on Faceless personalities. And is there going to be credibility there as well? I think the Barstool example is a great one. It's a great example for a lot of your audience members to go understand, explore and understand how they went from being a media company to absolutely killing it with their commerce projects. Except for that watch project that they.

The only reason I mentioned that is because brands listening. You think audiences, they think creators, but there's a white space, too, to go partner with existing media companies. A skincare company could do with Vogue. It doesn't necessarily have to be a big influencer because Barstool has proven that this model is for sure.

Like, I'm pretty sure the founder of Glossier was a blogger, right? She had a successful blog that I think had the word Gloss in it, and then a product kind of spewed off of it. So why wait for that founder to stumble upon that idea herself and then go through that arduous journey of saying, oh, I need to make my media company a commerce company? If you already have a commerce brand, go reach out to them. Make those collaborations. Like I said, 2023 is going to be the year of the nontraditional collaborations between brands and creators and brands. And these smaller media companies, it's all about connecting eyeballs to dollars, right? And so these two will always need the help of one another. So if you're a founder, go think about these nontraditional relationships. You can go find with media companies, whether it's a personal media company and a creator, or even just a smaller media outlet like the bar stool from ten years ago. I think that's really exciting.

Faceless. When it comes to Faceless AIS, I haven't had a chance to work with them yet. But what I do see happening there nonetheless is that these parasocial relationships are being developed even without having seen a face. So there is definitely a risk to partnering with someone who hasn't presented their face yet. But I will say there is definitely no shortage of people liking that content, enjoying that content, and developing a relationship with them. And if there's a relationship, there's an opportunity for commerce.

Awesome.

Well, Zamar, thanks so much for joining us on this episode, and we can't wait to hear how your brand kind of comes together, some of the projects that you get involved in, and can't wait to have you back on the show.

Blaine, Ramon, thank you so much for having me. If anyone in your audience has any questions for me, you can find me on Twitter, zawarcon or the website is hellorelrel.com. That's where you can find me. I'm always happy to riff with any founders or creators as well. Sweet.

Yeah, and we'll drop those in the Show Notes as well. So thanks a lot and have a good one.

Man. Thank you, Zawar. Thanks, guys.

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