What's up, DTC. Pod? Today we're joined by Lee Jasalavitz, who is the co founder of the Quality Edit. So, Lee, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you guys are building at the Quality Edit?

Yeah, of course. I can take us all the way back. I'll keep it brief, but I'll take us back to when I started working in the digital advertising space at a small agency. Well, at the time was small, called Hawk Media in La. And that was almost a decade ago, and that was really the golden era of Facebook ads and starting online businesses. It seemed like anyone could spin up a shopify site and make a half decent product with no real branding, make some pretty average Facebook ads and be very successful. So the agency really blew up and so did the industry. So after a few pretty grueling years there, I then wanted to get some in house experience.

So I joined Virtual right around when the brand launched, and I head up growth there for about four years, helping take the company from the ground floor to the nine figure business that it is today. And that brings me to the Quality Edit story. Ritual is where my co founder Lauren, who was on the podcast last week or a few weeks ago, and I met at Ritual. And we were sitting side by side for three years, tinkering around with high impact growth ideas and strategies. And what we really found most successful and what ultimately changed the trajectory for Ritual was a few bespoke content partnerships with a handful of top tier publishers like Buzfeed was one of the standout ones. And we worked with them in ways that had never really been done before, leveraging their press and leveraging their editorial in paid acquisition and paid advertising in new and novel ways. And it was at the time really groundbreaking and really changed the trajectory for Ritual and set it on its way. So we kind of found this magic sauce with Lauren being on the partnerships and storytelling side, passionate about helping brands sort of share their story in an authentic and compelling way, and me on the acquisition side, really thrilled and obsessed with driving measurable customer and revenue growth for businesses.

And when those two things came together, we kind of made the magic happen. And Lauren and I, outside of work, were also consumers ourselves. We shop online too much, we were also advisors and investors to other direct to consumer brands and we were constantly trying new products. And then we kind of had this AHA moment that although there did seem to be a new direct to consumer brand popping up on a daily basis, there wasn't really an authority in the space helping to actually vet and discover all of those brands. So at the start of the pandemic, when we had very little excuses, we co founded the Quality Edit.

Got it. And yeah, it's so fascinating in terms of the career trajectory going from running performance and acquisition at a really successful D to C brand into this new sort of space where you were seeing as one of your most popular channels. So before we get too far into the Quality Edit and I want to be able to kind of unpack that with you, go through literally how you guys are building it and everything about it. But let's step back a little bit to Ritual, right? So you having been there over the course of four plus years, you saw a brand really grow from a smaller sort of D to C brand, all the way up to you mentioned a nine figure brand through all of these channels. So what was that like along the way? How did you think about growth when you got there in the early days? Was it just Facebook ads at that time? What were some of the acquisition channels you were relying on? And then from there, where did you start? What were some of the really successful initiatives that you mentioned? I know you just mentioned this one, and we'll definitely get into that, but what are all of some of the things that worked really well and maybe not so well at Ritual?

Yeah, no, definitely, it's a great question. Like I mentioned at that time, I had just left the agency where it was pretty much Facebook ads. Like people were just running Facebook ads and driving really successful businesses. And so when Ritual hired me, I think they and I thought that that would be the case, like, I'm just going to run some Facebook ads for the next few years and we'll be golden. And when I joined Ritual Facebook advertising, they had recently launched, but Facebook advertising was 95% to 98% of their customer acquisition. And I was already starting to feel a little bit concerned with that. So the first thing I did was, okay, what other channels can we find these consumers? Because it just seems very concerning to be 95% dependent on Facebook ads. So one of the first things we turned on in a real way was sort of the next obvious digital channel being Google for vitamins.

Google is really a strong place to be. There's really strong search intent people are very specifically looking for, whether it's a prenatal vitamin or a multivitamin or post menopause or whatever it may be, people are searching for what they need. So it was almost like crazy to not be showing up there and became very quickly a really big channel for Ritual. And then we really started to look to what we kind of put into this partnerships, influencer third party validation bucket, where we essentially, I think, grew the company and the whole growth program through. And that included everything from podcasts, which became a very big channel for Ritual. And one thing that really stood out to me, particularly on podcasts, but some of these other channels as well that I'll get into was as a subscription business, we had visibility into where our best customers were coming from and podcast customers were always at the top of that list. I think those are the customers that really took the time to educate themselves, were really not making impulse decisions on seeing a cute Instagram ad and that more educated consumer really stuck around and became that really high LTV customer that we were trying to acquire. So then we kind of became obsessed, like, where else can we find this type of customer? And that was definitely through those editorial partnerships that I mentioned and through Influences.

I was very skeptical about influencer marketing. I have to admit I was very much proven wrong. It is very much still alive and it's a very strong channel to acquire customers through, but it is a very tedious channel. And so as we started building out the influencer marketing program, that's really when we had to grow the growth team, we needed a lot of human resources. So the team started with really myself and our VP of marketing and then grew to a team of 910, primarily focused on these influencer channels since they're not as easy as Facebook and Google, where you can have a really strong performance marketer, kind of pulling those levers and setting those budgets. And you can go from ten K spend a day to 100K spend a day if you're doing things right. But that's just not the case on some of these more difficult channels to scale. Like influencer marketing and podcasts.

So we were very hands on with everybody that touched the brand, every single influencer podcast host, at least at the beginning, we got on calls. We really educated on the brand and we're trying to build a large group of influences that really knew our story and our products and vitamins are not very simple. The ingredients are very specific and nuanced, and the benefits are not always obvious. So you really have to kind of be able to educate the people that are educating the end consumers. So, long story short, those were some of the channels that really helped take Ritual to the next level. And we really proved very quickly that Facebook ads wasn't going to get the job done. And we really scaled into a lot of those additional third party validation channels.

Yeah, and the thing that really is exciting about how you were thinking about things was kind of this idea of the right customer and the right intent around how you're acquiring them. Right. Because if you're just running Facebook ads all day, at a certain point, be that traffic becomes more expensive over time as more competitors come onto the platform. But B, like you were saying, you don't even know what type of customers that you're acquiring. Maybe someone sees an ad and they're like, oh click, I'll buy that. But they don't know why they're there and they're just going to churn and they're not going to have the LTV, which in a subscription business is super important. So going back and revisiting that idea of really strong intent and being able to target these in these channels. One thing you had mentioned was Google and Google Search, because people who are searching for these specific vitamins are probably going to be high intent buyers.

Right. So what was your strategy there? Were you thinking about it in an organic search sense, like an AdWord sense? Both and how did you launch that campaign?

Yeah, definitely. Very much both. The first initiative was on the paid side. So getting those paid Google Ads up, making sure that we have those paid ads showing up pretty much with every or close to every vitamin search within our right correct demos. But I think what's even more interesting is on the organic side, I think that there's a lot of interesting ways to show up on Google that are not just through paid ads. So we really started ramping up a lot of SEO and affiliate initiatives, which sometimes are one in the same or sometimes two different things. On the SEO side, brought in house a really incredible editorial writer to ramp up the frequency of blogs and posts that we were publishing on the ritual site and really doing the SEO research. Behind.

What are the searches? That are somewhat relevant, that can get people to our site, that can help us show up and make sure that we're writing quality content to be there. And then I think the other thing was not just on our website, but how could we leverage other websites, affiliates, publications, blogs, influencer sites, and make sure that when they're winning and their SEO queries are popping up, how can we be there? And so again, it came back to this influencer affiliate strategy of when you go and Google best multivitamins, if you did it now, you would probably see Ritual on a lot of those lists. And luckily, Ritual multivitamin, I'm biased, they do make the best vitamins. And so it was an easy pitch to make, and any of these affiliates would quickly see that. So there's a little bit of convincing and negotiating and sending product and schmoozing. But as a growth marketer, I always have to give a lot of credit to the product itself. That sort of gives us the opportunity to show up in these types of lists, like a health line, best woman's multivitamin as an example. So it was really my mission over the four years to show up basically in every single result on that first page or first two pages of Google.

Whether that's through a paid ad, whether that's through Rituals blog in an organic ad, whether that's through all of the affiliates that we are working with, all the influencers, the publications and the blogs. And I think we did a pretty good job of that, which you can test me on afterwards when you do some multivitamin searches.

No, I love that. I think the strategy is so good in terms of just being there in any way, shape or form. Like you were saying, it's not just about getting the exact search right. Even from a brand marketing point of view. I know Google will report just on impressions that you might be doing for keywords like Ritual. You might have been like, yes, you may have been getting, call it like hundreds or thousands of clicks on specific search results, but you could have been equally doing 5100 X. That just in terms of brand impressions where people maybe aren't clicking your link, but are just like seeing that blip of, oh, that's Ritual. And then when you hit them again, whether through an affiliate, through an ad, or elsewhere, they're like, oh, I've seen that.

So I think SEO definitely shouldn't be overlooked from an acquisition perspective. And then one thing I wanted where I think it's really interesting in terms of what you guys did on that side, and then turning that into what you're building with a quality edit now is you were basically saying, we have a good product. We're able to approach and build these relationships with all these different publishers, and we can set up that affiliate infrastructure, so everyone's going to win out. We know we have a good product, it already sells. They're already talking about this. So not just like building out the partnerships, but how did you actually set up the affiliate tracking were there software tools in place for that already? Did you guys have to build that out yourself? How were you able to set up that affiliate program for your own specific product with the publishers that you were working with?

Yeah, it's a great question and I think that if anybody's listening and they want to build like a really good affiliate tracking tool, I think there is space for that. It was very much a triangulation of data pulled from the actual affiliate platforms, the share sales of the world, and there's so many of them. So making sure that you're checking on the share sale and the pepper jam impact radius and however many they are. But then also we were lucky enough to have the data resources in house to build out really helpful dashboards. We used a tool called Looker that really helped us keep track of all of these various data sources all over the place and make sure we're both tracking performance and finding new opportunities and insights from that data. But it's definitely not affiliate tracking is not the prettiest thing. No.

Absolutely. And I guess the last question I'd have on that before we move more into quality edit is for a brand who's maybe thinking about doing their own affiliate stuff. Now, is it more about because I know at the large end of the scale right there's, like, massive affiliate networks that are doing tons of traffic, and you need to have a really good offer to be able to sell into those. But for a smaller brand starting up, what are the affiliate opportunities? Is it something you have to build out yourself? Are there resources that you can tap into? Like if you were imagine you were a small brand, you start up, you're doing like call it a million in revenue and you're like, okay, I've done some Facebook stuff. That's kind of working. Now I want to dip my toes into affiliate. How would you approach that?

Yeah, I would start by going off to the affiliates or blogs or websites that are showing up where I want to show up. So if I'm selling dog food, I would very simple Google search, like, what's the best dog food and who's showing up there? And I would reach out directly to those websites and I would make them a really compelling offer. I really wouldn't be cheap about it because Facebook ads are expensive AF and it really means that you have quite a lot of budget per customer to play around with and really give to an affiliate. Like I would rather give $10 to an affiliate than pay $30 to acquire a customer on Facebook ads. So really think about what your customer acquisition cost is and go directly to them and make them a really good offer. A lot of the times the affiliate commission rates are 10% 20% and if you have a low AOV product or a subscription business like ritual was that 10% of the first order is pretty meaningless to particularly a large affiliate. But, you know, as a growth marketer, if you have a subscription business and you know that customer is going to stick around for six months, your order value is not that first month. Call it $10, it's over the course of six months.

So you can go to that affiliate and say, I'll actually pay you 100% of the first order. I will give you that 100%, it's all yours, and make it pretty hard for them to turn down. It really backs out. It makes sense to do that. And it helps you show up where you need to show up, and it also really helps you build the right retargeting pools and audiences of people that are searching for what you're selling for. So there's also a premium on that, even if they don't check out immediately.

Yeah, I think that's such a good point in terms of what you're saying about subscription and LTV right. A lot of brands have figured out where their payback period is on a customer. And if that like you were saying, you can even get away with if you have the right type of product giving away the whole offer for free. And the affiliate is going to be pumped about that and the customer is going to find it in a way where they have very high intention and they're already being met with the type of resource that they were looking for in the content to begin with. So that's awesome. So why don't we move a little bit forward to the quality edit? Right. So you clearly have seen this work for a brand, how it can grow, and now you decide to kind of, like, flip to the other side, and you're like, wait a minute. This can be a resource, and we can build out a resource that has all these benefits that we've been talking about, and we can build it out ourselves.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about what some of the thought processes were going into being able to build the quality edit from the ground up? You'd seen the other side. So what were the considerations you had as you went to build this product yourself?

Yeah, definitely. As a growth marketer. We were working with so many top tier publications and with smaller niche blogs and influences, and there were often very specific things that I needed or wanted or knew would drive success and just kind of couldn't get from the other side. Like, hey, Buzfeed, we're driving all of this traffic to your article, but we're losing all of these retargeting audiences. Would you mind sharing those with us? No, that's not going to happen. Or. Hey, x publication. We're seeing pretty strong results on this article, but I think that we could really optimize it if we maybe adjusted the headline to XYZ or we added a CTA, they're not going to do that.

And it seemed almost silly to me that a lot of publications are looking for new and modernized ways to monetize, but then on the other hand are not actually listening to the modern growth marketers really. And so after a few frustrations, we just decided let's do it ourselves. We know that we would need to build a legitimate publication because working with brands like Ritual that are very precious about their brands, they wouldn't want to work with a publication that was kind of just purely selling themselves out. There's a church and state in publications that has been around forever where the partnerships team and the BD team works separately and individually from the editorial team. And we knew that that would be a really important part of actually building the publication and then kind of coming back to the performance side of things. We also knew that it would take many sort of tools for success to arbitrage success on paid social. And that would mean we would need high quality editorial. We would have this third party validation coming from actually building this publication, a real publication.

We would need UGC ad creative. That's what performs best. So what, ads are actually driving traffic to the high quality editorial. If those ads are missing the mark, then that editorial is not really going to see the light of day. And that was another thing that I felt traditional publications were really missing the mark on. We also knew we would need like conversion rate optimization, we would need landing page testing, we would need media management strategy and whitelisting. It's this whole 360 degree ecosystem that nobody was really doing a good job of. There were these traditional publications that were kind of stuck in their way and then there were these very performance focused performance agencies that were kind of starting to get in on this strategy but were doing it in a way that almost sacrificed brand.

It was like, oh hey, I don't care about the quality of this content, it just needs to convert and I don't care about the authenticity of this content or the authenticity of this publication. There's a lot of fake shell publications out there that I just knew for brands like Ritual and many others that wouldn't fly. So all of those things that was probably just like a long ramble of stuff came into the creation of the quality edit and how we can really build a performance agency out of a publication to help brands acquire customers more efficiently.

And another thing to one of your points that you had mentioned before was the fact that in the old system, right, you have these publishers and you have PR firms and they're doing all this stuff but they're not actually catering a lot of the times to what the customer needs. And this is just like an anecdote. But I've seen this time and time again where a founder of a company is like, they're working really hard. They secure a PR firm. PR firm gets them a placement in a piece or whatever, and maybe it's like, obviously the PR firm is going to talk it up and they end up getting the piece and then it's like an okay placement. But then they go in, there's no backlink, the title is messed up, and then there's no recourse to fix that. And that just seems like so obvious because it's a horrible customer experience for that founder. And the people who are looking to get placed into those places, they're like paying in some cases 1015 20K for one or two articles.

And then those articles run and it's like, oh, what happened there? I think that's just something that's very relatable as people think about this modern landscape. Is that something that you guys have seen before in your past? And is that something that you guys can hopefully solve for a little bit better?

Yeah, I think I still have nightmares from I guess I'll just call out it. It was a vogue article. Sorry vogue. I still love you. I think we paid somewhere between 30 and 50K off the top of my head. And it was a pretty big bet that we had taken. And I was a little nervous about it, but I was really excited. And then it was just like an absolute disaster.

It was a complete slop. And not only was it a complete slop, but I think there was maybe like six sessions driven to the site or something like that. It was awful. So, yes, I've had that exact experience with other publications and that was really something that we wanted to very much avoid with Equality Edit, and really wanted to kind of provide the level of service to D to C brands that they aim to provide to their customers in this industry. It's such a big part of success, and I think that that has also driven a lot of the quality edit success is being able to cater and tailor to the customer in a very real way.

So why don't you talk us through a little bit about, like, let's imagine I'm a D to C brand and I'm looking for an engagement with the quality edit. Right? What does that look like? What can I, as a brand expect? How does it work? Why don't you just walk us through that a little bit?

Yeah, definitely. So we work with many D to C brands and as you know, we tailor things to our customers. So because of that, we've really pivoted and adjusted according to what we're hearing brands need and want the most. And so we have a few different ways of working with us, but really the way that we're seeing the most success with is pretty much a 360 degree media management capacity. So a brand will come to us or we'll go to them if our editorial team approves, we'll get products sent out to our editorial team. They'll test out the product, try it out. There pretty much always has to be like a genuine interest or love for that product and an editor that's really going to be able to write an authentic story or review of that product. And then we would also send out the product to our creators who will help create the UGC ad assets.

And then we'll align with the brand on what their KPIs are, what their targets are, what their CPAs are internally and what their goals are, and then essentially use a combination of the UGC assets that we've provided the. Editorial that we've created. The third party validation coming from actually driving ads from the quality edit rather than directly from the brand, along with all the testing and landing page optimization that we do. So it's pretty much a performance agency out of a publication that really does everything. Like some brands want to be very hands off and they kind of say like, hi, chat to you in a month if things are looking good and we share back a report that's automated and live for them to check in on performance. And it can really be a pretty hands off and really effective performance model and sometimes we're more hands on. But I think a lot of performance agencies focus on media management and then need the brand for pretty much everything else. Like, okay, what's the ad copy, what's the creative, can you send me some ad assets? Like, I need your creative team.

And the way that the Quality Edit works is essentially a performance agency. If they had every resources that resource that they needed to be successful.

Got it. And then the other question I had there is the brand would start working with you. They'll send you the stuff, you guys will do the whole review, the editorial, the ad copy. It's almost like you're able to create these really trustworthy because you said it's so important to have that trust and truly be able to write and review these products. But you're almost being able to create these advertorials and landing pages and all these different assets for these brands that then they can use and repurpose however they want. Right? Are you seeing any other sort of use cases where brands, I don't know, are they running ads to some of the stories that you've done? Are they including those stories in their newsletters to their customers? What are some of the other synergies that come out of all these different types of content forms that you're creating?

Yeah, no, definitely, great question. There's a lot of interesting sort of insights that we learn through a lot of these storytelling and content initiatives that we are able to report back and share back with the brand and they'll learn things about their brand and about what's working or not working that they never. Knew that. Yes, of course they're copying they're iterating on what we're saying is working and we want that to be the case because the brands that we work with, their success is our success and we're really happy when we stumble on something that they can really take into all of their initiatives across the board. But I'll say what really excites us most is when a brand sees that our initiatives are more efficient than their internal initiatives and just sort of let us run with that. So we're able to scale and pretty much increase the quality at an initiative budget. Whether the brand is decreasing theirs or not kind of varies on a case to case basis but we have been able to scale brands media spends with Tqe Ten X in a month, for example. So we've also gotten really intrigued by how we can actually take those insights and scale them even further and diversify them further.

And so another thing that we've started doing is also influencer whitelisting and so a brand can we'll share the story from the quality edit handle? And we'll learn that XYZ story is working best and then we'll start working. With our roster of creators and influencers and having different voices share a similar story and have that story come from their, you know, working with one of our creators or influencers to make that UGC ad to also write the editorial on thequalityedit.com it creates for multiple know that all kind of came from this one umbrella, but allows us to constantly kind of diversify the ad account and scale it up.

No, that makes a ton of sense and it seems like there's so many like you were saying, once you've kind of got an engagement going, there's so many different ways that you're able to there's so many angles that you can attack from, right? Whether it's just the content piece itself at face value, whether it's like the ads that brand can use, whether it's the whitelisting. So in the case of the whitelisting, does that mean the influencer might be you might whitelist their account and it might be like the editorial article that you've created which is being whitelisted from their account. It's like that it got it. So there's all these different avenues that you can use this content and this trustworthy content to continue to grow and I think that's really cool that it's not just a one dimensional play. There's so many different levels to it, right? Because at face value, if you just look at the quality edit, you're like, okay, this is a great editorial site, but you don't really realize that it actually goes a couple of levels deeper. And once you understand what's going on under the hood, you're like, oh, okay, this makes a ton of sense for brands and why they would engage with you guys. Let's step back and let's go into a little bit about just from the user's perspective right. Why don't you talk to me about the quality edit what some of the initiatives are because clearly you guys have gift guides, articles, shopping guides.

How do you think about your content strategy and what the users are actually interacting with? How are you thinking about that whole experience?

Yeah, I would say about 10% of the content that we publish to our site is content that's in partnership with brands and it's always labeled as such. But like I mentioned, it was really important to us from the beginning and through everything that we do to really build a publication that we would actually want to read, that we would be interested in and that we would want to come back to. And so 90% of our content is based on what is getting the most engagement and what people are coming back to look for and we've gotten really creative with a couple of different content, verticals but at a high level. I think the gift guide or listicle roundup type of content really does resonate with people and is really enjoying to consume and I think what we're really excited about is we started with this niche of the direct to consumer brands in the D to C space and all of the products that are being launched. But I think that there's a level kind of deeper which is the actual consumer that is purchasing those D to C brands also has very specific lifestyle needs and goes to very specific restaurants and travels in a very specific way. And I actually don't think that there's many publications that are speaking to this exact consumer in a way that we can and will continue to do. So we're excited to keep evolving our content and help curate the sort of modern day consumers lives across a lot of things that they do.

But I think what's really cool there is if you just think of the trajectory of the business, right? Like you as the quality edit. Yes you do the performance marketing piece and all this sort of stuff but you guys are a business in of yourself and just to think about the direction and basically what you're building is almost like the modern day publishing house that's suited for what? Brands and people who are really going to be paying and syncing ad budgets into what they really need. Right. If you're able to solve this problem for D to C and consumer brands that are selling physical products, like you were saying, you can do the same sort of things for whether it's restaurants, whether it's hotels, local guides, local services. There's so many different ways in which you can expand into lifestyle and other opportunities. And those companies, they need services just like this, just in the same. So it just becomes a really cool when you think about it, where the growth path is. There's just so many opportunities to be able to go after, right.

Exactly. Yeah, you summed that up really well.

So one of the last questions I have before we wrap up here is from here what was it like building a team out to do this from a company perspective? How has it been building the company? Because you guys obviously need writers, you're working with all these different clients, you're executing all these different services so why don't you talk to us a little bit about what it's been like so far like as a founder building the quality edit out as a company?

Yeah so the first thing I'll say is that I'm very passionate about building teams. It's always been something that I've loved doing throughout my career, and so I think that that's really the most necessary, maybe, skill for a founder. So I feel really grateful and excited to have built a team around me that has really been able to grow Tqe over the last two years much faster than I would ever loan. I think one thing as a founder that as a first time founder that I don't know how prepared I was, was the ups and downs are very real. And so I think you got to learn to try to be a little bit more even keel and cool, but especially now when things are volatile in the direct to consumer space, in the digital advertising space in the industry in the world right now. And our business is obviously going to fluctuate with that has definitely been very humbling experience. But yes. So to maybe kind of come back to the question and answer how we built the quality edit out between Lauren, my third co founder, Scott and myself, we all very much stay in our lanes.

And I think that the partnership between the three of us has really been a big moat for us where I believe Lauren is the best at what she does. I believe I'm the best at what I do just after I said I was humbled. And Scott is the best at what he does. Scott's job was to build out the editorial team. Hannah has brought on I think 50 plus of the best editors from high tier publications. I've brought on performance and growth marketers that also are the best in the industry and we've really been able to prove out success for our performance partners. I know Lauren shares this stat over and over again but we're seeing a 30% decrease in CPAs and 20% increase in ROAS typically in comparison to brands internal accounts and we're beating internal accounts 90% of the time. So yeah, I think that that moat of a leadership team and each of us really being able to grow our functions and work really well together, but still allow one another to kind of take the lead on what they do best, has really been the mote and differentiator for us and has helped us grow quickly.

Yeah, and it's so important that you guys have different qualities and skill sets that are where you can kind of stay in your own lane and really own a different suite and all those different functions are totally different. So as we think about like, now that your skill set is you're on the growth and the performance side of a growth and performance minded product, how do you think about growing the quality edit? What are some of the initiatives with your growth hat on? How do you grow this publication to continue to be successful?

Yeah, I think that one thing that is more important than ever is first party data. Any growth marketer will know that there's a serious loss in third party data right now. And post iOS has made things extra challenging in an already challenging environment. And so I think that building an audience and building that first party data is going to become more and more valuable and brands will pay more and more for it. So one of my main priorities as a growth marketer when it comes to kind of putting my growth hat on for the quality edit and not necessarily for the partners that we work with, is really building that first. Party data and building up those audiences and getting email addresses and texts and sending surveys out to our customers and learning about what they're interested in, who they are. And I think that having that data and building that pool of data will just get more and more valuable. So that's a huge priority and focus and then on the client side and building out our client base, just continuing to listen to brands and what they need.

I think that this influencer whitelisting world is such a tedious thing to kind of pull off at scale and like I mentioned, kind of going back to the ritual days and hiring so many people to be able to vet, influencers, and negotiate with them and get whitelisting access and monitor their creative and make edits. And it's such a crazy process that I think in building out our own roster of creators and influencers that brands can tap into that have also been vetted and tested and we've sort of done the trial and error so brands don't have to do all the testing that we've almost already done. I think that that's an area that we're really focusing on, on the growth and client side as well.

Yeah, and it's great being able to apply that growth function to both sides, right. Not only the services that you're offering to the brands, but also this customer base and this readership. And I guess the last question I have in terms of growing an audience, right? Because it's different than in some cases, it's different than a brand who's going to have a bunch of emails and they're sending content around. Like, hey, here's our new product releases. Or a consumer service or consumer technology where you can send push notifications and you're like, here's our service. Here we can engage you. So a lot of times you're going to be engaging your audience that's a readership through new content. So does it take the form of, like, do you guys have a newsletter that you think about things like how are you driving your first party traffic and how are you capturing more and gathering more of readers?

Yeah, our newsletter is something that I admittedly neglected in our first year, I would say. So we kind of lagged in the growth department on the newsletter, but have really been focusing and ramping that up in the last year. Just last week, actually, we launched a bit of a rebrand and a site redesign. Definitely check it out. It looks awesome. And that site redesign has also helped us surface content in really fun and interesting and easily shoppable ways that we're definitely taking into our newsletter. And we have some recurring content buckets like Launch Digest that people really come back to and add to Cart. Like, what are our editors favorite picks? So starting to kind of build those verticals that people are excited to get in their inbox every week and just growing out that audience and only now really starting to do our own growth marketing to actually acquire newsletter subscribers, which is something we actually haven't done yet.

No. It's so exciting. So many different initiatives to take on. I just like it because I feel like a lot of the businesses, I feel like you guys are doing something that's really novel and unique. And I think it's just really cool to think about how these type of businesses are built, where on the surface level, if you look at it, you might be like, okay, I generally get it. But when you really look under the hood, it's really cool to think about. So as we wrap up here, Lee, where can our listeners connect with the quality edit and maybe other founders if they're trying to find you? Are you on Twitter? Like, what are the best channels for both the quality edit and you yourself?

Yes, definitely. Please reach out to me at lee@thequalityedit.com. Luckily, my first name is a little bit more easy than my last name. It's just L-E-E. Check out the site, thequalityedit.com and our Instagram, and you can also find me on LinkedIn if you're able to spell my last name. Jocelylavin.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on with us and we can't wait to see you guys continue to grow.

Thank you so much. It was great.