#309 - Scale Your Brand Like a Pro, DTC Blueprints from Homestead with COO, Joel Padron

What'S up DTC pod? Today we're joined by Joel Pedrone, who is the COO and partner at Homestead Studio. So Joel, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in the d to C space and what you guys are building at homestead.

For sure? Been around the game for a while now. Honestly. Been in the space. Started influencer marketing like ten years ago. Had like over 10 million followers on social media through there, learned how to build my own ecommerce sites, promote traffic to them and that kind of opened up the whole web of ads, email, all the things that come with it. Went over to Crossnet early in my career, was one of the early hires there. So I got my hands dirty scaling a brand from seven to eight figures in d to c, and then decided I wanted some more challenges. So went agency side.

How can I keep duplicating success helping brands in the seven, eight figure plus range scale online? Sweet.

So were you working with Chris over at Crossnet?

For a while.

And how'd you guys meet? In Miami?

Yeah, they moved down when they launched Crossnet. Really? And got to meet up with them through some mutual friends. So met them, had a good time, became friendly, stayed in touch, and then eventually they moved across the street from me, and we just started playing basketball every single week. So built up a good relationship, just naturally. Not really even business focused. And then we ended up working together. They had an opening. Looking for someone? I had a brief period where I was like, you know what? It was Covid.

I'm looking to get back into the ecommerce space. I took a break, and I didn't even submit my application. They were like, hey, we kind of want to consider you. Can you submit your application? I was like, all right, fine, I'll do it. They hit me up. They're like, yours was the best. Let's do this. I was like, all right, cool.

I'm game. So good relationship, very fun crew, and very fortunate. Got to learn a lot being behind a brand, doing a lot of cool things, and push the boundaries.

It's interesting that Crossnet is very specific in the sense that Crossnet was, like, defining a category, right? It's not like a beauty product that already exists. You know, the market. Crossnet is a product that is very differentiated from all the rest. And so I'm curious how that ties into the previous experience you had. What did you do before Crossnet? And then how was that experience different than the stuff you did previously?

That's a great question, and it's interesting. A lot of the work that I was doing in the influencer side was toward very broad audiences. So most of my clients were global brands. We're talking Uber, Bacardi, Adidas, and then working with celebrities as well. Jennifer Lopez, DNCE. Like a lot of global brands, I could not really target smaller audiences. So I did take a brief period where I started to learn how I could help people that have a local business a little more niche. So Crossnet was a fun example where I got to test the new skill set.

And one of the big things was where we even started was understanding your audience. I think that's something that no matter what size you are is very important and it's specific to a brand, especially across that that's unique. So one of the things we did was understand the audience. You think it's something people in our age demographic are a little younger, are like the main people into it, but you'd be surprised the people purchasing it are moms for their kids. So that is a good starting point where now I needed to revolve all of our messaging and our value props and how we convey the product in a way that speaks to actually moms buying the product for their kids while still keeping it cool. So that's an example of how I could go from something super broad to understanding your audience and how can you make it stand out. Yeah, it really starts to understanding who cares about your product and most importantly, who's buying it.

Yeah, I definitely want to talk about the agency side and your approach to sort of engagements and identifying first steps to take when you get a brand in the door. However, I think Crossnet is special in the sense that it was bootstrapped. And so when you're coming in bootstrapped and you're as early as having to identify the value, props to market, et cetera, the clock is ticking and you yet don't know which one is the marketing strategy that is going to best work for the product. And you get that wrong a few times in a row, it becomes too late to find the winning strategy. So how did you identify, how did you approach figuring out what was going to be the right strategy for this company, marketing strategy for this company before the clock run out?

Yeah, it's obviously very important when you're working with Bootstrap. Like you said, few wrong decisions. That's it. Your business is done. And I think a lot of people don't take that seriously enough. They're quick to sprint and go do the work, but they don't take enough time to sit down, process the information, make the right decisions. So I view things from an approach in terms of priority. What's going to make the biggest impact? First thing I always say again is start with understanding your audience.

So a lot of times people can name competitors. I like my ads that look like this. It's like, cool, who's actually buying your product? Why are they buying it? What use cases are they utilizing it? Understand that demographic, because from there, now is when you could craft offers. Now is when you could craft ads. Now is when you could craft landing pages, user messaging. How are you going to do all of that without knowing who you're speaking to. So for me, it's like step one in the approach. If you cannot clearly tell me who is actually buying your product, people make assumptions and they're not always correct.

Demonstrate with data who is buying your product? What are their interests? Create those personas or customer avatars. I hate all that BS stuff that you hear, like, make a business plan customer avatars, but it's there for a reason. So, yeah, like I said, that's kind of how I approach a lot of things. Know your customer, go into offers, go into ads, go into landing, page messaging. It all ties in together. If you get the first step wrong, everything else you do after, you're just wasting ad budget.

So right now, you guys at home said you guys cater to brands that are doing seven to nine figures and have scaled up their, and have scaled up the needs in terms of what they need in terms of all of the different parts of the advertising and performance funnel that you just mentioned. But first, I'd like to kind of go one step back. What you were just talking about is, like, very foundational stuff for a brand that's getting started out right. Like, who is your ICP? Who are you selling to? Are your offers right? Like, what do your landing pages look like? All of that sort of stuff. I'd love for you to talk to us about maybe some of the brands that you guys have gotten to work with, right? What did they get right in the early stages? And what are some of the ways that you see brands who maybe don't make it to the seven figures where they're ready to light a bunch of money on fire? What are some of the big mistakes that you see those brands making that they should get right out of the gates?

Yeah. Happy to share more. We've built a lot of that approach into Homestead. When we receive any leads, we put them kind of through this question process. And honestly, it starts with a little bit of DDC finance. I need to make sense if your business is even viable from a financial standpoint. So usually we're looking at what are your product costs, what are your average margins, what's your fixed rate to like, what's your run rate? How much fixed expenses do you need to cover every single month? So then whenever we're running ads, we know, cool. We need to make this much in gross profit to cover your labor, your warehouses, your office, anything to run the business.

Typically, we're looking for brands that have your cogs. Can't be more than like 40% at least. Usually it's a nice spot. If you've got 75% to 90% margin, I would say that's a good starting point. And then from there, it kind of lets us see, like, okay, what level of spend do we need to be achieving at what Roas or efficiency target, whatever it might be. Does it make financial sense for you to work with us? We usually compare that to what their historical data is. So it's like, are we really far off from that? Sometimes, unfortunately, sometimes they might tell you something on the call. And then you look at the data, it's like, how do you expect us to hit a $15 customer acquisition cost when you're averaging 70 for the last year? It's possible, but we do our due diligence there.

The other part then, is understanding your brand, kind of like we just touched upon. We'll send you a sheet that's like, cool. Send a list of your competitors. Outline your unique value, props, outline what are the use cases. Outline what differentiates your products. If you don't have a good product as well, there's not so much that you could do. You could still market your way through a bad product in the beginning, but as you grow, it's just worse and worse. You're just building something that's going to fall.

So for us, it starts very foundationally there. And then, honestly, something that people don't talk about is, what's the vibe? Are you actually going to listen to me or are you just going to try to pretend that you know everything? Oh, you did that one time. We're never going to do that again. I think that's something nobody talks about. But the more and more clients that we've worked with, I could tell off the gate, if you're going to give us the range that we need, and you're also going to do the work on your part to make this a successful partnership, or are you just going to point your finger anytime you're upset, your advisors, your investors aren't happy? Am I going to be the punching bag or am I a partner?

Yeah, I think that's a really important way to think about things, because, like you're saying, partnerships, a lot of the times, are two way streets. And it's not just like, oh, here you go. Figure it out. Because like you were saying, there are certain foundational things that a business has to have in place for it to work. So you guys need that partnership to be working correctly. So my next question for you is going to be kind of what you were saying about as brands are getting ready to scale like they're coming up on, call it seven figures, maybe like 5 million to $10 million. Are those clients that are coming into you? Are they solely focused on d to C? Have they kind of started doing some omnichannel or retail stuff at that stage? What is it that you're seeing commonly, like right now in the market from brands that you're working with? Are they on Amazon? Why don't you just give us paint the picture?

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. It comes up a lot and when's the right time to expand channels. And I have a lot of experience at that. With Crossnet, it's actually one of the DDC brands. That majority of the revenue comes from wholesale, big box Amazon. They have a good percentage of the revenue from global markets, much more substantial than majority of brands. So I understand how it could make a positive impact on a business, but I understand how much work it takes to get there. So there isn't a blanket answer, honestly, but I typically think until you've really scaled something to the maximum of your ability, you've expanded your own product catalog, then once you've done that, then you could expand markets.

You've proven yourself, you've proven yourself in the US market, your product, you've expanded and been able to capture more purchases, then you could kind of duplicate the success. If you're still figuring it out, you should not. So I think that's kind of like the criteria that I recommend rather than a revenue band, because it could be different. Traditionally. I would say, though, eight figures. Once you're getting into eight figures or trying to crack into eight figures, that's when it makes sense. But for us, the brands that are able to even achieve eight figures, you need to have proven yourself with like, you need an offer to scale behind all of the things that we've talked about. You had to cross off these steps in the fundamentals.

If you're at seven figure range, you've got proof of concept, your product works. If your return purchase rates are strong, you've got a working product. So at that point, it's like add fuel to the fire. You're not necessarily figuring things out. And even like Raymond, you said, it's like a lot of these businesses, a few wrong moves and you're out of business now. It's when you have the capital cushion that you can make investments in. These efforts is when you should start investing and trying to scale beyond them, not when you're looking for a silver bullet.

What are the favorite companies that you like to work with like, is it a specific vertical? Is it really the dynamic between you and the founder or the person you're working with there? Is it a specific sort of margin and unit economic of the business? Is it defining a category? Like, what are the attributes of the companies that you're like, oh, man, I'm fired up to work with this brand.

Yeah. And we get asked that a lot, too, where it's like, do you specialize in a certain nature category? And honestly we don't. We're pretty agnostic. As long as you're a physical product on Shopify, obviously aovs need to make some.

I meant you personally.

Sorry. Are you able to repeat the question then?

Yeah, no. What companies right now are you really excited to work with? Is there a specific vertical or type of company that you're looking for? More of those. And you're really excited to work with?

Yeah, honestly, I like to work the brands that are fun. So I've got enough years of experience in the game. Have a good team where if you pass the basic qualifications, if you're someone that I want to work with, want to see you win, your product excites me. It's very likely that I could excite somebody else to purchase your product. So I really think that the intangibles and more about the relationship, how we're going to work together, I think that's become a very strong indicator if we're going to have a great time and have something successful or are we not going to have much?

And it goes both ways. Right? What is it about homestead that makes companies want to work with Homestead? Why should a company work with Homestead over any other agency? There's a lot of noise in the twitterverse on the agency world, and Homestead seems to be doing well. So what is it that makes companies get excited about Homestead?

Yeah, we're really fortunate that most of our leads come from word of mouth and good work. So that's always been our focus. We're not really the loudest voices online, but people tend to hear about us. We like it that way. We like being known for our good work and not our hot takes. So for us, it goes down to our background. Started with running majority of an e commerce brand. We're the full outsourced agency doing UGC videos, landing pages development.

That's what we were doing when we were founded. So we're ahead of the game on that. A lot of people are media buying shops or like creative shops. They're very good at one thing. We've always just been very deep at understanding what it's like to run a business. Our founder, Zach stuck, he has his own portfolio brands, so he's acquired or started his own. At this point, it's over an eight figure portfolio. So a lot of the things that we recommend, we're doing it ourselves with our own money.

So that's something that other agencies aren't necessarily doing. So, yeah, for like, it's very clear when you start working with us, the questions and the quality that we ask, I think that's what separates us. We're not over here copy and pasting whatever the Twitter sphere is saying. We're out here, like, creating and testing new theories. So for us, it goes down to that. And again, I'm going to continue with the theme of just like, do you resonate with what their approach is, what their personality is? And for us, it's just like, it's part of our company culture. It's like, do the best work that you can and have the most fun you can possibly. Yeah, it's tough to even keep track with a lot of them.

But for us, honestly, we've got some exciting ones in terms of size, obviously, we have very large clients like hexclad, but I actually like when we crack some of the smaller ones, like those mom and pop businesses, that it's just them, they're figuring it out, they've got it to a good point. And you're able to implement landing pages and educate them and teach them throughout the process. And some of these have been able to scale up significantly. We have clients that been with us for four or five years, and it's been amazing to watch them from very early stages to now being eight figure businesses. And how can we continue being that partner to them? That kind of guides them through the next levels of stages that helps them through up problems. It's not always good. I think it's good to highlight those times that you might mess up. You might have made the wrong decision, you might have cost the business some money.

How can you make it right and be a good partner in those difficult times? I think that speaks a lot as well, where it's valuing the relationship more than just the dollar. So, yeah, I think that might be my favorite case study. Now we're talking about it. Those brands that have been here for the longest, nobody knows their names, they're not the sexiest brand, but being able to make an impact on their life and their business, I think is the most important.

Totally. I bet that's really rewarding for you and your team. So, okay, you guys do a bunch of different verticals within marketing. UGC, email, sms, subscription, performance marketing. These are pretty much almost all the verticals. The bread and butter of everything marketing in DDC, when a brand engages, you go, do they have to go for everything or do you tailor? Okay, we're just going to do this. This is what we recommend. I'm sort of wrapping my head around like, well, do I just not need a marketing team if I have homestead? Because they do it all.

It's a good question. And it's obviously one that we go up against every day. For us, we've built them out of necessity for what really moves the needle. So even in this day and age, you guys probably hear it all the time. Everybody's landing page is creative, all this, but then you go and actually speak with a brand. Most of the times they've maybe never tested a landing page. If they have, once, twice, if you're lucky, zero iteration. So everybody says all these great things, but when it comes to seeing the behind the scenes, how can you make meaningful impact on them? A lot of times I've never tested video.

I've never got video to work. I've never done UGC. Mind blowing to all of us, probably right now, but this is the true reality of seven to eight figure brands. So you need to be able to provide the full funnel experience. No longer can you just rely on media buying that's gone. Creative is good, but if then your email, you have a leaky funnel like cool, you have a pop up that converts at 1%. You're barely signing up people, you're not getting repeat customers. These limit your ability to scale unpaid.

So understanding and having solutions for all of those is helpful for us. I think the entire industry acknowledges that you need to really have the full funnel really dialed in. Ad costs continue to rise, so you need to be more polished than ever. And I think it's a great thing that now there's a lot more focus on profitability. It's more important than ever to be first order profitable. You can't just rely on all these things like LTV and all these other fluff words that were going around when money was just flying everywhere.

Yeah, I think that's super important in terms of thinking profitably from the first order and how you scale from there. So I'd like to go in depth. I know you guys kind of service the whole stack of marketing. So I'd love to kind of pick apart each one and maybe we can talk about what the kind of best practices are and how you think about it. And so I know landing pages and creative has come up several times in this conversation. So I want to go a little bit deeper there.

Right?

How do you guys think about when you guys onboard a brand or when you're working with a brand, what makes a good set of creative and how do you match that creative to a landing page that is going to make things convert?

I love that. I like the way that you even phrase it, like having the creative match your landing page. I think that in itself is something that has had some of the most success with a lot of brands. If you could find what worked and have your messaging match, you will be shocked. Eight to nine figure brands and beyond do not do that correctly. And when you do it well, I've heard many times and in my own experience improve a brand's row as by three times at least. So landing page is important. I'll give like a very detailed example.

We'll even go back to Crossnet. So when I discovered that moms purchasing for their kids is actually the main buyer, what we did then is like, okay, how can we make ads that include families playing together in their yard? So we would have entire families in our content playing instead of let's say pro athletes. Now in our messaging, the value props are okay. It's height adjustable, so anybody in the family could play. It's very safe, it's portable. You could set it up in your backyard. Your kids, you know where your kids are, they're going to be safe. And now you have all the reviews also be from parents or organizations like whatever it is, you now have cohesion across the ad landing page and your messaging.

That in itself is like a strategy that anybody could implement and I still see very little people doing it well. So you get that funnel done, I guarantee you'll make a lot of money.

We are really excited to announce that DTCPod is officially part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals. And we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests, and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot podcast network@HubSpot.com. Podcastnetwork.

I love that.

So basically the idea is a matching creative to the landing page, but then also thinking in terms of the audience and the value props that are going to resonate with those audience. So when you're coming up with the creative on the back end, whatever landing page that's leading to make sure to have the benefits aligned to that ICP you're speaking with, and that's going to drive conversion.

But wait, I have a comment on that. So there's two sides of this coin where some people are like, you don't need to worry about that until you're at like $100,000 a month in spend. And then there's people that are like, it doesn't matter. I'm always going to make that message consistent. If I can do better, I'm going to do better. And as I mentioned, then there's people that are like, yeah, that's just a huge waste of time and operations, especially if you're just at seven figures and you don't have the bandwidth to create landing pages for each audience. So at which point do you think that it's worth to start looking into? Okay, let's make creative specific to each audience and make landing pages specific to each audience.

I think that's a great call out. It is a great call out. And I'm always very quick to say, hey, the advice you're giving is a little too advanced for most people. So I think, again, the way that I approach it at least is from the start, you need to understand who's buying it. So you always need to speak, ideally to one person. I'm an individual watching an ad, you need to be speaking to me. So find what the highest percentage of people that you could really resonate to and make everything about them. That's when you have a funnel.

Like, if you don't have that, a home page is meant to be very general. If now we're driving traffic to an ad, we're calling out a specific pain point or value prop, and you're funneling traffic to a page that talks about that. Again, if you're sending it to your homepage or PDP, that's meant for an uninformed audience, that's very broad and general. If you're trying to capture paid traffic that has low attention span, you need to keep that story going. So I think the moment that you're spending ad dollars, you should already start doing that. It's a form of understanding your own business. It's going to be what allows you to scale. And then I could even go even more tactical, too, where once you figure that out for one audience, now you're duplicating a proven concept.

You're scaling on something that is proven and you're not just throwing darts on the wall, spinning up creative, hoping it works, which is what most people do. So if your audience was, primary audience was moms, the next one, we're going to be like, okay, it's college kids do the same thing. Now, if you have, let's say, a page builder app, there's so many of them out there. There's page deck, replo, unbalanced list goes on and on. You kind of just swap out the images and the copy to resonate with it. So it's very low lift. I had to personally do that when I was kind of a one person team. So it's very practical to do, and then I'll even share what type of landing pages tend to work best.

We spend tens of millions of dollars on sending traffic to landing pages. Listicles are, I would say is the most proven winner. Most of the times it's the easiest one to make, it's the easiest one to iterate on. It ties into what I'm saying. It gives you the most opportunities to showcase or speak to a specific audience. Compared to other formats, I still will say shoppable are kind of like a second best one. So it kind of mimics a penny. Sorry, it mimics a product page, but it allows you to be more specific with your messaging, so you're less limited by the default setting of what your shopify theme is.

And now you could really customize a product page that's more educational and you could really control it more. Again, you could still apply the same principles as I mentioned, matching your messaging, but those, if you're going to start landing pages, test listicle and shoppable first advertorials could have success, but I would say those know much lengthier in copy and also like the lowest win rate. So if you're limited on resources, as you said, Ramon, start doing that from the start. Hear your high percentage shots, go out and take them.

And what you just said, I think you said a bunch of brands who might make it to your stage, you're like, they're not even doing anything with landing pages, they're just driving traffic to their homepage or their PDP. So for maybe some of those brands, whether you're at scale or whether you're know a, why can't you create a lander in Shopify? And what are some of those other tools that you just mentioned that you can create those tools in? And then do they allow you to split test or how are you kind of evaluating which messaging is resonating the most and converting the highest?

Yeah, that's definitely one of the big things that a lot of the new technology in the recent years has helped. I don't know how to code. So we're talking like three years ago you had to custom code landing pages or customize the Shopify theme. So it would be super expensive, super time consuming. You're waiting like three months if you're lucky to get something done nowadays. I'll go through them. I would say the big three is like page deck, unbalance and Replo. Those are no code solutions that you can just install as a Shopify app.

So technically, any founder, any in house employee should be capable of making a landing page on there. All you're doing is just drag and dropping. Add in your copy, add your images into your buy box of whatever product you want to promote, and from then on, it's just strategy. Can you come up with a good offer? Can you write compelling copy? And do you have a product somebody cares about at a price point that makes sense? So yeah, it takes spend a day, spend a day, launch it. I think that might be the best part. Launch the damn landing page. Everybody goes crazy on the fine little details and everything. I know I launched one as a draft and it's like, wow, that blew everything out of the water.

I'm glad that I didn't sit three months waiting on getting every single little period and everything perfect. Launch a damn landing page. Iterate after.

It's funny, like landing pages have become a lot easier to do. However, out of all of these channels, which one is the hardest one but the most rewarding? But the hardest one. Like for example, UGC. We all know it works, but it's hard to scale. It can be hard to scale and to do it right, especially with this new method of spinning up a bunch of TikTok accounts and having creators make ugc content. I've done that a bunch of times. It is an absolute nightmare to try and scale up even scaling influencer stuff like you did it with Crossnet. Before there were all these systems and everything.

And even today the best system is like in house spreadsheets, automated outreach, et cetera. But let me take a step back here and throw that back at you before answering. Which one is the most challenging? I'm curious, what tip do you have for anyone listening to scaling influencer outreach?

So I always think the best strategy is the one that you could follow the best. So focus on less. Do more better is the recommendation. Influencer outreach is tough. Sorry, camera, camera. Lost focus. Hold on. Come on.

It'll come back. Influencer outreach is definitely something that's difficult. It is, in my eyes, a little more low percentage success. And then typically you need to make sure you're driving meaningful Roi. So for a lot of brands in Crossset, it was difficult. You're shipping heavy, expensive product, so sending out a lot of things forces you to be very calculated. I'll actually want to counter the approach of influencer outreach, I would say focusing on content creators, actually the term of content creator more. If you're running paid ads, you need to make sure that you're getting very good quality, that you could iterate rather than volume.

So you could have a lot of volume by iterating and making variants of, ideally a content library of very good content that you've built up. So I crossed that. What I did was I'm going to make sure I have awesome openers. I'm going to make sure for every product line I have videos of it being used by only males, only females, mixed, mixed age groups. And now I could mix and match my creative. I would say focus on building a creative catalog of assets that you could mix and match rather than again playing the volume game of send 100 pieces of product out, pray that 10% of them are good, and pray that you could even use them in your ads. I think that approach is horrible. I don't like it.

So I would recommend send UGC briefs. Get what you need, edit it, get creative with it.

Yeah, I think that's really on point. And that's something even Ramon that we've seen in creative. It's like when you get a really good creator who creates a fire piece of content, you're able to like, they know how to create the hook. So when you put spend behind that, it's going to catch and it's going to eat a bunch of your budget in a great way. My next question kind of bounces back to creative, right. Creative is something where whether it's creative or UGC, it's always changing, there's always new stuff popping up. What are you seeing right now in the performance creative side of things that's really working for d to C brands or some of the brands you're working with, whether it's related to a platform, related to a type of content style, related to a creator's Persona, what are you seeing that's working?

Yeah, it definitely changes fast. It changes fast. And I would probably go with two things I've actually really been a fan of the trend that more ads, primarily UGC content, are mimicking organic posts. So kind of like a TikTok reply, but making it actually look real, not those fake screenshots on a phone mockup. Like, no, I'm talking like an actual question somebody would ask that makes me feel like I got recommended a post that's not an ad. It's like on my for you page or whatever. I think if you could craft something like that and be able to explain the product in organic way, I think that's going to continue to do well. The other that I would say is we're actually big fans of utilizing statics more heavily for testing your messaging.

So UGC and videos obviously are tougher to put together, they're tougher to execute on. So if you're trying to creative test and you want to test angles and headlines, do that with statics, you're able to spit out a ton more than you can videos. And then once you find what your winner is, like, oh, wow, we've had clothing where it's like, oh, it makes your butt look really good. Well, now go make your videos that highlight how it makes your butt look good, rather than like, oh, it's flattering, it's slimming, it's all this. No, you found what the audience cares about. Go get video made for it. So I would say if you follow those two things with your creative strategy, you should do pretty well.

Something that isn't talked about enough is like the caption too, and how it plays a part into tying into the creative. How do you guys think about the captions?

I think they're important. The headlines mostly. So the headlines, obviously the platforms have shrunk over time. How much text actually appears. So your headline and your first line is so important. Then there's the other part of it now that it's hidden behind. See more. If somebody has to click that step, you might as well take advantage of it now.

So we have seen, I would say, a bit more longer form copy work. In my past, I was a big fan of very short, snappy copy. But because of the changes, take advantage of if you have someone's attention and they click on that, utilize that free real estate. So yeah, use your copy. Stop thinking of it as a super big afterthought. But I still will say the other items that we've talked about have a bigger impact. I would put copy in your ads after all the things we said. So understand your audience, offer landing pages, ads, and then add a copy.

And when you say offer, I just kind of want to go a little bit deeper there. Can you clarify that? How do you come up with a good offer? Is that just price in terms of what you're pricing at and what you're bundling and what you're getting? Or how do you think about constructing a really solid offer?

I really think it does come around to that. So it could be done many different ways. It could be get with purchase. It could be buy to get x, it could be a new customer offer. I think that's something that's not talked about enough, a specific offer for new customers to come in. I think if you're relying on paid strat, like paid social to make an impact on your business, that is a very fundamental piece. Like if you don't have that proven control that you could scale off of, you're going to have a difficult time. So that's why I recommend get an offer that works, that makes financial sense for your business and then you keep that as your control.

Now you're able to split test creative and all these other things. If you're changing an offer, you don't have a good one. You're going to have less data points to refer. And if your creative work, because creative landing pages, all those. At the end of the day, it depends on conversion. Like if you're not getting much conversions, you're not getting much data. Again, you can't overvalue the soft metrics. At the end of the day, what matters is where people are putting their dollars, not where they're clicking a like button or something else.

Do you guys play with bundles?

Yeah, we definitely play with bundles. But again, I think the distinction that I really want to highlight is a new customer offer. There's been a trend where everybody wants to boost their aov on the first product. But I want people to think, if I have never purchased from you, why are you trying to sell me three products? I don't even know if I like your initial product. So I want people to really think on what is an attractive offer to someone that has never purchased from my brand and then scale off of that. So I've had brands where in select cases it makes sense that I want to lower your new customer AOV. I want you to stop trying to sell me two or three products at once. Sell me one or two at a very strong offer, get me in the door.

And if your product is really good and you get strong return customers, you could get them in the back end. I think too many people are making that mistake of, I want $100 off of someone, dude, they don't know you yet.

Do you think the same applies for subscriptions?

Subscriptions obviously could be a little different at that point. It's more you're in the checkout kind of level. Like, do I want to save and maybe roll a dice? I could technically cancel it and just pocket the difference. So I think that the subscription component, it's good to have it in there. I wouldn't push so heavily on the front end offer. It could make sense, especially in CPG or consumables, anything replenishable. It could make sense to offer something advanced if you get a subscription. But if we're talking outside of that realm, I wouldn't necessarily recommend pushing subscription heavily on first time customers.

Yeah, my favorite advice here, sometimes, and it's something that you hear all the time, but it's like sometimes you need to just take off your business hat and put on your customer hat and just be like, if I was a first time buyer going to this, how would I see this?

Right?

And that seems so of, and you hear it so many times, but like Ramon is saying, it's like, are we thinking about bundles? Are we thinking about subscription? And at the end of the day, a new product or a new customer who's shopping is just like, I don't even know this brand. I just saw an ad for it on, like, should I even buy it? So I love know always kind of coming back to that baseline of thinking. Because at the end of the day, you're selling to humans and new buyers.

Yeah, I will highlight on that point. That's usually one of the best pieces of advice. Again, I try to simplify my information where it's practical for the most amount of people and has a high percentage of success. So I'll audit a brand or I'll look at somebody else and they're like, how the heck did you find this? It's like, I went to your public ad library, I pretended that I was going to buy this product, and I found all the mistakes in your website. I found what I didn't like in the user journey. And now I created a solution. Like, everybody's so stuck inside the ad account that if, as you said, take off the marketing hat, go through the journey as a prospective customer and see what you think every single time. To this day, I come up with plenty of ideas.

I don't care if it's like some of the d to C darlings in our own space. I won't say any names, but there is always improvements that you could make no matter what. So that's something that takes five minutes and you will get so many learnings, and it's much cheaper than hiding a consultant.

Man, I love that because we're so in the weeds, we forget about this stuff and then we even forget to look at our own websites. On mobile, we're working on the desktop making all these changes, et cetera. And then it's like, oh, shit, this is going on in mobile. Had no clue it even looked different or this design update wasn't done here, or the CTA here is actually driving you to the wrong place to different place on mobile. So that definitely happens all the time. So that's a good low hanging fruit advice for anyone listening. So as we approach towards the end, Joel, I think we have people who listen that work at agencies, they work at brands. And so I'm sure a lot of people are curious on like, hey, I wonder how much different it is to be a partner or work at an agency versus working directly in a brand.

So what has that experience in transition been like for you? And then what advice do you have for anyone considering a transition like that?

I love that. It's funny where I feel like I took the opposite approach. I went brand first, agency second. Typically, the path is agency first, brand second, but the pros and cons are the same, really. I think if you're starting out, it might actually be beneficial to go the agency route first, just because I would always say it's best to specialize first, and then you have value that you could kind of like start bartering and exchanging, get your foot in the door somewhere and learn something else. So go to an agency, you're able to learn on someone else's dime first. You're going to be surrounded by top talent. You're going to get a larger sample size, you're going to be able to pattern, recognize what works, what doesn't.

So I recommend doing that first. That's the biggest difference in an agency, is you're going to have a larger sample size that comes with less focus. Going super deep. So now the brand side is you're getting a sample size of one, and now you're just going super damn deep. A b, testing everything, understanding the cause and effect reactions of every single thing in the business. You start learning things like cash flow, how decisions impact it, payback periods, finance. There's so many things that you would never even think if you're a media buyer or just like a freelancer that's only been doing agency work, having that very deep understanding and even how to speak the language of founders, know what it's like to be in their seat, what keeps them up at night? What do they really give a dang about at the end of the day? I'll tell you, they don't give a shit about your CPM. They care about how much money they made that day or how much they lost that day.

So it's very direct and you learn a lot there. So I would recommend go agency first, brand second. If you really want to, then go deep and focus on that.

Especially like it's more data points that you get faster. The rate at which you get those data points of seeing different brands and seeing different strategies play out in real time at the same time is something that money can buy. It sort of reminds me when I went through techstars with trend previously. The big eye opener for me was we were isolated during COVID building, but then here we were in the same room with ten other startups, seeing what everyone was doing at the same time. So Joel, for anyone listening that wants to get in touch with you or Homestead, how can they do that? Where can they find you for sure.

I'm on Twitter LinkedIn. Search my name Joel Pedrone and if you'd like to check out Homestead Homesteadstudio Co. You can check out any of our work examples there. Reach out to us if you'd like to work with us. Sweet. Thanks Joel. Thank you guys.