Jordan West

Yeah, absolutely. I'm super excited to have this conversation. So I have actually been on this podcast before. We were talking a little bit earlier that this is actually where I learned the difference, or I learned that I was wrong when I named my podcast Secrets to Scaling Your Commerce Brand. I have a lot of people in the Amazon Walmart kind of world reaching out all the time to listen, and I'm like, oh, no, siri, this is about selling on shopify directly. And then I realized I'm like, I was using the wrong term all this time. You think you're smart, and then you realize there's a lot smarter people out there. Anyway, you guys nailed it with a DTC Pod.

I mean, that's what I should have done.

That's so funny. Yeah, I mean, it's funny how lingo evolves and I mean, I even feel like what we're seeing in ecommerce D to C whatever you want to call it. It's like brands are now moving more into Omnichannel and retail and all this sort of stuff. So hopefully in a couple of years, we don't look back and play what were we doing? And calling it the D two C. Pod, I think you're good for now.

I looked at the Google Trends just recently, and D two C not that is not it. DTC is the one that if you want search volume, that's the right one. Like, buy along and also Ecom. DTC still beats out ecom. So just so you guys know, I'm always looking on Google Trends for stuff anyway. Yes, I've been in this world since 2014. 2015. Accidentally chose shopify when it came to a baby clothing store that my wife and I had.

Really glad that I did. Great mistake or great accident? Happy accident that happened there and then I've been in this world ever since, and I absolutely love this world. We own a bunch of brands as well as an agency in the space that's more on the growth side. And I'm obsessed with it. I love it so much. I love seeing brands grow. It's part of what I do.

Awesome. And a couple of things that we're really excited to be able to talk about is A, you having the experience of being able to start and launch your own brands before, as well as manage that process for other brands. And it really seems like your guys'specialty is helping brands grow, which is a big component of D to C and big component of growing a brand. So would love to kind of I thought for this episode, it'd be a lot of fun to kind of go in and talk from the perspective of someone who's setting up ads. If you're launching a brand, like, what do you need to know about ads? What do you need to know about growth? Where do you get started? So maybe we can just start there, right? If you're launching a brand, because I know your guys'specialty in the agency world is taking brands from call it like two to ten mil of revenue, but let's just say before that, right? We're starting a brand, we're launching it for the first time. Maybe we don't have any expertise or experience in ads having done it before, but we've got to figure something out. Where do we go? Who do we either go to? Is there someone we need to go to? Is this something we can figure out ourselves? Are the things that we can set up? How do we get our store and our ad motion kind of set up and ready to go?

Yeah, good question. So I recommend to everybody at first, when you're first starting out running ads, you got to run them yourself. You need to understand what that is before you ever hand that off to an agency, because there are a lot of bad agencies out there. There's a lot of people that came up in 2018, 2019 when you could put anything up and it would convert. And they were agencies at the time. Right? The problem is there's a lot of them still out there, and you don't know which ones are good and which ones are bad, and which ones know what they're talking about, which ones don't, right? So that's why I recommend everybody actually learn this stuff to a certain extent. To start, don't go and hire an agency right away. You will not be successful doing that unless you have a boatload of cash.

Now, that's totally different for venture backed companies. Absolutely hire an agency out of the gates. But for you bootstrappers out there, you got to learn this stuff. And so when you're first starting, you need to figure out where your customers are. Is this a product that you have that people are searching for? If people are searching for it, then you only have a couple of options, right, to start, and you need to look at low hanging fruit. And so Google is a wonderful place, Google. And I'm definitely recommending Bing. Now, Bing's user base is starting to grow because of having Chat GPT integrated into it.

There's a lot of things going on there. So I highly recommend going to a search platform, Amazon as well. Right? If people are searching for your product and you have some sort of unique purple cow type product in your category, please do that, right? Start with search. Start with performance. Max now, when I'm saying Performance Max, there's a bit of a caveat that I want to make here. Performance Max is a machine learning system, right? What it needs is data. It needs data to optimize to serve your ads to the right people in the right order at the right time. And so going with Performance Max when you first start probably isn't the greatest idea because you don't really have data to feed it, right? So it needs that data to be able to do well.

Same thing on the other side with Advantage Plus with Facebook. Same sort of idea that's their machine learning algorithm at work. It's kind of the pinnacle of all of the AI that they've built in both of these platforms over the years. So highly recommend using them, but make sure you actually have data to put into these programs, and Facebook won't even let you use Advantage Plus for the first. I still have consulting clients that I work with that are doing a couple of million dollars a year and still aren't able to access Advantage Plus. And Facebook is like, well, we'll give it to you eventually. So that is kind of where I would start. It.

Start thinking, like, where exactly is my customer hanging out? Right? And don't start with paid ads. Do not start with paid ads. Get your hands dirty. Go and do some of those hard things. Go into Facebook Groups, start talking in there, go into Reddit forums, do the hard work first, and then start to magnify what's actually working.

So I love that. So you said don't start. Well, two things that I love that you pointed out. One is don't start with Paid Ads right out of the gate because you need to understand what's resonating. And the second thing was you got to do it yourself, right? So in that lens, if we're assuming that we're not starting with paid and we're not just dumping a bunch of money into it and we're doing it ourselves, what are the things that I need to know to get set up? So let's assume that I've already set up my shopify. I've got the brand, I've got the product, I've got some maybe general ideas for messaging that I might want to start testing out. What do I need to get set up? Do I need to get Google Analytics set up? What do I need to set up on Facebook? What do I need to embed into my site? What are some of these basics ad systems that as like a first time brand operator that are going to need to be in place?

Yeah, you know what's awesome about that question is that it's not just new brand owners that need to know this stuff. There's a lot of people that we go and audit their accounts and I'm like, whoa, you don't have that set up. You don't have that set up. That's interesting. So, first of all, Google Analytics four, ga Four have to have that set up. As of recording this tomorrow, you need to have this set up. This is absolutely essential. It's not just another analytics platform, everyone, okay? Remember that ga Four is what feeds back data into Google Ads.

This is your Google Ads. Like, if you're ever going to run Google Ads, you must have Ga Four set up. And it needs to be set up correctly. It has to be Google search console. That is something that a ton of people do not have set up. Google Search Console is going to give you all of the data and the connecting point data to be able to look at your search engine optimization, which is incredibly important. That's the goal that you don't need to spend on ads is your SEO, right? So Search Console is an absolute huge one. Google Tag Manager.

So making sure that you've got that all set up and correctly making sure you're not like double tagging things and all of that. Google Tag Manager is a bit of a beast. I'm not going to get like super into GTM right now, but know that that needs to be set up on that side. If you're on shopify, all of this stuff is so much easier to be able to set up. Not Google tag measure isn't. But Ga Four is incredibly easy to set up. Make sure you have all this in even before you start running ads, right? Facebook Pixel, making sure that it's set up and installed correctly, really important. Making sure that you have the conversions API set up with Facebook ads, incredibly important.

You're going to be able to reach a lot more people. And even if you're not running ads, remember that this is collecting data in the background so that when you are ready to run ads, I highly recommend your first ads being retargeting ads for people who came to your site and then you want to retarget them wherever they go. Still, it's a lot more difficult in this coming up cookie list world that we live in to actually be able to do that. But the big platforms are hopefully helping out with us being able to actually tag those people. So those are the things that I would set up immediately while you're starting to get traffic.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point is even for people, if you don't know you're doing ads, you don't know you're going to an agency, you don't even figured out what's necessarily working just yet. Just making sure you have the right infrastructure and data points connected so you're ingesting that data because you will be able to turn that on and you will be able to do a lot with it when you decide that's somewhere that you want to go. So I guess just my next follow up question there is you were talking about cookie lists, right? What does that mean for brand owners? How is it going to impact advertising? And what do brand owners need to know about different regulations coming up with as it pertains to personal data and cookies?

Yeah, totally. So the sort of like high level of it is that you're just going to have less and less data, right? Just like what happened with iOS 14.5 when Apple swooped in and were the privacy heroes. Which just FYI they're not. It's just for business. It's just so that they can add billions more to their bottom line. Look, I got a MacBook Pro, I got an iPhone. I love them. As a company, I think that that was one of the worst possible things that they could have done for both consumers and for advertisers.

Right? Because what this new cookie list world means is that you're just not going to have personalized ads anymore. You're just not going to have the same personalization that we had before. What was so wrong about us serving ads that were actually relevant to people, right? What was wrong with that? People don't understand like, oh yeah, okay, great, they're going to mask your privacy. Like, big deal. What it's going to mean is just it's going to be a lot harder for brands to actually get their message in front of the right person. It's going to get more expensive to acquire customers, all of that kind of stuff. Now remember that you can still get around some of this, except for iOS. 17 now is coming out and removing all utms off of the end of URLs.

So essentially what that means is like, you just can't track anyone ever. So what do you need to do? I mean, it's not the end of the world, right? We did all of this before Facebook ads came out. We're only less than ten years into Facebook ads. So it's okay. We're all going to survive, but things are going to look a little bit different. We have to measure things differently. And so part of that is post purchase survey is huge. Having your own first party data is incredibly huge.

So using a tool like Triple Whale or North Beam, there's a free version that socio has put out as well. Those are incredibly important to be able to actually track what is going on and what's actually moving the needle. Because as you start to spend $1,000 a day, 2000, 3000, there's some big numbers that you need to account for and figure out how you're going to scale. You can't scale if you don't know what's actually working.

Oh, 100%. And one thing I'd love to talk about is some of those platforms that you just mentioned that kind of bring some clarity and context to what's happening and all the noise. How do they work? What do they do? You as a marketer, how are you using them?

Yeah, good question. So I don't know the details behind the scenes, but essentially they're using a bunch of different ways to be able to identify people, right? So you can actually track people way longer. Facebook's new attribution window, as of new as of like two years ago, is seven day click, one day view. Well, how many customers of a real brand, not just a product company, right? Like some fancy little product that pops up that you're going to spend $20 for? I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about real brands here. How many people see a brand on day one and purchase like very, very few. How many people within seven days purchase? Very, very few. So Facebook has a seven day click window and a one day view window.

You cannot see what is going on beyond that. When we run post purchase surveys, 70% of our customers have known about us for 30 plus days. Well, no analytics platform is going to be able to pick that up, right? But some of these tools, like Triple Whale, big fan of Triple Whale, they do pick that up and they show the entire customer journey and how many times they touched a Google ad and a Facebook ad and this and that. And you can actually see with big swaths of data how people are actually entering your funnel. Interestingly, one of our brands, we were sure our top of funnel was all Facebook. But we noticed as we were scaling up our ad spend. We weren't really increasing our revenue, and yet Facebook was telling us, yeah, we're getting great results. Results kept coming, but our revenue wasn't increasing.

And we're like, what is going on here? And so we dug into the Triple Whale data and realized that actually, on a first touch, most people find out about us on Google. We're like what? None of the data told us that because Google ads generally will take less they'll take less credit for your ads. Whereas I find Facebook on platform takes way more credit for your ads. So you need to be able to balance all of these things together, right? You need to balance Google Analytics Triple Whale data, post purchase survey data, on platform data. It all needs to kind of work together. And it's really important that you don't just take one, but you also need a single source of truth. I've chosen that to be Triple Whale.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, it's great to kind of hear how you think about an attribution, and especially when you're blending so many different sources of data that have different inputs. It's never going to be perfect. Perfect. And it's a really tough problem to solve. But like you're saying, having a good understanding in a couple of different systems is key. So let's go back to kind of what we were talking about before and getting your system set up, getting everything in place before you start running. I know you mentioned starting with Retargeting, so let's imagine you're a Bootstrap brand.

You're just going through maybe call it your first production run or something. You've got a site up. Things are starting to work. How do you launch your first retargeting campaign? Like, what are you thinking and how are you doing it and why are you doing it?

Yeah, totally. So this is where you're going to start to actually have to dig into some of your customer psychology, right? What is keeping them from purchasing your product? Right? It's probably not price number one, right? Yet everybody goes to price. I know what we're going to do with our Retargeting ads. We're going to run a discount. It's like, do you think that's the number one reason why somebody didn't purchase maybe in 2023? People are feeling pretty poor right now, but there's probably a bunch of other reasons why they didn't purchase at first. And so thinking about your customer psychology and figuring out what that is, looking at your frequently asked questions and then putting those into either video form I love video form for Retargeting, especially using like, stories and YouTube and all of these places where people may actually have their audio on, I think that's really, really great. So then starting to touch on what some of those issues are that they're facing now. Am I saying that it couldn't be price? Absolutely, it could be price.

But don't start at price. Start at the other reasons why people may not purchase your product. Right. So for that, you're going to need to figure that out from your customers. You're going to have to figure out why don't people purchase? Like, what actually stops them? So you might have to pick up the phone, you might have to send some emails, do some of that hard work at first. That isn't fun, but it's so effective.

I love that. Even in terms of the strategy right there, I think what's really actionable is rather than just saying we're generally retargeting and we're going to either run a discount or we're just going to say, hey, we exist, it's more about saying we've got this opportunity. We know this is a lead that's come to our site, is familiar with our brand, we're going to serve them something else. So when we remind them, we may as well be able to point out some of the things that are on their mind, maybe preventing them from buying, and speak to some of those concerns, address them and look to get conversions and engagement that way.

Totally. I mean, you guys know from going and making your own purchases online, sometimes it could be the smallest thing. You're like, I just didn't see when it would ship out and I kind of need it for next week. So I'm not going to buy from this site because I don't know when it's going to come. Right. Like something that simple. And there are tools that can fix that for you as a brand. Right.

But you would have never known unless you picked up the phone and asked somebody and exactly.

And then when you're given that information, all of a sudden you're like, wait, I know I'm going to get it on time. Let me just go ahead and buy it. Or maybe it's a question about the quality or social proof. Like you're like, oh, is this someone a brand? That is actually legit. Do other people shop here? And then you might see a testimonial or something like that. So there's a whole bunch of creative ways to basically retarget using that psychology. I think that's awesome. Then let's talk about the next step.

So once you've set up retargeting, imagine we're growing a little bit, we're seeing some success there. And also from a retargeting perspective, what platform are you going with first? If you had to pick one, are you starting on Facebook or Meta? Are you starting on Google Ads for retargeting? Like, what ecosystem are you playing in when you first start a retargeting effort?

Yeah. So first on Meta Ads, Facebook ads, whatever you want to call it, it reaches so many people there. Also you don't need as big of a seed audience down on Meta comparatively. I still think it's like 20 people, something like that comparatively did to Google, which you need a much bigger audience to be able to retarget over on Google. Don't ask me why, but that is the difference. So I would definitely start over on Facebook with any of your retargeting efforts and then move over to Google once you've got a decent amount of people on Google. The one thing is that for Google to do retargeting, people do need to be signed into their account generally. And a lot of people watch YouTube without an account, right? You're just watching YouTube, not signed in.

So that's just a couple of things to keep in mind.

And then actually that brings up a good point. So both of these platforms are pretty complex in terms of what you're able to do, the types of ads you're able to run. But Google always struck me as a really interesting one because you've got the typical Google AdWords and being able to target different keywords where you're paying per click, but then they have a whole different ecosystem. They can be pushing stuff to YouTube, they're advertising within people's emails. There's like all these different ways in which they're advertising within the Google ecosystem. When you're working with your brands, are there any areas that you like to really focus on that you think work better for commerce or better for other things?

Yeah. So I love YouTube for Retargeting. I really love YouTube for retargeting because you can tell such a story and people lots of times people will watch your whole YouTube ad. An incredible way to indoctrinate somebody into your brand or tell a story that you need to tell. You can't necessarily just tell on Instagram or Facebook. You just might not be able to tell that same story. So love that. And then Performance Max, guys, Performance Max is like takes all of Google's most amazing things, puts it together, and then it's a black box, though.

That's the one thing, it's a black box and you give Google your best assets and let them run with it. It'll include Google Shopping. Performance, Max, is what smart shopping was. It just has way more things added to it, like YouTube, like images for Display and Discover. It's got everything that you can think of within Performance Max. So once you're ready, I highly recommend testing performance.

Max and then is that Performance Max, for example, does that cover like Google Shopping or do you run different campaigns with but perfect. But do you have a specific strategy for Google Shopping or just put it into Performance Max and let it do its thing?

Yes, of both. Also, Performance Max is informed by the other campaigns that you have running. So we'll always have a Google Shopping campaign running as well. The problem is Pmax generally just takes the budget and puts it into a Pmax campaign, but you need to have that running. So, yes, highly recommend running, especially whatever your top products are as a Google Shopping ad. High margin products, really good one to run on Google Shopping. I mean, you can run your whole catalog if you want I just recommend trying to keep it fairly simple on what you're running and then let performance max, just go ahead and figure out where the customers are. I haven't seen new customer acquisition costs this low in years, and Pmax is bringing them all in.

It's incredible.

Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit of both, right? Because you can think all the things that you want to about your customer. Yeah, my customer searches for this product. Right. There's tons of search volume, but until you actually start testing them out, you don't know which one's actually going to convert. Right. You don't know until you actually have the data. So I recommend getting a it's funny because there's a bit of a different recommendation than some principles that I really believe in, and that's going very deep on a specific subject. But in this case, really, it's a matter of like, hey, let's test these things out organically, especially Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, let's test them organically.

Are people enjoying what we're doing over here? Is this driving business? If so, then let's bolus over there. Right? I just think that low hanging fruit is on Google. I mean, it's where people would go to search for things. But if you've got some special kind of product that no one's really searching for, like, guy I've been helping out a little bit has a human dog bed, right? People are not searching for a human dog bed. Google's not going to work for that. Maybe Pmax, because Pmax is incredible at educating people and doing all this kind of stuff. So maybe on Pmax, but that's. A total Facebook product, right? You see it and you're like, oh, human dog beta, I could use one of those.

No, that's really cool. And also just following up there, are there any other channels? So now that you're like, okay, we want to test on a whole bunch of different channels, see what works, see what works for us, and then we'll be able to really understand which direction we want to continue going. Are there any other channels outside of the typical ones that you get really excited about, or do you think it's more about just understanding, okay, let's go Meta, Google, maybe some stuff on TikTok and some other platforms. How do you think about that?

Yeah, so I think that there are incredible places that are totally untapped, and you just have to think about where your customer is. Right. A lot of people's customers are actually on Reddit. And yes, running Reddit ads may not be a good idea right. For them. So actually figuring out though, where do these people hang out? So let's talk about moms, right? Where do moms hang out? Where are we going to target moms? Well, moms love Facebook groups. They are all about Facebook groups. Get into those groups and start answering questions.

I mean, if you guys have followed me for any time, you'll see, I actually, me personally, I go into groups and answer questions. Even in newbie groups, I go in and just answer questions. And I never tell people to come work with me. But you know what they do? They come and work with us. And so similarly, when whatever that is, so say your target demographic is moms, right? You just go in and you start being a part of the conversation in there. I would way rather see somebody spending money on that being a part of the conversation, because they're probably going to learn a lot within that conversation, being a part of that conversation. And then every once in a while, that's fine to drop a link, right? But make sure that you're giving way more than you're taking from those groups. That's where I would recommend going.

But again, for different people, if you're into motorcycles or something, right, maybe Quora is your place, I don't know. But figuring out where that customer exactly is hanging out and asking questions and looking for advice, that's where you got to be.

I love that. I think that's really actionable advice, especially for earlier stage founders who are really trying to understand their brand identity and what resonates with their customers and what problems they really want solved and how to speak to those problems. That's actually really incredible. The next question I have kind of and you hit on it a little before about search, the power of Google search, SEO, and the importance in ecommerce. And that's something I wanted to cover. One thing that I've been seeing a lot of recently is that it seems like there's a really like google actually really likes indexing blog content and content for ecommerce stores. So typically that stuff was all done by media and commerce stores. They're not really focused on blogs or doing anything like that.

Have you seen anything like that or what's your kind of SEO advice or strategy for brands?

Yeah, good question. So my first advice is trying to rank for the keywords that actually matter, that are like buyer intent keywords, right. Don't do that on a blog. Don't rank for those keywords on a blog. Rank for those on a collection page. So that's my first bit of advice. Not your home page. Unless you're like a single product company, rank for it on a collection page.

What Google wants to see is that you are a subject matter expert. That's where blogs come in. So yes, totally. You can get some blogs ranked. Are they going to give you purchases? Maybe. But what they're going to do is show you as a subject matter expert on your site. So on your blog, talk about things that have to do with your target demographic. That's where I see blogs totally doing like top ten lists.

Awesome idea. Like listicles are still like Google loves serving up listicles because we love reading them, that's why. So those are some sort of ideas, but you really want to make sure that you have topically, relevant information on those collection pages. Put it below, right? So you might have to find somebody to help you out with that. Make sure you put all that information below. It still all gets indexed and it's going to tell Google exactly what your site is all about. We've actually been doing a big SEO push at one of our companies lately, and I just was reading a report right before this and we were able to get an extra 3000 visitors last month just from SEO. And some of these things that we're putting in, that was not a ton, but that's an extra 100 people a day that are reaching us through organically.

We're not paying anything for it.

Yeah, and it's SEO such a strong channel too. Because not only are you being able to drive that traffic organically, but then if they're hitting your site and you are able to do retargeting or you have a Facebook pixel in there, all of a sudden those become customers that you're able to have a shot at bringing into your ecosystem. You wouldn't before, right? And again, maybe they're not searching specifically for your product, but now your brand becomes relevant to them. And like you were saying before, a buyer decision isn't necessarily made immediately. So now you have the chance to win them over through your whole ad and retargeting strategy.

Totally. Yeah, you nailed it. Cool.

And then why don't you talk to me a little bit about once you've kind of got all these channels up and running. You know what works. You know what messages resonate with your audience. And now let's talk a little bit more about your sweet spot and how you work with brands, right, that are doing call it between two and ten mil in revenue. What does that look like in your day to day? What are you seeing? What are some of the exciting trends that you guys are tapping into in the ever evolving ad and growth space in D to C?

Totally. So one super untapped place is Performance Max, right? People don't understand performance, Max. There's not even a lot out there. There's like a few people talking about Pmax and yet it's like so powerful. It's such a powerful thing. And so we are obsessed with Pmax. We're obsessed with different ways to leverage Pmax. It's not just a matter of just like, chuck it in and it's going to work.

There's a lot of ways that we leverage assets that we're already using on the Facebook side over in Performance Max. So that's one place that I would, if you guys are in that sort of range, definitely talk to your advertising agency about how they are scaling up Pmax for you. That's a huge thing over there. And then on the Facebook and or the Meta side, it is all about constant testing. Constant, constant testing. Now, there's two different things at play here. There's this dichotomy between constant testing and consolidation in your ad account. So bringing things down to the smallest amount of campaigns and ad sets you can have so that the machine learns while at the same time testing, testing, testing to figure out what people actually want.

And so on the testing side, you're going to be looking at a lot of top of funnel metrics, right? So click through rate, cost per click, all of these things that are showing like, hey, are these ads resonating? Because if the ad resonates and then you send them to a landing page, that makes sense, they're probably going to convert, right? Or at least three or 4% of them are going to convert. So that's what we're constantly looking at. And so at Upgrowth Commerce, we have this perpetual creative machine TM that's sitting in the back all the time, creating new creative for our clients. The reason being is that we found that people get what's the word? It's just lazy, right? Where it's like, oh, well, this one's working. I don't need nothing new. And then they don't create new creative until it's too late and that ad is fatigued and that ad set is dead and it's never coming back. And so we have this perpetual creative engine in the back that's helping gather UGC. It's helping gather new video content.

It's helping gather carousels and collections and all of these different ways. And also, one big tip for people is that image creative is still crushing. It's still absolutely crushing, and no one's using it because everyone went on the.

V yeah, well, two really interesting points you brought up there. One, ad fatigue. I think as a brand, sometimes it's not easy. As easy as to see as it would be if you're in the consumer seat, right? So if you're on Instagram, I know a lot of times I'll be flipping through ads and I'll be like, oh, my God, this ad again. I've seen this same exact thing for four months now. What's going on? And the brand isn't going to be able to see my reaction to thinking that, but that's what's going on. And I know I've seen that. I'm like, I've already seen that.

I'm not going to engage. I didn't engage the third time, I'm not going to engage the fifth. So that one's really interesting from that perspective. So always thinking about how can you keep creative, fresh and engaging? So it's like I'm seeing something new instead of just seeing the same thing over and over and over and not taking action. The other thing that you mentioned in terms of video and image that I find really interesting is social media platforms, they have X amount of inventory and it's people's attention, right? So an image is able to convey so much that a video, you may not be able to get to the point in 10 seconds. By that time, someone's already flipped through your ad or whatever it is. Right. So I think that a lot of times when everyone's going all in on one thing, maybe you kind of look for the opportunities where maybe everyone isn't doing things.

And I think video clips and Reels is a perfect example where when no one was doing it, it was amazing, and that content was going super organic, super viral. Now everyone in the world is creating Reels, and you can already see the reach is starting to dwindle because it's more competitive for more time, and it's not even in the best interest of an ad platform like Instagram or Facebook. Who wants more time and attention to be able to serve ads?

Totally. That's exactly right.

Blaine so anyway, as we kind of wrap up here, jordan would love for you to just share a little bit more about your podcast as well. I know you've got the agency. We talked about that, how you guys think of things. But yeah, tell us a little bit more about the show. Who do you talk to? What are the topics? And yeah, we'd love to hear about it.

Yeah, cool. So secrets to scaling your Ecommerce brand. Generally, we have one episode a week that's super tactical, and then I have a couple of interviews in there as well. Really trying to interview thought leaders when it comes to commerce, d to C, all of these people that are connected and around that you hear about apps and tools that you might have thought about, like, should I actually use this one? So we just had the founder of Caro on the podcast the other day. Really great interview with him. Interesting.

Actually.

He was the creator of Earthworm Gym, so that was super cool. Loved having him on the podcast and chatting all things video games. He created all the Matrix games, too, which is super cool. And yeah, so we just have super interesting people on the podcast. I get other agency owners on there recently, had Taylor from Commentary Collective on him, and I did a little podcast swap. That's all the kind of stuff that we talk about on the podcast constantly is, what in the world is going on in here? If you feel like you're going crazy, this is probably a good podcast to listen to as well.

No, I love that. And it's so funny because for anyone who's listening, the way Jordan and I connected is I'm working on this AI tool for podcasters, and we were, like, chatting through the customer service, and he sends me his podcast, and I was like, Wait a minute. I was like, you have an commerce podcast as well. And then he was like, yeah, I've been on your podcast, so that's how we're here. That was super fun. But anyway, Jordan, it's been a pleasure. And for anyone who's listening, where can we connect with you? Are you on LinkedIn Twitter? Like, where's the best place to find you?

Yeah, totally. Those two places are the absolute best. So Jordan West Marketer on LinkedIn. Jordan west ecom over on. It should have been Jordan West. DTC. Now, I'm regretting my handle at Twitter on Twitter, but yeah, those are the two places. And I really just try and put out content that's actually useful.

I'm not a content creator, but I do put out content every single day just based on whatever's working.