what's up DTC pod? Today we're joined by William Gasner, who is the co founder and CMO of Stack Influence. So William, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you guys do at Stack influence.

Awesome.

First off, appreciate having me on the pod. And yeah, I'm the chief marketing officer at Stack. We automate brands and micro influencers and do it all at scale so think hundreds to thousands of promotions a month. My background is actually in the D to C ecommerce space, so been an ecommerce seller since 2019. Had some big failures and big successes. Became a million dollar seller actually during the fidget toy boom, which was a pretty interesting story in itself and used lots of influencer marketing during those days, which actually led us to create stack influence and solve a lot of the issues we were seeing in the market. Brief background.

Yeah, I'd love to kind of understand a little bit more about. So when you were doing the fidget spinner sort of stuff, what was the influencer strategy and what were some of the pain points that you guys were looking to solve?

Absolutely. So a few different things, and I think this is a challenge across all D to C brands, is when you first start out, getting your first customers, building up content and building your brand itself are quite challenges.

Right.

And so what we found is specifically the smaller creators was, it was kind of the best bang for our buck because we not only were able to generate a whole bunch of content that we could use on our marketing, our ads, our social media, but we could effectively get promotions and awareness out there predominantly by just sending free product away. Right. And paying certain creators depending on what their reach and their engagement was. But it was a really effective tactic for us to just kind of get the ball rolling, because once we generate some great content, and then we started getting some initial sales, building up a newsletter list, et cetera, we were able to use that content, start running ads. The ads performed much better than the kind of professional content that we were paying actually photographers to generate. And then from there, it kind of snowball effect.

Right.

You start to build up a community of people who love your product. They can consistently promote for you, become ambassadors, affiliates, and get on the roller coaster and get going. So that was really where I had used it in my past e commerce businesses. But during the pidget toy trend, especially because it was a massive trend, was really where we took advantage of it full force and we're able to actually really leverage it. We had huge success actually on Amazon, and I can go into how we leverage those tactics specifically for online marketplaces. But, yeah, that was where we found a huge amount of success.

Yeah.