Welcome to the commerce Sally podcast, where we believe that great brands are built on passionate leadership, smart operations, and of course, powerful marketing. I'm your host, Josh coffee. And today I have a guest of honor, Matt Harvard, who has so much experience that excels way beyond even my knowledge with the things that he has is done with unicorn industries, Harvard media, and all the eight figure and nine figure brands that he has built.
And he has created. So today, Matt and I are gonna be diving deep into algorithmic scaling, rapid experimentation and other things around growing and e-commerce business. Right on. I'm excited to be here. This is cool. Yeah, Matt, I'm so excited. So but just kind of before we dive in here I have no we've known each other. I feel like it's been for almost, almost it's coming up on a year.
I feel when when you kind of went through one of our totally our giveaway bootcamps, and, and as soon as Matt got into our giveaway bootcamp, I realized, oh, wow, this guy's like a, a hidden Jedi that has so many skills that I never knew about. And I'm so glad that I met you because you have such a track. I'm definitely old enough to feel like a, like an old Jedi, like OB one Kenobi here. So. I love, you know, it's funny actually, Dylan and I, we filmed a we filmed an ad yesterday.
That was, I was OB one Kenobi. That's so funny. You mention that with our I'm R 2d two. It's a, it's a funny ad that we're gonna be launching, but but Matt, I'm real excited to have you I know, I know when I was kind of look when I talked to you I you've managed so many brands and, and, and one thing you said that, Hey, you stopped keeping track after you guys had done 350 million in revenue, which to me is just like, and I'm sure a lot of people listening is like,
that's a whole different level. So I'm just curious, like from you like, could you tell us a little bit about you and like even what you're doing now, because you just have done so many things. Yeah. So I, I have maybe an interesting path here. My background is actually tech. My first big successful company was the software company that I sold to a fortune 500 company FMC. Back when I was that was my 30th birthday, present to myself was selling that,
that business. But that, that, that tech foundation becomes important later on. And and, and I've been around a lot doing just different things. I got a lot of varied interest. But in in 2011, I co-founded a company called Intech and it was a tech company. It was a software company. And we we, we pivoted a few times we ended up writing apps and our app company just took off. We were doing probably 45 million a year with this app company.
And, and after a few years just literally got, I was bored. It was a subscription app company. We could do two years after we made our last change in code. We were still making like a half million dollars a month just on the return subscription billing stuff. But I decided to try to, to get into e-commerce and it was disastrous to start. It was really bad. But, but, but my thing was, I was trying to get in using technology.
I was seeing if there were things I could automate or, or gain an advantage in speed through through technology. And and ultimately in that process, I just kind of literally stumbled across some things and ended up creating my first. And, and again, I wanna be clear this was after several failed attempts, but my first big e-commerce brand, it was a brand called healing solutions, which is essential oils. And it was, it was an Amazon exclusive that company.
We built that up to about a 60 million a year company just doing essential oils. We got big. We, did you remember when hoverboards came out? Yeah, we were like the number three selling brand of hoverboard. We, we did when, when the hoverboards came out, we did like 70 million in hoverboards in about eight months with our brand power
board. And then the FTC, we had forced recall all it was that ended up being a total nightmare, big learning experience to do that, but that kind of started what has been, so I was fairly late in that game, but I'd been hanging around affiliate marketing, hanging around, obviously online tech, really my thing and understood a lot of these principles. I'm I don't consider myself a very good marketer in, in that sense of, I don't write great copy.
I'm I love getting into Photoshop and screwing around, but it's a complete waste of time. I'm I'm like I put stuff out just like, okay, like a fifth grader could probably do what I do. But I find that there was an advantage to having that tech component. And, and so again, this is back in maybe 2013 or so, so, so almost, almost a decade ago, it was, it was, it was over a decade ago that I
started that company. But again, it started as a tech company regardless, one of the things that this was, I think, fortuitous for, he was that, you know, Facebook then figured out Facebook ads and mobile. And cuz when I was back, when I started Intertech, they had not figured any of that stuff out yet. And. Oh, so you grew that with Ling Facebook advertising. That was pure Amazon. Yeah, just Amazon. Wow. And just Amazon. So my first two big e-commerce brands were,
were Amazon brands. And but I started to figure out that there's a lot of power in the algorithms that hopefully that's a word that people understand, but just that there are computer programs and they are opinionated biased computer programs by bias. I don't mean the, the, the bad kind of bias that we generally think of. They're just, they have opinions. They have things that they want to reward and things that they want to punish.
And so my first big e-commerce success came, not because I'm a great product developer, not because I'm a great copywriter or a right, really slick funnels and, and video sales letters. I'm I I'm like, I'm not like horrible at those things, but I am not good at those things. It came because I figured let's lean in on the tech side of this. Let's see, can we really figure out the algorithm? And then as the algorithms just started to, they took over the advertising
world. I in the last, you know, in the last seven or eight years, it's not just you know, Google search. Yes. But it's still fairly it's, it's, it's intent driven, but YouTube, Facebook, TikTok Twitter, there's some platforms I don't use as much like Twitter and stuff, but still they're, they're algorithmically driven. If you wanna get really good, Amazon is algorithmically driven. If you want great distribution on Amazon,
you figure out the algorithm. That's one of the ways to do it, I should say. And so that kind of started that journey for me. And, and I became disenchanted with, with Amazon and ended up going on to do my own house brands and direct to consumer which is where I am right now, where I have been at Harvard media. And so my next several brands that eight figure brands and nine figure company. So Intech was a nine figure company, Harvard media, nine figure company.
Harvard media came on the heels of getting out of the Amazon side and going DTC, which means mostly for the past gosh, 4, 4, 5 years. It's been, I, I I'm all in on the, a, on the am, sorry on the Facebook algorithm I've, I've spent, I know that just in the last three years I've spent like 54 million just on Amazon, just on my offer. So that's not as an agency or, or anything else. And by the way, also doesn include YouTube,
which I play fairly big on YouTube. It doesn't include TikTok, which is newer, but also something that I've, you know, I I've, I've played I I've played on and stuff, but it, it's mostly just really getting into that algorithm side of things and extreme scale on, in the algorithm. Well, I, I, I mean, a lot of people have eCommerce come and they think that they're at scale and it's like, oh gosh, there's so much more that you've got out there.
If you could get friendly with the algorithm, if you could get the that boost that comes from really getting in with the algorithm. So like, what is that? I. Dunno if that's what you wanna hear or not, but. So like, what does that look like? So you mean like again, really friendly with, with the algorithm, like what's an example of VAEs like clicking for one with or one of your brands. So probably a good example of that.
We got one of my brands we sell. So, so at Harvard media we had four house brands and they were across a, a wide variety of of verticals. And so one of them, we were selling high end
furniture by high end. I mean, we, we were selling a multi thousand dollar product there and and we were kind of, I mean, it was effective, but we were, I, I would say we were limping along in that if we tried to scale it, anybody who had advertised on Facebook at a deep level has experienced this, try and scale it and everything collapses, try and scale it, everything collapses. We, we were really struggling to get past about $30,000 a day in, in revenue there.
And but we really needed to be like, we, we need to be multiples multiples of that. We needed to scale, not just, is there 10% growth here? Is there 20% growth here? We need to be at, is there four or 500% growth here? And so, you know, we go through a lot of testing. We, we were testing for probably two or three months at this point, but then eventually you find this common here here's, unless you've experienced this, this is hard to, to, to describe because we were profitable
on the product, right. And it was good. And most people stopped there. Most people start optimizing from that point, they get to the point where they, they, they could start selling something and they start optimizing. We kept experimenting, experimenting, experimenting what we found.
We have the concept called relentlessly chase the tail, which means just to, to constantly, as we're testing to constantly be looking for those outliers constantly be looking for those things that algorithmically stand, stand out from every everything else. And eventually what you end up with is a product that people love, meaning you can sell it. So that's the conversion optimization side of things.
And again, that's the part that most marketers, all they focus on is the conversion optimization is can we sell this effectively? But when you also combine that with algorithmic love and you, and you figure out the algorithm, the algorithmic side of it now, suddenly your distribution goes sky high. Now SU you know, Facebook is saying, gosh, we're we wanna show this to as many people as we can cuz we love what you're
doing as well. And so now you get the, I have a weird technical term for this, I call distribution matching, but it's that I get the funnel love that the, the, the conversion love combined with the, the the Facebook algorithm love and suddenly without changing my conversion dynamics at all, I'm getting two times, three times, four times the traffic coming into me from Facebook because I'm, I'm very heavily aligned with their algorithm, right?
And so the first time that we kind of put all that together with these chairs that we were selling, it was is okay, we're gonna take a piece from this and we're gonna take this piece. The algorithm seems to love this piece. And, and, and we started cobbling together. This, what was originally his like Frankenstein funnel. And I didn't know if it was gonna work or not, but when it all came together and literally like it went, it, it went bonkers. It went crazy in the period of a week.
And then if I could just follow this up, that thing at plateaued again, where we, it was originally, we couldn't get more than $30,000 a day in revenue. Then it turned into, we couldn't spend more than $30,000 a day on our, on our average different. Different problem. I guess. It's a different problem for sure. Yeah. We were coming up on black Friday in, I think 2019.
And we had made a commitment that we were gonna have our first million dollar day, best day we'd ever had up to that point was like, like $227,000. And we knew that in order to have our million dollar day, we were gonna have to spend about a quarter million on advertising. And and of that quarter million, I think 150,000 needed to be on these chairs. But again, every time we, you know, we, we get up to about 50,000 in spend and everything just collapsed.
We knew we were gonna get some lift from black Friday, but we also knew we didn't have the, we, we didn't have the algorithm love in place. We had the conversion process in, we needed to, to, to get to a whole different level and we tore it down and we did like massive amounts of testing, literally like the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday leading up to
black Friday. And, and, and then on black Friday, we turned everything back on all this kind of, all of these algorithm components that we figured out and almost turned it on blind. But on that day we spent 250, I think, 250, $3,000 on Facebook and and did 1 million and 4,000 wait, 1 million and $4,000, I think, or 1 million, $400. It was so close. That's crazy. Even if it was 4,000, like that's just so, so 0.4%, you know? Yes. Yes. Wow. but that really started
just kind of journey. I mean, I knew that there was power in the algorithm, but as I started to kind of piece those things together, that really that, that just kind of became my thing is, is I'm gonna know. And, and, and I'm gonna have an advantage one cuz I, I, the math at, at the level of math and most people like their eyes roll back in their heads like, oh, math, I don't want math to come into this, but by math, let's just say there's a predictability to it.
There is a consistency to an algorithm that I happen to be particularly adept at seeing that and getting that and testing against that and, and trying those things out. And that's become even more now since the you know, post ATT changes in Iowa 14.5 and, and those sorts of things. It's, it's been something that, again, there's, there's a huge part of, this was just fortuitous and good timing and I happen to be a nerd. But it, it definitely has following that path has been a good,
it works. It it's, it's a good way to do things for me. So, so like when I hear that, so when I hear like, okay, well we're having trouble spending more than $30,000 a day. And then we spend more than we spend $250,000 in a single day on ads. Like that's a different tier. Right. So I think there's different tiers that we all that's. About five different tiers from
where most people are at. Yes. So we go through these tiers, but like the thing is like, I've never, and I'm just gonna be Frank, like I've never paid for coaching or gone through any kind of training or program that teaches you. Like, oh, here's how you spend $250,000 in DTC Facebook app. So like where, right. I'm just curious for, for like, how did you learn those things? Was it trial and error? Did you like, where did you start diving in? Really? I. Don't think it's coaching out there
for it, to be honest. In fact, one of the things that I really believe right now is coaching. Lemme take back, let's not say coaching, let's say courses, courses, the, the, the, like the recipe version of things can only get you so far. There's a point where you know, I've now scaled multiple brands, but also multiple businesses, including software businesses and, and non eCommerce businesses. And you reach a point where there, there is no recipe for it anymore.
In fact, even at the earlier levels, even with recipes, most people, statistically, it's not going to, to work. And by the way, that's not because the recipes don't work. It's just that timing is involved and there's a human element to it. And there's a lot of other stuff that goes into this. And so you'll find even with course in coaching, when you just take the outof the box stuff, there's only so much that that, that it can do for you.
My experience is beyond about three to 5 million a year in revenue, those things, the, the, the, the coursework part of it becomes less reli, way less reliable, not just less reliable, significantly less reliable. And then you go to a point where it's like, any course that says, they're gonna teach you how to scale at this level is they're lying. Not that's I, sorry, I, sorry. I it's almost.
It's almost irony cause like to, to teach you how to scale, like at that level, like it, like you said, it's so many tiers higher that like, I'm just, I've never, again, personally, I've never learned from someone who has, I've never gone through a course and we SP and tens of thousands on our own education to always stay, you know, test things, you know, to always see what is available. And I've never talked to someone who has said, I run 200, I've run a $250,000 day campaign successfully at a
whatever that is. So yeah, it sounds like you're just trailblazing almost on your own. At, at that level. Yes. Here are the challenges that I ran into, by the way, as we, as we get, I say, I, that we ran into, this was definitely a team effort. But first of all, since I grew up in the internet marketing world originally as an affiliate the people that I kind of had on my pedestal where it's like, gosh, someday, I hope to be as successful as them.
And I kept going back to them, hoping that they could give me some hints as we started to grow, even that first time around at Intech. And one of the things that I realized that was really a challenge for me was at some point I'm like, well, crap, I'm like three or four times their size. Now the stuff that they're trying to teach me is not applicable. And, and I'm realizing I've gotta go my own route because I'm also not enterprise size. I also, you went through
a period. It's like, well, what can I learn from Amazon? Or what can I learn from eBay or Microsoft and realizing, gosh, that's also not the way to go because they can do things that I can't do right now. I can't emulate them a lot of times. So, so there was a, I felt like I was kind of in this tweener phase where, where we did have to have a lot of invention on our side, and that just got worse at Harvard
media at Harvard media. You know, then it's like, gosh, now I'm, I'm 10 times bigger than, than these people that I've been trying to learn from. And I'm experiencing problems that when I ask them, Hey, what'd you do about this? They've never experienced them or they'll tell me, well, just do this. And it's like, okay, that's what I had to do. You use the were tears. I used the word thresholds, but it's like, okay, well, that's what I had to do three tiers ago.
And if that's your level of solution, it just communicates to me that you've not, you, you've not done this yet. Which again, not a knock, not anything else. It's just that in that world, in that eCommerce world, that typically is the, like the hustle and grinding commerce world. If you're doing, you know, if you're doing 5 million a year, you're doing well. If you're doing 10 million a year, you're doing better than just about everybody. I think we were in the top.
It was like, at one point we got this in a pop top 0.1, 7% of e-commerce companies or something along those lines. But again, hard to find, well, you know, who do I follow at this level? And there's a lot of, there's a lot of trial and error and by the way, a lot of trying things out and then realizing, oh crap, okay. We could have just used this tool over here. We could have just done this,
this thing over here. It just, it took us $200,000 to figure that out and that, that we didn't need to spend, but we didn't know that we didn't need to spend it. So I guess we're all just waiting on the Matt har course. That's what we're all waiting on. Yeah. Right. But so look, here's the thing. I've actually, I went down that road at the beginning of the pandemic. I started doing some of those things. And I started doing lives you know, zooms.
And it was a lot of this was says that we're forced to go online and I'm, and so I thought, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna start sharing some of my knowledge. And then that led to creating what we call the hard media insiders. And I very, very quickly realized one. I'm just, I'm not cut out. I don't have the patience for,
to, to do that stuff. But also I, I, I just, I'm, I'm not a believer in, I can CA I can put this in a, in a box and, and that everybody's going to be able to, to just, I think there are principles that you can learn that will lead to your success, but it's because you learn the principles. Not because everybody wants the tactics. Everybody wants to know, you know, how do i.my eyes and cross my Ts and do that kind of stuff. And I can certainly,
I can give those. I can sit, we can sit here for five hours and I can tell you some like badass stuff on Facebook and, and YouTube and things at the day that that stops working, which may be tomorrow. You're, you're, you're at, at a minimum, you have something that doesn't work anymore at worst. You've got something that's gonna get accounts banned, or that's going to cause active
problems for you. So I, I, I just, I got out of that, although I'm, I am, we're considering doing something right now, purely on experiment, rapid experimentation. It's a more, a much more confined model. And is the foundation for almost everything that we do anyway, but we'll. See. Well, if we could dive, like, actually I would love to, I'd love to dive into the weeds of that a little bit if that's okay. Because like, okay. The that's, so
that's what you've said. I mean, you said you spent two to two and a half months, or three months just literally doing rapid testing. Like, what does, I'm curious, like, what does that, like, what does that look like if you've never done that? And like, I'm just curious from your perspective, like what, what is a little bit of the overall strategy that you take for that?
So boy, where to start on this, can I, can I start first with where we're at from, especially post apple iOS 14.5, because that leads to, it doesn't necessarily change There, there is some amount of foundation that's important in, in that, because you used to be able to, I don't know how long you've been doing this, Josh, but, but you used to be able to throw out something middle of the road. And like, I'm not a great singer, right?
But there are auto tune programs that can make me sound like I'm passable. And Facebook used to be like the greatest auto tune trick ever in e-commerce and marketing end. I used to, you used to be able to throw out something that was kind of middle of the road and let Facebook optimize it for
you up into workable. That was a, so that's what we call an implied proof model, meaning that you thought you had a good audience, you thought you had a good product and a good angle, and these other things, you throw it all out there to Facebook and and, and could figure all that out for you. They could stack a lot of unknown variables together and figure out how it's going to work. Does that make sense? And, and that used to be a really, that used to be a viable pattern in
Facebook was just be good enough. Well, so one of the things right, that doesn't work anymore, first of all, that, or, or is, is very challenging to make that work. You have to be playing at the extremes. And now I'm gonna answer your, your question here, because it ties directly into this. You you've gotta, you have to play at the extremes right now.
And the extremes are that I see is you you've got either high threshold and high threshold is something that means it takes a lot of time and effort, but it also has a very high payoff to it. So high threshold things are video sales letters, high threshold things are product development. There, there are things that they are I'm consuming, they're slow. They likely cost money to do. And you don't get very many opportunities to get them wrong. If you get your product development wrong.
Unless you've got really deep pockets, the, the average entrepreneur gets like one or two shots at that. That's it before they're like, I'm, I'm outta money. I, I don't have another $50,000 to source something from China and, you know, do my own thing again. Or if it's a, you know, let's say that you're gonna hire, I have no idea what, what, what, you know, your agency charges for things, but let's say, man, we're gonna out and we're gonna hire an agency.
We're gonna shoot a really high quality sales letter and really invest resources into high quality video sales, which if you do do it right, the payoff, the reward for that is, is amazing, right. But if you do it wrong, it's gonna suck all your money up. And, and you're kind of, you're stuck, but there are people that, that high threshold, it is the right move for them. It's usually when they are, if you already got skills, if you've got something there that you can leverage,
then that's a way to go. The other way to go is high frequency. And so it's like, I, if you've got high threshold, which is low frequency, usually not a lot of shots at making mistakes. And those sorts of things, the high frequency is, is the other way the high frequency has to come along with really low threshold. Meaning in my case, I'm trying to get it down to like, as long as it's not an actively stupid idea, because those are easy to weed out. It doesn't have to be a good idea.
It doesn't have to be, nobody's gotta sit around and brainstorm and think about, you know, it would be super cool, cuz this is the mistake we make as marketers all the time. We think something's gonna be really cool. Oh, this, this video would be great if we shot this, oh, this will be funny and that's gonna work. And then you realize, oh, or doesn't sell as well as we thought it would. But, but those are,
that's a slow process. So the, so this high frequency process is, well, what if we could through, through a combination of really lowering that threshold down super, super low. And, and I'll, we can talk about that in, in a little bit too, but that that's going to be through one, just making. So it just can't be actively bad. And combining that with a little bit of tech, a little bit of automation so that we can really accelerate that process.
And now here, here's the thing mathematically, and this is a mathematical principle mathematically, you're more likely to achieve a high quality result through iteration through rapid iteration.
Then you are through what's called high intentionality, high intentionality, meaning I've got this high concept, video, high concept, product, high concept funnel sales process, whatever it might be, statistically, you're better off saying, well, let's just go lower concept and go really, really fast through a lot of variations of that. That has come to us now to where this off of one of my last just lives that I was talking to somebody with.
And afterwards we, we came up behind the scenes in, in my, in unicorn and we thought, you know what? I bet we could teach people. Cuz he had mentioned having getting 500 product ideas. Somebody asked, what do I sell? And he showed them a process it's like in, at the end of this, the, the, the point of it was you're gonna get 500 product ideas in 21 days. And everybody's like, man, I'm blown away by that 500 product ideas in 21 days.
I can't even think of one right now. And at the end 21 days, I'm gonna have 500. And as I got off that, I thought, you know what? Most people think they're testing a lot when they get through a half dozen tests. And by the way, most people also don't understand what a proper test is, but they think they're testing a lot at a half dozen. And it's like, you know what? We could probably teach people. This is what I just mentioned.
This experimentation course I was thinking about, I bet we could show people how had to do 500 experiments in 21 days on Facebook. And for most people that's like, what? Like, that's just, that's. Where I'm at right now that I hear that. And that's what I'm saying, right? It, it, it's a little bit like what, how does that even work?
But here's the thing you can have. I one, it it's way easier than what you think it is probably cuz one of the things that's happening is you likely have a, a, a, a not a great understanding of what a true experiment is. But also, and this is the other thing that, that, that, that really changed with iOS 14.5. Like I said, you used to be able to kind of throw something out in the middle of that.
It's not, it's neither high threshold nor is it high frequency, but you can throw it in the middle and Facebook will optimize you to high, to, to, to, to high effectiveness. Right. Does that make sense to you? I, I, if I'm speaking in, in terms that, or again, I speak in nerdy terms, so you can tell me to either shut up or say it differently or whatever, but you could throw it out in the middle and, and, and Facebook would optimize you and
you had what I considered. Again, this is a random number to some extent, but I figured that on this kind of continuum you had about a 70% optimization window, meaning you just had to not be in that bottom 30% and Facebook could probably optimize you to something meaningful. That's no longer even close to true. You get about a 30, 10 optimization window right now, which just means you have to end up higher. You gotta throw something out higher
than what you did before. But again, you can't, if you try and start there, it doesn't, it doesn't end well for most people who try and start that high. So we go all the way the other way. And so we go through a series of things. What, what we call naked tests and gosh, how do I, Josh? Do you golf at all? I don't not at all. I taught golf. Okay. All right. Taught golf. Do you at least understand some of the concept of golf then?
Some of it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Here's here's the, the probably I, I golf a fair amount by the way. And my partner, oh. You're in the valley, Charlie. I used to live in Scottsdale and everyone lives on the golf course. Absolutely. So I'm, I live like two blocks from paradise valley and I, yeah. That's so anyway so one of the, this would be like the equivalent of this's, how most people used treat their Facebook accounts that still do actually.
And that is if I wanna get better at golf, the way to get better at golf is I go out and I golf a lot. But the only time that I would actively actively work on my game was while I'm golfing, which is super slow and you don't get a lot of reps and you don't get, so if you're bad at golf and the only way that you improve is to go out and golf, which set sounds logical by the way, you're not ever going to be a very good golfer. Right? I hope that makes sense.
This applies by the way, for any, almost any performance based activity. So how you get better at golf? One of the things I was famous for that my office, if you ever came to my office and had a meeting with me was I likely would take the meeting while I'm practicing putting my office, or I had a little chipping green setup or more likely we just have the meeting at my at my simulator studio. And so while I'm doing that, I'm, I would spend two hours just working on my grip.
I would spend two hours just working on my foot placement. I would spend time in my office chipping and putting and doing is all things, but I found these ways to, to, to break down the practice where I get a lot of micro reps that then when I finally step back on the golf course, then when I put it all together in an 18 hole game for, for multiple hours, that I don't get very many opportunities at now, it all pays off.
Does that hopefully does, does at least that analogy, does that story make sense to you? That it totally makes sense. And it just reminds me that now we need to get a, a CrossFit rig so I can start working on my muscle ups in the studio here. Yeah. Yes. And, and, and, and start working on the, on, on the,
the intricacies of that. Yeah. But this is how most people treat their Facebook advertising and, and I, and I'm gonna, I use Facebook as an example, cuz that's really my domain, but it's how they treat their business, which is they treat everything as a game as, as the, like the we're out on the course golfing. And if you're using funnels, for example, they everything's gotta go through the whole funnel process before they know, did this work, did we get better? Did we not get better?
So part of what we're doing with our tests, what we call these naked tests is, is the equivalent of in golf. Well, what if I practice my grip for a while and experimented with grips and I'm not actually golfing. And I don't know, like, I don't know where this leads, but I'm, I'm separating it from the result of golf and just PR just working on this, this little concept, right? So in a naked test, we'll do a tremendous amount of testing over what we call like naked messaging.
What happens if we just throw this message, job, this message out this message out. I can run. I, I can run 50 of those in a day pretty easily. And, and they only cost between two and $5 a piece to run. 'em We have what we call naked offers. So that's kind of the, the next level of that. And again, I, I can run probably maybe 10 to 12 of those a day, again, very high frequency. They cost me less than $20 to, to do something like that. Even at scale, they, they,
they do that. So we have a, a whole series of these things that we can run where we're splitting out these element and getting the reps in and getting the there's a famous concept from gosh, now I can't remember his name. He wrote outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, you know, he's got, he's got the 10,000 hours, 10,000 hours is one of those things. There are rules for the 10,000 hours. It has to be a skill with immediate feedback and all these, but here's the thing. All those rules
apply to performance marketing. And, and this is one of the things that falls into that category. Only my thing is my belief is it's not about 10,000 hours. It's about 10,000 tries. If you can stay alive long enough to get 10,000 tries in. And that's obviously an absurd example, but conceptually it works. The point of it is how fast can you iterate through the iteration cycle that most businesses go through is it's not gonna get 'em to a hundred tries before they, it doesn't work anymore.
But if you can come up with a velocity fast enough that at least puts you on a pathway, I could look at it. And if you told me, Matt, you gotta get 10,000 tries in this year. I get 10,000 tries in this year. And, and, and here's the mathematical result of that. The mathematical result of that is I will win. That just is, that's not confidence. That's not bluster. That's not, you know, Hey, believe in yourself and you can do it. That is just the math.
That's what happens when you get that many tries in and you've got the agility to come back. This would part of it, part of what was important in that was the feedback loop. So when you know how to evaluate that feedback loop, how to adjust your responses, how to feed that back in and, and really accelerate that cycle. It's it, it's just, it's a super, super
powerful process. And by the way, I, it leads to now, if I were gonna go out and say, okay, I'm gonna spend a lot of money on an agency to go out go out and create some, some video content, some commercial type things, or to you know, a, a, a good funnel. It also, I, I now have proven all of the elements. It's the equivalent in golf of all right. I I've been working on my grip for hours. I've been working on my stance for hours.
My approach I've been working on, on, on my hip movements and unlocking all that stuff and all of these little things. And now I'm gonna go out to the course and it's gonna pull and I'm gonna pull it all together. And by the way, I applied this principle to my golf game and I added like 40 yards to my drive in a 10 day period, which is exceedingly difficult to do.
But the concept holds in any performance based activity, you master these small things, you get the reps because you can do it very, very quickly with a low here and here are the low cost to your mistakes, high frequency, and, and eventually, and, and then all you're doing is you're chasing the, again, what we call chasing the tail, which means you don't care about, well, this one got 2.2% clickthrough rate. And this one got 2.2, 5% clickthrough rate that that's traditional test.
And most people are not ready for optimizations yet, but that's the only way that they learned how to do it. They learned how to do AV optimization testing, and it's terrible. It's killing their companies. That that's how they do testing, cuz it's the wrong way to do it. Instead, you know, you throw out 2.2, 2.3,
2.2 0.5, 2.12. And, and you, and then, but you get enough rapid iterations and suddenly you throw out a four and it's like, oh, okay, all right, you wanna get around the loss of signal that you have on Facebook right now? That's how you you've gotta play for those outliers. You play for those, those things where it's like, we, we just absolutely broke the mold for
what's possible. Not cuz we're genius, but because we just, we did enough stuff fast enough that we, we, we got out of the, you, what's gonna be best between 2.1 to 2.3. And that's what all of our ranges are. And then suddenly we throw out a four it's, I'm going through this with one of my partners right now that we've gone from literally like a percent and a half clickthrough rate on the front end. But just this last week they were throwing out front end creatives.
Now they're getting 12% engagement on 'em 12% clickthroughs on them again. Not cuz I'm sitting here like I'm a genius. Let me tell you what you should put in your creative it's because we just tried so much stuff. We lowered that threshold down so low. They've got like support people. They're like, well, I don't know. Should we test this? Should we try this? Throw it in there. That's how low the threshold is on this. Throw it in there and let's see.
And then you, then you go into what I did with the chairs where it's like, right, we got this, that was 4% and this, that was 6%. Let's start mixing and matching and, and now let's start applying some intelligence to it. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh my gosh, this one just got 8%. Oh my gosh, this one just got 10%. Okay, holy crap. This one just got 12%. And as we sit back and look back at it, it's like, gosh, there was no genius.
There was no like I everybody's waiting around for the, what's the big, huge idea. And it doesn't one that rarely happens. And when it does happen, it rarely works. This is more, how can we just be average and ordinary, but be average and ordinary, super, super fast. And and, and the results people under this is results at an accelerated pace and people underestimate the, the power of those compounding results. So, so. I probably didn't even answer your question by the way.
No, that's that? So that's like drawing such, I have so many ideas coming to my mind right now. So so I'm hoping to kind of like before we kind of close here, what I I'd like to get a little tangible if that's all right with like, so when I hear rapid testing, different things like I'm hearing okay. So we're gonna be rapid testing headlines, creative we're gonna be doing different like primary text. Is that what you're referring to when you're saying like rapid testing within
Facebook? Like, are you, you isolating. That's part of it E. A single variable, your. Rapid test extreme I extreme isolation. Yes. And, and so that is, you hit on some of the elements that we will test. We will do rapid tests, naked tests on headlines. We'll do naked tests on on, on the creative side of it, but we'll also do naked tests on just pure messaging.
We'll throw out an ad where we're not, we're taking out all of the conversion elements of a creative, for example, meaning we're not trying to come up with a cool image and something and, and, and great copy and everything else. We're just testing those. Our audience respond to this me, so here here's, I'll give you a, a, a concrete example of this. We have add one of our brands was pain remediation.
And so we were trying to, to, to find, well, what is the thing that, that people are gonna respond more to? And so we tested just a whole bunch of literally these are ads that had no creative to them at all. It was basically just, they were just call out ads. It, it was essentially this is what we call a naked offer.
And it was you know, if we could if, if you could rid yourself of, you know, sciatica pain without whatever would you do that that's all is as simple as that, that's actually probably even more complex than it was. And we throw that out in just a, a very basic a format in our case is just a two color ad. And, and, and that's, it, it didn't even go anywhere by the way, like we, we were linking off to at the time, like web MD type things or something, I, we,
I wouldn't do that now. I've got a different method for it, but at the time that's all that we were doing. We just wanted to see, what's the message that our audience is going to respond to. And, and it was, you know, is it site sciatica? Is it you know, different types of foot pain or whatever. And we discovered that sciatica had it performed like 30% better than anything.
Anything else did. Now, we use that to start to, to move up and, and start incorporating that into, into funnels, into sales pages, into other things. And so that even was before headline test thing. This is very headlines are sexy. The message is very unsexy. The message is just, would you have a conversation about this? Is this something that you're
interested in? And, and now from there, we move them into funnels, sorry, into sandboxes, which are about let's have that conversation and see what your intent is, is your intent. We have what we call a consumption loop intent, but we also have an action loop intent which we don't need to get into here. We won't get into here, but, but it starts breaking this stuff down big picture. This is more complex than what people
are doing right now. But little picture, it allows us to focus on these little teeny foundational building blocks that people right now, the, they assume, we assume as entrepreneurs, we assume that we know way, way more than we actually know. And we assume that stuff that makes sense, this most people who go out of business, it's not cuz they don't, it's not, cuz they're stupid. It's not cuz they don't have good products or, or any of those things.
Most of the time they have reasonable stuff and sometimes even brilliant stuff, but there's a lot more to it than just a good idea. There's a lot more to it than this makes sense. This a lot of times, again, anybody who's done, Facebook marketing knows you take. So like this makes sense. This makes sense. This makes sense. This makes sense. But when I run it, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't work. I can't get it to convert on, on Facebook.
And so a lot of what we're doing is let's get really clear about what are you assuming is going to work in this process and let's see, can we devise a test that, that, that proves just this element, just this element, just this element before we add 'em all up. Cause adding 'em all up is slow. Building a funnel is slow sourcing. A product is slow. Doing a, a good video is slow. Even when you're good at it, it's slow, right? So let's test all these things
really fast outside of it. And, and, and then kind of piece 'em back together. I've done a horrible job explaining that, but, but conceptually at each step, it's very simple. In fact, I would say it's way more simple than what most people are doing even though in total, when you get to the big picture, you've had more complexity to get there, but, but at each step of the way, it's way easier. And that by, by extension, by the way, way, way, way faster using things.
There's another good concrete example. I dunno if familiar with a an app called banner bear and I don't think there's, there's nothing magical about banner bear, but what it does is it lets you set up an image template and then, and then you just make an API call and you can essentially just churn out a whole bunch of of graphic creatives very, very quickly. And so we'll do a lot of things like that. It's part of how we can and it will automate the, the ad creation side of that as well.
But, but that's what allows us to, to throw out, you know, I could launch 50 tests. I could launch 50 tests from scratch in probably within
three hours probably. Meaning I got all 50 things in there, got the creatives done, launched them on face, got the right campaign structure, did everything else, but using things like a combination of banner or bear and air table that, that allows us to just ideate very, very quickly test very, very quickly and then come back around, you know, get, get this feedback a very tight feedback loop coming back around through and, and, and it's actually more accessible than
most people think that it is it's it's, it's, it's way more simple than I've probably made it here since this isn't I don't talk about this as a, as a profession. So I'm, I'm over complicating it right now. Probably. No, I think this is, this is so great, Matt, and like I'm, I'm grateful that you did spend this time and you've given me actually a lot of ideas of things I would've EST for us, but then also our clients.
And I think like my, my biggest takeaway from kind of hearing you talk through these things is, is that there's a lot more experimentation that needs to have in people that are kind of doing way more, almost like back when in the Google world they called 'em sags, right? Single keyword ad groups, people sometimes treat their Facebook ads like that too, where they just put all their stock into one thing and they're like, this is it.
You know, it's their baby, they doctor this ad together and it's just like, and then it doesn't sale or it doesn't do as well as it could if you were testing. So I think my biggest takeaway in all of this is there is, there's a lot more experimentation and like you say, rapid testing that needs to happen. Most people are off by probably two or three orders of magnitude with how much testing they should be doing.
They think that they're flying when they get a dozen in and they should probably be doing five to 10 times that many, but then they, if they do it the way they're doing it, you can't do that. That's that's the next breakdown is yes, you've misunderstood that I hopefully there's no offense in that, but they've just misunderstood what they could and should be testing and how to actually run a, a test. And what a valid test is.
We internally differentiate between an experiment and a test cuz testing, people think AB testing and again, AB testing is a terrible, that's a horrible idea for most people because it's, it's pure optimization and most people are not ready optimizing from a, a, a, something that is not profitable to something that's a little bit less, not profitable is not where most people need to be at. They need to get wildly
profitable first. They, they're not going to get there to Fu 10% at a time they need some, what's gonna move the needle a hundred percent. What's gonna move the needle 200% and AB testing. Is it ain't that? Hmm. Well that's, I, I think that that's the, for me like that, that's huge because what I think always, what get you here, isn't gonna get you where you're going and for anybody that's listening right now, like Matt has been where so many of us desire to go.
And so many businesses I speak to would just like dream of having a business, that's doing five, 10 million. And even beyond that, like you've talked about 60 million plus 90 million numbers. Like that is so aspirational that I think that hearing from someone like you, that has been there, you've done that. Like, what you're doing is so interesting to me because I'm not, I'm not playing in that level. You know, yet one day I will and I'm excited for it.
But when I hear that it's so foreign to me because like, you're right, nobody teaches what you know, and it's come through all this experience and experimentation that you've been doing. So anybody that's listening take this to heart because what you're doing now, isn't gonna get you going. And it takes changing things. And listening to guys like Matt, that really know what they're talking about and have been at those places that you desire to go, that that can provide that feedback.
But Matt man, thank you for being on here. I appreciate it. Where have you been a value? I it's been fun. Where can, where can people connect with you? I know you're not a huge social guy from what I've gathered, but where can we send people to connect with you?
Probably the easiest place. Just go to unicorn industries.com and and you can connect with me in fact, I, so there will be some we're, we're putting out some cheat sheets and stuff on rapid testing and things out there too, just to help people with this process. So go to unicorn industries and, and from there easiest way to reach out to me similar to what you did, Josh is there'll be messenger links and some other things on there. I, I, I like messenger. I like
reaching out that way. So sorry, alarm's going off there. Yeah, that's that, that's, that's the easiest way to do it. Start@Unicornindustry.Com. Awesome. Cool. Well, Hey, thank you Matt, for being on we really appreciate it and I'm gonna make sure that anybody listening once Matt has that out, we're gonna go to Ali podcast.com/matt. And we're just gonna go ahead and redirect it to that cheat sheet.
So at least grab their email for it, but but we're gonna send them there so that, that way no one can get access to it. I know I'll be going there as well. So you have been listening to the eCommerce Ali podcast where we believe the great, great brands are built on passionate leadership, smart operations, and of course, powerful marketing, Matt and I are great that you hung out with us today. So much stuff here to dive in, go replay it if you need to, because this is important. Thank
you. And we will see you next time.