This subscription box made one mistake that cost them customers.
In this episode of the MAG GROWTH Podcast, Noah Wickham sits down with John Roman to break down what went wrong, how it affected churn and retention, and the exact changes they made to fix it. Learn how product testing, systems, and customer feedback shape a successful ecommerce subscription business like BattlBox.
Transcript from video:
Chapter 1: Subscription box challenges explained
0:00 I would say the biggest difference is being a glutton for punishment. What a horrible complex thing to have to navigate. 70% of our revenue is a mystery box that we ship out that people are [music] are willing to give us money
0:16 on pure mystery and surprise. The biggest scary moment [music] is that so let's say this next box has eight items in it. that allows eight choke points and if a single choke point happens the entire box is in peril which is absolutely brutal.
0:30 Throughout the years you know past 11 years has there ever been I guess like a giant flounder moment.
0:37 We sent out mission 26 the do kit it was a complete missed mark. It was not a good box. Any KPI that matters when it comes to managing [music] a membership a subscription business was negatively affected by this. I think I still have
0:53 PTSD from it. The mistakes are where the learnings really are. It's not exciting to share the losses, but the losses [music] are the good stuff. I want to read about the losses because that's that's where the the winning truly exists, the recipe for it.
1:05 Welcome everybody to the Mag Growth e-commerce podcast. I am graciously having the presence of John Roman today.
1:12 John is coming to us from Battlbox, a subscription box all about the idea of adventure delivered straight to your door. John, thanks for joining us.
1:22 Noah, thanks for having me. And small world that you were a battlebox customer once at one point in time. I was and it it was just thing before the podcast we
1:30 were just talking about that and the idea of just small world people we know places they are and the fact that I was once a customer and so I uh I might have
1:39 a couple of things to say but I wanted to kick us off here first and foremost say just kind asking simple question of for those that are I guess uninitiated
Chapter 2: Subscription vs regular ecommerce difference
1:48 what is the realistic difference between a standardized just like consumer package good ecom brand and a subscription box what are like the three key differentiators you would say.
1:58 Sure. So, so when we started in 2015, we we were a subscription box. We actually don't um use the term as much anymore.
2:07 It's more a membership. We're more just a outdoor and adventure gear brand. But, uh, you know, when I think of the differences, subscription box having one
2:17 and it's still just to to keep me honest here, it's still about 70% of our revenue. It is our flagship product with certainty. But I would say the biggest
2:25 difference is being a glutton for punishment. What a horrible complex thing to have to navigate. You're you're having to forecast numbers. You know, when you get any sort of scale 6 months
2:40 out because of production runs and manufacturing and you know, forecasting numbers 6 months out is super challenging because you don't know how you can have the the best funnel ever and there's so many variables outside of
2:56 your control like meta or Tik Tok shop or insert advertising platform you're using just going through the es and
Chapter 3: Why mystery products still sell
3:02 flows. So, um the complexity is is up there. I was chatting with someone the other day and he said the two complex
3:11 super smart guy smarter than me. He said the two complex most complex businesses he sees in the DTOC space are subscription boxes because of the reasons I outlined and then a true like scaled apparel brands because
3:28 you know you're only selling jeans but you have 1500 SKs because of color and sizes and and variations that it becomes an inventory nightmare. It's just a very complex why would we do this to ourselves business. That's probably the big big separator, right? It's a little
3:44 bit interesting that, you know, 70% of our revenue is a mystery box that we ship out that people are are willing to give us money on pure mystery and surprise. Now, I think, you know, 11 years into this, we kind of have a track record that we send really good gear out
4:00 and you are getting massive value. So, I think it's a little bit easier, but I think that it makes the barrier to entry probably pretty difficult. It's a pretty
4:08 big moat just because we do have the track record. like if you and I, you know, stayed on after the call and we're like, "Let's launch a a battlbox
4:16 dppelganger and and go to market, it's tough." Yeah, I kind of answered the question. I didn't give you three kind of like one.
4:23 I'll take it as an answer, you know, like because I agree with you. I think, you know, being someone who I mean, I've worked with, you know, subscription boxes in the past and then, you know, as
4:32 well been consumer of them, right? Both for you guys and other ones. And, you know, from the customer perspective, I think I've always understood that. I
4:40 think that mystery aspect is a big allure, right? And there are some that like you can always look and kind of see what are you gonna get ahead of time and you can do exchanges with some and
4:48 things like that, you know, as like customer side. I always looked at I'm like I don't want to know what I'm getting, right? Like if I get something
4:56 Yeah. It's like if I get something I don't like, that in of itself is more of a reflection on like how they're, you know, doing different consumers and like
5:03 what they're sending out versus like an actual I would want something, right? if I want something specific, you know, you just go get as a customer. So, there is that allure. But I'm kind of curious from I guess for you guys especially when it comes to like building out and
5:19 creating because I mean realistically, you talk about the idea of apparel having 1,500, right? Different SKUs every single month. You guys are
Chapter 4: How products are selected and tested
5:27 basically coming up with a brand new subset of SKUs for the boxes, right? So, like I guess how is that process even working? How do you guys I mean I assume
5:35 11 years in it's probably fine-tuned, but was that just like a giant hurdle when you guys were first kind of launching off?
5:41 Yeah. So, so to your point, yeah, we're adding um on average seven uh seven to eight SKs every single month that uh will, you know, together make up the upcoming box. And just to just to clarify, cuz I know there's probably some um if we're going to use the term
5:57 subscription boxes where like it's a mystery box and if I'm signed up and you're signed up, you might get different things than I get. That is not the case with Battle Box. We do a very strategic shipping West Coast to East Coast drop. Everyone gets it around the same time. We have four different tiers
6:15 and they stack, but everyone's box is the same the same items based on tier. I always thought that was like a better way to go too because you know from the aspect you and a buddy can both be signed up for this and both get the same thing and then you're like oh this is
6:31 awesome right we both can go out and now use this new thing we have.
6:34 Yeah. And the flip side of that is possibly the negative experience that you and I compare our boxes and you got this really cool item and I didn't get
6:43 that and I'm like that's not cool like like and that would absolutely be a thing. So back to your question, it's it's changed a lot and it's become this this wild process currently of, you know, having the eight new SKs each
6:58 month, a new box that drops. Meanwhile, the the one-time part of the business, we might add 100 SKs a single month if we're if we're, you know, showcasing a new product line.
7:09 Right now, we have about 2,000 SKs in total. But the process of the box is at this point it's a it's a welloiled machine. It's also so regimented in process that I'm sure the team at times gets annoyed by it. But ultimately we
7:25 have to ensure that the customer has a great experience. That's priority number one. So we have this wild process where you know we have this funnel of new items. it comes uh probably 50% comes from existing members suggesting they have a lot of ways that they can fill
7:40 out forms and send us pictures and suggest items. Then 25% is team out in the wild trying to find items and 25% is going to be just vendors reaching out to us. Regardless of where it hits the
7:54 funnel, all of that comes to the same point where we're we're getting samples.
7:58 So we're receiving typically five samples. that goes to five different people and two of which are our creators, our testers, and they're
Chapter 5: Internal voting and rejection process
8:06 literally taking it out into the woods or wherever needed to test the item and see if it can uh hold up and not just
8:13 fall apart and it's good quality and that they like it. And at that point, we're then running financial models, making sure we can purchase it for the
8:21 needed price, that the company's big enough to scale, big enough to get it to us by our enhanced date. If both of those boxes are checked, it then goes to
8:29 a team of nine on internal where we have a call, the items are presented and um the creator has tested, it's passed that
8:37 test, it's passed the financial test, now it's is this, you know, good enough to make it in a battlbox. And the team of nine, two or more nos, it's gone.
8:49 Wow. which is extremely maddening, I'm sure, for the team that got it up to that point to then just, you know, have a case of the Mondays and two people
8:58 don't like it on the call and it's it's out. But, you know, the rules are rules for a reason and it ensures that the items are are good items at the you you
9:06 can make everybody happy, but it is one of the downfalls of everybody getting the same thing is you're never going to find an item that 100% everybody is going to get excited about. At that same point, I think to have that like rigid
9:21 testing, right? And like even be that allowance of like, yeah, two nos and it's out, right? Like that I think there
9:28 are a lot of like both businesses and brands that are willing to like push the needle on that, right? As long as they
9:37 can, you know, make it work at the end of the day. And that's one of those that being super rigid when it comes to like checklists and process and things like
9:45 that is in my opinion like one of the ways that you just grow business, right? For us that's a huge thing internally.
9:50 Everything has a checklist. Everything has an SOP. If you do it more than one time, it needs to be SOPD and have checklist, right? And the fact that you
9:59 guys have that for especially something as in my opinion like critical to the business as like the product choice like that makes sense. But with that as well,
10:07 I was curious when you were talking, what is the lead time there? Like you had mentioned earlier like 6 months for like forecasting, but is that like how long in advance you guys are like
Chapter 6: Supply chain risks and delays
10:15 planning specific boxes or are there times where like something comes out and you're like we have to get this out in the next month?
10:22 Typically, we're trying to keep it planned out 9 to 12 months out.
10:26 I would imagine you have to, right? You have to often times the lead time of purchase order green light to the vendor and receiving it typically is only about 90 to 120 days. We do try to work out further than that 150 to 180 just to give lead time for mistakes. The biggest
10:44 Gary moment is that so let's say this next box has eight items in it. You know, that's possibly eight different vendors, eight different purchase orders, eight different things being manufactured somewhere, whether it's stateside, whether it's in China, whether it's in Italy, going to have to
11:00 go on a boat. That allows eight choke points. And if a single choke point happens, the entire box is in peril, which is absolutely brutal. There's
11:08 scenarios where, you know, we've had it in the past where three weeks out, we're getting a heads up for the first time
11:16 and something is due in three weeks to our door a month before the box goes out and they're like, "Hey, we're not going to hit this time frame." Okay, well,
11:24 what do we do? Right. So, we've come up with some things that we put in place where we typically try to have in our warehouses already a replacement product for each team.
11:34 Yeah. Like filler type items that you put in. we're it still passes the it still went through the the regular process, but we have 12,000 of them
11:43 sitting there in case of um one of these scenarios. The biggest hurdle issue we did is we brought back themes which made what I just described very difficult because it's got to fit in the theme which means we just have to have more more supply chain funnel more options
12:02 because no one ever has the quantity we need sitting on a shelf. It just doesn't exist anymore.
12:07 Yeah. I imagine at like at the scale that like you know, we're talking 10 years ago. I bet you guys didn't have enough to where you know that was big issue. You could probably find from any
12:16 wholesaler like, oh yeah, they probably have some stock. But it's like you're not going to find 12,000 plus of one item to say, hey, this is [laughter] something we need tomorrow.
12:27 Yeah. Back back in 2015, you know, we we were sometimes ordering stuff after we had already renewed the box. we knew the
12:36 exact amount we needed and it was you know sitting three states over and was quick trip to get it. So the scale has definitely changed changed things and
12:44 made it uh pretty anxietyridden at times. Well, on the topic of anxiety, Ren, as you were kind of talking about
Chapter 7: Planning inventory months ahead
12:52 that, that was going to be one of my questions actually later on was this idea of like, have you ever had a situation where a product, you know, it doesn't come through in time? And the
13:00 answer is obviously yeah, there. Yeah, I guess the a better way to ask that question now just kind of hearing that is throughout the years, you know, past
13:08 11 years, has there ever been, I guess, like a giant flounder moment where, you know, basically pie in face, you guys
13:16 end up, I don't know, whatever it is, you send out a box and like 90% of people just have like a negative opinion
13:23 or review of that one or you send one out and you guys see like a giant spike in overall cancellations. Anything like that? Has there ever been one of those
13:31 moments or has it been fairly kind of smooth where you're like you get your customer audience enough, you understand what the idea is here that you know you can kind of fulfill everything and like more.
13:43 No, we've we've we've absolutely[clears throat] messed up. [laughter]
13:47 Look, I I tried to give you a little optimism there. Yeah. Though to be fair, the process that I described that has been in place now since 2021, late 2021, since that's been in place, we haven't had one of those moments.
14:00 Um, and we have enough checks and balance where we won't. There'll still be crazy scenarios where something is in route and it's going to be 3 days late
14:10 and that's going to put us three days behind on kitting and shipping. So, we might have to communicate to customers, hey, your box might leave 2 days later
14:18 than planned. Those scenarios might still occur, but the big uh-oh moments won't. Um, I think of two in particular.
Chapter 8: Biggest product failure story
14:27 One, this is a long time ago. It was called, I'm going to Google it. It was mission 26. So, we call our monthly
14:35 boxes missions. Mission 26 would be our 26 month in business. So, two years, two months. We sent out mission 26 the dopp kit. It was a themed box on male grooming uh grenade Soapco soap uh
14:54 grenade Soapco company taint scrubber aloffa. It had some grenade supply anti-persperent, a tactical toothbrush, a six shooter razor, a do kit bag, some beard oil, a
15:11 knife for like grooming it. We missed the mark. So, it it was not a good box. We suck.
15:19 You're you're you're calling it out like you're saying all these different items and I'm like I'm sitting here waiting and being like this sounds more like I
15:27 don't know like a what's a what's it like bespoke post or like Yeah. Like one of those type of things, right? It was it was not it.
15:36 Yeah. It's like, you know, if that's if that's your core audience and everything, that sounds like a great great box. But, you know, for you guys,
15:43 I can already like call. I'm just like, "Oh, I can see the writing on the wall."[laughter]
15:49 Yeah. Any metric, any KPI that matters when it comes to managing a membership, a subscription business was negatively
15:56 affected by this. Churn went down. New acquisition became more difficult because this was the latest box we sent.
Chapter 9: Customer reaction and churn impact
16:04 The 50 boxes we sent out each month to creators to do reviews and they didn't like it. So, their audience was it was a
16:12 complete missed mark. In hindsight, you know, we we didn't have the processes in place. We weren't testing stuff. We weren't we didn't have a good of pulse
16:20 on the membership as we should have two years in that we do now. Yeah. So, it just missed the mark every which way to Sunday. It was it was bad. It was How'd you recover from that?
16:29 I mean, I think we owned it a little bit. We were very very clear. The only thing you really can do, right?
16:34 Yeah. We This This was not the best box ever to be fair. Some people liked it.
16:39 The group that liked it was absolutely a minority. was the majority of our customers were like, I I don't know. You know, to be fair, it was, you know, we weren't the same size as we are today.
16:50 You're naturally going to churn through even good customers because you can only pay X for so long before you're eventually going to turn everyone out or not everyone, but the majority Uber majority of people. So, it was just a I mean, it took probably 6 months before
17:06 we completely writed writed the ship from it. But that's that's the first one that comes to mind because I think I still have PTSD from it. It's not good.
17:15 Sorry for making you have to relive that today. No, it's it's it's it's good to relive things like that. Sometimes you learn from uh the worst of mistakes. That's the best you can do when you make mistakes. Lots of learnings from that one. [laughter]
17:28 I guess uh a question that kind of made me think there because you talked a little bit about churn, right? And I think for the average e-commerce
Chapter 10: How the business recovered
17:37 business, like two major metrics that they're always looking at, right, is customer acquisition cost and like
17:44 customer lifetime value. For you guys, especially with like the way that, you know, typically box products and everything work. I assume that customer
17:53 lifetime value is exceptionally high usually. And like for you guys, what's like average retention, you know, just any customer in general?
18:02 Yeah. So, if I could uh go back to one of your first where you asked for the three separators, it does make forecasting revenue much easier, right?
18:12 More much more predictable. So, yeah, our our LTV is a little bit over $1,000.
18:18 Um, which is which is a lot for a DTOC brand. It's spread over typically five and a half months is the average lifespan of a member, which we define that as a as someone that has a subscription box at some point. about $700 of it ends up being from the
18:34 membership and a little over $300 ends up additional one-time purchases from our shop, from our battlvault, from
18:41 promotions and sales. So, yeah, it's a big number. And one of the benefits of having some sort of reoccurring revenue,
Chapter 11: Customer lifetime value explained
18:49 membership, subscription box, etc. is when you have the data to know the LTV, you can get probably more aggressive on
18:57 the acceptable acquisition cost than than you can otherwise. DDC brands love to look at repeat buyer percentages and
19:04 metrics similar to those which again the benefit of having this native reoccurring new product offering makes those numbers very very very high.
19:14 No, absolutely. One of the things that I always talk to brands about and everything is this idea that I've said when we're thinking of like retention
19:22 marketing, right? that at the end of the day, nobody is actually a customer until they have bought from you at least two
19:28 times, right? So, until they have bought from you twice, they're still a prospect. Because the reality is, if somebody just buys from you one time,
19:36 right? And let's say they do a single month, it's like, okay, well, yeah, they've they've triled you and they've triled some things, but they're not like a true customer in the sense, and you're
19:45 still going to have to likely have to pay to try and acquire them in some way, shape, or form, right? So, it's always that thing that I think about and whenever we're thinking of like
19:53 something like this where it's like super easy to, you know, look at that and be like, "Yeah, I know exactly on average how long this person is going to stay every single time they sign up." I
Chapter 12: Long-term customers and loyalty
20:01 imagine it just makes, you know, that idea of retention marketing that much easier. That does make me wonder though, do you know by chance, what is your how
20:10 long is your longest standing customer been a customer since the beginning?
20:16 Well, I guess I should ask, is this like an actual customer or is this somebody like, you know, at this point?
20:21 So, we're big on community. Um, so we have, you know, the Facebook members only group where you have to be a paying member to be in it. We have
20:28 about last time I checked and we checked maybe within the last year we checked, we still had um 13 people that have been
20:37 with us that have never missed in the 130 boxes that we've sent. Half of them are involved in the community. half
20:45 never engage with the community. It's not their thing. They just they just want the gear. We've done special surprise and delights through the years.
20:54 Typically once a year, we'll stack rank our active members based on amount of boxes they've received and and revenue spent and send them surprises. And it's
21:02 a pretty wild thing at times to see that some of these people like, you know, they've they've spent 40, 50, $60,000 with us, which is which is not a small amount to spend.
21:14 No. No. I I mean it's type thing like here for us we still have technically it's not the first but the second ever client that we ever brought on right and
21:22 it's that type thing where like anytime that client is like hey can you guys do this we're like yes [laughter] yes yes please we're more than happy to
21:31 right because it's uh it is that thing of like having a customer of any kind that is like you know just so die hard
21:38 and like someone who's just like I mean for the ones that are involved in the community that's even better I would imagine than you just like ones that are like, "Yeah, I love this brand. I love
21:47 everything that happens. I love ging every month." But like the ones who are also like, "Yeah, also be a voice of like just openness and, you know,
21:54 support and kind of, you know, referral just word of mouth marketing is always just at the end of the day." So, it's funny you said that. So, we
Chapter 13: Building community and content strategy
22:02 have um we've done this now for this might be seven years possibly. So, we maybe right before the pandemic, we
22:10 implemented this who's become a friend now. He was he was just a pure that networking and conferences. His name's um Anthony Kums runs a female um underwear subscription called Splendy's.
22:21 Would meet him at conferences, would hang out with him, you know, a decade later, he's he's been in my house, he's held my son multiple times. We become
22:29 friends. But just chatting with him before we were such good friends, he gave me a takeaway that we instantly went back from the conference and and
22:37 executed it. And we defined this LTV number which which I won't say what it is um but it's obviously above average
22:45 LTV and um when a customer hits that with us they get a special tag in our ticketing system and it's exactly what
22:54 you described like you anything at all like within reason but like it's not hey does this work just just make it right
23:03 keep them happy surprise and delight we've already outputed our coverage with them like let's treat them best way
23:11 possible and keep them for as long as we want and make them as happy as possible. Absolutely. Because you have to, right?
23:17 And you know the people that are willing to stay with you like the longest or just like the happiest with a service, a product, anything like that
23:25 are also just going to be nine times out of 10 probably also worth their weight and gold as far as just like again that referral marketing. They're they're telling people, right?
23:35 Exactly. Whether or not they even tell you that they're telling people, it's like they're telling people and like, you know, it's it is one of those one
23:42 thing you guys have that is almost exceptionally unique that so many brands try and do in this day and age and I think they don't do or at least they
23:50 don't execute super well is that idea of community that you touched on, right? And more so outside of just community, you guys have now expanded into like other avenues, right? Like for instance,
24:02 you have your uh you have your YouTube TV series, right? For games. Battle games. Yeah. And that's it's one of those things where it's like for you
24:10 guys 11 years ago, did you have that as like an initial goal and purpose in mind that we'd be, you know, going into a
24:18 community type of, you know, brand and building out into areas where we're bringing up, you know, internet TV shows, things like that, or was it just
24:27 kind of like a it came to you one day and you're like, "This is what I want to do now with this." Yeah, I'd love to say that it was part of the original plan and we just exit.
Chapter 14: YouTube and content growth strategy
24:36 Everyone always wants to say it, but it's not that's not the case. It came about a year in 2015, our initial go to
24:42 market strategy and we were wildly ahead of our time here. In the first month, we had 30 boxes that we were sending to
24:49 YouTubers, which 2015, that's quite unusual to be part of our non-negotiable GTM. and um these 30 boxes, they were
24:58 sthe pro plus, the best box, and comped to these these 30 YouTubers and we had conversations with all of them, just
25:05 give an unbiased review. Um and we knew that that was going to pay pay its weight in gold organically. Also to date
25:12 this 2015, we had a pre-purchase survey, um not a post-purchase survey. We're stopping you from buying. Don't buy yet.
25:20 Tell us how you heard about us. uh which is wild to think about from a a CRO perspective, but we had one and it was
25:28 the the usual suspects of you know Facebook, Instagram, Twitter at the time and there was an other and you could type something in and uh month two we saw this this uptick of people clicking other and writing current 1776.
25:44 We we don't know who that is. We don't know what that is. We jump on we jump on the internet. We find him. His name is Brandon. Brandon Curran. He has a
25:53 YouTube channel and he's reviewing our boxes every month. Like, oh, it's one of the 30 boxes we sent out. That's great. It's not. We can't find random guy.
26:03 It's a It's a random guy that's a paying customer paying full price on the top tier and doing reviews and getting a lot of momentum. And clearly people are now coming to us to to buy because of it.
26:15 So, we reached out to him. We said, "Hey, nice to meet you. by the way, you don't have to pay for your box anymore.
26:21 Like, we're just going to kick you just you get the box for free now. And we did that for a couple months and then we said, um, hey, we're going to give you
26:28 $500 a month, the box for free. Talk to us before you put the video up. Like, let's let's collab on this. And then,
26:36 uh, a little over a year in, we gave him a call. And Brandon's two decades into a career, a chiller mechanic, HVAC kind of
26:45 stuff, but on like bigger scale. um not like you know our homes nuclear plant kind of stuff but this was his career
26:54 and he was doing this at nighttime lives uh a state over and we said hey do you want to pack up you your wife your three
Chapter 15: Marketing attribution challenges
27:01 kids and moved to Georgia and just do this content piece full-time talked with his wife Katie and came back and said
27:08 yeah let's do this and at the time he was just doing this one monthly unboxing and and part of the strategy when he came down was how do we expand this how do just not even double down on content.
27:20 How do we quadruple down? How do we just go content content content? That is your job. And from that it was it was gas on
27:27 fire. The the community just surfaced immediately. Um which we already saw kind of hintings that it would, but no, it was a it was a it was a customer.
27:38 I love that. That is such a in my opinion like classic thing. Like having a face having a face for a company is like we're huge on content, right? I
27:47 mean, we're doing it right now. We're filming podcast and like it's how we also grew as a company is just like YouTube content, YouTube content,
27:54 YouTube content, right? And like, but a big aspect over the years like you start to realize that like the content itself kind of almost outgrows the
28:03 company in some capacities at times where like the community is like almost there, yes, for like the fact of the company, but also like they're there for the creator, they're there for trying to
28:12 understand. And so like especially like seeing for instance like you guys with like bow games everything I feel like that's kind of where it's at where it's now it's like you have this thing that
28:21 is the community the content and all of that that happens to circle back into Bbox as well and like they almost are like in tandem together.
28:30 Yeah. Yeah. It's super wild like you know don't get me wrong we spend more than I would ever want to um [laughter] on meta every month right? It's yeah,
28:39 we have to. The difference is you look at our uh post-purchase survey that we have. We decided to move it from pre to post. Good thing I was going to be talking to you about that afterwards.
28:49 Um so on the post-purchase survey, we asked two questions. First question is where do you first hear about us? You is um all capital and bold just because
28:58 we're trying to get the data to then look at our other sources of truth and marry them. The second question is how
29:05 long did you know about us before placing your first order today? This is only on first orders. And the reality is, you know, we can we can pixel and
29:14 watch the journey through traditional means, but if you're watching a YouTube video with us, there's no pixel there,
29:22 right? You're watching our TikTok and you're entering the funnel and 40% know about us for greater than 6 months before purchasing and we're not able to
Chapter 16: Why content drives real sales
29:31 pixel them for that long, right? So like we're we're seeing exactly what you said. It's it's the case. So we're spending all this money on, you know,
29:39 meta traditionally and it it looks like it's top ofunnel. It's prospecting. It's not reprocting, retargeting, but it
29:46 truly is not top ofunnel. It's people that have ingested our content and that's our true top of funnel. And then these prospecting campaigns are truly
29:55 midfunnel. It's just super wild to live in a world where the the content is the front runner and the community is the front runner because the business behind it.
30:03 I think if anything from anybody who ends up listening to to this podcast, I think that right there is actually probably the biggest takeaway is the
30:11 fact that you know when you're looking at any form of marketing attribution, anything for business, a brand, anything like that, right? It is, I think, rare
30:19 uh especially for larger brands to truly like be getting just somebody clicking on ad who has never heard of you, right?
30:28 Like if you're doing anything correct with your advertising, a lot of your ads are going to be hitting people who probably in some way, shape, or form
30:35 know about you, right? And like to have that as like a survey and get that true attribution versus just like a, oh yeah, they clicked on an ad for the first time. They must just have heard of us.
30:45 and it's like wow did they right not too many people click on ad then immediately purchase you know especially a subscription I think that's a great
30:53 takeaway and a great thing that people should look at implementing themselves your northbeam or your triple whale is isn't going to tell the whole story cuz it's impossible it can't
31:01 well especially with YouTube content right because YouTube content it's like you know sure it's like maybe if you have specifically a UTM for in the
31:09 description that somebody clicks but how many times is that happening compared to they're going to Google searching and it's a and direct.
31:16 Yeah, exactly. And you know, the same thing like somebody clicks on your, you know, Instagram profile, then clicks on the banner, everything. It's like, okay, well, that gets all replaced. But I
31:25 loved everything we talked about today, John. I greatly appreciate you coming on. Anything you want to share with everyone before we hop off here.
31:31 No, you can you can check us out. Uh, just go to Google, type in Battlbox.
31:35 You can spell it any which way you want, and it's going to come up correctly. There's no E in it. It's B- A T L B O X.
31:41 As far as following my stuff, uh I'm most active on LinkedIn. I have a blog online queso.com where I kind of it's
31:49 80% me, 20% guest writers. The purpose is kind of just sharing learnings. I think social media can be especially on
31:57 the the DTOC, you know, building in public world. I think there's a lot of uh toxicness where people only share
32:04 wins kind of bothers me like because to the point of the do kit that you asked me about earlier like the mistakes are where the learnings really are. Um 100% transparency on the wins and the losses.
32:18 Yeah. And nobody want it's not exciting to share the losses but the losses are the good stuff. I wouldn't read about the losses because that's that's where the the winning truly exists the recipe
32:26 for it. So online case was a lot of a lot of that. a lot of not just the wins, but like you know, we got our teeth kicked in today and this is what we we took away from it.
32:36 Fantastic. Yeah. Everybody go follow John and all of his content. John, thank you again for hopping on. Uh greatly appreciate. No, thanks for having me. This was great. [music]
