Subscribe to The Podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and Spotify
Josh Snow, Founder, Snow Oral Care
Click here to Skip to the Podcast Transcription
Josh Snow always finds ways to thrive in difficult situations.
Growing up, his family didn’t have a lot of money, and he wanted to help them cover basic expenses. So Snow taught himself how to create websites at his local library, which is how he stumbled into entrepreneurship. He eventually took that knowledge and built a software company from the ground up, which he sold by the age of 21.
Now Snow runs multiple successful businesses—with the most prominent one being his nine-figure teeth whitening business, Snow.
And he’s still finding ways to overcome adversity. Just as most businesses have been impacted by COVID-19, Snow also took a huge hit in terms of sales, with its conversion rates cut in half when the pandemic first emerged. However, by making fast, strategic changes, Snow got his company through the temporary setback and is today seeing higher-than-average sales on its site.
In this interview, Snow shares exactly how he made the necessary changes to his business. He also provides advice to other online businesses on how to get through this time by adjusting everything from your subscription model to your approach to influencer relations strategy.
If there’s any other type of content you’d like to see that would be valuable to you during this time, please don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected] to let us know.
Also, if you want to learn how to start a profitable online store in 12 weeks or less, check out our FREE masterclass taught by 4x multimillion-dollar ecommerce founder Gretta van Riel.
Key Takeaways
- How Snow stumbled into entrepreneurship through necessity
- The journey to selling his first software company at the age of 21
- Why Snow believes adversity gives you the opportunity to pause and reprioritize
- The inspiration behind Snow, and how it grew to be a nine-figure business
- How the company has been affected by COVID-19, and the changes Snow made to help his business bounce back and make more sales than before the pandemic
- Snow’s recommendations on how to adjust your subscription products, influencer relations, and paid ads strategy during this time
- The importance of evolving and meeting your customer where they’re at
- Why Snow believes you have to be an “everything” person if you want a successful business
- Advice on using Shopify vs. funnels
- The choice between hunting rabbits vs. elephants (metaphorically)
Full Transcript of Podcast with Josh Snow
Nathan: First question I ask everyone is, how did you get your job?
Josh: Yeah. I truly did stumble into what I’m doing and entrepreneurship in general. I’m sure a lot of people have a similar story so I won’t harp on it too much, but growing up I wanted to be a doctor because I wanted to make enough money to help my family out. I’m the youngest sibling in my family and my brothers and sisters didn’t have an opportunity to go to university. So I just wanted to help out my family. I come from very modest means. So I was like, I want to be a doctor because I want to make enough money, help people and I would like to earn the respect inside of the community, like be able to do charitable work or community work.
I figured being a doctor check those boxes off and it does. So I was just like, I’ve got to be a doctor, I’ve got to figure this out. I stumbled into entrepreneurship because times got a little bit tough for my family and I was looking for ways to make money really just to buy my own stuff. I was looking to buy my own underwear and socks. It wasn’t like I was trying to… at 13 years old, 14 years old, I wasn’t thinking like, oh, I want to buy a Lamborghini. It was like, at the time it was, I don’t want my parents to have to struggle, or I don’t want to be a burden to them for asking for things for school or whatever it might be.
Not that they made me feel that way, it was just in my head. I started looking for jobs to see if I could work somewhere to make some money and obviously nobody could hire me at the time because I was 13, 14 years old. So, I felt really stuck because nobody wanted to give me a job. I really wanted to help my family out. The economy started to turn the other way, 2007, 2008. Yeah, I was stuck and so I was looking for a job. So the job I have today was invented or I discovered it through necessity, through struggle, adversity. At the time I was hanging out at the library. My family didn’t have a computer at home even. So, we didn’t have internet or computer at home.
So I was at the library and back in the day with your library card you could get about an hour of usage on the computer. So I was reading books at the time because you’re on books or computers, that’s about it at the library. If I wasn’t playing sports, I was at the library. So, I learned how to make websites. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. I didn’t know what I was learning at the time. I was reading these books because I was taking comprehension tasks, getting points for every book that I read. Those points I could cash in for like baseball tickets and soccer tickets and all that type of stuff.
So I didn’t know what I was doing, I was just reading books and I found the hack that if I read the reference books, like the For Dummies books, they were considered a 10 out of 10 points but they had a lot of pictures in them. So, I was able to rack up a bunch of points by reading these dummies books and I’d always been interested in computers even though we didn’t really have them growing up, I was always fascinated by them. So, put two and two together, I started reading these how to build websites For Dummies books and I said, wow, this seems like something I could actually do. So I started building my first few little websites and blogs and I didn’t even know really what I was doing, but I just was putting stuff out there and I was blown away that people started commenting and from all over the world, I didn’t know where they were at.
So that just like, it blew my mind. I was like, “Whoa.” Then once I found that I could make money from it, well, I could make websites for other people and they would pay me to do that, that’s when it all clicked and it happened for me at a very early age. But that was what set the domino effect to today, running multiple brands and doing what I do today was, I want to help my family out. Can I make 500 bucks making a website for somebody? How can I be the best at making websites and then it progressed from there.
Nathan: Yeah, I see. So humble beginnings. Talk to us kind of fast forward to now, how many brands do you own and operate? How many companies do you have? It sounds like you got a lot going on man.
Josh: Yeah. So, I’m obviously known for Snow. At Snow is the Internet’s most popular oral care brand. We’ve worked with all kinds of celebrities and all of that. That brand has really taken off. I think it’s a refreshment in a dormant category, a very large category like oral care. It’s traditionally very tough to break into an industry like that. I chose that market and that industry because I wanted difficulty. I had been going through some tough times again. So this was like a… it’s funny how you get these realisations through adversity and speaking through with the time we’re going through right now with adversity, I think it gives you time to pause and think sometimes and really prioritise what matters. For me, I had sold my software company at 21 years old and I had more money than I would ever imagine. To me, I was a billionaire, in my head, right? I was like, “Oh my gosh, I made it.”
So, went and bought the Lamborghini and the Bentley and I thought I was on top of the world and I guess I was at the time. I had finished university, top of my class, first in my family to finish and everything was great. But when I sold my company, six months into it, I felt I didn’t have a purpose anymore. I was like, okay, this is fun but what am I going to do next? Whatever I do next has to be that much bigger than what I just did, right? There was just all this pressure on me and most of it was in my head, I guess. But, I was looking for things that I wanted to… markets that I wanted to disrupt and two of my buddies were creating a mattress company, it was the first bed in a box company, went on to become one of the largest, one of the top three in the world and I was like, okay, what markets am I going to look at?
So today, I own and operate primarily two businesses. One in financial wellness, personal finances, and the other and obviously oral care. Those are the two main ones. I’ve been fortunate to invest and advise lots of other brands, a lot which are no longer around today where, like I said, when I sold my company I thought that I could buy my way to be an investor or something and so I just started throwing money everywhere, $250,000 here, 200,000 here, 500,000 here. You do that enough times and your pile of cash starts to disappear pretty quickly and there’s no call back on that capital. So I realised that if I was going to… what I realised, I wasn’t rich enough to be able to give the way I wanted to give in the aspect of being an angel investor and investing in lots of businesses. I felt that I was a little to restless too. I felt like I had to do something, I needed something to do.
I happened to be going through oral surgery at the time, jaw surgery and that’s what allowed me to stumble into the oral care markets. Personal finances has always been something that I’ve been fascinated by because coming from an upbringing where we weren’t wealthy by any means, I had to learn the hard way of letting people manage my money and stuff and getting screwed over. So, personal empowerment through personal finances or empowerment through personal finances is something I’ve always been passionate about because they don’t teach enough about it in schools and university. So that has always been a background. But I’m most passionate about those two businesses. That’s where I spend the majority of my time.
Nathan: Yeah, I see. So, what was your software company that you sold at 21? What was it and what did it do?
Josh: When I was 13, 14 I started programming, web development specifically, and then moved to design because again, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just like, oh, I need to design it? Okay, I need to figure out Photoshop. I can’t afford Photoshop. How do I download a torrent of it because I can’t afford it. It’s just like one thing led to the other. So I built essentially an agency. I didn’t know what I was doing until I was 15 or 16 years old, made my first million dollars at 17 or somewhere around there. You feel like there’s this moment of like, oh, this parade all of a sudden it breaks out. In reality was in my head but I wasn’t even satisfied because I was like, okay, that means there’s so much more potential.
So to answer your question, what happened is between 17 years old and 21, I started to look at this agency business. Could I sell this type of business? What am I doing here? What’s going on? I found that really what was unique about what we’re doing was a software I had built in the background to automate a lot of stuff because I knew that the agency work was very high maintenance, very high touch and so I wanted to use my software and programming background, software development programming background to try to automate or at least semi-automate a lot of this stuff in terms of media planning, media distribution, particularly through media buying like Google Display Network.
Again, I didn’t know a thing about anything I’m talking to you about. Everything I learned is from forums, communities, YouTube, Google and books. But Google has two sides of their platform and multiple sides. They have their search where you go to Google.com and then obviously the display side of things, which now includes YouTube. So display is, are those banner ads you see on every website. So when a client would come over, let’s say like Apple let’s say, and they’re launching a new product, they say, okay, we want to allocate $10 million to relevant websites that are talking about the iPhone or talking about our competitors and we want to place banner ads next to those blog posts so that we can grab the attention of a relevant article.
So essentially what my software would do is, aggregate all of those websites that had Google Display Network on them and create banner ads that had a specific language based on that article. So in simple terms, let’s say you sell ice cream cones and you have a new ice cream flavour coming out, vanilla. You’re coming out with vanilla for the first time. You want to spend a million bucks promoting this new vanilla ice cream. Well, everywhere that is talking about vanilla or ice cream or desserts or your competitors, you want to be in front of. But if they’re talking about vanilla in politics and then they’re saying if someone’s vanilla, they’re very plain and basic, you probably don’t want to show up there.
So, the contextual, which means finding the words vanilla and showing an ad next to it, it’s not always the most accurate form of advertising. So all I did was… and the reason why I came up with this, was because I had overspent a client’s budget like 40 or 50,000 bucks. It was bad. I just remember it was really bad. It’s because we had the Google Display Network running, which is what we were getting known for but some of the negative keywords, which means don’t show me for this weren’t enabled. So we ended up spending like an extra 40 or $50,000 of the client’s money and they had someone smart enough who was able to dig into it and had an idea of what happened and it was really… it wasn’t on purpose, but the negligence was on purpose. It was obviously our fault. We were paid to manage the money.
So I was like, wow, there’s a fault in Google’s algorithm where they’re not always showing the most relevant stuff. It’s like if you’re running a campaign right now with the Corona virus stuff going on, you have to be sensitive to what’s going on and you don’t want to seem, and hopefully you’re not, but you certainly don’t want to accidentally seem like you’re profiting off of what’s going on. So let’s say you had an ad campaign running right now and it accidentally showed up and it made your company look like you were being insensitive to what’s going on globally, that could hurt your brand. It can only waste your money, but it could hurt your brand big time. So there was a huge value to the software I’d built to traditional PR agencies, traditional media companies, because they worked with a lot of blue chip clients that couldn’t afford to have that type of damage happen to Google Display Network.
So that’s six years I’m trying to condense into five, 10 minutes to explain as best as I can. But that software was valuable. At the end of the day, it wasn’t a very complex piece of software, if I’m being completely honest with you. I made it because I didn’t want to lose clients money anymore and then I sold the shit out of it and I sold it by saying, “Look, you can go to another agency but they don’t have the software we have. You might accidentally put an ad on a porn website and your brand could be ruined. It’s up to you if you want to take that risk or you can come with us. We have perfect reviews, you can talk to all our clients. We work with the best people.” So I used it as a sales tool and then as we started working with PR companies that were reselling our services, so they would have like Nike craft, whatever.
I couldn’t get those clients myself, but they already had those clients but they would say, “Josh, you guys do all the digital media buy and we’ll just mark it up. We’ll give you 10% of the ad spend, we’ll take 30%.” I’m like, “Okay, sounds good.” Well, I ended up signing that software, I piecemealed that software to those exact resellers because it was much more valuable for them to have versus their competitor to have. So it’s important to break that down because that’s six years of strategy and figuring stuff out as I took agency service side business, built a piece of software on accident, I guess, and then leaned into that software as our unique differentiator to charge more than everybody else and to keep our clients longer by scaring them in a sense. Then using that piece of software to go and sell to the people who were reselling our services and say, “Hey, either you’re going to get it or your competitor is going to get it, only one of you is going to get it.”
So I had to really like finesse that deal because I was working 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I had gained like 80 pounds running that business. I was working a lot. I’m in charge of a lot of people’s money. I had an expensive office, lots of employees. It was really, really hard. I don’t know if I didn’t sell that business, it would have been really tough for me to keep going. Once I sold that business, six months later, I went through a burnout and depression. But that’s from 13 years old to not knowing what I’m doing to 21 years old, multimillionaire and to depression/burnout, a delayed burnout to now, where I’m at now. It’s been… lots has been going on.
Nathan: Yeah. Wow. Crazy. So, you started Snow and how long have you been running it? When we spoke offline, it’s okay to share, right? You guys are like a nine figure business, annual revenue, right?
Josh: Yeah. Snow started actually… so, the first inkling of Snow started probably, oh yeah, so maybe six years ago. So, a while ago. That was the first inkling of it, of like, I bought the domain name, thought about… I remember at the time I had a business partner, another business and I wrote on the white… these big whiteboards in our office, I wrote down what I thought Snow could be. I had always been fascinated in beauty and a lot of our clients were in beauty and cosmetics and makeup, et cetera. So, I had this personal fascination with fashion and beauty products, cosmetics. So I wrote this out. My partner was a little bit more software-like, very business to business, very software focused. So when I wrote this whole thing out, he was like, it sounds cool, but I didn’t really feel him jive with it all the way.
So, I just said, “All right, well, I’m going to buy the domain name and we’ll see what happens. I don’t know.” So I bought the domain name, I just put it aside because I felt, not embarrassed, but I just didn’t feel the energy coming from him about the idea. So I was like, screw it. Well then fast forward, two years past that, this is about four or five years ago now, I have jaw surgery, take out my jaw from my head, put it back in my head. I’m sitting there healing and I’m looking at all the products I bought and I’m like, gosh, they’re so ugly. All these products are ugly. I would never post any of these stuff on Instagram. I was like, why can’t oral care be exciting? Why can’t there be exciting flavours, exciting ingredients, collaborations, celebrities? Why is it not here? Everybody has teeth as far as I know and I’m like, why is there not excitement in this industry?
As I was recovering from oral surgery, I had my jaw closed for two weeks. I’m sitting there researching and then I hit up my dentist, my orthodontist and my oral surgeon and I say, hey, will you guys help me like connect me to people. I want to get in initially the teeth, whitening space because teeth whitening was the only thing I could do without being a dentist or whatever like any procedure. So they’re like, “Yeah, we’ll help you out.” I hadn’t been helping about business and stuff and connecting them, they were just good friends by that time. They are like, “Yeah, we’ll help you out, we’ll connect you to who we can.” That was the beginning of actually turning Snow into an idea.
But it first hit me about six or seven years ago and I don’t know why, I don’t know what it was that just excited me about it but I drew everything out on a whiteboard, I might even have pictures of it still. I was like, it’s going to be called Snow boom, boom. Once I thought my business partner, he just didn’t really like the idea that much as much as I did, I put it away. But if I would have went with it at the time, who knows what would have happened. I’m happy with where we’re at regardless. But, who knows? We maybe we would have had a two year head start if I would have went with my gut.
Nathan: So fast forward to now and now in the current times, how are things going? Have you guys been affected from online consumer purchases and everything there. Talk to us about that.
Josh: So the first seven to 10 days, which was, let’s see here, March, I don’t know, like March 10th through the 20th, let’s call it, March 10th to the 20th our conversion rates cut in half pretty much. People just were not buying, they were still visiting the website. We have about a million, million and a half shoppers a month. So, we were still around the same traffic numbers, but people just weren’t buying. So, it made sense and I looked at myself and I was like, I’m over here, stocking up on food, stocking up on toilet paper and whatever, just kind of herd mentality and so everybody’s in shock, of course, they’re not thinking, how white are my teeth? They’re thinking, how much toilet paper do I have and that type of stuff.
So, I was worried because I’m like, oh my gosh, if this lasts a long time, we’re really going to have to look at what we’re going to do. Do we pause the advertising? I don’t know. So yeah, we were affected the first seven to 10 days, significantly, like cut in half or less. Then we started to look at, okay, what can we do authentically because our audience is 500,000 plus strong. They’ll call us out whenever we do something that’s not totally our brand, which is great. It’s good to have that. Sometimes it’s annoying because when you want to try something new, you know that they’re already… they’re just waiting there. But yeah, we changed our messaging a little bit. We reminded people that we’re still shipping. We brought our spring cleaning sale 25% off. We brought it up to immediately. So 25% off sitewide, we’re donating a percent of proceeds to small businesses affected by COVID.
One of our team members brought up the idea about Feeding America, that there are a lot of people without food. So we’re changing our organisation next week to Feeding America. So we’re going to give some money to Feeding America now. So we changed our verbiage. We said, if you’re going to be at home you might as well be whitening your teeth. Come out of this smiling with the widest smile you’ve ever had. We started pushing some of our other products like our anti-ageing lip balm and lip scrub and floss. Then that 25% off discount, giving the charity aspect, reminding people that we’re an American company, shipping from America, we’re still in operation. We asked small business to be patient with us, we’re shipping as fast as we can, order before we sell out, we don’t know when we’ll get inventory again so there’s some urgency there. Some combination of that just clicked for us and over the last five or six days, we’ve had incredible sales days. I mean, it’s like if not normal, it’s better than normal, which has been really interesting.
Nathan: Interesting. So, do you have an element of recurring revenue and subscription with the whitening, with the refills?
Josh: So we just launched toothpaste and pre-order. So toothpaste will be a subscription product. Mouthwash will also be a subscription product. Then we just added subscriptions to all the products. Our customers, they wanted to subscribe to the lip balm, the lip scrub, the floss and the refills. The refills, the average customer is refilling every three to six months, more closer to the six month range. Toothpaste is every two months up to four months. So every two to four months they’re restocking on that. The other products are in between. But yeah, there’s a piece of it. By the end of this year, about half of our revenue will probably be coming from recurring customers.
Nathan: Yeah. I think during times like this recurring revenue is really, really important. What’s your take on that for like ecomm businesses and where they should be thinking right now around even that or any of the changing up the messaging or yeah?
Josh: Oh man. I mean, the thing is right now there’s a lot of uncertainty going on, uncertainty around jobs, uncertainty around health a lot. So, the more certainty you can provide on your website and in your ads and the more… you want to be sensitive to what’s going on, you don’t want to over hype it where it seems like you’re doing too much and you also don’t want to be oblivious to where it seems like you’re insensitive. So I think being sensitive to what’s going on, if you’re still shipping or if you’re still in operation, let them know that. Be very clear with what’s going on. You don’t have to send an email out like every 5,000 companies have sent me emails, I don’t really care.
But, you don’t have to send an email about what you’re doing in COVID but it should be on your website very clear, we are still shipping through this madness or through these tough times. We are here for you. You can call us. We opened up our phone lines. We put our phone number top right on the website. We put our phone number in front of everyone, live chat because we want to be there with the customers. What we’ve found is that they’re very understanding. They’re very like, “Wow, you guys answered? You guys are working through this? That’s amazing. I’m so proud of you guys.” I’m like, “Oh no, don’t worry about it. My shipment is late. It totally makes sense. Listen, you just stay safe.” We are banding together as a… the entire world has banded together and said it’s okay and our international customers are cool with it.
So we’ve been changing our messaging around subscriptions because subscriptions… profit cures all in a business and revenue cures all profit most importantly and recurring subscription income is the only thing you should be focusing on right now. Now, doesn’t mean that every customer is going to do that or be open to that, there is subscription fatigue, there’s a such thing and your business, I’m speaking generally, your business might not play well to subscription. My business is toothpaste and mouthwash. That makes a lot more sense. Toothbrushes like, yeah, but some of our other products don’t play as well. Some of the other things we’re doing just don’t play well to subscription. That’s okay. What you want to focus on though, the premise is recurring customers, retaining the customers. So, it’s important more than ever for your email channels, your SMS channels, are you calling your customers even if you’re B2B, are you picking up the phone, talking to your customers, to your clients?
So this is the time where you really got to step up that point of communication more than ever before. But I would be pushing if you are in e-commerce and it makes sense for your business to have a subscription format, if you’re running advertising, I would be running all that advertising to a subscription offer, 50% off your first month, 50% off your first year, whatever that looks like. Try to build a Netflix or Amazon prime in your business of some sort because times like this is exactly why you want to have that, to be able to depend on that income versus let me wake up today. Too many businesses are Facebook Ad dependent and single product dependent or single offer dependent. Too many businesses.
So if I told you right now, hey, pause all your Facebook ads, would you go out of business or would you stay in business? Pause your Facebook ads for 90 days. If your sales will go to almost zero, you don’t really have a business right now and that’s okay, but you have an offer and you have an offer that might be doing well on Facebook, but you’ve got to diversify. I don’t care how small you are, how big you are, you’ve got to diversify and you’ve got to build recurring income. Otherwise, you’re in a hustle business, you’re not in a business, business.
Nathan: Yeah, I agree 110%. So talk to me about discretional costs. Have you cut back on influencer marketing? I’d love to talk about that. You’ve been pretty legendary on the influencers that you’ve worked with. I think that’s how, to be honest, I first heard of Snow was some of the big celebrities that you’ve worked with. Are those things you are cutting back on or Facebook ads, PPC? Are you getting more aggressive because costs are down by like 30%? CPMs are a little like really low now so compared to three months ago. So yeah, are you going on the front foot or what?
Josh: So, any of the discretionary stuff so, influencers definitely we’ve pulled back on. We’re looking at everything. I mean, this is a great opportunity again, to detox, look at every software expense no matter how big your company is. I mean, the bigger we get, the more of a reminder it is to look at every single expense. So down to the water bottles, are we getting too fancy, to the software, to…? It’s a principle. You might only save five bucks or 50 bucks on the software by cancelling but if you’re not using it, you’re wasting that resource and wasteful spending is a practise you want to prohibit against as much as possible. So we try to, as a team look at in every department, how many pieces of software are you paying for every month or are you using it? When’s the last time you used it? Could you live without it?
Influencers, if anything’s not driving bottom line, right now we’re cutting it or we’re trying to cut or we’re putting it on pause. Then in terms of Facebook ads, all ads across the board, Google, Snapchat, et cetera have dropped about 30% for us as high as 50%. So we are as best as we can, tripling down. So, yeah, we’re pushing really, really hard. I mean, April could be a 10 plus million dollar a month if CPC stay the same, if they stay low enough because we are getting much more bang for the buck. People are at home, they’re on desktop. So if you’re not opening up the desktop ads, open those up because people are on desktop more than ever right now. Like I said, I’m on this iMac, I’m on my huge desktop. I can open 20 tabs right here. So you want to hit me while I’m on the desktop because the conversion rate is so much higher on desktop, especially when you’re selling a higher priced product, anything over a hundred bucks.
So, we are tripling down on all advertising. We are using the time right now to push our message forward, get in front of as many people as possible. Obviously convert as many to sales. But there’s going to… we’re also building our retargeting pools so, we’re trying to get a million people to the website, only X thousand of them are going to buy, but we’re building that 60, 90 day retargeting pool. We’re building our email list so that when they feel ready to buy, because not everybody feels ready to buy right now, they’re still worried, they’re not sure what’s going on, but as soon as we run a flash sale or as soon as they feel better in their position, we’ll be there to convert them.
So it’s a great opportunity for you to build your email list, put out content from your brand, run contests and giveaways, all of these things. So, we’re like trying to triple down as hard as we can on all fronts in terms of advertising. You should be in your business as long as it makes sense and you’re making money, you should be taking advantage of essentially a 30% discount right now.
Nathan: That’s an interesting take. It’s like, everyone knows Warren Buffett’s famous quote, be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
Josh: Stocks are the only thing people… stocks and a few things are the only things people run away from when they’re on sale. If a purse goes on sale, you’re running to pick it up. If a stock goes on sale, you’re scared of it. So I think right now is when a lot of opportunities out there, if you’re looking at it the right way, I think, Post and Kellogg’s, Kellogg’s came ahead of Post Cereal when Post Cereal was the number one cereal brand, they pulled back on advertising. Kellogg’s was an upstart. They stepped it up. Post has never been able to catch Kellogg’s since then. Volkswagen and Toyota in the ’70s, same thing. Toyota stepped up, advertising Volkswagen pulled back. Volkswagen’s been chasing Toyota ever since. There’s an opportunity.
You look at 2008, 2009, all of the amazing companies that were built in a downturn or recession, there’s opportunity there if you look at it the right way, but you’ve got to take things on a day to day basis. It’s survival of the fittest, it’s Darwinism. You’ve got to evolve very quickly. You’ve got to change your messaging. You’ve got to change your offer. You’ve got to be willing to discount things if that’s going to get people over the edge. Right now you should be loading up. Even if you’re breaking even, but you’re able to pay salaries or you’re able to keep just stuff moving. You want to keep stuff moving. Unfortunately, like I went today to a Vietnamese restaurant that we like, and he said sales… he was super happy. He was like, sales are about 35, 40% of what they normally are. So it’s great.
In my head I’m like that sounds horrible. I was like 35% of what they normally are? So 70% discount on your day to day sales numbers. But then I thought about it, I’m like, well first of all, restaurants, nobody’s going to restaurants. It’s just not happening. He’s not a big chain so he doesn’t have a lot of money to back them up. So the fact that he’s able to make 35 to 40%, call it almost half of what he used to make with half of his expenses cut down because it’s only him and one other guy running the restaurant right now, that means he can put food on his family’s plate, he can pay his bills, he can keep the restaurant alive. He can pay rent because rent is still going to be due. So I’m like, that’s amazing. The fact that you can still make 40% of what you do as a restaurant, that’s awesome.
So if he’s happy, you should be happy with anything around there just so that you stay in business, you can pay your employees, if it’s at all possible, take advantage of the cheaper advertising. It’s almost like the Facebook gods dropped a little fairy dust out and said, for those who it applies to and who are fortunate to be that position, here’s an opportunity to get a discount while things are tough and it’s just supply and demand. That’s just how it works. But my heart goes out to millions of small businesses around the world who… the average in America, small business has 26 days of savings. So 26 days go up, they’re out and even if the government gives away who cares how much money, by the time the money comes in, the business is out of business.
So if you are working online, if you have an online business, whether it’s digital, business to business, business to consumer, whatever it might be, find yourself very lucky and strike while the iron is hot. The opportunities in front of you, you’ve got to recognise it and you’ve got to strike on it because not everyone’s as lucky as you.
Nathan: Yeah, I agree. It’s very, very tricky. It’s a crazy time because you don’t… I know a lot of people would be self-conscious, right? They don’t want to be seen like they’re selling or profiting or capitalising of… all these people that are losing jobs and all these crazy things. What is your take on that?
Josh: Yeah. So you want to be sensitive to it, right? But you want to be as… take what you would normally do as a brand and a brand is built by what you say no to versus what you say yes to. There’s a quick anecdote, this is part of brand building is, we had the opportunity to launch charcoal, charcoal toothpaste, charcoal this, charcoal that. Well, charcoal destroys the enamel over time. It’s very bad for the teeth. So we decided, although it could be a multi-million dollar channel for us or product line, we decided against it. We still have not come out with charcoal toothpaste or charcoal whitener. We have a charcoal floss in between teeth, but that’s the furthest will go with that stuff.
So, you have to choose as a brand, what is your moral compass? What is your ethical compass to say, what is right, what is wrong? What do I feel good about? Can I be proud of this two years from now? If New York times did a story on us about what we did during this time, would you be proud or would you not be proud? If you want to be proud and you have ethics and a moral compass, you’re going to use that to guide all of your actions and your ideas. So for us, you’ve got to keep selling, I mean, first and foremost, unless you’re like, if you’re selling a crappy product or service or you’re drop shipping and it’s taking eight weeks now to get to people, you shouldn’t be selling that stuff.
Have a common sense metre in the sense of, am I doing right by the customer? In a vacuum, would this be considered good or bad? Whatever it might be. But if you have a decent business, let’s say you’re selling keyboards for computers or you’re selling webcams or whatever it is you’re selling or nutritional supplements, I don’t know, digital products, it is your obligation as an entrepreneur, as a business owner to continue to drive value. If you’re actually driving value for your customers and is your obligation to stay in business and continue to do right by our customers, open up the returns, we do free returns, free shipping. We’re opening up a lot of those lines. I told the customer support team, “Look, if somebody orders and they feel bad afterwards and they just want to refund, there’s no reason, they just want to refund, just give them the refund.”
Because here’s the thing, yeah, it’s 120 bucks but right now 120 bucks means differently than it did three months ago. 120 bucks three months ago it was like, ah, whatever, I’ll make it back. Now it’s like, if I’m not working, 120 bucks that’s a week of food. I don’t know if I… I changed my mind. I really wanted Snow because I saw a Kardashian use it but I changed my mind. So normally we would have like a down sale. We’d be like, hey, I understand you changed your mind. What if I told you you could get… we’ll give you a $50 gift card or whatever it is. Now, we’re backing off and we’re saying, look, if you change your mind, you want to refund, got it. We’re doing the 25% off sitewide so that we don’t have to charge full retail for our product. Trying to listen to our customers, be understanding.
The truth is, people are at home right now and they want to whiten their teeth, they want to feel more confident, they’re hopping on zoom calls, they want to be able to feel comfortable with their smile, they want to have something of normalcy in their life while all this stuff is going on. Something they can control. You can’t go to the dentist here anyway right now, none of the dentist office are open. So, if you’re applying to get your teeth whitened, sorry, it’s not going to happen, you can’t go to the dentist. You can’t even go to the store to pick up strips. So, we’re trying to be there for our customers to help them feel more confident. That’s part of our brand is to help people feel more confident.
So the answer is like, if it’s something that you are going to feel proud of, if it’s something that you feel confident about, I can’t answer that for everybody because you might not feel confident at all selling the products right now. You might not feel confident taking any money from people right now. We opened up our payment plans, so it’s 25% off and then it’s zero interest, zero fees on the payment plans. So it’s literally, I think it’s like 28 bucks for four months for the full system, zero interest, zero fees and you get the 25% off. So we’re going above and beyond to meet the customer where they’re at so that we can make it affordable if they really want the product. So it’s 28 bucks instead of 150 bucks.
So, using Afterpay, Klarna, things like that, meeting your customer where they’re at right now and putting that out there saying, hey, we’re here for you. Here’s our payment plan. Here’s 25% off. You don’t have to go and give 75% off your brand and do that. But it shows that you’re being sensitive to what’s going on and the customers will remember that. They have pretty good memories on both sides. You screw them over, you don’t deliver on your promise, they remember. If you go above and beyond, you give them a phone call, you check on them, they will remember that.
Nathan: Yeah. I think that was an awesome answer man. Thank you. I think that was spot on. So, talk to me about drop shipping versus brand. Because I know you would see both sides of the table because you’ve been in… yeah, you’ve been in online space sounds like for 15 plus years so you know that world. What is your take drop shipping versus building a brand?
Josh: I think drop shipping just like… So, I started essentially building websites for the people. So I started as an agency and so that allowed me to find my footing over time and it took a long time. I started at 13 years old making my first website. By the time I sold a business, I was 21, so it was eight years. It was a long time. I’m talking… even though I was going to school at the time, it was eight years of like, all I thought about was this stuff. I got great grades in school and stuff for my family and all that but it’s eight years of obsession. Now, I’m 27, tack on another six or seven years on top of that, which is just a different level of obsession of where I’m at now.
Drop shipping is great in the sense that, teaches you how to run advertising, teaches you how to write copy, teaches you how to do that stuff. That’s awesome. I think that you have to break away from that one way or another. Obviously it’s sales business, since day one we don’t sell anything we haven’t made from scratch. Anything else out there that looks like us is a counterfeit, send them my way, we’ll take them down. Everything we’ve created is from scratch. That’s just something I’ve chosen to do. I would do it again even if I had to take a loan out, even if I had to put it on credit cards. There’s just something about shipping every product ourselves, touching every product ourselves, putting it in the package, seeing the name that’s printed on the label.
There was a time where, in the very beginning I was still shipping out of that. Here I am, multimillionaire, shipping out every package myself, driving to the post office, 50 at a time. So I was touching everything. I designed the first website, wrote the first copy, wrote the first ads in AdEspresso, boom, boom, boom. I did everything myself. I called the customers myself on my cell phone. I did everything. But I did that because it’s a principle. It’s just what I do. It’s all I know. When I started my first business at 13, 14 years old, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was doing everything myself. I was programming, oh, I need Photoshop, how do I learn Photoshop? Let me go to Google, how to learn Photoshop, or pick up a book. That’s just all I know. All I know is how to get my hands dirty.
Now, I’ve learned delegation and having a great team because you can only do so much yourself. Nowadays I spend most of my time on the phone, in meetings, travelling to close deals. I spend time doing that but I can still get my hands dirty. I can go and… I can Shopify liquid develop, I can go write code. I feel like too many people are afraid to do those things. They’re like, ah, I’m not a math person. Ah, I’m not this. It’s funny because everybody is a money person when the money comes around, but nobody wants to be a math person and nobody wants to be a programming person and nobody wants… you’ve got to be an everything person if you want to do it well and you want to be big. If you want to be respected by your team, you have to kind of do it all.
Otherwise, you’ve got to be so brilliant in whatever it is you do. You either got to bring a tonne of money to the table where you can hire a huge team or you’ve got to literally be Albert Einstein or Elon Musk or I don’t know, Elon Musk gets his hands dirty so I can’t even point to him. But, yeah, I think drop shipping versus brand building, drop shipping is a great arena to learn things for sure. The problem is people get stuck there too often because I’ve learned in my life to chase difficulty. I chased the difficult things in my life. I thrive off of them because that’s the only time I learn. If I take drop shipping, I’m learning a lot. I’m learning about logistics, I’m learning about customer support, like I’m taking a lot of it.
So it’s a great, great learning ground. I’m not knocking it at all. But to go from that to building a brand, which I think is one of the hardest things to do in business, like the Olympics of business where you’re printing every label, you’re writing every ad, you’re doing every day, maybe you don’t do it forever. I did it for the first few months, then I started to build my team. But at least you can touch it, you can feel. There were days where I could feel in my blood, how much our sales were by the time I woke up. I mean, I could feel it and I would open Shopify I’m like, “Oh, I was really close.” I could feel when something bad was happening. It’s weird, you’re so into it. I’ve worked with a lot of people and the ones who are like, I’m not a numbers person. I’m not a math person. I’m a nothing person. I’m a poor Hispanic kid that grew up with spit on my face. So like I’m a nothing.
So, for me to be able to build a multimillion dollar empire from scratch and build an amazing team around that, I’m a nobody. So, if I can figure that out, there’s no excuse. So I think for me, sometimes I… particularly younger people including myself, I was victim of it, it’s like I want success tomorrow. I want to be a billionaire tomorrow. I want to be a millionaire tomorrow. It’s this need for now. So drop shipping gives you a little taste of that. It’s dangerous though. Drop shipping is hunting rabbits. Building a brand is hunting elephants. Hunting rabbits, you could do it by yourself. It’s very exciting. Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, you feed yourself for the day, great. Hunting an elephant requires skill. It requires strategy, it requires a team, but you can feed an entire village and that’s a more powerful skill because less people are hunting elephants.
Everybody’s hunting rabbits. It’s fun because you’re running around, but you exert so much energy that you never can build up the fortitude to go after an elephant. People who hunt elephants don’t want to hang out with people who hunt rabbits. It’s just a different game. So you’ve got to choose what you want in your life. I got tired of hunting rabbits. I had exhausting. I was really good at it, but I got exhausted. I got burnt out of doing that and I was like, I don’t care if I’m broke. I don’t care if I never make a penny in my life, I want to hunt elephants. I want that side of it.
Nathan: Yeah. I love it man. Yeah, look, yeah, it is totally different. I think that was a great breakdown. I share your same sentiments there. Talk to me around something that no one ever talks about, but I found interesting when we got connected was around using Shopify versus having a funnel. You said that yeah, you guys have funnels in place. Are we able to talk about that?
Josh: Yeah, of course.
Nathan: So yeah, should people be using a Shopify store for their brand and running PPC to that cold traffic, retargeting traffic, whatever, or should they set up a funnel? From my experience, a funnel converts way better for an ecomm product or any product for that matter running through a funnel. But a lot of ecomm founders, they don’t do that, man. They just go straight to Shopify. It kind of baffles me. I’m not really in that space, I know a little bit about it and I help my partner, she’s got a really successful ecomm business and I come in on the side and help guide her, but yeah, it’s crazy. Talk to me about that, what your take is.
Josh: Yeah. I mean we’ve been guilty of it too. I mean, but unless you have a serious brand, if you’re… here’s the thing, if you’re Louis Vuitton, I remember for the longest time they had flash on their website, wouldn’t even load on my computer. If you’re Louis Vuitton, they don’t care about their website. They want you to come in store anyway. You’re going to… and look, if your wife is asking for that specific bag, trust me, you’re going to find it or you’re going to get a divorce. You’re going to find the bag. So if you’re Louis Vuitton, you can get away with that. If you’re Joe’s Protein Bars that just started on Shopify, I’m sorry sir, but you’ve got to court me before I become your customer. So you walk up to a girl you like and you say, “Hey, let’s go to bed.” She’s like, “Well, what do you think I am?” Someone who says yes to that, is probably not someone you want to keep in your customer list aka get married to.
So, you want to court your potential customer, you want to hold their hand and think about sales since the beginning of time. It’s like, you come on and say, “Hi Nathan, are you looking for a car or truck?” “Yeah, I’m looking for actually a van. My wife is expecting. We’re expecting our third child.” “That’s amazing. Wow. You’re expecting your third child. Wow. That’s very, very awesome. Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?” “Oh, it’s a girl.” “Wow. That’s amazing. You know, I just had a baby girl last year and I got to tell you, it’s my first girl…” you’re building rapport. You’re building rapport. Then you say, “Hey look, Nathan, come over here. I’m going to show you something. I just came on the lot.” So you’re building excitement. I’ve got your attention.
Okay. Now I’m building the interest. “Come over here, I want to show you something. Okay. So this is my personal favourite minivan. The reason why is every other minivan looks like a soccer ball car. Here’s the truth. She’s saying… she’s probably telling you it’s for me, I’m going to be driving all the time. There are times where you’re going to have to drive that. Heck when she’s… you have to drive to the hospital and God forbid she’s delivering, you’re going to have to drive that day. Well, guess what? You’re going to pull into that hospital in style. This is amazing.”
Then you want to move into the next phase, the desire of like common formula. But the desire of you being in here. It’s like, “Honestly, this is a chick magnet. I know you’re already with a chick, you’re never going to cheat on your wife or anything but I got to tell you, I drive this thing around on Sundays to go get coffee and stuff by myself and I cannot… I don’t know what it is about this design, they hired someone from Aston Martin so I think they put a lot of… it’s like the Aston Martin vans, I guess.” So now building his desire. Then action, “If I could make this work for you, how much are you looking to spend? How much did you tell your wife your budget was?” “I told her I wouldn’t get something more than $600 a month.” “Okay. If I can make this Aston Martin van work for you for $600 a month, would you have a reason to say no?”
That’s a funnel. What most e-commerce entrepreneurs are doing is, you’re coming onto the car lot and they’re throwing you right into a van. You’re like, I wanted a car. I wanted a truck. Well, how’d you… I don’t want a van. They’re slamming you into it, and then they re-target you with the same van that you don’t even want. You’re like, why are you trying to throw me in this fricking van? I don’t want a van. Eventually you wear them down. You spend all this money, your CPA goes really high, Cost Per Acquisition and finally you say, all right, I’ll give it a try and they buy the van. Charge back rates are high, customer satisfaction is low and nobody’s coming back. A funnel allows us to take someone and say, here’s one weird trick to boost your confidence. Ooh, that sounds interesting. Then it talks about how your smile is your number one trait. So that’s an advertorial.
So you can do this for free. You can literally just write somebody out, write a story. People like to hear stories. If you’re selling a book, it’s not about the book itself, it’s about what the book has done for people. So chapter three of this book literally made me a millionaire. They were like, whoa, chapter three . I’ve got to check out this book. All right, let me click that. Oh, wow, I can download chapter three specifically, with just putting in my email. That’s awesome. I could tell a story. So the funnel process is very important because it takes a cold traffic.
I mean, think of our brand, Snow. Snow was seen by about 90 million people last year. So our ads were seen by 90 million people. Out of that 90 million, only about 10 million came and visited our website. Shopify is not made to convert sales. It’s made to accept sales. There’s a difference. So you need to have something for, whether it’s click funnels, whatever the heck you want to use, maybe it’s just an advertorial. You can create a WordPress website or on Shopify blog on it so you can literally go inside the Shopify, if you are already there create a blog and put seven reasons why people are switching to blank, put your name of your brand and put the best seven things you can think of that I would care about as a stranger who doesn’t even know who you are and send the traffic to that versus sending them straight to your product page, which is like throwing someone into a minivan who came in to buy a sports car and they’re like, I don’t even know what I want.
One of the best ways to do this, which we found success with is quiz funnels. So taking them through a quiz, do you drink wine? Do you drink coffee? Do you smoke? Do you brush your teeth? Are you in your 40s or in your 50s? We ask them 10, 15 different questions and then we say, based off of this, here’s what we recommend to you, we recommend the extra strength because you told us that you smoke and you drink red wine and you’re in your 50s, you’re going to benefit most from our extra strain package. All of a sudden there’s a little bit of customization. Even if you gave… even if you hacked it, and in the beginning you just gave everybody the same recommendation, you would have three times the conversion rate than just sending people to a page and then hoping that they buy. You have to take people through.
You can’t propose to strangers on the street, you’ve got to take them on a date first and funnels are the best ways to take people through a date and allow you to tell your story and why you’re different. Prop up your price before you even show them what the price is. That’s why you need that process. I think we’ve… digital products have it, infoproducts have it but I think e-commerce, it just has never been a big thing. People are successful in spite of it, but now that Facebook costs are going up, all of a sudden people are saying, oh, what are funnels again? I think I need one of those.
Nathan: Yeah. No, it’s interesting. So look, we have to work towards wrapping up, man. This is an awesome conversation I could talk to all day brother like just shooting it. Let’s talk about influences. Yeah, I think I’d be foolish not to ask you. Obviously you’ve worked with which Kardashians?
Josh: I’m trying to think of whose posted. Kim, Kylie, Kris, I mean, we even had Caitlin posts as well. So we’ve had all of them I think except Kendall and obviously Rob and that’s it. Kourtney I think posted. So anyway, we’ve had pretty much the whole family share our products and as far as I know, they actually use our products, which is really cool because that’s a testament to the quality of what we built.
Nathan: When you work with these big celebrities like a Kardashian or a Jenner, what are you looking for? Because I think when people look at influencer marketing and they’ve tried it and they say it doesn’t work because they spent, let’s just say a couple of thousand dollars and they didn’t get a return, is that what you’re looking for? Or what is it that you’re looking for when you work with these celebrities? What is your intention? What is your goal? What is it that you see the bigger picture? Because I think I know what it is, but I’m curious.
Josh: Yeah, I mean, back in the early days, you could pay the influencer… TikTok has it right now, like TikTok, if you have the right offer, the right product, you can pay 500 bucks for someone with a million followers and you’d be a fool not to at least make some type of money back from that. So TikTok is early enough that you can take advantage of some of the stuff if you have the right product, the right offer. Instagram used to be that way. It was like the heyday and you had all the weight loss teas and the weight loss bands and all this stuff. It opened the way to the more “” industries that are a little bit harder to get those customers to stand out but it was working. People could sell a product for 20 bucks, make five bucks on the product and get someone to promote it for five grand and they’d make 10 grand on it. It was literally hand over fist, people were printing money.
Well, as all things… as it always goes, supply, demand. So what happened is that over the last four years, there’s been a spike and bigger brands have been getting into influencer marketing. Everybody thinks they’re an influencer so there’s been this surge of like, I want to do this full time. I had one brand that paid me 20,000 Josh so, that’s my price. I’m like, well, I would love to pay $20,000 but that’s just not the market anymore. So, because Instagram and Facebook have limited the reach of organic posts so much now, the value of an influencer is really around the content.
So the way we look at influencer marketing now is you’re either our customer, which is free to get you to post it, we just have to have some type of incentive there and make it cool. So free or you’re a small influencer we’re paying 50 to maybe 500 bucks, but we’re really paying not because we’re going to make money on the post, we’re paying because we think you fit a look that we’re going forward to portray who’s buying our products or we think you have an attribute that we think would stand out in an ad or… it’s content. So we’re paying for content and then everyone in the middle who used to work with, I spend millions of dollars in the middle, they’re out. So if you’ve got between one to 10 million followers or even I would say 500,000 to 10 million followers on Instagram, we’re probably not looking at you at all unless you are nationally or internationally recognisable.
So you might only have 3 million followers, but that’s because you used to be the biggest TV star 20 years ago, but you still have appeal. Okay, maybe. But unless you’re Nicki Minaj or we’ve done… worked with like Ashley Benson so she’s got 21 million followers, unless you’re Ashley Benson, Nicki Minaj or Kardashian or you’re one of our customers or you’re someone with just a few thousand followers, everyone in between has gotten squeezed, unless it is on YouTube because YouTube the content lives on and on and on. So if you’re like a fashion influencer or you’re a makeup vlogger that we might do some type of collaboration with you that make sense and the content is going to live there forever, okay, cool. But the days of every influencer driving a Range Rover and just working from home and posting pictures with some tea, those days are long gone and they’re not coming back.
So, I urge entrepreneurs to focus on, follow the money, first of all, always follow the money. I don’t care if it seems cool, you know someone who knows a celebrity and you want to become enamoured with it. The reason why I’m successful in celebrity deals is, I never get obsessed with any one deal. I’m willing to lose any deal at any time. I’m willing to wait. Okay, Nicki Minaj isn’t ready for us? Okay. We’ll talk in a year. Let me make sure she has product. Let me keep her updated along the way, we’ll see what happens, next. It’s like, oh, so and so doesn’t want to do a deal, well, there’s a hundred more, there’s a hundred more. So I never get stuck to any one deal.
To answer your second part of question is really around brand equity. So what I’m looking at is, if I get the micro influencers, my customers to post, that’s content, I can reuse that content on my website, on my ads. Their sister might see it and want to buy it. It carries a lot of weight, great. If a Kardashian posts or Nicki Minaj or Floyd Mayweather or Rob Grownkowski, if someone posts like that, I’m leveraging that in retail. So now a retailer or maybe you have a small gym reselling your protein bars or you got the laundromat down the road that you want to sell your products, you come in and say, “Hey, did you know, so-and-so Kardashian posted us? Check it out.” All of a sudden they’re like, “Come right in, sir. Wow, you want to speak with me? That’s very nice of you. What can we do to work together? Oh my gosh.”
So, you’re leveraging it. Do not kid yourself and think that you’re going to go and spend even a hundred thousand bucks on, I don’t care who you have and that you’re going to make the a hundred thousand back, it’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. If you use a coupon code, it’s going to look very promotional. They’re going to hate you for it. Let alone celebrities don’t ever want to post on their newsfeed anymore, they only want to do story posts, which is crazy. 25,000 bucks for 24 hours on a story post and only 10% of our audience is going to see, forget it. Take your money and go and spend it on Facebook ads where you can track every dollar, it’s profitable. Take it on Instagram, every dollar is profitable.
Then once you have enough money coming through and if your goal is to be in retail or your goal is to have a globally recognised brand or household name and you have the money to do it and you’re willing to lose it, then go and do that.But really right now, influencer marketing is just… they’re really expensive trophies for the most part.
Nathan: I love your take around the brand equity and the content. I think that’s, yeah, really smart and I think it really comes down, like you said, like with YouTube, you find… I don’t know if you can comment, I don’t know if you have the same experience, but from my experience, YouTube has seemed to have a much deeper and stronger relationship with their audience. So it’s not just about the follower count, it’s the relationship that they have with their community and their fans.
Josh: Oh. yeah. I mean it’s the new TV. So, when you… for example, Friends, the TV show has been running forever and each of the cast members make 20 million a year just from the reruns. There’s an affinity there. I mean, there’s a deep, deep, deep connection with someone you watch every single day. Whether you’re crying, whether you’re lonely, you are sitting there and you know that person. In your head you’re like, I know Kim Kardashian because I’ve watched her since I was eight years old. It’s like, no, you don’t, you’ve never met her. It’s like I know her. I know what she likes, I know how she is. You see a large percentage of the population starts to look like a Kardashians. I mean, from… and it may not be directly but you see the eyebrows, they draw the trends.
So TV, which is now YouTube is very much in that similar fashion. People are obsessing over these bloggers, watching every single move, their mannerisms, they are buying their merchandise so when you get in front of that audience and you get a stamp of approval from their leader, which is the vlogger that they choose to follow and we have really like micro nichefied TV watching. So if you’re into hunting, but you’re also somehow a vegan, but you’re also into makeup but you love Lamborghinis, you probably somehow can find a vlogger that matches all four of those random traits and you will say, that is my blogger. That is my celebrity. That’s where I fall. I’m going to go to all their shows, I’m going to buy all their merch. If they tell me to buy snow, I’m going to buy snow because I trust this guy. I just trust him.
So you want to find those high affinity points. What I’ve found now is with the larger celebrities, they don’t have that touch because they’re not talking to their audience, they’re just posting pictures and it becomes superficial. The vloggers make you laugh, they make you cry, they make you nervous. That’s the ephemeral feelings like we want to go for that when we’re trying to place our product into any type of video. So YouTube, if you’re a YouTube influencer, you’ve got some time left, but you better be really strengthening that tie and figuring out what your angle is and growing your audience. Because I would love to talk to you if you have a very tuned in audience, I would love to chat with you. I’d rather work with you and spend a little bit more money to have content that’s going to live forever and be highly engaging that I could reuse as well than to get a 24 hour story posts on someone that’s never talked on video before to their audience.
Nathan: Yeah, I think that’s spot on, man. Well, look dude, we have to work towards wrapping up. Two last questions. One, any just parting words of wisdom. You’ve shared so much gold, this was an incredible conversation and then two, where’s the best place people can find out more about yourself and your work?
Josh: For sure. Yeah, I would… like I mentioned that earlier, chasing difficulty, adversity sharpens diamonds. I mean, what’s going on in the economy right now, it’s an opportunity to take a step back, take a pause, look at what you’re doing, look at what you have been doing, what has been working, sticking to your guns. Look, if you have to shut something down, shut something down. I know it’s painful, but from the ashes you will rise. I’ve had more… it’s so cliche, but I’ve had more failures than I’ve had successes. It’s just true. That’s just how it works. You have to be willing to make those hard decisions right now. You have to cut costs. If you can keep selling, double down on advertising. If it makes sense for your business, stick to the core principles of what you’re doing and then chase those difficult parts. This is an opportunity right now to learn some difficult skills.
If it makes you uncomfortable, as long as you’re putting real effort behind it, you focus on it, you say, I’m going to turn off my phone, I’m going to block off distractions, I’ve got two hours to take this course or to learn this, I’m going to take notes, I’m going to take it seriously, and now I’m going to apply it, you can learn media buying, you can learn this web design, you can learn packaging design. I knew nothing when I got started and so I believe in you, I believe you can learn it. Now is a perfect example of opportunity to push yourself to go and learn those things. Maybe it’s learning delegation, leadership, whatever it might be. So those are some parting words in terms of what’s going on right now. The best place to find me is on Instagram @JoshSnow. Then Snow is on Instagram just Snow, S-N-O-W. Then the website is trysnow.com. T-R-Y S-N-O-W.
Nathan: Awesome. All right, well look, thank you so much for your time, man. As I said, you shared so much gold and really just, really insightful stuff and I learned a lot myself, personally. So thank you so much man.
Josh: Thank you. It’s my pleasure.
Key Resources From Our Interview With Josh Snow
Subscribe to The Podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and Spotify