- The Weekly Sharpener
- Posts
- The Weekly Sharpener #102
The Weekly Sharpener #102
Find your zone of genius 🥸
👋 Hey fam!
I'm really excited to share this 👊 Monday roundup with you!
This week on Add Creative we speak to Jesse Pujji (CEO of Gateway X and Kahani), and the conversation is so incredibly rich, I hope you all take 30 minutes to spend time learning from him.
He shares his learnings on bootstrapping, raising money for the first time, prioritization, and growing as an entrepreneur over time.
The most interesting thing we get into is how to find your zone of genius. I won't give it away but it's worth listening to figure out what is your and how you can lean into it.
We also talk about the digital downturn and how you should be thinking about the next phase of business you are going into.
Finally, we look at how you can grow your business while staying efficient with your KPI's.
Enjoy and hope you're thriving!
Cheers,
Chase
P.S. - a special offer from one of our partners only for newsletter readers 🦾
Pencil - Creative AI
Making ads is a grind. 🥵 Figuring out what works is the same.
What if you could scale your creative testing on paid ads by automating the creative production process?
All you need are your assets, branding, and performance data and you could have new ad ideas. No more thinking about what to run, you have ads served up on a silver platter!
(15% off your first year with code: TDS15) 🎉
Partner with us 🤝
Marketing agencies, freelance creatives, e-comm experts…want access to our generous revenue share and co-marketing opportunities? Become a Pencil Partner today! You can learn more here.
🎙Add Creative
Apple Podcast 🍎 II Spotify 🎧
A sneak peek from Episode 27 👀
I do think there's, you know, there are certain things that sometimes at different times people just learn by doing it. But I think prioritization is one of those things that really is. It is the secret, and I think like everyone can always get better at it.
I'm pretty good at it, but I could still get better at it. And the couple, some of the couple hacks I use, you know, one is somewhat similar to what you just said, which is I will do this sometimes on a daily basis, even. I'll do it on an hourly basis, sometimes on a weekly basis. And monthly, if we could only do one thing.
In the next hour if we could only, if I could only get one thing across the audience, what do you want me to get across? Right? Wow. We just, we just focused ourselves, Okay, if I could only do one thing this week, what's, what would we do? You know? And, and, and it's just a, and then I'll, so, okay, what if we could do two?
And I think there's just, you don't actually need to do a ton of analysis or anything to get that done.
If you enjoy the episode, please rate us 5⭐️'s & share!
Content that matters 🐐
Why it matters: The digital downturn, yikes that doesn't sound good. Doom and gloom, right?
This is what we are supposed to think. We are beaten. I don't see it that way. This is a market correction and corrections are bumpy for those in the eye of the storm.
You are in the eye of that storm. In 2007-2010 people who were business owners and job seekers understood the challenges of an economic downturn.
Since then we've had the longest bull run in history. Meaning we forgot what pain really feels like.
That's not bad, but learning and growing don't feel good while they're happening. Better companies, with better systems, and tighter objectives will emerge from this.
Why should I bring this up?
"Ads are harder now" is the common refrain I hear these days.
Maybe customers, who are inundated with information about the downturn, inflation, and political polarity are most discerning with how quickly they part with their hard-earned cash.
That means ads aren't harder, it means you have to be better at:
Ad -> Landing Page -> Offer
You have to be better at communicating your value above all other options to that prospective customer.
It means you might need to have more differentiated creative or a second landing page build.
STOP LIVING IN THE PAST.
The world is evolving.
Buying patterns evolve.
Why hasn't your customer acquisition strategy or philosophy?
What this all comes down to is:
1) Update your expectations for what the baseline should look like because there are hundreds of things your customer deals with on a daily basis that have nothing to do with you.
2) Be mindful of your customer's life. Very few things are truly necessary: Food, Water, Clean Air, Home, Transportation, Health.
Is anything DTC in there? Nope. You can make yourself useful and convey that when they purchase and every day in between the second purchase and the third and so on.
A bit of a tirade that isn't SO tactical but during this time of year, it's a lot of hyperbole and going into the 2023 reset period and time for reflection remember, the job is to be of value.
Only then do you extract value downstream. All of our spreadsheets don't matter without that.
Happy to discuss this more 😂
Thread of the week 🤌
This year, we've almost tripled our ad spend on Meta while reducing our CPA by over 15%. Here's exactly how we did it that you can steal too...
— Cody Plofker (@codyplof)
2:42 PM • Nov 12, 2022
Why it matters: There are some incredibly meaningful learnings from Cody, who is growing his business significantly through creative testing + paid media.
My favorite from here is:
Obsession On Creative Testing "We used to spend 10% of budget on testing. In the last 90 days, we have spent exactly 47.9% of budget on our "Creative Testing" campaign. I used to be worried that even 10% would be too high because I didn't want 10% of our budget to be "wasted"."
You might this is self serving - it is. But also many of your aren't using Pencil (yet), so why should you be creative testing - because your customers are evolving and the way you communicate your value needs to as well.
My question to you: are you testing?
Check out the rest of this thread, it covers:
Account Structure
Testing
Landing Page Test
Quiz for all traffic
Good data
Let me know what you've been focused on most from this list.
Special Offer from soona 🍾
The ultimate creative solution for your e-commerce biz. (We love these as you prepare your content to get moving in Q1 or even need some last-minute help for holiday)
5 brand new packs that bundle content and take the legwork out of meeting platform best practices + tech requirements.
20% OFF: pencilpack
Expert Strategy + Learnings
Some amazing learnings from thought leaders in DTC.
Carl's CRO Tips 🙌
People want to see people.
They want to feel familiar, understood, and assured when they land on your site.
How to action this:
Place faces on the first landing section
Make faces look at elements that need attention
Place faces on the first landing section
For more 🔥 follow Carl Weische from Accelerated.
Rahul's Paid Media Learnings 🤘
Make the most out of the videos you receive from content creators.
Here are 4 ways to repurpose your videos:
Test a variety of sounds or voice overs
Test different hooks, from audio to text
Test different video lengths - split testing videos from 15-30 seconds
Take the highest view times of the video and turn those into boomerangs
Follow Rahul from Reach Digital for more 🧠
Creative Cuts ⚔️ - ICYMI
Want to learn about WHY the creative you love works and how you can leverage it 👇
Worth Your Time 💡
No explanation, just amazing content.
From our Library 📚
Join the ✏️ community
Sign up to learn and meet 100+ other great founders & operators across DTC.
Curious about what we're building? 🧱
Check out our roadmap and upvote what you think is important! If we have missed anything, you can add your suggestions as well.
YouTube Channel 📺
Check out our library of amazing video content.
Fav Newsie's
Eli's Newsletter: CX & Retention Learnings
Enjoy this issue? 🤌
Share The Weekly Sharpener with another marketer on your team.