On today’s episode, we’re talking to Bryant Garvin, the head of marketing at Ozlo Sleep. He discusses Ozlo’s journey of launching a successful product on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which raised over $3.5 million combined.
Bryant shares insights on the importance of a unique product, strategic marketing, and leveraging crowdfunding platforms for building community and gaining momentum. He details the origins of the sleep buds, initially a Bose product, and the transition to forming a new venture focused on improving and scaling the product. Bryant also covers the aspects of venture backing, the significance of pre-launch operations, and the role of ‘performance branding’ in scaling businesses.
Moreover, he highlights the utility of advertising on different platforms, engaging with the audience, and the importance of a well-defined value proposition. The podcast concludes with Bryant emphasizing product differentiation as crucial for crowdfunding success and the challenges and solutions in utilizing platforms like Indiegogo.
Find Ozlo’s website here, their Kickstarter campaign here and their Indiegogo campaign here.
George:
Hi there. My name is George and I help independent creators launch their products and games. On this podcast, those creators share their journey from an idea to an actual product and everything in between. Today’s guest is Bryant Garvin. He is the head of marketing at Ozlo sleep and Ozlo sleep buds. Their first product raised over 1. 4 million with their Kickstarter for earbuds that you can sleep with. Welcome Bryant.
Bryant:
Hey, what’s up? How are you doing, man?
George:
Great. Great to speak to you. You guys did such an awesome campaign, both in terms of financial outcome, and also I love the product. I’m one of those people that sleeps with their AirPods in, which is not good. So for those How many ear infections have you had? There you go. It’s really not good. So just to kick us off. Tell us a little bit about the product so people know what this is about.
Bryant:
Yeah, absolutely. So also sleep buds, we actually coined a phrase, sleep buds, not earbuds. Cause while there are little earbuds that fit inside, I don’t know if you guys were watching this, we’ll be able to see it, but these little tiny earbuds fit flush inside your ears. And allow you to sleep on your side, toss and turn, do whatever all night long. Allow you to stream whatever you want to be able to fall asleep. Then we’ve got some algorithms and some other stuff, sensing when you fall asleep, that can transition to white noise, or rambling brook, other things like that’ll help you keep you asleep, right? Cause one of the biggest problems with sleep is noise disruptions. Disruptions in your room from a snoring partner in your house, a city. If you live in a city, right? All the sounds, the horns honking, someone dropping the base upstairs, whatever it is, right? And so this helps mask those sounds with other sounds there that keep it so that any disturbances don’t spike and kick in your wake up because we were designed to every disturbance to wake up. From caveman days, right? And so it allows you to be able to get that restful sleep that you need no matter where you’re
George:
at So you could start with music or a favorite podcast and then it detects when you fall asleep Because that for me is always the thing i’ll start with a podcast like jack cornfield some meditation stuff and I fold it fall asleep To it And then the next thing it’s Tim Ferriss. And then it just wakes me right up. So exactly. Prevents that a
Bryant:
hundred percent. So this will be able to do that. You can also set a timer. Cause a lot of times the things that help you fall asleep, that get your mind to quit racing, to get to distract you so that you can get calm and get centered, aren’t the things that keep you asleep and so you can choose whatever you want. Like I know people that watch friends on their TV every night to fall asleep for stuff like the lights. Bad. But secondly then they have to set a timer on their TV. If they have a partner, that partner’s forced to sit there with all of it. You can literally do that in your ears. Listen to that fall asleep and then either set a timer or eventually have the sleep buds sense when you’re sleeping and transition gently over to these masking sounds that we have white noise or things like that.
George:
This all sounds super advanced. And also I noticed that your Kickstarter looked amazing. So tell us a little bit about the company, the origins of this, because it doesn’t look like an overnight success to me.
Bryant:
You’re absolutely correct in a lot of ways. So the sleep buds themselves, the actual design of the sleep buds, the case, the original basic design, the earbuds, all of that stuff, the sleep buds themselves were actually a Bose product originally. So Bose came out with the sleep buds back in. 2017, 2018, I believe. And they had a really good thing going. They decided internally to focus on their core business. And so a lot of the other parts of the business they needed to get rid of, even if they were successful. So some people internally decided to take the opportunity and run with it. They saw opportunities for improvement. And opportunities to scale something that they think there was a huge market potential for. And so three of our, three of the three co founders were originally Bose employees. And they left Bose and then to pick this up and started to run with it. And so they brought me on as head of marketing a year ago. Yeah, and so inside of that we’ve got all night battery life We’ve got your sound, acoustics, all of that stuff in there, as well as the ability, like some things that help us detect when you’re sleeping and all of those things in that little tiny thing.
George:
I’m going to guess that you guys had some prior investment going into the crowdfunding campaign, right? For, we did, yeah
Bryant:
We’re venture backed. So we’re a venture backed by life arc ventures, which is one of the largest medical medical venture companies as well as artists ventures. And so we did have VC funding to help start getting the product into place. I come from. Multiple growth companies in the past. I was the original director of marketing at purple, the mattress company. Then I was at groove life. I’ve so I’ve scaled brands over and over again. I’ve done multiple Kickstarters, Indiegogos, all of that stuff, even with products that are repeat, the brand is already there, but repeat dropping and inventing new products as a place through crowdfunding to get it. It’s not so much about funding as it is about momentum, building community, all of those types of things, right? Yes, the funding’s great. It helps us have additional funds into the production of the product and pre sold a lot of units, right? But for us, it was more about starting to build community, build this awareness while we were finalizing the actual development of the product and getting it into production.
George:
Yeah, because that’s always interesting, right? People would say if you’re venture funded, Why do you need to do crowdfunding?’cause the, so the funding part is actually not what you need. It’s the crowd part that
Bryant:
you need. Yeah. It’s about the crowd. It’s about validating what we’ve got there. There is the opportunity to create this early community. That were that are really excited about it. Begin testing ads as well. What messaging is actually working, which audiences, those different types of things and starting to figure those things out so that as we go along, we’ve got a lot of that ready to go. When we actually have product on our e commerce site, ready to ship, when we’re ready to start putting it into Amazon, all of these things, we’re building that momentum without actually having the physical product yet to ship to backers.
George:
Interesting. So you’re actually, you’re doing a lot of sort of marketing not so much market research with marketing research, like what ads work well, how do you target this? What’s your messaging so that you know that before you actually go big on your own e commerce store?
Bryant:
Yeah, absolutely. Which ads on Meadow, which audiences, which YouTube to Google, like all of those different places. But on top of that, all of these backers now have a vested interest. And so we can ask them, like we sent out a survey a couple of weeks ago asking them, Hey, what was it that made you decide to buy? What are the reasons? How do you plan to use it? Like all of this information that we just got all of that. And while somebody that backs on the Kickstarter or Indiegogo isn’t necessarily the same person that’s going to drop money when you purchase like from an e commerce site and it’s ready to ship next day or from Amazon. It still gives you a nice core direction to really focus in on.
George:
Yeah. And Kickstarter backers or crowdfunding backers in general seem much more excited to fill out surveys and share what they think and, tell you what you want to know about the product and versus if someone just orders it off of Amazon, you don’t even have your email address. You you literally cannot even ask them a single question. Yeah, exactly.
Bryant:
And not to mention, like when you launch on an e commerce site, getting reviews is hard. Yeah. Okay. I’ve now got all of the 55, 000 plus backers from Kickstarter. We moved to Indiegogo in demand after partially to continue that momentum to continue the pre orders, continue getting revenue coming in and building like understanding the scope of what we would need for production, right? Cause as we scaled this, we’re like, Oh, we need to scale production. And so doing all of those things ahead of time, especially because making something like this takes time. It’s not just something I can call up. Somebody like, Hey, ship me 10, 000 more of those overnight. Stamp them out. They’re literally making these like little, all of those little tiny pieces that go into that.
George:
So what can you break down the marketing process that you went through? Because we have an expert marketer here on the pod, so we want to make use of that. So you obviously did some kind of pre launch campaign. Cause you, you hit, 350, 358, 000, I think on day one. So talk us through what you did.
Bryant:
Okay. So a couple of different things. And I want to back us up just a little bit. So I talked about how I’ve scaled multiple companies, right? My Desire and ability to grow a company is built on three pillars. The very first of those pillars think of it like a three legged stool, right? The very first of those pillars is actually product in order to truly build a successful business You need to have a really good product. Everybody’s heard. What’s your unique value proposition? What’s your unique selling point? That is so true. You need to have a product that is actually differentiated from The sea of sameness that exists in the world, there’s a ton of knockoff products. What makes your product truly unique? And you need to understand that and you need to be able to express it clearly. So that expression of the differences in your product versus what other people might be interested in or might be currently using today is the second piece. That’s creating content. Whether that’s blog posts, whether that’s whatever, obviously everybody is probably watching. This is familiar with purple mattress video was at the core of that create really unique videos that sold the proposition, but did it in such an entertaining way that you’ll sit there and watch a four minute video without a video ad, without realizing you watched a four minute infomercial essentially. And so the content is the second piece. And then the third piece is the amplification of that content and product. And that’s like your. SEO, your advertising, your email, your newsletters from other people, all of those types of things, right? Like great product, great content. Amplification of both of those. And if you do that, you can scale.
George:
Yeah. Because what we’ve noticed, cause we, we run an agency, so we do a lot of different projects and it’s it’s the one builds on top of the other. And if you do everything right, it just flows. It just goes right. If you have a great product, it’s easy to make great content. If you have great content, you put a little bit of. We pour a little bit of gasoline on the ads and it just takes off. But if one of those things is missing, if the product isn’t great or the content isn’t great, you can’t really artificially get there. You feel it instantly.
Bryant:
Yeah, you feel it. But also even if you have all the money in the world to fund into something, it only gets you so far before it starts to have diminishing returns. And the product, if it’s not truly differentiated, truly unique, truly something that’s lasting, the reviews are going to start coming in. You’re not going to have the repeat. Like it’s just, you’re having to funnel in more to get back what you already got. And so the product is why I think it’s key, like you said. But along with that, so because there was this product that existed in the marketplace, we knew that there were a lot of people that liked the Sleepbuds originally. We knew there was a market fit for people that needed this product because Bose transitioned it out as we were coming in, they actually ended up selling out early and there was a gap in the marketplace. That was one other reason why we came to crowdfunding was to start filling that gap, even before we had the product available. And so when we first came to market saying, Hey, this is who we are. The verge wrote an article as an example. We’re on the front page of the verge. Three ex-Bose employees are resurrecting the sleep buds. Okay, front page of the verge. So a lot of the traffic that came in when we launched was from a few key press articles. But then it was also, we started running ads again, like Google ads again, some of the phrases that might have been out there, driving them into our site, collecting email saying, Hey, we’re coming soon. So when we launched, we had a couple thousand emails that I was able to send out of everybody that was really interested and be able to push that momentum to start off with.
George:
Interesting. So you didn’t just run meta ads to that landing page to just, just do lead gen campaign. Wow, that’s impressive. Yeah, that’s that’s really cool. So so and there
Bryant:
is some benefit. Sorry I didn’t mean to cut you off There is some benefit to the fact that there was something that existed prior, right? We could capitalize on some of that energy that existed before And pull that didn’t pull that demand in for us.
George:
Yeah, and it’s so smart to amplify Pr and news stories, right? Because that is the best kind of advertisement because it gives you know authority To this thing that you’re doing. And then three ex-Bose employees, obviously, it’s not just some random scammy crowdfunding weird thing that no one knows about. That’s exactly, that’s really smart. So I think that plays in. So to your earlier point about the sort of the three legged stool, that is like your amplification, right? So when you have something good, you amplify it when they’re a good article comes out, you run ads against it to amplify the good thing that’s already out there.
Bryant:
Yeah, yep, exactly. So like we, we took a screenshot essentially on mobile of it. We changed the logo for the verge, changed some of the type because all of that stuff is copyrighted. And so you want to make sure that you’re playing safe and by the rules. And so we changed up some of that and put that is still to this day, one of our best. Performing. And I’m saying performing, it’s like bottom of funnel type of ad, but it’s one of our best performing ads on meta as an example.
George:
I’m literally, we have a campaign right now. I’m going to steal this idea from you like today, and I’m going to, I’m going to do it. I’ll re I’ll report back how this works. That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. Okay. So for your prelaunch so you have these articles coming out, you use those to drive. Signups on your landing page. Was there anything else you did before you went live or was this the main driver?
Bryant:
That was the main driver in the press. So pr so we were prepping for the press and the Advertising to drive people in to sign up to be notified when we launched
George:
So the launch date comes around you have these emails you send out your notification Was the 350,000 funding that you hit. Did that all come from those emails that you had signed up? No,
Bryant:
A lot of the press we had initially, we had them under embargo not to launch until the day of Kickstarter. So all of the press and the email, we coordinated all of that. So that when we launched, it was this massive flood. of people. And so I actually didn’t do any real true advertising for the first couple of days because I wanted to see what this did for the brand, right? What kind of momentum can this do? Because this was a really unique opportunity to be able to see how much impact can A press story have on revenue. Yeah. And we were able to see that.
George:
And w can you share, for example, like which ones did the best or what kind of numbers you get out of a story like that, roughly?
Bryant:
It did. I, first off each publication’s a little bit different, right? Where you get it from, but like the verge was one of our best ones because it just tracked inside of Kickstarter analytics was like 90 K plus. Like over the whole period of time. Which is pretty solid. That’s really awesome. Yeah. And that’s last attribution. Yeah. And that’s the last click attribution on the verge. So that’s pretty cool too. So that doesn’t count all the other people that maybe went to the website, signed up, didn’t do anything. Like all of that type of stuff as well.
George:
Yeah, for sure. There’s always more, for example, Kickstarter has this thing. It’s shown in the dashboard as search. And I always think that is probably just, delayed attribution of something else because they probably read it on the verge and then they just searched on Kickstarter. Exactly. And did you offer like an affiliate deal or anything to the press or this was purely just on the merit of the product?
Bryant:
Purely just on the merit of the product. Again, that’s why product is so important.
George:
So you’ve launched you have all this press coming in and then did you run ads in the end? Yeah.
Bryant:
Yeah. We’ve ran, been running ads this whole time. So meta ads, YouTube ads, Google ads. And part of that is, is that’s one of the really unique things about me and what I do is I understand the impact of YouTube and how it can grow a business. I’m going to take everybody back to marketing 101. Okay. Marketing 101 is essentially understanding people and persuading them to do things. Would everybody agree with that? Okay. Okay. In order to understand people. And get them to do things you need to understand what they’re already doing and how to interject yourself into that conversation so Why do you? Open up facebook as an example
George:
so me personally I do it to check on my ads manager, but I and to check on old friends or like folks from high school See what they’re up to
Bryant:
but Okay, but like you just open up. There’s your feed there, right? And you’re just scrolling through it. You don’t have a very specific purpose unless you’re replying to a notification or something, right? What about you? What about YouTube?
George:
You’re looking something up. How do I hang up a mirror in my bathroom.
Bryant:
You don’t open up YouTube when you’re standing in line at Starbucks, right? You open it up when you’re actually going to do something. The whole purpose for Facebook is essentially wasting time. It’s a slot machine, you have no idea what’s going to come up, and you’re cool with whatever to waste your time there, because that’s your whole intent and purpose behind it. If an ad comes up and is interesting, You’re likely to engage with that ad, click on that ad, maybe even buy something from that ad. Whereas on YouTube, your whole purpose was to watch the video after the ad. So even if the ad is really interesting, are you likely to click on that ad, leave YouTube and the thing that you intended to do in the first place and go purchase that product? No. No. You may watch the ad. But then you’re going to watch that cat video or whatever it was afterwards, right? So user intent of the platform that you’re engaging with users on is really important to understand. And so if that’s how YouTube works, it’s not going to have the same type of attribution or impact that Facebook does, which is add, click, conversion, add, view, conversion type of thing, right? YouTube is going to be add, impact potentially, hopefully, awareness, all of these things. They’ll watch the video afterwards, and then if something really got your attention, where do you go next with with that ad? You’ll go search for it on Google or Amazon, right? One of those two places. If it’s a physical product, if it’s any kind of a tangible good that you can buy, you’re either going to Google or Amazon to search for that product, okay? And so the attribution for YouTube sucks. But everybody wants to use youtube the way they use meta and facebook and instagram, but they’re completely different platforms The user behavior is completely different and you’re expecting it to behave like this duck is you’re expecting it to behave like a donkey Whatever it is, right? Like it like you’re expecting two things to behave similarly when they don’t in any way sense or shape people may wait Spend time in both platforms But the reason why they’re there is completely different. And so you need to understand that. And that’s what i’m really good at doing is hooking people on youtube getting them to watch an ad Okay, my average view time on one of our ads that we’ve got for Ozlo sleep is 104 seconds.
George:
That’s long. That’s really long So so what
Bryant:
makes it they’re choosing to watch it. They’re choosing to watch it first. Yeah So
George:
so so what’s in the ad?
Bryant:
It’s entertaining. Okay. That’s the most important thing is it’s entertaining. Like I’m really big on hooks. So the first two to three seconds of an ad has to grab your attention. Okay. If you can’t grab their attention, they’re not watching your ad. So in that first two to three seconds, we actually script out multiple intros. We record multiple intros. We cut multiple intros and we test those ads to see how the hook is. Okay. Everything else about the ad is pretty much the same. We’re getting all the main points in, but we also create a modular so we can pull a piece out of the middle and a piece over here and stitch them together and actually create micro ads for Facebook or Instagram or other things like that at the same time. Or remarketing ads hammering in a specific point that maybe is hit on two thirds of the way through the video because we like we’re doing three minute, four minute ads, right? And so being able to get someone hooked enough. To stop from hitting that skip button, right? Cause they’re automatically, the moment the ad comes up, everybody’s looking for the skip Oh, okay. And if you can get them to pause for just a second, you’ve got them potentially, right? Just a little bit longer, just to be like, wait, what is this? And so the hook is the most important thing. Questions in hooks I have found are really impactful. And there’s a reason why. Can you give an
George:
example of a
Bryant:
question? Okay, so at Purple as an example, we tested a couple of different ads for the Sasquatch. It was for a mattress protector, okay? Purple mattress protector, okay? It sold a lot of mattresses too, because it was just an interesting video, okay? But the, we recorded a bunch of different hooks. We tested them all, and one of the hooks was Did you know that did you know that Sasquatch pee smells like lilacs and freshly pissed daisies or something like that, right? Really bizarre. The hook that actually won said, Did you know that the wrong mattress protector can ruin the feel of your mattress? Really simple and basic. Yeah. But, is there a single person in the world that asked that question to themselves? Before that question was asked, but the moment that question was asked, you start thinking, did I know that? How do I do that? Is that something that’s possible? Your brain, your subconscious, because all we need to do is hook the subconscious to pause long enough to hopefully hook the conscious. Because we are all designed to notice things that are different. Questions in our environment automatically make us focus because it could be danger. Danger, Will Robinson. And so asking a question automatically gets somebody’s subconscious mind to pause, even for a microsecond, to try and answer that question. If I asked you, Hey, what’s the temperature there where you’re at right now? You’re immediately thinking, what is the temperature where I’m at right now? What do you want to or not?
George:
Yeah, it just, it breaks the pattern. It breaks whatever pattern you’re in, right? If you’re in this pattern of, I’m just going to, I’m not even paying attention to this ad or I’m looking for the skip button, just having a question breaks, whatever it is that you were doing in your mind. And I think this is where good meta ads actually are a little bit similar where it’s like your ad creative should be a little bit weird or. Maybe even unclear in some cases because that you’re scrolling, you’re thinking, what am I looking at? So we often do a really weird detailed, super zoomed in for example, where you’re like what is that? What is that? Yeah? different from that Yeah, exactly. But the same thing. So that works the same on YouTube then you just, you’ve got to snap. You’ve got
Bryant:
to be able to grab the hook, got to grab the hook, and then you’ve got to keep them entertained because that’s the thing is you can hook somebody to not hit the skip button, but if it goes from that into just boring, they’re going to go watch what they went there for. So can you keep them entertained? While you’re doing it, that requires you to have really different, really quick hooks and changes between perspectives, like shooting things from multiple angles so that you’re having these quick shifts and visuals as well as audio, other things along those lines so that it keeps their attention there because everybody has nothing in this day and age has short
George:
attention spans. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And people are in some sort of a trance, if you’re scrolling Facebook or you’re watching YouTube, a lot of people are just not really paying attention. So another thing that I, now that I have an expert here on this kind of stuff, what I find fascinating is the targeting for the kind of products that you do, because both mattresses and like also sleep, there are products that. Anyone could want or use because everyone’s sleeps. So what kind of targeting settings do you apply for such a sort of generic category? It depends on where
Bryant:
I’m running the plot of the tar, the campaign originally. So on Facebook and Instagram and even Google, if I’m launching it on Kickstarter, I actually create audiences around Kickstarter and Indiegogo and crowdfunding. I want to get. The people that are most likely. So out of all of the audiences that exist on meta today, Kickstarter as an audience is actually one of the few audiences available. And it’s been, it’s because it’s been there forever. I like I used this back in 2016 when I was doing purple and it’s still there today and it’s a pretty good sized audience, but these are all people that are interested in crowdfunding already. So going broad. You’re going or going with somebody that’s already got an interest in it. Which one are you more likely to convert? Because there are more hurdles to convert somebody on a crowdfunding campaign. If they’ve never done one, then say Amazon or an e commerce Shopify site, there’s just more hurdles to jump through. And so I create custom intent audiences on mute on Google, which is where you can literally create an audience based off of what people have searched on Google in the last 30 days. And then serve them a YouTube ad.
George:
Interesting. And that one is, and that, that audience is focused on Kickstarter as well on
Bryant:
Kickstarter, Google, all of that stuff. But then I can also take things like earbuds for sleep, other things like that, and create an audience there on Google as well. And then I can start pulling out audience insights out of hey, who are the people that are actually visiting the website? Who are the people that are actually doing this and pulling the audience insights out of Google, right? Found that people that for some reason, there was a lot of people that were interested in travel to Indonesia. They were in market for that. Cool. I can target that potentially as an audience and test and grow and scale there. But I also go broad because. Niche audiences are great, but those niche audiences eventually all run out. Yeah, and if all of your creative was designed against just niche audiences and it’s performing great there It doesn’t mean that it’s going to work great at a broad audience. Whenever I’m testing creative I’m always testing in a broad audience way Excluding anybody that’s really already interacted with me in my ads because I want a clean view of what’s happening If that makes sense. Yeah. And if I go broad, I can always niche down. Usually if you’re broad and you niche down, it works niche down and try to go broad. It doesn’t always work the opposite direction.
George:
Yeah, exactly. That’s a one way door. And in this particular campaign, I don’t know if you can share this, but how much of the funding came from. Paid media. So meta Google, YouTube ads, how much came from PR and how much came organically from Kickstarter as a platform?
Bryant:
So Kickstarter as a platform definitely drove a decent amount. We ended up getting luckily connected early with somebody over there. We became one of their projects we love. So there was some benefit that we got from that, which lots of Kickstarter campaigns don’t get. So there was some benefit to that. A lot of the, Growth there came from the paid advertising and I scaled it as we went. So like I scale advertising based on profitability or whatever you want to call it, right? Like my break even point maybe for Indiegogo Kickstarter. And what that means is I’m looking at how many dollars I’m putting out versus how many dollars we have coming back in. I’m tracking them on a daily basis, weekly basis, a monthly basis. I’ve got a Google sheet that I’m literally doing that that right there alone. Is so much different than what most people do most people look inside the platform and what it’s saying And don’t even look at the back end data and what it’s saying If I’m spending just an example, 2, 000 a day on YouTube and Google and 2, 000 a day on Facebook, but Facebook is saying that 85 percent of all of the conversions are coming from Facebook and at a given day, that just doesn’t feel right. Do you know what I mean? But, and if I was just going off of that, I would. Maybe completely pause or kill the other stuff that I have going on, but I’m looking at it from an overall macro level of dollars out versus dollars in. That’s how marketing used to be done when we didn’t have pixels and tracking and all of this stuff.
George:
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I also think that the tracking is overvalued, especially with Kickstarter, where tracking also isn’t just the best from a technical level. But for example, like you can run a campaign. Where you spend on ads and you get great pledges every day, but, meta only attributes, I don’t know, a third of that. So you kill your ads because it looks unprofitable. And then the next day you have zero pledges coming in or, just a handful. So what is that? Is that So I think you’re spot on by just looking at input output very broadly. And the other thing as well with Kickstarter specifically, because I used to work there, so I don’t think it’s a secret, but their algorithm promotes campaigns. The more they have transactions on a daily basis. So if you don’t, jumpstart that they are also not going to expose more people to your campaign. So that’s not, that’s another thing I think where, by that broader view on input output with your dollars makes. It’s a lot more sense because it’s it’s untrackable, but that impact.
Bryant:
Absolutely. And when you’re testing a bunch of things like isolate your tests, right? So if I’m looking at, Hey, I’m going to increase my investment in meta as an example by 500 a day and I’m spending 2000 a day right now, like that’s a noticeable impact to your investment. Does that make a noticeable impact in your revenue? And I look at things on NMER, marketing efficiency ratio, right? Or I actually say AIR, ad investment divided by revenue ratio, which is a percentage. I don’t think of ad spend as spend, I think of it as an investment. Like I literally don’t use that word ad spend, I use ad investment. Because if you’re investing, it should be returning something. Spend isn’t that.
George:
Yeah, totally. And also I think there’s a lot of Residual returns that you may get out of this. If you play your cards, right? For example, custom audiences that you can get out of this, right? That you can use even after your campaign, you have all these purchasers. And if you set your pixel up correctly, it can learn, or you can upload your customer data, or you have all these Facebook posts that have now have hundreds of comments that you can continue to promote even afterwards. So I think that also is something that I think a lot of people overlook in that they do this in a very isolated way. And they don’t really think about the value that they can create with that data, with those same dollars. And basically you just, you can double your output from a single dollar.
Bryant:
The long term, the long term impact of things is what most, lots of people don’t look at, especially in today’s digital advertising landscape and where most digital advertisers have grown up and most e commerce companies have grown from. They’re like, A dollar today, dollar out, dollar today. That’s, it’s very transactional. There’s no brand building. And for me, I actually coined a phrase called performance branding. Anybody that’s doing performance isolated or doing branding isolated, they’re doing it wrong. You should be able to do both conjointly. Like all of my YouTube ads at purple, my ads that I’m running here at Ozlo sleep, they’re performance driven, but they’re also building brand. They’re building a brand voice. They’re building brand identity. They’re building brand around the product and the company and all of this type of stuff. And that has lakes down the road. That I can leverage. I can build those audiences inside of meta for people that have done 15 second views, that people have, that have engaged with ads, that have done all that stuff, and I can leverage it over time in platform a lot longer than I can externally. So are you leveraging those in platform audiences to then kickstart your next thing? Yeah. And I’m not saying just kickstart as in Kickstarter, but like That when you launch your direct consumer site, are you hitting all of those people that engaged with your ads? Maybe clicked on them did all that stuff in platform. Are you setting your windows long enough for those beyond 30 days? Are you doing 60 90 180 days? In platform because it’s got all of that data because it doesn’t have to worry about cookies or exactly or any of that other stuff Are you leveraging all of that when you launch your e commerce site and can start shipping because there’s so many people that you might have Touched that would have been interested Weren’t willing to commit to doing indiegogo kickstarter or something else. Maybe they’ve been burned on one before Maybe they don’t really understand what it is. Maybe it’s just too many hurdles to jump through
George:
Yeah, 100 and this is why I think I don’t want to take a stab at any particular Agency because we are in that same space, but I think agencies that don’t use The creators or the brands page, pixel ad account are robbing people of some of that sort of long tail data because yeah, you might not realize that now, but later down the line, if you have, like you said, all those posts that have engagement, those are potential audience sources. You can make an audience of people who saved a post and that’s super valuable. So if that ran on someone else’s page, you lose that.
Bryant:
Yeah, and there’s a place to allow like it to run on other pages because that’s again a form of third party validation, but if that’s all you’re doing, you are short sighting yourself, you’re short changing yourself because of those reasons that you just mentioned. One thing that I’d also mention, Is think about what type of audiences you might want to create, even if you’re not using them now, because if you create them now, it will gather all the data. Whereas you may come along and be like, Oh crap, I wish I had all of those 15 second engaged video views to remarket. Once I launched my product and you didn’t create the audience, they don’t exist anymore. Yeah. They can only go back so far.
George:
And it can be pretty cheap as well. We have a project right now, which is for a playing cards based on Winnie the Pooh. So we’re looking for people who are really into Winnie the Pooh. And that’s very specific, right? That’s not an interest that we have in meta. So we just run landing page views against Disney and we just then build audiences off of whoever, engaged with the ad, watch the video visit the landing page, because those are the people who within Disney. Winnie the Pooh. So even if that audience doesn’t exist and it costs a couple hundred bucks, to just get started with that and to just get some engagement going. So you can build your audiences, even if they’re not in meta. You’re a veteran. What do you want if nothing else? What do you want people to know and take away from this? If they are thinking about launching their own campaign.
Bryant:
So again, I’m going to harp on it again. The most important thing is make sure that your product is actually differentiated from what’s already out there, that you have a unique value proposition and that you can clearly explain it in a few sentences. Your elevator pitch, like basic sales, one on one type of stuff, marketing, one on one type of stuff. But if you have to take 10 minutes to explain what’s different about your product, you do not have that UVP, your unique value proposition, unique sales proposition locked in. And you need to be able to do that in order to be able to explain it to a consumer why they should buy that product, right? You need to be able to explain it so that the people helping you with your marketing, even if you’re not doing it, if you’re using an agency or whatever else, being able to explain those types of things, like you can have great ideas, but make sure you spot check it with other people and help use your Everybody has a network of some kind, let the people really, truly talk to you and like, help you refine that process so that when you launch, you’ve got a really refined, unique position to stand on. And that’ll really be the thing that really helps you grow. And the other thing, like I said, is don’t get so obsessed with the data in platform. Look at you, you are running a business, even if it. Wasn’t intended as that originally you’re just like i’ve got this really cool product idea I want to do that You should want to be able to grow this into a business Which means you need to be looking at it as a business which means dollars out versus dollars in versus cost of goods All of those types of things and you need to get into that from the very beginning All right. There are so many kickstarter campaigns that are funded successfully they Even get the product out to people, but they have no money left at the end of the day and they can’t keep going. So think all of that through.
George:
Yeah, it is a business and you need to be, financially responsible and think of it as a business and not just as people throwing money at Your wild idea, if you want to be successful long term Bryant thank you so much. This was an incredible conversation. I learned a ton so many nuggets. I really appreciate your time is, do you guys have a new campaign coming up with Ozlo or so we’re
Bryant:
currently on, we’re currently on Indiegogo. We just reached production. We’ll be starting shipping soon. And then once we get through all of our kickstarter and Indiegogo orders as production ramps, we’ll be able to actually have it available on our e commerce site and then eventually on Amazon. But these things, just so you guys know, and I had it pulled up and I didn’t share it, but Ozlo Sleep. The sleep buds as of this point in time is the number one off platform in demand campaign of all time since 2015.
George:
Wow, that’s insane. Let’s dive into that real quick then before we wrap up because I actually I wanted to ask a pointed question about Indiegogo and I restrained myself. But since you brought it up, I’m going to take it there. So we have so Indiegogo adds a tip for themselves at the checkout these days. So annoying. You order a product you want to check out and then indiegogo adds and it’s a high one It’s 10 or 20. It’s something and so we yeah have actually stopped recommending folks Do indiegogo in demand because we see like we had a project the other day out of the 20 People that added it went through checkout only one of them. So one out of 20 Made it through the checkout. And my suspicion is that it’s because of the tip, but you guys don’t have that issue.
Bryant:
We have some people that have that issue, but we also have a lot of people asking on social and stuff like that. And so we’re commenting and saying Hey, it’s optional. You don’t have to do a tip. Yeah. You can choose to select and have it be zero. If you’d like to, the way they also have it put in there, it’s not really obvious that tip is going to Indiegogo and not the creator. And that’s a little bit of my thing. That’s there. I think Indiegogo has a great platform. It has a community like Kickstarter. I think the Indiegogo community is almost a little bit more tech focused than Kickstarter is these days. I think Kickstarter is very much game entertainment type of stuff. It’s still, obviously we did amazing for Ozlo sleep. But I think that those are some of those things that. Is going to come back to bite Indiegogo in the butt eventually because they could actually be making more revenue in the longterm. Even if they increase their fees a little bit, which they’re already high, like they would end up making more doing that than forcing the tip on the consumer.
George:
But you guys, okay. So you guys see that issue, but if people are asking the question, you’re educating people on how to use it and we’re
Bryant:
educating it. And honestly, like we have. Advertising and communication and education on the page in our ads, all of those things is so good that it’s getting people over the hurdle of jumping through everything on Indiegogo. We’re up to 3. 5 million now. All in between kickstarter and indiegogo so you’ve more
George:
than doubled your kickstarter on indiegogo, basically
Bryant:
oh, yeah, we’ve done over two million dollars on indiegogo And so and that’s we scaled that slowly as we’ve gone along here Leveraging that methodology of dollars out versus dollars in yeah, right But it was an opportunity for us to community getting those pre orders Yeah, and yes, we know for a fact that it is probably impacting conversion Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that we’re losing that money again We’ve got the long view if we can get to break even on this The long term view is we’ve built all of these audiences and interests that we can then go back and remarket to these people When we launch on our website, we’ve got a 10 000 email list now We’ve got 2500 people on our text message list now, right? Like all of those types of things plus now 14 000 backers
George:
Yeah, but I think also it’s like only the strongest of products survive crowdfunding because of those hurdles. If you have a product, people are not going to put up with all those hurdles, but if people really love your product, they’re going to, they’re going to deal with it. Yeah.
Bryant:
Yeah, exactly. And that’s the key. And
George:
that’s the key. Bryant thank you so much. That’s why products first. Products first. That’s number one. We should just bring out a little ebook about this whole session. I think it was a evergreen. Bryant, thank you so much. In the show notes, folks, if you’re listening, watching this, we will have links to, to Bryant’s stuff, to Ozlo sleep. You can still get your Ozlo sleep buds on Indiegogo. You can remove the tip if you want to. Yeah. Thank you, Bryant this has been a real pleasure.
Bryant:
I appreciate it. Talk to you later. All right.
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