Outranking Nike's SEO with Shark Tank alum Teddy Giard from Moonwalkers

George: 0:00
Hi there. My name is George and I help creators run successful campaigns with my company’s YG and fantastic funding. On this podcast, you’ll hear from creators how they consistently launch record breaking campaigns so you can do the same. My guest today is Teddy Giard, founder of Teddy Giard Studios. He helped launch Moon Walker’s AI powered shoes on Kickstarter with phenomenal results, and he has previously secured a deal on Shark Tank for Mark Cuban while he was still a student. Teddy is a mastermind when it comes to seo, pr, and scaling brands through social media. So today we’re going to hear about the strategies he uses, so you can do the same. Welcome Teddy.

Teddy: 0:37
Yeah, thanks for having me, George.

George: 0:39
It’s a real pleasure. I think it’d be good for the listeners to know how we met and how we know each other. So there’s this project that was on Kickstarter a few months ago called Moonwalkers. they’re AI powered shoes that let you walk at the speed of a run. They’re world’s fastest, extreme, cool world’s, fastest shoes, like the coolest thing ever. And Teddy was already working on the project. I clawed my way into that project because we do this, I don’t know if you know this, but we do this thing internally at yg where we look at like cool projects online that we find, and then I just spam the hell out of creators because I just, if I want to work with him. And then I was on vacation in the US. I saw they had, didn’t reply to my emails and I was like, okay, fine. And then I saw it on Good Morning America or something. I was like, damnit, it’s so cool. So I like, I messaged them again and then they were like, yes, please work with us and run our ads and help us with the crowdfunding part. So that’s how we met. But then you have actually been the original mastermind behind that campaign. Before we get into that, let’s go all the way back to Baby Teddy when you were 19 and a student. And you were on Shark Tank. What were you doing with your life back then?

Teddy: 1:49
At that time I knew that I wanted to start a company. Like when I first went to college, I went to Clemson University in South Carolina. I knew that I wanted to start a company. I didn’t know what it was. And I happened to stumble upon a group of college seniors when I was a freshman going into my sophomore year. Who had a, had an idea, needed someone to run the marketing department. At the time, I didn’t know that marketing extended beyond just making cool videos because like videography was my background. But yeah, when we ended up taking that company scaling it from zero to$5 million in five years time direct to consumer e-commerce, which was what I was responsible for, made up about 70% of our revenue. And my junior year of college, we took that journey to Shark Tank. We basically invented in, it was like an ice cooler. It was like a jacuzzi for a case of beer. But we went on Shark Tank, secured a deal. I think we were the fastest deal in the history of the show, but it was cool. I wore a kangaroo suit, did a back flip. And it was just a fun journey. It was like the best launch pad you could really ever ask for. Learned a lot of hard lessons about understanding how to structure a business, what your roles are. Figuring that stuff out. The lessons I learned are invaluable for someone, exiting at 22.

George: 3:12
That is insane. So take us to that moment where you’re 19, you’re in a kangaroo suit, you’re in the tank. Were you not shitting your kangaroo suit with nerves?

Teddy: 3:24
I I always tell people this one, but I had never watched an episode of Shark Tank before the show. Because like when I knew that we were like getting considered to go on, I didn’t wanna look at the sharks as anybody, but just normal people. And I knew that if I watched them on tv it would’ve just psyched me out. So I was surprisingly pretty natural. I remember more so when the deal closed and when we found out we were going to air, because the deal after the show works differently than the deal on the show. It’s, there’s business and there’s Hollywood. I can’t really touch on that too much, it, that’s just how it is. There are two sides to the show and, but I remember when we found out that we were going to air was when I was like, wow, this will be life changing for my business career, I was just filled with gratitude.

George: 4:13
And was It really life changing in the end?

Teddy: 4:16
I’m very grateful for the show. I don’t wanna say that it’s the end all, be all, because it’s so different going in there than when you go into a room and you actually pitch investors. Like I have a neighbor in my coworking space right now who’s pitching to investors within. Epic startup and it is just so different, and so it the PR that it generated was amazing, and the doors that it opened were amazing. And at the time, a group of college students who were starting a, starting a. Business that started as a class project in the hallways of Clemson University. We had no idea what we were doing, so we had some we had some amazing mentors that taught us how to develop products. Actually opened up our global supply chain, which is where we were manufacturing the products. If they hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have had a working product. When that happened, we also were able to, they worked with us close to. A year and a half. And if it weren’t for them, like we wouldn’t have even been a functioning product. So we were very blessed to be coached through the entire thing. And when the Shark Tank thing happened, it really gave us the opportunity to go and try to run it ourselves because for the first time we actually had the web traffic we needed, we had, the credibility to go approach retailers. At the time we still didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know how to make a wholesale pricing sheet. We didn’t know how to go in and. I like, I wasn’t even I’m not afraid to admit it. Like I wasn’t even collecting email addresses. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know what I was doing. But that was funny enough, like that was what kind of led to the crazy reliance that we had with that company on social media. And that was where I figured out how to use content with both advertising and both organic reach. Our reliance on social media ended up becoming a superpower down the road, obviously. Now, I would never advise a company to not diversify their, reach and their marketing. Like budget, but that was where it was. So long story short, it was definitely life changing in the sense of met people, got published in Ink Magazine like that. That was super cool. Super grateful for that and super grateful for the casting director her name’s Mindy, who gave us a shot. Nicole and Ronnie who were our, I think the producer, they coached us through our pitch, stuff like that. But you experiences like that are once in a lifetime and it was definitely a once in a lifetime experience.

George: 6:46
And are you still able to hit Mark Cuban up when you have a new business idea?

Teddy: 6:50
No. No. I, no. Yeah, we don’t, yeah. Like I said, there’s the show and then there’s the business side. It’s a matter of whether they close or not.

George: 6:58
Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, there’s not, there’s I hear there’s very strict NDAs. You’re the second person we’ve had that has been on the tank and it’s so painful to tease out anything about how this show works.

Teddy: 7:08
Yeah. I like, it’s one of those things where I don’t really know what I can and can’t say, and I, beyond grateful for the opportunity, and I don’t wanna say anything that pisses anyone off.

George: 7:18
That is an insane jumpstart to your career at 19. Obviously you then learned a ton. So then fast forward to today, let’s talk about Moonwalkers. Um, Moonwalkers as a campaign, they didn’t raise a crazy amount, but they also didn’t do a crazy amount of advertising. We came in a little bit towards the end of the campaign to help them with that, but, What was insane about Moonwalkers was the amount of organic reach, pr. It was just everywhere, and that’s your work. So talk us through what was the brief that Moonwalkers came to you with, and then what did you do?

Teddy: 8:01
Totally. So I actually can’t take credit for the success on Kickstarter. Funny enough, those are my two partners, coworkers, Jake and Sawyer, they run the Pardon company. I run that with them. But at the time, I was still in a full-time job when they were starting off with the Kickstarter campaign. So I remember easing my way into what they were doing, but. They were tasked with telling the story of what the product was, how it functioned and where it went. And the organic PR that the company got was rather remarkable to the standpoint of where, to your point, George, there wasn’t a lot of advertising or marketing strategy done behind the actual physical launch of blasting out on socials. And that was what, led me to realize Hey, what if we actually did a pre-order model post Kickstarter, like internally through our, through the business? And what if we actually started, running an actual marketing campaign? And that was where we really took it to the next level. So we did a full scrape of the SEO landscape based off of what impressions we had seen on social media and what we were able to pull from Google Analytics. And we found a bunch of keywords that we could rank for ourselves. We saw that the world’s fastest shoes, that keyword, that search term was actually like rather popular and it was completely owned by Nike. So we knew that we wanted to outrank Nike to do that. In order to do that, we had to generate something over like 50 million views within, a month span of time. And having conducted an entire content strategy where we made over 50 pieces of content based on seo, key search terms, what people were looking up and how we could actually. Tell the story in a fast, efficient, high quality and engaging way, we were able to blast out and create this spiderweb effect on social media. It’s actually a strategy I’ve held onto for, five years or so, and I pitched it to a couple brands, but Sanji with Shift Robotics was the first guy to give me the budget and give me the opportunity to go and let it rip. We generated 79 million organic impressions and over 1500 pre-order sales within a 30 day span. That’s, as far as I’ve seen, like I think we ended up doing 200,000 followers, close to 200,000 followers on TikTok. Over a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. In my whole career I’ve never seen a product or a marketing campaign take off to that level or organically. And that just gave us the fuel we needed to, we have an amazing ad partner, someone I’ve worked with for a while, his name’s Graham Welter. I’m gonna keep name dropping these people cuz they deserve the credit. It’s not just me, and. Graham has been able to, he now has the audience, he now has the organic traffic to filter through and find the actual purchasers and, clear as day. We know who our buyers are now and we know how to expand. And so it’s just amazing that we were able to build this foundation and grow from it. At the end of the day, If you’re going to work with a marketing company or you’re going to develop a strategy and they can’t tell you who your audience is or how the problem you’re solving is resonating with that audience and they don’t come up with a communication strategy to directly speak to those people, you’re probably gonna waste your money.

George: 11:14
You make it sound really easy, but those are some insane numbers. You just casually dropped. You outranked Nike in a shoe related search term. That’s insane. So we’re gonna need more details from you, Teddy, because you can, you can’t just drop things like that and then be like, yeah, that’s just how we roll. So first you scrape the web for search terms, right?

Teddy: 11:38
So yeah, we wanna find out what people are looking up. People are asking questions and I think a lot of this comes down to. Naming convention. So let’s say you’re trying to start a company from scratch. If you’re solving a problem, why not name your company around a problem that, let’s say George, you’re trying to find socks that don’t stink when they’re sweaty. You know what I mean? What would you look up on the internet? No smell socks, maybe no smell socks is like very high ranked on Google. It probably makes sense to either do a campaign or if you’re starting out from scratch, just straight up, if you can get the trademark, name your company that, and build everything around it. So like starting to think, and this framework of thinking, I actually got from Robbie Fitzwater, he’s based outta Greenville, South Carolina. I got this framework of thinking. He was like, he always told me, he said, Hey, if you don’t, if you don’t build a company or marketing campaign around Google search terms, you’re not building for long-term success. And that kind of also derives from the standpoint of. If you’re building a product or a service and you can’t identify the problem or clearly communicate what problem you’re solving, you might not be pro solving a problem at all. You’re probably not gonna find a lot of success. So if people aren’t actively searching or trying to research a problem that you’re solving, you’re gonna spend a lot of marketing dollars trying to create that problem. One of the first products that companies that I actually started we didn’t see a spike in success until about three years. And people were like, that’s a ridiculous idea. That’s crazy. I don’t think we actually need it. It was novelty enough to where it was going to succeed. But the amount of effort it takes to market a product that isn’t actually needed and created demand is far more expensive than actually building off of something that’s actually. Sought after. I think a great example of this is one of my mentors and good friends, Kyle Bergman, he’s the founder of Swoveralls, another Shark Tank alum. He was getting up in the morning and trying to decide whether he wanted to wear sweatpants or overalls. Huge dilemma. And he was like, man, what if someone made sweatpant overalls? And sure enough he saw that more than, I think it was more than 15,000 people were searching for sweatpant overalls a month. He’s that’s enough to build off of invented Swoveralls. Now he’s running a million dollar company selling sweatpant overalls. So it is, it’s figuring out what people want and then supplying them with the solution in a sector to where they’re able to find it. Because if you’re gonna focus your entire efforts on trying to. Market people or educate them in a direction to then find you, you’re just gonna spend a lot more money than if you just build off of what people are already thinking about.

George: 14:35
That makes a ton of sense for no smell socks and sweat pants overalls. But then for mood walkers, what I wonder is, was anyone searching for like ai, like robotic shoes?

Teddy: 14:49
No, but people were searching for E- scooters, E-bikes, E whatever. So that was also one of the first things we did was we jumped in. We’re like, okay, so we own world’s fastest shoes and we’re gonna get that goal. It’s a layup. And not that sounds bad. Outranking Nike was not a layup, but we knew that we were capable of doing it. But we also wanted to, we also wanted to own the other search terms. So we wanted to own E-shoes we wanted to start ranking for wearable tech, stuff like that. So E-shoes was our first attack, and that one, we own the space on E-shoes as well. But building off of the familiarity between E-scooters e-bikes, we were able to actually break down like demographic research across our top competitors in those landscapes. And then make like assumptions based off of what the high key keywords of traffic. Like what the high search terms were across the board, frequently asked questions, stuff like that to assume what questions our audiences were going to ask. And by proactively making those pieces of content, we made over 50 clips, probably used 30 of them, there’s 20 left over. Yeah. They were search terms that we thought were gonna be used, they just weren’t. There might be a time where they’re used, there might be a time where they’re not, but you have to be thinking in the future, what’s gonna be happening two months after we launch this campaign, or else you’re just being reactive. Like marketing is a proactive sport. It’s not a reactive sport. If you’re running a reactive marketing department, you’re like just slowly trying to walk in quicksand.

George: 16:31
Yeah, for sure. And so you made all these clips, so you’re talking about video clips, right? And then or pieces of content, like what did you make and where did you post

Teddy: 16:42
Yeah, so I always like to start with a content strategy where we start with long form content. Break it down in short form content. So what, once we had the long form content, we had the B-roll, we had the shots. And by B-roll I guess I’m gonna break it down of what I’m saying. We had those hero shots. We had those shots of somebody walking their dog with Moonwalkers, and those are my partners, Jake and Sawyer, like they are some of the two most talented videographers on the planet. And they, they just know how to style people, capture’em in that aspirational light. And so we had those aspirational shots. Now it’s just taking those shots and putting context behind it. Taking those questions that people are asking, taking those search terms that we wanna rank for and how can we talk about them and communicate them in a perspective that makes sense. So once we have those clips, we take the long form, maybe a one minute piece, and I look at it and I go, okay, how can I make this 30 seconds? And you try to cut out as much fluff as you possibly can. When you cut out the fluff, you add a bunch of B-roll, those hero shots I was talking about, and you add a good song, make it cut on beat, all of a sudden it’s, it is an extremely engaging piece of content. So we know that’s gonna work on TikTok, we know that’s gonna work on Instagram. I can’t tell you why other than just experience and understanding what people want to see and the duration that they’re going to watch it. If you’ve watched enough pieces of content, and this is one of those things I was joking about with my coworkers the other day. It’s I can watch a piece of content and roughly tell you whether or not I think it’s going to perform. We would play the game where we’d go and we’d post something. We’d go, okay. I go, okay, I think this one’s gonna do 20 million views. It happened a couple times, this one’s gonna do 20 million views. It also helps that shift robotics, moonwalkers, which just this crazy product that no one had ever seen before. How do we showcase it and answer these questions to where, I’m gonna watch that video and I’m gonna go, holy shit. Can you run in it? You can’t run in it, but if we answer that question, we’re probably going to get another couple million views. You know what I mean? And then you have people that are asking, oh, can you run in it? How fast do they go? Okay, if we answer that question, we can probably send’em down the rabbit hole. At the end of the day, if you go down a rabbit hole, watch 20 videos and we can get you to our website and get you to sign up for our mailing list, watch our Kickstarter video to see how the product works. We’ve completely educated you on our product, and we can hit you with one to two retargeting ads to understand whether or not you’re somebody that’s gonna make a purchasing decision.

George: 19:23
So summary of this: one, you have an awesome product. I think that’s undeniable, right? Like this, all this stuff doesn’t work if the product isn’t just.

Teddy: 19:33
You wanna start with good product, there’s no such thing. Exactly there. There is such thing as good marketing with bad products, but like I said, you’re gonna spend a lot of money to market a bad product. Yeah,

George: 19:43
exactly. Okay, so we have an awesome product then. You guys made amazing video and photography and assets, like you said, your partners at pardon? They made the video. Anyone who hasn’t seen it just needs to go check it out. It is an amazing video and it, like you said, it looks great and it looks aspirational. So we have a great product, we have great video materials. You then start posting snippets of it, but you make those snippets to answer questions. So you proactively think someone sees this, they’re gonna, they see someone walking in it. You think proactively the question might be how would I run in it? Or how fast could I go in it? And so because you’ve been proactive, all that content is already there, and that’s how you can keep people in your content forever, right? Until they go to the site.

Teddy: 20:30
And that’s content in general. So if we’re like speaking just on content. Nowadays, it’s pretty mainstream to say, oh, I have I’ve been, I think you, you hear I’ve been consuming content. You’re consuming anything. If you’re eating something, if you’re drinking something, it’s doing something for you, right? For the most part. If you’re consuming content, you’re typically trying to get a hit of something. Whether you’re trying to consume something to educate you, whether you’re trying to consume something that’s gonna make you laugh, whether you’re gonna consume something that’s gonna make you feel aspirational or even if you’re like watching, we always joke about travel porn, like just like the lifestyle, like going to Italy, going to whatever. If that’s what you’re eating up in the back of your mind, you’re also doing your own research or saying where you wanna go, what you wanna experience, what you wanna do. So everyone’s going on social media consuming content because they are trying to. Feel a certain way. So at the end of the day, if you’re a product, if you’re a business, if you’re a brand, you either have to focus on making people consume something to feel a certain level of emotion or a certain feeling, or you have to focus on educating them and making them feel like they’re learning something.

George: 21:44
Yeah, and I think one of the really interesting things about this project from a crowdfunding’s perspective specifically is that you took a really long term approach to this. Obviously the lead up to the campaign, you had all this content already, this whole strategy has been unfolding, but the Kickstarter wasn’t the sort of the end all be all either. You guys are also taking on pre-orders after the Kickstarter and like that can, so the Kickstarter almost just felt like a step in the process versus. The final event. And so talk to us a little bit about that, because I think it’s very interesting how this plays out over many months.

Teddy: 22:23
I always look at a Kickstarter as literally a kickstart. You’re kickstarting your business. So it’s the first step. It is the first time you’re introducing your product or a solution. You’re, more importantly, you’re introducing a problem. People are either gonna resonate with your problem or they’re not. And so Kickstarter is your first chance to see whether or not people are going to resonate with your problem. The audience on Kickstarter and George, I think you can dive into this is a really unique audience. Early adopters are special people. They want to be the first to market with something and they want to understand the problem because they want to be the people that tell everybody that they saw it coming. You know what I mean? Yeah. For sure.

George: 23:04
100%. Kickstarter backers want to be special and they want to be the first, and they want to be able to be leaders in their group. And I think that’s also why when we run ads for this campaign and when we run ads for all campaigns, We use existing audiences and we use very specific targeting settings that don’t really work well for anything else. And so I often see this where if an purely an e-commerce ad agency does a Kickstarter campaign, their ads perform horrible, and then when a purely Kickstarter marketing agency does e-commerce, their ads perform horrible. It’s a very specific niche and type of person. And I think what’s really smart about what you guys did is. If you don’t have that audience like an agency has, because we’ve been doing this for years and so you know, we have all those audience databases. You can create it for your specific target audience, which is what you guys did. You just made content that appeals to that type of person and therefore you load up your pixel, you get your email signups. And so sometimes people feel like hiring a crowdfunding agency is the only way to get there, but I think what you guys proved is that you can actually build that up by just putting the content out there way ahead of time.

Teddy: 24:19
With the right approach and I think the right investment, you hear time and time again that content is king. You can have the best SEO approach in the whole world. You could have, you could come to me and say, I understand our demographics. I understand what they want. We know how to give it to them. We’re going to take over the planet. Our product is so good. If you’re not capable of hiring the right people to tell that story visually, you’re not going to succeed with the campaign.

George: 24:50
Let’s dive into Teddy Giard Studios. Because you’ve done this for Moonwalkers, you can do it again and you can do it for other people. What can people hire you for and what does that look like? So if someone’s listening, they have a campaign that’s coming up, they want to have the same success that Moonwalkers had, what does Teddy do for them?

Teddy: 25:11
At Teddy Giard Studios we’re scaling multimillion dollar products and brands through digital strategy and storytelling. We specialize in go-to-market strategy. So we specialize in go-to-market strategy, product launches, and then we also specialize in just telling stories in effective advertising. So if you’re looking for SEO research, web development, if you’re looking to sell a product, if you’re trying to do digital advertising or even social media growth, we do all of that. Our favorite clients to work with are people that have a product, have a set budget and a set goal of what they’re trying to achieve, and we’re able to build the team around it to actually bring that product to market and bring it to life with the vision that the client has. Down the road Teddy Giard Studios functions just as much as a portfolio of my own products that I’m launching into the market too. Having launched products in the past, we’ve got some cool tricks up our sleeves. What excites me about the position that we’re in is we have a team of Avengers all around us. Ultimately where it comes down to is we’re blessed to where we’re in a position right now to where we are able to take on projects that we’re passionate in. So it feels more or less like clients are pitching us at this point than we’re pitching clients.

George: 26:25
What a great position to be in that is truly blessed. But yeah I think absolutely, I can totally vouch for. Ted Giard Studios, we’ve been working on this project together, not in the same thing, but we’ve, I think we’ve both seen each other’s work, and I think it’s just been so impressive seeing you work and how you work. And so I definitely recommend everyone and anyone to, to reach out to you for their brand. And I think one of the cool things like you just said about you is that you have been there, you have been the 19 year old in a kangaroo suit on Shark Tank, launching a product and, taking it there. And so basically with you, people are tapping into someone who has walked the walk and then can share that experience. I think you are an amazing asset to any campaign. Highly recommend it. Teddy, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. We’ll link in the show notes below how people can find you, how people can reach out to you. We’ll link to the Moonwalks campaign as well. If you haven’t seen it, definitely check out that video that Teddy and his team made as well. Would you look. Superb and teddy, thank you so much for your time.

Teddy: 27:25
Awesome, George. Thanks for having me on.