Two 2027 DTC Shifts: AI Retention Marketing & TikTok Creator Burnout

All right. We are back with another episode of Marketing Operators. You've only got Connor Rolain and I today. Cody had to bail on us for the brand new, very exciting recording of Operators Build and the launch of Winx. I was teasing him this morning that he's found a younger, hotter podcast to hang out with, and we're feeling a little on the outs.

We're excited to see the episode, but, but we're gonna miss him today a little bit.

We were all in person this week for the Postscript, uh, summit where they sort of debrief us on the current state of the business. We talk about the future. I think it's a great jumping off point. to discuss maybe some of the things that we learned this week, as well as how that might affect each of our retention strategies moving forward.

You know, it all starts with like profile enrichment is kind of what I took away as like the foundation of what they're building. I think they're building a very robust, I mean, it's more or less a CDP where, you know, they're pulling in all of these data points from post-purchase surveys and 2-way conversations with customers and a bunch of other data sources to basically pull all this into their profile. So you can understand as many, I don't wanna say features, but as many like characteristics or preferences or life events, et cetera, um, for all of your customers. And then they're basically funneling that into their AI messaging, which is what they're calling Shopper, which I think is largely replacing like SMS sales, which we've used a lot in the past. And now we're migrating into Shopper. And then Shopper is basically using all these data points to just create hyper-personalized messages. So like, you know, if I'm buying from Ridge because I just got married and someone else is buying a ring from Ridge because they just like, you know, want to have a wedding band to wear when they exercise, like Postscript's taking all that information. It's creating what I think they're calling memories internally. And then they're just, their whole, their whole future is like super hyper-personalized messaging based on all these memories coming into all these different data sources from. from a variety of places. So I think that's very cool. I think like for us at HexClad, as we've expanded categories, we're trying to think through how do we segment and push people into the right products and the right messages at the right time. And to me, this seems like a really awesome step in that direction compared to what we're currently doing, which is just like a lot of a waterfalling of messages. And it's working, like we're growing these categories and we get really good engagement on these lifecycle marketing flows, which to me tells me we are we are showing relevant messages to relevant audiences, but like, could it be even more relevant if instead of waterfalling these messages, we were utilizing the memories and the, and like the data segmentation that Postscript's building out to say, hey, you know, we just had 100,000 people buy in the last 60 days. Like now instead of waterfalling those people through our lifecycle marketing, we can actually build more intelligent segmentation and say, hey, We're gonna put this 3,000 into an Eyes flow. We're gonna put this 1,000 into an Aprons flow at the same time instead of waterfalling people across. So that's like one of the use cases I'm the most excited about. But yeah, I mean, really, really cool stuff from Postscript. I mean, I'm just amazed at how they're building and how they run that company.

My biggest takeaway and what I think is like gonna be undersold a little bit, the AI messaging, the personalization, super, super exciting. This shift to Postscript 2.0 and like the profile piece of it, you said it's CDP light or CDP-like. Does HexClad use a CDP currently?

Yeah, we use a CDP. We've had one for, I mean, we've been using the same one for like 4 years. I think ultimately the goal is to like have a robust enough data warehouse and ability to query that data warehouse that you no longer need it. But we do still use a CDP because our data warehouse isn't quite there to the point that we've been able to sunset it. So we're really using our CDP for Well, one indexing across like large datasets of consumers, you know, our CDP partners with like, I forget, you know, like Nielsen and there's a handful of other that have massive consumer datasets. So you can kind of take your Shopify list and say, hey, where does our list over or under index for certain interests and stuff like that? And then we're using, we're still using our CDP for a lot of our like cohort-based analytics segmentation, market basket analysis, stuff like that. So we still do use our CDP quite a bit. I'm in there every week. They have a really nice LLM overlaid on top of it that makes querying it really easy. So yes, we are still using one.

My understanding of CDPs is that they really unify, they make a profile independent of a given channel. And that's like, you guys can integrate Klaviyo and you can integrate Shopify and you can integrate, you know, wherever else you might be collecting any sort of consumer profile and then appending that with additional data so that when you say you can, you know, enrich it with Nielsen data and get better insights into those customers, it's happening because it's independent of any given channel. The flip side of this is Klaviyo, you cannot have a Klaviyo profile. I mean, I'm being a little bit simplistic here, but it was this way for a really long time. You cannot have a Klaviyo profile without it first being an email. And that's like a big limiting factor where, and you've basically fractured the way that you can speak to customers. CDPs have unified that over time. It also goes down to like my deep disappointment with Klaviyo because I think that they have always been the closest thing that brands have to CDPs. They did eventually roll one out last year. It's very expensive. I don't think it's very good. I don't think it's going to get adoption from like the, you know, mid-8 figures to 9-figure brands. They've been so close to being the central source of truth for all of our customers. And I never think they like really embraced being that. And that's like, I think a kind of a key part of what Postscript's trying to do moving forward is to say, hey, we've always been an SMS platform. Profiles on Postscript have always required to have a phone number attached to it. What 2.0 is, is a move upstream of that where we say we're gonna have unified profiles independent of SMS, and then now we can append all sorts of different tags and identifiers across all these different channels so that they could do SMS. As they announced on sort of unofficially announced on Twitter recently, they're going to be doing email in the future. You could be ingesting Shopify profile IDs. You could be ingesting, you know, in the future it'll be Postpilot IDs or whatever else that like they are going to be the central platform for dealing with our customers independent of channel. And I think that will be very empowering as we sort of push strategies downstream in a more like unified, thoughtful way. And that's what I'm super excited about. A lot of those shifts. independent of AI. Like there's no, their ability to make this shift was dependent on AI, but the platform itself is not necessarily like AI native. And then moving forward, we'll be able to just leverage all that information a little bit better. And that's what I'm super excited about. Um, that was kind of step one for me.

One question I have on that was to like, 'cause like the, to the extent that Postscript's becoming a CDP is, is in the sense that they're, they're like just tracking so many customer attributes and that's super cool, right? They looked at that, that Bar's BoozeCoos brand and they were showing us how this comes to life. I'm curious because the way that I use RCDP a lot today is really for like cohort-based, like LTV market basket analysis style of querying. And I am curious if, if Postscript will like Again, it's all like customer attributes right now, which is amazing and that's super valuable, but I still, there's still the need for me to go in and be like, you know, hey, we just launched these egg pan ads in the last 60 days and our AOV is way higher than just this single egg pan or single rice pot. Like, I want you to tell me what are other people buying? And that's super valuable because now I can go and be like doing more like custom upsells, cross-sells, bundling based on that. And like, that is one of the biggest use cases of the CDP that that I'm using today. I'm also using it to understand like, are we effectively growing our like 12, 24-month LTV and all our yearly cohorts? And like, again, super valuable information to understand if our product roadmap strategy's working, if our retention marketing strategies are working, but more of like a quantitative perspective on lifecycle and LTV and market basket analysis. And again, I'm still using it for some of the more just like customer attribute stuff, which is what Postscript's building towards. But I am curious if they're going to ultimately go all the way in that direction where I can go right into Postscript as well and say like, hey, cohort everyone that I acquired in July of 2025 and show me how they've been maturing and the reorder rates and where we're seeing like the biggest bump in LTV. Like, I'm curious if they're going to be able to like cross the chasm and be that like quantitative value provider for that, that like CDPs are currently. servicing right now as well.

[Sponsor Content] Everyone is talking about AI, but few operators are actually using it to speed up their marketing and make better decisions. At Ridge, we use Runneth. It's an AI brain for the whole marketing team. It watches every creative you've ever run, knows what's inside of each one, and connects it to what actually drove revenue. You can plug it into your Klaviyo, Shopify, Northbeam, your whole Google Drive. It reads all of it. So instead of asking what worked last quarter, anyone on your team can ask for 10 evergreen concepts worth testing before Q4 and get them back within minutes. We use it. HexClad uses it. Jones Road uses it. It's the best AI brain for e-com brands on the planet. If you don't use it, you're gonna fall behind. Go to runneth.com and book a strategy session. Mention Marketing Operator sent you and you'll get $1,000 in free credits. I mean, to be clear, we're both speaking in a very unofficial capacity, right? There's some speculation going on around, uh, uh, around what Postscript's gonna be doing. We did get some good information this week. Um, I will say, I think there are going to be a number, a handful of platforms positioned to unify customer data or just like data generally and get value from that. Sayers Analytics being a great one. I've talked about it a number of times on the pod where it's like just brands investing in their data warehouse to extract value from that. I think we're in the relatively early innings of Postscript doing it. They seem to have more of a channel focus where it's like, hey, let's start with these unified profiles and let's let's power great one-to-one messaging across email and SMS and RCS. And in the future it's WhatsApp and whatever else, and they'll integrate with third parties potentially like a Postpilot. That seems to be more of their focus, but I could also see on a long enough timeframe, these platforms converging and maybe Postscript does have a great analytics tool, or at the very least, some sort of MCP that you can tap into and begin sort of querying the data more granularly. The big takeaway And like we've talked about this in many different instances is I think a lot of DTC brands, their data has been extremely fragmented. If you look at the, this is my big qualm with like retention as like a practice in our industry is that Klaviyo, Postscript, you know, you were using Amped Popups for a while. You have Revo as your customer accounts. They're all very disparate and unifying that data is extremely difficult and cumbersome. And this just felt like an example of maybe us moving towards a world where that gets a little bit more aggregated and therefore we can be a little bit more strategic about how we're speaking to people across channels.

Yep. And I think that's why people, like, that's why we use a CDP today, because we can query it and cohort it based on, you know, like orders from a certain channel or someone that has had a touchpoint with direct mail. Like it does create a sense of connection between all these different marketing touchpoints that a brand has. And I think that's why a CDP is still very valuable. So, but yeah, and I think like, I don't, the other thing I love that Postscript's doing, and they've always done this and they continue to lean in, is they're always validating on a holdout basis, looking at incremental revenue, incremental return on ad spend. And, you know, we're using Shopper now, testing it in a lot of our lifecycle marketing and SMS. And we're running holdouts against all of it, you know, Shopper versus like the static messages that we were going to send. And then we're measuring the lift and we're being very systematic about it to make sure that when we are rolling out Shopper, it's incremental in every individual instance that we're rolling it out. And now we're moving into like, I think we're in the campaigns beta. So we're starting to do some more testing there. But, you know, I always appreciate these SaaS companies that are, You know, incrementality first, even if they're not like a House, you know, Postpilot's another, or yeah, Postpilot's another great example of a, like, retention lifecycle-based company that also really leans into user-level holdout tests, which I really appreciate.

Well, that's the, you're describing the incrementality alliance, the unofficial alliance that's forming between Postscript, House, Postpilot we mentioned, maybe we put Intelligems in that group. Everybody thinking about incrementality, making our lives a little bit easier.

Yep.

So, um, on this point, so we talked about, uh, this platform shift that I'm super excited about. This idea of unified profiles, I think is good. You already touched on this a little bit, but Postscript's having, they're in a very interesting position also. What was really cool is I've been hearing this message for 3 years and it's sort of really coming to fruition now that them being with SMS, they are like, their core competency is a text-based channel, which is from an AI perspective, like gonna benefit the most, right? Like, like AI knows exactly how to deal with natural language. It is, that is its bread and butter. Um, so they wanna be having all of these, uh, one-to-one conversations, um, inferring these attributes and details about a customer, saving that down to this unified profile. Um, which is what you were describing, uh, a, a, as something that you were excited about. These like memories where they had an example of a woman who, um, was shopping and her like daughter-in-law was celiac. So you, that's a very important memory. And if I'm gonna sell her food in the future, like that's, that's something that I should really consider. And that is something that is like harvested by this one-to-one conversation saved onto the profile. Super, super interesting. Um, I'm, I'm really curious. You mentioned A/B testing some of the campaigns and flows now. I think this is also a really interesting conceptual shift in retention. Maybe you could just describe what those look like. Everybody listening's not gonna be necessarily actively testing Shopper. So what's the difference between using Shopper within a flow versus, um, what we traditionally think of as flows?

Yeah. I mean, traditionally it was just like static, static flows, right? Like you have a, you have some sort of lifecycle marketing setup that's based on a trigger. And when someone hits that trigger, they go and they get pushed into a, a series of flows. It could be pre-purchase, abandoned cart. It could be post-purchase, uh, like a, like a cross-sell upsell. So we are just basically testing, pushing people into those static flows versus pushing them into Shopper where they're getting dynamic living, breathing messages that are two-way back and forth. And then we're measuring the lift between the two cohorts. And then when Shopper wins, we're pushing all that traffic into Shopper versus the static flows. And, you know, that's what I'm really excited about. I think where my head went when I started seeing all the stuff that they're building out is brands are going to start to get really, really, really incentivized to get as much memory and context on each individual person. that comes into their brand's world as possible. So like where I start to think is, well, what if instead of putting someone into a, what we always call like our general cross-sell flow, which is like the first place that anyone that purchases goes in terms of like, you know, product marketing, you know, we obviously have a lot of like transactional use and care stuff, but like in terms of product focus, product pushes, we're putting people into these general cross-sell flows to start to build more awareness around all of our categories after they've bought our hero products. Where I could see this going, and I think what brands are gonna be incentivized to do, is to try to have as many two-way conversations with each individual as possible, as soon as they possibly can, because that's where you're really extracting a lot of the memories and the context on each person. So maybe now instead of doing the static, you know, cross-sell upsell, like category education flow that we have, which is like a 6-email flow, it's very robust. It really gives a ton of awareness of everything that HexCloud offers. I could see as saying, hey, you know, right after someone purchases or right after their product's delivered, let's actually get them into a 2-way messaging automation with Shopper so we can start to extract information from that person by trying to understand like, hey, what are you going to be most interested in next and why? And that's where I can start to be more thoughtful about putting someone into like a knives flow versus like specialty cookware flow. So Yeah, I, that's where I could see our program going is we're just trying to get people into these. And I'm not saying we'll totally sunset static lifecycle because we have very, especially in email, right? Like we have very thoughtfully messaged and designed flows that really explain these categories in a way that I just think sometimes SMS can never do simply because the medium doesn't lend itself as well to like longer form or like designed content. But I could see us like adding steps upstream to get those conversations going so we can start to like, Extract more memories earlier on, and then again, not waterfall people, but actually put them into the right flow at the right time based on the conversations that we're having and the info that, that we're being delivered through this, this two-way messaging stream.

Totally. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, this is all Shopper today and like this AI agent that is, that is having conversations on your behalf with customers is all a descendant of their SMS sales. tool from like 4 years ago, 5 years ago, where they had a—

We love that tool, by the way. We did a lot of testing into that as well, but now we're replacing it with Shopper.

[Sponsor Content] Well, totally. The, uh, the original SMS sales tool from Postscript was a group of people that they'd hired in a, in like a big corporate office building in Phoenix, Arizona to manually have conversations with, with customers over time. And then they, and then ChatGPT-2 came out or whatever, and they were like, oh, hey, there's a path to actually automating this all the way. And having an agent do this on your behalf. So one way to think about this is just a literal sales agent speaking to customers, identifying what information is relevant, and then naturally cross-selling them into other products and categories. And what's just so crazy about that is thinking about, you know, if you think about some of these like Klaviyo profiles and the amount of like splitting, I don't know the proper terminology, but like if you look at some of these flows within Klaviyo, someone's manually going through and building all this logic in order to get like this, hyper-personalized email so that you can get 5% of your list down to this like very specific message. There's a scenario where all of that goes away and an agent is just discussing with someone, figuring that information out for themselves, inferring where they should use that information and where to send you next. And then your flow has no logic in it. It's just a sort of like nebulous box and the agent's guiding them towards their like next best product. And the beauty of it is you can literally just A/B test that. So it's like you can, you can trust whether it's good or not. Um, but that is a very, Very weird, interesting future, I would say. Every growth team defaults to the same metric, acquisition. Not because it's the best answer, but because retention data is the one number nobody trusts enough to act on. So budgets keep going to new customers while your highest LTV customers sit unmeasured. That is the gap that Serra's IQ closes. Brands like Momentus went from days to minutes at month end. Faridy uncovered $1.1 million hiding in their customer data. Posh Peanut turned one customer segment into a 6x return, and Ridge and HexClad run on the same foundation. Sarah's IQ is the only tool in the industry that certifies data accuracy before an answer ever reaches you. Not certain? It says so. Which means when you finally look at true retention and LTV, you're not guessing. You're deciding with numbers you can trust. Starting at $19.99 a month, live in a matter of days. If I had to start over and scale to 9 figures today, Sarah's IQ would be a non-negotiable, and at this price, it's a steal. Go to sarasanalytics.com. That's Sarah's, S-A-R-A-S analytics.com and book your walkthrough now.

Yeah, the segmentation is now like someone was funneled into like high intent towards, you know, category and like the way that they get in there is from all these different data sources. You know, I think it's, I want to, I want to mention like the old way we used to do this because it's so different now compared to what like post-trips building towards. So our old way used to basically be, we would, before we just waterfalled everyone through all these, we would basically say, if someone's bought and they've done any of these actions on our website, which was mainly like, have they visited one of the knives product pages or collection pages, or have they done anything on our website that has shown intent towards this category? We're going to put them in that product category's cross-sell upsell flow versus a different one. What we found is that the segments were just simply too small. Like we were, we were being way too segmented and we weren't getting enough volume through those cross-sell flows. And that's when we moved back to just more like, hey, let's remove the web filters and let's just like do this kind of waterfall, waterfall approach. So you compare that, which was like only web data now to, uh, shopper and like what the memories and the context that Postscript's using. And it's like, Sure, the web data, but it's the post-purchase survey data, it's the two-way conversation data, it's the reviews data. Like I'm probably only hitting on half of the different data sources that they mentioned this week in terms of what they can use to pull in to provide context. So it's giving brands that power again to create just segments that are high intent towards the right thing. And it's just been very hard. I mean, HexClad's like, we have huge volume and even us just based on the web analytics filtering, The segments weren't large enough. So I don't think most brands probably were able to create the large enough segments only off of web data. So it's cool that Postscript's giving people the opportunity to like bring in more data sources, more context, and do the hyper-personalized marketing that we've all been trying to do for years with, I think, varying levels of success. Okay.

A little bit of a tangent here. And then I want to ask if the information we got this week or anything else how you're thinking about retention going to 2027. Um, have you ever been a member of Equinox, the gym?

Uh, I have not. I'm familiar with it but have not been a member. But, and I've been on like guest passes, of course.

Yeah. Um, Equinox, you know, coastal elite sort of gym. It's like $300 a month. The equipment's basically the equivalent of like a 24 Hour Fitness, but they have extremely nice bathrooms and you get like, you get like free Malin+ Goetz like moisturizer in the bathroom. That's like, that's the pitch for for those unfamiliar. But there, I'd call it retention marketing. They might call it sales, they might call it customer service. I don't quite know. It is extremely well done. It's obviously productized. It's obviously automated. It's largely done via plain text. And they're like, you know, when you're onboarding, they're asking you for questions, they're pushing you into new— for new classes, they're telling you about the gym, you can respond right there and a real person will reply back to you. But it is a, extremely white glove experience for something that is like technically not that expensive. $200 a month is like not a lot. I think it's extremely well done. I've always felt D2C retention looks more like that in the future. And it feels like Shopper is like of that same ilk, albeit completely automated and like way more AI native. Um, but just this idea of like offering a truly white glove one-to-one experience, um, which I think is very, very cool.

And it didn't feel You know, some of these like automated bots, whether they're AI or not, they feel it. And there's a level of like impersonalization that I just think is generally not a good like human to brand touchpoint. You know, when we were reading these messages from Shopper, they felt very, I don't know, they didn't feel very body or AI-y, you know, they, they kind of felt personal and, um, it just felt different than how some of these these messages from non-humans have felt in the past. So I think, I thought that was very cool. Has Ridge done, I wanted to like ask you the same question you asked me, like what, what has Ridge been doing with Shopper, if anything? And like, how have you guys been thinking about like the implementation roadmap of, of Shopper at Ridge?

I heard it was a Meet from Rich Panel. Him and I had a conversation a couple months ago and I loved this sort of framing, but he talked about the difference between code and intelligence. And code in this case would be like, what, what are the, what are the aspects of this strategy that are codified? Static SMS flows would just be an example of code. These are, this is the text, this is how we send it. We do it in this order every couple days. Intelligence on the other side would be purely shopper. Like we are just, we are having a conversation with you. We are inferring information. We are developing the strategy as we go there, given the context that we have. I do think there's this interesting sort of discussion to be had around like what percentage of your program should be code versus intelligence. Some of that comes down to maybe your objectives as a brand. Maybe you want very certain messages sent. We have brand slogans, we have founder stories that like, maybe I don't want an AI regurgitating in any way. That would be an example of something that I would just prefer to have codified. We have other ones where I'm fine with it being a more freeform inferred experience using AI. So I say all that because what we've tested, so, oh, there's also a cost component to it is the point that I was gonna make. Anything AI, especially right now, is like gonna come with some additional cost. So we just wanna be thoughtful of like the way that we're implementing it. Um, where we've tested Shopper so far, which I liked conceptually, but I can also see becoming obsolete really, really quickly, is a coded, um, flow. Like, hey, we know what messages we wanna send them. 1, 2, 3. The 4th message was an open prompt that's like, what else do you need from us? Like, how can we help? And that, That then triggers a completely intelligence-based experience for the subscribers. And we found lift with that. And that makes sense. It makes a lot of sense to me actually, that this approach of, um, we know they just want the, you know, whatever it is, 10% discount in the first message. We know that they just wanna hear the 99 reviews in the second one. Let's like just get the really important stuff out of the way as cost-effectively as possible and then push them into an intelligence-based experience. So it become extremely one-to-one, extremely bespoke. And that was, like I said, we found a lift on that. That's good. So that's what we've got in place right now.

So it's a yes and approach, not a, not an all static or all shopper intelligence. It's like, let's, let's merge the two in a thoughtful way here.

This would be an example of a hybrid approach. Like I said, that's where we started. Like I see more and more examples in data where I'm like, this could, this might just be super dumb. We should just completely embrace AI that this sort of hybrid approach will be extremely obsolete in 6 months. So we're dealing with that now and we're, we're currently testing a full shopper-based flow where just like basically from the jump you're receiving intelligence-based messages. Um, so that's where we're at now. But what's interesting and what's great, and actually Adam, the, one of the co-founders of Postscript, stressed this a lot, is that the new platform, their number one priority is flexibility. That like they want to be giving brands the ability to pick and choose where they want to utilize certain features. Um, So having that flexibility is super key. We have it now and we can just be, um, you know, experimental in the different touchpoints that we can use Shopper and AI messages for.

[Sponsor Content] All right. This ad is technically a job posting for Neon Pixel, but, but stay with me here. Neon Pixel is hiring performance marketers, people who actually get incrementality. They understand holdouts, they understand triangulation. And really that's the entire pitch because when you sign with Neon Pixel, these are the marketers that are running your CTV strategy. We've been with NeonPixel at HexClad for 3 years now, and they really do work like an extension of our team. Live on real living room TV in days, helping with creative strategy, same-day end card swaps, and measurement read in our stack, not just some black box dashboard that we don't really understand or have insights into. And that's ultimately what a managed service looks like when it's staffed by real operators and real marketers. So whether you want to work on the sharpest CTV accounts in DTC, or you want that team running yours, go to neonpixel.co/careers to apply. A few other, I think, key features that are really awesome. One is the merging of profiles. You know, one thing that's, that kind of happens right now in Klaviyo is you'll have the same person and they might have, you know, 5 different profiles because they have signed up with different emails or, you know, and maybe they're, they could be doing that for a variety of reasons. Maybe it's just like on accident, maybe they're trying to game you and get your discount code 3 different times. So you often end up in Klaviyo, you might, if you have a million profiles, you know, only 850,000 of those might be actual unique profiles. And obviously Klaviyo charges on a profile volume basis. So that's one thing that Postscript is building is like what I'm calling the deduplication of profiles. And I was talking to Adam, he's like, yeah, I would bet like a brand of HexClad size, like you might be able to reduce your profile count by like 5 to 15%, which is huge. I mean, that has huge implications on cost savings. on our ESP. So I thought that was cool. I thought their Figma integration was really badass. Like the ability to just take your designs from Figma and port them right into your Postscript account was like lickety-split, very easy. And then the third thing that I thought was super cool was the ability to like take your lifecycle marketing like as is. And when I say as is, I mean with all the logic set up and then all the emails and all the logic you got on the emails and just like port it right over. You do not need to rebuild. Like if you have a 15-email welcome flow with all this different logic and branching and it's really complicated and that probably took many, many hours and iterations to build, you don't have to go and like have your OG account on one side of your screen and your new one and like build it bit for bit. You can actually just like port it over really easily and not have to rebuild all the logic in the, in really anything. So That was also very cool. I think they're making, they're definitely thinking about how do we make migration as easy as possible? And, you know, there's all this, like, you know, you hear about quote unquote tech debt and they're trying to make it so there is no tech debt when you want to try to switch over to Postscript, which is pretty cool.

With the conversations that you've had this week, does it change your approach to any sort of retention tactics, like going into Q4 or 2027?

I want to get these 2-way conversations happening earlier in our lifecycle marketing journey, because I think the earlier we can start those, The better we can segment people because we have more context and more memory on people. I think that's the key thing here. And I, you know, we're finding wins with Shopper in a lot of our lifecycle marketing, which is great, but how do we just get more context from more people earlier on? I think it's just starting those, like pushing people into those two-way conversations earlier in their journey. Like right after someone, like our hero set's the 12-piece set, right? And it always has been for a very long time. So like, Right when someone buys that 12-piece set, or maybe shortly after, I should probably be trying to get a 2-way conversation going to understand why they bought it, what they're interested in next, if their next order is more relevant for like them as a personal user or a gift. Like the sooner I can get those conversations going, the more context and memories I have on these people, and then I can be more thoughtful and more segmented and more personalized in the messages that we push them into, whether that's shopper or whether that's static or whether that's a combination of the two. So I think that's the big one that I'm like gonna dig deep in with our retention team is like, what is the strategies to do that? And I think there's probably a variety of ways we can get that going, but I'm just so excited about that because I think the more memories and context you unlock about an individual earlier on in their journey, just the more opportunity you have to give them hyper-personalized messaging. Whereas if you wait too long, you know, now it's like, Oh, it's 9, 12 months in and now we're having a conversation. Well, it's like that previous 9 months, you probably missed an opportunity to like send them a personalized message. So that's the big one that's in my head right now. And then also like, I just think the ability to do more cross-selling on all of our categories in SMS specifically, which obviously I know there's like RCS, which is great, but still probably less ability to be as rich in how you explain a product versus email. Really excited about the ability just to like continue to promote our other product categories through shopper messages that aren't reliant on like highly designed experiences like email is.

Where are you guys at with that?

We're not using it that much. Uh, I think we could probably be using it more, but it's not a huge part of our SMS strategy right now.

Okay. So, so we are in the midst of an A/B test for rolling out RCS. So we've taken Um, like 30% of our list, we've just moved them to RCS. Uh, and RCS rich content send just gives us way more functionality. The experience on iOS is way different. It's more branded. Um, we have the ability to do more rich, um, like content cards and carousels, all sorts of cool functionality happening within RCS. I forget, this was months ago. I got off a call and just realized RCS, I think, is totally the future. It's another one where Everything's more expensive about it, which is total pain in the ass. Um, the carriers are earning like almost MMS-like fees. Actually, I shouldn't, I shouldn't speak out of turn. I don't know if that's quite true. Both, both text-based messages and anything with functionality are more expensive than they would be in an SMS experience, but you get all these additional benefits of it being a different experience, the added functionality, et cetera, et cetera. So we're testing that now. And I also think we have some great results. I think there's like an early mover advantage here where if you are one of the first, I'm only getting, I'm only getting RCS messages from one other brand right now. And I think being one of those brands just has outsized impact in the short term. I think eventually everybody will, will, um, move to RCS and this sort of novelty will wear off and you won't get the benefits from it. But we're running a current A/B test and we're seeing a 46% lift in revenue per message being on RCS.

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What's the main difference between the normal SMS you're sending versus the RCS message? Like, is it, you said it's more branded. Are you using like media in it? Like, what is the, what's the actual creative difference?

Early on, we're like trying to, limit the amount of variables as well. So it's not as if we rebuilt our flows completely to utilize all the like images and carousels and functionality. Um, it's really just this like, uh, so you benefit a little bit from that. Like just the links are better, they're cleaner, they're better CTAs technically. Um, but really it's just like dedicated, um, experience where we have the branded logo up top. They already know what our brand name is, is saved at the top instead of it just being a number in case they hadn't saved our shortcode. So it's really mostly just those. Um, we're seeing an increase in clicks per message. That's up 25%. So we're seeing a 25% increase in clicks per message. That's click-through rate. And then, uh, an increase in conversion rate as well. So just overall, much stronger experience. I am of the mind that RCS is inevitable, and I think there's short-term advantages to moving there now. So something to think about.

Interesting. What are some of the big things that, you know, we've, we are what, 2 or 2, 3 days out now from the, from the event. So we've both had, have had time to think about things like turning the same question you asked me to you. Like, what are, what are some of the big things that you, like, where are you going to be moving first based on all the new information that we just got from Postscript? Like I said, we're going to be trying to probably try to do more 2-way messaging with shopper early on in the flow or in the, in the consumer journey to extract more context and memories. to inform better segmentation and better, more personalized messages? Like what's, what are you guys thinking about at Ridge?

Yeah, so just like generally speaking, RCS is a big focus of ours. I, I'd like to verify that that's the right approach and ramp up going into Q4. I think we'll continue down the same path that we've been on as far as testing into Shopper. That seems like a no-brainer. I think it'll only get better over time. One recent example that's related to the unified profiles of, of Postscript 2.0 is We are, and I don't know if you guys have experience doing this or if you have any advice for me, but we'd like to A/B test our customer offer that we run for Q4. So during Q4, basically the whole site gets marked down for customers. They get, for the sake of simplicity, they get an additional 10% off during this period. We highlight that in dynamic elements across email. We talk about it in SMS. They log onto the site. If they're logged in, Revo will personalize the top banner. they can see some additional little complimentary messaging reminding them that they're getting an additional 10% off. It's a really great unified experience that is exclusive to existing customers. We'd like to run a holdout on that. That's super hard right now. Like, you have to, it's super hard, it's what I said earlier, it's cumbersome. It's like, okay, we've gotta find some sort of source of truth and say, okay, maybe we're gonna tag all these customers in Shopify so that we can build so that we can properly hold out the segments across Klaviyo, Postscript, and Revo. It's just a little bit odd to do. So again, one of my takeaways is like, I love the idea of having a platform and a tool available to us that has unified profiles so that we have a better single source of truth for like where we want to think about our customers. And when we think about activating them in different ways, in this case with the customer offer, we could sort of build it from a place that's first unified instead of what we're doing right now. We're gonna try to like, stitch it all together to make sure that we can get a 10% holdout for a couple months. And that's just a little bit silly. So, um, my goal for 2027, more thorough implementation of things like customer offers. Postscript 2.0 should help that with unified profiles because we ideally have a little bit better of a, of a source of truth. Whether that's true or not, or how quickly that becomes true is still TBD, but like directionally, it very much aligns with how I'd like to be thinking about some of our retention practices.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

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You were talking about some success you guys have been having on TikTok Shop. I had a tweet recently, so I'd love to jam on like how we're reconfiguring our community of creators, but why don't you give us a quick rundown of how TikTok's working for xCloud over the last couple months?

Yeah, you know, we've been ramping up aggressively. I think, you know, the past like, call it 9 months, really since like halfway through last year was really about setting up the foundations the right way. Like we made sure our, our TikTok Shop as a marketplace was set up in the right way with all the right products and all the right merchandising. We started getting products in hands of affiliates and getting them to sell. We've done like probably 50 or so like TikTok Live shops or shopping experiences in that time period as well. And it's worked. Like we've been able to successfully get a ton of content coming, a bunch of GMV max, you know, we're like a 7-figure brand on TikTok Shop now. So now we're moving into this like, all right, great. The foundations are there. Let's scale it. So we've onboarded with T-Bar, which I think we've talked about a few times now. And so the Discord's now in place. So we're pulling a lot of people into our Discord, getting people really excited. We have that one-to-one communication with them now. We are recruiting a ton of affiliates now through this competition that is coming. And as a result of it, our GMV max, like organic revenue is, or sorry, just GMV TikTok Shop revenue from affiliates is growing like gangbusters right now. We're getting way higher volume of content, which is then actually allowing us to spend as much as we ever had on GMV Max as well at as good of efficiency as we've ever had. So we're really scaling up the entire channel as a result of just sourcing a lot more organic TikTok Shop affiliate content. We're also now, I think we just found like our number one performing TikTok Shop affiliate creator recently, which was not a result of of the gamification competition that we're doing. But like we've had our best unlock in Meta with a TikTok Shop Affiliates content. This like single creator really works head and shoulders above everyone else. And now we're getting ready to pull all the content. I think we've gotten like 100 pieces of content now through the competition that we're running, which we get rights to, right? So now we're getting all that downloaded to put into a Google Sheet so we can start to get that live in the ad account as well. So this just like, this entire ecosystem is really starting to to pick up. And the piece I want to pause on is like our level of spend in GMV Max ads. Like, again, we've never— we're scaling this aggressively right now. You know, we'll spend well into the 6 figures on paid ads behind GMV Max this month, more than we ever have. And it really all comes down to like the volume of content that we are getting that's allowing us to put spend behind it. And it's just great to see that like, I think no matter where you're at in an early ad account, it's always about volume of creative to like really get it working and getting it scaled. And it's different for us in Meta now, but like TikTok Shop, GMV Max ads are probably where Meta was for us in like 2021. And it was like volume of content is what allowed us to scale those channels then. And volume of content is what's allowing us to scale this GMV Max channel now. So it's exciting to see that and just how the volume, you know, this huge flywheel happening in in TikTok Shop for HexCloud right now. It's really exciting.

Um, the products that you're promoting via GMV Max, how are they different from what you typically promote on something like Meta?

It's very different. Um, generally speaking, on Meta, we're, we're promoting sets very aggressively, and that's what really works for us on Meta. Our TikTok Shop is all about individual products. Now, the caveat here is like our 6-piece pan set still does really well on, in TikTok Shop, and that also does well in Meta. I think that's probably the biggest area of overlap, but it's a lot of individual product, individual frying pans. Our high-sided pans work really well, um, in TikTok Shop. Those are like our deep sauté pans, our like griddles and woks all do really well. So it's a lot of our core cookware still, but it's the individual products, which are still like relatively expensive in the context of TikTok Shop. I mean, those are still like $150 to $200 products, but it's a lot of those that we're getting the best performance out of versus our like 12-piece set that really drives our business on Shopify. So certainly a distinction in, in like the products that people are going for.

Would you say, is this, um, I know Amazon also has more single pan options, but is this the most you've spent promoting single, single items before? I mean, HexClad has historically been like almost exclusively like 6 and 12-piece bundles.

Yeah. And even with Amazon, I would say that like, a lot of that performance on those individuals is simply halo from the marketing that we're doing on .com, which again is promoting sets. So like we're promoting a 12-piece set and then someone that sees that Meta ad, they're like, ah, I wanna buy, I wanna go buy on Amazon 'cause I'm a Prime member. And then they're picking up one pan. So yes, this is, you know, by far the most we've ever like specifically promoted in our marketing, these individual products, without a doubt.

You're getting all these creators, producing content around single pan items, how relevant is that actually gonna be to your Meta ad account? Are you gonna begin promoting single pans on Meta or are you gonna use them to try to drive set sales?

Yeah, we are. We're actually excited about the opportunity to promote some of these individual products on Meta because we think that there are some like audience unlocks by doing so. Like the example, and this has changed, right? Like my thinking about this has changed a lot. One of our best new funnels we've launched this year is our, egg pan and rice pot funnel. And those are individual product funnels. Now we see that the AOV on those ads are actually in the like $250 to $300 range. And those products cost like $130 each. So a lot of people are coming in and buying both of them. A lot of people are buying, you know, one of them plus other products. So people are seeing this individual product push and then they're coming in and they're building much larger carts than just that individual product. But that's been one of our best, most efficient, most scalable new funnels this year. So I'm actually excited Because I think that we're going to be able to reach new audiences by promoting, let's say, a deep sauté pan that we're probably not hitting right now because we're not promoting it. And I also think that much like the Japanese products, people are going to see that deep sauté pan, they're going to come to site. And I think the AOV is going to ultimately be much higher than just the price of that deep sauté pan. So I think it's, there's a lot of like newness, um, in sense of like new products being promoted in our ad account. that I think there's a lot of audience unlocked to be had. So I'm actually excited to get a lot of this like wok, griddle, high-sided pan, you know, double burner griddle content and see how it performs in Meta.

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Yeah.

For Ridge, like our hero product on TikTok Shop is a $29 tracker card. Our most popular ads like don't feature a Ridge wallet at all. It's like a tracker card in a standard leather wallet. And that's put us in the headspace of, yeah, of is there, is there you know, is there the opportunity to build sort of an acquisition funnel around this product in a way that we've, we never have in the past and started with like identifying that it was an opportunity on TikTok. So I generally really liked this idea. I've heard it from a number of other brands also. I think the absolute best brands are then leaning into that further and actually developing products for, you know, the visual nature or the price point that's really going to work on TikTok Shop. And like, that forcing function basically of like, hey, we're gonna make you rethink what products are able to be promoted on this platform. And that's gonna sort of shift your strategy here as well as maybe elsewhere is really, really impactful.

Can I ask you a question about that?

Yeah.

'Cause so you said your tracker card, which is like a $30 product, is your hero product on TikTok Shop. But I also know that we've talked about how a large percent of your Meta budget is going against creatives that have come from TikTok Shop affiliates. So what's, what does that look like in Meta then? Like, is it that, that hero product or is it still the wallet ads that are the TikTok Shop content that's performing and scaling in Meta?

Yeah. So, uh, I'll break it down for you because this is like a nice segue into my tweet. Um, 30% of it was our EDC budget at the time. And that was the vast majority of that was tracker card ad spend. What we haven't, and that's because tracker cards work on TikTok. Okay, great. We get that winning content. We can move it over to Meta. It was, it's been working there really well as well. And like, that's, that's the connection. And that's because—

Are they buying the tracker card? Are they buying the products?

I mean, the tracker card's $29 and the, but there's a 2-pack, there's a 3-pack. The average order value was like $80 or something. I think we looked at it. We use, and I love doing this, the product analytics within Northbeam. I think it was like 60, 65% of total revenue attributed to tracker card ads on Meta came from tracker cards themselves. So people were buying other stuff. We did get to an $80 AOV. That's still 30, 40% less than what we would typically see for the category. And then we can sort of, you know, further corroborate that by, by looking at the product analytics data and saying, okay, yeah, the vast majority of this revenue is actually coming from the tracker card itself. So it's become an independent funnel. That's how we got to that 30% of EDC spend coming from affiliate content. The problem, and the reason I was asking is because the wallets are simply not that good for TikTok Shop. And like, I'm sure we can get better at them and we've got a number of things that we're going to try. Um, but if, if the, if the tip of the spear for our creator program is based around TikTok, that part needs to be working. And for wallets, it currently isn't. Um, and what I mean by that is like, we can In order to get great ad content, a creator needs to be able to produce a piece of content, get it into the GMV Max campaign, and earn dollars doing that. There's some sort of expected value. Anytime they sit down to create a video, there's an expected value they're going to get. If wallets aren't really working on TikTok Shop, then they are not really incentivized to create good wallet content. Or, so that's one piece of it, and I'll actually put that there, is like, if you're not getting volume on TikTok Shop, and the main way that you're incentivizing your affiliate creators is through commission on those sales, then they're simply not incentivized to create content around that product. The second way that we were producing content is around these contests where we would say, hey, create 30, 40, 50, 100 videos. If you hit our GMV criteria and hit this amount of videos, then we'll pay you like $5,000. So there's an expected value there. And if someone's gonna create 60 videos, they'll create some wallet videos at some point. The issue with that though is that again, if it's not quite working and they're not hitting the GMV criteria, there is uncertainty as to whether they will actually get the $5,000 if they produce the 100 videos. Um, so what ends up happening is people don't spend that much time producing great content. They're all of a sudden saying the expected value for me creating this video is not that high. I'm just gonna create 100 videos in an afternoon and a half and Kind of spam this into TikTok. I technically qualify. If one of these happens to land, then I'll make $5,000. But if not, I won't have spent that much time on it. And that's a really sort of misaligned incentive to have. And that is, that stems from the product that they're promoting itself, not quite working on TikTok. So there's a couple paths there. One, we're gonna try to get it to work on TikTok. That would be ideal scenarios if we can find the right positioning and product and price and design. for wallets to work on TikTok. But what we're doing now is we're just gonna more directly align the creator incentives with where we're creating value, which is winning ads on Meta. We wanna say, hey, independent of whether you can actually sell this thing on TikTok and whether it can get delivery in GMV max at the target that we want, if you give us great content and we can spend on it on Meta, we're gonna just pay you a percentage of ad attributable revenue there. And that's the, that's sort of the evolution of the program that I'm excited about for our hero products. For the short term, we're still going to be a far more meta-dependent business than GMV Max. So let me just better connect the dots between ourselves and creators, make sure we're getting the best possible content there and that they're getting rewarded for that. So that's the shift. And that was the sort of soapbox I was on, on X this week as I was explaining the decoupling of creator communities from TikTok Shop.

So basically what you're saying is wallets, wallet ads don't perform as well in TikTok Shop, but they still do perform head and shoulders better than anything else in Meta. And what you're saying is like that there's a disconnect there because if it's not performing in TikTok Shop, then these creators are de-incentivized to make it. And then all of a sudden you're not getting the ads that you want to scale up in Meta. So the question is, well, how do you motivate people to build the winning Meta ads? And you say, hey, pay them a percent of attributable revenue in Meta. And then they'll be more incentivized. Question on that, because I think one of the big values of TikTok Shop is like how streamlined everything is, right? Like a creator can post today and in real time see how much TikTok Shop revenue they're driving, and then they'll know what their commission is. And same with GMV Max, like they can see in real time how much revenue their ads are driving, and then see, you know, know what their kickback is. How are you creating that, like, that sense of real-time feedback, knowing that you're taking the content, you're bringing it into Meta, and they probably don't have as quick of feedback on like, hey, this ad you just made produced $20,000 of revenue in the first 3 days. That's really good for you. Like, what's your, do you have a solve for that and how you're like creating that loop?

Yeah. So that's the new sort of, um, like SaaS providers in this stack, the Tribes, the Refunnels, the Yookas of the world are the ones that are gonna They're connecting the dots here where like literally Tribe has a little widget that shows the daily earnings of a creator. So I can just, I can just produce content. I actually never even need to post it. I'm just sending it to HexClad. You guys are approving it. It's getting auto-uploaded to your Meta account. If it's a great ad, it's getting spent and I'm understanding immediately whether I'm earning dollars or not. And this is just a great example of like, again, TikTok Shop has been synonymous with like, activating creators at scale because they've had the best native tools. But I think over the next 6 months, we just see a bunch of other tools come in and allow brands to align incentives with creators in ways independent of TikTok with all the same real-time feedback, and that there's ultimately gonna be a ton of value to create there.

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Are you finding that these affiliates are already in Tribe? Are you often having to say, hey, go to Tribe, 'cause that's where we're gonna use, we're gonna be in Tribe for Meta and like, you should be there. Or are they not in Tribe? Are you finding that there's like a distinction between the TikTok Shop affiliates and the creators in Tribe?

No, and I think, I also think this is a thing that like rapidly accelerates is creators will realize they can make more. I think creators will understand that revenue might be more dependable if it's based on, you know, Meta ad attributed revenue or Meta ad spend versus TikTok. We signed up for Tribe. They have their own creator discovery. So we immediately had Tribe native creators applying, which was great. And I, it was one of the reasons I wanted to try it was because I just can't help but think those are going to be some of the savviest sort of creative strategists. If you're already exploring, like you're not even posting, you don't even, you don't feel like a creator really in many ways. You're just like producing content and getting it right into some other brand's ad account. Like, I just think you're going to more often than not be a stronger creator than the like cold outreach we're doing on TikTok. As soon as we signed up, we had people in our Discord that we'd only ever worked with via TikTok saying, oh, Ridge is on Tribe now. That's awesome. I'm gonna sign up. So I think we're gonna see like this very large and growing community of affiliates, like almost demand it or at least be excited about it. And there really won't be, the switching costs are super low. It's super easy to understand at the end of the day, like great content's great content. So I think that the community itself really picks up. The other thing that I'll say, and this is very anecdotal, we have a big creator community. We just rolled out Tribe. The sense that we've gotten is that TikTok affiliates are tired of TikTok. It is, I think it's really hard to drive predictable performance. There are all sorts of platform shifts that are out of their control. As I mentioned, like in my tweet, there's just difficulties from the brand perspective too. Brands needing to do fulfilled by TikTok to be Going live for, you know, 15+ hours per week. It's just the barrier of entry is, seems like it's getting higher and higher and there's more hoops to jump through. I think brands are maybe jaded by it. And I think creators as a byproduct of that are less rewarded. So I think they're all looking for more dependable, you know, incentive-aligned ways to work with brands.

Yeah. You know, historically we haven't used Tribe because we just have like an army of creators that will, that will go to certain people for certain, for certain things, but you're making me rethink if we should get on there based on the conversation. So I'm, it's good. It's a healthy rethinking of whether or not we should be leaning into Tribe a little bit. I do think this does not, you know, you have the question in our doc here, like how does this work alongside product seeding and influencer? I think this just creates more distinct lanes, right? You have your TikTok shop and your Tribe creators creating true ads, and then you still have your like product seeding influencer just creating very organic native content. I think both are very important. I think, I mean, I know we've done this in like the early years at HexClad where we've tried to like kind of square peg, round hole with our product seeding influencer and trying to like make that content work as ads. And I think over time we've realized that we actually don't want like our product seeding creators making ads 'cause we want it to feel super native and authentic and just kind of have that like subconscious awareness of our product being everywhere. And I think there's a ton of value in that. And you don't necessarily want that content to be like super addy and direct response. And then you have this new emergence of TikTok Shop Affiliates and Tribe and these other platforms where you're just going to be able to streamline the actual creation of ads. So I think that if anything, this just like creates more distinct swim lanes between the types of content you're trying to get from these different sources. And in reality, it should make each one more robust, like your organic feeling native content from seeding. should hit much harder and your ads from these like DR creators should also hit much harder, you know, from the product seeding. So I think if anything, they kind of like rise all tides here and they allow you to really lean into like what each is really good for instead of trying to seed someone and overly brief them and they're not really someone that makes ads. It's just like, it doesn't work out that well. So I think these, like, there's these distinct swim lanes in how to use influencers and creators and organic versus paid happening. And I think it's, it's streamlining the process for brands and it's allowing them to connect with the right creator for the right initiative in your business. Like, I don't want someone that's gonna drive 50 million organic impressions for me with super engaging organic content to necessarily go and try to make me an ad, 'cause that's not really their bread and butter. That's not really what we're— that's not really the value they're serving our business. And same for like a TikTok Shop affiliate, right? Like they might only have 5,000 followers. There might not be a ton of value in them doing like super natively product placement style content. I want them to go and make an ad that I can scale in GMV Max and Meta. So I think these like, these distinct swim lanes are emerging. And I think that's a really good thing for both brands and creators, 'cause it not only streamlines the process for brands, it also makes it really easy for creators to understand what the brand wants. And it just makes everyone on the same page right away.

Is there like an ideal type of content that you like to see from your product seeding program? And maybe even not ideal in terms of like, it's the objective, but is there a consistent type of inclusion that a creator will have of HexClad product that you just like?

Top-down shot of pan and then the creators creating whatever meal or whatever style of content is native, is native to them. So like there's this guy on, on Instagram, his name's Kyle Istuk. I think we've seen him a ton and he makes this like super fun, engaging content and he's just using our pans in it. And they're like, what I don't like is when it's very quick shots of our pan and you don't get like a very good look at it. So like Kyle, for example, He'll do very like fast cutting, like meal content and our pan, like when he's doing something on the fry pan, it's always the first thing sitting there, right? It's like the pan is there and then you start to see like ingredients getting plopped down on it and like that's the perfect product seeding activation because our product is front and center and it's ultimately positioned as the tool that's being used to produce this outcome that Kyle's working on. So it's stuff like that that is, you know, the ideal the ideal setup for us because our product design is so, um, recognizable. And that, like, that's all I really want is to get that, like, subconscious, um, exposure.

It makes total sense.

Yeah.

'Cause I was thinking about it, 'cause I'm like, for Ridge, I was like, nah, I want the product seeders, like basically making ads. Um, but there's, I think there's such a difference between our products because HexClad can be a part of cooking content and that's what you want. You just want the ambient presence.

Yeah. Exactly. And yeah, totally. I think our, our product especially really lends itself to that like ambient presence goal. Like if you go look at Kyle Is Tuck, like you'll, you'll see what I'm talking about. It's very, he's not talking about the product at all, but it's like, it's, it's right there. It's literally taking up 3/4 of the frame because he does this like close-up shots of the food and it's perfect.

Yeah. And 18 million followers.

Oh, this guy's a distribution.

Oh no, sorry, sorry. 1.8 million followers.

1.8 mil. Yeah, 1.8 million. But like this guy gets like mil, like 4.8 million, 9.2 million, 2.2 million. These are all, those are all impressions on his last 4 pieces of content. So his distribution is like insane. It's like sometimes orders of magnitude, you know, 5x or 10x what he's, what his follower count is.

You know what we should do though? We should shout out Keegan.

Oh yeah. Shout out Keegan Teagues. Keegan sent me, Connor, and, and Cody, uh, uh, an earmarked package of, of David ice cream. It's been a while since we've talked about David. It was very good. I like the, I like the cookie dough the best. I don't know what your favorite flavor was, but I was—

Yeah.

I just, you know, whenever I want to wake up, I like to eat like 500-calorie breakfast. Not, not too little, not too heavy. So I, I just wake up now and I have like 3 pints of David ice cream and I'm there.

Yeah, dude, I was joking. I was joking. The future's so bright, dude. We got self-driving cars, we got the cars driving us around, we're gonna have ice cream every day. We're just gonna load up a bunch of content into GMV Max and print a bunch of money. I mean, that's ideal scenario.

What a time to be alive. What a time to be alive.