How to Create Marketing Moments: Give People a Reason to Buy All Year

Welcome to the Operators Podcast. Today, we're talking about one of the most important things about running a business. How do you create interest when people aren't necessarily already looking to buy? There's things like Black Friday and holidays that generate obvious demand from customers, but the real alpha is when you can create moments out of thin air that make people compelled to pay attention to your brand and to show up and to buy. Even the biggest companies in the world are engaged in this. Look at Amazon. First, there was Prime Day, then there was multiple Prime Days that spanned 2 or 3 days. Then there were Prime Days over different parts of the year. They've even expanded their Black Friday section to something they call the Turkey 10, which is 10 full days before Thanksgiving to way after Cyber Monday. Everybody's trying to do this. You should be doing this in your business. And fortunately, One of our hosts, Sean Frank, who's with us today along with Matt, is going to share how Ridge has done an absolute masterful job of this. So Sean, I'll just kind of open up the episode with a question. What is it that you do to generate demand during summer? What's the event? And tell us a little bit about the history of it and how it's done this year.

So every year we do an annual sweepstakes. It started in 2021, and I stole the idea from somebody else. I was not the first person to think about giving away a car on the internet, right? Uh, it hearkens back to like the McDonald's Monopoly, like this like annual event people get really excited for. But I was at a Nick Shackleford event called Geek Out in San Diego coming out of COVID and there was a guy who was on stage talking about how this was his whole business model. He would just buy cars, he would run offers to them, and if you bought items, you were entered into like, you It was like buying like lottery tickets basically. Like, and who, if you spent more money, you got more lottery tickets and that was your chance to win this awesome car. And I'm like, okay, cool. That's a great idea. I'm gonna do that. So that summer, me and Connor bought a Gladiator. We put a cool decal on it. We drove out to the desert and we spent probably 12 hours filming us with this Jeep. And it's like, it was probably 50 grand for the car, probably 20 grand for the filming, and it's probably 20 grand for legal stuff. So like, look, We spent $100,000 a day on ads back then. Let's just take one day's worth of ads and gamble if we can drive some sort of results out of this. We got some great footage and hopefully we could show some B-roll of that first year sweeps. I was the stunt driver, so I was jumping this thing, like I was whipping it out in the desert. It was awesome. And then so we went live with it and we've never done this before. So like there was a ton of learnings. This was before anybody else was really doing sweeps. There was like Ronin and this other company that I learned from. There's like, you know, 4 or 5 people out there trying it, um, and it worked good enough that it was worth a second shot. So we've improved that every single year. This is probably our 5th or 6th sweeps that we've done this year, and it's elevated to the point where now we're giving away, you know, Lamborghinis and supercars, and we have Tony Hawk as a spokesperson. And now it ends up being like a multi-million dollar invested campaign, runs for 45 days, just wrapped up, and It is, it turns what is our weakest months of the year, which is July and August, into both of them are now multi-eight-figure months. And, you know, this period was up 100% year over year. So we've been able to like really refine this over time and turn it into like a real jewel of our Q3 campaigns.

So this is becoming like a really meaningful driver of your entire year's financial performance at this point.

Yeah.

Look, we're still very Q4 heavy, like Ridge's 50% of revenue happens in Q4. But it ends up being, you know, we, we try to create as many peaks as possible throughout our business, right? Like if we didn't have sweeps, if we didn't have Father's Day, we also run an anniversary sale in March. If we didn't have those things, revenue would be like pretty low and then there'd just be a massive shoot up in November and December. It would be 80% Q4 heavy and you just can't run a business like that, right? Like cash flows, investing in inventory, keeping people around, paying people. You can't have be so backloaded.

So out of necessity and cash flow, we actually had to Sean, so how do you guys know that sweepstakes in July and August is gonna impact Q4?

There's a couple different ways to do sweepstakes. You know, Jason from HexClad used our model as lead gen for Q4, right? So like they did not tie that much revenue performance to it. They really tried to get people's emails, get them into the brand, warm the funnel. They have a longer consideration cycle than we do. We do some of that, but we're actually looking for like, In the month, revenue generation and demand, right? Our MER went up year over year and revenue was up a bunch year over year, and that's because we did sweeps better. So we are actually trying to convert these people. And some of the, the tactics and tips to do that are bonus periods. So like, you know, typically throughout the entire thing, you spend a dollar, you get 1 point. We have bonus periods where you get 2x points or 10x points, right? And then there's the closeout period where it's 10x points. And we really try to drive those conversions. If these people are interested in sweeps, they care about cars, we try to convert those people in the month. There's for sure spillover. Sweeps ends, we have a 1-day break, then we immediately go into Techtember, which is like our big tech event because the Apple announcements are happening. So like, there's going to be a lot of people who just saw power bank ads and phone case ads and tracker card ads that are now going to go see those because we're— we've pivoted to this, this tech moment. So we will have conversions out of it, but I don't want to get it lost that we are treating this as a In the money, in the moment, getting those dollars event.

This is truly bottom of funnel, clearing the funnel. You've talked about that before, Sean, maybe just for everybody listening, give us a synopsis of how you think about the funnel, the kind of filling the funnel versus clearing the funnel idea.

What I'll say is there's always people who are interested in your brand, considering your brand and purchasing your brand. And that is why you have sales every single day. The modern Meta algorithm is very focused on those bottom 2 rungs of people, people who are considering your brand and people who are purchasing your brand. It's why you can run Meta campaigns at a 3 or 4x ROAS. There is no way to take someone who has never heard about you and get them to purchase and get a 4x ROAS on that experience. You have to build a full funnel approach to get that going. And What Sweeps lets us do is run unique creative that features Tony Hawk and a Lamborghini, and we can put that on ads on TV or on reach campaigns on YouTube and get a bunch of people at the very, very top of funnel event, which is awareness into the brand. And then we can use the month campaign to push those people down and treat it as a funnel clearing event, right? You should have a funnel clearing event at least once a quarter because If you're just building demand all year and have somebody in consideration for 9 months, that's a leaky bucket. You're gonna end up losing half of those people to competitors who run more aggressive sales, or they're just gonna forget about you. Nobody cares about your stuff that much. So I think every 45 to 90 days, run a funnel clearing event. And Sweeps for Us is, is kind of both of those things. It gets people in who aren't considering us and it pushes 'em to the end of the funnel very quickly.

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If you're still running just straight percentage-off discounts, you're stupid. There's other ways to be adding value to your customers. I think, I think there's 10 different type of promos. And don't get me wrong, we do percentage-off discounts all of the time, right? But You know, there's times and place for that and you shouldn't just always go back to that same well and just keep fishing out of it. You should try layering in gift with purchase, you should try layering in, you know, VIP offers, you should try layering in bundling, and then you should try layering in something really fun and crazy like a sweepstakes.

I agree, Sean. I think when you run too many sales, you actually wind up with offer fatigue and that creating a peak moment that is not a sale, like it's not just a discount, Is a better move for like overall brand equity in the year. It's like, it's fine to have these big promotional moments, but then it's like, how do you create another moment, another peak where you just bring in a lot of people? And I'm assuming for you guys, you fill the funnel with sweeps. Like that's a big part of it. It's just, how do I fill funnel for Q4?

Okay.

So Sean, let's say that I, I own a business. I'm convinced that this is something I need to do. I need to generate demand for my brand in periods where it's not very high. How do you start doing this? How would you think about the calendar? If I'm laying out my calendar, where do I target to try and create these events?

Yeah, identify what type of brand you are. So depending on who your audience is, you already have natural built-in peaks, right? If you sell to moms, you have Mother's Day, right? If you sell to kids, you have back to school. Everyone has Q4, but if you're a health brand, you also have New Year, New You. So everyone should have at least 2 peaks and Then you can piggyback off of what the behemoths in the space are doing, right? So Amazon's gonna run Prime Day, what feels like every 3 weeks now there's a new Prime Day sales event or something, right? So there's already—

Prime Year. Prime Year is coming soon.

Can't wait for Prime Year. So there's already going to be Amazon running promos on this. If you're in wholesalers, let's say you're Nordstrom's, Nordstrom's has their VIP sales period. There's already gonna be these events. Plot them out of who your partners are and what they're currently running, and then look to the best in the industry. People have been buying cars every month because they always feel like they're getting a good deal. How do they do that? There's a bunch of promos in the car industry around end of month, around Toyotathon or whatever they're throwing at you, right? Summer savings. So put those on a chart and just use AI to do this, right? Put in, you know, furniture companies do Labor Day, July 4th, Memorial Day. They're always finding ways to throw sales at you. So there's already a natural sales Cadence, and then just look for what's unique to your brand that you can slot in. Steal Ridge Wallet's calendar. What we're doing at Ridge is we're creating as many peaks as possible. Right now we have 4: Q1 anniversary sale, Father's Day in Q2, sweeps in Q3, holiday in Q4. You should be coming with at least 4 peaks to your business, 4 reasons to buy once a quarter that is unique to your brand.

Okay, Sean, so how does this differ from just running a bunch of sales? Like, how is your approach not just putting things on discount more?

Well, you could just put things on discount. I mean, that's what Prime Day is, right? Prime Day is just forcing you to have larger and larger sales, right? Going back to Toyotathon, they're just trying to mark their cars down a little bit to get you to make a purchase. The problem with a brand is we have this unknown aspect called brand value you're trying to protect, right? How do you protect gross margin? How do you protect the perceived value of the things you are creating and not just it get worn down, right? The JCPenney effect, just continue to mark things down 70% until it's worthless. You wanna avoid that. So we try to create fun special events like sweeps that is non-promo focused. Techtember is non-promo focused. So if you can find a non-promo focused event, you can maybe do a special collection just for VIP customers. You could do a gift with purchase. That is, you're giving something of extra value, not Discounting your product to create the value. There's different ways to solve this. You know, you could do special bundles or whatever else. We'll have a playbook of like the 10 different discount types that you guys can download and check out, created with Claude. It's pretty awesome. But there's ways to do this that isn't just straight discount size.

Yeah, I think that's one of the ways that you've incorporated giveaways where it really is a sale, but there's this hook of the giveaway. And I'm guessing that also generates like a ton of SMS, email signups, uh, you're, you're growing your list significantly during this period also.

Yeah, it's great for list growth. Um, you can enter for free via SMS or email. Uh, and then yes, there is some sort of Q4 buildup. Those people are on our email list. We will spam the hell out of them. We will email them forever and ever trying to get them to make a purchase. Uh, but the sweeps is so good for us because we're such a male-dominated brand. We get to put Tony Hawk and cars in ads. Like, there's no other reason for the wallet company to do that. You know what I mean? Like, why would the wallet company have a Lamborghini in the ad? Well, if we give one away, we can kind of justify it. And that, that is just such a good visual hook for a brand. Creative-first thinking is leading to stuff like Sweeps.

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Yeah, every year we're trying to raise the stakes of Sweeps. Like, you know, just like any good reality TV show, every season you got to raise the stakes. What are we doing now to make it more interesting than last year? If we just gave away the Jeep Gladiator every single year, I, I think that it stops being interesting to us. I think it stops being interesting to the audience. So Just like how Amazon Prime Day has now added like 4 dozen days, it's because they have to keep raising the stakes. The easiest way to do that is just more days, right? And for us, you know, every year we have a list of 12 key objectives. One of them on there this year was celebrity in sweeps. So we went into this year knowing we wanted to get a celebrity in sweeps. I, we didn't know who it was going to be. We didn't know how it was going to come together. We worked with a bunch of talent agencies to get proposals. whose timing works, who's in budget, like who is interested in the project. We put all of those out and then we had a debate internally about who was the perfect guy. And as soon as we got the quote from Tony Hawk, we knew he was the one. And I could talk about why Tony Hawk, but I think it's just like multi-generational awareness. So like it hits younger people and older people. And who doesn't think Tony Hawk's the coolest guy ever?

For real. You know, Sean, you've said before that it is a skill, it's a competitive advantage to be able to spend a lot of money on marketing. And I think that really resonates here. My guess is if we went back to '21, I remember when you started doing sweeps, if somebody had told you the amount of money you'd be able to spend on marketing in August, you probably in 2026, you probably wouldn't have even believed them because you've, as you've scaled this thing, it sounds like you've scaled your ability to market during this period tremendously.

Yeah, we'll spend, we spent more money on marketing in August than the whole business did in Q3 2021. You know what I mean? So our marketing budget alone is bigger than what the whole revenue was in that Q3. So yeah, it is the ability to invest in marketing is what drives top of, you know, like top-line sales results in an e-commerce brand. It's just the reality. It's like, you know, marketing is everything.

Absolutely. So maybe walk through, this is year 5 for you. How did you raise the stakes a little bit every year? Can you walk us through the progression? Because obviously it's easy to look at Tony Hawk and a Lamborghini, and that is something that was built over time. You've got a 9-figure brand and you've sequentially built that and scale over 5 years. It's not realistic for, even for me, if I wanted to start doing something like this, not really realistic. People have to start smaller. So what would be your playbook if you were walking in to help a business owner of how to have a 5-year plan to build into something fairly significant?

The first year needs to be an MVP. So like what we often see, people get so excited and then want to do it perfectly the first year. And then, you know, perfect is the enemy of good. They end up like spending way too much money on a campaign that nobody cares about. And other people try to do sweepstakes, and I think they've done this, you know, Monos is a luggage brand. They're like, we're gonna give away a car that must have been like $650,000, a beautifully shot campaign. And then like they didn't want to gamify it. And I'm like, okay, well you just wasted a bunch of money because it's kind of a game. You really have to kind of lean into like the cheesy nature of it. So don't let yourself get caught up in getting all the details perfect. Find the cheapest MVP way to see what it looks like so you can get initial results. For us, that was, we just, We went down to an off-road shop, they had a Gladiator, I bought that exact one. I put a decal that I printed off of like, you know, one of those do-it-yourself websites and I just put it on there and we went there and shot it. You know, less than $100,000 for a whole, you know, campaign including the car. The next year we raised the stakes by getting Hennessy Performance involved, right? So they made a car for us, we did custom wallets with them, great. The year after that it was a better, bigger car with a better, bigger shoot. The year after that we did 2 cars, 2 winners, right? We did 2 cars and one of 'em was a Lambo. And on this year we're doing 2 cars, the Lambo, and actually it goes 3 cars this year. We did 3 cars, the Lambo, and then Tony Hawk. So it's just like always trying to like raise the stakes just a little bit every single time, make it a little more professional. And now by year 5, you have the campaign you wanted to do in year 1. But like, this is where taste and skill need to be matched up. Like everyone has way better taste than they have skill. And like over time we got our skill level to a point where we can actually deliver on the taste that we all have.

I use the analogy all the time that scaling a business is like taking, you know, a Honda Accord and trying to get it to where it can drive 150 miles per hour. Like it's hypothetically possible, but it's going to need all new parts. And so the first thing you might want to do is be like, I'm going to go get an engine that can drive 150 miles per hour. But if you drop that in a car where the tires and the shocks and the brakes and everything else aren't prepared for 150 miles per hour, it's not going to work. And so you have to just kind of piece by piece upgrade the machine where it can go faster and do more. And it sounds like that's what you've done. So Sean, what are, as you mentioned, like you've been standing this up, learning as you go, what are some of the mistakes you've made or learnings you've had over the last 5 years of running a sweepstakes?

The top 3 easy to take away tips for running a sweepstakes for your brand would be number one, don't break the law. You have to understand where It's legal to run these campaigns and what paperwork you have to file and make sure you give the car away. I think too many people are scamming people by not actually giving away the car. If you say you're going to do it, actually deliver on it. Number 2, don't incentivize the wrong behavior. You're giving away a free prize. There's free entries. People are going to try to spam you. You could end up giving away the prize to a robot and not a real customer.

That's bad.

[Sponsor Content] And then number 3, don't invest too much money in this unless You know, it's right for your brand. Like, try to find the cheapest way to get this started. Do a mini campaign, right? Make sure your audience responds to this because we've seen a lot of brands try this, you know, female-focused brands, high-end brands. And like, if it's an audience mismatch, it's just you're going to waste a bunch of money and create a bunch of work for no reason. This took us 5 years to make an awesome multi-eight-figure event out of this, but we've had to invest a lot of time, energy, and effort, and it works for our brand because we know who our audience is. So Those are 3 tips. Run with those and you'll be, you'll be set. Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for D2C and e-commerce brands. Inventory, purchasing, warehousing, financials, all in one system built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet, not one that has more direct 3PL integrations than Fulfill. They integrate with over 400 3PL locations globally. And most of you listening to this right now are either running your own 3PL relationship or you're about to. And the second your 3PL and your ERP aren't talking to each other in real time, you're flying blind. You don't know your true landed costs. You don't know your real margin. You're reconciling spreadsheets at 11:00 PM trying to figure out where $40,000 went. I know because I am on Fulfill. The visibility we have now versus what we had before, it's not a marginal improvement. It's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up for D2C, and it's not some live-coded piece of crap. Believe me, Those exist. Fulfill isn't one of 'em. Go check out Fulfill. Tell 'em Sean sent you.

Sean, high level, how has sweepstakes done this year for Ridge?

Oh, it was fantastic. I mean, July, multi-eight-figure month. August, multi-eight-figure month. Growth averaged across both those months, over 50%. Those are our 2 sweepstakes months and they are delivering outsized returns and outsized results. We're super happy with it.

It's like brands who literally take over like Black Friday, like Cards Against Humanity when they became a potato chip company. Like they just, every year they on Black Friday, they're like, we're gonna sell this year. Like they just always do something that I think is hilarious just to hijack it. So that might be an interesting one for us to go after. Um, I don't know. Those are my 2 ideas.

Okay.

The other thought that I had is, uh, and I don't know if this fits with what we're talking about because it's less scheduled. But, um, using your brand to take advantage of kind of, uh, one-time opportunities that bubble up to run something promotional because of an intersection with the social trend or the news or whatever. Obviously, Sean, you guys have done a great job at this at Ridge. Uh, Matt, do you see any other brands that you really admire how they've done this?

I wanna give people a local example. Uh, so it's not like a big national thing, 'cause I think that there's lots of, like, Sean's playing at a very large, like, national US scale. So I had a friend, years ago, he ran a chain of baby stores, baby retailers, right? I think they had 9 locations. They had a pretty big e-commerce business. He created this day every year. He worked with like local fire departments in every city that he was in, and he created like National Car Seat Safety Day, right? Like we just made it up one day and he'd have the police and the fire departments come out. And he told people, if you're a new parent, We're gonna have all of these pros come by and show you how to install your car seat. Turns out he also sold a shitload of car seats from this event, but it created like a, an entire like movement and moment for his company and it crushed and it just, he just made it up. Like that was a completely fabricated event.

I think it's such a good point that obviously the people listening to this podcast have a variety of different sized businesses. And you don't have to have Tony Hawk to do this really well. You don't have to be giving away a Lamborghini. I mean, another big brand example, Chick-fil-A had a Dress Like a Cow promotion day, and I don't remember if it's you got a free sandwich or free ice cream. The only reason I really remember it so vividly is Brian has one of those inflatable cow costumes that has like these really like obscene udders on it and wore it around the office all day. But it's just a good example of like, Whatever your brand is, there is some surface area to create some uniqueness, to create some draw. And I think memorability is really what the game's all about. Like you said, Sean, we're trying to stay front of mind with people and it's an attention economy. This is another way to capture people's attention.

Yeah, I think Gymshark also does the, I don't know if they do it anymore, but I remember the Gymshark 66 thing where like for the first 66 days of the year, It's like a UGC campaign. I don't know if you guys have done this, Sean, but like the whole idea is document your new habits and then I guess they choose a winner and the winners get like a whole year supply of free Gymshark stuff, right? So it's like, it's kind of meet the moment of new year, new you, but then create like a longer running campaign that serves a purpose. Like they're very creator heavy as a brand. So like you just got a ton of content. I think that's a good example. All the big guys do it. Starbucks does Red Cup Day. Like there's lots of, lots of companies who like create non-promotional moments.

If the thesis of the episode is like, find time on the calendar that you can own in a special way because Q4 is too noisy, right? Father's Day, Mother's Day, there's a lot of competition there. Just find something that your brand can, can go out there and do. The reason why we chose sweeps over a day is I think it's really hard to make a day work. Right? Like, there's like a lot of pressure on that. It's, it's, it's by nature, it's anniversary. So like, you can only do it once a year. Where sweeps, it's like, look, we could buy ourselves 45 or 60 days. If we fuck something up in the beginning, gives us a lot of time to course correct. So that's, that's why we chose this, like more of like a whole time period. Um, I would really like, you know, I, I think of it as, uh, Nordstrom's private sale or whatever, right? Like if you're a credit card shopper at Nordstrom's, you get like this access to this event before everybody else. That's why like we, we chose this for sweeps or, or McDonald's Monopoly. It runs for a month or 2 months or whatever. Uh, but those are all great examples. You should strive to have some time period on the calendar that is yours that you can go out there and defend.

Sean, uh, can you expand on the, that the comment on the day? So you said like it's better to have like a 40-day, 45-day period cuz you've got lots of room to like move and change and like add stuff, take things away. But if you try to hijack just like a key moment in the year, so like a Mother's Day campaign or a Black Friday, like wh— why do you I understand why you do it, but like, are there any brands that do a good job of taking like a Black Friday and turning it into their own?

Dude, it's flashlight versus a supernova. You're never gonna make a big impact on Black Friday. Why is Prime Day in July and how come they just didn't turn Black Friday into Prime Day? It's 'cause even Amazon that has half of all GMV cannot compare to just the cultural significance that we grew up going to places on Black Friday and shopping, right? I don't think you should try to own anything in the back half of the year. It is, it is too difficult.

I actually think it's even hard to repeat that, Sean. Like, even if you could, let's say you like do your Patagonia one year. Remember the Don't Buy This Jacket campaign? Like, crazy viral, dude. They didn't repeat that the next year. Like, you just, it's so hard to like pull off something like that year after year. Well, what you're talking about is like, no, we have a system. There's a playbook, it's repeatable, it's clear space. Like it's just more scalable, I think.

Yeah. And dude, the internet is not designed for, you know, single points in time anymore. It takes multiple days, multiple times along the internet, multiple ads being served for people to even understand what the hell you're talking about. So trying to do it all in one day, I think is just too difficult. Even a week is too hard, right? Like our sweeps is a minimum of 45 days because that gives us time to get ads on TV, it gives us time to launch a bunch of different creative and A/B test what's working, what's not working. So, you know, hats off to those people who've been able to carve out a day on the calendar, right? There's still probably some days left. You know, I don't think anybody's doing Earth Day. I think you probably own that if you were Patagonia or whatever. But if you're a new brand trying this, you got to make it more of a full campaign event for a month.

But you mentioned it, Sean, there's different consideration windows. But it's very rare that you can get a very large number of people to make a decision like right now about a thing, no matter what it is. I mean, one of the things we've even, I think we're in a very impulse category in drinkware, but even with us, we have seen the behavior of putting things in cart and letting them sit there for a week or two before they purchase go up and up and up year after year, that people are almost using like their carts like a bookmark system more and more. And so like the longer your period, also like I can't even count how many times there've been these one-day events where I'm like, oh, I really want to go to that thing, or I really want to do that. And I don't because, you know, like I end up having something that comes up and it's like, oh, I missed that. So when you have a longer period, I think you're obviously going to get more participation. One of the things that I think you guys have seen, Sean, is as your product catalog has grown, that's obviously benefited. uh, sweeps. Can you talk about why having a large product catalog, uh, and having multiple different things you can sell really helps when it comes to filling your calendar with special events?

Yeah, so everything has a unique, uh, peak, right? Like, yes, Q4 is a big peak for everything, but wedding rings have a peak in the summer, luggage has a peak in the summer, wallets have a peak in Q4, right? Um, you know, we talked about Techtember. Tech products have a peak in September and October. The actual demand for phone cases is higher in September than it is in like Black Friday because people are getting their phones now and they need to buy phone cases now. So the more product categories you offer that are different, the more peaks you naturally set yourself up for throughout the year, right? You know, if you're selling roses or chocolate, your peak is not, you know, Q4, your peak is gonna be February. So there's inherent peaks to product categories. The more product categories, just the more surface area of success you're gonna be able to sell things more often throughout the entire year. And if your business is naturally very peaky, right, my Q4, if I did nothing, would be 80% of my revenue. Your goal is to normalize that out. My perfect business is every month is doing, you know, a little bit less than 10% of my revenue because then I can plan, you know, like my life is so much easier. I can plan cash flow, I can plan inventory or whatever, but like we are not You know, uh, subscription Netflix, right? Like our revenue is going to be peaky and it's your job to fight that natural forces of nature.

So one of the things that we've learned in this area is that smart operators have higher margins during their sales than you would expect. And the reason that they're able to achieve this is because they only put a targeted portion of their product portfolio on sale. And it turns out that sales drive a lot of foot traffic, But they don't necessarily always buy the thing that's on sale. Often they buy some of your best stuff that's not on sale. So one of the ways that you can be on discount more often while still keeping your margin profile high is by being really intelligent about what you put on sale, promote the sale, but then also have some of your best stuff at full price. The larger your product catalog, the easier that is to do.

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So Sean, where do you go from here? You're like, Lamborghinis and Tony Hawk. Are we, are we going to the moon? Like what, what is the way to take this to another level?

And he's actually going to give away a seat on a space flight. That's going to happen.

I think, I think we're right now in real time figuring this out.

Yeah. Look, we have a campaign idea that I'm not going to leak. Um, you know, I have to get a lot of buy-in, right? We have a creative director. We have to get celebrities bought in. Like it's a whole thing. One other way we ratcheted it up throughout the year is adding more geographies. So this is the first year we've added Australia and the EU, and there's probably no more geographies for us to add, but there's probably ways for us to do those geographies better, right? So going back to the Sean Frank classic principles, 3 ways to increase revenue. You can sell more products to more people, more places. So you can either expand what you're selling, the target demographic, or the geographical regions you're gonna sell into. And with Sweeps, we've been able to create new products that work well for Sweeps. We've been able to kind of nail this car guy demographic, but are there other people we should be going after? But then we have done a great job going to all these different countries. So Canada, the EU, AU, and the UK, we're available in all those markets. So I think you'll just see us try some different stuff. I think there's probably room for a female-focused Sweeps at some point, right? We could probably give away a wedding or something. So we'll let you guys know how it goes.

Now you mentioned this earlier, Sean, that you've seen some brands that are more female-focused maybe struggle with this. Obviously the male demographic, you know, things like fast cars and giveaways, like that's gonna draw eyeballs, draw attention. Do you think that there are some demographics where this is not gonna be effective or where you would take a different approach if you were going after that demographic?

I think higher-end consumers would not like this. I think they'd be turned off by it or confused by it. Like, Sweeps appeals to people who like McDonald's Monopoly, and I like McDonald's Monopoly, so it appeals to me, right?

I'm not That is me. Yeah. That, guys, I literally, like, I literally, at one point when I went into McDonald's when I was a kid, they had a huge cardboard box because you could go in and you could ask for free pieces and they pulled it out and they took a couple of things out of there. And I literally like thought about how could I steal the box? How could I get all of the pieces in the box? It might be—

I am not this person.

Yeah.

Like some people, you know, kind of scheme about how to rob a bank. I just wanted to steal all the Monopoly pieces.

Yeah, dude, look, I'm, I'm right there with you. Um, so anyway, like, if that— if you're Mike, you like sweeps, right? I think there's a lot of customers who don't. I do think it's really hard with a female demographic because people, people see what we've done, they're like, oh, we should do it for cars. Guys, I hate to break it to you, women don't like cars that much, you know what I mean? Like, uh, so you're gonna have to find a unique angle for it. I think there's a way for us to actually crack it next year and, and maybe we can end up doing it. But you should just know your customer and if you don't know your customer, do a test. Like try to give away something worth $5,000 or $10,000, right? I think that's how Jason and HexClad ended up starting getting into sweeps is like they just did a small one and they've worked their way up to this, this big golden ticket campaign.

So Sean, the biggest pushback you'll get from people is, oh, this is terrible for my brand if I'm constantly running promotions, sweepstakes, sales, this is killing my brand equity. What would you say to those people?

Well, the first one is nobody cares about your brand that much, right? Like, you be honest about what perceived value you really have, right? And I, I talked to a brand, I think he was on, you know, maybe it's a future Help an Operator's episode, but we were talking about, it's a multi-thousand dollar product and he's like, yeah, I can't run discounts or like people are never gonna buy it at full price. And I'm like, people are never gonna buy this again. You know what I mean? Like, You have to, like, if you're a single-time purchase, incentivize the hell outta that first purchase, right? Like, you know, my Eight Sleep, I think Eight Sleep's a great product. I think it's $4,000 or $5,000. They'd sell a hell of a lot more if they just did flash sales all the time at $2,500 or $2,900, right? I think they're shooting themselves in the foot trying to defend this brand equity piece when you really just need to get people over the finish line, right? So my first piece of advice is nobody cares about your brand that much, okay? My second piece of advice is, yeah, look, we— there's always something discounted on ridge.com, right? We have a sales section. Um, if you are a discount-focused shopper, you can go there and make a purchase. To Mike's point, it is less than 15% of our sales are coming from the stuff that's discounted. Most people want what they want, right? They want the coolest color or they want whatever speaks to them, right? And just everyone knows this is, this is who they are in their own life. You go to a website, are you going to buy the shirt that doesn't fit because it's cheaper? You're going to buy the shirt that fits because That's the one you want. That's just the way people are gonna work. Now, there are 20% of consumers who are discount only and have the discount stuff on the website for them, right? For the most part, you can get a lot of sales being full price. And what sweeps does, it's just one of 10 different discounting options, right? Or promo-focused options. Rotate through all 10 of them throughout the year, right? So yes, have your straight percentage off sitewide sales. Those are totally fine. Then do a gift with purchase. We do a lot of those, right? Right now you can get a free USB cable and ridge.com. That's a great gift with purchase. It doesn't matter if you're discount-focused or not. People like getting a nice little free thing. You can do bundling. If you— people want to save, have them buy more, right? 3 power banks at ridge.com. It's like the cheapest way to buy a power bank. And I'm happy because I'm selling 3 of them instead of selling 1. You should do, uh, something like sweeps, like a big, a big special event. You should do VIP offers. You should do— here's a great one. I don't think we do enough of this. Go to Vans During back to school. Right now is a great time. Go to Vans, make a purchase. They're going to give you a gift card that you have to come back in Q4 to spend.

Okay?

It is like that, that future savings, future reward, that like built-in loyalty. Vans has built their entire business off of that. So look, there's way more than just discount promos. You can do a bunch of different stuff, and we'll have a full list available over at 9operators.com.

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I love what you're saying, Sean. I think with the generative AI and the ability to canvas the market, to brainstorm ideas, there's a whole universe of ways that you can make your brand more relevant and compelling to people. And it's up to you to test your way into what works. But I think what you've said that I would really double-click on for everybody listening to this is that you just, you have to test, you have to experiment, you have to iterate. This isn't about making a decision and then going big or charging ahead. It's a lot of micro tests. And then when you find something that works, it's upping the investment in it, upping the investment in it. As you continue to understand it, you scale it. This is what the smart operators are doing. Small experiments done over a lot of different areas and then doubling and tripling down on the things that work. We've used this analogy before, but it's the bullets, then cannonballs. In the 1700s, if you were, it was a period where, you know, naval warfare is a big thing. And when these ships would engage in battle, the problem that they would run into is you had a limited number of cannonballs because they were very heavy. But you gotta have cannonballs to sink the other ship. The problem is these cannons that were shooting the cannonballs weren't even particularly accurate. So how do you make the most of the cannonballs you have? What they would do is they would lay a gun on top of the cannon when it was aimed. It would shoot at the other ship. If they hit the ship, then you load the cannon, then you shoot the cannonball. So bullets and cannonballs is what I'm hearing you say, Sean. And everybody listening to this, There are ways that you could start experimenting next week that will help you to move towards finding a way to implement this in your business.

Can I give a pro tip for people? If you wanna talk about, uh, creating moments, you, every brand should have a playbook repeatable system for hijacking viral cultural moments. So like when something is going off, you guys remember this year, like there was the flag thing on top of the Empire, whatever that building was in New York. Like you, you should have a set of rules and guidelines and then what do we do when something comes up that we wanna hijack so that your marketing team can just say, all right, run the playbook. This is relevant for us.

Go.

Yeah, we do a very bad job at that. So that is a great tip that I should, I should actually take to heart and learn. Um, you know, every day, um, the average man thinks about the Roman Empire. We, we have not done anything with that. And that was such a good meme that we gotta, we gotta lean in on.

That would be so good.

Yeah.

Like Caesar for a day. It's our Caesars for a Day sweepstakes. The question is, what would come with that if you were Caesar for a day? All right, let's talk a little bit about the marketing tactics. I'll transition us to there now. Okay, Sean, I want you to get in the weeds and help us understand the marketing tactics. You're a great marketer. Connor's a great marketer. Ridge is one of the best at demand generation. So obviously part of this is having a compelling event and structure. But tactically, what are some of the things that you've done that have made the actual like media buying, getting eyes on this, getting people to the site really work?

Well, that is the whole point of Tony Hawk, right? It's like you put a celebrity in your ads and like it just gets a higher retention rate, better click-through rate. Like all that stuff just ends up being way better. So that is why we splurged and got Tony Hawk in the ads. That lets you spend new types of creative more places. So partnership ads off of Tony's account on Instagram, Or that creative goes farther on the YouTubes of the world. So that is like the creative way we're solving that. And then the biggest tactic is all the winbacks on the website, right? So like we have, it's gamified to hell, dude. It's like, you know, we have, you know, it's down now so people can't experience it. So like maybe I could find a screen recording, but we have like mystery crates. So like in your cart, you'll get bonus offers, right? So like, you know, if you're going to spend $100 on ridge.com, you get 100 entries. It could be a bonus period so you can get 1,000 entries. And then there's a cart, there's a mystery crate that'll give you another 500 entries, right? So like really gamifying people to go through the checkout flow. And then using Revo, people can log in and see exactly what they have. We can put bonus offers in there, right? So like we've really tried to like make it an account sign-in experience and like an, uh, e-commerce upsell. Like we really go like full-blown. We take all the best lessons from the black hat, gray hat guys and apply it to a white hat website. So I love all the random little conversion optimization stuff we're doing, but better ads that let us run more ad creative and more spend behind it, and then put those on more places and then drive 'em to like a hell optimized website. That is like the beauty of Sweeps.

So Sean, one of my favorite parts of being in text groups with you is that we get Adorable pictures of your son.

It is like Sean baby pics all the time now.

I love it, man. How's the dad thing going, Sean?

I look, I think everyone thinks they have a cute kid, but I just want to point out, I think I have an especially cute kid. You got a cute kid, man.

I'll give you that.

Yeah, I think he's like top tier, top 1% cute kid. I love this little guy, dude. I mean, being a dad's great. It does make you I'm so worried all the time he's going to get hurt. I'm like, oh my God, I have to protect this guy with my life. I'm like, I love him too much. The second thing is I had a bunch of work trips, right? I was in China for a week. I was traveling around Asia for a bit doing a bunch of work stuff. We have this thing coming up in New York. Being away from him sucks. He's only 5 months old, so I'm going to be gone for, call it, a month of his life. He's going to forget who I am, dude.

Well, it's really crazy during that period. When they're 4 or 5 months old, if you're gone for a week, it's like you've literally missed 6% of their life and you'll come back and they're like doing totally new things. And it's a very like, it's like, wait a minute, what the heck? Like he's so much bigger. Like how did, when did he start crawling or what? You know? So I remember that completely from when we had newborns.

I can't wait for Sean. I cannot wait for you to have a toddler. If you think you're worried now, wait until the kid is trying to commit suicide. every minute of every day.

Oh, because that's all they do.

It's like, where's the scissors? I'm gonna put them in my mouth and run into the door. Like, it's just what they do, man.

Okay, just a pause here. If you have, if you have young, uh, toddlers, don't leave scissors laying around.

I guess John's about to experience—

they didn't get the memo about sharp objects, but you don't want to do that. Uh, Matt, what about you? You've, you've been living in Winx world Uh, how are you feeling?

I mean, CPMs are down. I'm, I'm so happy. I saw Cody post.

I actually—

I guess it's all relative, right? What, down? They're down from hundreds of dollars per CPM. So that's great.

I mean, like, yeah, they started off at like, what, $150? They went up to $800 and now we've got them down to like what I would call a reasonable CPM. Uh, I actually thought I sent the screenshot to Cody. I'm like, this is a mistake, right? Like that was my first comment. So I don't know. I'm, uh, I'm feeling optimistic. At the moment, I'm always optimistic. I think I'm irrationally optimistic though.

How many subscribers do we have? Are we sharing that?

We're not yet. No, I got it. We got, we can't, we gotta, can't, we gotta bury the lead, man.

Okay. Stay tuned, guys. You'll see if we're making any money yet.

More than one, less than a million.

You're not making money.

Sorry.

We can say we're not making money right now.

You're, you're telling me that the $800 CPMs aren't first order profitable?

No.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Turns out That math doesn't work.

I'm looking forward to being in New York with you guys. We're going to be doing a lot of in-person recording for our Titan series, which has been great. We've gotten great feedback on that, and I think there's going to be some really tremendous content. We are going to be doing a mastermind in NYC, and then I think we're actually doing a live pod at Beanstalk. So that'll be a lot of fun. If you're listening to this, that may have already happened, but that's what we've got coming up. We're excited about it.

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I think the last week was the first time where the AI stuff went from just extremely exciting to a little bit concerning, maybe a lot concerning. Like, I'm like, okay, I am so AI pilled. And I think for a long time it was like, you're trying to convince people like how good this is and how much you can do and how powerful it is. And this is real. And now I think it's like, okay, but is Terminator really going to happen? Like, is the, you know, is Judgment Day coming? We'll see. But Astra's absolutely amazing. Like, as a side note, I, so I had 4 Codex resets. So when you buy a pro account, you get, I think what they're saying is like a $200 pro account with OpenAI is like $15,000 worth of compute. It's like just this unbelievable deal. And then they've been giving out some free resets and they gave out a bunch of free resets when they released Astra because they had some technical difficulties rolling it out. So I had the equivalent of like 5 pro accounts worth of usage and I used it all in 3 days. So I think I used $75,000 worth of compute over the weekend alone. And It was unbelievable watching what we were able to do with that.

What'd you build, Mark? $75,000, just like a widget?

Yeah, I built, I built, I don't have anything clever to say. I built an operating system for the new companies that we're building that basically approaches the business from the perspective that The role of humans is qualitative decisions, positioning strategy, and that 100% of the execution is machine-driven because I think that's where we're going. And I've literally stood up a piece of software. I don't even know, it probably would've taken a team of engineers a year to build it or multiple years and stood it up in a weekend. And I think that I'm starting the main kind of idea, I would say, Sean, without getting too much in the weeds, Is that we hear a lot about how the AI is getting a lot better because they're starting to build these recursive loops. I think you can build recursive loops in your business where you have a bunch of systems and they talk to each other, and as they talk to each other, they all get smarter and that they do all of the executing. And I think there's a good chance 5 or 10 years from now, the way that we do e-commerce or we do business today is gonna seem so weird and so quaint. It's like, wait, you just like stared at a screen a bunch? Like, here's another thing that I'm doing a ton of. I'm doing a ton. Almost all my coding is done on my phone with Codex on remote via voice.

Yeah.

Astra's voice control and like the dude.

Oh, unbelievable.

Yeah.

This was, this was definitely one of those weeks that things were like, oh, wow.

I mean, there's been lots of those. Yeah.

You kind of got a picture of where it's going, right? Like, it's not even like, yeah, we're kind of there, but like, I mean, last night OpenAI released a proof for this just crazy math problem. But they were showing a comparison of Astra, which is, you know, the flagship frontier model right now, compared to this internal model that destroyed this math proof. And this internal model on low reasoning just destroys Astra at extra high. And it's just a reminder that like whatever they've got behind closed doors right now makes this stuff look like toys. And this stuff is, insanely powerful. So yeah, so you're not gonna be doing any clicking, you know, anything digital that people do in your business, that's gonna be machine-driven in the future. And I just wanna be at the front end of transitioning that.

Can I ask you guys both this question? Like, am I the only one who struggles with the like optimism-doomerism seesaw right now? Like, I get so excited that I'm like, I wanna throw up in my mouth with like everything that's happening.

I have no doom. There's no doom in my entire body, bro. It's all gonna work out. Oh, that's so good. Yeah, look, I mean, Mike, I'm totally with you. I have, what's funny is I have Claude and then, you know, ChatGPT is a cowork model and then I have GrokBot and like all of them are just running all of the time and my job is just going back between all of them and just talking to 'em. I'm like, okay, now you do this. Okay, now you do this.

You're like the little bird, the little bird thing on The Simpsons that just pushed the key with Homer.

Yes. He's preventing, he's trying to prevent, it prevents a meltdown and then the little bird comes out.

I'll send you guys a screenshot of what I sent my team last night, but I built like a really amazing piece of software and I sent it over to my leadership group and I'm like, hey, if you don't know how to do this, I did it in 5 prompts. You're not gonna work here anymore. So I'll send that over in the group chat. But yeah, we're taking it very serious over here too, guys.

All right guys, thank you for joining us for this episode of Operators. Hey, create demand, create events that grab people's attention when they're not already looking for you. Be like Ridge. Take some of Sean's advice, put it into action, run experiments, start small, build something significant for your business. Thanks for joining us. We will see you guys next time.

Bye.