In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Julia Rubien and Nicolette Brunetti of Amie, a TikTok agency for beauty brands. They discuss effective affiliate marketing strategies on TikTok Shop, emphasizing the importance of strong shop operations, community building, and data-driven content. The conversation covers commission structures, contests, retainers, and creator engagement, highlighting the need for strategic planning and long-term investment. Key takeaways include selling the affiliate first, nurturing a supportive community, and ensuring operational readiness before scaling. The episode offers actionable insights for brands aiming to succeed on TikTok Shop.

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This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

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TranscriptJulia Rubien 00:00:00  I think clients think that sometimes it’s as simple as, let’s just invite everybody to a target plan, and that’s that. And one time I had to write out for clients, like all the different strategies that go into affiliate marketing, and without showing the slide, I’ll kind of rattle some off. But to us, we think there’s acquisition strategy, there’s commission strategy, there’s engagement strategy, there’s partnership strategy, there’s sample strategy, tiering strategy, incentive strategy, event strategy, content strategy. So there’s all these different strategies.

MC 00:00:36  Welcome to the Ecom Breakthrough podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.

Josh Hadley 00:00:50  Do you want to know what’s actually working on TikTok shop right now? What are the strategies some of the top brands are implementing in order to grow their shop sells or attract new affiliates. Well, you’re going to love today’s conversation. Welcome to the Econ Breakthrough Podcast.

Josh Hadley 00:01:05  I’m your host, Josh Hadley. I scaled my own brand from 0 to 8 figures in sales, and now my mission is to take it to over nine figures on my journey to nine figures. I bring you the unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Ezra Firestone, and Brandon Young. Today, I’m excited to welcome a guest who is a repeat guest back on the show, who is truly shaping the future of e-commerce through the power of TikTok. Julia Rubien is the founder and CEO of Amie, a TikTok agency dedicated to helping beauty brands grow and thrive in one of the fastest moving platforms today. Also joining us is her head of growth, Nicolette Brunetti. Through this conversation, we’re going to be discussing what’s working for our brand, what’s working in their agency and the many brands that they are working with as well. so welcome to the show, both Julia and Nicolette.

Julia Rubien 00:02:05  That’s always such a great intro. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:02:09  Good to be here.

Josh Hadley 00:02:10  Well, excited to have you both on the show. Julia, we had a really good conversation in our last podcast interview. So if those who haven’t listened to that podcast episode, make sure you go hit rewind, go find Julia’s last podcast interview on the Econ Breakthrough Podcast and dive in because she, like, just dispelled like, what I loved Julia as we went through the last episode was like, you broke three things down into like, here are the actual like team members and departments that you should have just to execute TikTok in a good fashion, right? Which is like, do you have somebody that’s kind of like your face of influencer or affiliate partnerships? Do you have somebody that’s on the op side to deal with all of the, hey, listing issues, the violations, and then you have kind of like the advertising component, marketing strategies, and basic customer service as well. So that set a really good framework. But now I want to jump into all the juicy details, which is like, all right, what’s the sexy stuff of like, hey, if you do this hack, here’s what’s working with all the affiliates.

Josh Hadley 00:03:16  so, Nicolette, I’m going to I’m going to direct the first question to you here. You’re working with so many different brands and you’re seeing what’s working. What’s not working on TikTok shop. What are the top affiliates doing or the top brands? What are their strategies that you’re seeing they’re implementing that’s leading them to success today?

Nicolette Brunetti 00:03:39  I think TikTok over time has become a lot more approachable and a lot more like digestible for brands now. So we’re getting a ton of interest in the beauty space on brands like they just want to get started. They’re so excited, to dive right in. And I think, some of the things that work for us, I think, as an agency is just being really upfront about the investment and the time and the cost that it takes to like, really like drive results. on TikTok shop and like, like you mentioned, like affiliates is a huge pillar of that. so I think what’s working is having all of the levers in place you need to drive success on job and also managing expectations on like, how long it takes to drive a momentum and, and sell your products on shop and see that like virality hit over the next few months.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:04:33  But, yeah, I think making sure that you have like a solid hero product strategy that’s affiliates are organically already talking about or like excited to promote on on TikTok and like also in like a video visual format, making sure that your hero product strategy is aligned with your sample strategy that you have. Budget and enough volume and samples to be sending to these affiliates. and then what’s working on the affiliate side, I would say, is just, Having the right commission structure in place. So like, let’s say you have a $10 product and have 20% commission, it’s probably not going to like perk affiliates ears, right? They’re not going to be making much, off of a like 1 or 2 sales. so having the right commission structure in place, as well as sample strategy, and even like retainers, making sure that you have retainers in place that are appealing to affiliates. if you need to drive content volume or just like award top performing affiliates. So I think that just having like those bases in place at the start of your journey on TikTok shop are going to naturally like get affiliates to come, and want to promote your products or your brand in general.

Josh Hadley 00:05:51  Yeah, no, I love that. So on that note, then you talk about having to like have an investment. So when people come to you and they’re like, hey, I want to turn on TikTok shop, like, I should be doing $1 million next month, right? Like, what does it take? what do you guys, you know, Julie and Nicolette? What are you saying to brands like, hey, by the way, when you come into this, this isn’t like we just start printing money tomorrow. Like you need to come in with. How much capital are you recommending people come in with to just run a test, basically.

Julia Rubien 00:06:23  Well, so first of all, I always and I might have said this on the last episode, but I see TikTok shop as this pyramid and you need all parts of the pyramid to make it work. You can’t do just one piece or the other. And this is what we we chatted about. You need to have the operations as the foundation.

Julia Rubien 00:06:39  From there you have the content, which most of it comes from affiliate, but a portion should also come from your brand own content. And then at the top of the pyramid it all ladders up into your paid ad campaigns. And so those are several different initiatives. And also, you know, we have to kind of understand that different industries have different ROI benchmarks. So it also depends on what are you selling at in beauty, which is what we can speak to in beauty. The ROI benchmark for TikTok shop is maybe a 1.5 to like a four, but it’s usually not like a ten. Or if you see that kind of high ROI, you’re not scaling the way that you should on shop. And I think growing your GMV and scaling is key to shop, because that’s how you’re going to get that profitability and the brand awareness and the halo effect in all of those things. And so just being realistic that when you go into shop, it’s not as easy as turning it on and then you have $1 million of sales.

Julia Rubien 00:07:37  Like there’s a lot that goes into it, you know. And when we look at the PNL, because we do a PNL for all of our clients, I think they’re oftentimes shocked by all the different levers we’re pulling, and all of it eats into the margin. And you’ve probably found this too, in your own business. But you know, the affiliates have their commission, TikTok has their portion of the sale. Then you have possibly discounts. Then you have affiliate retainers, you have the sample costs. You have the ad spend. You probably have the agency fees because most brands, you know, they need an agency who has the bandwidth or the community of affiliates that’s already built in. And so when you factor all of that in, you find that, you know, this is a long game, this is not a short term get rich quick type of scheme. This is truly your you’re propping up a brand new retail channel and you want it to be healthy. You want it to live a long time.

Julia Rubien 00:08:27  You ultimately want it to be profitable. And that’s going to take effort. And that’s going to take investment for sure.

Josh Hadley 00:08:34  Yeah. Nicolette, anything else you would add onto that?

Nicolette Brunetti 00:08:38  I think that’s what like when if we have a consult and the brand comes to us and they’re like $1 million first year, we’re like, yeah, yeah, let’s do it. Like but here’s the investment that it takes in order to get there. It’s like it’s, you know, it’s achievable. But, you need to be able to like, invest into the channel itself, too. Julia often says on consoles too, like it is opening up an entirely new channel in and of itself. Just the way, way back when. When a brand starts selling on Amazon, when it starts, when it opens up its DTC, its website, when you launch at Ulta, it’s Sephora. it takes a little bit of time to gain that traction. and it’s not like an overnight success. Like, I think a lot of, like, news articles make it seem.

Josh Hadley 00:09:26  Yeah, well, you’re just like one one viral hit away, right? All you need is one influencer. So I think that’s a really good segue into this next part, which is okay. So one of the things on TikTok like there’s three, there’s three main ways to generate sales on TikTok. There’s lives, there’s your own branded content and then there’s affiliate videos. If you just boil it down, there’s three key ways. So let’s focus first on the affiliates because I think that’s where most people gravitate towards first and foremost. How long do you like what are the best strategies brands are are utilizing to attract the right affiliates? And I’m curious like, and we can share kind of what we’re doing, but I’m curious to hear what happens if a brand comes to work with you. Do you already have like a set number of creators that you work with? And that’s kind of like the appeal is like, if you work with the me, you get these creators, these are proven creators, or you guys always actively trying to recruit new creators for specific brands, or you just more recruiting them for the overall agency, and they get to work with lots of brands with you guys.

Josh Hadley 00:10:38  How does that work from your guys’s perspective?

Nicolette Brunetti 00:10:41  Can I take care of you already?

Julia Rubien 00:10:42  Yeah. So I think it’s a little bit of both. Right. So we have an affiliate community and they can definitely lean on that. But we’re always growing that affiliate community. So we’re bringing affiliates in every single day to the community. And when we onboard brands, we’re obviously bringing in affiliates that resonate with that brand. That being said, we’re in a specific niche, right? We’re in beauty. And so you can use these affiliates across all these different brands, because at the end of the day, they all have this beauty audience. But it’s it’s ever growing. And I think brands, it’s great when they’re in cold start to just be able to tap into a pre-existing community. It gets them out of cold start faster than if they just started from nothing. So I think cold start brands lean a lot on our community. Mature brands might have their own and then we help, like what I call co-parent that community with the brand basically.

Julia Rubien 00:11:35  And I think with affiliates, the more hands on deck that you have, the better, because there’s just so much communication to be done and you want to keep the discord and we’ll get into discord strategy because I think that’s definitely what’s working. You want to keep the discord active and you want to keep affiliates engaged. So I think it just depends on where the brand is at. But yes, we have our affiliate community and it’s it’s always growing.

Josh Hadley 00:11:59  Yeah. And I think the so what’s working on our side is if you’re just a brand owner and you’re doing this internally, which we’re doing, I think most people are going to say like, hey, good turn on a yucky bot and that that’s it. Yeah, right. And what we’re doing is like, you need to be doing that and more. And so we turn on yucky bots. That’s great. Then we’re going to go out to Kayla Data. And then we’re going to go find all of the top creators that have been selling our competitor’s products.

Josh Hadley 00:12:29  And then we’re manually reaching out. And yeah, we’ll send a message through TikTok DMs. However, most creators don’t can’t. They are getting spammed thousands of messages a day. So like good luck being seen in a TikTok DM. First of all, so what do we do? We’re going to go reverse engineer and we’re going to use there’s a few different software tools that we’ll use to go identify their LinkedIn account, to then be able to grab their email address or be able to grab, like even their home mailing address and their phone numbers, like everybody’s information is public. If that’s news to you at this point in today’s day and age, like welcome to the 21st century. But we reach out like we’re we’re literally going to text that creator, and they’re going to be like, how in the world did you get my number? Right? But like, you have to go after those top creators in very creative ways. What we are seeing is like it’s becoming it’s almost like these are like little mini sales reps for your brand.

Josh Hadley 00:13:32  And do you want the the sales rep that closes one out of 100 doors that they knock on? Or do you want the sales rep that goes and closes 50 of the 100 doors that they they knock on, right? It’s like obviously you want the better ones. And so what we’ve seen is like there’s just creators that are naturally engaging. They just naturally know how to sell. They just naturally know how to, like, weave things into conversations. Have a good hook right at the beginning. can you teach some of those things? Yes, you can, but a lot of it is really like it just comes naturally to most people. And so what we’re trying to do is really target the creators that like it just comes naturally to them. I mean, as you guys recruit creators, is it more of like, do you guys have like an education program that people go through? So you’re more willing to take on new creators that maybe brand new to TikTok? Or are you trying to like, poach, like top, top creators and bring them into your guys’s network?

Julia Rubien 00:14:33  And again, I think it’s it’s both it’s leveraging both of the strategy.

Julia Rubien 00:14:36  And we do something similar. Actually. It’s it’s interesting to hear you say that that’s working because we use not Yuka but Reacher right now. And, Reacher is great. But then also we have a CRM, a same thing, collecting the information, getting creative as to like how we reach them. Do we do new email newsletters, whatever it is. And then I think a lot of top affiliates, to your point, they want to be given outreach on a one on one basis. So they want you to actually reach out over email or something intimate like text, because they don’t check the discord, like maybe the lower tier affiliates do. So I think it’s it’s it’s kind of almost like it’s similar to a Nicollette. I’m curious what you think about this, but it’s similar to how we run ad campaigns. So on ad campaigns, we do upper funnel all the way down to lower funnel, and we find that that’s the most successful for a Sephora and Ulta Beauty brand is to do the full funnel.

Julia Rubien 00:15:29  And it’s very similar with affiliates, where it’s like you want to nurture and incubate those lower tier affiliates, but you also want to strategically target those top tier affiliates, and it’s this full funnel of affiliate marketing that you want to pursue. But Nicolette. What are your thoughts on that?

Nicolette Brunetti 00:15:46  No, I couldn’t agree more. I actually like that, that metaphor. I come from a sales background. So when we were putting together like our affiliate strategy, like our affiliate structure for our department at Amie, I kind of looked at it through like a sales lens where, you know, like, like you said, like these affiliates are selling for you, but you also have to sell to the affiliates. You have to get them to want to sell for you. So when you think about, like a book of business, let’s say in our discord, we want our whole book to have, I don’t know, a thousand in there. over the next month. It’s like, you know, how how are we going to outreach them? Do we do it or do we collect emails on fast moths? Because you can download emails on there, right? do we reach out to them in Affiliate Center? Like how many touchpoints do we have with them in order to convince them to be a part of our community? and then once they’re in the community, like how do you develop different treatment plans to kind of get them to ultimately drive the most revenue for the brand? So we nurture them through engagement on a daily basis.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:16:51  We host webinars that kind of trains them on how is their creative, leverage through GMV Max campaigns? How does GMV Max campaigns work? we have an amazing creative strategist on the team that helps, like kind of comb through the content that they’re posting and give recommendations on how they can improve their hooks and their call to actions and their camera quality, things like that. So, yeah, we have different treatment plans kind of on, on each affiliate based on where they are in their journey of being an affiliate on TikTok shop.

Julia Rubien 00:17:24  Or like the term treatment plan. They really are getting treatment. But also like one time I wrote out for clients. You know, I think clients think that sometimes it’s as simple as, let’s just invite everybody to a target plan and that’s that. And one time I had to write out for clients, like all the different strategies that go into affiliate marketing and without showing the slide, I’ll kind of rattle some off. But to us, we think there’s acquisition strategy, there’s commission strategy, there’s engagement strategy, there’s partnership strategy, there’s sample strategy, tiering strategy, incentive strategy, event strategy, content strategy.

Julia Rubien 00:18:02  So there’s all these different strategies. And each one we dig into really really deep. And so it’s not as simple as just yeah inviting a bunch of affiliates to the target plan and saying, you know, that’s that it’s we get really strategic on every single level and every single part of that affiliate funnel to say.

Josh Hadley 00:18:23  Yeah, I love that. Well, I love that you talk about it as like a funnel, and people need to walk up that funnel just like hot. Like if you’re doing top of the funnel marketing. Right, just for awareness, all the way down to like super engaged buying, etc.. So with that being said, all right, I want to dive into those tactics. So Nicola, I know like you talked about like some of the engagement things that you’re doing, you’re like there’s daily engagement. We have like a weekly webinar, we have feedback that we’re giving proactively to our creators. I love all of those things. Now I want to get into the the weeds or the details, so to speak, with you here.

Josh Hadley 00:18:58  So what is daily engagement look like with these creators to ascend them up this funnel? as Julia talked about.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:19:07  I think on a daily basis that.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:19:08  Really looks like, it depends on how your discord is set up. So each person should have a welcome message when they come into the discord. Right? they should also be able to see any of the announcements that we’re making. I think right off the bat, it’s super important to grab their information. that way you can continue to engage them. Let’s say, like Julia mentioned, event strategy. So if we have any events that are coming up, like they know what’s happening near them in their town. so we grab, like, information like that. when we’re trying to engage them in the future. like, you know, their city, their state, like things like that. we also we have, like, different parts in the discord to where, we have campaigns that are running so they know exactly like, okay, I’m here, I can get started on this campaign if I submit ten videos for X amount of dollars in, like in retainer fee, like I’ll be able to apply for that, and, and like, get started right away.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:20:12  another thing we do is, shout outs. So our affiliate manager will comb through all of the best performing, TikToks in the accounts, and we’ll give shout outs on, like, really amazing content. we have another section in discord that creators can actually submit their videos and say, you know, how would you edit this? Like what kind of feedback can you give me. So it’s really collaborative. And there’s just active learning every day as well as like, you know, shout outs. Congratulations. Like we’re trying to trying to build a positive, collaborative community that people want to come to, and learn from over time.

Josh Hadley 00:20:52  I love that. What are you doing? Do you guys run any contests or anything like that? That’s some of like the the best things that we’ve been doing is like trying to incentivize and keep them excited about working with our brand specifically. I know we’ve all seen goalies like, hey, win a Lamborghini, get an air. You now have a condo in, in UAE or something like that.

Josh Hadley 00:21:16  So what, are you guys running any of those contests?

Julia Rubien 00:21:19  Yeah, not to that degree. No condos in UAE from us, but no, we’re definitely running contests. And I think that’s a big part of it. And that’s to generate that content volume. Right. It’s one to get affiliates excited, but also to make sure that they generate a lot of videos that we then feed into GMV max. So I think we have a couple running right now, actually. Nicolette I saw there was a $2,000 cash prize in our discord recently.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:21:45  Yeah, forever. Who? whoever achieves like the highest GMV, a lot of the times, it’s cash for, at least for our community, that they want us as incentives. We haven’t, toyed with the the free car yet. Anything like that free AirPods. We’ve we’ve thought about too. But I think for, for now, the cash incentives and like even the higher commission bonuses like a, a 5% bonus on your commission during this time to this time, if you achieve this much in GMV has worked for us.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:22:16  so we haven’t had to like go into like the big prize category.

Julia Rubien 00:22:21  Have you tried Josh that has worked but also hasn’t worked lately for you? Have you tried anything that’s that’s failed lately?

Josh Hadley 00:22:31  I, I’m always failing at something. So that’s. Now I have to think through too many things. You wouldn’t be a.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:22:37  Donor if you weren’t.

Josh Hadley 00:22:39  So let’s talk about. Yeah, well, I can share with you. Kind of like our best one. And then I’ll share our worst one. Okay, okay. So we’ve tested, like, a few different, like, contest strategies. One was just like, I wanted it to be a volume game, right? I was like, how many videos could I get? People like to just create on their own. good news is I had some creators that posted like 200 pieces of content in one month for me.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:23:06  That’s awesome.

Josh Hadley 00:23:07  Bad news is, there’s like $100 of GMV that came from those 200 videos, right? So what ended up happening? And we had like every week we had like, hey, if you post 20 videos, you can get 100 bucks, or if you post ten videos, you get 50 bucks, right? And what ended up happening is like, we just had a lot of people posting really crappy, like spammy videos to an extent.

Josh Hadley 00:23:32  Right. Where it’s like, now I’m just doing it out of, like, a number. Like, I just this just needs to be a video. So here’s my video. So that was my mistake. Like, because I had like two, three second videos, I was like, this isn’t even a video, but it quote unquote count. So saw a lot of people like gaming the system that way. Now with that, like we still had a couple people go viral during that contest. So like, but like I was basically taking all of the sales from those two best creators to then fund all the other, like 80% of the creators that, like, literally didn’t move the revenue needle whatsoever. They were just posting just a post. so that was like the the worst performing campaign, so to speak, where we just like, sent a lot of money out to a lot of creators that didn’t do anything for us. The best performing one, after I learned that lesson was like, okay, well how about and another interesting tidbit like you guys talk about just cash offers.

Josh Hadley 00:24:34  Same thing. We’ve surveyed our audience. We’ve talked to them. They’re just like, just give us cash, please. Just just want money. I’m like, okay, easy enough. We don’t have to get too creative here. but what, the best one was, like, just based on GMV tiers and, like, as soon as you cross $1,000 in GMV for this month, you get X amount of cash reward. And then when you hit 5000, you get X amount of cash reward when you hit 10,000. And that is like and we also surveyed the creators and like that’s what they wanted as well. Because the challenge is if you do like a certain I think contest where it’s like everybody’s competing against each other, that you’re lower level creators, they’re like, yeah, there’s there ain’t no way I’m going to be able to compete with these top ones. So like, I’m not even going to compete or try in this contest. so if you just make it where they’re all competing against each other.

Josh Hadley 00:25:29  It’s good from a sales perspective, and maybe you could do that with like your top ten creators to, like, really push the needle. But for us, when we reached out to our 5000 creator list, like, they don’t want that because they’re like, I’m not a top creator, so I know I’m not going to win that. But when we do something that’s like, hey, you only have to compete against yourself, can you get to $1,000 in GMV? Can you get to 5000? Nobody’s holding you back. Nobody’s preventing you from getting this extra bonus except yourself.

Julia Rubien 00:26:01  I love that.

Josh Hadley 00:26:02  So that that’s been one. And then the last one that we’re going to be testing out here for the next month, here is I’m trying to figure out ways to like exactly what you’re doing to incentivize, maybe like the beginner creators, because we’ve got a lot of those. The experienced ones can go hit those GMV thresholds and they’re incentivized by it. But like some of the beginners, they’re like, I can’t even get $100 in GMV, which is a separate conversation.

Josh Hadley 00:26:29  But like, what we’re going to do this time is we’re going to do like a raffle. Okay. So there’s going to be like $500 cash prize. But what happens is like the the GMV threshold goes a lot lower. So like generate $100 in GMV, get ten raffle tickets, generate 250, get 20 tickets, 530 tickets, hit 1000 GMV. Now you get your cash bonus and 50 raffle tickets. So then at the end of the day, it’s like, all right, well, the lower the beginner creators still feel like I’m winning something. Now I have a chance to be entered to win this $500 cash pot at the end of the day. But also, the top creators can keep scaling up that that ladder of like hitting those tears and bonuses and things like that. So that’s my latest advancements of what I’ve been working on. I love it.

Julia Rubien 00:27:25  I think that that just really speaks to like it speaks to the fact that volume, content, volume is important, but not everything. And it really comes down to the quality of the creative, but not even just the quality.

Julia Rubien 00:27:38  Because of course, there’s a lot of affiliates that are just starting out. But the effort, like the effort that those lower tier affiliates are putting into it. And you reminded me that something that we do now is we have these one on one calls with affiliates, to help them. We have webinars to help them creatively. We also have one on ones. And we did this thing recently where we will send you a free sample if you do two consecutive one on one sessions with us, because it shows that you’re trying to learn and trying to improve and trying to put effort into your content. And we want to reward that. So I think it’s yeah, we’ve seen some crazy crappy, you know, content to like the AI content or the slop or stuff where people just try and get the videos out, but really rewarding and prioritizing the affiliates who, even if they don’t have a lot of GMV, you know, they’re trying you can see them learning. And I think it’s it’s like a 10,000 hours thing.

Julia Rubien 00:28:32  Like that’s how we all became content creators in the agency. I’m a content creator. I didn’t have that background before I started five years ago, and I think I calculated that I’ve made something like 2000 to 3000 TikToks, and my early ones are so crappy, and the ones today are so I think they’re great. Probably in five years. I’ll also think they’re crappy, but it’s just putting in the time, in the hours and and iterating and making content over and over and putting in the effort. And then you end up getting there and becoming a better content creator, which in turn makes them a better affiliate.

Josh Hadley 00:29:06  Yeah. Nicolette, what’s working with the affiliates in terms of like, wanting or getting them engaged with the specific brand that maybe you could share, even for me, or even the brand owners that are listening to this, like, what are those engagement tactics that make it sticky. Because here’s what I know. With all these content creators, they get thousands of messages a day. A lot of overseas brands.

Josh Hadley 00:29:31  And what’s funny is like, I’ll have it in our WhatsApp group with our creators. They’ll be like, got another message from so-and-so brand following up for the 10th time saying, hello dear. How was your weekend? I hope you had a lovely day skiing. But like, they just laugh at it because it’s like that’s the majority of like the good news is that’s the level that we have to compete with, which that bar is real low. Yeah. But like the problem is they have thousands of messages to comb through. So how are they going to find me amidst the sea of that? And how do you ensure that somebody else doesn’t give them a better offer with a better commission structure, that they’re like, hey, I’m, I’m jumping over here because I do believe it. Like one of your best competitive advantages can truly be like your stickiness to that brand where the creator is like, I know I could go make more money over here, but I just love this brand and I vibe with the owner or something like that.

Josh Hadley 00:30:24  So I’m curious to hear, like your thoughts. Like true or false? And how do you do that?

Nicolette Brunetti 00:30:30  Oh, God. Okay, that’s a loaded question. I think we have sort of like competitive advantage and the fact that our brands are very well known. we’re focused on, on partnering with Sephora and Ulta Beauty brands or brands that are at big retailers. So I think the products in and of itself and the products that we choose in our hero product strategy, they’re already exciting products. They’re products that, like affiliates, want to get behind. They understand them or they already have some organic virality, so there’s something that they can get out of that. so I think that, like the brands that we work with and the products that we want to promote are engaging in and of themselves, it doesn’t take too much to like, convince somebody to want to get a sample, you know? so I think that’s great. I think, like the proactivity that we do is in our outreach. So we do use bots, as well.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:31:26  And we have follow up messages in those bots. So we don’t just send one message, we send quite a few. I think it’s what, like seven touchpoints in sales before you actually get somebody to convert. I look at like engagement the same way. so we’ll, you know, we’ll message through Affiliate Center, we will grab their emails from Fast Moss and try to get in front of them that way. some of the times when we’ve had a top of, top performing affiliate that we’ve really, really wanted to work with and we haven’t heard back from them. through Affiliate Center, we will email them. If we haven’t heard back from them via email. We will put together like a beautiful offer that they kind of like, can’t say no to. and we’ve heard back quite a few times, like at least 2 or 3 times that I can think of off the top of my head. when you give them an offer, like, here’s the retainer, here’s what we’re looking for from you. Like when can you get started? And usually that happens via email.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:32:23  so that’s been a good engagement strategy is actually just like showing them like what they could earn from this partnership rather than like you kind of cut out like all of the, you know, let’s get to know each other. Like what are your rates kind of conversation when there’s just an offer on the table for them? so that’s been helpful. Anything else you can think of, Julia, from an engagement perspective?

Julia Rubien 00:32:45  no, I was going to say, you know, similar to you, I think we do have an unfair advantage with our brands already having traction. So I think it’s easier for us to rally them behind a Sephora or Ulta brand that they already love. I think also, and again, we can’t speak necessarily so much as a seller because we are an agency. But I think as an agency, we just we maintain a, a culture and a community that feels very approachable and very friendly and, very relatable. And even when we have these webinars, like we’re putting people on the calls who are also content creators, and so it’s content creators talking to other content creators.

Julia Rubien 00:33:28  And so it feels very much like we’re in this with you, and we actually have people on our team who are affiliates and they can speak to that experience. so just relatability and making these creators feel seen, heard. I think that keeps them in the community. But like Nicolette said, if you just need to get their attention, putting the offer on the table, does the job. But what I will say, one of the strategies that we tried that didn’t work as well is we tried getting individual videos at a higher price point, more similar to influencer marketing, to see what that would do. And Nicolette, maybe you can speak to this as well, but it just wasn’t our most successful tactic. It didn’t drive a lot of outcome. And so I think contest challenges, those things get affiliates more excited Commission. Then maybe a high retainer for like 1 or 2 videos. I think that falls more in the influencer marketing realm, which is what we’re moving away from. And so I think that’s also a big misconception, where you see influencer marketers approach affiliate marketing the same way, and it just doesn’t land because it’s a different audience.

Julia Rubien 00:34:36  It’s a different type of creator. It’s a whole different game altogether.

Josh Hadley 00:34:41  Yeah. Okay. So on that note, let’s talk about retainers. We have never implemented a retainer for our brand. I know other brands do it right. Like there’s there’s 1,000,001 ways that creator or people are having success on TikTok shop. but we haven’t had to do retainers. It’s all been through affiliates and or just commission and then having like these contests on top of it. What do you guys see? Like is the puck moving towards like if you’re not doing retainers, dude, like you’re going to be left behind or are you seeing like because again, Julie, as you talked about like, hey, I want $10,000 and I’ll create one post for you. And it’s like, that’s not the way TikTok really works. like, what do you guys see from that perspective to give guidance to a brand owner? Like, what’s the going rate for a retainer and how much content are they getting for X amount? And I know it varies by creator, but like what’s the general rule of thumb.

Josh Hadley 00:35:40  And do you see better performance from retainer creators versus just commission creators?

Julia Rubien 00:35:47  Do you want to take this, Nicollette or.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:35:50  I have so many thoughts. Okay. do you need retainers? Yes. So we operated, like, for quite a few months where we weren’t suggesting retainers. We didn’t have it in the PNL. once you sample the creator, at least in the beauty space, they’ll do you know what they need to do with the, with the product and, you know, submit it via TikTok and, kind of just take the product and go. So we wanted to actually make sure that we could like get, you know, more out of those creators. So once you sample the products, we have actually monthly retainer strategies that we put in place for every single brand that’s unique to that brand and what their needs are, whether it’s volume, whether it’s GMV, whether it’s better content quality, whether it’s partnering with L3 plus creators, which are creators that are bringing 25 K or more in a month in revenue.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:36:42  But yeah, so we have different different strategies for, for different brands. And we kind of split up the retainers based on the needs there. but yeah, it’s been incredibly helpful to help with, kind of spreading the investment that we’re putting into sampling, and getting more like squeezing more juice out of that. so we have retainers for actually, like part like larger partnerships, like we call them affiliate influencers that have a bigger following, but also like are still pretty well known for selling on TikTok shop and being an affiliate. So totally different from like a traditional influencer that’s kind of just featuring the product and driving you to the website. And then we have a separate bucket of retainer money that’s meant to incentivize and motivate creators to post more content.

Josh Hadley 00:37:35  How much is that on that one? Like, I’m curious, like how like what does that look like for like the smaller creators to just, like, get more juice out of the sample that you’re sending them? Like, I get that strategy, but does it just vary by creator or is it just like flat?

Nicolette Brunetti 00:37:53  I think what we’ve seen is, okay, so for like a lower tier sort of creator where we’re kind of just trying to drive a lot of volume, they’ll do ten videos for 150 bucks, like, it’s very inexpensive.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:38:09  They’re just really excited to like, you know, get that flat fee and be able to put in some work and put in some practice, work with the brand, get a sample. And it’s very inexpensive. Like to work in that way just to get the content volume out and get the the product more visible on like the for you page. the sort of higher tier creators, the ones that like are really known for TikTok shop content, and like have their niche and understand like the way it all works and, and all that. I think we would pay them probably an average of like $100 per video. So we had a really successful one, where we spent this time $750 for five videos, actually. And they drove they basically covered like the entire kind of like what you said in the beginning. We worked with quite a few of them just to see, like, spread it out and see, which like, tier of creator brought in the most revenue. Like how much kind of juice we could squeeze from each one.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:39:17  so some kind of did ten videos for 150. Some did like five videos for 750. Based on their experience on the platform. and that creator actually like, covered the, the ROI for kind of all of the other ones too.

Josh Hadley 00:39:31  Nice. I do love that. And it sounds like if I’m getting it, Nikola, it’s like, I don’t know, we kind of test it out, right? And it’s like, well, we change it this way, this way, but all you need is like, you just need one win that can cover all those other like, mistakes and learnings. And it’s just kind of like a process, right? It’s like constant refinement, I guess.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:39:52  Yeah. The only thing that I would say, like we try to stray away from is just like simply overpaying. And we do have like an influencer department at our agency. And so we stray away from pretty much the entire influencer process there when it comes to just like one post for, you know, $5,000.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:40:09  It’s. We backtrack and make sure you know. Oh. Is this. There was one creator. I’ll give you an example. we work with, can we say our brands? Are we allowed to do that?

Julia Rubien 00:40:22  Let’s keep your hands off it for now.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:40:26  we work with one. We work with one, pretty, well-known cosmetics brand. Right. And, we had a creator organically talk about the product, and it went completely viral. It sold out the product. Like it went really amazing. we wanted to continue to work with that creator in, like, a longer term retainer capacity. And we got her rates back. and they were I think it was $15,000 for two videos. which, you know, in the affiliate space, it’s just simply not worth it. You need volume as well as, like, good quality content. so we decided, like, that’s not the right partnership for us because we can’t pay $15,000. You might not see any ROI. Even if it’s a well-known creator and they’ve had, you know, good performance in the past, you really need to negotiate, as much content as possible, even if you have to do it creatively.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:41:20  So. Yeah.

Julia Rubien 00:41:22  But I think it speaks.

Julia Rubien 00:41:24  To, like, Josh, you were saying, you know, how do we maintain stickiness? And I think small retainers are the way to do that, because I think you see a lot of affiliates come in, get the free sample, bounce to the next brand. But if they know that they have a consistent retainer deal here in this community, even if it’s small, it’s one more reason that they’re going to stick around and actually help build that brand with you.

Josh Hadley 00:41:48  How do you make sure you don’t lose money on, like, even the small retainer deals, right. To where it’s like, all right, 150 bucks, ten pieces of content. Great. What if they produced zero GMV out of those ten pieces of content? Do you remove them off of the retainer? Like, do they have to meet GMV thresholds to stay on that retainer.

Julia Rubien 00:42:08  Yes. So they if they’re not hitting goals, we probably wouldn’t give them another retainer. and then we’re also tracking the outcome.

Julia Rubien 00:42:17  So let’s say that the brand gives us $5,000 of retainer budget. We’re actually looking to see what’s the ROI on this particular retainer budget is if it’s low, how can we optimize it if it’s high? That’s great. Let’s let’s keep working with those affiliates.

Josh Hadley 00:42:33  Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Love it. All right, so one other thing I wanted to share with you guys that I think you could, you could find useful. And for our listeners as well. One of the things that we’ve done recently is that we took we downloaded all of the content that we got on TikTok for some of our, like, our hero product. And then what we did is we took out all of the hooks, right? We transcribed the videos, took out all of the hooks, and then we associated like the GMV next to each of the videos. And then we sat. And then what we did is we uploaded all of that into ChatGPT to make a custom GPT. And what we did is like.

Josh Hadley 00:43:16  Tell us first why these videos did better than the other videos. Right. So now we get to see like, all right, here are the patterns between all the hooks. And then on the reverse side, here’s the pattern amongst all of your crappy videos that didn’t generate any GMV. So what we did is we then uploaded that into a custom GPT with some instructions, and then sent that custom GPT out to the creators to say, hey, whenever you’re about to create a, you know, a video for this product, go get your inspiration for hook ideas here and run them here, because it’s going to vet out and it’s going to be like actually based on pattern recognition. This is more similar to the $0 GMV thing. So if you’re going to go this route. but if you use this angle, you’re more likely touching on all the viral videos that you use. So we’ve seen like really good, feedback from the creators that way to say, hey, thank you. Like, this just helps me produce better content overall.

Josh Hadley 00:44:20  And that’s that’s the way that I’ve been trying to, like, focus on stickiness outside of not doing retainers. It’s like, what are the other people not doing? And how can I just make their job as creators easier by giving everything to them, almost like spoon feeding it to them to just make it easier. Do you guys do that with like creative briefs or anything along those lines?

Nicolette Brunetti 00:44:42  We do actually. Okay. So we we sort of have an advantage here where our clients who are investing into like affiliate scope with us, they also invest into TikTok. So we’ll, you know, build and manage their entire TikTok presence. We produce all the content that’s posted onto their page. So we already have like so many learnings over the amount of time that we work with them on, the best performing products that are performing on their page, the hooks that we’re using. And a lot of the times if you see the people or they if you see the brands that we partner with, you’ll kind of see that we, we take a really amazing piece of content and we tweak it a little bit, but we just we rinse and repeat the strategy because that’s just how TikTok works.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:45:27  Like, if it’s going to work the first time, it’ll probably work the second time. so we take those learnings that we have organically already on the page, and then we, filter that into the creative briefs. Like, for example, we know one, brand. It’s a haircare brand. But every time we mention, this smells so good, it smells so different than any other brands, of hairspray. Like, anytime we mention the scent or the fragrance, like, sales, sales are through the roof. The, the amount of video views are better than anything that doesn’t mention. Like if you just talk about, like the efficacy of the product, it doesn’t do as well in the hook. so yeah, so we’ll take those learnings and then we’ll actually include those learnings as recommended hooks in our creative briefs that we send to affiliates, which are typically on retainer. or we’ll kind of like, add that image to our, our general outreach. Like, if we don’t have time to have those one on one conversations, we’ll take the learnings that we have on the organic brand page, and then we’ll kind of like put out a list of, recommended CTAs, recommended hooks that are performing really well.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:46:40  And, we’ll put that in the creative brief.

Josh Hadley 00:46:43  Yeah. No, I think that’s super smart. really good strategy. I think, like, you should constantly be updating those creative briefs, right? And like.

Julia Rubien 00:46:52  They’re like living, breathing.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:46:53  Documents. Right?

Josh Hadley 00:46:54  Yeah. Yeah, I love that. All right. As we begin to wrap things up here, Nicolette, Give me. Like, what’s one of the best things that you guys have done that’s produced great results? Then give me some of the like. Give me a couple failures as well of like, hey, we tested this. I probably wouldn’t do it again.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:47:13  Let me start with the failures. Let’s let’s do the bad and then we’ll end with the good.

Julia Rubien 00:47:17  All right.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:47:18  I think something that we have tried before is I think this is just a piece of advice, is making sure that your, like, your shop operations are in place. So when it comes to, like, inventory planning and it comes to potential, TikTok shop violations, those are some things that like if you just work really closely with your TikTok, if you have one on the violations or, you’re just paying more close attention to like the average run rate or the average sales that you’re getting on a popular product.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:48:00  You can kind of mitigate that, or at least like come out of that a little bit quicker. when you go out of stock on a product or when you get like a product violation. So that has actually like tripped us up a lot, where we’re gaining momentum on a product and getting a lot of content from amazing creators on the platform. And then we had to switch products and switch content strategy and all of that. And I think we lost, you know, some, some momentum there, like in prime time, like in December, for example. just from, you know, products going out of stock or we’re just not able to sell one product because it’s been flagged by TikTok shop. So I think that would be like something that we’ve learned from and something that we talk about our brands with right up front. Like we have a questionnaire that they fill out and we say, you know, are there any stock outs? Do you have, on your best sellers, your hero products. Like do you foresee them going out of stock, in the near future, in the next 3 to 6 months, we make sure that we have enough on hand that when we start promoting it, we don’t even have to think about that.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:49:02  hopefully in the future. okay. And then what was the question? So something.

Julia Rubien 00:49:08  Like.

Josh Hadley 00:49:09  What’s worked well for you. Right. What’s produced wild success that you’re like, I didn’t know that was going to happen.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:49:16  I would say for me it was it’s hiring the right team members, honestly. when we first started out on TikTok shop, Julia and I, we were like, let’s, let’s just dip our toes into it. You know, we did creative. We’re amazing at paid advertising. TikTok shop is still a newer platform like based on, you know, Amazon and its competitors. and so I think hiring a team with expertise in discord, in affiliate strategy, not just influencer strategy in partnerships, who also know e-commerce. I think hiring the right team members has completely skyrocketed. Like our business, our winnings, our success in performance. We have multiple brands in 5 to 6 figures now that we manage, like on a monthly basis. So I think hiring people with that expertise, even though it’s still early in the game for TikTok shop, has been like, personally, my greatest win.

Josh Hadley 00:50:21  So are those people that you’ve hired. This is a really good one because like TikTok, shop talent is like few and far between right now.

Julia Rubien 00:50:28  It’s so new. Yeah. So.

Josh Hadley 00:50:31  Like, are you saying like, these people came from what type of backgrounds did these people have?

Nicolette Brunetti 00:50:38  well, depends on on the type of work. But like for operations, heavy, Shopify heavy e-commerce even like if you can find somebody that’s been in your niche, like, we have, beauty experts that, handle the e-commerce strategy for our brands. I would look at that. for affiliates, we recently hired a new affiliate manager who has agency expertise and also just has been and built, been on discord for over ten years and built plenty of her own discords as well and understands engagement strategy, how to structure it, how to how to acquire, new members. So that’s been super helpful, I think, for our agency. And I think also having leadership like Julia in place who just want to, to test and try new things and just say yes to everything and, learn and build as we go, I think has been super, like, that’s that’s worked great.

Nicolette Brunetti 00:51:46  I think you have to go all in on something like this. So, yeah, I think I think our brands have benefited it, like all of our collaboration and just, courage to try something new and get the right people in the right place to, to see success. Yeah, it’s it’s everything kind of works all together. It’s it’s not really one thing that comes to mind.

Josh Hadley 00:52:11  Yeah. No, people definitely like hiring people. And the right person is probably the most outsized, like arbitrage opportunity that exists today and will exist in decades and eternity to come. And as it relates to business. So I love that. Julia, anything else that you want to add? What’s the biggest, like, mistake failure you guys have made along the way? And what’s worked from your perspective?

Julia Rubien 00:52:37  When I think, I think maybe what I can speak to is like, since Nicolette.

Julia Rubien 00:52:45  So eloquently spoke to the failures and the.

Julia Rubien 00:52:47  Successes, and I would totally agree with her there, I think maybe I’ll speak to like what I see brands trying to do a lot that might not be successful, stuff that we avoid with our brands that I see them do, which is why I think they’re not successful on shop.

Julia Rubien 00:53:02  So it’s not necessarily our failures, but I think it’s traps that different sellers fall into. for one, we see a lot of brands who they want to skip to affiliate before they do the shop operations. They come and they’re like, I want to do affiliate marketing. How can I start? Like, let’s do it? And I think they don’t realize that your hero product strategy, your merchandising, the way you’ve set up your shop, your inventory, like Nicolette said, is so important to have algorithmic favorability that if you just go to affiliate marketing with no real strategy in place, it’s like building on sand. It’s not worthwhile. And so having to re-educate them and say, no, no, no. First, we need to actually look at the PNL. We need to look if this makes sense. Do you have the resources for this? Do you have the ad spend to support this type of content. So it’s not just affiliate content for affiliate content sake, but is there a bigger strategy here? And do you have the right hero products? And when we go out and we sample these affiliates, you know, looking at fast moths and saying, are these the right products to sample? So before you even jump into affiliate marketing so that it’s worth your while.

Julia Rubien 00:54:11  And then I think the other thing is a lot of brands, they, they basically want the really top tier affiliates, but they’re not giving those top tier affiliates a reason to be there. And so they come in and they’re like, how quickly can you get me the biggest, best, most high GMV affiliate? And what they don’t understand is it’s not like influencer marketing, where you can just pay an Alex IRL and be done with it. What it is is you’re selling to the affiliate and not necessarily the consumer. And it’s a it’s a conversation that has to be had in tandem with how your GMV is going to grow. And as your GMV grows in your shop, more affiliates will be attracted to make content with you, and you’ll get bigger affiliates over time. But I think they they think that you can just go straight to the big affiliate, and they don’t realize this is a long game, this is community building. This is nurturing your pool of affiliates. This is taking some affiliates and helping them become large affiliates.

Julia Rubien 00:55:14  And this is also a conversation about how are you fueling GMV Max to scale your ad spend. So your shop has more GMV so that larger affiliates come in naturally and want to work with you because they have limited real estate on their page. And to your point, they get thousands and thousands of messages from sellers. So if they’re going to work with you, they need to know that financially it’s worth their while. And so you can’t from cold start just come in and think, I’m going to sample the top affiliate and they’re automatically going to make content for me with nothing else in place. And so I see that misconception a lot, and I think that could lead to a lot of quote unquote failures with Shop Man.

Josh Hadley 00:55:55  Julia, you hit the nail right on the head there. Really well spoken.

Julia Rubien 00:55:59  Thank you.

Josh Hadley 00:56:00  Love that, love that. Well, as we wrap it up, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. These are the three actionable takeaways that I noted.

Josh Hadley 00:56:10  Would love you guys to let me know what I’m missing. So number one, Julia, you said this perfectly and I wrote it down. I think action item number one is you have to first sell the affiliate. Okay. If that can become your frame of reference, I think that’s the first domino that knocks over the rest of this. Right? Because if you realize this is not about like selling products on TikTok, this is actually about selling creators that want to come, quote unquote, work for you. And so then you need to think through that should then enable your thinking for what’s my commission structure? How am I going to keep them engaged? How am I going to support them? What’s different and unique about me than some of the overseas brands that may be offering 50% commission? Right. What is your going to be your unique spin? Because you’ve got to be able like there’s limited real estate. They have limited products. They can sample, in 24 hours. So what can you do to sell them on your vision, your brand? Why work with you rather than somebody else? I do believe that if you as a brand owner can figure that out, it unlocks everything, and it’s the competitive advantage that other people cannot replicate themselves.

Josh Hadley 00:57:31  Right? I have a bunch of overseas competitors in my category, and I look at it and I say, good, well, it’s rising the entire market, but they ain’t stealing my affiliates. I’ve watched it. They don’t steal my affiliates because, like, my affiliates don’t want to go work for those overseas brands at the end of the day and like. That’s the mindset shift. So that’s action item number one. Action item number two is I love what you guys talked about in terms of like creating the community and the engagement and ascending people up this ladder. And so if you look at this from like a marketing funnel perspective, you’ve got to bring in maybe some newer creators or they’re at least new to your brand. And it’s like, okay, how do we get them? Just like excited about the brand, knowledgeable about the products, how do we have them just begin posting about the products? All right. So we offer a retainer. Okay. Now they’re in the rhythm of posting. Now let’s run some contest.

Josh Hadley 00:58:25  This gets them even more motivated and engaged to continue to work with us. We then give them feedback. Right. And you have different like tiers and maybe commission structures as they ascend up this GMV ladder to where now you have bigger retainer models for some of those top creators. And really what you’ve done is you’ve architected a pathway from here’s where you start. Here’s where you can go. Which, by the way, if you can clearly articulate that to somebody when you’re trying to recruit them, like that’s so much easier of a sell for an affiliate. So I love the engagement and performance based retainers to just like accelerate people up that value ladder. My third and final action item here is this comes down to like making sure that you have the right butts and the right seat, especially as it relates to TikTok, because if you don’t, yes, you could go find a great affiliate manager. Fine. You could go find a great discord manager. Fine. They they add value. But as Julia mentioned, is like you got to find the right people to at least get your foundation set, which your first foundation is your shop operations.

Josh Hadley 00:59:37  Is that set or are you going to like as soon as people go viral, you’re a out of stock. Your listings aren’t optimized anyways like now. Like your affiliate marketing is just ten times harder. So what I would say is. Like make sure you have the right seats filled first, which is you need to first be able to check the box. Do we have our shop operations down pat? I mean that was Nicollette like biggest like failure. Quote unquote was like we weren’t ready with inventory or the merchandising strategy for it yet. So like, why push the gas on affiliates and lose a bunch of money if we’re not even ready behind the scenes? So I think, like, everybody gets excited about the shiny objects sales, working with affiliates, generating GMB, great. But first get your house in order. Which is honestly. And for entrepreneurs, it’s the boring stuff.

Julia Rubien 01:00:27  The stuff that.

Josh Hadley 01:00:28  We.

Julia Rubien 01:00:28  Don’t want to do.

Josh Hadley 01:00:30  But you got to. So those are my three action items. Anything else that you guys would add on here that I missed?

Julia Rubien 01:00:37  I think that’s perfect.

Julia Rubien 01:00:38  And I would say also, you know, start a discord strategy, Really get your discord in order. Structure your discord. Keep it warm. Keep it engaged. Keep it active every day and you’re on a good path then.

Josh Hadley 01:00:53  Nicolette.

Julia Rubien 01:00:54  Anything else?

Nicolette Brunetti 01:00:55  I agree, I think I agree with everything said. I think pulling all the levers is super important. Just coming in and having a plan and having a strategy like it doesn’t have to be a spray and pray situation where we’re just like sampling everybody in there, you know, take some time to think about it. and then you can always like test them, learn from there.

Josh Hadley 01:01:16  Love it. Good words of wisdom. Well, Julia and Nicolette, thank you both for joining the show and we look forward to doing this again down the road.

Julia Rubien 01:01:24  Yes. Thank you for having us.

Nicolette Brunetti 01:01:26  Thanks, Josh.

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