Jason Kutasi is the founder and CEO of SkyHouse, a performance marketing agency that managed $50M in ad spend for 2025 – its first full year of business. He’s driven roughly $500M in advertising over his career and built a children’s book publisher acquired by Scholastic and a digital marketing platform acquired by Capital One.  Jason specializes in copywriting, funnel analytics, and scaling high-growth DTC and telemedicine brands.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the E-comm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley speaks with Jason Kutasi, CEO of Skyhouse, about scaling e-commerce brands. They discuss the importance of average order value (AOV), emphasizing that brands need at least $60 in margin to run profitable paid ads. Jason contrasts Amazon-first versus Shopify-first strategies, recommends bundling and subscriptions to boost AOV, and advises starting with freelancers before scaling with agencies and in-house teams. They also explore Meta advertising, creative quality versus volume, and how AI augments—but doesn’t replace—skilled marketers and copywriters.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction to the AOV Problem
Jason Kutasi explains that Amazon sellers often struggle to scale on other platforms due to a low Average Order Value.

00:00:34 Host & Guest Introduction
Host Josh Hadley introduces the episode’s topic and guest Jason Kutasi, founder and CEO of performance marketing agency Skyhouse.

00:02:26 Amazon vs. Shopify Mindset
A discussion on the two primary approaches to starting an e-commerce business and the challenges faced by Amazon-first brands.

00:03:39 The $60 Margin Rule
Jason explains why brands need at least $60 in margin to profitably acquire customers on paid ad platforms like Meta.

00:04:37 Strategies to Increase AOV
Actionable ways to increase Average Order Value, including creating sister brands, bundling products, and offering aggressive subscription models.

00:07:56 The “Shopify First” Advantage
The benefits of a higher AOV, which provides more margin to scale advertising across multiple channels beyond Amazon PPC.

00:10:30 Why You Must Be Omnichannel
Jason argues that Shopify brands should sell on Amazon to avoid losing customers who prefer to purchase there.

00:14:01 Case Study: A Massive Meta Ad Win
Jason details a recent successful video ad campaign that scaled to thousands of orders in a single weekend.

00:20:04 Navigating Meta’s Andromeda Update
A discussion on Meta’s shift to creative-driven campaigns and the strategy of slicing avatars for better, more stable performance.

00:23:34 Agency vs. In-House Teams
Jason breaks down when to hire a freelancer, an agency, or build an in-house team for your marketing efforts.

00:29:13 Why Most Marketing Agencies Fail
Jason shares his experience with underperforming agencies and what brand owners should look for when hiring one.

00:33:28 Building an In-House Team Alongside an Agency
The importance of building an internal team to de-risk your business and test new offers before scaling with an agency.

00:36:38 The Future of E-commerce and AI
Jason predicts AI will commoditize ad creation, making predictive modeling and data-driven rules the new competitive edge.

00:41:42 AI as a Human Amplifier
AI won’t replace skilled marketers but will augment their abilities, allowing them to perform at a much higher level.

00:44:43 Three Actionable Takeaways
The host summarizes the episode’s key lessons: fix your AOV, build in-house, and leverage AI with smart people.

00:49:33 Jason’s Final Recommendations
Jason shares his most influential book, favorite AI tool (Claude Code), and a respected figure in the e-commerce space.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Tools and Websites
“Amazon“: “00:02:26”
“Shopify“: “00:02:26”
“Meta (Facebook/Instagram Ads)”: “00:02:56”
“Google Ads”: “00:02:56”
“YouTube Ads”: “00:02:56”
“TikTok“: “00:06:23”
“PayPal”: “00:11:49”
“Apple Pay”: “00:11:49”
“Google Pay”: “00:11:49”
“Shop Pay”: “00:11:49”
“Claude Code“: “00:50:05”
“Meta”: “00:38:16″Books
“The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber“: “00:00:56”
“Cash Flow”: “00:49:36″Videos
“Video Ads”: “00:14:01″Notable Mentions / People
“Skyhouse (Jason Kutasi’s performance marketing agency)”: “00:01:35”
“Prosper Event“: “00:03:37”
“Native Ads”: “00:06:23”
“Jason Akita“: “00:51:16”
“Alex Hormozi“: “00:34:47”

Concepts / Strategies / Advice
“CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)”: “00:22:44”
“Ad Set Budgets”: “00:35:09”
“Creative Velocity”: “00:22:44”
“Audience Targeting”: “00:21:58”
“Funnel Metrics”: “00:25:25”
“Internal vs. Agency Teams”: “00:24:09”
“Focus on AOV (Average Order Value)”: “00:45:49”
“Start with Freelancers”: “00:46:42”

Episode Sponsor:

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

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

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Transcript:

Jason Kutasi 00:00:00  So I meet these guys, these men and women, and they’re like, hey, by the way, I have this great product and we’re selling it on Amazon. We’re doing great. We’re doing 5 million, 10 million, $15 million a year. And you know, we’re ready to scale it up on Meta or Google. And I’m like, the first question I always ask is what’s your AOV.

MC 00:00:20  Welcome to the E-comm 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 00:00:34  Would you like to know the secret way that Amazon is killing your business? Today’s guest has the answer for you, so stay tuned till the end. Welcome to the Econ Breakthrough Podcast. 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.

Josh Hadley 00:00:56  Past guests include Ezra Firestone, Kevin King, and Michael E Gerber, author of the E myth. Today, I am super excited to introduce you all to Jason Kutasi. Jason is the founder and CEO of Skyhouse, a performance marketing agency that managed $50 million in ad spend in 2025, its first full year in business. He’s driven roughly $500 million in advertising over his career, and built a children’s book publisher that was acquired by Scholastic and a digital marketing platform acquired by Capital One. Jason specializes in copywriting, funnel analytics, and scaling high growth DTC and telemedicine brands. With that introduction and welcome to the show, Jason.

Jason Kutasi 00:01:35  Thank you. It’s so funny. Oh, it’s always funny hearing somebody else like, say who you are and you’re like sitting there listening and you’re like, did I do all those things?

Josh Hadley 00:01:42  That’s a cool guy to know. I should know that guy.

Jason Kutasi 00:01:44  Yeah, yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:01:46  No, Jason, I I’ve seen you present a couple times a different e-commerce events and have always been blown away.

Josh Hadley 00:01:53  In fact, you and I jumped on a zoom call just to talk because, you know, you scaling the children’s book business had a lot of meta funnels, things like that, that are very similar to everything that we’ve been running as well. So you are a wealth of wisdom, and I know our audience is in for a treat, but we’ve got a clickbait title here that is, hey, Amazon is secretly killing your business. So, Jason, what is the answer to this question? Like, how do you feel like Amazon is secretly killing these e-commerce brands because you just spoke with a lot of them and you got some really good questions, and I think you have a good answer here.

MC 00:02:26  Yeah.

Jason Kutasi 00:02:26  So like there’s there’s two ways to approach an ecom business. And I think, you know, you either go, you know, it’s like the Bloods and the Crips. Are you either rocking Shopify first or you rocking Amazon first. And so I think if you start with Shopify, Amazon’s nothing but gravy and nothing but lift like in the kids book business, 22% of our revenue came from Amazon, and we spent roughly $800 a day doing blocking and tackling, you know, brand building defense, which, you know, we were spending, I don’t know, three, 4 million a month, something like that on meta ads.

Jason Kutasi 00:02:56  So like to spend $800 a day on Amazon was like nothing. So that was really nice. But I think that one of the problems is when guys start on Amazon, they don’t focus on AOV the same way that the Shopify guys do. And if you’re running on Shopify to get traffic, you have to go to meta or, you know, Google, you’re running YouTube or Google Display or Demand Gen or whatever. And a lot of this is before TikTok became TikTok. And so like I went and I spoke at the prosper event, I don’t know what was that two weeks ago, something like that. And then I did this, this roundtable thing for MDS. And then I was, you know, we met at the end of a conference shoot. What was that, November? Something like that. Yeah.

MC 00:03:37  Yeah, yeah. And so like one of the.

Jason Kutasi 00:03:39  Things that was interesting is these guys. So I would meet these guys, these men and women, and they’re like, hey, by the way, I have this great product and we’re selling it on Amazon.

Jason Kutasi 00:03:46  We’re doing great. We’re doing 5 million, 10 million, $15 million a year. And you know, we’re ready to scale it up on Meta or Google. And I’m like, the first question I always ask is what’s your AUV? And so I’ll get an answer like this. It’s like, well, it’s, you know, it’s a skincare brand or supplement brand or it’s a gadget of some kind, whatever it is, and it’s 30 bucks. And I was like, okay, so you sell it on Amazon for $30. You make, you know, $15, maybe less or whatever, but like, you make 15 bucks. Not a chance in hell you’re going to get that to work on meta and YouTube. And the secret number, not the secret number, but like the sweet spot is, you have to be in a minimum of $60 in margin to to pay for that ad spend. So you have to, you know, he who can pay the most for a customer wins. And so then it always dovetails into this other sort of thesis or conversation and was like, well, how do I get my AOV up? Well, there’s a couple of different ways to do it.

Jason Kutasi 00:04:37  I mean, one of them is, is you start a sister brand. So same manufacturing, same everything, wrap a different label on it and clone everything over and then just raise the price. So particularly if you’re selling a non commoditized product you can raise the price to whatever. So this t shirt I’m wearing, you know, I can go buy it on Amazon for $5 or Dollar General or whatever, or I can go buy it from Saks Fifth Avenue for $500 or whatever. Right. Same thing with kind of supplements. It’s much harder if you’re selling batteries or kids books. This is one of the problems with kids book business. There was a fixed perceived value, like how do you charge $100 for a kids book like you like you can’t. And so, you know, then you effectively go into option number two is you really have to to bundle or run some type of aggressive subscription offer. And I don’t mean like black hat, you know, the consumer isn’t aware. But you know, this is very common in E-com now guys are running effectively single SKUs, subscription funnels for that offer.

Jason Kutasi 00:05:37  Yes, you can still go buy it, not in subscription, but the offer is subscription. And so then you can focus on the lifetime value of that customer, which still can get you, you know, over $60. You know, it just sort of keeps there’s no cap on it really. And then you have a cash flow problem, not a profit problem. But yeah, it’s just a very it’s a very, very common thing. And I think that one I feel like I know, but I think that that’s why you see a lot of these guys run on TikTok because TikTok is, for the most part, lower ticket, way more impulsive buys. And so TikTok kicks over to Amazon at a really, really nice ratio. But it’s because of that AOV. I remember we got into native years ago on the kids book business and we were, you know, we were we didn’t have that many books. We were selling three kids books. So it was like three kids books or $30.

Jason Kutasi 00:06:23  Like, you can run low and slow in a little bit, but like, you cannot hit the gas. And to be frank, we’re only here to hit the gas. It’s I don’t know, that adrenaline rush. I feel like is is why why we do it. That’s why we play the performance game instead of the the brand game. The brand game isn’t hitting the gas at all. Like, we’ve allocated $1 million this month for reach and frequency. And we’re just going to let everybody know about this, you know, this amazing business that we have. But the performance guys just want to rip. And so I think the the big takeaway for the Amazon guys is really, really, really focus on how to get your AOV up. The buy the buyer decision is very different. So like somebody who buys a kid’s book off of our Shopify site didn’t wake up this morning and go, I need a kid’s book for Timmy’s birthday. If they did, they’re just going to go to.

MC 00:07:12  Amazon.com.

Jason Kutasi 00:07:13  Or Target.com or Barnes. And now you have to compete on price. And if you run a regular funnel off of that, it’s the same sort of marketing funnel. So what’s the problem solution. What you tried before, it’s not your fault. Overcome the objection. Scarcity close right. So price is a factor. But like you’re you’re trying to sell a solution and convince them that why they should buy the product as opposed to like I’m going to go to Amazon.com and I need to buy some Energizer batteries. Like, it just it’s just very different that way. And so yeah, I wish I wish more Amazon. They’ll get there. But I wish more Amazon guys focus more on AOV V because there’s so much scale, like there’s so much scale. So yeah, that’s that’s the that’s the takeaway.

Josh Hadley 00:07:56  I love that comment. And I think it is so true. And in hindsight, I wish I would have started my business back with like a Shopify first mindset. Here’s where I struggled. Jason, like I always was in the groups where people were doing well on Shopify, but I could not figure out how to unlock it for my brand because our products were 15, $20 items.

Josh Hadley 00:08:19  And I was like, I can’t run a single ad on this, like, let alone like just the the fulfillment fees at the time with like having Amazon send it out. It’s like, that’s gonna eat up 60% of the stupid products price. So like, this is this is dead in the water from day one. Yeah. I kept experimenting and trying it out and again, probably wasted like hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to figure it out on this like stupid low value AOV stuff. But like the the switch kind of flipped when stuff started going viral on TikTok, and we then said, oh, we can see all the other things that people are buying together with this. Why don’t we just run that as a big $100 AOV offer? And yes, now we have $60 in margin to go after these customers because I don’t, unfortunately have a subscription product. However, after talking to you, there’s some very creative ways that we we probably need to begin experimenting and implementing that into the business. But here’s the big point that I love that you took away on that is when you start on like kind of a Shopify first mindset with a higher AOV and you have a more premium product.

Josh Hadley 00:09:23  It gives you so much more margin to play with, where then you can scale it to the moon, theoretically, because you’ve got CTV that you could dabble in. You’ve got more PR, you’ve got meta, you’ve got Google and YouTube and Google PPC like the list goes on and on. Whereas if you start a Amazon brand, guess what you got? I got Amazon PPC and that’s my only lever, Right. And that’s it. And so I to your point, I think that the smart e-commerce brand owners are shifting in that direction. And Amazon is still a great platform. And it is those Shopify brands that do not list their products on Amazon because they’re worried about cannibalization. I laugh at that because it’s like, man, it’s just all gravy like you talked about. And there is a good number, I think, like your number at like 22% of your sales were coming from Amazon. I think that’s about the halo effect. Over onto Amazon. It’s like 20 to 30% of the sales people stop scrolling.

Josh Hadley 00:10:18  They pick up the Amazon app and then they move over there. They search it, they find it, they buy it over there, and it’s like, great, I was going to lose this sell anyways to my competitor. Now I just pick that back up. I mean, it’s kind of the way you see it.

Jason Kutasi 00:10:30  Yeah. So you you touched on a really interesting thing. So when we started on the kids book side of things, I’m like, I’m not doing Amazon. Like, I want to own the customer. I want the, you know, I want the retention. I want to be able to email them, SMS them and whatever. And then I just had this thought. You know, so you’re wearing this blue dress shirt, which is also ironic because this is the example I always gave people about this, which was if I walk into Nordstrom’s to buy a shirt and I feel like this shirt did $100 is too expensive. And then I walk over to Macy’s in the same mall, and I look for that shirt, and that shirt’s not there.

Jason Kutasi 00:11:04  Am I walking back to Nordstrom’s? No, I’m just gonna buy whatever they have there. So you’re just losing to your competition? It’s. And so anyway, we we threw it up on Amazon and it was like day one. We just saw revenue coming in and doing no PPC. Right. They were just going there and typing in the thing. And you know.

MC 00:11:23  Amazon.

Jason Kutasi 00:11:23  For a lot of these E-com brands is is similar to PayPal is kind of the way that I look at it. It’s just easy. So you’re trusted particularly for your new brand. You know you’re going to get your money back if the vendor screws you. All I have to do is hit a button to buy. I don’t have to pull out my credit card. I don’t have to enter my address like all of those things, you know? Which is why, like PayPal, and now Apple Pay and Google Pay are becoming so popular, it’s just you just hit a button. It’s the same thing with like shop pay.

Jason Kutasi 00:11:49  It just reduces so much friction. And yes, Amazon takes a big rip and so does PayPal and so does Apple. So but I’m like you would have lost that sale anyway. Maybe you would. Maybe you retarget them. Maybe they come back. Maybe I go to the mall again next weekend and I didn’t buy a shirt. But I promise you, if you see me going in shopping for clothes I am buying that day, I do not want to go back. The batteries in your remote control are dead and you go to Amazon to buy bad. I’m buying batteries today and so you just have to be where your customer wants, you know, wants to buy.

Josh Hadley 00:12:22  Yeah. Really well said there. And I do think like if you’re not just there. And again that’s part of like an omnichannel like scaling approach. But you’re right. Like people think that oh I have a whatever $20 million brand on Shopify. Great. Kudos to you. Like not many people get there, but I’m sorry. They’re like, still, nobody knows about you.

Josh Hadley 00:12:41  Like you’re still not even close.

MC 00:12:45  Yeah, we have a client spending.

Jason Kutasi 00:12:46  3 million a day on YouTube.

MC 00:12:48  A day? Like what? Profitably.

Jason Kutasi 00:12:50  That’s also an asterisk.

MC 00:12:52  But, like.

Jason Kutasi 00:12:52  There is so much traffic and so much reach and so many other channels. And then we do see guys take the hero product that they have and, you know, and you’ll move it over to TikTok. So the opposite is actually also true about this. So if you have like $100 AOV product, it is way harder to sell that product on on TikTok. And let’s assume you’re top of the mark in a category on Amazon. It is very, very hard to sell that $100 product. So all of a sudden you have to figure out, well, what do we do to be able to sell that $100 product on TikTok for 20 or 30 bucks and for, you know, on Amazon for 20 or 30 bucks. And so like it plays both ways. You know, we sold $100 book bundles on Shopify.

Jason Kutasi 00:13:31  We sold single books on Amazon. And so you just have to adjust those AOV by the channel that you’re that you’re on.

Josh Hadley 00:13:39  Yeah. Totally agree. Now Jason, I would love to double down. I would love to hear who who’s spending $3 million a day on YouTube. And probably I would love to know that business model. But let’s talk a little bit more about like maybe some of your clients, maybe some case studies there. But also you also had a massive like your biggest day ever just a few weeks ago. And I would love to dive into that. So why don’t you share some wins?

MC 00:14:00  Yeah.

Jason Kutasi 00:14:01  So we so one is most of the people listening to this this podcast will remember I doubt they will forget. But you know January and February were terrible on meta. I think January was the worst January of my career. All things considered, given the size of our agency and the number of clients we had, it was just terrible. In February, you know, February sucked as well.

Jason Kutasi 00:14:21  And, you know, it’s an algorithm change. What are you going to do? Right. So like you get kicked in the nuts, but everybody else is like it makes you feel a little bit better, but it’s still it’s still painful. And so one of the things that we noticed was video was doing a lot better. So when we had gotten back into the sort of agency game, we were only doing statics. And the reason is because that’s what we like. That’s what we knew. That’s what we were good at. And statics are cheaper traffic and you are very copy forward. So the ad text matters more. Your landing page advertorial whatever. Like the salesman matters a lot more. And then we have this other thesis that when you’re making videos, all you’re doing is introducing a massive increase of variables that you have to figure out. So it’s not even like man or woman, it’s how old is the woman? What ethnicity is she? What does she sound like? Does she have short hair, long hair? Glasses? Red lipstick? No lipstick.

Jason Kutasi 00:15:13  Like she in a kitchen, a bathroom, her car. Like, there’s so many variables. And our our thesis in marketing had always been very much a staged gain approach. So, like, you know, we’re just trying to get from step A to step B, figure out the problem, move to C, etc. but we found that our videos were doing really well. And so I think it was last week, I think we were 72, 71, 72%. Video I tracked that metric And look at the end of the day, a lot of guys are just video, video, video, video. How many, how many times can you say video fast? And that’s fine. But like as an advertiser, you have to remember that Meta and Google also have static inventory that they have to fill. So the win is both. So here’s what happened. I’ll just give you the numbers. We launched an ad on a Thursday and we were roughly like 30% under target. So we let it go.

Jason Kutasi 00:16:03  And then Friday we came back and we started surfing it, which means that intraday we were just raising the budgets. Then Saturday I was like we should hit this thing hard. So I called the client and I was like, hey, so this is looking really good. We want to be more aggressive this Saturday and we normally are on Saturdays. Saturdays we usually push the chips in a little bit. Here’s what we’re seeing. And they’re like, yeah, let’s do it. So it was one ad five hooks. And so we started moving it to other accounts. And then that Sunday we pushed the chips in again harder. And we had done 3200 front ends like initial sales. By 1230 eastern. We were running in three at accounts, and we scaled it up so fast that we didn’t have time for meta to adjust the daily spend limit, which was set to $100,000 per account. So we probably would have been close to 10,000 orders that day off of an ad that launched on a Thursday. Yeah.

Jason Kutasi 00:16:59  And then, of course, the client calls us on Monday and they’re like, so, you know, we’re pretty much out of inventory, right? Like, we’re gonna have to cap you at 4000 orders a week. And I’m like, all right, I saw this coming. But when you’re on the gold, take it. And so that, you know, that was really. That was really fun. So here’s what we here’s what we did. And I think a lot of times people try to overcomplicate things. Did we launch a thousand ads? No. Did we launch it? We launched a handful of ads. But here’s here’s what the guy did. He was obsessive about the authenticity of that video. So this woman is just talking in her bathroom. But there were these pauses. She was touching her face a certain way. She would, like, Pause and look around a little bit. You could see the wrinkles in her forehead. The. You know, we scaled up the images before we put it into the, you know, into it was a video, video.

Jason Kutasi 00:17:43  And so like the pores were just better like it just looked great. And the video editor working on it was at the end I was. The video was so good. I was like, so you were pretty much going to quit last week. And he’s like, you guys were just writing me, like just writing me like, do better, do better, do better. And so that was the that was the net result. And so, you know, there’s this balance between, you know, laser focused and just the shotgun approach. Right. So you give me a shotgun with a bunch of shells and, you know, a beer can on a tree stump. And I’m just like blindly ripping. Sure, I’m going to hit it. But if you also gave me a rifle, I’m definitely going to hit it. But the rifle, you’re not just ripping like you have to pause those slow dial in your scope, like there’s like work on the front end. And not to say that one is better than the other, I think they’re both kind of necessary.

Jason Kutasi 00:18:31  But yeah, it was just it was just a massive, massive day. And so we took a lot of learnings from that and rolled it into to ads for some of our other clients. But yeah. And so the quality of the actual video went up a lot. Now, look, the script was great. Like it was also happened to be a good script. Oh, there was one tip for your audience that we found. I don’t know why this works, but it does. We asked. We added in a towel rack in the back of the of the bathroom and for whatever reason, like the audio portion out of video got way, way better. Like, there was this echo, like she was in her bathroom, that my only thesis is that by adjusting the prompt afterwards and adding that in reinforce the fact that this woman was in her bathroom. And so Vail was like, oh, we really need to focus a little bit more on bathroom audio. And so anyway, it was super fun.

Jason Kutasi 00:19:23  I mean, I must have hit refresh a thousand times. I was in a I was in a great, great mood all weekend. But we’re only in this game to drive really, really fast. And yes, you know, we made a lot of money for the client. You know, they had a very good day also. It’s funny because they kept checking in to like, are we still on target? We sound like, yes, you guys are on target because meta has delayed attribution, but we’re real time. So I’m like, yeah, it’s all coming in because, you know, they’re looking in the ad accounts to see where we spent, not just the CRM to see those orders coming in. But yeah, that was a that was a fun day, which was crazy that it happened on the back end of January and February.

Josh Hadley 00:19:54  Yeah. No, that’s that’s why you keep pushing forward. Right. That’s entrepreneurship at its finest. It is always having that relentless optimism. But Jason follow up question on that.

Josh Hadley 00:20:04  So with Facebook or Meta’s new kind of like Andromeda update. Yeah. Is it a is it a volume game of creative? I mean, that used to be the case. It’s like, oh, you want better ad performance. You want to scale up faster. All right. Now go from ten, you know, creative pieces and feed it a hundred video pieces or something like that. What are you seeing working today and is it a volume game or is it just like you said, it’s actually like it’s primarily quality.

Jason Kutasi 00:20:29  Now it’s it’s both. But you know how much is too much. And I think that when you see guys that are running a tremendous amount of volume, often the quality isn’t there. And so you’re getting lucky. And so you’re running around with a shotgun, just fire and trying to hit this beer can and maybe get lucky. But like that’s luck. Not a strategy. I mean, it’s a strategy, but like you’re hoping to get lucky with that strategy. You’re just placing more bets at the roulette table, let’s say.

Jason Kutasi 00:20:55  But the big shift in Andromeda, which we had kind of always done, I guess. So we weren’t impacted by Andromeda as badly as I think we others others had been. And so the whole thing was around your audience was core, and so you could sell whatever you want. You’re selling fruit baskets, and you would set up the campaign that that campaign would have an apple seed, an apple space seed audience on an apple seed. And so all those creatives are targeting people who like an apple. And so if you’re selling fruit baskets, then you have another campaign for bananas and it’s very, very audience driven. Now the audience is matter, but like not nearly as much. And so the creative has to basically dictate whether it’s an Apple person or a banana person. Because of that, though, the one piece that I think people very frequently skip over is when you’re creative driven. You can slice thinner and thinner into a given avatar. And so what I mean by that is these are all the people that bought apples off of our Shopify store, and these are all the people that bought bananas.

Jason Kutasi 00:21:58  And that’s great. And sure, you could go in and slice and dice and go, well, this person bought three bananas and this person bought one banana. Great. But what you can do on the creative side with the avatars now is you basically just take somebody who likes apples and then you go, oh, well, now I’m also going to do applesauce and apple pie and apple slices, and I’m going to do men who like apple slices and women who like apple pie. And then I’m going to do older women who like apple pie and younger women, and then women from the South who might be, you know, very, you know, conservative Christian. And then you got women in San Francisco who were just, you know, more liberal, and you can just keep slicing that down. And the approach that we take or the way that I think about it anyway, and my, my team does is if you start with what the end goal is and then you work backwards. So what is the end goal on meta today? It is a large scale CBO with lots and lots of winners.

Jason Kutasi 00:22:44  And so as you start slicing down that fruit basket avatar by fruit, by gender, location, religious beliefs, age, kids, no kids, married, not married, ethnicities. Whatever it is that CBO gets bigger and bigger and bigger, which makes it more and more stable over time. And so, yes, creative velocity matters in the sense that I have to get to all of those slices, all those individual avatars. So I need some volume to get those avatars. But I’m not putting up 1065 year old women in Georgia who like apples. I’m not doing, you know, another thousand of bananas. Like. And then that’s just too much. You need to, on some level, be prescriptive and thoughtful about what you’re doing. Otherwise, you’re just going to be burning money. You want to burn money? Come over. We’ll have a whiskey. We’ll sit in the backyard. We’ll throw it in the fire pit. It’ll be a great night. We’ll have a fantastic time. But like, I prefer to not burn money.

Josh Hadley 00:23:34  Me too. No, I. So I love this, Jason. Here’s where I think it gets complicated. How in the world do I manage all of that? And you just talked about. I have a good video editor. It has a good script. It has like you’re using so many different tools and ultimately it comes down to the same. The age old question which is agency or in-house and when do you cross those barriers and platforms? I mean, you’ve scaled some very big companies in the past and you’ve worked with a lot of large companies. So what is the right answer? And I know it’s nuance, but when do you go use an agency. When do you build in-house.

Jason Kutasi 00:24:09  So I think there’s so there’s there’s four buckets. So one is freelancer. So you got a guy he’s working for you fractionally an internal media buyer or whatever. You got that guy. You have affiliate traffic. Maybe an affiliate is going to test your offer, whatever it is. So you got that guy, then you have what I would call an a full time internal guy or guys or team generally smaller.

Jason Kutasi 00:24:28  And then you have an agency. So it comes down to where you are in the life cycle. So if I’m starting a brand new brand, I know nothing about meta. I’ve never bought ads there. I suggest you go out and hire the lone wolf who’s got half a dozen clients, and who’s going to stand up some. Okay, adds, maybe he’s fantastic, by the way, and you get a chance to bring him in full time. It’s usually not the case, mostly because these are guys that want a like a lifestyle business. You know, I want to live in Costa Rica for six months, and then I want to move to New York for two months, and then Europe and then Bali or whatever. They don’t want a Joby job. So the reason. Like, what’s the what’s the goal of that stage or that business? It’s to test your funnel. That’s it. That’s it. And so you’re looking at your funnel metrics. How do you improve that funnel. And how do you get to a place where you really start to understand your AOV and your cohorts on a very, very basic level? Most times where we get brought in is on the back end of that is, the guy can only get it up to $5,000 a day.

Jason Kutasi 00:25:25  He doesn’t know how to spend more than that. And it’s fine, right? So like, you have an E-Class, Mercedes and I have a fryer. We’ll do it the other way around. Right. And we’re both racing on a track, but we’re going 60 miles an hour. It doesn’t matter. Right. And then you get up to 80 or 100. And maybe there’s a dude and a civic. And at 100 that starts like rattling. Right. And so the way that you drive a car at a faster speed is, is very different than the way you you drive it going 60 miles an hour, even a hundred miles an hour on the track. So anyway, the point is, is I think you start with a lone wolf fractional guy, and maybe he’s good. Maybe he’s not. Maybe you test two of them against each other or whatever, but you really want to manage your costs and you’re trying to figure out your funnel. Do I run, you know, eight books? Do I run 15 books? Do I run 20 books? I don’t know, like 20 books isn’t going to have the same conversion rate as ten.

Jason Kutasi 00:26:17  Ten is going to be more. So like you’re trying to find that sweet spot that that ultimately makes you the most amount of money. One common mistake I’ll see is guys will stand up and offer, and I’m like, well, I don’t want to pay anybody. And I happen to know some affiliates or an affiliate network or a guy said he would run this on a rev share or whatever it is. And I agree that I’m going to I’m going to front him $2500 or $5000 in test budget because if he, you know, hey, like you’re trying to attract them, like you have no risk. So run it and see what happens. If that fails, you are not getting him back. He’s like, I already tested it. It doesn’t work. No. We’ve made all these changes now. Cool. Give me another $5,000 to test. And I was an affiliate for years. That’s how I cut my teeth on performance. But, like, why do I want to go back? Like, I don’t that there’s like a million other offers I can run as an affiliate and then but let’s assume the you have this lone wolf and he sits and he tests and it’s going really well.

Jason Kutasi 00:27:06  And you’ve been in marketing for a while. So your funnel is better or whatever. You have two choices now. You either go agency or you try to build an internal team. For me, you’re going to get the easiest transition by moving to an agency then and then an internal team after that. So what’s the job of an agency and that like we are gasoline on the fire. So I’m going to be able to throw a lot more resources at your product than you can across a lot more channels. Because if you go and get TikTok and Yahoo and Google display and email and ask them like, dude, you, you literally just built an agency internal. Now over time, you can build all of those things out, all of those things out yourself. I would argue that in a good agency, I actually think most agencies are fucken trash. We tested probably a half a dozen with the book business. I fired all of them. So but their job is, is to basically, you know, accelerate, accelerate your growth.

Jason Kutasi 00:27:59  The benefit however, and I would still do this is build a team internally, even if it’s small, even if it’s a couple guys, for a variety of reasons. One, you’re probably going to share more details, more data with your media buyer. Maybe you have a new funnel. You don’t want the agency to just start running it. So you have your internal guy run some traffic to it and you’re testing the next offer, and then you get that offer dialed and then you kick it to the to the agency. More importantly, if for whatever reason, that agency doesn’t work and you can’t find another one, that’s good. You just created an entire choke point for your business. Like, do not do that. I have told every client forever. Build an internal team. Go get a couple guys. The hard part is, is you got to kiss a lot of frogs and you know. Well, how do I train them up? They’re getting training, and they’re gonna need a manager.

Jason Kutasi 00:28:45  And do I start with, like, the manager and then get the guys, you know, one level down. Now start with the guys, one level down. Just get them. Just manage them like normal. Normal people within your within your business. But really what you’re doing is you’re decoupling risk and you’re giving yourself the latitude or the grace to be more aggressive with budgets. You can and I don’t mean spending more, I mean losing more. Right? You’re going to spend you spend up three offers and this one’s not working. So we’re going to dial this one. But like it just gives you more control. You just have to be in control of your traffic and your offers.

Josh Hadley 00:29:13  Yeah Jason I love that comment. You talked about this, though, and which is definitely been my experience. Most of the agencies out there suck. Yeah. And so when you did that with the book business, like what did you do? And especially like I would argue you came from a unique like affiliate copywriting aspect.

Josh Hadley 00:29:30  So like you could get in there and nerd out on the offers. But like I would argue, like probably 80% of the brand owners. Like, they don’t they don’t have that skill set or expertise. And so they are relying on an agency. And even when it comes to hiring internal always easier said than done. So like, what did you do in that circumstance where it was like one agency after another, you cycled through five. Like, how were you a still profitable? And B how did you begin to scale up from there? What were the lessons learned and what did you do? What moves did you make?

Jason Kutasi 00:30:00  Yeah, I mean, so we were we were marketers, right? So we had an agency before we started the book business. So it’s kind of an unfair, unfair edge. And the vast, vast majority of our traffic was internal. But, you know, some of the agencies that we brought in. This is the hard part and is an agency owner, and I probably shouldn’t say, but I’m going to say because I believe it.

Jason Kutasi 00:30:19  And I think it’s important all of the agencies that we ran were founded by guys who are gangster, killer, cold traffic guys, all of them. I knew them all. We had kind of come up together. But what ends up happening is what’s that movie with Michael something or their duplicity, the copy of the copy of the copy. So we had this one girl on our account who is 23 years old, and we gave them all the audiences, all the lookalikes, like all the funnels. We knew it worked. We were running. But I was like, let’s just see if we can give this to them, get this particular book funnel working that Apple Book funnel, and then we’re going to go build the banana book funnel and work on that. And we’ll start stacking funnels for for top line growth. Dude, we have this advertorial that she sent us that was horrible. So I called her up. We’re a difficult client because we know how to drive a car fast. I will say that.

Jason Kutasi 00:31:06  And so I called her up and I was like, hey, I just went through the funnel. Here’s some of the very basic advertorial changes I suggest making. Oh, yeah. This is great, Jason. And so she, like, made some changes. Came back. It was still absolute trash. And we ended up losing a couple bucks because I had signed an agreement with some term. And then I was like, dude, I’m I called up the owner and I said, look, man, I have a real problem. And I sent him the the pages and she’s overspending and all of these things. He got on a plane, flew down, they had two offices, flew to the other office, basically fired half the people there, by the way. And, you know, we paid for the traffic. He refunded the entire fee. And so like and this is not a pitch for the agency. I just it’s how I think about agencies. Most guys don’t do this. But like we don’t put term in our contract.

Jason Kutasi 00:31:53  If you don’t want to work with me like just move out. Like I don’t know if you’ve ever lived with a woman and then you decide to break up if you’re still living together. It’s terrible. It’s the worst. You just don’t want to go home. Right? And so I was like, if you don’t wanna work with me, you can fire me at any point. And so yeah. So we so we do that. We have two times now refunded money to a client. And the last one was, oh God, what was it? $30,000. I wrote a cheque back to a client. Like agencies don’t do that. And I was like, look, man, I guess I could say I’m doing this for you, but I wasn’t. I was doing it for me. It just the guy was gambling really, who was buying the traffic and. Yeah. And so we’ve done that twice not to not a 30 grand, but I don’t know, it’s just like treat people the way you want to be treated.

Jason Kutasi 00:32:37  But back to my other point actually before I got distracted was it’s very, very important that the agency that you do decide to hire, it was probably founded by a guy who knows how to run traffic. And so really it’s like, what’s your training program look like? How does that information get disseminated? Because I know that the 30 people we have now, 25 it, 25 people today, you know, we were eight last January. But if I go to 100 or 250, I mean, how good is that person going to be? It’s the game of telephone. So, Josh, I train you to buy traffic. You know, I’m at ten. You’re a nine. You train in, the next guy is an eight. A seven. The next person might be a three. And so I think there’s, you know, there’s some value in understanding how close the person with, like, the really good media buyer, the really good creative strategist, like how close are they to the rest of that, to the rest of that team.

Josh Hadley 00:33:28  Yeah. Oh, fantastic words of wisdom. And again, I think like my takeaway too is like get to know the owner. Like don’t definitely don’t just talk to the sales rep whoever like be the account manager. Like get to know the owner. Because in those situations like whether it’s you guys or another agency, it’s like, yeah, you want to understand like what their processes are because like, bigger is not always better, right? And oftentimes it’s probably even worse for that sole reason of the the telephone game. It’s like the the quality just gets diluted and diluted over and over again. If you’re a new brand, guess what? You’re you ain’t going to be talking with the best account manager or the best creative strategist. You’re like, you’re just the new guy on the totem pole. So yeah, fantastic insights there. Jason. And I also loved your approach of like build while you’ve outsourced, build in-house while you’ve outsourced to an agency. Yeah. And run it simultaneously. I think that’s super important.

Josh Hadley 00:34:21  And this isn’t this isn’t just for the meta advertising or performance marketing game. I think this applies across the board. If you’re going to go higher in agency for even Amazon PPC management, it’s like, good, go hire a team member that can go take a couple of those products and go replicate the exact same systems. And Alex or Moz talks about that. It’s like I’m going to start working with an agency, letting them know, hey, here’s the guy that’s meant to replace you. Train him on the exact same systems that you’re doing.

Jason Kutasi 00:34:47  And yeah, there’s I mean, we do this all the time. I mean, one of our clients, they paid me to consult their internal media team. And, you know, maybe I’m an idiot for doing it. I think that our team is going to be better trained because they’re trained by me every day than, you know, than the weekly or biweekly coaching call that they have. But, you know, I can, you know, shortcut some things.

Jason Kutasi 00:35:09  I was like, dude, here’s how we’re testing today. Here’s why we’re testing. And how we tested yesterday is not how we test today, and it’s not the way that we’re going to test tomorrow. We just switch back to ad set budgets about a month ago from CBO. And yeah. And so like there’s that piece. So you know, I tell them like don’t do CBO do ad set budgets. Here’s why. Here’s the data that supports it. I also think another benefit of an agency, too, is like we see a lot of verticals. So, you know, telemedicine, health, beauty, lead gen like all the all the things pretty and and so we can see those trends. So like what are the audiences that are performing the best or what’s the account structure. What’s the time of day. And then there’s good days and bad days on meta and there and those days are super obvious. You’re like, every single client got crushed today or every single client hit today. It just happens.

Jason Kutasi 00:35:53  And so yeah, and then I would also say, don’t be afraid to test agencies against each other. As an agency owner, I don’t like it. But like, you know, I, I don’t know, like put me in a race like, let’s see who’s faster. And so I don’t know, there’s there’s that like competitive aspect that I kind of like. A bunch of my friends who have agencies there like no full exclusivity. Like now it’s a little bit harder if somebody just hired, you know, hires us for meta versus like, you need you’re you’re in charge of retention and meta and YouTube. And we really look at the multi-touch attribution model. Dude another agency comes in. That is so hard. It’s just super, super dirty data. But for the vast majority of the people listening to this podcast is not going to make a difference. Yeah. And so don’t be afraid of that too. So the way I think about it.

Josh Hadley 00:36:35  Yeah, I love it. Totally aligned with that.

Josh Hadley 00:36:38  Jason, there’s one final thing that I want to hit on before we wrap things up today. And that is like, where is the e-commerce space in marketing overall headed with AI? I mean, it continues to change on a daily basis, but let’s make some predictions here over the next 6 to 12 months. Like where do you see the E-comm and AI space going?

Jason Kutasi 00:36:56  So I’ll tell you generally where I see it going and just where where we’re going, which is an offshoot of that. So ads funnels, the whole thing are being commoditized, right? I mean, you could commoditized the whole thing all the way through Shopify. If you’re dropshipping from AliExpress like. And so you can make videos. You can have cloud right copy. You can do all of those things. I still think today a good copywriter. The output from cloud that they get is better than the output than 98% of people because they like if you’re, you know, you and I are both in Ferraris now back on the track, but you used to be a race car driver.

Jason Kutasi 00:37:32  You’re just going to beat me. I remember there was this guy I used to work with who wanted to be a NASCAR driver, and we went to the go karting thing. I forget what it’s called, but like, you know, the little go karts and the indoor track or whatever. The guy lapped me three times. Not just me. I wasn’t like in the back, but I’m like, how do you like, we’re in the same car. And he’s like, yeah, most of the problem is, is that you don’t know how to not lose speed into turns by like, when do you brake? When do you hit the gas? My thing was like, my tires just kept breaking out all the time. Right. So like, your back end breaks out and all you’re doing is hitting the brakes. So he maintains speed. And so I still think for for a while. Anyway, somebody who is a race car driver will do better than a Ferrari than somebody who isn’t. And that’s mostly around copy.

Jason Kutasi 00:38:16  I think copy is the most important. Just it’s the salesman in any job forever, the person who makes the most amount of money is the salesman. And so that’s where the that’s where the value is. And then I think, okay, cool. Well the videos that’s crazy. Just like the, the quality of videos that you can have generated. And then, you know, meta is like, oh, you know, just let let meta make all the decisions. And you know, it’s so smart and it’s so amazing. It’s super smart. However, what are the two metrics that Medicare is the most about? They care about engagement and they care about CPM. Why do they care about engagement? Because the more time you spend on platform, the more ad inventory is created for them to sell. And then what do they care about after that? How much are we selling that ad inventory for? And so you have misaligned interests. So we’ve been spending a lot of our time now is really around the, you know, predictive and, you know, the predictive modeling and then around the rules.

Jason Kutasi 00:39:10  It’s not just rules. It’s not like if you see do this, but like very AI driven statistical models to make decisions. And so I ran this test on our landers, just the landing pages. We have guys watching. We clip hourly. Like we don’t run 24 hours a day ever. That’s also if you want to come over and have some whiskey and burn some money in my backyard, we can do that, but whatever. Don’t run 24 hours of it’s bad day like it’s stupid anyway, so, you know, we’ll have two landers and the guys are, like, watching it, and they’re like, they’re trying to wait for some statistical relevance and so on and so forth. We would have saved our clients or reallocated the budget, depending on how you want to look at it. $1.5 million. If we had used that model to make decisions on our landing pages, 1.5 million doing nothing different. And so where I think this whole thing is going, and I see people talking about this modeling and what they’re doing, they’re not doing it the way that we are, and which is also kind of wild to me, but whatever.

Jason Kutasi 00:40:01  They’re like, oh, apples are doing really well. And like we tell you that apples are doing really well. So like make more apples. I’m going deep and super granular. And so really the future, the way that I see it is if I can make 1000 ads an hour, we use predictive modeling for red, yellow, green. And if it’s red, that never gets run. If it’s yellow, you only have a little bit of traffic to basically see if it correlates to the underwriting that you have. And then if it’s grainy, let it run. And still if it doesn’t work, you clip it. So really trying to take the decisions out of the human element totally out of it. We’re not there yet. Like we have the modeling, but we still have guys sitting in the driver’s seat of self-driving cars. And I just think that that is really going to be the I think that is going to be the future. It is. Meta’s meta would beat us, I think, because they have so much more data.

Jason Kutasi 00:40:47  But it goes back to they have misaligned interests like we have found performance better on meta. When you scrub some of the revenue that you send back to meta, like, think about that for a second. So you have a $100 product. And you told meta that, yeah, I want this product for $100. And then you’re like, yeah, like we don’t, you know, we only send 80% of the conversions back. So it’s like we actually don’t do that. We actually shave the price because I want to know who bought. But like the average price is 80 bucks. And then we see better performance on that. And then you think okay, you know for the people listening you’re like, oh, you can accomplish this with big caps and stuff. Yeah. But like meta is running it for them. So you have your target, but they know how much revenue all of your competitors are generating from their products at what price points. And they like, they seem to just kind of figure it out a little bit.

Jason Kutasi 00:41:35  And I want the competitive edge that other people don’t have. And so I think it’s going around I think it’s going back to to data.

Josh Hadley 00:41:42  I love that, Jason. Love that last little tip that you shared there, scrubbing the data back to meta. But I love the way that you articulated that AI. Most people are looking at AI in terms of like, oh, I’m just setting up this bot, and this bot is going to go run things for me. Great. If you have some like I would say like basic kind of like SOP driven tasks that just need to be executed. Great. Let a bot run at it. However, the analogy with the race car driver in there, it’s totally on point. And that’s the way I see AI being utilized the best over the next. Even I don’t know, like I’ll say five years, then I’ll come back and watch this and laugh at myself. But I mean.

Jason Kutasi 00:42:20  For a while it’s going to be a while. For a while.

Josh Hadley 00:42:23  Yeah, I don’t think humans are going extinct anytime soon. And I do think that, like that race car driver, like the copywriter is just going to get amplified and be able to do 100 X now better than what they’re doing today. And so what I think AI does is it augments who you already are and let you go ten times faster. And so I still think like $100 million brand built with one guy and a bunch of AI bots. It probably happens, but I don’t see it as like a sustainable business. But what I do see is some wicked smart marketers and a team of people that are all leveraging AI and all the admin is taken care of, but they are utilizing it to create sophisticated models, right? Just as you talked about. They’re using it to enhance their copy and test, copy and iterate even faster. So I don’t think the humans are going away. I think that they’re more like just exponentially outperforming others because they now have these tools that make the decisions faster. They’re able to iterate more quickly and more accurately at the end of the day.

Josh Hadley 00:43:25  And that’s what I’m excited about, where.

Jason Kutasi 00:43:26  I think I think that, you know, the I was listening to a podcast with, I can’t remember it was, oh, it was when Lenny’s podcast, I think with Marc Andreessen. And he’s like, look, it’s really simple. If you’re a good coder, AI just turned, you know, ten x to you if you’re an amazing coder, they just 100 x to you. And so, you know, if we have really good copywriters, let’s say they can just create a lot more copy. And then you bolt on the feedback loop that we have with the data and so like and then it also learns. But there’s still today a piece of the tastemaker right. Otherwise you don’t go say make me an ad and you look at this ad and you’re like, it’s perfect every time. No it’s not. You’re like, go make me five ads. I hate these two. This one, let’s see it. And I really like these other two.

Jason Kutasi 00:44:08  And so there’s still this like tastemaker quality and in marketing. And there will be for a while five years I don’t know maybe maybe a little bit longer. But I can say is that the longer you and I race you as the race car driver and the same exact Ferrari on the same track, over time, I’m going to get closer and closer to you not catching up. But like if we race every time our our times are going to get closer and closer. But I don’t know, you’re going to get better too. Every time we race. So am I going to pass you one day? Maybe. Maybe we’re sleepy that morning when you woke up and I don’t know, then I pass you. But yeah, I’m with you on this.

Josh Hadley 00:44:43  Yeah. Fun conversation. I’m sure we’ll look back a year from now and say like, man, how much? Everything. But love the predictions and love the insights here, Jason, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode.

Josh Hadley 00:44:56  Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing something. Number one, we started this conversation with Amazon secretly killing your business, especially if you’re an Amazon first brand, and it all came down to AOV. So my first action item for you is if you have a low cost item. Yeah. Or long story short, if you don’t have a product that gets you $60 in margin every time you sell it, then you’ve got some work to do. And Jason elaborated on a few things. There’s obviously subscription revenue that we could look into, but bundling is a big component of it. You may even have a bunch of $20 products that you need to sell only as a bundle on your website, or you need to come out with a sister brand and just raise the price from 20 to $100 and increase the perceived value of that product. So but at the end of the day, if you want to scale a big brand, I think it’s very hard. It’s very rare to get a commodity brand.

Josh Hadley 00:45:49  I look at like a lot of the, you know, deodorant type businesses. And the only way that they they can sell a stick of deodorant on Amazon, that’s fine. But if you look at it, if you funnel hack and here’s a actually a really good scenario. Magic spoon, probably my favorite. A box of cereal. Who in the world is going to buy a box of cereal on an e-commerce website like the unit? Economics don’t even make sense. Well guess what? If you go to Magic Spoons website, they force you. The only thing you can do is like buy a bundle of six boxes of cereal. It’s expensive. It’s like still $4,050 just for cereal in and of itself. but like, take a page out of their book. And that’s the way that you’re able to scale a big brand. And I think arguably, like if you want to get to 100 million and beyond, you have to implement something like that. So that’s actually item number one. Action item number two is going into the agency versus in-house situation.

Josh Hadley 00:46:42  And Jason, you kicked it off by saying, hey, you should honestly go go start with a good freelancer. You may have to kiss a lot of frogs, but like go find somebody that can at least like get you a product market fit to say, hey, there is something here and it is the juice is worth squeezing over here. You just need to get things tested. And again, it may take a couple freelancers to get it dialed in a little bit. But then you talked about adding an agency to really turn up the volume on that and whilst simultaneously building your in-house team. I loved what you talked about with, hey, add an in-house team. They start working on maybe some of the new offers or the new funnels that you want to test, get them kind of working, get your beta test out of the way, then go give it to an agency to go light it on fire and to just amp up the volume. So I think that that is good words of wisdom across like not just performance marketing itself, but across anything that you want to outsource to any agency, whether it’s TikTok shop, Amazon, PPC management, etc..

Josh Hadley 00:47:40  I think the most valuable thing that you can obtain is human intellect. And I think that, like the biggest arbitrage that exists now and will continue to exist in the future, is like one higher can have exponential returns in your business. Somebody that unlocks something with the next right mindset for you. It’s always easier said than done, but even in the world of AI, I don’t think that goes away. So that goes into my third and final action item, which is hey, don’t be scared of AI. You do need to figure it out, but you need to figure it out while still having the humans as the race car drivers in those autonomous vehicles. just like, you know, just as we look at the world today with Tesla and things like that. Yes, there is autopilot and it works, but like, you still have to have somebody driving that car. And again, I think the world changes in the coming years. But for where we’re at today, I think that the most important thing that you can do is truly associate yourselves and build out your network, which again, Jason talked about is network, how he’s he’s never done hanging out with people because his vast network is so vast.

Josh Hadley 00:48:41  But Jason, that’s why I would also say, like, you’re very successful because you’ve surrounded yourself with very like just smart people at the top of their field. And so the more entrepreneurs hang out like you are with who you hang out the most with. Right. And so that’s my third and final action item, AI. Leverage it. But the most important thing you can do is bring in really, really smart people to your business. Let them harness AI. They I know that if I hire a good copywriter or a great copywriter and let them do AI, I mean, they’ll still run circles around me, even though I might have cloud code or something on my side. So, Jason, those are my three action items. Anything else you feel like I missed or should have added?

Jason Kutasi 00:49:21  No, I thought this was this was great. This was the content, at least for me. You get in the habit of saying a lot of the same stories over and over, and a lot of new stuff here, so thanks for pulling it out of me.

Jason Kutasi 00:49:31  no, but I thought I thought it was great.

Josh Hadley 00:49:33  Jason, final three questions for you then. What’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Jason Kutasi 00:49:36  Cash flow. So when I got into direct response, it was it just sort of like. It’s like, how to be a better salesman. That was a that’s a must read for all new hires. So like just think about how to sell with your keyboard a great book.

Josh Hadley 00:49:54  I have not heard that book before.

Jason Kutasi 00:49:55  So that’s.

Josh Hadley 00:49:56  Good. That is a writer downer right there.

Jason Kutasi 00:49:58  Yeah, it’s a good one.

Josh Hadley 00:49:59  All right, Jason, I know you’ve got probably lots of answers to this one, but what’s your favorite AI tool that you’ve been using and how have you been using it?

Jason Kutasi 00:50:05  Cloud code I’m on the verge of divorce. If I keep going to this usage, this usage, it’s like crack. I can’t, I just can’t stop today. I’m just knocking off small things that are super annoying. And so my favorite example, which I did earlier in the cloud code thing, is like I found out how long one of the guys was taking to upload manually or a guy on his team.

Jason Kutasi 00:50:26  We had like a media ops guy and they just upload all these ads, but I’m like, this is insane. I would never do this. The cost of the guy a month is nothing. But I’m like, this is like it just irked me so much. And so that took a day. And yes, there were some, some issues like, oh, I actually want to change this and tweak this and whatever, but Claude code is just. I don’t know, it’s. Claude itself is getting closer to Claude code. But Claude code just lets you do so much stuff. Yeah, I’m. I’m cracked on it. It’s like all I want to do all day. I do love my wife, by the way. And my my my kids. But I’m like, there’s this piece of me that’s like, I just want to play more Call of Duty. It’s that same. We were talking about this at the beginning. It’s that same, like dopamine hit, just like boom, boom, boom.

Jason Kutasi 00:51:05  So fun.

Josh Hadley 00:51:06  So totally agree. And it just gets better and better every day. So that’s the fun part. Yeah. All right. Third and final question here. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-comm space that other people should be following in?

Jason Kutasi 00:51:16  Why? The guy who got me into the affiliate space actually was a guy by the name of Jason Akita, and he probably has grown more affiliates than anybody else. He has what I think is the best AI telegram group. It’s about 100 guys, super, super active. But because of his background now at this point in my career, two most of those guys are marketers. And so they’re just like, they’re all talking about how to use AI in marketing. He’s had some e-com brands. He, you know, isn’t just running with affiliates and stuff anymore. But that guy historically has been more gracious with his time and teaching and training than, you know, most people in the affiliate space.

Josh Hadley 00:51:54  Fantastic. Well, Jason, this has been super fascinating podcast interview.

Josh Hadley 00:51:58  If people would like to learn more about you, learn more about your agency. Where’s the best place for people to reach out to you?

Jason Kutasi 00:52:03  Twitter is always the best, which my handle is just Jason Kutasi super, super creative. So I’m really easy. I’m really easy to find. You know, we have a website, but I don’t know, we’re not too active with the leads there. But you know, if you’re interested in what we’re doing with AI or have questions about, dude, it’s always Twitter. So that’s the that’s the best place.

Josh Hadley 00:52:21  Fantastic. Well, Jason, thanks again for joining us today.

Jason Kutasi 00:52:24  I appreciate you having me. Dude. This is great. It was very fun.

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