Damon is a powerhouse in the world of wellness and e-commerce — someone whose leadership journey combines global experience, deep product expertise, and a relentless commitment to quality. I’m thrilled to welcome back Damon Sununtnasuk, the founder and CEO of Natural Cure Labs — the company behind the Palmara Health and VitaTails brands, known for their research-driven, USA-manufactured supplements for both people and pets. Crushing it on Tiktok, Walmart, Target.com & Amazon.com

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

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Damon Sununtnasuk, founder and CEO of Natural Cure Labs. They discuss strategies for scaling wellness brands using social commerce, with a focus on TikTok and the balance between AI-generated and human-created content. Damon shares insights on leveraging AI for cost-effective, compliant marketing, building and managing global creator teams, and the technical challenges of scaling content. The episode concludes with actionable tips, book and tool recommendations, and reflections on the future of e-commerce and AI-driven commerce.

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

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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.

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 go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:00:00  Again, like of the 8000 cleaners, we have 90% of dormant. Right. And who’s in charge of, like, keeping these guys engaged and educated and enthusiastic? You kind of need someone to sort of be that cheerleader, but also to help and like, understand, like, okay, this person, you know, needs requires a little bit of extra attention here. Or, you know, I think that’s that’s a big bet we’ve made. And we just brought the person on within the last 30 days.

Intro 00:00:24  Welcome to the Ecomm 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 00:00:37  Everybody wants to know the secret how to go viral on TikTok, how to make money on TikTok shop and ultimately, how to get more views on TikTok. Today’s guest has done exactly that scaling a wellness brand from a tiny startup to an Amazon bestseller and even trending on TikTok.

Josh Hadley 00:00:55  You’re about to hear exactly how he’s done it. Welcome to the Ecomm 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 unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in the e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael E Gerber, and Brandon Young from day to dive and Cellar systems. Today’s guest is a powerhouse in the world of wellness and e-commerce, someone whose leadership journey combines both global experience, deep product expertise, and a relentless commitment to quality. I’m thrilled to welcome back onto the show Damon Sunan to the founder and CEO of Natural Cure Labs, the company behind Palmyra Health and Vida Tales brands known for their research driven USA manufactured supplements for both people and pets. He’s crushing it on TikTok, Walmart, target.com and Amazon with that introduction. Welcome back to the show, Damon.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:01:59  It’s great to be back. Josh.

Josh Hadley 00:02:01  Damon. you and I have crossed paths, multiple times since the last time we talked and had you on the podcast.

Josh Hadley 00:02:07  And every time we’ve talked, you’ve shared, like, just some wicked smart strategies. And in fact, you, you presented to the MD’s Million Dollar Seller Summit and you won the best speaker award there. So I’m teaching you up here to let the audience know that’s listening right now. Like, this guy’s got some real meat and potatoes that he’s going to pack into today’s conversation. And so like listen up. There’s going to be a lot. We’re going to dive into the weeds of like how to crush it on TikTok shop. What effect that has over onto Amazon. And really just like how to raise more brand awareness and what’s working today in getting more views on TikTok shops. So, Damon, with that, glad to have you back on here since we last talked. what’s kind of working in the world of TikTok right now that you think our, our listeners need to know about.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:03:01  All right, Joshua, that’s a really flattering intro and it’s my pleasure to be here again. I’m a big fan of yours in the podcast, and it’s awesome to be back back in the hot seat with you.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:03:11  Look, TikTok, as you know, is, is an environment and marketplace and, and platform, which is always changing. And just like everyone who has been on Amazon for long enough, you know, that, like, things are, they’re not really evergreen. They’re always, shifting. And the latest thing that we’re seeing right now is just the absolute dominance of, AI produced content. And it’s really interesting. Some research that we’ve done on our side suggests that, half 52% of all short format content on YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels, etc. is all AI generated, right? 58% of all the advertising you see on YouTube. AI generated and some of the more provocative studies suggest that. Of all the new content being uploaded to Pinterest today, up to 90% of it is also AI generated. And so that leads you to a question. It’s like, oh my gosh. Like, Does this make sense? Is there a reason behind all this AI content and and is it actually working? And I believe that, yeah, it does.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:04:23  And my my question that I posed to our colleagues at MDS and others is like, does it even matter that it’s that it’s AI generated? If you look at the demographic, makeup and composition of TikTok users, the vast majority, 56% are Gen Z. And I believe that Gen Z really just doesn’t care that it’s AI generated. I think that they care about the emotional value, the storytelling, the, the experience that they receive from the content, not necessarily the source of the content. And I think that in ly therein lies the, the sort of the crux of the argument around like, whether or not we should invest or pursue or consider AI based content. so from our perspective, that’s kind of been the focus over the last quarter is better understanding AI’s place in terms of content generation, how it lands with different audiences on TikTok, and how to do it at scale so that you’re not spending hours a day generating AI content that doesn’t get any views.

Josh Hadley 00:05:33  I love that, and I think it is really fascinating, to dive into the world of AI because I think it’s like a hate love relationship, right? Where it’s like it’s a lot of time to invest and try to figure it out.

Josh Hadley 00:05:46  And then there’s also the people that, you know, there’s also a lot of studies where people like humans as they read content. They’ve actually proven like humans are actually pretty smart at being able to say, read and say this. This feels like it’s written by AI. Right. And so likewise, especially if you’re watching a video, a lot of people are going to question that. But I think what’s interesting is like, look, AI is here to stay. I think AI like there will be AI written content. There’s going to be AI videos. In fact, I would like those numbers that you shared. Super fascinating. 52% on TikTok, 58% on YouTube AI content. Okay, that number is probably going to be approaching 8,090%, within maybe a year or two on a quick timeline, right? So that’s the that’s the scary thing, but also see it as an opportunity itself. So, Damon, I’m curious to hear from your perspective, I know you’ve kind of done a study even for your own brand.

Josh Hadley 00:06:45  Like how much does it cost to work with a human creator to produce content. First, how much do I have to invest to spit out, you know, an AI produced video that is at least halfway decent that people are going to like, want to learn more? Or at least create good brand awareness for your product. So maybe walk me through kind of the way you’re approaching social commerce now with AI and humans at the same time. Or maybe you’re trying to move away completely from humans and you’re just you’re in the land of robots. talk to me about that.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:07:22  Yeah. Great question, Josh. And, not not completely in the land of robots quite yet, but we have taken a hard look at our creator relationships and portfolio, and the numbers are were quite striking, frankly. So looking at our creator recruitment efforts over the last few months, we’ve onboarded something like 8000 unique creators, probably very similar to your efforts. Josh. the challenge with this, and it sounds like a very flattering, very high number.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:07:51  And, the team should be very proud for the relationships that they formed. The challenge is that, over the last, I think it was 90 days. Our lens was that 95% of those 8000 didn’t create any new content. Right. And so we spent all this effort and time researching, doing outreach, onboarding, sending samples, training, coaching, nurturing just to have a group of folks who are not producing. And of the 5% that did produce a further 9% were rather low performing videos. And we defined low performing as a GMV of less than $100. So when the numbers shake out, really there were 841 videos produced in the last, let’s say, 30 days. And of those, only 47 were considered like high quality or high performing videos, and that’s a lot of effort for a very small outcome, right? When you look at some of the numbers behind this, it’s not exactly cheap to maintain and recruit a creator community. From our calculations, on average, it costs around $55 to recruit and onboard a new affiliate.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:09:10  That’s taking into account the agencies that we use, the tools that we use. We have a dedicated employee internally to help with this sample, shipping things of that nature. On average, it takes about three weeks to produce the very first video, and again on average around three and a bit hours of sort of back and forth between the brand and the affiliate to help coach them and train them and help them feel supported. And and then an additional $31 on average to boost their content using Spark Ads and GMB Max. That’s in total approximately $86 per affiliate video produced. Looking at our own internal numbers, the return on an average video from a human creator is around $68. Of course, some are, you know, really high performing and some may go viral, but on average you look at all the videos produced. It’s around $68. That’s actually a negative ROI. When you think about it. Compare that with an AI produced video. And again, we’re not kidding ourselves. Like people understand that it’s AI content, but we are we’re operating under the hypothesis that it’s not the fact that it’s AI that matters.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:10:19  What matters is. Again, like the storytelling, the value, the emotional experience, etc. that you’re providing and looking at the monthly costs of some of these tools. So for example, headroom is around $30 per month and hedgerow is what you use to develop the sort of the talking head. Right. The the animated AI experience. And then you have a program called Levin Labs, which is, I would argue, one of the best voiceover options out there. And that’s about $22 per month. And these are both systems that operate on a credit system. Both products operate on a credit system. You get around 4000 credits for Hydra, 100,000 credits for 11 labs. And when you chunk those up into 32nd videos, you can create, I think it’s, 30, or so Hydra videos per month using, their credits. And you can easily cover that in terms of the number of videos you can make with, 11 labs. VoiceOver. So in total, when you sort of, break out, okay, these are the 32nd videos that we’re able to create with using our credits.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:11:26  You can, the average video cost is around $2.05 per videos. an order of magnitude cheaper than what you might pay. recruiting and training and supporting a Creator. When we look at the the AI returns per video, we see that each AI video can produce on average around $32 of of GMV. So that’s an ROI of 15 x compared to what a typical creator video would be. And in addition to being a little bit cheaper to produce and higher returning performance, you have a lot more control when you’re in a space such as ours that, relies on, strict adherence to compliance. The last thing you want is, is someone inadvertently making a claim or talking about a cure or something of that nature that could get both the creator in trouble and the brand. At least when you’re producing on your own, using your own tools and scripts and, and and AI, you have ultimate control over what the experience is and what the Tok track is and what the hashtags are and what the description is. So is you’re able to be a lot more dialed in as it relates to what you would like your audience to hear and understand, but also the compliance adherence.

Josh Hadley 00:12:45  I love that, and I think it makes a lot of sense to be able to have more control. You’re also more in control of like how many videos do you want to put out, right? All of it. You have more control other outside of the human element. Now I’m interested to dive in before we dive into the real nuts and bolts of the like, how you’re setting up this AI strategy, because we’re going to get deep into that. Like who’s creating the script? Who’s managing this process, how are you posting it? How many accounts does this go to? We’re going to get into all those weeds. But before we get there, you told me like you’re not doing away with the humans. They’re still going to be in there. All right. Why don’t you share with the audience? Kind of like what is your team look like that is supporting your creators because you just you outlined a few things, like you’ve got somebody that’s maybe coaching your creators. You’ve got somebody that’s interacting almost in terms of like customer service to an extent with your creators, somebody that’s approving or giving out samples and things like that.

Josh Hadley 00:13:48  Walk me through, you know, what your team looks like. That is, you know, compiling like this overall cost to like, hey, it’s 50 bucks before we even get a video. because of all the overhead, the sample cost, fulfillment, etc.. Walk me through that.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:14:05  That’s right. Yeah. So our team is is, changing pretty dramatically in real time to try to accommodate and best optimize for the creator experience. Like I said, we’re not doing away with our career relationships. We absolutely love them. And we treat them like family, like part of our organization. And we do our best to send thank you gifts and personalized notes and little things to sort of express our our admiration of their support and their collaboration. So I hope that It. My setup around AI did not demean any of that, but, our current setup is as. As such, we have an agency which focuses on identification and outreach. So we’ve developed what we consider like our ICP for creators. And so we know the type of person we’re looking for that’s the best reflection of our brand, our values and how we want to communicate our, our offering.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:14:56  And then the agency goes and tries to find these people in various ways, right? Manually searching through TikTok, Instagram and other social media profiles or using a tool like Yuka, reach or AI, right? They have pretty powerful tools as it relates to uncovering potential creators, and then we use a combination of both manual and automated outreach. So when it comes to outreach, we split it into what we’re calling sort of broad or mass outreach and hyper targeted outreach. From a broad outreach perspective, we send literally thousands of messages per day, Again, trying to focus on particular creators that align with with various products because the response rate is very low. It used to it didn’t used to be this way, but everyone has sort of caught on to the mass outreach game here, and you can expect a response rate of less than 0.2 percent, right. So it’s very, very low. So for every 10,000 messages you send, you’ll get a handful of responses back. Right. And the responses you get back from Mass Outreach may still not be the qualified individual you’d love to partner with, like some of them may not have the profile that exactly is a good fit.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:16:07  Or perhaps the content that they produce is is just not aligned from a compliance perspective. So like you get further loss when it comes to like those like clearing through and qualifying those responses. But it’s still important because there’s still a lot of creators out there that would love to then have a great profile and love to participate. They just don’t know who you are. So one aspect is like using bots like Reacher or Yuka to do a lot of that outreach for you. We have just like an email flow that you might see in Clavijo. There’s an initial outreach that’s sort of like, you know, talks about the brand, the value and the the the potential to collaborate. Sends a follow up message that sort of reiterates some of that and with a little bit more urgency. And there’s a final message that says, hey, look, we’re not here to to pester you. We just love to, to partner, if at all possible. Right. On the opposite extreme, you have targeted outreach, and this is a lot more of a surgical approach.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:17:01  We know who our ICP is. We know the type of creator that is the perfect match. And we go to try to find these community leaders. And this is very, very manual. So we’ll we’ll look using hashtags or keywords or general search on different media platforms and and then construct a very, very, personalized outreach. So we’ll spend probably 45 minutes crafting the, the best outreach. Because I am I’m very convinced that you only get one opportunity to make a first impression. And these create the best creators are probably solicited quite a bit, right? And the generic like, hey love what you’re doing. Like we have this product, do you want to go promote it? For me, that’s never going to cut through the noise, that’s never gonna show the creator that you actually care and actually spent the time to learn who they are and why they’re a good fit. And so we we take the time, right? So we take the time to find the creators, put them in a short list, and then we deep dive.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:17:54  We watch at least 20, 30 minutes of their content, take tons of notes, try to understand who they are. You know what, you know what their motivations are, what are they trying to do as part of their personal brand? And then we try to align ourselves with that during our outreach because, again, you only have one chance to make a first impression. So those are two ways of outreach. And for the majority, our agency helps us with that mostly in the mass outreach, the target outreach, we bring that in-house. We have a dedicated person who helps with our community management. And so the process is okay. So we identify our potential creators. We do the outreach either mass or targeted. When the creator expresses interest we have a bit of an onboarding experience for them. first we we asked for their email because people I think are really overwhelmed and saturated with the Creator Center DMs or even DMs through other platform like direct on TikTok or Instagram. What’s nice about getting their email is you get to put them through a flow.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:18:53  So like many e-commerce companies, we use Clavijo. So we give them an onboarding flow where we tell them, hey, here’s our brand story, here’s a little bit about, our, you know, our background in history and why why we matter and sort of the pillars that we like to talk about as it relates to quality and transparency and trust. and then we, you know, have another series about the products themselves and another series about best practices, another series about compliance. Because, again, for our industry compliance, it’s kind of like the the make or break aspect of of doing anything. and, you know, staying within your lane. So we have this onboarding flow. Of course we this all happens simultaneously when we send out the product samples, because we want people to experience the product. Try it for a few weeks, you know, see how they how their they personally, you know, relate to the product. And then so they can tell their story. And then just before the first video goes live, we always send them what we call like a mini script, which is not 100% like, hey, this is what you say, please parrot it back in your video.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:19:56  It’s more of like a like, hey, have you considered these angles because you’re using this product? This product has worked really well for other people in this way. Maybe this is something that you consider just so they’re not starting from scratch. You know, it’s not not a blank page for them.

Josh Hadley 00:20:08  It’s like you’ve kind of like dissected like some of the top hooks that have gone viral from other creators and some of the scripts that they’ve used. And you’re just saying, hey, here’s some of those scripts, here’s some of those hooks that you can use. Please use these as like a starting point as a frame of reference to. Then go put your own unique spin on it. Is that the way you’re using it?

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:20:29  We at one point we were that explicit by saying, hey, these are the winning hooks that we’ve seen performed super well. You should consider trying them. We don’t necessarily do that anymore. What we do offer our reference videos. So Reacher has a tool called the flywheel, where it just automatically curates a dynamic list of the highest performing videos that you have, either in terms of views or GMB.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:20:50  And it puts them into one page so the creator can go look. It’s like, hey, what have other creators done before me that have worked really, really well? And so we allow other creators sort of do some of that coaching on our behalf. What we don’t want to take away from the the influencers are their sort of creative liberties, right? We never want to be ultra prescriptive unless it comes to compliance, of course. So the last step is giving those reference videos say, hey, like if you want to be inspired by what’s worked well in the past. Here are some examples for you. And then we let them produce the first video. After the first video is produced. Then we offer them what we call like a feedback loop. We watch every video, every single video that’s been made for us. We watch and then we try to provide a little bit of coaching and of course in like the like the criticism sandwich style, where we thank them for, hey, this is an we love what you’ve done.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:21:45  Like thank you for being a part of our community. Here are some considerations for how to make your your video a little bit more high impact in the future. And again, thanks for everything you do. We’re really, really looking forward to the next video and that we call it a feedback loop. It’s because like with every video that’s produced, we provide this feedback. And I think it does a couple things. One is it signals to the creator that like, we care like we’re actually looking like we’re not some faceless, nameless brand who just like, asks you to make a video and then walks away. Like, we literally watch every video. And I think that that provides a sense of motivation and pride for the creator to produce something of high quality. And secondarily is, you know, we do believe that it helps improve quality over time. It helps keep the creator safe in terms of compliance, but also helps us disseminate some of the best practices we’ve seen over literally thousands of videos.

Josh Hadley 00:22:38  are you are you proactively reaching out? Like, are you like tracking each of these creators, or are they submitting the video to you or notifying you like, hey, I just I just posted my video.

Josh Hadley 00:22:50  Or are you proactively like, they don’t even know you’re looking.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:22:53  We’re very proactive. Yeah. So in the TikTok affiliate center you can see the videos that like by day, what new video has been posted. And that’s what we do. We like every single day what new videos are posted.

Josh Hadley 00:23:04  So full time person like is this, is this still like the community manager then?

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:23:09  Yeah. So we’re expanding this this element actually. So we just hired another individual to help manage the community. And the community is a little bit of a different yeah, take on. And so the community would include things like of course, like a lot of the training and onboarding would be part of the new role that we’ve just created. And in addition to that, it’s around sort of the nurturing and incentive of the individual. So, you know, creating a video is one thing. Creating a video at scale, like where you’re constantly producing contents another. And sometimes, you know, people have different motivations and require, you know, different incentives to, to continue to produce.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:23:45  And so that’s going to be their full time job as well as like creating an actual community for our creators. Right. A lot of people talk about creating discord communities. I think that has become a little bit tedious or overwhelming for many people to manage. So we’re using WhatsApp right now and.

Josh Hadley 00:24:02  You’re just in WhatsApp. Not even a discord.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:24:04  Not even a discord. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:24:05  Nice. I’ve heard the same thing. So we jumped on a call with our creators, a couple weeks ago. The overwhelming response was like, please get off discord. Really I don’t. Well, it was just like, we don’t even there. There are so many brands on discord, I just started, I just deleted the app because like anytime I walk in, it’s like, it’s just such a hot mess of crap that I don’t even know where to begin. And if I’m not in there all day, every day, like I have no idea what’s going on and it just became too overwhelming. So I think, like that’s why the discord thing, like I have a debate every time with somebody is like, you gotta be on discord.

Josh Hadley 00:24:42  And I’m like, I don’t know, like, but it’s also hard. Like that’s where a lot of the brands are and with their creators. So it’s it’s easy. Supposedly the adoption should be there. But also like I think it probably matters on the ICP for who the who’s creating those videos for us it’s it’s a lot of moms. Right. That’s that’s not the ideal demographic for discord anyways.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:25:06  Precisely. Yeah. Yeah. I heard the same feedback from Alex Bonilla and other MDS member who said, like, look, the reality is the people who his ICP is the demographic trends a little bit older and as do his influencers, because you want your influencer to sort of mirror your ICP. And discord was just too tall of an ask for them. So they’re also only on WhatsApp right now.

Josh Hadley 00:25:29  Interesting. Cool. Yeah. All right.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:25:30  So the WhatsApp community is cool because like you’re able it’s you’re able to communicate outwardly. But there’s also internal conversation that happens. You know when someone goes live there’s a little bit of, you know, amping up that’s done within the community.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:25:42  It’s like, okay, now you’ve got this. so that part is really cool. We’d love to make it even stronger. It’s very small, kind of lumpy in terms of its participation right now, but we’re looking to make that an even stronger focus in the future.

Josh Hadley 00:25:54  Love it. Okay, then what else? What else is going on with your team there?

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:25:58  Yeah. So, apart from the full time community manager. So we’re going to have, like the agency for the recruitment. We’re going to have a person targeted for targeted, Effort as well as like sort of the platform management, because the reality is the TikTok platform is should be treated as its own space, just as you would treat Amazon or Walmart or Target, you need to manage the the the product portfolio in a different way, has different bundles and different campaigns, different sales and and other compliance things. So that has to be handled by an individual. Then you have the community and then the separate and very, very new aspect for us is all the AI content creation.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:26:39  So now we have also hired a new person to help support that. For us, content creation is a space that is so rapidly changing and and it’s something that we’re kind of learning in real time. But right now we’re splitting efforts into some of the infrastructure aspects. So like setting up like fresh email accounts, the United States fresh TikTok profiles, the United States, warming up those profiles by consuming and watching content that is related to your ICP. Right. So for you, for example, Josh, you said okay. Like a lot of our audiences moms, right? So you would want to start, like with a fresh TikTok profile, consuming content that is related to what a mom would watch. Right. If you start watching, I don’t know, UFC videos, maybe that profile that you’re, you’re setting up wouldn’t serve or sort of be connected to the audience that you’re most interested in. Right. And so there’s an enormous amount of infrastructure and effort that has to be done to ensure that, you know, your TikTok profiles are being created in the US and serving content to US audiences.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:27:43  That TikTok profile is, sort of seeded to align with your ICP and that it’s sort of interacting with a TikTok platform as a person would do, like, like watching videos, making comments, following, sharing, etc. this all has to be done right? And right now it’s I’ll admit it’s a little bit manual for us, but we’re working really, really hard to develop, scripts and data and automations to try to automate a lot of this at scale. That’s the infrastructure part. Then you have the content creation.

Josh Hadley 00:28:21  So we’ll so let’s let’s pause there real quick because now we’re going to get into the real weeds. this is awesome. Okay. So if I’m to dissect all of this for our listeners, those that are on TikTok, you have a little bit of momentum. What I’ve gathered from you, Damon, is like, tell me if I’m wrong. Here’s your kind of like team structure agency that’s doing some reach out, some outreach. Okay, we’ve got that. Then secondly, you have a separate person.

Josh Hadley 00:28:49  Is this a one separate role? One full time person that is doing dedicated specialty outreach to very dedicated people? Is that a full time role or are they also doing a few other things?

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:29:02  They’re doing a few other things. Yeah. So this is all rapidly evolving. Like, we’re recording this on the first day of the quarter for and, so we’re, we’re we do the iOS operating system as you do, I believe. Joshua. And, so we’re forming our rocks right now. And so there’s still a little bit of a negotiation, but this is how we’re seeing it play out. Yeah. So the agency will it’s handling outreach for now. we eventually will bring that in-house. Right. another person will sort of manage the platform as a, as a whole.

Josh Hadley 00:29:33  Yep. So that’s almost like a. Yeah. I like your analogy there. It’s like all of us that are on Amazon, like you have an Amazon like brand manager or somebody that’s overseeing like the analytics, the compliance, the customer service, the account, health issues.

Josh Hadley 00:29:46  Right. And promotions, setting up the listings. Make sure they’re all live.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:29:51  Precise.

Josh Hadley 00:29:52  Listings. Correct. Right.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:29:53  Yeah. Right now we have 58 listings that are flagged for California prop 65.

Josh Hadley 00:29:58  Oh that’s.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:29:58  Fine regulation. Yeah. And so like who’s in charge of that. You know, so the same person that’s in charge of that is also in charge of targeted outreach.

Josh Hadley 00:30:06  Okay. All right. That makes sense. So you have a platform and targeted outreach. Then you have somebody that is community manager, right. Which is just trying to like get engagement with people I assume. Are they running contests and things like that.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:30:22  Exactly that. Like incentive incentive ladders, managing the WhatsApp group and sort of curating the onboarding experience and sort of like the sort of the the creator journey after the sample has been sent. It’s a brand new role. Josh. Okay. That’s something that, that I think was required once you get enough creators because look, again, like of the 8000 creators, we have 90% of dormant.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:30:47  Right. And who’s in charge of, like, keeping these guys engaged and educated and enthusiastic? You kind of need someone to sort of be that cheerleader, but also to to help and like, understand, like, okay, this person, you know, needs requires a little bit of extra attention here or, you know, I think that’s that’s a big bet we’ve made. And we just brought the person on within the last 30 days.

Josh Hadley 00:31:07  Okay. Awesome. Totally agree with you on that. And then you also have a separate person that is watching the videos and giving them feedback. Is that true?

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:31:18  No. That’s a that’s a content manager or the community manager.

Josh Hadley 00:31:21  That’s the community manager as well. Okay. but somebody’s actively in there watching the videos, giving feedback. Rah rah rah rah. Yep. Okay. With that, the biggest question is going to be this are these US based roles or are they overseas?

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:31:38  And I are making me open the kimono a little bit.

Josh Hadley 00:31:40  Josh because this has been our challenge.

Josh Hadley 00:31:43  Like we’ve had to gravitate more US based, personally for our brand because a what can you view on TikTok if you’re located outside the US, you’re going to get a different viewing experience, right? So I think that’s a component of it. And then obviously, like there’s just a culture or a cultural disconnect if if this is my face of the brand, so to speak, that’s trying to get people engaged. That’s my perspective. So I’m just interested to get what have you done here? Because this is the harder part. This in my opinion, this is not an easy VA job.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:32:19  I hear you and I empathize with with where you’re coming from. so currently there oversees the agency’s Philippines based community manager is in Colombia, and the another colleague is in India. And so kind of all over the place. But we look for the smartest and best and most motivated, most analytical talent wherever they reside. We’re a little bit agnostic to that. Yeah. Time zones can be a little challenging. My days start pretty early, but, so far we’re we’re making it work.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:32:55  And I think there’s a bit of a competitive advantage to having having that that setup. And we’ve actually I’ll give you a small plug here. we used your, hiring methodology to find these amazing overseas talented individuals.

Josh Hadley 00:33:11  Awesome. Well, I’m happy to hear that you’ve followed the podcast enough to hear my seven steps of Hiring, which is great. I’m curious, and I’m sure the audience would love to know which, where did you find them on? Was it, online jobs or was it through LinkedIn? Was it through, Upwork? Because those are all the strategies I share in there. What’s are you finding any common patterns? And I’ll tell you what we’re seeing to.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:33:37  You know, we started with indeed. And we had some success with indeed early on, but then we switched over 100% to LinkedIn. It’s because, a person in my, EO forum is, he’s, big into, remote working in, in Venezuela. And he’s like, oh yeah, for like the thousand or so villas we’ve hired.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:33:59  It’s all been through LinkedIn. And so we’re like, oh my gosh, if this guy is doing it on LinkedIn, like there must be a there there. And so he switched over LinkedIn. It’s a lot more expensive, a lot more tedious. There are, of course pros and cons to every platform. But yeah, we we’re now almost entirely on LinkedIn.

Josh Hadley 00:34:16  Yeah, that’s exactly where we’ve kind of gravitated towards. Indeed gives a lot of good like a lot of good volume. But if you want to try to find somebody that’s not technically on the market, LinkedIn is a really good tool to use that. That’s a whole other separate conversation.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:34:30  It is on an earlier podcast of yours.

Josh Hadley 00:34:34  Yep. All right. David, this this is awesome. All right. So now we’ve got a good lay of the land of what’s going on in your your TikTok world. now let’s dive into this strategy where you’re hiring a full time person that is going to be managing these kind of anonymous TikTok accounts and how you’re creating content there.

Josh Hadley 00:34:53  So you’ve got somebody I would assume is this person in the US or. No, that’s still out.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:35:00  The biggest challenges for us actually. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:35:02  Okay. All right.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:35:03  So but not not for reasons you may think.

Josh Hadley 00:35:06  Okay. All right. Well tell me more.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:35:09  So content creation can really be done from anywhere. Right. And I’ll walk through the steps of how to create content in just one moment. But the publishing of content that’s the hardest part. TikTok is very sophisticated and quickly sniffs out if you’re not from the US, right? And there are several ways to try to post content to get it to serve to US audiences. And we spent a lot of time figuring out all the all the wrong and all the hard ways, right. the old and traditional way of of trying to get TikTok to believe that you were in the United States. It’s not through a VPN, like that’s the most basic and easiest way for TikTok to say, okay, you’re suspended. the most traditional way is just getting a physical eSIM from the US.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:35:55  And what a headache that is. Like where the world is your person creating content? It could be the Philippines, it could be India, it could be Venezuela. Like, how do you get a decent or a physical sim into that country? EE Sims I’ve heard mixed feedback whether or not EE sims actually work a US based eSIM. I’m told that if you were to, load an eSIM onto a phone abroad, you would have to immediately wipe the phone factory use of the phone, restart it, initiate it as as a US phone, and using the US marketplace using the US eSIM. And that’s a way to sort of indicate that, okay, this phone is a US phone and then you have VPN on all the time. You have no apps on it except for the App Store, TikTok and Gmail and the and that’s it. Right. And you’re using the eSIM for connectivity, you know, not necessarily Wi-Fi. So it’s very cumbersome because if you want to have, let’s say, 100 hundred profiles.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:36:50  You can have 100 phones and 100 SMS. That’s really a tall order. And so what we’ve recently found is a, a site called G lark, or maybe it’s G lark, which offers the ability to let me take a step back. We also used, mobile phone emulators. So just like you would use like a virtual machine from abroad, we just used a virtual phone from abroad using VPN. And again, it was blocked. It was not blocked, but it would serve to a country that’s not the United States. And that’s not what you want, right? And so finally, we cracked the code with G lark plus proxy, to emulate the virtual phone. And the proxy gives it like a US cellular connection. It’s, the proxy is not the not the cheapest part, but at least you get the data served to a US audience. So that’s been a bit of a journey, but a big break for a big breakthrough when it relates to creating content from abroad. If you’re a US base is not a big deal if you listen to other people.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:38:01  Yeah, like there’s a guy, a guy in MDS is like, oh yeah, my my mom’s basement in Ohio has like 500 iPhones holding up in it because the guy lives in Madrid, right?

Josh Hadley 00:38:13  Yeah. That’s fascinating. Okay, so talk to me about how this all works. So let’s talk about the phone aspect if you’re going to have I mean, how many different accounts are you running right now. Is it a hundred. Like what’s the what’s the volume of this that you’re talking about? Right.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:38:29  No, not even more close right now. We’re still early days. We started to gain momentum and then we found out the hard way, like, wait a second. All these views are not US based views, like they’re not helping us. We only sell in the United States like we are a US based, US manufactured company, and our audience is 100% us. So like we had to kind of hit the reset button. B7. So we’re way back to just a handful of accounts right now.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:38:49  But the goal of this quarter is, is to set up around 500 accounts. And, and yeah, it’s all done through the platform G lark.

Josh Hadley 00:38:58  Okay. So G lark is basically allowing you to not have to have 500 iPhones in somebody’s basement.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:39:06  They do the virtual phone modulation. What you need is like 500 proxies. And that’s where it gets super expensive.

Josh Hadley 00:39:13  So how does that work? What are you doing with that?

Outro 00:39:16  You go to a proxy.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:39:18  Dealer or a website and you buy US based proxy to like connect to the phone to tell the server that you’re a US based phone. Otherwise, the phone is just connecting to the internet and it could be sourced from anywhere. Like the connection could be from anywhere.

Josh Hadley 00:39:33  Okay. All right. So you’re getting you’re paying for a proxy. Then you’re paying for g lark to kind of make all of this happen. Okay. Your goal is to get to 500. That’s all right. Okay. Love that. Now, now we’ve got the technical setup aspect figured out.

Josh Hadley 00:39:49  Now we’ve got 500 accounts that need content. That’s why we need that content at scale. So walk me through how does that happen. Especially if you’re going to have somebody managing this that is overseas, not a native, English US speaker per se. How are you ensuring that this is it? It resonates well with the US based audience.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:40:12  It’s all AI and like excellent use of data. So we have a very structured SOP. And for those who are starting from scratch, you really have to start with like what I’m calling your I ape your ideal AI persona. Everyone has an ICP like who your customer persona is. But like as we discussed earlier, Josh, like you’re your creator should reflect like the values and the reality of the person consuming your your product. products. Right. And so you need to understand like who is that person. And so what we did is we downloaded all of our order data, put it into an LM of your choice to analyze whether it’s perplexity or, or Gemini or Grok or ChatGPT and said, hey, using the the data, we’ve given you sort of the name, the, the address, the post code, the frequency, the frequency of purchase, the average order value, etc..

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:41:11  Tell me, like, what are the demographics, what’s the age, gender, location, income level of this individual, and what are the some of the psychographics? What’s their personality, lifestyle, interest, pain points, etc.. Right. And we we actually made it committed a pretty big error when we first ran this exercise. Josh, which was that for every one product we sell on TikTok, we actually sell for on Amazon. So like, wow, Amazon’s got four times the data. We might as well use that data, right. And so what that data spit out for us is like, oh well your customer persona is, you know, largely educated, high income, suburban, you know, persona. And I’m like, okay, great. That’s that reflects the, some of the creators we’ve onboarded. So we’re on track. But then we reran the exercise using TikTok only data, and it was completely different. I mean, our TikTok only data was was very different. It was a more ethnic, profile with a very different, income, location and education.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:42:11  demographics were like, oh my gosh, like, thank goodness we ran with the TikTok data because it’s telling a very different story. So you understand who your ideal AI persona is and then you got to go create that avatar. So what we do is, you know, using that data, we we generate several like, authoritative, personas that can be trusted. Right. Because when you’re selling a personal or a wellness or a health product like that. Trust aspect is really, really critical for us. And we ask again, any LLM which you want Gemini, ChatGPT or whatever, like give me five, right. And it’s really amazing. It describes in detail who these five people are. Perfect. So then you take that description and then you you have to create a frame. You basically put it into an image generation tool, to create like, like the physical manifestation of this persona. Right. And so you can use flux context pro or Image in for there’s so many different tools out there to generate the, the, the, the again, the physical representation of the description.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:43:24  And then, what you do is you need to sort of give them a voice. So again, using the same demographic data, knowing, you know, we create a lot of these custom GPT where we sort of teach the AI model like, hey, this is who we are. It’s what represents our values and our products and our ingredients, etc. then you sort of make some short scripts, right? Use a prompt like, hey, apply the following format to generate a 32nd video script. One spark an emotion with a viewer through fear, shock or some ideology conflict. You know, to set up a curiosity gap like draw the viewer in to try to keep them with the goal of keeping them in at least six seconds. Three you know, do the reveal, blah blah blah. So you have to give them like give, give the AI some coaching about what it is that you want to do. And then you, then you, go to 11 labs and you put that script into a level lab.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:44:16  So you pick a voice which, which is aligned and reflects your persona. Right? So you don’t want to give you a silly extreme example. You don’t want a female voice for a male persona. For example, 11 labs has thousands and thousands and thousands of voices. You just choose the one that you think is the best representation for your your figure. And you sort of, You can dial it in like using speed, stability, similarity. There’s different levers that you can use within 11 labs to make it sound hyper realistic. And it really, really is incredibly convincing.

Outro 00:44:49  11 labs gives you.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:44:50  The benefit of generating up to three times the voice output, and we recommend doing it all three times, because if you do all three times, you can sort of pick and choose the sentences that sound the most fluid and natural, and then you sort of combine the two, right. You take the the voice out, come from 11 labs and you take the, the AI frame that you generated, you know, in usually in headdress.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:45:14  Or you can use, you know, Vo four or any other tool you want and you combine them together. Right. And one quick tip here is that we learned again the hard way. Like you want to really, really controlled environment for your frame. Again the frame is just the the AI avatar right. They can be outside on a playground, or they can be inside in a doctor’s office. It’s a really big difference here, right? You want excellent lighting, a controlled environment where externalities like someone walking in the background or wind blowing a tree branch or something, that we’re like, that’s not going to become confusing and create noise within the final output. Because what I’ve noticed is, like the more stuff you have in the background, the more there is to animate in the AI. And that’s like very, very distracting. So really, really controlled indoor highlighting environment and then you just let the magic work. It’s incredible. You put in the the top track, you put in the the avatar frame, and you can add expressions and emotions or gestures to try to make your avatar a little bit more dynamic.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:46:14  That’s completely optional. You can use character three or video three. Yeah. And then you just produce it. Right. And it takes you know, we have experimented with different video lengths ranging between, you know, one or 10s to like a minute and our experiments because it does get costly. Right. You burn credits with every second of, video you make. So we’re experimenting with now he’s having the AI avatar open the video, and then using a mixture of B-roll and other things to sort of fill the rest. You’re not consuming an enormous amount of credits. So that’s how you do it.

Outro 00:46:47  I love this.

Josh Hadley 00:46:48  Okay. I’m tracking with you. We’ve got these videos created. Now what? How are you actually posting these? And then what are you. Because I asked you, are you linking these to TikTok shop? And you said no. So how are you measuring the impact that these videos are driving for you? Are you just doing it views based alone or looking at your Amazon data or are you getting sales on TikTok shop? Like, how are you able to say like, hey, it cost me $2 per video, but I’m getting $32 back.

Josh Hadley 00:47:21  So tell me how how all of that is working as you post these videos?

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:47:27  Yeah. Great question. And the answer is sort of all the above. right? So when it comes to posting, this is what we learn the hard way. We initially try to post from a physical phone, you know, the country. And that wasn’t working for us. And we tried to get a virtual phone from abroad and that didn’t work anymore. That didn’t work either. Now, this sort of proxy, it seems to be working well for us now. Again, relatively manual process. We’re working on some automations and scripts to help do that at scale when it comes to, like sort of the anchoring of the, of the post. So an anchor or a product anchor is just means like a product been tagged. So it has a little orange shopping cart at the bottom. We don’t do that for a couple of reasons. One is for compliance. Right. Like we don’t we don’t want the profile to be misinterpreted or, or, come into conflict with the brand.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:48:21  Right. We want to keep those very, very separate. Two is when you don’t have a product anchor, you have a little bit more flexibility in what you can say in terms of content, right? When you have a product anchor, you’re governed by TikTok shop rules, not TikTok creator rules. Right. And they’re very different rules, actually, when it comes to what you can say and talk about topics, etc.. And so we think that the non anchored videos are probably better. How do we attribute performance and sales is all on. instead of a CPM it’s RPM. Right. So CPM as you know, it’s like the cost per thousand views when it comes to advertising. Is just Latin for Milan which means a thousand. So RPM is a revenue per thousand views. And what we’ve done is we just dumped in like 18 months of sales data from TikTok to say like, hey, on average per 1000 views, what is the revenue that we get per 1000 views. So we can predict like, okay, like on average we get around $17 per 1000 views.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:49:25  And so when you see the view count increase on non anchored content, you can extrapolate out okay here’s the value of that video. So like for a million view video you can say like hey that’s probably like a $19,000 value for a million views right. And what’s interesting is that what I love about TikTok and non tagged content is that, the benefit is not isolated to TikTok. And you’ve heard this all the time. Josh, I think you were the one that introduced me to the the term halo effect, right? And we’ve calculated this very, very explicitly. We took a 72 hour window, for a tagged video on TikTok. And we saw exactly this, the curve. Right. Like we had this video go viral. It had 1.15 million views in a very, very short amount of time. And so we saw this like huge uplift in, our TikTok sales. We took the same window, the same snapshot across Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, etc. for the same 72 hour window. And we calculate it out like, okay, here’s our baseline using the trailing 30 day sales.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:50:33  This is what it should have been. We also compared it to trailing 365 days. So like okay on this date a year ago, what did we sell on this date a month ago. Why don’t we sell. And then what’s the difference between the viral spike enough. And what we’ve calculated is that a TikTok spike accounts for around 61% increase in sales on other channels, above. Above the norm, above the mean. Right. So how crazy is that? So you get the RPM on TikTok shop that revenue per thousand views, for a tagged video. So for an untagged you eliminate that. No one is because no one’s.

Josh Hadley 00:51:10  Arguing in your shop, right? Like you’re saying for these untagged videos, your assumption is not that they’re going to go search and find you on TikTok shop. It’s like they’re going to leave the app and go to either Shopify, Google or to Amazon.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:51:26  That’s our hypothesis, right? And we’ve actually we’ve run the numbers on that as well. Right. So if you go into the Amazon brand analytics and you look at your Amazon sales rank, we’ve again done the exercise.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:51:38  Right. Okay. And that’s 72 hours. What happened to our Amazon sales rep. Right. And it’s insane. During the 72 hours of that viral video, we had a 56% organic improvement in Amazon sales, ranking 56% jump.

Josh Hadley 00:51:50  This is an untagged video.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:51:52  This is a tagged video. So people kind of knew what it was. But the untagged videos, you can sort of coach the viewer into understanding who you are and how to find you. You would never be super explicit, like, okay.

Josh Hadley 00:52:04  Leave to me on.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:52:05  Amazon. Yeah, exactly. You got a recipe to get banned quickly, right?

Josh Hadley 00:52:09  Yeah.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:52:10  But, you know, there are ways to definitely do that. But what’s interesting. Josh, you’ve been around for a long time, right? And it was like early 2000, right? No. I’m sorry, 2020. I think it was I apologize. So I think it was Michelle Barnum Smith, actually, who introduced the concept of marney chat. The search find by right search my by was huge for sellers for a really long time.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:52:35  For those who are not were not indoctrinated back in 2020. It’s basically when you had something called Marnie chat. It’s a bot that, you run on, on Amazon, I’m sorry. On Facebook, you run a bunch of ads, you know, bringing people to a particular page. On the page, you have a bot that says, like, hey, do you want to play a little game? What you need you to do is go to Amazon using these specific search terms to find this product, buy it, come back, and we’ll give you a small reward, usually in the form of of like a visa gift card or something like that. And for a long time that was how like wow, people ranked super fast because it’s in Amazon’s in like the A9 algorithm view. Like, okay, why is an organic search in organic find and organic by like this is a high converting product. And we’re going to we’re going to reward it with its Serp ranking. Right. That’s long gone. That’s totally against terms of service.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:53:24  The Amazon reviews that as you know. Ranking manipulation. And it’s completely banned. Now what’s so interesting about organic TikTok content. Untagged content especially is like there’s no manipulation happening, right? People see a video which is entertaining or informative or authoritative. They like what they hear and see and they go under their own, you know, power to go try to find it and acquire it. There’s nothing against the terms of service with that. So like, the stronger you can make your case when building content, the more likelihood, the more likely the individual will go. Try to seek out your your product, and that is that’s going to do wonders on your organic sales ranking. And so what we saw was not only do we had a 56% improvement in organic ranking within that sort of small window for virality six months later, the ranking is still 29% lower than it was, you know, before the video. It’s like like it works, right? Like increasing your sales ranking through organic efforts really, really works.

Josh Hadley 00:54:30  Love it. So ultimately, you’re just with these other 500 accounts. You’re just hoping that, like, the views snowball, even if you’re even if a video gets even 10,000 views, you’re like, count it as a win. Because across 500 accounts that ideally could get 1000 to 10,000 views. Like and one of them could go viral. Right. But let’s just play the easy game like just a thousand views across 500 accounts. That’s 500,000 views. That goes a long way to then just like massive brand awareness, right?

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:55:04  Maybe more. And like, you know, I hate to keep dropping names on today’s call, but like Brian Kelsey is a huge, huge proponent of this. Like, he he owns a lot of TikTok accounts and he’s basically been able to calculate, okay, this is what a million views are worth, right? A million views is going to give you this amount of uplift in your sales. And that’s what he aims for is like the content, you know, could be super strong or very weak.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:55:26  What matters is the exposure of the views he he likens and uses. He uses a metaphor that, you know, all these videos that are being published and produced for, for, you know, using AI for TikTok. It’s kind of like, online billboard, right? You see it once or twice, maybe it’s sort of in the back of my mind, you see, you see the fifth or sixth time, like, okay, fine. Like something’s registering now, right? And so it’s a in his perspective, it’s very much a volume game.

Josh Hadley 00:55:54  Yeah. Love it. So with that, the play to scale out 500 videos like that is just you have somebody full time spitting out a lot of videos, and they all have to be different, right? Because TikTok doesn’t like duplicate content.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:56:10  It tastes like hates duplicate content. But again, there’s another AI solution for that. I forget the name. It’s starts with something or something. I’ll have to go look it up for you. Josh, I apologize, but it’s, It’s a tool which will take an original, video and manipulate it just enough to make it unique.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:56:28  Right? Whether that’s changing out the text overlay, slicing and dicing the frames a little bit, you know, speeding up, slowing it down. I don’t know what it does for precisely, but, that’s one way to do it. But we wouldn’t do that on our own. Content I don’t believe we’re doing instead is making any automations to to help do this. So what we’re doing right now is like, look, yes, you can individually brainstorm a lot of topics headlines, subjects, texts, etc. but like we’re limited by our own, internal knowledge within the team. So we’re doing now as we’re creating bots to go scrape conversations and keywords in different communities. So think about Quora or Medium or Reddit and the conversations that are happening out there. Not necessarily about your product, but maybe competitor products, maybe about themes within your industry. Maybe, you know, concerns about some ingredient. Who knows. But there are a lot. There’s lots of opinion out there, right? And the idea is to go find that opinion and start to play with it.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:57:27  Right. So we scrape these conversations, the sentiment, the topic, etc. and then we start to filter the noise. Right? We start to compartmentalize like okay like this okay. This is the theme. So what are some scripts and tones and hooks and other thematic elements that we can sort of manipulate here. And then with that we get to clean it up and put it into, you know, again, like an LLM where we say, okay, take giving all this, create some short format scripts that like sort of play with this theme. Right. And then at that point you have a limited content because like there’s unlimited noise out in the internet. you have very diverse content because it’s all being sort of sort of filtered and washed over time to sort of create the appropriate script for your ICP, and then you can automate that into, you know, again, the the scripting, the the voiceover, the the avatar, and then eventually with time will automate the posting as well.

Josh Hadley 00:58:25  This is brilliant.

Josh Hadley 00:58:26  This could be a whole other masterclass you need. You need to break that down. That needs to be a course. but this this is fantastic. Damon, I know we’re running up on time, but is there anything else you want to convey to our audience before we begin wrapping up here?

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:58:40  Well, I suppose that it’s that, there’s an enormous amount of opportunity when it comes to, socially driven commerce. It’s a shame to see, you know, flip shop. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. They were, like, the second closest competitor to TikTok in the form of, like, you know, consuming product information via video and then making purchase decisions on that. I think it’s here to stay. Social commerce is here to stay. And if you look at some of the stats, it’s really shocking. In China, I think it’s one out of three products or purchase via a live. It’s incredible. 32% or something like that of products in China are purchased via live shopping. And in the United States, it’s 1%.

Damon Sununtnasuk 00:59:28  I don’t believe that the American consumer is that much different than the Chinese consumer, I really don’t. I think they they all want value and they all want, you know, the best product they can get for their money. And I think that that’s probably where the direction we’re headed is, is through social, social commerce and particularly live based shopping. And so I encourage people to like, okay, if you’re dragging your heels on TikTok now, you’ll be even further behind once live shopping catches up. And yes, TikTok is kind of its own strange beast, but I promise you, the effort and and attention you give it now will pay off in big ways in the future.

Josh Hadley 01:00:11  Yeah, I think you summarize that really well. I truly believe that the brand’s 3 to 5 years from now that are succeeding have done two things. They’ve created brand awareness about their brand through creators, whether that’s AI creators or actual humans. And then secondly, they have gotten the word out into the Reddit forums, the Quora forums, the Wikipedia pages, and also just general old school, press releases, PR efforts to get their products mentioned so that the change that will happen in e-commerce is going to be driven by social commerce and agent ecommerce.

Josh Hadley 01:00:52  Those are the two biggest things that are going to change in the next 3 to 5 years. We’re going to be looking at a totally different e-commerce landscape. So those are the two things to like stay ahead of.

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:01:03  I could not agree more. Josh. And if I could, quickly reiterate your second comments. The first comment completely agree. We just spent the last 40 some minutes speaking about, social commerce and commerce is is here. I think the websites in the future will not be optimized for human eyes. It’ll be optimized for LMS to crawl it as quickly as possible, decide what product suits its master the best, and go acquire that product. In fact, just last month, ChatGPT silently released a commerce portion of its experience. Right? And I think in the future, you’re not going to decide, you know, what you’re having for dinner, your AI agent’s going to decide what you’re having for dinner, and your agent is going to go out and find it in, acquire it and provide it for you.

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:01:55  Right. And those who are not optimizing for AI discoverability, as you just said, Through showing up in communities, showing up, you know, through Linktree mentions, showing up through blog posts. Press releases is another one. I think you and I have been watching the same. The same, information. Josh. But yeah, these guys are going to be way left behind, like so it’s really, really critical now to like, get on the radar of these LMS so that when the LMS driven commerce comes like your the choice.

Josh Hadley 01:02:34  Yeah. Couldn’t agree more. Love that. All right. So I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. Let me know if you think I’m missing something. Damon. So action item number one, because e-commerce is going to evolve and it’s going to require a gentle e-commerce. It’s going to be social commerce. One of the most important things that you can focus on right now is, in my opinion, building connections with creators, whether that’s bloggers, whether it’s YouTubers, whether it’s TikTok creators, I don’t care what it is, but you have to have a determination to reach out to those people, because as you do that, you’re also at the same token, building up your agent into commerce at the same time, because the agent agent commerce is going to be crawling all the social sites, it’s going to be crawling YouTube.

Josh Hadley 01:03:29  We already know perplexity gets a lot of information from YouTube and it’s reading descriptions, things like that. So like good like get get the word out there. So truly like build your creator army. and again, I think humans are a really, really big portion of that. So if you’re not there today, start by taking the first steps of ten minutes a day, reaching out to somebody, and start small. But this is another compound effect that will truly grow. And you’ve got to be making moves today. so that’s action item number one. Action item number two is if you’re not on TikTok shop, I would definitely encourage you to get on TikTok shop. And there have been people that have said, hey, I’ve reached out to a bunch of creators, haven’t got great videos. I think the key thing here is like, all right, try one more time. Based off of what Damon just talked about. Like, did you have a dedicated enough flow that like, okay, yeah, you gave out samples.

Josh Hadley 01:04:29  So, like, what happened with those samples? Like, did people just willy nilly just start creating content for you, or did you actually onboard them? Did you give them like, here’s about the brand, here’s our features and benefits. By the way, here’s some videos that have previously done well. Or hey, here’s some inspiring videos from competitors. If you’re just starting from scratch to spark some ideas for people. And then it’s a volume game. So if you haven’t done over a thousand samples, I would say. That’s where you need to go back. And it is a volume game. Get that first. And if that doesn’t work, then you lean into what I would say. Action item number three here is build your AI creator army. At the same token, because no matter what social commerce platform pops up, the AI videos are here to stay. And so it’s important to create a system and a process. And you outlined a very great system and some great tools I would encourage people to recommend to look into.

Josh Hadley 01:05:29  And it’s another volume play here, right? You don’t need them to go viral if they do go viral, definitely an added bonus. But even if you get 1000 views across 500 videos, 500 accounts a day, like that’s 500,000 views a day, you’ve already proven and we’ve seen it. Everybody else has seen it. The halo effect onto Amazon and even to Shopify. That’s that’s where your brand can grow and get to $100 million. Damon. Those are my action items for the audience. Anything you feel like I missed here.

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:06:01  As always. Josh. Thank you. Nailed it.

Josh Hadley 01:06:03  Awesome. All right. Hey, let’s go back to my favorite three questions. Number one, give me a new book that’s been influential for your life.

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:06:13  I’ll cheat a little bit. Josh I’ll give you three. So I am just completing the third book in Alex Pharmacy’s $100 million series. I think it’s $100 million offers. No. Maybe. Is it, offers first, or is it, products first?

Josh Hadley 01:06:30  So I believe it’s the, Well, it’s the money models.

Josh Hadley 01:06:34  This is last book.

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:06:35  This is the last one. Yeah. So it’s three books. One is around, you know, building 100, $100 million offer, another $100 million dollar lead leads. Thank you offers, then leads, then money models. And so I read the first two. It’s easy to, you know, suggest that. Okay, these are obvious, aspects of any, any commerce. But the reality is we need to be, as Alex Ramsey says, we need to be reminded a lot more. They need to be taught. So rereading these books is like, oh my gosh, of course it’s so obvious. But yes, why are we not doing this? And so I think if anyone wants a little bit of inspiration, very actionable, guidance like the $100 million series from entrepreneurs is really great.

Josh Hadley 01:07:16  Love it. Excellent recommendation. Totally agree with you on that. Question number two what’s your favorite AI tool? I know you’ve shared some of them, but what’s your favorite right now?

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:07:26  There are so many.

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:07:27  But the one I think I’d leave your audience with today is, a tool called Prompt Cowboy. so as we all know, AI is no different than Excel, where it’s kind of like a garbage in is garbage out in a relationship. So if you give it a very weak prompt that’s not descript and not very precise, like you’re going to get a very nondescript, non precise result. Right. And what prompt cowboy does is it? You put in your lazy prompt. And typically I think we can all admit our prompts are are weaker than they could be or should be, and a prompt cowboy will expand it and make it a lot more detailed, a lot more utilitarian for use in an LA.

Josh Hadley 01:08:04  Love it. That’s a great idea. All right, third and final question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:08:13  Right. Well, I guess apart from you, Josh, I’d like to, nominate this time around, Matt Altman.

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:08:20  we’ve never met. I would love to meet you. So, Matt, if you’re out there and listening, please respond to my messages. This guy is so smart, like, so, so smart. Every time I hear him give a presentation, my mind explodes a little bit. This guy, is just way ahead of the curve. He’s super analytical, very, very scientific in his approach and how he researches and how he formulates his, his hypotheses. And he’s just like, honestly, one of the smartest guys out there. And if you, Yeah. Again, he’s. I admire him a lot. And, if you’re listening, Matt, I would love to get in touch.

Josh Hadley 01:08:55  Awesome. Matt is a great friend. And, yes, somebody that has, dropped a lot of knowledge from. So another great person to follow. Damon, if people want to learn more about you, follow your journey. Where’s the best place to follow you at?

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:09:09  I think probably LinkedIn is the best.

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:09:10  I have a very unique name, so it’s not a hard time. Not not a hard time finding me. So yeah, LinkedIn would be best.

Josh Hadley 01:09:17  Awesome. Damon, thanks again for returning on the show. And, maybe we’ll be at part three when you’ve solved the riddle of the J. Commerce, so I know you’re on that. So anyways, thanks again for your time today.

Damon Sununtnasuk 01:09:31  Looking forward to it. Thank you. Josh.

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