How does a new brand with only 12 reviews and zero organic presence convert customers on Meta?

💰 Cody Plofker reveals how to sell a new product with no track record

😎 Sean Frank recommends a couple 20yr olds to run your TikTok Shop

📊 Matt Bertulli shows you how to benchmark your Black Friday numbers

Sean Frank CEO, Ridge

Too unc for TikTok Shop? Hire 20yr olds.

TikTok Shop will surpass $100B GMV globablly this year.

At Ridge, it does six figures a month.

too unc to be on TikTok Shop-
Just hire Tyler and Alex.

I did.

Two college kids built an agency to help brands launch and crush on TikTok Shop.

tbar finds creators. Coaches them. Run cash contests to get more videos posted. Gets the rights so we can them as ads.

We run our creator TikTok content on Meta. They eat 30% of our ad spend every day.

We are not the only big dog they work with

Gruns
HexClad
David Protein
Vita Coco

We are also using them at Winks.

Common Thread Collective saw what they were building and bought them.

TBAR is offering our readers a 30-min TikTok Shop audit for free. Directly with the founder, Tyler.

Get the playbook they run for us.
Scale before BFCM.

That is a real meeting link. It says CTC at the top because Taylor Holiday bought TBAR. Good co-sign if me and the other big dogs are not enough for you.

Cody Plofker Jones Road, Advisor

Four 9-figure executives + one new operator are building a supplement brand in public.

Below is their most recent update.

How Do You Sell a Product With Zero Track Record?

If this was easy, everyone would do it.

We are on V7 of our website, tested three different offers, have rewritten copy more times than I can count.

Six weeks into building Winks, we had our lowest-ever CPA day on meta at $69.34.

We are spending ~$600 per day. Our rolling 7-day CPA is going down; number of total new purchases is going up.

That’s the trend we want to see.

We still have a long way to go. Our job is to answer the same question every new brand faces.

People see a billion ads a day. Everyone has been burned.

We are asking someone who has never heard of us to put something in their body. A friendly looking monster mascot and “doctor formulated” only get us so far.

Eight things we are doing to build trust and get customers:

1️⃣ Hiring (More) Doctors
2️⃣ Founder Content
3️⃣ Much More UGC
4️⃣ Rebuilt The Website
5️⃣ Partnership Ads
6️⃣ Lab Testing
7️⃣ 60-Day Guarantee
8️⃣ Customer Onboarding

1. Hiring (More) Doctors

Dr. Todd Born formulated Winks. He also created a partnership ad and a lander about how melatonin can ruin your sleep.

Todd has been phenomenal. But he isn’t widely known.

We launched a supplement aimed at women with five male founders, a friendly mascot, and very little of the expertise behind the formula showing up in our marketing.

The next step is a health advisory board.

• Qualified experts
• With an audience
• Who people trust

Why? To explain the science, guide future products, and show up in our content and ads.

Cash and equity are both on the table.

2. Founder Content

Matt and I are making yapper videos.

The first email after you buy is from Curtis Christopherson, one of our co-founders and our product lead.

Is it working? Not sure.

Our theory is that seeing the people behind Winks and hearing why we built it will give customers more reason to trust us.

At the very least, we have a story to tell.

• Why we built the product
• What ingredients we chose
• How it’s impacting our sleep

It makes hypothetical sense to me. But Matt tried it at both of his brands with mixed results. At Lomi, founder ads carried the business for the first two years. At Pela, their primary buyers are young women. His content flopped.

We’re throwing spaghetti at the wall. Time will tell if it sticks.

3. Much More UGC

We launched with a lot of AI slop.

They worked … sort of.

Maybe they work better for non-consumables. Because the trust threshold isn’t so high.

Before we launched we also sent out roughly 50 products and got ~10 reviews. In hindsight, we should have gone bigger with the initial seeding.

• Finding creators
• Sending product
• Receiving content

Right now I have like 60 Trybe videos to review. To be honest, we probably have too much content relative to what we’re spending.

The job is figuring out which messages work.

We have creators in Discord, run weekly calls, and coach them.

The content is getting better. We’re changing offers, landers, and copy. All at the same time. We care more about getting lift than we do about knowing what caused it.

CPAs are coming down as more human content goes into the account. I can’t tell you exactly how much credit UGC deserves.

My gut tells me humans are still incremental.

4. Rebuilt The Website (Again)

Honestly I’ve lost count. This is maybe V7. In six weeks. And we are working on a rebrand. Will share more on that soon.

The original site leaned heavily into kids and family. We’ve pulled that back, made it feel more premium, and put more of the product education up front.

Clarity is so important here.

• How the product works?
• What results to expect?
• Why these ingredients?
• Why not melatonin?

We even got feedback that people didn’t know it was a drink.

Old site on the left. New one on the right.

The new one explains what each ingredient is, how much is in a serving, and why we chose it. Research is only a click away.

We spent 12 months and $100k to make this product as premium as possible. Somehow we still missed explaining any of these points to the customer at launch.

5. Partnership Ads

These are outperforming pretty much everything else.

We partner with influencers directly (not Trybe) and run the ads through their accounts. The product has enormous TAM so we can partner with lots of different creator types.

We have influencers in:

• Fashion
• Fitness
• Journalism

Most of them have 100k+ followers. We’re going to do a lot more of this. Again, humans are incremental.

6. Lab Testing

“Premium ingredients” is easy to put on a website.

But we want people to be able to inspect the evidence. We’re working on using LabTested to make our batch results easy for customers to find and understand.

It publishes results from the lab, ties them to the relevant batch, and lets customers open the original report.

Stuff like heavy metals and microbial testing. Once we put it in place, here’s how it could look.

7. Money-Back Guarantee

There are two sides to the trust equation.

First, believing the product could work.

Second, being made right if it doesn’t.

Our guarantee gives customers 60 days from their first order to ask for a refund. Email us. No questions asked.

Someone can believe the product might work and still hesitate to risk their money finding out. The guarantee lowers that risk and makes the first purchase easier.

8. Customer Onboarding

We rewrote our entire post-purchase welcome sequence.

Needed to do a better job explaining:

• When to take it before bed
• How much water to use
• What to expect that night
• What to expect tomorrow

These sound basic. To a new customer, they are critical. We’re also asking for feedback. We want to know:

• Do they like the flavor?
• How often are they using it?
• What would they like to change?

Getting the first order means we gained someone’s trust.

Now we have to keep it.

Matt Bertulli CEO, Pela + Lomi

How To Benchmark Your Black Friday Numbers

What conversion rate does your revenue forecast depend on this Black Friday?

More importantly, where the hell did you get that number?

Most of us start with last year’s performance and pencil in an improvement. Or grab an industry average from Google.

The problem is, conversion rates vary by time of year, traffic source, and category. What’s an accurate target?

Good news. Shoplift, the Shopify Plus Certified CRO platform, open sourced its data across 28 ecommerce categories.

You can access the benchmarks for free. Select a month and see any category’s median:

• Add-to-Cart Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Average Order Value
• Revenue Per Visitor

You can even drill down into one specific vertical to see the expected mid-level range for each of those metrics.

And the report provides a seasonal summary for your category with a proposed 12-month calendar.

Go dig in, find your numbers, and see if they align with your current Q4 targets.

Shoplift will benchmark your store and send you a custom testing roadmap.

FULL EPISODE

​How We Launched + Marketed a New Brand From Zero​

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff
🤓 Chief Executive Officer

P.S. (Disclaimer): Special thanks to TBAR Partners and Shoplift for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

​Read online | Unsubscribe​