25 Hottest Ecommerce Takes

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined today. This is where, as we're recording this, it's July the 10th, although you'll be hearing it the following week, but we're just coming off a big July 4th weekend, Taylor, how you doing?

How was your how was your fourth?

[00:00:21] Taylor Holiday: It's great. I live in a part of the world where fireworks are legal. And so the 4th of July is like a war zone. But which is like perfect excitement for a 10 year old boy. So I got a couple of those. It was my dog's first 4th of July. And so we were a little nervous because generally speaking, dogs get a little anxious with fireworks.

But she, she's, she's doing great. She's doing great.

[00:00:41] Richard Gaffin: Just totally fine with them. No, no barking.

[00:00:43] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. At first she was kind of curious, kind of ran after it, but then eventually she was just kind of sitting there watching them with us. So she did great.

[00:00:50] Richard Gaffin: So did you get any of, like, the full blown mortar style? You drop it in and it goes up and

[00:00:55] Taylor Holiday: Just what, just what we can buy from the stand to support the local little league, Richard, that's a, that's all we're doing, which there's a, that's a fascinating, like if you've ever done, if you ever want to go down a good rabbit hole, go down the rabbit hole of how those firework stands fund schools in local Communities and what a great business model.

This is where the way they get massive distribution for all these fireworks stands is they go to local organizations like the little league and say, Hey, you work the stand. We'll supply the product and we'll split the profit with you. And so they get distribution everywhere really, really fast at times where staffing would be so hard to do.

So you have no labor costs because it's all volunteers from the local organizations. It's really a fascinating business model. So there's, there's someone, someone should do a a deep dive into that on Twitter and put that thread together. Cause I think it's super interesting.

[00:01:44] Richard Gaffin: yeah, that's interesting. I guess I wouldn't have expected that level of innovation from the guys who came up with the little parachute man who comes out of the firework or whatever. But maybe I should have, I guess, is what I'm saying.

[00:01:54] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Fireworks have not evolved much except in the packaging. But other than that,

[00:01:58] Richard Gaffin: All right. Well, Hey, here's the, here's a segue for you. Speaking of fireworks over that July 4th weekend, another, another set of explosions went off in the e commerce Twitter world when Taylor dropped his 25 hottest e commerce takes over the July 4th weekend. Now I would say maybe 25 percent of these ended up being.

Actually hot in terms of the controversy that they engendered in the comments. But, but what I wanted to do is, is kind of go over some of them. Cause some of them are in some ways are sort of rehashing stuff that we've talked about on the podcast before, but I think there's some really interesting conversation to be found in some of the contradictions that people saw maybe in some of the, the list.

So we're not going to read through the whole thing, obviously, cause there's 25 of them. I'm going to list off two different pairs. So we'll start with pair number one, which is item four. Which is you're making 10 X too few ads, which of course is something that we've said many, many times on this podcast. And then, well, actually, I guess these aren't necessarily contradictory with each other, but they're related, which is to say you're making 10 X too few ads. And then number six, that your company would make more money if your highest paid marketing team member was a video editor. So I think some of the pushback to four was this idea that making 10 X too few ads, just building volume.

At the expense of actually creative strategy is a bad thing, which is obviously something that we already agree on, so maybe we don't necessarily need to go into that, but six, this is one that I found interesting because I haven't heard this necessarily explicitly expressed from you before this idea that you'd make the most money, you'd make more money rather if your highest paid marketing team member was a video editor.

Break that down for us. What does this mean? Sure.

[00:03:36] Taylor Holiday: I only publish things like this on days where I have a bunch of time to argue with the Internet. So, the reason I published it on the 4th of July is because I was sitting around all day doing nothing. And so I could argue with the Internet because I know that's inevitably where I'm going to end up.

And my favorite response, if you haven't read these, there was a comment that Preston Rutherford wrote on my LinkedIn. He was the, he's one of the co founders of Chubbies. And to give you some incentive to go check out this list, here's what he wrote. He wrote to all the readers of this comment, please use these 25 points to drive the first half day discussion at your brand's Q3 or second half executive leadership offsite.

Or every agency's second half kickoff with your clients, objectively going through each one of these with genuine curiosity will likely be the difference between them making it to 2026 or going out of business. Easy for brands to scoff at or throw out the whole post. If one of the 25 doesn't squarely apply to them, or if they disagree with one of them, even if they disagree with one or two or a few, rather than disregarding it, ask themselves what in the general theme on this point.

That could apply to us. Let's discuss that idea and see what we need to do differently based on the idea. Brands don't necessarily need to follow all of them to a T, but need to honestly consider each one and make sure they either heed the point or have a damn good reason not to. I don't a hundred percent agree with everyone, but I can make a small adaption to the point.

And when considering it that way would have made better decisions for a long term growth and contribution free cashflow and net income generated for the brand. Taylor, this is hot fire. The blue flame type. So that is my, my incentive for you to go read this. And I appreciated press and I wanted to just say thank you.

Cause that was one of the best LinkedIn comments I've ever gotten in my life. And I think it's really is what you're trying to do with a list like this is to force critical thinking. So I want to just say that this isn't about dogma. This isn't about an objective only way to do things, their provocation, their ideas to consider what we might mean.

And so when we get to this next This is a setup to answer, do I think the video editor should be your highest paid person in your marketing department? Well, no, like that's not true in my marketing department and it's not true in any brand that I knows marketing department, but I think it is interesting to explore what would happen if it were true.

And here's why I think it's a compelling idea is the point I'm really trying to make is that brands under resource, the primary place they make money in. When I go into a business yesterday, I was in Utah for one of our customers is a nine figure business that spends. Eight figures plus on meta a month.

So the vast majority of their financial investment and revenue generation comes from this channel right now, internally, if they want to create a meta ad, the media buyer can submit a ticket to the design organization. And it's three weeks to get that ad back.

[00:06:25] Richard Gaffin: Oh, wow. Yeah.

[00:06:27] Taylor Holiday: is just doing a bunch of things.

And that's not uncommon from big companies, right? That they has a design team that works on everything they work on point of sale material for retail and emails and the display ads and billboards and magazine print ads, they do all these things and the resource allocation doesn't match the value creation.

And so what I'm saying with this tweet is that the primary asset. Inside of most organizations, that's creates revenue is a meta ad. And so if you had somebody who was uniquely gifted and talented to produce amazing creative, and I, not just to think it up and I, I, I have a growing community. Belief that we need to merge the idea of strategy and doing as much as we can, and that doers should think strategically and strategic people should think about their capacity to do.

So I don't just meet an editor that has to only receive direction. I meet an editor with vision, an editor with thoughtfulness, an editor with a deep understanding of your business. That's why you would pay them so much money. But if they could every day make amazing video ads, For your meta account, their impact inside of your organization would be really, really great.

And that's the point I'm making is that if most of your money is spent in this channel, It creates most of your revenue, then you should resource it appropriately.

[00:07:50] Richard Gaffin: That's yeah, that's interesting. My experience, like the biggest operational waste of time on the creative side is one person telling another person what to do basically

[00:07:59] Taylor Holiday: right, exactly.

[00:08:01] Richard Gaffin: details. And sometimes when you're working with a huge design organization like that, the only way to get out.

What you want to get out from them is to say, okay, at second one, I want this to be on the screen at second

[00:08:11] Taylor Holiday: That's exactly right.

[00:08:12] Richard Gaffin: if somebody can make those decisions, you can trust them to make those decisions for you and then create the thing Saves an incredible amount of time and it's much less of a pain in the ass, of course

[00:08:22] Taylor Holiday: And, and if I'm a video editor, like I actually have the hard skill, the technical skill that if I can spend time to develop some of the soft, creative ideation skill, like your value is just, it is. Immeasurable like your potential to create impact inside of organizations. If you can actually take a bunch of raw material and turn it into assets over and over and over and over again that impact revenue, right?

Cause every ad has the potential to create immense amount of money. Now, each ad doesn't always work that way. But your potential value creation is really disparate relative to other employees. If all I make inside of the organization is, I don't know, point of sale material, your ability to alter the dynamics of sale are constrained.

They're latent. Their feet, the feedback cycles are slow. The POs don't work the same way. It's going to be really hard to assign you specific value, but if you make an ad that all of a sudden everybody can look in the ad account and go, it spent 500, 000. That value gets assigned to you in a really unique way.

And so it's just, it's a huge opportunity to really clearly impact the organization. And I just think resource allocation inside of these big companies doesn't match the actual value creation area.

[00:09:33] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that makes sense. I think there's another little, you were sort of alluding to this, like a little lesson that designers are probably better at creative strategies than they think they are. And creative strategists are probably going to be better designers than just a rando off the street. And like learning those two skills and bringing them together is just an incredible like combination of value

[00:09:52] Taylor Holiday: I don't give you an example. So Brittany Watterson is one of our Gross strategy manager here at CTC. And she started making TikTok and I follow her on TikTok and she makes great content about marketing material. I like, she knows how to put together a story. She knows how to edit the frames. She gets the medium, but at CTC she doesn't do edit.

She does strategy. She writes briefs. She directs people who make things, but then I see her create her own stuff and I go, oh yeah, you, You could use CapCut. You would know what to do. You actually are intuitively able because, and these tools now are like, you need a few hours of focused intention to figure out the general principles of how to be good at them, not to become world class at it, that obviously takes a lot more time, but they're really amazing how good these tools are nowadays to help you with this process.

[00:10:35] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So one of the thing in a point, maybe implicit in number six, are you, are we taking a stand here that video is superior to the still image when it comes to a meta ad? Or is that, I mean, a video editor could make a still and would it be difficult or anything particular

[00:10:49] Taylor Holiday: I think to make a still great is, is more predicated on the The product that is contained in the image and the surrounding context in which it's delivered. I think that the potential for a video to do more of the work on its own is higher, but I don't know that I believe that definitively. I think that you could, you could, you could replace the idea of editor in this frame.

With someone with editing and design skills even better. And generally speaking, what I noticed about editors is a lot of it is font treatment. Like you're still stylizing stuff in a way that is all a video is, is a series of static frames really, right? Like, so you still have to lay that out in a way that is consistent with graphic design elements.

And so I think that those skills could translate pretty well, even if the tooling is slightly different.

[00:11:39] Richard Gaffin: Okay, so let's let's jump into another one here. Or another potential contradiction. And so actually the, the one I was referencing before wasn't four and six. It was four and 16. Four being you are making 10 x too few ads. 16 being test everything is the worst E-commerce advice that gets shared every day on Twitter.

Although I think like if you've been a listener for the pod to the podcast, particularly for the last two, three weeks, you understand that there's not necessarily contradiction there. We're not talking about making small variation changes. So I just wanted to clarify that. But then the other one,

[00:12:09] Taylor Holiday: that's, that's fair.

[00:12:09] Richard Gaffin: The other one I wanted to point out was number 10, which is ASC tricked everyone into increasing spend on existing customers and remarketing and 25 branch should probably loosen their exclusions on meta. Your customers are forgetting about you. So talk about at least the relationship between those two things and

[00:12:28] Taylor Holiday: they sound, I could see why that could be sounding like I'm saying two different things. When I say meta tricked everybody, what I mean is it happened without them doing it intentionally. That's not a statement about whether it's good or bad. That's a statement about a thing that occurred. And I'll give you an example of how it occurred.

In ASC, you set a percentage of your budget that you want to be spent on existing customers. So let's say I set it to 10%. Okay. What I say, what I'm saying to meta is 10% of that budget that I set on a daily level can be set or can be spent on existing customers. And then I set my daily budget at a thousand dollars.

What you have said to Meta is you can spend up to $100 a day on existing customers. Now, if meta that day because you have a cost control on spends only $500, you've still given them the ability to spend a hundred dollars. Of the 500, which is actually 20 percent of the budget. So one that's confusing right away.

That wasn't intuitive to me when I understood it. And I've seen a lot of people misinterpret that as just a clever way to potentially spend more money on existing customers to the fact that they gave you that slider. Prompted in people's minds of like, Oh, I don't know how much of my budget should go to existing customers.

And what I noticed is like, no one really knew what to put. So they all just put like, I don't know, 10 to 20%, 10%, 5 percent versus historically, we all were like really rigorous about exclusions in ways that I think is really different. So it just prompted a behavior. I think that got everybody to go like, Oh, I don't know.

Yeah, I guess, I guess we want some signal in there or maybe. 95 percent new customers feels pretty good and versus it was all zero in many cases before. No, no, I'm, I'm speaking in some generalities here that there's lots of. Cases, but I think that, and then there's just the general idea that ASC as a product experientially moved further down the funnel in an attempt to produce better performance.

That's a, that's an anecdote that I've heard that a lot of people have experienced that idea. We have some data that shows that. Over the first half of the year, there's been a greater increase in the growth of existing customer revenue, the new customer revenue across brands on e commerce that would potentially validate that idea.

But I don't have any specific confirmation that that's true, but that's something that I hear from a lot of people about that product.

[00:14:58] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So there's,

[00:15:01] Taylor Holiday: So then the idea of loosening exclusions though, sorry, to get to the second part, I actually think that this might be a good thing. Is that what I have seen is that especially in our cohort of customers, which are eight figure brands, is that they have matured and grown their customer file to such a size that they have this large group of lapsed customers, meaning customers that haven't bought from them in, in A year in eight months in nine months are not responding to your emails and really need to be remessaged and resold on the brand.

And in addition, you've likely launched so many new products. It's time to let them know. And one of the things that happens like, so again, this is fresh in my mind because I was with a customer yesterday is they, they started in one category. Then they expanded into a disparate category and the overlap between purchasers of those two product categories is not very high.

So functionally, they're different customers. But at the, at the, at the campaign level, they were excluding all customers. Well, that doesn't make any sense. If you have, let's just make up a brand. Let's use Ridge as an example. And you were selling wallets and then you sell suitcases and the wallet customers don't buy suitcases.

And the suitcase customers don't buy wallets. Why would you exclude the wallet purchasers from the suitcase ads? And so I think that when we think about exclusions, what you're really trying to do is to avoid. Non incremental ad attribution. Okay. Well, the way to do that is probably more focused on the kind of optimization that you use.

So click optimization reduces non incremental sales. And second is to reduce the overlap where email and SMS would have generated the purchase anyways. So, Which is likely in the period of active customers where usually in the first, let's say 75 days where email and SMS is still likely to pick them up with new announcements.

So I think by narrowing the range of exclusions. Avoiding exclusions between product categories, you can get a better definition and better opportunity to increase the signal to meta about who's buying and drive incremental contribution. Not just of the new customer variety.

[00:17:06] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. So in a sense, it's less about loosening exclusions and more about being more specific with them or more granular or detailed in terms of

[00:17:16] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, that's right. So when I say loosening, what I, what I mean is like, they were too tight before you, you had everybody excluded. And now I want you to let some people back in. So I can see how that could be Sort of thought of as the opposite. We need to tighten the exclusions, meaning you have everybody excluded and we need to shrink the pool.

What I mean is we need to like bring some customers back into seeing your ads. More people need to see your ads. Some of the customers that you already have, the idea that you have someone's email address and that they've seen your product once doesn't really mean they're yours. You really have to actively sell them over and over and over again.

[00:17:46] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, there's an interesting, like, we don't, I feel like we don't talk much about the lapsed customer portion of the kind of shrinking the sponge conversation, I guess, like we always, there's your existing customers and there's your new customers, but then particularly, like, like you're pointing out as you grow, if that lapsed customer file becomes massive, then all of a sudden, like, that's a bunch of warm leaves that are just kind of leading on the table or leaving on the table,

[00:18:09] Taylor Holiday: That's right. And what happens all the time is that we'll reintroduce that last cup laps, the customer base, and you'll get like a, a quick, quick, quick Spike in revenue. Now it doesn't last very long because that group isn't enormous. You'll saturate it fairly quickly. The marginal frontier on it's pretty small, but if you set it that as a small continual budget, you'll avoid creating that lapse at the same rate.

So you'll just, you'll activate more customers more often on a persistent basis, but it will produce usually for a lot of you, like a meaningful initial.

[00:18:39] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. So let's let's, let's call it a couple others here. One that we talked about a little bit before we hit record here that I thought was interesting was number 12, our kids will laugh at the idea of buying things from a brand's website. Now, obviously that was maybe a little bit hyperbolized, but maybe unpack that a little bit, like really?

[00:18:57] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, well, so I think that that what happens with purchasing is it like evolution just moves closer and closer to the point of discovery. I think a website was a step in this direction is that the Internet actually brought. The purchase of, of something closer to the customer from the retail store.

So previously, if I was watching a TV ad, the closest I could get to the transaction was the get up, get in my car, drive to the store and buy it. A website brought it closer to where I could go from seeing it on TV to looking at it on my computer or my phone and making the purchase initially. I just think the end result is that the inevitability is the transaction layer Moves all the way right to the point of discovery.

So where does discovery happen? It happens in content. So think about that as social commerce. You're on Tik TOK, you're on meta, you see something and you can instantly purchase it with one click inside of meta or inside of Tik TOK. We already see that happening. I think that's going to continue to grow.

YouTube's going to launch that. Everything's going to launch that. Right. I think you're going to see. Commerce layers on top of video content, like movies and TV shows and reality TV, where you're like, Oh, those are cool shoes. Click purchase. You saw bits of this already with Amazon as the content provider for Monday night football and how they, they did a black Friday TV show.

And there was all this like transaction element inside of the content. I think that happens. I think I could be, I think AR and glasses and things like that are all places where in the real world, if I'm out and I'm like, Hey, that elephant hat that Richard's got on that thing's pretty dang cool. And I can say to my glasses or my Siri, Hey, send me that elephant hat.

I don't care where it came, where the transaction occurs on a website, on Amazon or whatever. I think that level of interaction is, is also going to happen. And so. Part of this is I watch my kids. If my kids want things, then it, like, it's not part of their idea that they would go to a website. The places that they think purchase happens is they go to Amazon.

So one is like, they know that Amazon brings things to their house every single day, like instantaneously. So the first place they would look to buy anything, no matter what the object is, is Amazon. And then second is they, they like talk to Siri like in a way that I, or not Siri Alexa in a way that is so foreign to me, but she is the primary source of everything.

And so I just see these, like the sense that the idea of pulling out a device, typing something into a browser, navigating through multiple steps of clicks where I fill out my information, it's all too cumbersome. As crazy as that sounds, it's really slow and doesn't actually deliver on the instantaneous potential that commerce has in the world of discovery.

[00:21:47] Richard Gaffin: that's interesting. Well, I wonder how, like, how do you think that that principle of evolution would apply to products that take, have like a longer consideration period? Because I could see that also happening where there's like a consistent, something that reminds you to go back and purchase or to explore further or whatever.

But like, how do you see that playing out?

[00:22:07] Taylor Holiday: I see. I think that that depends on where we get knowledge from. So right now, if you think about. How would I do that now? I would Google something, right? Like, so if you told me, Oh, I've got this really cool new watch, I might Google the brand, read some reviews, watch some videos. And I wonder if there's not an intermediary source of truth, like whether that's my personal AI assistant, Jenny, that I created.

And I just say, Jenny, tell me a little bit about. Product X, and she sources all the reviews and information and says, yeah, Taylor, you've got this thing. That's like it. And remember when you did that? And I actually saw that Reggie, your friend has one. So I've texted him about it and I got you a response back and did it like in a way that I could imagine that how I would source information about an object right now.

Again, our millennial brain, we Google it. But that's good. I just think that that, that idea, the 13 blue links as the way to, to get to truth is not how my kids source truth. Like, I just don't think that the next generation is going to source truth the same way we did. I don't think that's consistent across any generation.

So I just think that it's going to happen in a very different way.

[00:23:09] Richard Gaffin: Fascinating. Well, speaking of the, maybe the generational divide, that's an interesting, not necessarily contradiction, but counterpoint to this is to 12 is number 15, which is that retail is so much bigger than online that it is hard to actually conceptualize the Delta. So unpack that a little bit and maybe explain how it interacts with the point you just made in 12.

[00:23:31] Taylor Holiday: So right now. How much purchase volume happens at physical retail as a percentage of all the transactions in the world, this is well known. It's like 85%, right? Like 15 to 16 percent of transactions happen online. 84 percent or so happens at retail. That is such a big number that it's, I think when I say it's hard to conceptualize is that I watch a lot of brands that are trying to grow a lot.

They're mid eight figures. And they're like, ah, how do I get 50 percent more growth? And you realize like, Oh, you haven't even, you haven't even touched the biggest portion of the market that still exists for your product. And this is like more true in certain categories. You know, we've used native deodorant as an example before on this podcast, a long time customer of ours, like the amount of deodorant bought.

Stop at grocery versus online is just so massively different that the idea of where your growth would come from. If you were a deodorant brand, if the answer isn't Walmart and target and Albertsons and all of those things, then like you have so much more potential there than you do online at the rate at which people buy deodorant online.

Now again, that's, it's different, different strokes for different categories, but you got to think like automotive is fascinating where Tesla is like one of the only companies that really sells direct to consumer cars. Like all the other cars in the world are bought at physical locations. And so I think there's, there is there, you're, you're right in that, like, there's this bridge between present state and future reality.

Today, I'm not telling people not to make a website. If I'm starting a brand, I'm building a website. Like for sure, all of the transactions happen on the website. And, but the future that I could imagine something different. And that's why I said our kids, that's like beckoning to the next generation more than it is a present day claim.

And the same thing is true for retail today. Retail is most of the purchases still. And. Who knows what the future holds, but today that's still the case. And I think a lot of brands again, so much of what I think about is where does future value come from? Where do you, as a business go capture future value?

And I watch people just like grinding this like meta ad engine, just try and squeak out 13 percent more growth. And it's like, wow, maybe, maybe there's other channels of massive, more opportunity for you as a business. Not that those things are simple or without their own complexities, but

[00:25:50] Richard Gaffin: I know this is a conversation before, but just because we're talking about it, what's because we, I mean, we're on record as sort of giving warnings about channel expansion or distribution channel expansion. What do you, what do you think the inflection point is? I know we've gone over this before.

What's the inflection point where it's like, okay, now it's time to start really, really thinking about retail.

[00:26:10] Taylor Holiday: when you can be responsible for the sell through in a location, when your unaided brand awareness is such that you have created enough to make sure that you're successful at it. So, when we did this, I'll give you the approach that we took when Kalo was like, okay, we mapped out the future of retail growth and we said, okay, what stores are they going to come from?

And we, we had three sort of primary retailers that we looked at. One was a sporting goods store called Academy. One was Home Depot or Lowe's, like the home improvement category. And the third was, I think it was like Dick's Sporting Goods or another sporting goods, or maybe it was fitness. Maybe it was like 24 hour fitness.

I don't know, but I'll just use, but I want to focus on the one Academy. And so we said, okay, Academy is a big sports retailer in the South, like Texas. And what we said was, okay, if we're going to be successful in Academy, then we need all of Academy's customers to know who Kalo is. And so we said, all right, where are their locations?

Okay. Texas. All right. Before we go to Academy, we're going to do work to sell Kalo into those customers in those demographics, in those regions. Such that with the way we sold into Academy is back in the day, there used to be this you used to be able to look at your audience insights in meta and see who your customers were.

And one of the categories was like favorite products. And so we took one of our internal organizational goals was to have Academies. Audience insights, their demographic customers, favorite products, BK low that we could use to sell into Academy and say, your customers already are a customer. We will win here.

If you put us into your stores. And so we felt responsible for the actual sale of the store. I think a lot of times people go, Oh, the retailer is going to help me reach new customers. No, they're not. They're going to put you on the shelf. And then like, maybe you'll be in a flyer someday. But like you have to make the product move.

And so I think the sequencing has to be when you have the capacity and dollars to support the sell through and distribution in the, in a, in a specific region, which usually means you start small and expand out as you have success.

[00:28:12] Richard Gaffin: makes sense. Okay, cool. Any, any other, other, other, sorry, any other one of these points that you want to call it specifically?

[00:28:19] Taylor Holiday: Let's see, I think the one about 10 X and your value inside of an organization. 

[00:28:26] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:28:28] Taylor Holiday: I think

[00:28:29] Richard Gaffin: Well, it's actually, let's let me, let me read it off just for the folks here. So number 18, number 18 is if you want to instantly 10 X your value inside your organization, become the best in the company at Excel parentheses, it would probably only take you 60 days of focused learning.

[00:28:45] Taylor Holiday: So, I, I think there are very few pieces of software that have been pervasive throughout multiple decades. And it's very risky to become great at an individual software because that could disappear in relevance really fast. Like, if you're the best at Canva, like, It's probably useful today, but in, I don't know, two years, maybe there's something way better and you're obsolete.

Excel is the most persistent, consistently used piece of software in every organization in the world. And so it makes you able to transfer skill across multiple business types, models, sizes, context, like enterprise level customers. The biggest businesses in the world and startups both use this piece of software constantly.

And what I've noticed is most people are not very good at it. And when you're good at it, it feels like wizardry. It's like magic that you can take and create a pivot table and know how to do a V lookup and take tasks that take people countless hours and make them happen really quickly. You'll get constant requests from people to help them.

You'll become known inside the organization. And you will be asked to do things and create and create Visuals and information for the most important parts of the organization. And when I say it's 60 days, I mean like if you took two like high end e commerce or Excel courses from Udemy or any other software, like, and you were really focused on it, it's actually pretty quick.

And so I think that like the, the potential payoff, if I was looking for a way to grow inside of an organization and develop more corporate reputation and capacity, it's the, it's the first thing I would

[00:30:18] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I've found I've been doing, I've been obsessed with Google sheets really for the, like the last couple of

[00:30:25] Taylor Holiday: Yeah.

[00:30:26] Richard Gaffin: I've built some, some tools for admission and that kind of thing. And, and you're right, the, the learning a new formula that does something incredible is like a really, not only is it a really cool feeling, but like understanding the thing about Excel and sheets is that if you ask yourself the question, I wonder if this can do, you The answer is almost always.

Yes, it can, that there is a way to get to it. And that's just a quality that most tools that we use on a day to day basis do not have, but Excel can do everything. It's incredible

[00:30:55] Taylor Holiday: That's right. It's flexibility is truly remarkable. And I think, again, it's just, you have a skill for life that's applicable in so many places. And again, Richard, your job is a creative who's in charge of a community group, leads a podcast, and you use Excel all the time. Like I I'm the CEO, I use Excel all the time.

Like it's pervasive in media buyers. Use Excel all the time, like create it. It just doesn't matter. Everybody uses it. And so being excellent at it is just such an obvious upscale that I think is useful.

[00:31:28] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. All right. So I'll leave you with the final question here, because I think it's interesting is, so these 25 takes are meant to be hot takes, but of course, even though it got a ton of engagement. In terms of likes and whatever and responses, there wasn't a lot of disagreement, which may have been disappointing as somebody who likes to argue, but what do you think it says, or how many of these points do people agree with a year ago or two years

[00:31:51] Taylor Holiday: Well, I think I've cultivated an audience that follows me specifically. I think there, there is a lot more disagreement probably in text messages and in Slack threads about what an idiot I am probably then then, then publicly, but I do think that We have been right about this about the shift of focus towards profitability.

And it's becoming normative now to say things like you probably have too many people or your OPEX should be leaner or, you know, those kinds of things. I think people are aware of it. And so, it is, I think, getting closer to time and I'm, I'm starting to tease a thing. Like you may have seen some things that I've been putting out about IPOs and the brands that I think are coming to IPO is that I think that what's been happening is we've been going through a cleansing as an industry, which is we're paying for the sins of the past, which was all the consumer brands that went public.

Weren't actually that good at businesses. Their stocks are all down 90%. There was a bunch of predatory lenders that gave out money that they couldn't afford. Everybody's going bankrupt. The venture capital money all fled and we're having to create health and cleanse ourselves of all of that. On the other side of that though, we can prove that consumer can be a great business model.

And I think there's some brands that have done it. And, and it's going to start to prove again, that this is an opportunity where growth capital can come and can be successful. And that there is a period on the end of this where people are going to want to go, I want to be a part of that business because it's producing great cash and it's growing year over year.

And it's a business I'd be proud to be a part of. And I think that that's roadmap is there and it's going to start to be elevated as some of these things. Thanks. Reset the top of the market, have some successful IPOs, have some big wins on transactions from this group of customers that have gone through this and are now really good businesses.

[00:33:37] Richard Gaffin: There you go. Well, folks, maybe that's the hottest take of all is that there's light at the end of the tunnel and things are going to look up and get stronger as, as we move on through the year. But all right, folks. Well, thanks for listening. That'll do it for us for this week. Take everyone. We'll talk to you next week.