Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee

[00:00:00] Taylor: All right. I guess I'm the host. I haven't been here in a while, but we're back for another episode of the "Ecommerce Playbook" podcast. Troy, it almost feels like you should be the host. You're the regular guest now. Should you just-- Should you be introducing me as a guest or the other way around? What do you think?

[00:00:16] Joy: It's been a year That just means you you're choosing to not do work. That, that doesn't seem like a leader's responsibility.

[00:00:26] Taylor: Joy and I get on the podcast to discuss his progress, think of this as like a public job review to discuss how you're doing and how you're evolving to meet the demands that I'm placing on you. And we're gonna go through a special offer that you've released that I think is an evolution in many ways of what I am constantly, uh, hammering you about in terms of the job to be done for our customers, which is do more for less money constantly.

[00:00:53] Um, that is the swan song of CTC that we're, we're after. Um, so we're gonna talk about that today, but let's jump in. Intro.

[00:01:08] Joy: We should keep that in

[00:01:11] Taylor: No, how, that, Corey, that's where you do the intro part. Um, all right, Joy, you, you sent me over an outline today that, uh, you wanted to go through with the podcast, and it starts by saying that you and I have an argument and fight every week, which I don't, I don't know that, uh, that's totally true. I mean, there is some form of argument every week because you're just an outrageous person that I have to contend with all the time.

[00:01:36] But what, w- what did you describe our weekly argument as?

[00:01:41] Joy: Our weekly argument is always about, it's, it's this idea that yes, we say at CDC that it should be always more at, at the same price or cheaper price. But the other part that actually is talked about more often is like extreme accountability. You're like, "Yeah, everything is your fault. I don't care what happened, it's your fault."

[00:01:56] And that is basically, I think it's a fight in the sense that of like, "This happened, this happened, this happened." You'll be like, "Yes, and your fault." And then I would ask you, "How is it my fault?" And you will come up with some kind of argument that would make it seem like, yeah, your fault. Which to put in extreme examples for people is like, if a earthquake happens and you died, you could have taken a different cab, been to a different hotel, could be traveling the world.

[00:02:19] Like, it always you could have done something to not die. And that's like the example what we talk about

[00:02:25] Taylor: Yeah. So I try and grant you back, uh, authority over your life is what I try and do. 'Cause in the agency business, one of the things that's very easy to do as a service provider is to capitulate responsibility back to the customer for the outcome. Um, and w- what I have learned over many years of doing this is that if you want to be responsible for the positive outcome, that means you have to be willing to be responsible for the negative one too.

[00:02:54] And so if you want to actually be seen as impactful and valuable, then the outcome is yours, and you have to see it that way. And so the, the idea is less that I believe that it's possible for you to control every variable, but just to recognize that the customer's reality doesn't care about the idea of individual responsibility between you and them.

[00:03:21] Their reality is I have money or I don't have money, and the consequence of that is you're fired or we keep working together. And so the only thing to do is to remain in a position by which I believe that I can look at the playing field and I can go exert my will on it such that I would alter the future reality to a better, better state for our customers.

[00:03:43] And so when you come and you wanna give me all the reasons why a customer failed, I just reject the premise that it's ex- it's an externality, and I grant you back the authority to solve it. And so that's, that is a lot of our conversation. And, and as a byproduct, I think what you do and what I watch people do, and I think what this offer is a byproduct of, is you then begin to want to take over a larger surface area of impact for the business, right?

[00:04:09] You recognize that, hey, if I'm gonna be in ch- responsible for contribution margin, I probably need to have a point of view on email. I need a p- have a point of view on the marketing calendar. I need to have a point of view on landing pages. I can't just sit in the meta account and tr- use that as the express way to impact the overall business health.

[00:04:27] And so you begin to expand the area of responsibility. Is that fair to say? Is I've, as I've pushed you to more authority and accountability, you begin to broaden the surface area that you want to impact.

[00:04:40] Joy: Yeah, this offer came out of hate, for everyone to know. Like, it purely came out of hate. It's like this is the one argument that I haven't won in a long time, so might as well just win it now. So this is the way we win it, just we just control everything

[00:04:53] Taylor: So maybe talk a little bit about what you were noticing in interactions with your customer base. And for reference, these are primarily seven-figure stores, so people earlier in their jour- journey, usually smaller teams. In terms of some of the limitations that you were running into with just the PE7 offer.

[00:05:09] And then the first evolution maybe you can talk about, which is marketing moments, that's like, uh, the first step. And then this offer now, which, uh, what are we calling it? I don't think we, we need a, we need a, a formal, uh, name that's a little bit more, uh, appropriate for the crowd. But, but how that evolution has happened and why you've gone to each of those areas, maybe share a little bit about that.

[00:05:30] Joy: I think it started with the core service where the idea was we need to provide the most value at the best price and be competitive, so we got a lot of people there. And then what happened was, if you think about growth strategy in P7 terms, in P8 it's different, but in P7 terms it's like can I spend more money at the same efficiency or better efficiency and get more volume, and can I do that as an arbitrage so I can reach a certain number so I can hire people, so I can have evergreen growth?

[00:05:55] Those basically sos has basically made us make marketing moments, which are like is there something we can do that will give you outbursts of revenue or efficiency or contribution, whatever your concern is. We set it up and we-- for the first time, that, that's where this thing started, which was like we will guarantee an outcome to you, which is if we don't make you the money you pay us, it's, it's money back to you.

[00:06:15] We'll pay you the difference back. Which basically held us to a hook of accountability, which basically made the same idea that it's like extremely accountable. It's just like I come up with the offer, I make the landing page, I make the creatives. So we did all of that for a particular marketing moment.

[00:06:29] It ran side by side to your growth plan. So whatever your growth plan was, it was the baseline, and then you wanna break the model, as we call it at CDC, we made marketing moments. That's how that came out to me. And after that, you still didn't like it as much, uh, because we weren't able to apply it on every customer.

[00:06:48] We-- I would say this, like it was a great adoption rate. A lot of problems were solved because of that. But that basically made it bigger in the sense that I wanted to sell speed for the first time, to be fair. That's another thing which is like we have sold value for the longest time. I was like if, if you're to-- like what the evolution should be is like it should be value, we should keep value, and then we should also add speed.

[00:07:09] And I was like, where is speed the most valuable? Like to who is speed more valuable than anything else? And it just came out to be subscription businesses because to them it's like a compounding in the opposite direction. If they don't acquire new customers, their business actually dies, and that's basically why we're like, "Okay, so how can we be fully accountable to it?"

[00:07:26] So I just went through all the data. We were like, "Okay, what are the things that we tell a person?" We tell them, "This is the offer," because of our market insights. And I actually don't think we-- I don't even think CDC has talked about how valuable the data set is to us. Because I don't think we've ever conveyed why the data is valuable, and I think like the hack that we look at it, at least at P7 it's more valuable than P8 because we can see an exact business in the exact same industry, done the exact same things with a similar product mix to be like 10 times bigger than what the P7 brand is.

[00:07:58] And then we can just go and be like, "Hey, this is what the bid is. This is what the industry average bid is, and this is what the average AOV is." And a lot of times, like I've sat through some funny conversations where the client is like, "Get me more volume at, at a better efficiency." I'm like, "Okay, but the business that's 10 times bigger than you has a CAC that's higher than your AOV.

[00:08:16] So like how is this happening?"

[00:08:18] Taylor: Well, and th-this is where I, I think the idea that people don't understand that you are a market taker, um, on Meta. That, that you don't get to set the price of the ad inventory. It's an auction. So the price of the ad inventory is not even really relative to the quality of your ads. That's an input, but it is very much a, a competitive environment for what someone else is willing to pay for that same conversion.

[00:08:43] If someone's willing to pay twice as much, they're gonna get the delivery and you aren't. And so this idea, you know, I think it's been popularized through whether you call it natural CAC, I prefer the phrase market CAC. The point is just that there's a price to win the feed, and it goes to the person who can pay the most will get the most scale.

[00:09:00] And so when you look at... I was even, you know, yesterday there was a lot of conversation on X about IMA, and they have like a $308 CAC, right? For an AOV that's like, you know, two-thirds of that. And so you've got... When brands see that, I think what they don't conceptualize is that so much of the speed game is a financing problem relative to a deep understanding of the payback period of your product and how far you can get someone-- how far out you can get someone to agree to finance that acquisition will be directly related to the velocity of the business.

[00:09:34] Um, and so I think that just trying to understand that, and it obviously works much better for a specific brand setup, which is brands with high LTV or subscription, right? So there's this, there's this dynamic by which there are a subset of brands that should be able to move in distinctly different ways than other brands.

[00:09:51] And so as we think about designing a service offering to meet people where they're at relative to the underlying genetic attributes of the business, I think this is part of what I see you doing with this offer, which is evolving for a subset of brands that have the capacity to move fast and want to do so in a unique way relative to some of the other portfolio brands.

[00:10:11] Joy: That is true. I, I think it will be like SKU-specific marketing pretty soon. I was thinking about like high AOV brands, and it's like, do you have call funnels and stuff like that? Like, it's a very different game if your AOV is higher. So I, I think it'll keep evolving, yes

[00:10:25] Taylor: Yeah. The service and growth strategy begins to sort of segment relative to the needs of the specific brand and their, and their attributes. And that's one of the challenging things about designing a service function to meet so many different markets. But, um, so, so marketing moments was this first evolution into further accountability, where one of the things we often run into, and this is true at the PE8 level, PE9 level, is that it is remarkable to me, remarkable how bad brands are at marketing, planning, and calendaring.

[00:10:54] Like, the idea of what is my offer and message and story next month is so underdeveloped that people will often come to us and there is no marketing calendar. There is no email plan for the next 30 days, or they're working in two-week sprints. And so they, they don't appreciate just how effective it is to really organize your m- promotion calendar, your product release calendar, your stories to meet the seasonality or cultural moments that are happening.

[00:11:20] Uh, and so you, rather than depending on them to provide us a marketing calendar, we then so say, "Hey, in that gap, if Taylor's gonna yell at me and say I'm responsible for this no matter what, I wanna take over building the marketing moments and building it soup to nuts." This is another thing that becomes problematic is the creative and the landers and the entire delivery rather than depending on it.

[00:11:43] So not only do you design the calendar, create the offer, do the ads, and run the landing pages so that you can take over responsibility, and we say, "Hey, we'll actually guarantee the outcome of this service because we know that it works so well." And so that was that first step into saying, "Fine, Taylor, I guess I'll go and make it work."

[00:12:01] Joy: That is it. That, that's purely it. I also think that there's, like, a cheating part of it. Like, to be able to guarantee, I had to have so much conviction that I can just cheat. Like, that's it. Like, I'm not saying we're gonna play the same game and me versus everyone else is playing the same game. We are. I'm, I'm cheating, and that's why we will win, for sure.

[00:12:17] I think part of that is, like, if it's an auction, if I can tell you this is what everyone is... Like, if, if it's a blind auction and people don't know what everyone else is paying, and I can tell you that's what the competition is paying, that's cheating to the highest degree. The other part is the API access to th- which we have access to.

[00:12:32] And even more importantly, it's like content. People, people talk about how content is so important. If you read the refundal part of this, that's actually, like, in- incredible. It says every time, like, one cent deviation above the mean, all the creators that work, have worked above average, you just get access to all of them.

[00:12:48] This is like, that's another par-

[00:12:50] Taylor: jumping ahead. You're jumping ahead. Let's go through each of the pieces of the offer. So as we think about this evolution, and I'm even-- I'm writing my next talk for Commerce Roundtable, a-and it's, it's the continuation of this idea of what a capitalist system does to force evolution and what skills emerge in those kind of environments.

[00:13:10] And when I think about my job as an agency leader, so much of it is to create the constraints of the environment such that that evol-evolution occurs naturally. So if you think about marketing moments and what you're doing in the service offering is you're saying, "Okay, Taylor is creating a condition by which we have to c-ex-continue to expand the revenue expectation while also delivering value to the customer so that they persist."

[00:13:33] And so it is really hard to create the compression where the price is low enough that you can guarantee the value consistently enough across so many different brands. It's actually a really hard, uh, mechanic to create. And then to go even further and go, "All right, well, how do we pack so much value into this that you use the phrase cheating, but that we can, like, guarantee the outcome as much as possible?"

[00:13:56] And so much of that is to, like, bundle costs reduction, so you actually create savings in the business that lower the hurdle rate to investment, but then also be able to create value on top of it. So let's talk about outside of marketing moments. So first we go and say we're gonna build the marketing calendar, we're gonna build the landers, we're gonna create the ads.

[00:14:13] Now there's an even further step here, and so talk about what this most recent offer is and everything that it includes for brands.

[00:14:20] Joy: So it goes through whenever we take over a client, if I had a perfect client and I could execute everything in a week, what would I do? And the journey would be, okay, market research of what works. What are the best products that work? What is the best products that sell according to me based on my margins and merchandise?

[00:14:35] Choose the best products. Understand the best offers for them in the industry. So we do all that research and we include our competitive advantage in it. Then we go and we make landing pages. And then the answer is, we don't make one landing page. And I think that's what-- When you talk to people, I, I always think about this phrase, which is like, it's not a binary.

[00:14:52] Like, it's not do I make a landing page every month or not? It's like, how many landing pages can I make? And when I guarantee it, the answer is infinite. As many as I need to win. And that's basically the idea to creative strategy. And it's like, it's the answer to all of these variables that we call growth.

[00:15:05] It's like, how many emails? As many as you need for the target. How many landing pages? As many as you need for the target. Same thing for creative. So we go and we make landing pages, and then it's like, what is good? And good and other is basically our data set. So we have that data set in Statlas, which is conversion rate versus AOV in a log table.

[00:15:20] So I exactly know what is the AOV that everyone needs to bid. Once I know that, then I need-- I also know in that table, okay, what is the industry average conversion rate at that point? And then I can go and I can make landing pages. And the second I find conversion rate above that, I won. Then we-- So we keep testing until we do that.

[00:15:35] Once we find that, then it's like, okay, now if you go to the brand, it's like, "Hey, I took your offer. I made the landing page. I can't test the offer because I don't have creative." So we start with statics. We make all the branded ads. We call them branded ads at CDC. Like, we make all the branded ads. They are the cheapest thing to produce, best thing to validate the idea.

[00:15:52] Once we do that, then they're like, "Okay, so this was a great journey." For an average brand, it takes a month to do this, to be very fair. For us, with the new offer, it takes seven days. Again, like selling speed at this point purely. And then what happens is like, okay, now how do I scale it? And a lot of the reasoning, and I think this is why speed is important, is like if I can make an investment to find a winning offer in a month, and then it takes me another month to scale that offer by having a lot of whitelisted content, and I can do that in two weeks, it's actually so much more valuable because the return is so fast that it's so consolidated earlier together.

[00:16:22] So we will do that. We will take the winning offer, and we will put a bunch of videos on it, whitelisted ads from it from Refund. And they're like, okay. And I run into this idea with a lot of people. It's like, I don't think the agency cares. And I know you have taken a lot of stances on this. It's like, it's a teacher's responsibility that you should make the agency care and all that stuff.

[00:16:42] And I'm like, "Okay," but like what would be-- What would make the person on the other side say, "No, no, no, the agency actually cares about my business more than my employees care about it"? And I think what that-- The way you do that is like, it's the carrot and the stick, right? Like, the carrot is we get to go and keep you as a customer.

[00:16:57] It's always the carrot. The stick is actually the guarantee, which is like, if I don't, I actually need to give you back the money, and nobody likes doing that. That's like the most painful thing that we can actually transfer over also to additional people working on it. It's like, "Hey, there's a guarantee.

[00:17:11] We need to deliver on this." That's actually one of the reason Marketing Moments is so great is because there's an inherent guar-guarantee to it. Like, we need to make it work. We need to prove the cost out. That helps a lot. And then we are, the thing that you don't like as much is like we are actually media buying 24 by seven on it.

[00:17:26] So that, that is my favorite part of this. But yeah, that's the entire offer, all of it.

[00:17:34] George

[00:17:37] Taylor: If we think about the collections of things that we sort of see as needing to be successful, you have the offer design, conceptualizing how to position your product relative to the market competition, relative to the inherent attributes, the gross margin, the consideration for LTV. Like, there's some mechanic in there by which there is the right relationship between the conversion rate and the price and the margin of the offer against whatever CAC you can afford to pay.

[00:18:06] And somewhere in there is just work to be done around testing the bounds in every direction and also framing it relative to the consumption patterns of the product that are useful, the other options in the market, et cetera, et cetera. And so often I see brands where they've just lost a sense of where the market has moved in terms of a price per unit.

[00:18:26] So let's say you're selling powders or pills or whatever it might be, there's a price per the underlying unit. Like, there's a price per pill in there somewhere. And oftentimes the market will move very aggressively downwards in a way that you just sort of lose consciousness of, such that the alternative options are so much better than what you're positioning that you can't actually win enough, uh, because the market has provided too good of alternatives, uh, in, in what becomes man- in many ways a functional commodity.

[00:18:55] And so I think that there are, there are a lot of, like, ways to be aware of that, that you have to just bring into the fold. And then you say, "Okay, now that we have a concept, we need landing pages." And to your point, not just one landing page, but lots of versions of landing pages. And landing pages, like ads, I think are, are, are something that needs to be produced a- at a variety and scale that allows you to message map between the creative and the, the lander as much as possible to different personas and different opportunities. And then we say, "All right, well, static images are one piece of that, but we also wanna be able to bring in what we find to be the best way to create high volume of diverse production, which is creators," right? I, I'm a big believer that if you want diversity and volume, you need to diversify production. Um, and so Refunnel is a partner that's come in and said, "Hey."

[00:19:46] So maybe quickly, for those who don't know, what does Refunnel do, and how are they specifically helping us in this case?

[00:19:52] Joy: So Refinal, I think few years ago, they got the-- They were the only people who have one-click whitelist. So whitelist, if you think about the experience, it's like so terrible. You need to sh-share pages and stuff like that. They were the first people from Facebook that got API, which made them the biggest. So they were one of the biggest partners for whitelisting.

[00:20:08] They had the most data, the most amount of creators that were whitelisted through them. And the way they came up is basically I called up Atif, he's the CEO there. I was like: "Hey, this is the business." He's like: "How can I just make everything work? Like, I will be the person responsible for it. I need to find a way to get a lot of creators really fast, make content incredibly fast, and do it at a bare scale than like there's the Hudson method," which is like how do we compete with that?

[00:20:29] It's like the way we can do that is we have, I think they had like 50,000 creators that were whitelisted across, I think, I don't know, very short time span. I was like: "Okay, so can we plot who works the most often because there's the power law involved here, and then we can just take every creator that's one standard deviation above the mean, and you give us access to those creators."

[00:20:48] They were like, "Okay, so let's put all those people together in a community." And I think there are like 3,000 people that's like the power law. These are people that worked almost always. They were put in the community. And the funniest thing was I was like-- And then it needs to produce value. So it's actually free to the customer that signs up for this from CDC.

[00:21:04] That's special. You can't actually get it anywhere else. But more importantly, they also don't charge percentages, which is like the other partners. Like any platform that does this charges you a percentage of revenue, percentage of spend, and they're like, "No, no, no. Flat fee, free to CDC customers." So that's like value creation.

[00:21:19] So I already decreased cost, and I replaced a department. If people think about it, it's like it was a managed service. It had to be managed because people had to reach out to thousands of creators. Some will reply, then you need to sort out tax forms and 1099, and like you need to do so many things for these people.

[00:21:35] You need to turn off your mic. Is something happening? Uh, people had to go and change so many things, and they had to get so many VAs involved and all of that, and now we don't need to because you just get all the work done and put into a single community, and you drop a whitelisting link. "Hey, this is the brand.

[00:21:49] This is the content we need to make. Everyone who wants to make it, apply." Done. Their tax forms are handled for, which I actually think like a lot of people who are doing the Hudson method should realize what the 1099s they're gonna file every year now for every single creator they've got, and there are like thousands.

[00:22:03] So that's also another thing that's covered.

[00:22:07] Taylor: So you get the landing pages, you get the static ads, and now you get this pre-curated group of creators that know how to make content that have already been defined. You get the ease of access to them, handling all the administrative tasks. You get the speed at which you can get them whitelisted and, and producing partnership ads in your account, um, all as part of the functional service.

[00:22:28] And again, because of our relationship with Refunnel, something you get exclusively through us. So if you are in a brand that feels like they're in a position to accelerate your growth and need all of those boxes checked, the capacity for our team... And specifically Joy, who is going to be delivering this service?

[00:22:48] Just so I'm clear.

[00:22:49] Joy: It's me. It's like I have the liability and all the risk on this one

[00:22:54] Taylor: So, so just to be clear, Joy personally will be the one doing the work. So when I think about what are all the things that I can access at a price that I can't get anywhere else, we talk a lot about, uh, uh, if you've ever heard me sort of reference the debate of in-house versus agency, my argument is always this is a dumb argument.

[00:23:12] The question should be: Where can you get access to the most talented person at the best price to work for your brand most often? Like, that's, that's what you really want as a leader, as anything, is that the, the idea that the people, the talent are equal on both sides of that equation, in-house versus, um, agency, is just not true.

[00:23:30] There are people who are better equipped to s- to support your band, brand, regardless of their employment status. Um, and I would just contend that Joy is one of those people, that if you had the chance to specifically hire him to work on your business under this pretense with all of this additional value, you will not find...

[00:23:49] You couldn't hire Joy. Like, you couldn't pay him to come work for your team. I can tell you he's wildly expensive and asks for more money every day. So that's a giant pain that I'm gonna hold for you to resolve to figure out how to keep him fed, um, while he globe trots across the country and, you know, buys new hats every week.

[00:24:09] But this is just a, a really unique opportunity to get incredible talent, a broad scope of service delivery with a commitment to delivering the outcome at a rapid pace, with unique access to tooling from Statlas to Refunnel to all these things. We can even throw Northbeam in there if that's important to you from a measurement standpoint.

[00:24:26] There's just-- It's, it's an unbelievable amount of value at a price that you can't contend with anywhere else. And so that's what my pressure is to our organization, is how do we continue to drive the cost of delivering value down such that the hurdle rate for you to make a return on the investment with us is better all the time?

[00:24:43] Um, not because we want the value creation to be lower, but w- because we want the value capture for you to be higher. Um, I just believe that that's ultimately an Amazonian principle that says the more value you deliver to the customer, the more that they're gonna wanna persist and stay with you and spread the word about the quality of the service.

[00:24:59] So Joy is after that all the time. In the original PE7 service, I still believe that's a massive home run, and if you're not one of these fast accelerating businesses, that's still the right place. Add in the marketing moments, which are guaranteed revenue creation in support of your marketing calendar, and now if you're one of these fast-growing CPG brands or consumable or subscription-based business, I think this service, uh, is incredibly, uh, opportunistic for you to take advantage of.

[00:25:23] So Joy, what else? Anything else you'd add in?

[00:25:26] Joy: I think two things. So I was on a call with a person who was interested in this offer, and this was like, this was mind-blowing to the person on their side. He was like, "I have in-house teams. I worked years to go and get landing page developers and creatives and all these people. So if you give a strategy, we'll execute on it."

[00:25:43] And I had to go and tell him like, "It actually doesn't matter. Like, if you have a strategy, we'll just execute it on our own. So we'll just compete. I'm happy to compete at this point." Like, at this point I'm actually happy to compete with your internal teams, external partners, like bring everyone on at this point, and I think that's what it should do.

[00:25:56] Like, the world should know, yeah, the world should know that we were the first time to guarantee this, and I actually want everyone to guarantee some outcome on the money they charge businesses. And if you do that, you actually win on the value creation side. Like, that's actually the accountability factor of this

[00:26:11] Taylor: I, I think that people just need to understand that the convert-- the idea that strategy and production are disassociated is just... That's, that's a lo- that's a bygone fact. Like, if your team is saying, "We'll do the execution, just give us the strategy," I would just say, "Hey, those people in this moment need to be able to combi- bring those skills together."

[00:26:31] There's just no barrier to the execution layer anymore. And so, uh, and, and candidly, this idea that like AI might be better at the production layer but not the strategy layer also is debatable. I think, I think there is so much capacity to unify those ideas, and I think the, the missing pieces for a system to do that is the breadth of context that CTC and Statlas can provide, as well as then, uh, the access to, to the unlimited token consumption and the capacity to go and produce all day long.

[00:26:57] That's another resource that we are gonna provide on your behalf. So there's just ways in which I think, uh, you just should demand an expectation with us, y- of your internal team or us, that the tools, the strategy, and the production all come together in one person. That's... And I've published this before, if you're hiring an employee, I would be asking: What tools are you bringing with you?

[00:27:15] What system are you bringing with you? What-- How are you gonna unify execution and strategy into a single person as much as possible? Because that's just the table stakes of these days. Um, you know, the conversation on Twitter I posted yesterday is moving from the 10% OPEX to the 1% OPEX, and I think this is a, a service in support of that.

[00:27:31] So Joy, good work. We'll see, we'll see how it turns out. Uh, Joy has some belief about the pace at which he's able to move that I'm, I'm skeptical of, uh, of him, but we'll, we'll... He

[00:27:41] Joy: But we tested it. I, I actually think there's the part of this which like, we are not doing this for the first time. We actually did it for two businesses, and now we are actually doing it for three actual business and we're documenting it, so that's the thing

[00:27:54] Taylor: Um, yeah, I, I, I think that you are very public with this, although you've been a little, uh, late in your publishing of all

[00:28:02] your data lately 'cause you're a little bit too busy. So I've gotta get you back onto the production timeline to keep the transparency up, because transparency is part of the mechanism for accountability. It's that if we're gonna say these things, we just want to more often than not publish the reality of the outcome, and so we're committed to doing that for the sake of improving our own product.

[00:28:20] Joy: I was thinking of doing like a weather report style on the e-com car buy every week. Like, this is what happened to the three businesses. I'm like, okay

[00:28:28] Taylor: So, I mean, like, yeah, the build in public idea, right, is very popular. Um, and I think, I think that what people miss about the benefit is it's, it's good marketing, but it also is, again, radical accountability. Just like publishing research, right? Like, like publishing research about cost controls or anything else, it's an expectation that we are subjecting ourselves to the scrutiny of reality, is that, i- is the thing that we're saying true?

[00:28:51] Is it working? And if not, um, what are we gonna do to evolve it? Because we care about progressive truth. We care about getting better as we go. So get with Joy. Press him to deliver value to you. Press him to deliver a value in excess of his cost. Say that that's what he promised on the podcast and that, uh, and make sure that that's what you're experiencing when you come to him, and that's the standard we have.

[00:29:12] So Joy, where, where, where should they reach out to you to make this happen?

[00:29:17] Joy: Sure. Email shaya@commonthreadcode.com or shayshorm_11, or just message Taylor. You can, you can flood his

[00:29:25] Taylor: ple-please don't do that. Please don't do that. Um, all right, Joy. Thanks for stopping in, and, uh, we'll see how this goes. Update coming one year from now.