Equation of Excellence

Rabah (00:01.028)
get all sorts of variations. Ray Hill. But my so my name's actually yeah well that's the thing is like I have like my ethnic name like Raba like you're supposed to kind of like glottal stop it but you're not getting Americans to say that so it's just like R-A-W-B-U-H is kind of Raba to get people but yeah. Dad's Algerian and mom's Mexican. It's a super weird mix. Yeah.

Nate Lagos (00:02.666)
Sure.

Nate Lagos (00:06.686)
I went to Middle Eastern with it.

Nate Lagos (00:16.17)
Yeah, no.

Nate Lagos (00:21.721)
What is your ethnicity?

Nate Lagos (00:27.238)
Oh, interesting, I would not have guessed Mexican.

Rabah (00:29.668)
Yeah, yeah, but my name's Arabic. It means winner or champion in Arabic. Yeah, let's go send it. Three, two, one. All right, folks. We had to dig into the budget here to book such an incredible guest, but this guy is one of just the absolute killers in the space. I've been following him for an incredibly long time. Just a wicked smart dude, just running just incredible acquisition strategies for...

Nate Lagos (00:32.246)
Gotcha. Hell yeah, dude.

Rabah (00:59.28)
beautiful original grain. They make incredible watches. Some of the stuff that you guys are putting out now is almost like proper premium like the because you guys have a spectrum of watches where you're in the kind of like couple hundreds. But now some of these other ones are like, Oh man, it's incredible. But Nate, Legos like the toy got it got it got it from original grain. Thank you for coming on the show, man. Yeah, like I said, you're one of my one of my favorites and I think you

Nate Lagos (01:00.846)
Let's go.

Rabah (01:28.468)
understand acquisition in a way that a lot of people don't. So I'm excited to jump in, but welcome to the show, Nate.

Nate Lagos (01:35.37)
Thank you so much for having me. I was pumped when you shot me that text. So yeah, good to be here.

Rabah (01:42.236)
Yeah, amazing. Yeah, so tell me a little bit about your origin story. How did you get into kind of paid acquisition? Yeah, let's start there.

Nate Lagos (01:50.91)
Yeah, so I went to college to major in marketing. First marketing class was great, learned the fundamentals, and I was like, this is the shit I'm passionate about. I love it. Second marketing class, and third and fourth and fifth and sixth, I realized that school was not gonna teach me what I needed to know to succeed in this industry. So I quickly started working for a startup in Greenville, Anchor Bat Company, this baseball bat company here. That was my freshman year.

Rabah (02:15.56)
Let's go.

Nate Lagos (02:19.47)
and did free work for them for a long time running paid and organic social, just Googling and YouTube things when I didn't know how to do them. So it really just kind of got my hands in it as quick as I could. Post college did the freelance thing for a while, eventually became CMO for one of my clients dugout mugs. We blew up quick. We were part of a lot of brands that blew up from, you know, 2018 to 2020.

Uh, hit inc 500 a couple of times partnership with major league baseball. Um, it was awesome. And then, uh, two years ago now, uh, left there and, uh, decided to start heading up marketing for a regional grand watch company.

Rabah (02:51.795)
Let's go!

Rabah (03:05.404)
Amazing. Yeah, well you left out your illustrious baseball career. Yeah. Pitcher, if I'm not mistaken, right? You used to have a heat.

Nate Lagos (03:10.93)
Yeah, I played a little ball in college. Yeah, got the jerseys up so people remember it. Appreciate it. Pitcher lowest ERA in NCAA Division II history. You can look it up. Zero.

Rabah (03:23.3)
Really? How many pitches did you have? That's it, that's it. Either the heater or the thing that just falls off the ledge, huh? I love that, I love that. How was your slugging? Could you hit or not really? Not great. Not college, yeah, people get into that. It's crazy.

Nate Lagos (03:27.662)
2. Fastball slider. That was it. That was it.

Nate Lagos (03:34.024)
Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Nate Lagos (03:42.179)
No, in high school. Yeah, but college just pitched

Yeah, I saw 90 miles an hour for the first time and I was like, Nope, can't do that.

Rabah (03:51.017)
Uh, I would argue hitting a major league pitch is probably the hardest thing to do in sports in my opinion. Is that, do you think that's off? I think that's about right. Yeah. All professional sports.

Nate Lagos (04:00.522)
100%. Yeah, when guys talk, yeah. Like when anyone is like, oh, if I had a hundred at bats, I'd get a hit. No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't. You might not run into one in a thousand at bats. Like it's, it's a different animal. The ball moves quicker than your eyes can physically track it. Like it's insane.

Rabah (04:10.032)
You wouldn't. Just, yeah.

Rabah (04:21.86)
Well, especially when you get those big lanky people, right? Like the Randy Johnson's of the world where they were doing the mathematics and like their release is so much closer to the plate than the kind of shorter pitchers. So it's even more exacerbated, especially if they're throwing heat because you can't really, they were talking about like the reaction time versus the time that it actually gets there. And there's just, I think that that's definitely the hardest thing. I would possibly put returning a pro serve in tennis.

Nate Lagos (04:33.355)
Yeah.

Rabah (04:51.784)
is probably maybe on par with that because you're getting a buck 40, a buck 50, but you can still quasi like get a little lucky with just getting it back there. That's fair. But yeah, I just I would.

Nate Lagos (04:56.448)
Yeah.

Nate Lagos (05:00.23)
Yeah, that racket's kind of big. Yeah. I'm not saying it'd be easy, but I think I'd be better at that than hitting a big leaguer.

Rabah (05:08.868)
Yeah, let me see. So 10 yards, or let's see, five yards rushing in the NFL, returning to pro serve in tennis or hitting a major league fastball. I still gotta go major league fastball, right?

Nate Lagos (05:15.444)
Oof.

Nate Lagos (05:21.671)
is the hardest, yeah.

Rabah (05:22.904)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. When you kind of developed your skill set, because I would argue you're in that kind of elite strata of marketers, was there education, books, anything that really started to lay the foundation that really comes top of mind that you could give kind of up and coming marketers some advice on what to start to internalize to help build out their foundation to acquire kind of your level of expertise?

Nate Lagos (05:34.978)
Thank you.

Nate Lagos (05:52.562)
Yeah, I got lucky. I followed Gary V on Instagram in like 2015 when he was like putting out dope marketing specific content. And like that was huge. I read his book crush it in college, which inspired me to start building a brand personally inspired me to follow a bunch of people on the industry. So my first follows were David Herman Connor from Ridge Charlie T.

Rabah (05:55.716)
Yep.

Rabah (06:02.549)
Yep.

Rabah (06:17.308)
Dave's great. Another killer. Yep. Powerful check.

Nate Lagos (06:21.662)
a bunch of guys that were putting out like real tactical advice about how to run this. And that was like it for me. Like that got me enough to get jobs and get clients and start to build up my own experience with all of it. And now that's what I try to do on Twitter is be that resource that I needed when I was 24 and ran into a CMO job and had no clue what I was doing. Really would love to just keep providing content that's going to help the next generation.

Rabah (06:52.176)
Dude, it's so much free game, definitely go, what's your handle? It's just Nate Legos, right? Yeah, so much free grain, free grain. Freudian slip. So much free grain there, and it's so well said. It's just so, anyways, go follow him. I don't need to pump you up anymore. Go follow him on the Twitters. In terms of kind of, because I had the same evolution and where at the beginning I was doing a lot of spec work.

Nate Lagos (06:56.334)
Nate Legos, yep, the original.

Rabah (07:19.92)
where it was just like either working for free or working for, you know, pretty under market. But I really encourage people to do that because I think there's a certain aspect of when you're inundated with solutions but you don't have the problem, those solutions don't stick. But when you encounter the problem and have to go find a solution, then it starts to get kind of put in your arsenal. And I think there's a lot of people that live in theory land which isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world, but

You don't want to stay there. Like you want theory land to then inform the real world to start to see action. Like I'm a big proponent of action breeds information and you're very rarely going to be right all the time. And so it's great to just try it, test it, launch it in a way that is low risk. And that's why like doing that spec work for either friends and family or low level clients in the not, not low level clients, like the business sucks, but low level in the sense of commitment.

I think that's such a great way to learn. Cause the other thing that I really encourage people to do is, um, at the beginning, if you can get into some sort of agency work, I think that I'm not a huge agency. I used to run my own agency. Agency life is really stressful, but man, you get to it's, uh, it's a, you know, PhD very quickly, especially if you can get to get involved with a great agency because you just get to see the gamut of things. And the other thing that.

And I think it's just your natural disposition, but being able to be client facing as well is huge. Like if you're super nerdy and stuff, there's nothing wrong with that. But the real crossing the chasm in terms of revenue generation is when either you yourself or the agency can put you in front of clients that starts to get into some really interesting places really quickly when you can meld the technical proficiencies with the client management. I think that gets into some, some really interesting places.

Nate Lagos (09:17.43)
Yeah. And, and like kind of that, like starting to communicate more with CEOs and founders and owners, I think was big for my career to understand what really matters. Um, cause I like, I do think some agencies and I'm not talking shit about anyone specifically, but like they're very focused on their metrics, but their metrics aren't always business metrics. They're ROAS, click through rate, whatever, like I know businesses that it was ROAS and click through rate are way better than us at OG.

Rabah (09:26.381)
Mm-hmm.

Rabah (09:37.788)
So what put?

Nate Lagos (09:45.814)
but they don't make as much money as we do. So I don't care. So yeah, kind of being able to see both the technical marketing side of it, but also how that affects larger business performance really forces you to focus on what matters.

Rabah (09:47.387)
Yep.

Rabah (10:00.584)
That's so well put and such a really interesting point because I think that's where a lot of marketing is going to end up now, even if it's with the agency is being able to partner at an intimate level to be able to understand margins, profit. I'm a big gross profit guy because if you get into net profit, you don't really control the OPEX at a company, especially from the agency side.

And so you don't really want to be connected to net profit that much because that's more business decisions operations, but being able to pump up that gross profit is such a, such a better way to live than, um, just looking at top line revenue, not that top line revenue is bad, but you don't want to sell these low margin products where you see all this incredible revenue, but nothing makes it down the P and L. Um, no, that's so well put. Um, what are you excited about in the marketing industry right now?

Like what gets you all hot and bothered? Are there any trends or channels or things that you're seeing where you're like, man, this is super interesting?

Nate Lagos (10:58.75)
Yeah, so since the end of Q2 this year, CRO has been our marketing department's number one priority. And it's some, and it, let me state, it wasn't before, because I'm not a CRO guy. I'm not a CRO expert. I know very little about it. I am great at acquisition advertising. So that's what I had focused on, you know, really my first year, year and a quarter here.

Rabah (11:06.241)
Interesting. Say more.

Rabah (11:14.072)
Yeah.

Nate Lagos (11:27.758)
Um, cause there was a lot of work to be done on that side of things. We got to the end of Q1 of this year and, uh, we grew and we grew profitably and we were pumped. And then I looked at site traffic was up 80% year over year and revenue was only up like 30% and I was like, Hmm, that's weird. And then we got to the end of Q2 and kind of painted the same picture. And we realized our conversion rate was down about 45 to 50% year over year.

Rabah (11:29.852)
Mm-hmm.

Nate Lagos (11:54.966)
And the traffic sources were the same, still advertising on Facebook, Google, and YouTube. Um, I was like, so I don't think it's all fake traffic coming in. Like that's super interesting. So, uh, all summer and through this fall, we've been super focused on developing, uh, kind of a, uh, extending our creative testing process from our Facebook ads into our site. Um,

Rabah (11:54.988)
Wow, okay.

Rabah (12:17.892)
Yeah, beautiful.

Nate Lagos (12:20.166)
And we have had a lot of wins unlock honestly in the last 30 days of just tweaking headlines, copy and photos on our site producing 20% lifts in conversion rate on different LPs. Yeah. So it, it's helped a lot, especially as we're kind of moving into the gifting time of the year where we're expected to do almost half the revenue for the year, you know, from November 1st to December 20th.

Rabah (12:28.897)
Yep.

Rabah (12:32.296)
It's not nothing.

Nate Lagos (12:47.83)
But yeah, CRO has been huge for us. We use a tool called IntelliGems for split testing currently. Yep, yep. They're awesome. His team is awesome. Hannah's our rep. She's fantastic. I'm not affiliated, invested. I don't get paid for this. Drew, if you want to float me a check, you can, but it's been such a great tool for us. Yeah, it's been awesome. And I think...

Rabah (12:51.92)
Yep, that's Drew Marconi, right? Drew and yeah, great humans, great people over there. I love Drew. Yeah.

Rabah (13:08.494)
He said, don't donate some bread.

Nate Lagos (13:15.418)
CRO is going to remain kind of at the top of our priority list for next year.

Rabah (13:20.136)
Dude, I love that. That's fantastic. Ready to get a little nerdy? Let's jump into some OG awesomeness. I guess at the start, take me through Black Friday, Cyber Monday. When did you start the promos? How did they do? What did you take away from it?

Nate Lagos (13:24.246)
Yeah, let's do it.

Nate Lagos (13:35.754)
Yeah, so I'm one of those hack marketers. We started on November 1st. I put out a long thread explaining why, but we've done it a few years now. And the story, the data paints is really clear. Customers that buy from OG from November 1st through Thanksgiving have a 30% higher LTV than customers that buy Black Friday weekend. So I think it'd be pretty dumb of me not to acquire as many customers as I can before then.

Rabah (13:39.012)
Let's go!

It's really good.

Rabah (13:58.856)
gorgeous.

Nate Lagos (14:05.258)
Um, so we launched the sale. Ours was up to 30% off. Most of the stuff on our store is like 20 to 25% off. We try to be pretty close to that. I think there's nothing more annoying than seeing ads that are like up to 80% off and everything's 10% off. It's super annoying. So.

Rabah (14:09.809)
Mm-hmm.

Rabah (14:20.617)
Yeah, the shaker bottle is like 50% off. You're like, fuck you guys, come on.

Nate Lagos (14:23.694)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we, we stayed pretty true to it. November from the first through Thanksgiving was pretty flat compared to last year. The big asterisk there is we launched with Buffalo Trace Bourbon last November 4th, which was still is like one of our biggest launches of all time. It absolutely crushed. So looking at the numbers for this year.

It was a little hard to compete with. We launched a new product and sold a hundred grand of it on like $2,000 in ad spend. Like that's hard to replicate without another big drop. So kind of flat year over year. And then Black Friday, Saber Monday weekend crushed. Even though the sale had been live for 20 days, a lot of customers still waited.

Rabah (14:52.636)
hard comp.

Nate Lagos (15:16.014)
And we crushed all the goals we had for BFCM. So now year over year for the month, we're up like 20%.

Rabah (15:24.866)
that's sensational. In terms of magnitude, Black Friday bigger than Cyber Monday? Yeah.

Nate Lagos (15:31.754)
Yep. Black Friday was a big day. Cyber Monday was about 80% of it. Um, which, oh, interesting. Uh, that was high for me. Um, I think we were planning on like 65% of it. Um, we did save a little bundle offer for Monday. So I had a little something new to throw out there. Um, but yeah, really good weekend beat every day from last year beat our targets for this year.

Rabah (15:36.516)
of sagro yeah that's about what I see usually for proper businesses.

Rabah (15:50.876)
Yeah. Yep.

Nate Lagos (16:00.478)
I'm very proud to say our forecast to actual, we beat it by one tenth of a percent. Uh, so we're getting pretty good at forecasting too. So that was exciting to see.

Rabah (16:07.216)
Damn, that's super great. That's, man, predictability in a business is really, that's pretty interesting, dude. That's some really high-level stuff. Man, I love to see it. So tell me about the gifting vertical, because that is the one thing that is interesting because you have such an incredible, high-quality product. And to be fair, you're starting to now have a nice spectrum of SKUs where you probably can get people to buy.

multiple watches, but I'm guessing on the whole people don't buy more than one or two personally, right? Yeah, so tell me about your gifting strategy because that's a, the unboxing, like the product's incredible, but like the experience is just, it's proper premium, dude. Like it feels awesome.

Nate Lagos (16:41.998)
Correct. Yeah, so we...

Nate Lagos (16:49.71)
Cool, right?

Nate Lagos (16:54.058)
Yeah. The, the, the guys, the owners, the team have done such a great job designing the products and packaging and, uh, the concepts of our products are phenomenal. So definitely makes it a little bit easier to sell them, but, um, fuck, what did you just ask me?

Rabah (17:13.912)
What do you think, how are you approaching your gifting strategy?

Nate Lagos (17:16.95)
Got it. Yeah, so a lot of people are surprised to find out that even though we only sell men's watches, more than half of our customers are women. So it's really important for us to nail time. Yeah, yeah. And it's most commonly a wife buying for her husband. So we see big spikes for Father's Day and Christmas. But yeah, it changes our messaging from the top to the bottom of our funnel for sure.

Rabah (17:29.341)
That's interesting.

Nate Lagos (17:45.602)
Like all the CRO wins we've had in the last month has all been testing gifting messaging We're gonna have to retest and rewrite all those copy and headlines again in January because we see much more Kind of like self-consumption buying in quarters one and three than we do in quarters two and four when there's a big holiday So yeah nailing gift-giving is like absolutely crucial for us. It makes the whole year

Rabah (18:12.336)
Are you triangulating this through like post purchase surveys, through like Facebook gender breakouts? How are you understanding how people are gifting? What data are you backing into?

Nate Lagos (18:24.234)
All the above, post purchase surveys, Facebook, and then we've got a tool called Good Segments too, to give us a demographic breakdown of all of our customers.

Rabah (18:31.632)
Okay.

Rabah (18:35.196)
Dude, I love that. One of the cool things that you do is you do some pretty great work on YouTube and then you also have some of the creatives you've been cranking out have been insane. So take me through kind of how you think of YouTube as an acquisition channel and then what does the creative process look like? Because I don't know if I've just been head in the sand, but.

I feel like the last six months or so, some of the stuff you're cranking out is, it's top floor, right? Okay, that's just not, that wasn't me being ignorant. That's a legitimate thing. Okay, so take me through YouTube acquisition strategy, how you think of that, how you measure it, and then let's jump into your creative process.

Nate Lagos (19:00.086)
It's leveled up. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's real. Yeah. Yep.

Nate Lagos (19:11.718)
Word, yeah. So we sponsor YouTube influencers and we track it very meticulously. It is our most profitable acquisition channel by row as by percentage by far. We're at November 30th today, our YouTube influencers for the quarter performing on average at a 6x. Now, obviously we can't push as much scale there as we're pushing on Facebook, but it's bringing in six figures of very, very profitable revenue.

So what we do is we find creators that are creating content kind of that aligns with each of the niches that our products do. So our best selling collections are made from whiskey barrel wood, guitar tone wood, military ammo crates. So we sponsor guys that do gun reviews and we sponsor guys that will open a bottle of whiskey and talk about the tasting notes and, you know, discuss the history of the distillery that it was made at.

We reach out to all these creators and we agree on a flat fee to sponsor, you know, one to three of their videos for the quarter. Send them a bunch of product and send them kind of high level talking points. I don't like to send them a script. I think listeners have become real attuned to when the ad starts and they tune out or they fast forward through it. So, yeah, so I...

Rabah (20:30.777)
I'm obsessed.

Nate Lagos (20:34.126)
trust that these people have built an engaged audience because their audience clearly likes what they have to say. So I give them as much freedom as I can, other than you gotta say, go to originalgrain.com and use our code to get 10% off. So yeah, and then we measure the results by code usage, which is a very like narrow, worst case scenario way of measuring it. That's how I like to make sure this program stays very profitable for us.

Rabah (20:45.596)
Sure.

Nate Lagos (21:04.542)
Um, and then we track revenue per thousand views on there. So kind of opposite of a CPM RPM that, uh, gives me a really good indicator of what I can spend on future influencer deals with creators within the same niche.

Rabah (21:11.723)
Yep.

Rabah (21:19.824)
Man, that's brilliant. In terms of ad reads, is this beginning, end, middle?

Nate Lagos (21:25.986)
Always first half of the video. I prefer as early as possible But we've had videos that are a half hour long that the ad comes in at minute nine And and crush you still

Rabah (21:27.536)
Perfect. Okay.

Rabah (21:36.028)
Mm-hmm. It still goes well. Okay, that's amazing. Yeah, YouTube influencers in the way that you've been doing it has been the most, to your point, there's a certain aspect of a ceiling on it, but in terms of like, man, getting that money out there, because the other thing is just the awareness play. And again, B2B SaaS, there's actually like, brand awareness is an actual thing, because I came from direct response. But.

Just the ancillary awareness, because obviously you need to track that DR stuff, but the ancillary awareness as well is I think, yeah, it's fantastic. It's such a, you've nailed the YouTube strategy better than anybody that I've seen. It's, well, I guess you got Isaac, but he's doing not pay, Isaac and Tyler are doing organic stuff. Yeah, it's not necessarily sponsoring things, but I love the way you think of it.

Nate Lagos (22:10.2)
is awesome.

Nate Lagos (22:20.854)
Yeah, they're doing their own stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy to me to know that our YouTube advertising budget never makes up more than 10% of our advertising budget, but it's still the thing that everyone I meet says, oh, I saw you guys on Chris D'Alea's podcast. Oh, I saw you guys on the Whiskey Tribe YouTube channel. And I'm like, it makes up such a tiny percent of our ad spend, but at my last...

Rabah (22:40.197)
Yes.

Rabah (22:43.442)
Yes.

Nate Lagos (22:48.206)
brand I'd done deals with John Boy and Barstool and like that's where everyone heard of us. And I was like, I spent six million on Facebook ads last year. You guys didn't hear about me from that. You guys heard about the 10k deal I did with that YouTuber. So yeah, that awareness is super real. We just like to kind of look at the direct response of it to make sure it's bringing in money now.

Rabah (22:51.308)
Right. Yep.

Rabah (23:12.004)
Man, I love that. Okay, tell me how you leveled up the creative. Because to be fair, the old creative wasn't horrible, but I just, this new stuff is just, it's another world. It's a different realm. So tell me kind of what that transition looked like, if there was different resources involved, briefs, like how did you think of it? Because some, would you do a Toyota one? That was just insane. Some of the Buffalo Trace stuff was really hot. Like some of the stuff was just, it was exquisite.

Nate Lagos (23:17.768)
No, it wasn't.

Nate Lagos (23:36.234)
Yeah, thank you, man. Our creative team's done an amazing job with it. Can you still hear me? Okay, great. You're getting a little bit blurry on my end, but...

Rabah (23:43.652)
Yeah, you sound great.

Rabah (23:47.872)
Oh, okay, it should be okay. Okay.

Nate Lagos (23:49.486)
They forgot we're good, cool. The creative team's done such an amazing job and yeah, has significantly leveled up in the last 12 and six months for sure. We actually just looked at a shoot we did like 18 months ago and we were like, wow, we can't believe we put that out. Like, we were like, it's at such a different level today. So that's kind of started with, we had our former creative director had left a few years even.

Rabah (24:04.517)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It really is.

Nate Lagos (24:18.71)
before I got here to start his own creative agency. And we still relied on him for a lot of our creative and he continues to hone his craft and hire talented people. So he's been awesome for us. And then we had hired a creator full-time about a year ago. He was a little bit less experienced, but he's really hungry and like really willing to learn. And one thing that we've done this year that's been a huge unlock for him is have him go to shoots

kind of other more seasoned creators and just be a sponge and absorb, you know, the different tactics and lighting techniques they're using. And man, he's grown so much and gotten so good at what we're asking him to produce for us. And it has been more than worth it from when you using that content from our ads to our emails, to our site.

Rabah (24:50.824)
Mm-hmm.

Nate Lagos (25:14.846)
at the end of the day, like we are a fashion piece. No one wants to wear a watch that's ugly. So the better that we can show off the details of how our products look, the better performance has been. And I like to say like, I know how cool our watch is looking in person. We need to get how they look online to be as close to that experience as possible. So we're gonna continue to invest in him and investing in creative for sure.

Rabah (25:41.956)
Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's to your point to the I think maybe that's where is popping out for me as much to where you're getting almost closer to that luxury watch feel, especially with like the details and the photos and just the lighting and like, nah, man, you guys, you guys absolutely nailed that. Speaking of in real life, do you guys have you're not in retail yet, correct?

Nate Lagos (26:03.582)
No, we were, we had a pretty sizable retail presence, presence pre COVID. We're in like, like Belk and Macy's and everything. Um, yeah. And it never went great. Um, like we were in there, we did all right, but it was never fantastic. Um, I think our watches are so unique from like what the average person is looking for out of a watch. I think it takes some education. I think it takes the right person looking at it. I like to say the guys that we're selling watches to.

Rabah (26:08.604)
Oh, okay, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. Really?

Okay.

Yeah. Yep.

Rabah (26:23.972)
Yeah, that's a fair point.

Nate Lagos (26:33.53)
are not going to Belk and looking at the jewelry counter for a watch. They're at the dive bar drinking a bourbon while their wife is shopping. Um, so, uh, yeah, we've, uh, we found success, uh, online for now and, uh, and don't have really too many plans on going into retail unless it's like a real niche pop-up, like maybe a collab with the right brand, um, but for now we're, we're happy and staying on.

Rabah (26:37.244)
That's a really good way to put it.

Rabah (27:00.708)
I love it. One more random question. How do you like to structure your Facebook campaigns? Are you a cost controls guy? Do you like ASC, lowest cost broad? Like where do you land? And let me caveat this too where I kind of shit, no, I don't shit. I just kind of tease a little bit about cost controls, but I think the best philosophy that people can have is do what the ad account likes. Like at the end of the day, you're there to make money for your client or your business. And

you don't need to get caught up in dogmas, but I just like always to hear perspectives of how killers are structuring and running their accounts.

Nate Lagos (27:36.23)
Yeah, the, the arguments online about our kind of nuts, uh, like, well, and like, here's my thing on it. I don't think anyone online is lying about what they're seeing. So it's like, listen, all these people are pushing what they do because it's brought them some level of success. So I like to tell anyone who's like, who should I follow on Twitter? I'm like, follow everyone on Twitter, but make sure you have a process and a system to filter out what might.

Rabah (27:40.159)
It's almost parody at this point.

Rabah (27:47.332)
Me neither.

Nate Lagos (28:03.902)
work for your brand, try it, test it, and then double down on what works. So I'll say that with that said, my spiel is we run broad targeted, uh, highest volume campaigns. Uh, we separate them by collection. Um, so like I mentioned, our product line is like fairly diverse. It's a different customer persona. Um, buying the whiskey barrel watch first, the ocean plastic one.

Rabah (28:09.757)
Love that.

Rabah (28:29.501)
Yep.

Nate Lagos (28:29.81)
Um, so we separate by collection. We also have campaigns separated, uh, for that gifting audience as well. Uh, one ad set in each, uh, we load up new creative, uh, once a week, we only make changes to our Facebook account on Tuesday that's turning off old creative, launching new creative and tweaking. Budgets. We do that once a week. Um, and then how we've been measuring success this year. It's been really eye-opening. Um, we look at Facebook, we look at triple whale.

Um, but we also have a spreadsheet where I track what we call real ROAS. Um, so I look at, I spent a hundred grand advertising the whiskey barrel collection. We made 400 grand from that collection. That's a good week. That's a four real return on ad spend. Um, given that's like where 90% of our advertising is, is going, I'm more than willing to attribute most of that to Facebook. Um, the only time we'll take out some revenues, like if we have a big drop, um, we're obviously email in.

Rabah (29:04.06)
Mm-hmm.

Rabah (29:15.464)
Love that.

Nate Lagos (29:28.87)
and Texas involved. But looking at that number has made our decision making a lot more stable. And with our inputs being more stable, our outcomes have become a lot more stable and predictable.

Rabah (29:40.964)
Yeah, I mean, obviously you said 0.1% into the projections. That's insane. Last question, are you guys ever interested or going to do over the air or linear TV? Does that ever make sense for you guys or not really?

Nate Lagos (29:54.23)
I don't know. I evaluated it at the end of last year. I was planning on looking at it again this year. To be honest, I think we're so far away from like the ceiling of Facebook ads. Like I think we can 10 X our spend before like, I think we need that kind of like national broad awareness. Um, so I'll take a look at it, you know, if a price is good around a certain event, like maybe, but, um, I don't think it's going to be a big part of our strategy for a while.

Rabah (29:58.155)
Okay.

Rabah (30:04.328)
That's fair. Yeah.

Rabah (30:19.184)
Yeah, try it.

Rabah (30:23.46)
Yeah, no, that's really well set. I, I'm also of the belief that you are not belief, but the thesis of, um, you can get to some pretty high revenue targets with, you know, two channels or three channels, whether it be Facebook, Google, um, YouTube, or some sort of thing where, cause the other thing that you get into is it can become a distraction and take away from the things that are printing you money. Um, so I think that's just a really, really amazing way to look at it.

Nate Lagos (30:47.786)
Yeah. We went through that with TikTok last year. We, we spent a hundred grand and six months trying to make it work and it didn't. Uh, and then finally doubled down on Facebook and making creative for it and new offers and LPs and, uh, found much more success there than we ever would on a new channel. Um, and yeah, I, I subscribe to, uh, I think Sean Frank from Ridge says it all the time. He's like,

Rabah (30:51.992)
Yeah, can be.

Rabah (31:12.964)
Yeah.

Nate Lagos (31:15.39)
If you can't get to a hundred million a year on Facebook and Google, it's not because of your advertising. Like it's, it's a product thing. It's a brand thing, whatever. Um, so that's what we're going to stay focused on.

Rabah (31:17.244)
That's it.

Rabah (31:20.849)
Yes.

Rabah (31:26.272)
No, that's brilliant. No, I love Sean. He's such a troll, but God, he's so damn smart. I love that guy. He is the goat. He's in Austin. Sean, let's hang out. You fuck. You ready for Firmat 5? All right. Oh, see, I see you have the LD. How much did you love that? Oh, so good. So good.

Nate Lagos (31:30.338)
He, dude, he's the goat though. Yeah.

Nate Lagos (31:39.595)
Yeah, let's do it.

Nate Lagos (31:45.282)
Dead billionaire? Dude, I love their response to it. I'm still mind blown at who at Arnold Palmer's estate thought it was a good idea to try to drop a lawsuit on. Guys, come on.

Rabah (32:01.36)
You guys got all this money. What are you doing? Yeah, dude, I totally. Yeah.

Nate Lagos (32:03.202)
Like, so yeah, I'm, I'm happy with the change to dead billionaire. I like it.

Rabah (32:10.908)
So good, liquid death, they don't miss. Okay, first question. If you had a superpower for a day, what would it be? And how would you use it to make the world a better place? Easy software.

Nate Lagos (32:20.162)
Oh, um, you know, when Jesus, uh, was pulling out like endless loaves of bread and fish and fed everyone, I'd, I'd choose that for a day.

Rabah (32:31.74)
kind of gangster. That was a quick g-g response. I love that. What's the most hilarious or memorable bucket list item you've ever checked off?

Nate Lagos (32:35.104)
Yeah, that was a good one.

Nate Lagos (32:42.114)
Hmm.

Nate Lagos (32:46.865)
Um...

Nate Lagos (32:51.17)
Give me a sec. Oh, I've got it. I've got it. Might get me canceled. There's video out there of me doing standup comedy and a rap battle in college. For the record, I won the rap battle. Got 50 bucks. Said some things I wouldn't say today. I'm sorry for that, but you know, it's 2015. But yeah, that was fun. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah.

Rabah (32:52.292)
Yeah. Oh, you're, you're fast.

Rabah (33:06.256)
That's amazing!

Rabah (33:10.018)
Let's go!

Sure, yeah, it's different times, different era. Yeah, that's pretty strong, though. Stand up and rap battle. I love that. Um, if you could create a new holiday, what would it celebrate and how would people commemorate it?

Nate Lagos (33:26.568)
Mmm

I'd love a holiday around just doing nothing. So many of our holidays are associated with seeing family or traveling or fireworks or swimming or whatever. And I'm just like, can we just get a day to sit on the couch and watch TV? I would love that for a week, would be nice.

Rabah (33:35.38)
I don't hate it.

Rabah (33:51.612)
The Lagos layover, I'm in, I'm in. I'm surprised you didn't pick a jorts-based holiday, but maybe we could put it in where you fold in to where you wear jorts on the... That's fair, there it is. That's a perpetual holiday, I love it. If you could swap lives with someone for a week, living their experiences and seeing their world, who to be and why.

Nate Lagos (33:53.322)
Yeah. Oh, I like that.

Nate Lagos (34:01.97)
Well, I celebrate that one every day. So yeah.

Nate Lagos (34:16.551)
My dog. 100% my dog.

Do my dog live the best life?

Rabah (34:21.116)
These are supposed to be hard questions, you're killing me, you're just slaying this. Oh my god.

Nate Lagos (34:25.654)
Dude, my dog gets tucked in every time she lays down in our house. She gets fed snacks and treats all day. She hikes every day. My dog lives the dream, dude.

Rabah (34:36.248)
I love that. What's your dog's name? Haley is a beautiful name. Shout out Haley. And you're slaying this. Okay, last question. This is the easiest one of them all. Best MLB pitcher ever.

Nate Lagos (34:38.186)
Haley.

Nate Lagos (34:50.05)
Um, gotta be Mariano Rivera. Uh, it's a closer for the Yankees, uh, and through one pitch for 20 years, through a cutter forever. And everyone knew that that's was the pitch that they were getting thrown and they couldn't hit it. Um, so yeah, the goat.

Rabah (35:05.128)
I still can do it. Yeah. Anyone a bunch of champ championships in Yanks too, right? Yeah. Five, yeah, that's insane. What an incredible sport. What an interesting sport. Nate, I knew you were gonna blow my mind and you absolutely delivered. How can people get more involved with Original Grain? Where do they buy watch? Where can the wives, girlfriends, partners gift the watch to people? This time it's yours, my friend.

Nate Lagos (35:09.842)
Oh yeah, I think he's got five. Yeah, it's nuts.

Nate Lagos (35:30.474)
Yeah, originalgrain.com. If you use code legos, you might get a little extra deal. I don't get commission on it, but I created a code for friends and family. So check it out. And then yeah, follow me on Twitter at Nate Legos, potential podcast coming out next year with a killer co-host. So very excited about that, but yeah, other than that, Twitter, LinkedIn, hit me up.

Rabah (35:34.808)
Let's go!

Rabah (35:39.594)
Let's go!

Rabah (35:48.762)
Oh, keep me posted.

Rabah (35:54.576)
Yeah, your videos have been really great. I really enjoy those. What's your Twitter handle? Boom. Easy peasy. And then are you still doing any site consulting stuff or you're booked up right now? Ish. Okay, well, Pingo. Well, yeah, hit them up. Well, you guys can explore. People apple people. You never know what the future holds. Nate, you're the best, man. I really, you're just such a fucking killer and I just love chatting things with you and I think the way that you see.

Nate Lagos (35:59.326)
Nate Legos, N-A-T-E-L-A-G-O-S.

Nate Lagos (36:07.226)
Eh, we'll see. Hit me up. Hit me up, we'll see. You never know what the future holds. Yeah.

Rabah (36:22.416)
marketing business is just absolutely top floor. So thanks so much for taking the time out to come jam with me, man. I really appreciate it.

Nate Lagos (36:29.238)
Thank you for having me, man. Appreciate it.

Rabah (36:31.1)
course anytime. Alright folks that's all we got for you. This podcast is brought to you by the company I work for firmatcommerce.com. You can go to firmatcommerce.com to look and see all the awesomeness we do. We help you make optimizations to your customer journey. So the customer journey is comprised of three things, offer, landing page, and creative. So we don't necessarily help out with the creative part as much. You bring that to us but we help you craft offers and landing pages, advertorials, quizzes.

Whatever you need, we can help you make the money, print or go burr. So go book a demo today from at commerce.com and we have a fantastic.

Nate Lagos (37:02.774)
You know, for the record, I had my demo this morning. Very interesting. I think it could play a big part of our CRO strategy for next year. Yeah.

Rabah (37:05.644)
Oh, you did. Look at this. Look at this.

very aligned with your CRO strategy, I think could be really interesting. See, go follow, go follow the man, the myth, the legend that there you go. We're just people, people. Yeah. And geometry of growth. Go check out our newsletter. We send it out every Friday. Has a bunch of awesomeness in it. You can just go to firm at commerce.com to subscribe right there. Go follow Nate. If you're watching this, go buy a beautiful watch. I'm holding my beautiful original grain up.

Nate Lagos (37:17.038)
And that's not even a paid endorsement. So there you go. Yeah.

Rabah (37:36.648)
They're they're really stunning actually and the unboxing experience is incredible. So they make great gifts So go buy all the original grains and then Nate again do thank you so much. I really appreciate you go follow Nate Go hit him up for some consulting if that is your thing. He is Absolutely top floor operator. Thanks so much brother. I appreciate you All right, folks, that's it. We'll see you next week. Bye. Bye

Nate Lagos (37:53.858)
Thank you, man. Appreciate it.