Equation of Excellence

Rabah (00:01.11)
All right. Three, two, one. Welcome back to another episode of Equation of Excellence. And this one, I got the young gun. had to peel him off the floor a little bit. is out gallivanting in Spain. who was the DJ? Where were you going? You're hanging out with who? Steve Aoki. Yeah. Did he cake anybody?

Noah Tucker (00:18.657)
I wouldn't say hang it up. He kicked like crazy dude, it was super funny.

Rabah (00:26.264)
Dude, his like, it's almost like a laser sight. Like it's actually really hard to throw a cake and he throws like full on cakes. Perfect. Yeah, right. It's insane.

Noah Tucker (00:30.935)
incredibly accurate. Incredibly accurate. Yeah, I have some videos I'll send you this, I'll send you after this, but he literally like laser beams it across the entire dance floor and hits someone perfectly in the head. To be fair, he practices. Yeah, yeah, like trends. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how to do it. I don't know, yeah.

Rabah (00:42.638)
And the cake stays perfect. I don't get it. Especially Bill Cakes. Anyways, we kind of jumped the shark, as you can tell, rocking the merch. But Noah Telker, founder, CEO of Social Snowball. Noah, give some people some color for you, because you're a young gun in the game. And it's been so cool, because I think the last time we did this was what? Maybe two years ago or something. It's been a while.

Noah Tucker (01:08.879)
Just be in a minute.

Rabah (01:10.304)
It's been crazy the trajectory you've been on. So give people the pitch of social snowball. What do you guys do? And then let's get into your story.

Noah Tucker (01:17.409)
Yeah, 100%. So the quick version is we're an affiliate platform for DTC Browns.

But we specifically focus on helping brands partner with what we like to call the modern affiliate because the word affiliate can have a lot of meetings. So by that we mean like creators, influencers, ambassadors, you know, pre social snowball affiliate platforms that existed for DTC brands were very focused around publishers, listicles, review sites as affiliates. And if a brand wanted to partner with an influencer, they would either have to use a platform that was built for publishers and super clunky for influencers or like a creator management CRM, which was more focused on like getting content and

and views and brand awareness than it was like actual attributable revenue from the partnership. So Social Snowball kind of sits in the middle where we are an affiliate platform and the focus is around attributable revenue. But the entire functionality and user experience is like super, super dialed in on what an influencer and a creator would want and also what the brands would need to manage influencers and creators.

Rabah (02:14.242)
Yeah, man, and you've only been around for what? Three years now? Not even? Four years. Okay, yeah, so give or take a year. What made you say, hey, this is the bet I want to make? Because what did you do before this?

Noah Tucker (02:18.021)
Coming up on four coming up on four. Yeah

Noah Tucker (02:27.639)
I was on the brand side, but like...

Just doing a lot of consulting mostly. I I started like a drop shipping store right after I graduated high school. And that's what like initially, initially got me into this world, which is so funny. And then like got super deep into the media buying space and was doing some consulting and tried to launch on my own brand. Some of them did okay. Most of them failed. But it was like super deep into the whole advertising world for DTC and any brand I would work with, whether it was mine or when I was running ads for as a consultant, I'd always launch an affiliate program. Like that was just like a no brainer for me. But

Rabah (02:36.513)
Yes.

Noah Tucker (03:00.137)
The affiliates that I was partnering with were just always Instagram little ambassadors, customers that wanted to share with friends. Like it wasn't these big publications. And so I had used all the existing affiliate tech in the Shopify ecosystem at the time that was built to power affiliate programs. And back then I didn't even realize that they were built for publishers. just thought like, wow, these are the most clunky, difficult to use pieces of software I've ever experienced. So I was just super frustrated. And I mean, I was dealing with it for maybe

Rabah (03:22.957)
Yes.

Noah Tucker (03:29.823)
like four or five years before I was like, you know what, literally everyone else I talked to also hates these affiliate softwares. Like someone needs to build one that's meant for influencers and that's sort of how the light bulb moment happened.

Rabah (03:43.192)
Dude, I love that. And you're bootstrapped, correct?

Noah Tucker (03:46.521)
We're bootstrapped. Yep.

Rabah (03:48.312)
That's amazing. So tell me a little bit about that journey, because I know there's a lot of people like, man. Candidly, I'm one of them where it's like, SAS needs money, et cetera, et cetera. Did you try to raise it all or no?

Noah Tucker (04:00.067)
Yeah, dude, we tried. I'm actually really glad it didn't work out though. But yeah, I in the early days, I honestly just didn't even think about raising money because my brain was so, so far removed from the startup world and the SaaS world. was so in like the e -commerce media buying world where raising money is not as much of a thing. So it didn't cross my mind and I had enough cash saved up from what I was doing before that I could at least throw a little bit of money to get it off the ground. I mean, really just to build like the MVP. But yeah, so I mean, we just

Rabah (04:12.813)
Yeah.

Yes.

Noah Tucker (04:30.734)
was bootstrapped and then at one point I started to get much obviously deeper into the SaaS world and the startup world and hanging out with people like Robbob that drive fun cars and I was like, I need to raise some money. I'm like, just because it felt like that's everyone does. I was like just trying to follow the trajectory that everyone does is what it really was.

Rabah (04:45.709)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (04:49.935)
So I tried and I reached out and we were also at a plateau at this point. This is like three and a half years ago. we just like got to, I don't know what it was, maybe like 20 or 30 K at MRR. And we just like, weren't really getting above that. And I felt like, okay, like this is probably a good time to raise money. We need to like get to the next level. and so I tried and I literally pitched every VC. I'm sure probably some that, know, some that you guys maybe even work with, like every VC in the space, some big ones, some small ones, I just got rejected.

Rabah (04:55.949)
Yeah.

Rabah (05:00.557)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (05:19.851)
by every single one. think like, I don't think I would have been able to handle venture money back then honestly. Like I think if we raised like a prop around now, I would be able to put that money to great use. Back then I still was so just novice at being a founder that I don't think it would have been good for the business to inject capital. So

Rabah (05:26.509)
Yes.

Rabah (05:36.322)
Yes.

Noah Tucker (05:40.097)
Obviously the VCs could sniff that. And although I didn't realize that at the time, them rejecting me was a huge blessing because after I got the last rejection from one of the VCs that I really thought was going to say yes, we were like, I thought we were days away from a term sheet with one VC. And when they said no, I was like, you know what? I'm done with this. I'm going to just focus back on the business. then like literally a month or two later, we broke out of that plateau, like very aggressively and just started growing a ton. So it turned out to be a blessing.

I mean, at the scale we are now, I don't think like it makes sense to raise because we make enough that, I it's just, feel like if a lot of SaaS companies could get to this scale without raising, they wouldn't have raised in the first place. It's like hard to get to here, but now that we're here, I think we can keep growing and compete. I mean, we are competing and winning against venture backed competitors. So it doesn't feel like we're playing at too much of a disadvantage at this point in the beginning for sure, but we had a good head start.

Rabah (06:23.106)
That's exactly right.

Rabah (06:36.898)
Man, that's so well put. because we were kind of bantering back and forth on Twitter. It would always be known as Twitter. I'm old. It's so spot on because I always joke where VC money, like they want to give you money if you don't need it, and nobody wants to give you money when you don't need it. Everybody wants to give you money. It's so paradoxical. And candidly, dude, it is a huge, I was involved with.

Noah Tucker (06:43.64)
Agreed.

Noah Tucker (06:51.961)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (06:55.864)
Exactly.

Rabah (07:03.222)
another company with a couple of buddies actually doing really well now. And I was kind of helping them on the road show, jumping on investor pitches and stuff. It's fucking miserable, dude. It is fucking it feels like the biggest waste of time. It's a full time job. So nobody's working on the business. It's a bunch of, you know, no disrespect to VCs. I actually like wanted to be an investment banker one point in time. I think if I ever got on angel investing would be really interesting to me. But

Noah Tucker (07:12.461)
nice. Yeah. It's a full -time job. It's a full -time job. Exactly.

Rabah (07:33.39)
candidly do it. A lot of these people are just have a bunch of money got really lucky and they really not actually the killers in the space. And the challenge is when somebody gives you 10, 20 million dollars, they kind of get some say so in your business and you start to have to. Yeah. And then you start to have to placate them is like, that's a great idea. Even though in your head, you're like, that's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. And it's there's but to your point.

Noah Tucker (07:48.567)
Right, they take that board seat.

Noah Tucker (07:58.916)
them.

Rabah (08:01.878)
If you can't build the bridge, it's easier to build it with money. And I think SAS is still probably the best target, because if you, like to your point, now you're probably prepped for it. But back then, no. But if you do have an infrastructure in place, you can literally just go spend money on better, great engineers. And you just build product faster, better, execute things quicker, bring stability to the platform, et cetera, which makes a lot of sense. Where in D2C, it's like,

Noah Tucker (08:18.094)
Yeah.

Rabah (08:27.214)
What you can do buy more shitty ads or, you know, buy more inventory that's just going to sit. It's really hard to deploy the capital. It's so hard to deploy the capital in meaningful way. But now I love that for you. mean, the whole thing just looks so proper. I'm just playing around the site right now, dude. It's just so crazy how you went from 0 to 60 in what was the was there a point where you're like, man, not that like you've made it kind of thing, but you're like, f***, we were.

Noah Tucker (08:29.143)
Yeah. Just decrease your ROAS.

Rabah (08:55.08)
We broke out of this plateau and now it feels because it feels like you're building a machine, which is when I see the best SaaS companies, that's exactly what it feels like where it's just this machine that I'm escalating. I'm just trying to either make the flywheel go faster or make the flywheel bigger.

Noah Tucker (09:10.967)
Yeah, dude, mean, I would say it happened in phases and there's probably more phases that I, there's definitely more phases I haven't unlocked yet, but I think when we broke out of that plateau like three years ago and started growing, there was a huge realization.

for me that like, I need to sell to bigger brands and I didn't build product for bigger brands. Like I was in the beginning, dude, I was like all on board of the $5 a month. Like, I mean, it wasn't, it was like $10 a month lowest plan. Like we had a free plan at one point. the, the plateau was caused by high churn and just low quality customers and no way to just like keep the top of funnel moving fast enough. And so when I had that realization that like, we need to work with bigger brands. It's not just like you could snap your fingers and that.

Rabah (09:27.874)
Yes.

Rabah (09:45.012)
Yes.

Noah Tucker (09:53.953)
happens like it's changes have to happen in product changes happen have to happen in sales strategy and go to market and any marketing has to change in customer success and onboarding strategy it has to change everything pricing literally everything so from the point where I had that realization to the point where I was like okay now we're like actually kind of positioned to what I envisioned we would be like when I had that realization was probably about a year to like change everything especially on a bootstrap budget keep in mind this

Rabah (10:08.578)
Yes.

Noah Tucker (10:23.745)
is about three years ago when we were at like 20, 30K MRR. So we didn't have like a ton of money to just like spin things around. But once we had the realization, things started moving in the right direction. And then maybe like a year from then is when I was like, okay.

Like we're kind of where I imagined us to be like a year ago, like when I had that first realization. And then I think like, again, recently, you know, just kind of like with the scale that our ARR is and the team count, like we're hiring our 20th full time right now. Like it, it feels like a real business. Like, it just feels like a proper business. Like a lot of our venture backed competitors are just a lot smaller ARR and a lot smaller team. And it just is like, okay, like this is.

Rabah (10:42.157)
Yes.

Rabah (10:53.43)
Holy shit.

Noah Tucker (11:07.609)
We're in the game. We're in the arena like who knows who's gonna make it out of the arena, but we're in it

Rabah (11:13.23)
Dude, I love that. What was the first big hire?

Noah Tucker (11:17.987)
First big hire, that's a great question. I'd say, so there's a few that stand out. So like, you know Zo -Habe, right? Yeah, so Zo is an incredible human. I hired him.

Rabah (11:27.394)
Yep, yeah, of course. It's wonderful.

Noah Tucker (11:34.293)
about a year and a half ago, it was. And he was the joint as like head of growth and like he really came in and like, I there's so many things that even a year ago, which, you know, we were doing, or a year and half ago, we were doing decent, like, there's so many things I didn't know, I didn't know. And like, he was ex -Cedlane, ex -Attentive. And like, he's like, he's been in successful SaaS companies that are bigger in the e -commerce space. So he just kind of came in and changed a bunch of shit really quick.

Rabah (11:52.632)
Yes.

Noah Tucker (12:04.129)
quickly that like changed everything. Like we didn't even have like any enterprise pricing structure before he joined. We were just like, 500 a month. Like that sounds fine, which is like so small obviously now in hindsight, but at the time, like it doesn't matter who the brand was. were going to build a 500 a month and he came in and like, thought as head of growth and partnerships, he was going to like create content and like reach out to partners. He's like, dude, I'm not doing shit until we get enterprise pricing. Cause we need to actually capture value from these customers that were busting her ass to acquire. So he came in and

Rabah (12:09.856)
I love that.

Yeah.

Rabah (12:16.822)
Yes.

Noah Tucker (12:34.015)
changed a lot of shit. That's just one example. And then more recently, we just hired a CTO finally, because I'm a solo founder, also non -technical. And so not having like a real CTO has been a huge challenge for us. I mean, it's crazy that we made it to where we did without a CTO, honestly.

Rabah (12:49.72)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (12:54.547)
So we and I've been looking for one for maybe like two years But it's like so it's it's a how you can't rush like it's the only other C level team member that we have and it's something that like it's either gonna be a Perfect fit or it's gonna be way off and I tried with some

Other hires that were way off and now we have one that is just a fucking animal He was the VP of engineering at grin, which is like our biggest legacy competitor. So he knows everything He basically like he was essentially the CTO the CTO was the technical founder So he was like basically built the entire engineering team He joined when they were two or three engineers and he left when there was hundreds So he's he's on the snowball wave and he's brought over all of his best ninja engineers

Rabah (13:20.418)
Yes. Yep.

Noah Tucker (13:40.897)
engineers from Grin to Social Snowball. have like four of them now. So we're just cooking on the inside now. And it feels like a huge unlock because we had good engineers before, which took a while to even get, but now we have like.

Rabah (13:43.631)
Noah Tucker (13:55.708)
10x rock stars that literally like can just mint like they could go like the the pipeline for me getting a shower idea to a voice message to like production product is like insanely fast right now and that was like never possible before

Rabah (14:11.736)
That's an incredible litmus test, honestly, of like ideating to getting it scoped. Shower Thought to Production timeline is like what's the average cycle there? That's actually a really interesting heuristic. I love that. I know you guys are mostly remote. Do you like that? Do you have any views on remote, hybrid, in -person, and then?

Noah Tucker (14:15.245)
Yeah. Shower thoughts of production.

Noah Tucker (14:23.813)
Yeah

Rabah (14:36.108)
How do you manage? How do you consider your management style? How many times do you meet? Shit like that. Give the people some color.

Noah Tucker (14:44.023)
Yeah, as far as like the remote versus office, like I'd honestly love to hear your take on it because I feel like I'm, this is one of the things that I'm still too novice to have like a strong opinion on. we've, we've always been remote. We're remote first. do lots of events and in -person stuff. So we get to see each other, which is a ton of fun, but as far as actually working, it's always been remote and I've never had like a real office job, before starting social noble. So I don't really have anything to compare against. I'm, I'm super on the fence. it's one is better.

than the other. So I'd love to hear your take on it. And then as far as my management style, think like with having a small company,

I don't have the luxury to micromanage. Like everyone is responsible, like with such a small team, everyone is responsible for so much that it's just impossible. And I have so much to do. It's impossible for me to be on top of people. So I try to only hire people that are very much the self -starter bias to action type because yeah, it's just, it's unrealistic. I also don't like hiring junior talent in general.

Rabah (15:39.384)
That's me. Yeah.

Noah Tucker (15:46.671)
I think a lot of people hire for culture fit and then train them on the stuff. I don't do that. Personally, I hire people that know exactly what to do, have been doing it for 10 years, and then on day one, they're already doing it for me. They could just tell me the KPIs are going the right direction. I don't like having to teach people stuff. I want them to teach me. I was in the beginning, I was like, we're bootstrapped, small, we're going to hire junior people and train them. No.

Rabah (15:47.416)
same.

Noah Tucker (16:15.375)
We're gonna hire super senior people and we're gonna suck it up and figure out how to afford it and they're gonna drive the business forward and tell me how it's going.

Rabah (16:23.202)
Dude, I couldn't align more than that. And again, that might not be different jokes or different folks, but I'm the exact same, man. I just don't do well with lower level talent. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Everybody's on a journey and stuff like that. But I couldn't agree with you more where I actually just posted about this where I candidly don't really even believe in training. I think that you give them, yeah.

Noah Tucker (16:36.27)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (16:47.341)
Yeah, I actually saw that tweet and I super agree, yeah.

Rabah (16:51.126)
Yeah, you give them systems and autonomy and you let them cook and then if it doesn't work out, here's a nice severance and keep the laptop and move on to the next. Because you also start to get a degradation in culture because A players want to be around A players, man. And it just doesn't work like that. And I also find that there is a certain level of commitment and effort.

Noah Tucker (16:54.435)
Yep.

Noah Tucker (16:59.32)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (17:06.264)
Yeah.

Rabah (17:16.61)
And when you have these junior people, if they aren't super bought in, you're going to get exactly that. And then you get into more of a warehouse mentality of managing where you're like, hawking. Like, dude, I could give two fucks less what my people do with their time. I tell them what I need when I need it and the how's what the money's for.

Noah Tucker (17:27.598)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (17:33.774)
Yeah.

Rabah (17:37.942)
and go fucking cook, dude. Don't ask me dumb shit. And there's definitely a certain aspect if you throw them in, here's a spear, go hunt. And then if you have questions, ask me great questions, but get as far as you can. And I couldn't agree more with that management style. That's my preferred way to manage as well, because it's a paradox when you get more head count, where a lot of times there's a degradation in productivity, which is so like how? I have more people, I'm spending all this money.

Noah Tucker (17:38.243)
Yeah. Yeah.

Noah Tucker (17:53.421)
Yeah.

Rabah (18:05.772)
and our output or our productivity is going down. I've seen it firsthand multiple times. So I think that's absolutely the path to go down. And I just candidly too think when people have ownership, if they're killers, you don't need to have standards. Because because my name's on it, I'm going to fucking kill it. But when you have like co -ownership or you have committees, and there's one of my favorite lines from Ogilvy is, go walk through all the parks in your cities. You'll never see a statue for a committee.

Noah Tucker (18:22.275)
Right.

Right.

Rabah (18:34.656)
And I think it's just such a bark is the segue going back to your question about in work or like the office setup. I'm kind of torn because I used to be so I've been in the offices and then one shitty. Yeah, shitty office environment sucks. So that's that's already off the table. But I did a work from home for a really long time. And then finally, at the previous role, triple, we had a really awesome office. It was awesome. And there's just

Noah Tucker (18:41.848)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (18:46.915)
Yeah, you've experienced both.

Rabah (19:04.552)
Something to the idea sex of getting people rubbing up against each other and you just have that where it's very hard to replicate it. But honestly, think the worst is, I think all remote's not bad. And then you do quarterly meetups. And then maybe a half year, twice a year, you get the whole company together. That's what we do. We do quarterly. So we do biannuals for the whole company.

Noah Tucker (19:23.171)
Is that for mothers?

Okay.

Noah Tucker (19:30.772)
But is it remote? Is it all remote?

Rabah (19:34.156)
So we're in like a hub model. So we have headquarters in San Francisco. We have a New York office. We have an Austin office. And then there's a smattering of people across the country. And then we have a big dev shop in Bangalore, because both Rishabh and Shreyas are proper Indians. So they know the scene over there, blah, blah. And so it's not

Noah Tucker (19:41.423)
Mmm. Okay.

Noah Tucker (19:53.39)
Nice, okay.

Rabah (20:00.418)
bad because the silos or the hubs are mostly specific. Like most of our sales is out of New York. Most of the HQ is San Francisco. So we have like our big developers out there. Rashib Shreyas sit out of that office and then the Austin office is all the marketing team and then we have everything. So that's not horrible. I think hybrid is really the worst. So I think for me the best

Noah Tucker (20:06.18)
Hmm.

Noah Tucker (20:27.267)
really?

Rabah (20:28.586)
Yeah, I think hybrid's the worst because you have a hard time with culture and like because some people are in office and those people are just going to get their messages through quicker, especially if it's like a hybrid where there's an HQ and everybody else is remote. I want to say like I don't think life is fair, unfair. I just think the incentives are so skewed towards the the people in the actual HQ.

Noah Tucker (20:38.231)
Right.

Noah Tucker (20:42.703)
True, true, it's unfair.

Rabah (20:57.346)
by proximity, their ideas get greenlit faster, not on merit, but by proximity, because I can convince you in person better. So I think my take is either go fully remote and then have those quarterly meetups for the specialized teams. like the way we did at Fermat is the specialized teams get quarterly and then we do a bi -annual for the company. And so it's like kind of like the World Cup and the Euros.

Noah Tucker (21:02.073)
Yeah. Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Rabah (21:24.75)
So every two months you're either meeting the whole company or you're doing your specialized, like your marketing or engineering or whatever meets up. And so you get that. Cause I'm also a big believer in, think real work is done individually. Like I think you need to collaborate and have synthesis, but you don't work together. You know what mean? You go get your deliverables, go do it. And then you come back together. So that's just a personal belief or thesis of mine. But I will say in person though,

Noah Tucker (21:29.945)
That's nice.

Noah Tucker (21:43.918)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (21:52.537)
Dude, how big is Fermat now?

Rabah (21:55.951)
Almost like 100. Yeah, like about 100 across the whole company. And then we're hiring like crazy, especially on the engineering and dev side, because we have a bunch of money to put to work. so yeah, it got big fast. And then the other challenge, and I don't know if you've had to deal with this before, it's really hard because

Noah Tucker (21:56.173)
Like the scene. Wow.

Noah Tucker (22:09.635)
Yeah.

Rabah (22:21.106)
as a startup, you're kind of almost analogize it to like a human, where it's like you're a baby and then you're an infant and then you're a teenager and then you're an adolescent. you're going through this and you're growing so fast that sometimes the people that got you to X might not get you to Y or they need to transform into the person that can get you to Y. And sometimes you have to make some tough decisions where

Noah Tucker (22:38.073)
Mm

Rabah (22:46.134)
It's hard because it feels like I'm such a non loyalty guy. think loyalty is what fucking companies tell you. they like there's like loyalty is never two ways. It's always they expect loyalty from the employee to the company. But there is never a company to the employees. I don't like the loyalty card. But it is hard when you build relationships with these people that are great. But you're just like, dude, I, you know, like, I need you to be X. And if you're not X, this isn't a charity. I'm sorry. You know, I mean, here's some nice severance and keep the laptop. But

Noah Tucker (23:02.703)
Thanks.

Noah Tucker (23:13.796)
Yeah.

Rabah (23:15.83)
And so I think that's one of the challenges of getting used to having to be able to look as the company gets more mature that, you know, because again, you don't change that much from your teenage years to your young adult to adult. Like you start to become that person. But during that early stage hypergrowth, there's so much change going around. And like you also said, you don't know what you don't know. And stuff comes up. We're like, dude, I'm pointing the guns in the exact wrong way. And

Noah Tucker (23:41.197)
Yeah.

Rabah (23:44.972)
I have all this cavalry, but we're about to tack on the beach. This is in soggy marshes. Like, this isn't going to work. I need a different set to get me there. yeah, I kind of rambled. hybrid, OK. Remote, great. In -person, great. And then anything in between, I find it really challenging to keep the culture cohesive. And another thing is I hate meetings. I absolutely despise meetings. And there's just no way to have a more productive meeting than in -person.

Noah Tucker (23:45.069)
Mm -hmm.

Noah Tucker (23:50.306)
Right.

Noah Tucker (24:14.509)
Yeah, yeah.

Dude, you really got the dream team for Ferma. I mean, I'm sure you've this a million times now, but you guys got the dream team. You guys blew up, essentially, right? You're everywhere. I'm curious to hear from you. And I know we're kind of going off topic here, but I'm just genuinely curious. How are you going to take this thing far from the D to C bubble, like the D to C Twitter and LinkedIn bubble? Because it's something I'm thinking of. I feel like we're so known in this little world, but this is...

Rabah (24:39.416)
So.

Noah Tucker (24:44.757)
just obviously a fraction of the greater tam that we're both playing in. Like how do you like you could only create so much content distributed in so many ways, work with so many partners, run so many ads. Like how do you break out of this bubble?

Rabah (24:59.054)
Yeah, mean, one, it's a great question. Two, I think it's a realization everybody has when they get into D2C where paid media is a great beachhead, small to medium is a great beachhead, but you can't live there. I mean, you can if you want to build, you know, like a 20 million a year business, 40 million. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to build a behemoth, you really have to go up market. And candidly, they're just better customers because one, they have an established business.

Noah Tucker (25:25.764)
Yeah.

Rabah (25:27.404)
Two, they're usually more sophisticated, so they're going to get more value from your product if your product fucks. So the two things that we are thinking about really heavily and trying to execute on are twofold. to your point, I love X, I love Twitter, phenomenal, but it's really high impact, really low ceiling. And candidly, a lot of the killers aren't on X, aren't on Twitter.

Noah Tucker (25:47.747)
Hmm.

Noah Tucker (25:52.302)
Yeah.

Rabah (25:52.598)
Most of the killers are like bad boys and girls move in silence kind of thing where there are lurkers on LinkedIn or weirdly enough, Instagram has been really interesting for us where there's a lot of big people on Instagram where we've been getting a lot of demo flow from big leads on Instagram, which is pretty interesting to me. There was no, it was more just stumbling ass backwards in the gold where we were just like Sonder runs all of our paid and he's killing it.

Noah Tucker (26:02.339)
Really?

Noah Tucker (26:09.335)
Really? What's the strategy for that? Like, just organic?

Rabah (26:21.686)
And we've seen, so it's like, cool. we're shifting away a lot of our, because we spent money on LinkedIn. It was horrific. But we have LinkedIn coverage pretty awesome because Rishabh's account, Shreyas' account, AO has a pretty big LinkedIn following. So we already have that Distro coverage there. So we're going to shift a lot of our budget into more Instagram heavy. And then we've had a lot of success with really curated events.

Noah Tucker (26:22.051)
Wow.

Noah Tucker (26:30.648)
Interesting.

Yeah.

Noah Tucker (26:37.924)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (26:45.123)
Wow.

Rabah (26:50.862)
So Lex just threw this really crazy yacht party that was amazing. The caveat there is one, they're expensive to the really hard to book the rooms because it's like or to fill the room because getting these really high level CMOs at these massive companies, dude, you have to throw something really crazy, cool, wacky out of the box. And even then they'll still cancel. And when you're throwing a 20 person party of two or three people cancel, dude, it's like that's that's a significant amount of people.

Noah Tucker (26:51.107)
Yes.

Noah Tucker (26:54.626)
I that.

Noah Tucker (27:01.689)
Mm

Noah Tucker (27:12.781)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (27:20.227)
Yeah.

Rabah (27:20.398)
So I think for us our enterprise strategy is going to be based on actually getting a little bit stronger and bigger on Instagram. I think you penetrate enterprise in two ways. One, you become this really cool, awesome kid that everybody's talking about that then the enterprise goes, hey, Billy, why aren't we using social snowball? Go check them out. Or B, you throw these really crazy curated events. Like I'm not saying like a dinner or anything like that, but something really like at the yacht there is basically like no selling.

Noah Tucker (27:38.511)
Mm

Rabah (27:48.658)
The yacht was basically, I mean, it was just an insane event. You got shuttled from the pier to the yacht on a Zodiac. You got off the yacht. You got this pre -made drink for you. You got this customized card that Lex wrote. There was these two activities. You either painted or you did a mixology class. We went around LSI. I mean, it was awesome. It was absolutely awesome. it's a big fucking lift, dude. It's a big lift. I have yet to find the...

Noah Tucker (27:49.603)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (27:55.971)
Nice.

Noah Tucker (28:10.019)
That's sick, yeah.

Yeah.

Rabah (28:18.348)
the unlock there because they don't all congregate in one channel. So for me, it's how can I really either increase that word of mouth awareness through doing really crazy, cool shit. Like we have this moonshot marketing thing coming out. It's going to be awesome. We're something really crazy that I'm really excited about. So doing cool, crazy shit that everybody's like, man, who are these people? And then trying to surface that way and then be

Noah Tucker (28:35.561)
yeah?

yeah.

Rabah (28:47.522)
doing super curated events. And then the other kind of real big win is if your product fucks, the beauty of enterprise and it's a feature or bug. If your product fucks, it's a feature because people buy B2B SaaS through a fear lens. don't want to make, they're scared to make a bad decision because their boss is gonna get mad. Where I think D2C is more, and it sounds a little bit semantics, but D2C is more of like a no regret strategy.

Noah Tucker (29:10.083)
Mmm.

Rabah (29:15.086)
I don't want to make a bad decision where B2B SaaS is like, I don't want my boss to think I'm dumb because I bought this software. Because essentially when you put in the purchase request, you're vouching for it, right? And then they're going to come back to me and like, Robbo, Noah, the boss is asking Robbo why he spent $20 ,000 on Social Snowball. Are we getting value out of it? And they're like, yeah, I am, blah, blah, blah. But if your product doesn't fuck, the challenge is if you do penetrate enterprise,

Noah Tucker (29:20.557)
Yeah. Yeah.

Noah Tucker (29:34.936)
Yeah.

Rabah (29:42.004)
all those people are connected. It's even more incestuous than Smith. And so that's the kind of double -edged sword. And I'll tell you what, it's really hard to get people to come back to do a second thing if it didn't work on the first time. And so those people are pretty much out of pipe for two to three years. And so that's the gamble, right? Like you have to be so product proud.

Noah Tucker (29:44.602)
yeah.

Noah Tucker (29:56.515)
Yeah.

Yeah, yep.

Rabah (30:06.786)
that all I need to do is get the kind of pit bulls thing, right? Where you're just outside hawking CDs, because you're like, I'm so confident in my product. But if the product isn't there, it can put some really big headwinds in front of you, because Noah is going to talk to Billy, is going to talk to Sally, is going to talk to Susan, and they're going to ask, hey, how was Robba's Happy Pills? Were they good or not? they weren't. OK, I'm not going to buy them. And so that's where I think.

Noah Tucker (30:07.065)
Mm -hmm.

Rabah (30:33.978)
The rub comes with enterprise like it's way better kills and they're way better customers. But man, if your product isn't ready to service them in a meaningful way, it just takes one or two. And I'm not even saying these people are even being mean about it. It's just like, hey, Rob, I heard you use X, Y or Z. How do you like it? I don't use it anymore. I didn't say anything like derogatory, but you got what I said.

And that's where I think enterprise is scary because you have to have your product in a really good place before you go enterprise. Whereas, mid to small, mid, it's OK. It's like, OK, we're working on it. We're getting there. so anyways, that was a whole long rambling answer is enterprise is the path. But enterprise is also really hard. And it's actually very expensive because spending $30, $40K on an event, it's like, fuck.

This thing needs to hit. You know what mean? It's not like nothing. And it's not just the money, but it's the effort that goes into getting these people to an event is a lot of work.

Noah Tucker (31:28.622)
It needs to.

Noah Tucker (31:38.019)
Yep, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Rabah (31:41.038)
Yeah, I guess in terms of what are you excited about? Where do you see us going? I mean, I think the market's gonna blast back. I'm almost positive there's gonna be cuts in the macro. It's September. So I think there's gonna be a monster Q4. Do you feel that? Are you excited? Are you nervous? What do you I mean, there's definitely the presidential election in the states, which is obviously a pretty big thing. There's gonna be some CPM inflation because they're gonna have so much money getting poured into the system. But

Noah Tucker (31:59.108)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Noah Tucker (32:06.381)
Yep.

Rabah (32:11.17)
I don't know, I feel like it's going to be a good, good Q4 for people.

Noah Tucker (32:15.821)
Yeah, that's why you got to diversify your customer acquisition, ladies and gentlemen, social snowball. But no, I think it's going to be big. And I'm really excited because we're just so much bigger than we were last year. So I'm really, I mean, it's a little scary, right? But I mean, the product is in such a much, so much of a better place, especially now with like the newer engineering team that I was telling you about. Yeah, I think it's going to be huge. And I think it's going to be really fun to like be on the forefront of it. I think more and more brands with the election and just with like the way that.

Rabah (32:19.33)
Let's go, let's go, company man!

Noah Tucker (32:44.257)
e -commerce heading, like they're really diversifying their acquisition, not just in general, but for during BFCM in particular. So it's really cool to see the different strategies that brands deploy with affiliate and influencer during like the most important time of the year, because, you know, it's something that brands are running evergreen of course, like you have an affiliate program, you have your influencer program, you have a post purchase referral program, whatever.

Rabah (32:48.792)
Yes.

Yes.

Rabah (32:59.374)
That's exactly right.

Noah Tucker (33:08.675)
But for BFCN, brands get creative and they really involve their community of ambassadors, influencers, whatever it is for the brand in their strategy. So I'm very excited to be part of that on a much larger scale this year.

Rabah (33:21.88)
Dude, I love that. What's your favorite feature right now in social snowball?

Noah Tucker (33:26.083)
Dude, my favorite one by far, honestly, is Safe Links. Do you know Safe Links? Everyone copied it now, so it's like not even that a... thanks.

Rabah (33:30.631)
No, it's a great name though. Say more, I'm already in.

Noah Tucker (33:34.761)
Alright, so context is coupon codes leaked to coupon sites as we know that sucks in general But when it's an affiliate code it sucks double because you're not only giving out discounts to customers that should be getting the discounts But you're also paying commissions to affiliates that didn't refer those sales and then after you realize you overpaid them You probably have to do some reconciliation and that can damage the relationship with the affiliate if they're like how much was from the leak and how much came from my Instagram and you're like I have no idea because there's no way to measure that it's just this

Rabah (33:39.584)
Yes.

Rabah (33:50.734)
Correct.

Rabah (33:58.307)
Yes.

Noah Tucker (34:04.625)
chain reaction of disaster when an affiliate code leaks. So that's context on the problem.

What we build is something called SafeLink. So SafeLinks are essentially a coupon code alternative is like how I like to explain it. It's like a coupon code replacement. So where affiliates would have historically been sharing a code, they would share this link instead. The link itself, a SafeLink looks just like a normal affiliate link. It could be shortened, customized, just like any affiliate link. But how it works is when a shopper clicks on the SafeLink and gets taken to the brand storefront. In real time, a unique single use code is generated from the Shopify and given to the shopper to use during their

Rabah (34:19.277)
Okay.

Noah Tucker (34:41.313)
shopping session. So if I'm an influencer and I'm like use my link to get this discount and Rob you click on my link but 10 other people click on the link 11 different single use codes will be generated everyone gets their own code so all the shoppers still get the discount the influencer still has a mechanism that allows them to share a discount with their audience but if honey or any coupon site were to pick up any of those codes it doesn't matter because they're all single use so they're they're worthless to these coupon sites and there's no attribution disasters

Rabah (34:41.4)
That's gangster.

Rabah (35:08.331)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (35:10.259)
That's a big one for us. That's like part of the moving up market for us, at least like the bigger the brand, the more code leak hurts. so Safe Links wins us a lot of deals. We launched it like a year and a half ago and I've seen so many other platforms copy it at this point, which, you know, product modes are temporary, it's, yeah, it's still my favorite feature.

Rabah (35:12.546)
All

Rabah (35:34.44)
incredible because this is better than the coupon blocker because this is upstream. This is a better version of that because before it was just a cock block. Yeah exactly, the coupon blocker is fixing a symptom. This is the root cause. I love that. I have a funny story about that too because early on at Triple Whale we were doing affiliate marketing was a really big thing for us and

Noah Tucker (35:39.585)
Yes, this stops it from happening in the first place. Yeah. This is surgery and the coupon blocker is a bandaid. Yeah, exactly.

Noah Tucker (35:53.163)
Exactly.

Rabah (36:02.466)
We signed on this new affiliate, really good dude, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, God damn, this guy is crushing. This is incredible. What a great buy this was. And then come to find out not only the coupon code was linked, like got leaked. So my right -hand man in marketing at the time, he was like, hey man, I don't want to be like the bearer of bad news, but I actually don't think this is as efficacious as you think it is. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he showed me all this data. I'm like, fuck. And then, and then,

Noah Tucker (36:09.571)
You

Yeah.

Noah Tucker (36:30.926)
Yeah.

Rabah (36:32.428)
come to find out the after every sales call when we started doing sales led stuff, they would send I made this like demo, one demo to rule them all took you through the whole platform, blah, blah, blah. And in that fucking description, somehow on our YouTube video,

it had the coupon code down there too. So people were already, because this guy had made this really cool video for us. so like, and they would send this out. And it was like this guy talking about the platform. was incredible. And it was closing people. But in his description, he had the coupon code there. So every it was just an absolute I mean, everything ended up working out. The guy was awesome. It wasn't anything like sus of like he put the code out on purpose kind of thing. But

Noah Tucker (36:50.317)
What? No.

Noah Tucker (37:00.556)
man.

Noah Tucker (37:15.328)
Right.

Rabah (37:16.332)
This would have been so much more useful for me. And I guess that's kind of an interesting segue. Do Do Do Do Do Do Do do Do do you have any aspirations for B2B? Because that's really the show. No, OK, none, none.

Noah Tucker (37:29.089)
No. I agree. just, the reason I say no and like tell me if you think I'm approaching this wrong, but yeah, the focus, the focus. Yeah.

Rabah (37:35.085)
The focus is great, but I do want to hear the rationale,

Noah Tucker (37:41.593)
I mean, the way I see it is like a lot of the affiliate platforms that I used, you know, back in the day when Social Snowball was not even an idea yet. One of the things that I think.

made the product difficult to use and just confusing was the fact that it wasn't ecom focused. When you're in Social Snowball as an ecom operator, everything is familiar. We're using the words that you know, we're using the acronyms you know, everything is clean and simple. It's just not over complicated. If we were to add like B2B SaaS as an ICP, we would have to change and add so much that an ecom user would be a lot more confused in the product. I think, I think we're just going to say laser focused on ecom. And

Rabah (37:57.292)
I love that.

Rabah (38:05.368)
That's beautiful.

Noah Tucker (38:21.585)
And that doesn't mean we can't expand outside of Shopify, but e -comm will always stay focused on, I think.

Rabah (38:22.968)
Brilliant answer.

Rabah (38:28.726)
I love that. That's a brilliant answer. Two more questions for you, and we'll wrap it up. I have all but fallen off on my Apple Vision Pro usage. I know you're a pretty Vision Pro maxi. Give it to me straight. Are you still ripping it? How are you using it? Do you like it? Because I've tried traveling with it. I've tried doing all this stuff. I just, it just.

Noah Tucker (38:33.807)
Alright.

Noah Tucker (38:42.38)
I am.

I am s

Noah Tucker (38:50.959)
I feel like me and you, when we first got it, we were both trying to be as bullish as possible. It was like, I wanted to be so bullish. So here's how I honestly feel now. I'm not.

Rabah (38:56.757)
so bullish.

Noah Tucker (39:01.805)
I'm still bullish, but I really only use it on flights. And when I use it on flights, I love it on flights. Like I can't fly without it. I work, I watch movies, I have a huge setup. Like I think it's incredible for flights. But honestly, like when I first got it, I used to just like work on it from home. Now I don't do that anymore with the exception of if I want to work outside, it's really nice to have a big screen with no glare. So I'll do that sometimes. But besides that, it's really just flights.

Rabah (39:29.634)
That's a really good, okay, that's a good one. Yeah, I tried on the flights.

Noah Tucker (39:32.429)
Yeah, in the sun, like I'll be working in the sun, like shirt off.

Rabah (39:38.572)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I've seen the pictures. It looks great. You and Murray rip it up. But I've tried on the flights, but sometimes it fucks me up a little bit with I have to turn the travel mode on because it doesn't like the seat. Do you have to do that too? Yeah. Yeah. OK. All right.

Noah Tucker (39:43.599)
Yeah.

Noah Tucker (39:49.295)
Travel mode. Yeah, travel mode, but that's what it's for. That's what travel mode's for, yeah.

Rabah (39:56.8)
Yeah, maybe I need to give it another shot. also feel like, I don't know, I sometimes I fly bougie. And then it's like, I feel like a douche, having to like, thank you with the wait, or the stewardess or whatever, or what have you, but maybe I need to give it, you just send it. Okay, all right, I need to get.

Noah Tucker (40:08.889)
Dude, I just do it. I just do it.

Dude, you got you can't you can't care what people think. I've had people take a selfie of me on the plane like that's how embarrassed I mean, I wasn't embarrassed but like I should have been. Yeah, you just gotta I mean, who gives a shit like, you know, it's No, I'm I've done it economy to like, I'm like,

Rabah (40:21.996)
Yes!

Rabah (40:29.824)
Nobody gives a shit. Yeah. Alright, I'm gonna rip mine out. What do you -

That's a flex.

Noah Tucker (40:40.569)
Yeah, good.

Rabah (40:40.926)
I love it. last question Noah. What is your equation of excellence? What do you think excellence is a function of?

Noah Tucker (40:49.255)
nice, I should have prepared for this. I think excellence is... I think one...

Noah Tucker (40:57.817)
pitfall people fall into is like trying to replicate other people's excellence too much. I look at you guys crushing it. I look at all these other SaaS companies crushing it. I'm like, okay, obviously I want to be crushing it more, but everyone had such a different path to get to success. I think it's important to learn from what other people have done if they've accomplished something similar, but you have to always, always know that your path should be different. And like if you try to force a path that someone else did,

you want to replicate their success, it's probably going to slow you down. Whereas if you were to take a step back and like think about your specific own situation and take learnings from other people, but not try to force the same path, like that'll take you much further.

Rabah (41:43.246)
Dude, that was such a menace in my 20s and you're over here just building empires. I love it, man. That's so, so well put. And there's a great Bruce Lee line, absorb what's useful, reject what's useless. And I think there's so much great information out there, but I think especially on Twitter, there's no context to it. So a brand doing 100 million a year and a brand doing a millionaire, don't listen to the 100 million a year brand.

Noah Tucker (41:55.907)
There you go.

Rabah (42:11.148)
Like you guys are just not in the same realm and what's working and they're doing. And so you also don't know what the cap table is like, what the balance sheet looks like, what the goals are. Like the goal might just be to get bought. So they just want to burn as much money as possible to say, hey, we don't care about profitability. Look at growth. And the other person might be like, hey, dude, I don't care about making a bunch of top line. I actually want to take home and make bigger distributions. so, man, I think that's absolutely such sage advice.

Noah Tucker (42:12.739)
Yeah. Yeah.

Noah Tucker (42:22.339)
Mm -hmm.

Rabah (42:41.016)
What a killer. Coming to us live from Spain right after the Aoki concert, Noah Tucker. Noah, how can people follow you? How can they get more involved with Social Snowball? This time is yours, my friend.

Noah Tucker (42:47.79)
Ha

Noah Tucker (42:53.453)
Yeah, if they want to check out Social Snowball, just go to our website, socialsnowball .io and you can book a demo there. But I love chatting about this stuff, so if anyone wants to talk to me directly, LinkedIn, Noah Tucker, Twitter, Noah Tucker, I'm always geeking over affiliate and influencer stuff, so yeah, happy to chat with anybody of course.

Rabah (43:12.418)
Dude, I love it. Thank you so much as well for being so flexible on your schedule. I know we had a couple reschedules on my end. You're very, very gracious. appreciate that. Swag packages in the mail. And then what else we got? We have, you have an event at Centling Commerce, I believe, right? You plug that?

Noah Tucker (43:19.01)
All good.

Noah Tucker (43:23.417)
Let's go.

Noah Tucker (43:29.207)
Yeah, I'm doing a panel there. Yeah. Are you going to be there? Amazing.

Rabah (43:32.45)
Yeah, think I might. I don't know. have a little stealthy event going on that Thursday, so I might not be there. I'm trying to figure That's the moonshot thing. I'm trying to figure it out. we'll definitely have some people there. We're sponsoring it. then I thought you guys had a, you don't have another event you're hosting, I thought. A fun party event. Yeah, both of them, right? You're speaking. Yeah, okay. Yeah, perfect.

Noah Tucker (43:41.367)
Okay.

Noah Tucker (43:51.725)
We do, yeah, we're throwing a party, yeah. We're throwing a party one of the days. Speaking there, yeah, we're throwing a party. We've got like a big Airbnb, so yeah. That'll be fun too.

Rabah (44:02.516)
man, that's going to be boss. That's going to be a boss. I thought your way least talk was killer. You were just made for the stage, man. You're just made for the stage. I love that. I think that's online too. If you guys want to go hear him rap a little bit more about affiliate. all right folks, that's all we got. if you want to go make the money printer, go burn, make funnels, like you create ads, go to firm .com or stock com, go book a demo there. And then we have an incredible newsletter that goes out every Monday written by the indomitable Alexa Kilroy called the geometry of growth. can go subscribe right on the website.

Noah Tucker (44:06.787)
Thank you.

Rabah (44:31.83)
No, you're the man. appreciate you. Enjoy Spain, my favorite country in Europe. And Barcelona is my favorite city in Europe. So tear it up there. Also, I would argue, top three Soho house in the world. That Soho house is stellar. I know you're a Soho house guy. It's spectacular. The lounge area, everything is just, it's first rate there. It's absolutely first rate. So dude, I appreciate it so much. me when you're in Austin again, and we'll do the dang thing.

Noah Tucker (44:43.691)
Yes, the beach house. Dude, we've been going. We've been going.

Noah Tucker (44:59.673)
Alright brother, thanks for having me.

Rabah (45:02.762)
Absolutely. Alright folks, that's another one of the books. We'll see you next week. Bye bye.