So hello and welcome to another episode, the Winning with
Shopify podcast and hello to our live audience.
I hope you guys are well. I'm from the UK, which is why I
sound quite funny and I've got 2 absolute Titans of e-commerce
and subscriptions here with me. We've got John from Battle Box.
John, welcome to the show. Good to have you back.
Third time is it now? Third time, yeah.
Amazing. And I've got a very, very big
question for you in a second. We've also got Ben.
First time we've met, first time good ranches.
See you there as well and found us.
So yeah, super excited to have you guys on.
I'm going to dive straight in. We always start with big
questions. So John, I'm going to start with
a big question for you. How have you guys at Battle Box
built such a big multi $1,000,000 business that is 70%
customer subscriptions? That's a, that's a great, great
question. It's tell me everything.
Yeah, well when we started in 2015, we only had, we were
talking earlier about that single skew single product.
We just had one product and it was subscription only.
We didn't offer anything on A1 type capacity.
We we also naivety we had launched on a very niche
platform. We're on Shopify now, but we
were on this platform called Crate Joy and they just didn't
have the technical capabilities to even have one time products.
So it was the business rules. Oh, I can hear myself now.
Yeah, there we are. The the business rules of that
platform set the rules that we only had one product, it was
subscription only. It wasn't until we wanted to
scale and grow further that we Brad the one time inner into the
mix. Amazing.
And we're going to cover some of those regrets of expansion you
were telling me a minute ago. Sure, cover those in a in a few
minutes as well. But I mean, Ben, you guys have
got such an amazing business. How have you guys built a 63 +
1000 subscriber base of customers in such a short space
of time? I like to see it this way.
If I could do it, anybody can. I mean, we had no, I had no
e-commerce experience, no industry experience.
We're an online meat company and, and you know, we just, we,
we had to get scrappy and figure it out, but we did know this,
the trick isn't to get them to buy one time.
It's how do you get the repeat purchase?
So, so for us, we actually, I mean, you know, everybody says
subscription, subscription, subscription.
And the good thing about meat is people eat it everyday, you
know? And so we, we knew that for us,
it really came down to the product has to be better than
what they can get at the grocery store because it's a, it's a
commodity. And with something so simple,
yes, convenience is 1 factor. But we knew from the beginning
that, that our quality had to be better.
So when they get that first purchase, they eat it and they
go, Oh yeah, I want to, I want to keep doing that.
I want to get that. And so John Lasseter, the Pixar
creator and he wrote in his book quality is our business plan and
the the book's Creativity Inc, amazing book for any founder
have I mean really for anybody, but he wrote that at the very
beginning. Quality is our business plan and
we really took that into the business of, you know, we, you
can trick people into buying things, but if you don't have a
quality product, they're not going to subscribe and they're
not going to keep buying and. I feel so many brands rely
someone who's in the tech space and agency space, they rely so
heavily on tech to try and give that nudge, that extra e-mail,
that 20% offer set becomes a no brainer.
But I love the fact you guys have gone actually let's in a
way almost ignore all of that. If it's a good product, they'll
want it again. And as you say, the products it
it runs out, you know, either goes out of date or you've
you've eaten it, you need more after that which.
I think it's just the sustainability of of your brand
and product because that's how you're building it.
You're making it about superior product.
I love that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And and John, let's go back to the early days.
So you guys, you won product on subscription, you've expanded a
lot and we were talking about the pros and cons of this a
minute ago. Why don't you share with us
what's that journey like? Why did you expand and what are
some of the lessons you guys have learnt over that time?
Sure. So yeah, so in 20/17/2018 we we
migrated to Shopify to then have the one time capacity.
Welcome to the Call Club. Yeah, we finally joined the, the
issue was not even an issue. We've never really allowed the
the curated kits, the subscription box to ever be
available in a one time capacity.
So we've continued to kind of own the narrative on supply and
demand and and membership. So it's only been one time
capacity products that make up a kit that, that we've offered.
And you know, as we've kind of matured and we've said, OK, the
membership is, is great. The membership is the core
business. The membership's the lion's
share of the revenue. It's past the point of
exponential growth, right. We're we're still growing a
couple points, you know, month over month.
It's it's still nice, it's still great, but it's not the
exponential days are are done right.
We've had a certain saturation unless we change fundamentally
the the membership offering. So at that point, how do we
still have that exponential growth?
How do we still scale significant revenue?
And, and the answer is, is additional channels, whether
it's in marketplaces or marketplace live shopping like
what not. You know, right now we have,
we're, we're doing demos, we're live selling on what not on the
other side of this this convention.
So cool. And you guys, whenever I talk to
you, there's always something fun, exciting, but as ACEO,
you're making sure it's also feeding the bottom line and
revenues going up, profits going up.
So yeah, if anyone who's here hasn't seen, they're literally
running, as John says, live shopping right now on what not,
which is awesome. Some of the stats I've got here,
Ben, about your business, I think are incredible. 55% of
subscribers are still active at one year, 40% are still active
at over 2 years. How do you, beyond just the
great product you mentioned, how do you build that loyalty that
trusts that commitment from those customers because those
stats are phenomenal? Yeah, I'm going to give more to
this answer, but I am going to go back to the quality has to be
there. And, and, and, and again, that's
been that was our whole messaging was better than the
grocery store ditched the grocery store.
And, and honestly, like we, I mean, we grew, gosh, we grew
really fast when we when we launched online, didn't start
online. We actually started, I started
selling the company selling meat out of the back of a truck in a
parking lot, like and, and then went from one truck to two
trucks to 5:00 to 10:00. And then over by year three, we
had about 20 trucks going around the country doing these like pop
up shops. COVID happened and we realized
we've got to get online. So we, we, we figured out how to
shipping perishable items is very hard.
And I, I told you this before the before the show, had I known
how hard it was, I probably would have never done it.
But we reached a point where we were, we were just too far in.
And there was, we either, you know, make it or we don't.
But we we knew how to sell meat and we knew how to do it in
person with those pop up shops. You know, it was 180° turn
launching online. And so we actually came to the
Sub Summit the very first year that we were we had our toe in
the water trying to ship, but we were still doing all the trucks
and the trucks were making money online was just losing money.
And so we came to Sub Summit that first year and learned so
much about subscription. Again, we didn't know anything
about e-commerce, We didn't know anything about subscription.
And so this, this conference really has a special place for
in my heart and for our business because at the time, I think we
brought our almost our whole staff, which was like 7 people.
And we like, we just all came like and, and learned so much
and took it back. But the biggest thing we took,
took back was the importance of subscription, the importance of
getting that recurring revenue and, and, and not just getting
the sale, but continuing to nurture the relationship, you
know, because once you get them to buy too many, too many brands
get the sale and then just move on.
And you know, we, it, it is a relationship and they're, you
know, they're, they're our customers and they could easily
be a competitor's customer. So, you know, we want to, we
have to provide value. Like I said, the the product
quality has to be there, but we have to find value beyond just
the product. And we do that through, through
education, through recipes, through industry news and, and
you know, have a, a regular cadence of giving, giving more
than just the meat in the box. Yeah, I love that.
And I you've touched on something that's really close to
my heart as well, which is the the fact that so many brands
focus and we're an acquisition agency.
Our clients focus so much on acquiring customers and then we
look at their PNL and they'll sort of split it by recurring
orders or existing customers versus new ones.
And we're like, what the heck are you guys doing?
And one bit of advice I'd give to any brand at the moment is
like set an LTV metric and make sure you beat it, whatever it
is. It's like we need to have this
many repeat orders, this much revenue per customer per year
and suddenly our job becomes easier.
We can scale faster now because we know acquiring a customer and
I mean you guys are phenomenal at this as well.
Yeah. So something, something else
that Ben said that I think is very, very important.
And I I want to bring it back to that because it's something that
we do as well. And it's, it's paramount.
It's providing the value outside of just the physical product.
So you know, Ben was saying that through education, through
content, we we do the same thing.
Like that is a major focus. We want to make that
relationship so much more than just the product.
Having a good product obviously matters, but taking to the next
level when you have that relationship.
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absolute extreme, didn't you? And phone Netflix and we're
like, can we have a show and tell us about the tell about the
show and how that engages outside of everything else it's.
Yeah, so we had a, a Netflix show premiere July 4th weekend
in 2020. It's somehow greenlit.
It's the entire season, all 8 episodes is basically a
commercial for us testing gear to determine.
It's it's cool. I've watched in a battle.
Yeah, it's really cool. And it's, it's performed well
enough where they've kept it, they've kept it on there, you
know, 667 years later. It's it's still a post purchase
survey still calls out five 6% of our net new comes comes from
the the the the season. So good.
So I mean, how many brands imagine they could have their?
Own. Well, I wish you.
It's not like you can replicate that.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
How I'm not the host, but how did that come to be?
Did you pursue it or was it just?
Happenstance. So High Noon Entertainment they
were the feather in their caps. Fixer upper and cake boss.
Yep. So they, they reached out to us,
pitched us, hey, we have this concept, we have some money from
History Channel. We want to film and we'll out
date myself here. A sizzle reel, which you would
do before a pilot like doesn't even exist anymore.
And they did a sizzle reel. History Channel sat on it for
six months, passed on it. We took it to they took it to
Discovery. Discovery sat on it for 6-7
months, passed on it. They met with Netflix and
Netflix said, yeah, we'll do it. And we want right of refusal of
seven seasons and this is a Netflix original.
We want to start filming in two months.
Wow. And then we got 120 page legal
agreement with Netflix. We're like our normal lawyer
isn't this isn't a fit for them. We found an entertainment
lawyer. Out if only Claude would have
been around. Seriously.
Yeah, Did not. Was not a thing and we we spent
an embarrassing amount with that lawyer redlined the whole thing
sent it back to Netflix Couple weeks later Netflix replied back
15 minutes later saying we apologize if we like miss set
any expectations. There's no there's no redlining.
There's no yeah, this is this is the agreement.
Take it or leave it. So we signed it, but yeah, it
was, it was. Germany when the lawyers ruined
the fun, that's what in the finance director.
Those are the annoying things in life.
I think that, but I mean it's, it's amazing you guys have done
that. I mean in your business spend,
if what, what do you guys do outside of products, outside of
marketing? Do do you guys give people
advice on what else to cook with the products you send?
And do you do collaborations with other brands, that kind of
stuff? Yeah, I mean, I mean, there's
like playbook 101 things of, you know, collaborating with
influencers, collaborating with mom fluencers in, you know, in,
in our space. The it's just the way it is
still in the US, about 70% of the of the shopping still comes
from the female, even though, you know, early on we thought we
would have much more of a male demographic because, you know,
meat and grilling and and stuff. But, but you know, we, we, we
quickly learned that men like to eat, but it's more women that
are still buying. And which my point here is this,
as soon as you can learn who your target audience is and, and
it is most brands, your audience is not everyone, even in a
category like ours, which is meat.
So you would think, oh, it's anyone who eats meat.
Still not true. There's a, there's a absolute
target audience. And for for us, it's 35 to 48
year old moms like that's like that's like our, you know, sweet
spot, biggest persona that we see when we go after that, when
we find audiences. And so when we started, we
actually went, we, we really grew the business, I mean,
exponentially the in 22 when we started online fully, we, we
2223 and 24. I'm about to blow your mind.
We had no meta ads at all. And to build an e-commerce
business without no Meta, no Google.
Unheard of. It's unheard of.
It's amazing. And yeah, so we really leaned in
to podcasts and yeah, podcasts and, and influencers with
podcasts and, and, and what we found is especially when you're
a new brand, you know, you, you don't, no one knows you.
Like right now we have I think 25,000 Trustpilot reviews like
with an average of 4.8 which is. I mean well done like that's
that's not easily achieved. Thank you.
We were talking about it on the plane here.
It was like, you know, we should put that SAT on our website.
I could share we work very closely with trust for that.
I could share some case studies that would convince you to do it
tomorrow. Yeah.
No, I know. Well, yeah.
And and you know, our largest competitor, which is number one
in the space, they have 1800. And so, so that's AI mean that's
a huge deal for us. But where was I, what was the
question? Where was I going with that?
Retaining customers talking about the things that aren't the
normal products I think was the question.
Yeah, yeah, I lost my train of thought talking about Trustpilot
reviews not being on the website.
It's impressive though the amount of the amount of reviews
you have on. Trust box, we went a different
route again. Getting people to buy meat
online is not the norm. Yeah, yeah, COVID helped a lot,
but it's still a a pretty big barrier to entry there because
it's perishable and it's just not.
Super normalized as well, which you would in a supermarket.
And so we borrowed the influence of podcasters, influencers, and
I'll keep saying influencers with podcasts like, and, and
because, and, and not the really, really big ones,
honestly, like they, they get kind of tuned out.
But it's like that the, the, you know, big enough to move the
needle, but not so big that they're crazy expensive.
And the people that are listening to those influencers,
those podcasters, they believe anything they say.
That's why they're listening. And you know, they're, and so
when they say, Hey, good, good ranchers, just ship me a, a huge
box of meat. And it's amazing.
You could have it too. Like we, we, even though they
don't the, they don't know us as a brand, but we get immediate
trust through that, through those voices.
So that's how we absolutely built the business from you know
00 subscribers to the 63,000 monthly that we have now.
And I mean, we just started like having Meta in Google be any
like significant portion toward the end of last year for the for
like literally the first time. Yeah, yeah.
And I love the contrast in both the brands actually where you
guys have gone, like how do we get this message out to as many
people as possible as fast as possible and just let's just do
some big stuff. Let's take a risk and see what
happens. You guys have gone grass roots
and kind of like work our way up.
It's, it's just so interesting seeing how you both created such
successful subscription businesses on the same thing
that Ben's talking about with knowing your customer and
talking to customer and nailing down that target group.
How have you guys achieved that specifically in the subscription
space, like nailing who subscribes the ones that don't?
Yeah, so. It's, it's, I would have guessed
before chatting today that we had a very similar demographic,
but it's not OK. So we're you know, sweet spot
is, is 35 to 55 male household income 1:20 to 1:30.
It's 90% of our purchases are men.
And so out of that 10% that are female purchases, 50% of them
are purchasing it for a male in their life.
So it's, it's a wildly, wildly different number, but it, it
matters, right? You want to target the right
people. I was actually on a call earlier
earlier today, just a, a, a, a video call and we're we're
shopping some new banking partners like full service and
watch out some. Might be here, Yeah.
Sorry, there's a back door if you but they.
They were asking some questions to better understand the
business and they were OK If we asked, you know, how would you,
if, if we wanted to double membership by the end of the
year, like, what would that look like?
And I, I told them, you know. Respectfully, it's that's
wouldn't be the move because we're hyper focused on our
demographic and we start kind of going a little open and getting
people that maybe aren't part of it.
The LTV is not going to be the same.
The CAC might look might look the same, but at the end of the
day, if the LTV isn't there, it changes the economics.
So, and I think it's so. Important playing that long
game. I mean, you've both been in
business long enough now to go Actually I'm looking 5 to 10
years ahead now, not just how do we pay the bills tomorrow.
And I think so many business sometimes get stuck in that loop
then of like we need to do a sale to get enough orders in to
pay the bills. But then we know we've lowered
our margins. That's creating a tomorrow
problem with our bank balance and taking that long approach.
Again, going down the route of quality and really understanding
that, that target group, I think so important.
Back to you, Ben, now you know who your target audience is.
How do you cater marketing and the way you position the
subscription model, how do you communicate that to your
audience based on who they are? Yeah, so.
Unlike you guys and we had, we really thought about when, when
we, when we first started about being subscription only.
But we went the approach of we want them to subscribe, but
we'll give them the one time option.
But you know, we, we want to put some friction between there and,
and so we, we, we charged $25 more for one time purchase.
Nice. And we're like, we would rather
they subscribe, but if they pay the extra $25 fine, that's.
You know. Better margin, Yeah, we're not
going to say no, right. And especially you know, in, in
our, in our, in our in our business, you have to give first
time discounts. And so, so we kind of saw it as
like a, as kind of a, a, a net positive of if they do the one
time again, we know they're going to love it.
And, and then and if they're willing to pay more for it, OK.
But, and so we went out that way.
And then and, and just by happenstance, 80% of of our new,
you know, of our customers just subscribed right out the gate.
And so, but now we're, we've started, you know, implementing
more, we're actually running an AB test right now on and the,
the $25, you know, just delta between one time purchase.
Some people on our team keep saying maybe we should just test
running subscription only. That's, that's the only offer.
I've, I've not greenlit that yet.
But what we're doing right now is we're running an AB test on
15% increase for a subscription, I mean for a one time purchase
and a 20% increase versus the $25, Yeah, yeah.
See how much more they're. Willing to pay to not.
Subscribe. I like it, which I think is
smart. The thing that drives me mad
sometimes when working with brands is when they just go
like, we've changed that and it's like, why?
And it's like, well, we should offer 10% off a subscribe and
save. And it's like, and the whole,
it's what I've just written in my notes.
They got the fact that you guys sat down and thought about it.
You were like, we've got a clear goal and it's subscription.
So offering just like a random 510% off the subscription,
clearly from your point of view, it devalues the subscription and
we're just making it up, whereas actually we don't want them to
do that. So let's just make it so stupid
not to that this is the value you're getting.
So the subscription itself is not discounted as the customer
sees it. It's so simple and so smart.
You guys obviously thought this through.
Yeah, well, and. Then and then also the reason we
did $25 versus 10% because it comes about our, our, our AOV is
200 is like 200 on the nose. So, but we realized $25 sounds
like more than 10% to a lot of people 'cause, you know, 25 is
bigger than 10. But again, that was, that was
years ago. And you know, like I said, we're
running that test now. I, I, I'd be remiss if I didn't
say this. We, a lesson we learned the very
hard way is we looked at subscription management
platforms as an expense and thought, right, that's it's so
expensive. And as we continue to grow and
scale it only like they're going to be, we're going to be paying
them $1,000,000 a year like. And that was one of the biggest
mistakes we made by seeing that as an expense and not as a value
driver. So we tried to build it
ourselves. You know, one of our developers
is like, I can write a code that it's just a script and it's
just, you know, and I see where this is.
Going and we. Yeah.
We, we, we missed a lot of recurring revenue those first
that first 18 months. And when we finally realized
what was going on, the beautiful thing is we were getting so many
new customers, it was masking it.
But when we, when we realized we were all, we were, I mean, we
were getting 80% subscribing, but we were only processing like
45%. I know because of bugs and
issues. Again, maybe if you're a better
developer than my team, you could do it yourself.
But I would say anybody starting out, don't look at subscription
management soft. There's a, there's a lot of,
there's a lot of really great ones.
And you can't look at that as an expense.
It's absolutely. It's a value.
Yeah, yeah. And getting that wrong knock on
effect on revenue could be massive and.
And, and the platform you're on as well, you know, we just like
you guys, when we started, Shopify was not what it is
today. And, and you know, even though
we were small, we were like, we had ambition to be big.
So we're like, no, we need something better than Shopify.
We went through the same thing we we thought we were going to
build our own and we quickly realized that was not not the
answer and went to Shopify and and recharge.
I mean, we still. See it now when we we walk into
brands that like using Magento or something and they're like,
this is our development team. I'm like team, you got a
development team. I was like, have you heard of
Claude? Like Claude is your development
team and you can write code for you and you put it straight in
Shopify and bang, it's done. And they were like, yeah, yeah,
we're migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is the classic.
And it's just, I think let's not go too far down the tech Rd.
because we could talk about that load.
One thing I do want to ask both of you, I'm going to start with
you, John, is obviously we're talking about growing a
subscriber base and that's fantastic.
How do you deal with churn both? How do you prevent it and what
do you do after the churns happened and I?
Think you and I chatted about this on on an episode possibly
so so we we care obviously a lot about churn retention way we
were caring about it before it was even cool, right?
Like pre, pre COVID where everyone was only focused on
acquisition. So we do a lot, it's just part
of our, our business rules and how the business was built.
So just so many touches constantly testing stuff because
it's it's so much easier to keep a customer than than than get a
new one. I mean, spoiler alert, Meta is
their their CPM and cat costs are are not going to go down
next year. News, news flash, it is going to
be Meta's going to charge you more than they did this year.
So I think it, I think it's huge.
I think spending time and, and testing stuff and, and, and just
coming to the realization that you've got in this customer,
you've gotten the hard part. Now, if you have a good product
and and and a good experience, like spend the effort on that
because they're going to stick around this episode of winning.
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That's taxcloud.com/winning and when you, when you do a lose a
customer, it was a very sad day. Do you guys reach out and talk
to them? Do you try and do some sort of
win back afterwards to go even though we've lost them?
If we can find out why, there might be something we can
change. Or yeah.
So, so this is super wild to say that we have this because we're,
you know, pretty much just a traditional D2C company.
So we have a full time guy, his name is Patrick.
He literally his full time job is calling churned customers.
We did a lot of testing. The sweet spot is 90 to 120 days
after they leave which was not my theory.
My theory was first couple of weeks we tried from immediate
all the way through a year and 90 to 120 days was a sweet spot.
He calls them, you know, I'll say it here.
The truth is it starts off as a customer service call, better
understanding. And he's documenting the reasons
they left, what their experience was.
Now it has to pay for itself. So it based on what they say.
It then turns into a sales call where he's positioning a offer
to them to bring them back, to reactivate them live while he's
talking to them. So smart.
Yeah, it's wild. I think that we have a full time
phone sales win back guy. Plus you don't have to.
Do the whole sales journey again.
They've been a subscriber. They know it, you just need to.
Work out what, what was the issue?
Let me fix it and and you're back here.
It's amazing. And Ben, how do you guys deal
with churn? Avoid churn in the 1st place.
Yeah. The the the easiest thing is to
this sounds revelatory, but to to stop it before it happens.
You know, it's like AI mean because at that point it's a
it's a sever. And, and again, you know, we, we
don't have a nobody has 100%, you know, success rate of that.
But if you can, you know, if you can predict before it happens.
And so again, part of our, so we use Shopify and recharge and,
and recharge has a really great feature, a a lot of great
features for churn. And, and you know, once you
learn, once you learn, OK, where, where are people most
likely to churn? And you know, again, for us,
it's food that they're ordering that they're buying.
And you know, what are the reasons they're turning or what
are the reasons they're cancelling?
And, and you know, yeah, what's the, what's the number one
reason? And for us, we looked about two
years ago and the number one reason was lack of
customization. So because we had curated boxes
and we we had a lot of different curated boxes, but they wanted
to make their. Own like build their own
components, yeah. You know, so we, you know, we
listen to our customer loud and clear and, and which you know,
and got got that going. You know, if you know, said
it's, you know, said it's a price, it's, it's, it's never,
you know, it's never quality. I can't say it's never quality.
It's rarely quality. But you know, for us it was lack
of customization and, and price. Those were our two biggest ones.
Can't do much about price because, you know, the price of
meat has gone up exponentially over the last three years, over
the last five years really. And it just keeps going up.
So I mean, it's expensive everywhere, but we were like, we
can't do something about the customization part.
And so, you know, our team, you know, diligently worked and, and
we got that, you know, as an option now.
But so it's listening, you know, you don't, if you, you don't
know what to solve, if you, if you don't ask the question.
So it's, you know, surveying our customers, surveying that we,
you know, we, we do we have a regular cadence of surveying our
current customers, not the whole list, but you know, a subset
and, and past customers. Why'd you leave?
And we're not at we I, I looked at our customer service manager,
who's in the back right there listening when you said the
calling every person who's turned and I, I made us.
Are we doing that? Oh, we're doing OK.
I love it 'cause I was looking at you.
Like if we're not doing that, we need to be doing that.
I love doing these live. We're all learning.
That's great. That's great, yeah.
No, that's, that's amazing. But so we realized that our
biggest drop off of if we can get, if we can get our
customers, if we if we can get them to their third order, like
that's this like we got them, it's getting them to their third
order. So we started putting more check
insurance between order one and order 2 because our biggest drop
off is between order one and order 2.
And so we started for us it was identifying that and OK, what
can we do difference? And then we also realized that
we were actually giving too much meat.
And it wasn't, it wasn't the money, it wasn't the OR, or the
value. It was the, they had too much,
you know, and so that's why they were cancel or pause or just
push, push, push. And, and so we actually, this
was 2 1/2 years ago when we realized that we stripped away,
you know, we, we took our average order value down because
like I said, it's $200 right now.
When we first started, our average order value was 250.
But what we realized is our, also our average subscription
was every eight weeks, 60% were on 8 weeks because the box was
so big. And so we want them, you know,
the name of subscription is to have recurring monthly revenue,
not bimonthly, you know, And so, so again, listening to the
customer, watching the data and what is it?
You know, the data tells you something.
And we have a saying in our, in our, in our company data doesn't
make decisions, people do. And you can be swimming in data,
but what decisions are you making with that data?
But if you study the numbers, if you look at it, it's telling you
a story and you just have to respond.
Yeah. I think having feedback loops is
so key. But to your point, you have to
actually listen to it and actually act on it, right?
People love to think that they have the their product is
already perfect and doesn't need anything.
And if you just listen to your customers, they're they're going
to they're going to tell you right, you're sending me too
much meat. Let me give you more money like
send me less and my old T VS going to grow.
I think it's huge. We, I mean we.
Had a brand. The reason is laughing is we had
a brand years ago and we kept saying to them, we don't feel
like you know why people buy. We can see the analytics.
It tells us what's happened. It tells us how it happened, but
it doesn't say why. And then we also did weed a
massive, they, they sold furniture and lighting, massive
LTV problem. No one came back.
Not an obvious subscription model.
And also, if no one's coming back, don't try enough on a
subscription, that's just not going to work.
And we did this feedback survey and the, and we started showing
the graphs back to the business and said we sent it out a week
ago. We got the results in.
Let's have a look at the graphs together and start.
Let's get some ideas as to what exactly what we're going to do.
And it was like, people don't like how long your product
descriptions are. They think they could be shorter
and quicker to understand. And she's like, but I like
those. I wrote those myself and was
like, oh, no, this is going to be a long afternoon.
It's just the millennial. Marketer versus the Gen.
Z marketer. Yeah, well, they so.
They were distributing products, COVID hits.
They had to go direct to consumer and she just didn't
understand. She knew what the distribution
channels wanted, which was loads of information about the
products. We buying the best we can at the
right price. There's all the consumers want.
They're like, I like red. Red's cool, isn't it?
I'm going to buy that because the image, the image sold it,
but there's these massive long descriptions yet to get through
before the add to cart button. So we're like, let's run an AB
test. And she sort of went no, no, no,
let's just leave it as it is or let's just change it.
It's like, but if we AB test, we know is it 5% important?
Is it 80% important? We get those kind of stats?
So just as far as laughing as you remember having this
meeting, it's a long day, but we're going to take questions in
a minute. I got one more question for you
guys. So think of any good questions
to ask these two, not me as challenging as you want as well.
I want to ask about background. I'm going to start with you,
Ben, because I saw a clip of you on another podcast and thought,
wow, that's it's quite a story of where you were before as to
how you got into starting the business and and founding it and
where you are today. Give us give us a quick version
of of the story. Like where did you start?
What led you into it and how are you running what you are today?
Yeah, I said at the beginning. I had no industry knowledge, no,
you know, whether it was business or meat.
I was a worship pastor at a large church in Houston and I
did music full full time from the time I, you know, when I was
19 till my till probably 30-4. And that's what I was really
good at it. And, and, but yeah, my, my
story. And you know what, whatever your
personal beliefs are, but my story is God told me to start a
meat company and I heard it loud and clear and I went, I was
working full time at the church and I can't, we just had our
first baby boy. He was maybe 6 weeks old.
And I walked out of the, it was a Sunday morning.
I walked out of the, the, the bathroom.
I was getting ready and I went to my wife.
She was holding her baby. And I said, I think God just
told me to start a meat company and it couldn't have been more
left field and thinking she was going to go.
We don't have any money. We just had a baby.
We don't know anything about running a business.
But she looked back at me and said, if you heard God, then I
trust you. And so we went well and here we
are. I I.
Am a worship leader of my church as well, which is why it
resonated me. I was like when I heard it, I
was like, this is amazing. So but John, how did you fall
into battle box as well? How did you get involved?
I can't go. After that, what?
Sorry, I feel like I feel set up here.
What do you believe, Jordan? Come on, Everything I was in.
B2B sales technology SAS. Cool, yeah.
I was, yeah, I was was investing in companies and I like
reoccurring revenue well enough to.
Set you up. This is fun.
So, yeah, not as not as a cool story.
Thanks, man. That's all right.
We. Got Netflix show which is cool,
but yeah, yeah. Sure.
Can we give? Them a round of applause.
It's amazing if you guys taking time out and sharing stuff,
yeah. To make one correction, I said
CX manager, she is our CX director as of a month ago is
that. Racially promoted or yes?
Love it you've. Obviously done well.
So well done. Very proud of you.
She walked into the office with Who Runs the World but Beyoncé
the next day. True story.
Does anyone? I love it.
Does anyone have any questions for these guys at all?
There we go, we got. 1. Yes.
So I'll just. Repeat it because the people
listening went no, what the question was yeah, what what AB
what AB testing tools are you using?
What software are you doing stuff differently?
Who wants to go first? Yeah, I'll, I'll.
Go. We were actually testing a new
one called testing a testing. Tool visually.
We're we're we've on boarded a a week ago and we're testing it
right now. We've used quite a few.
So we'll see. We'll see how it goes with with
that one. Nice.
Yeah. I don't know the answer to that.
And I was looking in the audience was trying to find
Michael Mcwhorter. Where are you?
He would know. Yes, yeah, yeah, I do.
Know ours is a Shopify. I mean, there's, there's so many
that's the beauty of Shopify is there's so much plug and play
out the box. Another mistake we made was
trying to even when we migrated over to Shopify, we we didn't go
head it. We we were still headless,
meaning we were there's still a good amount of development that
we were in charge of and about 7-8 months ago we went why are
we doing this? Like, you know, it was just let.
Them do it so exciting for a while wasn't it like 99 page
speed and stuff? But Shopify's improved enough
now you don't need to. Shopify's the expert.
Let them be the expert, yeah? Amazing have we got any more
questions for our amazing guests at all or we're good sweet.
We'll give them a round of applause.
Thanks for joining us, everybody.
And for everyone watching, thank you for tuning in.
Join us again next time. Thanks for having.
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