The Startup CPG Podcast

00:01
Daniel Scharff
All right, welcome to another episode of the startup CPG podcast. I am your host, Daniel Sharf, and today we are diving into the world of Amazon. We're with our official agency partner we think is the best partner for emerging brands because I've worked with them. They're called Daybreak Agency, led by our friend Leon Lewis. Leon has an impressive background. He started his entrepreneurial journey as a gamer and a publisher. He later got into the music industry. He founded a record label that contributed to the success of artists like Future Islands and Kesha. And he was even the CEO of a leading ukulele company and is a master ukulele player himself.

00:40
Daniel Scharff
His career has spanned roles at Honer Health, Warrior, Rebel, and in 2019, he founded Daybreak Growth Partners, which is an Amazon and retail media strategy and management agency for new and growing CPG brands. Leon, because I've worked with you personally, I am so excited to not just partner with you, but also get to have you here on the podcast. Welcome to the show.

01:04
Leon Lewis
All right, thanks for having me. I'm super excited.

01:06
Daniel Scharff
All right, so let's get into it. I wonder, maybe we could just start with your background a little bit. Can you tell me? Because you've had such a varied career in the background and most people will be listening to this, but if you were watching the video, you would see the plethora of ukulele in the background here. So who is Leon Lewis? Just tell us the story.

01:26
Leon Lewis
Yeah, it feels like it gets weirder over time. I don't know. I started my first business online in 1997. I was twelve in 1997, for the record. And I designed a board game and made a website and figured out how to sell it online and got my mom to sign for the one company that would process credit card transactions online at the time and everything. And it was successful. I mean, we made money. My parents were very concerned and all of that, but I was a kid, I grew out of it. I'd always been a musician. Got into the world of running a record label, did that for a long time. I ran a business online all through high school, paid my way through college, doing it full time. I kind of got out of that for a variety of reasons.

02:16
Leon Lewis
2008 and kind of the financial crisis was one of them, and some personal things were a part of it and moved to the world of honor. Matthias Honer invented the harmonica in the 1850s. And I came into that company, the US office, and were just starting to sell online as well as we had a massive retail distribution. And I was kind of the only person that knew how to figure out know at the time and even guitar center and eBay was really mean. This was very early mean. We helped launch the musical instrument category at Amazon when Amazon was still launching new categories and were beta testing advertising on Amazon, if you can imagine that. So did that for a long time. Ended up being put in charge of their ukulele company, Lanakai, which at the time was the largest in the world.

03:06
Leon Lewis
We scaled that up, we sold it in 2015. And I was here in Richmond, Virginia, and met Shane Emmett, that was the founder of Health Warrior, and they're trying to get someone to help with digital. And Richmond in 2015. People just weren't applying for that job. I was like, I'll give this a shot. This seems interesting. And health warrior sold to Pepsi. I spent a little time at Rebel and I didn't come from the agency world in the music industry and stuff. That wasn't really a thing, having all these agencies and service providers. And so I always just kind of felt like there was room to do it a little bit better and do it a little bit differently. And 2019 at Expo East, I had a friend of mine, Rusty Porter, was like, just follow me around.

03:49
Leon Lewis
You'll meet people that want your help. And I think the first three people we talked to were like, do you know an Amazon guy? And I was like, yeah, okay. And figured out how to start from there. And we've grown very organically since. Right. I mean, we have this great official partnership with startup CPG, which, look, helps us get clients, but it also just helps me be engaged and take calls with the community and help people. Our team has grown. We're nearing a dozen people and we're still referral only. Right. I mean, our average retention is 18 months for brands that we work on. Right. So we just have these good, authentic longer term relationships and it's been fun. It's been fun to kind of come into it and develop this perspective.

04:29
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I really appreciate that about you. I think you don't even really have, like, a LinkedIn out there. I was really excited when I first got to meet you through somebody in the channel who was like, yeah, this is the guy. If you're an early brand and you don't want to kill yourself on retainer, this is the high performance guy to work with. And so I was just super impressed working with you. I think just mainly because of how realistic you are about everything, you will show people the PNL and look, this is what you're going to convert, most likely. And if you put in this much money. Here are the sales that it could be for you through the first twelve months of the business.

05:05
Daniel Scharff
This is probably what it's going to look like, kind of like a flight path, and it may not be the thing that you want it to be, or it may be a lot better than you expect, but whatever it is, we're going to learn through this together. And so for me, the process just kind of made a lot of sense and just overall, very reasonable. I also was going to ask you, so I'm also a musician, not a successful one, but I really enjoy the process of it. And when I meet other musicians, sometimes they'll say things like, hey, what's it like to launch a CPG product? Well, it's a lot like trying to make it as an artist as well. Actually, the process for me is so similar.

05:44
Daniel Scharff
Know, you're developing a, you're maybe you're out there in the studio or you're practicing and you're really trying to get the product that you're bringing to market to the best place that it can be. You're trying to develop a core audience, you're figuring out who it speaks, know things, just don't get discovered on Spotify. Like, you're out there marketing it, you're doing concerts the same way that we're out there doing digital marketing and demos and building your audience. What do you think? Any other parallels that you see?

06:13
Leon Lewis
Well, there's no one investing in bands. Getting investors and backing is a challenge for sure. And it's definitely. I mean, I think you go through rounds of iteration. I think a lot of people always say that, like many bands, they put out a first album and you have some success and then the second album is kind of a dud and you come back to it with the third iteration. I think we've seen a lot of brands have their first innovation and it's like, oh, okay, yeah, well, we learned a little bit and now we're going to do it, our third product line, and really nail it.

06:48
Daniel Scharff
Right?

06:48
Leon Lewis
So it's that you have to work until it just really starts to flow. And it's also one of those things like music and brands. I think you just hit that critical mass of like, hey, we put out enough flyers, we gave out enough demos, we gave out enough samples, all of that we just started to actually build that awareness.

07:09
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. And then all of a sudden it starts feeding itself and you get the word of mouth going. I was really interested when I was just learning about what I needed to do when I was putting out my first album and talking to other musicians, somebody who I really respect who had helped with the production of the album. She wears really cool glasses and has a total look that works for her. And I was asking her about it, she's like, yeah, well here's the coach who worked with me on that and helped me figure out who I was and then how I wanted to present to the audience and then that was my thing. So pretty interesting, kind of a parallel to a lot of the branding and marketing stuff that we all work with as well.

07:43
Daniel Scharff
So total tangent here, but I know you and I both love this topic. Hopefully it's interesting to everybody out there who's listening and if it's not then.

07:50
Leon Lewis
Well, you know where the fast forward.

07:52
Daniel Scharff
Button and yeah, getting into the Amazon world that early, pretty interesting to me. I have a family friend, his name is Michael Lazaro. He had an agency in the very early days for Facebook marketing. It was called Buddy media and then he sold it for a bajillion dollars. And I just was so fascinated by the people who can figure out the emerging technology and how to build services business around that where then they are the first ones who know how to do it. And then when people kind of realize you're the person that they call. Did you ever feel that way about the mean?

08:27
Leon Lewis
I think, you know, all of these things started off like, know, Amazon was just much more simple. I mean, you know, the cost of advertising is just one of those things where it's like the business was much easier to run and build and invest and to grow because the cost of advertising was just like 10% of what it is today. And I think even when I was running my record label, were a record label, but we had about 5000 items that we sold. We were a mail order business and we designed a platform that basically is what Shopify is. Right. And it was so interesting to just kind of see these very simple concepts that were very practical really emerge and become a part of a much kind of more complicated whole. But fundamentally they're still the same, right. Those fundamentals still matter.

09:21
Leon Lewis
And I do think that one of the things that I try to encourage people to really look at is zoom out and let's look at the whole business. Where are we going? What is our twelve month plan? What is the financial outcome of that? Because I think sometimes forest for the trees, whatever analogy you want to use, we get too zoomed in. I also think sometimes ecommerce is over specialized now and it's like if you nail the fundamentals, many other things fall into place. Right? There's a million metrics for ecommerce, but there's like five that you have to nail, and then everything else kind of sorts itself out.

09:53
Daniel Scharff
So I think, what are those five?

09:56
Leon Lewis
Yeah, for sure. Do people convert on the product? Right. I mean, that's obviously critical, and that's a reflection of having the right again, it's like the right pack size, the right creative conversion is really critical. The repeat and retention rate is an important part of that, not just as a whole. But then your lifetime value is really critical. And then obviously, kind of your cost of advertising, your tacos, your total advertising cost of sales over time. How is that evolving? Right? And like on Amazon, if you run an advertising report, there's like 50 columns, and it's like, when I run those reports, I just delete like 45 of them because it's like, okay, these are the things that are really going to matter, and the rest is valid if we really need to dig in.

10:45
Leon Lewis
But it's also noise versus the holistic piece of it. From some ways, it's a combination, I think, of looking at it from a fundamental perspective and then also just being able to look at it as your own consumer would. Right. And honestly, founders are, we love the founder community, like, the passion that people have. But sometimes it's like, well, let's really boil it down to the fundamentals. I try to take calls with as many people as I can, even if they just have questions. And people come to me with these questions, I'm like, you don't need to worry about this anytime soon. It's like, this is so much further down the track for you. Let's align on where you're at today.

11:28
Leon Lewis
So I think kind of helping to guide that and presenting things, I think, in a relatively simple light because it's like, again, we know if we nail some of these fundamentals, then everything will move in the right direction.

11:39
Daniel Scharff
Makes sense. All right, cool. So getting back to some of those formative experiences for you on Amazon, and I don't know if you would say it was like more health warrior when you were at rebel, what were you learning in those days? What were the key things that you were learning yourself about Amazon that would then later lead you to start?

11:58
Leon Lewis
I think, you know, one of the things health warrior was a venture backed brand, and grocery was crazy high growth at the time. And one thing that we thought was that there was just someone that just had magic. And it was just like, oh, we just have to find the person that's just going to nail it. We just haven't figured it out. And we definitely learned over time, like, oh, no, we have to do the work, we have to do the hard stuff. And that was one part of it. The other thing was that even, and this is 2015, 2016 or so, even back then were seeing increasing cost of advertising. We also started to realize at that point that big CPG would do anything to protect its turf.

12:41
Leon Lewis
That was a really big thing that we learned in the bar set and that sometimes being that high growth brand, it puts you in that middle ground where the big brands are like, this is our number one person to go after. And then the small brands are like, we just have to take what they have right now. And so we would end up in this very interesting middle ground. But the other thing that we really started to dig into and kept us actively investing in the brand was that we saw repeat and retention was healthy and that were building more momentum against it. Right? We didn't have great tools to measure that at the time, but now we do. And that's one thing we really dig into. It's like we're talking about CPG, we're talking about consumable products.

13:27
Leon Lewis
And so rarely are people buying a snack and they have it one time and that's like they just never buy it again. Right? So those are things that are very green or very red flags for us. It's like if we can be early stage with the brand and say like, hey, your repeat and retention is great right out of the gate, we have people already placing their fourth or fifth order. We can just stretch this out over a 24 month period and you're going to get really excited about the outcome. And those customers just build more and more profit dollars over time. Right. Conversely, we also see brands where the discussion is more like, hey, like, you really need to think, know the price point, know the conversion, like the overall product, like promise.

14:13
Leon Lewis
And, and maybe like, Amazon's going to teach you a hard lesson right now and maybe take a pause, do that work and come back and let's try it again. Right?

14:23
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, super interesting. I was just remembering I used to work at Mars chocolate way back in the day and they were just starting to think about Amazon way later probably than they should have in retrospect because Hershey's was doing five or ten x what they were doing because they weren't paying attention to it. And so it is pretty interesting for a legacy company like that to think about, like, okay, they're just not spending the resources, but then they're not getting started. And I think to your point around, it doesn't just happen overnight. You got to put in the work. It's like with anything in life, I think the temptation is for us to see there are a couple of people out there that, I don't know, go viral for some reason. You're like, yeah, we just need to do that.

15:05
Daniel Scharff
There's almost no strategy where you're actually going to make that happen to the bitcoiners out there. Probably the people who already made that filthy money already have it, and it's going to be very hard for you to make it very simply. And I think I've learned that lesson also with startup CPG going back four or five years, like fighting for every single user we really wanted to have join the slack and then we just put in the work and demonstrated the value. And then four or five years later, now everybody is telling their friends to join and the growth is really organic and it just happens in a really nice way. But man, it takes a lot of work to actually make that, you know?

15:46
Leon Lewis
And Amazon is interesting because I told a couple of people today, I was like, the number one resource on Amazon is time and mean if we're talking about startup CPG brands, right. That is like the thing that we don't have, right. And so there's a lot to be said for, I consider Amazon an ever expanding web, right? So the older your product is, the closer you are to the center and thus the more connected you are to everything that has come since. And you see a lot of examples of that and that is how Amazon works, right? I mean, Amazon, you know, if you boil down Amazon, it is a search engine that wants to show people what it thinks they're going to buy. That's the whole thing. It doesn't necessarily look at the highest bid for advertising or things like that.

16:33
Leon Lewis
It's like what is the thing that we know is going to turn into a conversion right now and we're going to prioritize that organically. That's just how rankings work or with advertising. Right. And that's why when you're a smaller brand, you have to pay a crazy premium because you have to tempt the algorithm. Be like, you know what, we're going to take that money. We may not sell something, but we're going to take this higher bid versus the Pepsi or the coke that's just there. And that's a very interesting way to think about it. Right? I mean, is it exactly wired that way mostly. But Amazon doesn't really talk about exactly how it's wired. But that's how we approach it. That's how we see it work practically. And it is something to be said about starting that process.

17:14
Leon Lewis
And even if it isn't time for explosive growth, it's like, well, let's get you moving. There's also a lot of categories when we think about beverage and stuff like that online is just going to increasingly be a receptacle for your brand growth and demand. Right? I always tell beverage brands might have told you this at some point, but I mean, if I love a product. So rebel is a good example. When we started at Rebel, there was no e commerce. Everyone thought I was insane for wanting to launch know. And when we launched, we had a crazy high average order. You know, it's like, why? Why is this happening? Well, if you go to whole foods on like a Saturday, as many people do, most people shop for groceries on the weekend. It's like, it's a super shop set, right? Any brand.

17:57
Leon Lewis
But rebel or protein drink or kombucha, it doesn't matter. It's like if people love that, they want to have it all the time. And you kind of look like a weirdo if you're just like, I need like 20 of these off the shelf right now, right? Or like, hey, could you go in the back and see if you have a couple of cases of this? So the logical thing to expect is people discover your brand, they love it, and they go online and they start buying cases. That's how you really start to move units. And that's an interesting way to think about it, too. Right? So Amazon is both a growth opportunity, but it's also a place where even your best customers, they're not necessarily going to be big d to c shoppers anymore. They're going to come to Amazon, right? That is increasing.

18:37
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I see that. And I shop that way myself. Also, I might find something that I like. But then, man, I'm a big Amazon fan. Like shopping on Amazon, at least personally, I get my groceries from Amazon fresh because they're the best prices. Basically, I'll get my staples from them. I wouldn't necessarily, I feel like you can get bananas any color except for yellow from them. They just kind of go from like green to brown. But for staples, they just have the best prices and it comes right to my door. So I definitely appreciate it. And also just the ease of getting everything on Amazon. I don't want to enter my info into a bunch of different websites and get all the emails from them and have to enter my credit card info and passwords. That'll definitely get leaked at some point by some.

19:20
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, personally, that's definitely how. So if you're a new brand and you're thinking about how to go to market, who is Amazon going to be right for? Who should think about Amazon as a big part of their strategy versus who might it not be? Right.

19:41
Leon Lewis
Mean, you know, look, perishable is going to be really hard, right early on. I mean, that's one thing that's challenging. The other thing that we see is really challenging, frankly, is I, I've had those conversations. Even know beverage brands where it's just, it's like, look, if you've never had something and you're just a regular consumer, it's like, are you going to buy a whole case of them to start? And that's going to be your first experience? Boy, that needs to be like a great product detail page to win that. And that's exactly what we see. Right. I mean, it's not like it's a wrong place to start, but it's a particularly challenging place to start. Right. And things like where you're going into a particularly competitive vertical, protein powders, protein bars and stuff like that.

20:30
Leon Lewis
I think that there's a lot of work that you can do in retail, in store and Amazon can certainly be a part of it to start, to just understand that message that really drives it home and gets the conversion. Right. So Amazon can be the right place to start. But also some categories are more expensive to break into than others, right? And I think one thing to look at, I mean, there's a lot of great tools out there, the helium ten s of the world and jungle Scout and all that stuff where you can download and really look at your category revenue, right? And so if you're in a category, you look at Amazon and it's like, hey, most of the revenue in this category is tied up in three huge brands that I see everywhere.

21:12
Leon Lewis
It's probably going to be kind of hard to break into if you see that, it's like, oh, there's a ton of interesting brands comparable to me that seem to be having this healthy. Maybe not huge, but like 10, 15, 20 grand a month. It's like cool. We can probably build towards that, right? So a lot of it, I mean, you can do some basic analysis in the space yourself and sometimes we see that certain categories really under index and it's surprising. Salad dressings is a weird one, like if you look at the salad dressing category on Amazon, it's pretty small. Like, big brands are not selling that much salad dressing and small.

21:46
Daniel Scharff
I wonder why either.

21:48
Leon Lewis
I don't just, it's one of those things, I guess. It's always there and you're going to buy it when you go to buy the veggies. So it's not necessarily an afterthought for Amazon. It's just been one of those things that really, it's kind of mysterious and interesting and weird how it shakes out versus other verticals. Anything with the word energy related to it, explosive right now, tons of room to just drive trial, but expensive to break in. And so the ecosystem is interesting because every little niche has evolved in its own unique way. And in some ways, you're right about Mars. We've had the pleasure at daybreak of, I'm super proud of it. We've worked on a lot of legendary candy brands, big League Two and warheads and stuff like that. And it's awesome. And it's like.

22:39
Leon Lewis
And a lot of these guys, they just never got around to thinking about Amazon. Most of the candy we eat in this country is manufactured in this country. They're legacy companies. And this has been pretty far down the track for them. So it's been commercialized much later where the brands actually take charge of it versus others have been really played out. So it's been really interesting to see that and then to see where certain brands are able to drive outsized impact in their category or start to really change the narrative. Right? We have a nut butter client that they make a cashew butter, but they can sell against almond butters and peanut butters and keto butters and not keto butters and protein peanut butter.

23:21
Leon Lewis
And it's such an interesting narrative for them because, hey, we take that to the thrive buyer, the whole Foods buyer, and it's like, look at this data. We're not huge, but no one else transcends the category like we do.

23:33
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, you know what? It's interesting to think about some products that just hit. So one example for me always comes to mind is just iced tea, the relatively new one from Seth Goldman bringing it back after Coca Cola discontinued honest tea. And I would be in sprouts, innovation sets. And there are a lot of drinks that just sit there and snacks that sit there. And the just iced tea is, it's, it's such a simple product. Know, it's a glass bottle and it's clear and it says just iced tea. And it looks nice but high quality but pretty plain. And there's just something about it. You're like, I get it and it looks good and I'll take it.

24:13
Daniel Scharff
And I don't need to know who the brand is and I don't know if they're doing much on Amazon or not, but I suspect it would do really well there as well because it's just such an easy concept. Probably shipping glass is not the easiest thing for them to do. But in general, I feel like that's an easy one to take a flyer on if you're shopping on Amazon and it has good reviews. Yeah, I'll take that. Versus a lot of other stuff where you're like, yeah, do I want a whole case of this thing? I hate waste more than almost anything. I do not want to have twelve of those and have to get rid of eleven of them if this thing doesn't taste good.

24:46
Daniel Scharff
Whereas if I'm like, let's say if I'm all in on cmos and then I go on Amazon, I'm just going to get the one that has the best reviews. That seems like a good deal and I wouldn't know any of the brands. So yeah, pretty interesting to think about the dynamics of categories where there are strong brands but maybe not strong premium brands or no one's really doing good job and they're just like, maybe not a lot of competitors on there and they're legacy brands, I guess, same as retail.

25:13
Leon Lewis
And I think that, look, this space is just developing. I'm looking forward to expo this year like I do every year because I just know I'm going to walk around and just be like, I thought I knew this industry and I was totally wrong. It's like there's just so many new things emerging and it's interesting when you talk about we started working on Etha change probably six months before it even launched their first product and later became Justice Tea. And just watching that whole transformation, I mean, obviously getting rid of honest tea is just a ridiculous decision they made. But I think justice tea fits because it is maybe in some ways like not threatening and it's like, oh, good, this is just good iced tea. I like the story behind it. You don't necessarily know that it's honest and that whole story. Right.

26:04
Leon Lewis
And sometimes I think that can work really well versus sometimes if people come to me and they say, we want to launch on Amazon and we're doing something no one has ever done before, that's actually like one of the scariest things someone can say to know because it's like Amazon is very much about putting things in the right box, right. You search for protein powder, no one's trying to sell you workout clothes. Right. I mean it's very much in its own box. So if you're like, oh, we have a new box that no one else is in, it's kind of, I mean and that's something that maybe you can know a lot of adoption for that. But online channels can be a particular challenge, especially marketplace like Amazon.

26:40
Daniel Scharff
Be expensive. Yeah. To teach that to everybody. But yeah. And know I've worked in the energy drink category and I was just blown away by the volume that Celsius was doing online. And actually the thing that surprised me most was their price point. But yeah, to talk about a consumer's dream for that because if you like that product and yeah, you don't want to go into the grocery store and just buy a 24 pack and have to carry it, then you can go on Amazon and it's a fraction of the price honestly, to get it shipped to your house. I don't know how they do that, but it's cheap and obviously it's very much on trend. Right.

27:16
Leon Lewis
Mean, you know, I'm digging Amazon a little bit because I know the answer to some of that which mean if you look at big like within Amazon, one of the things that Amazon has really pushed them to. Right. Is to match their pricing at the grocery store, right. And that goes from Pepsi to coke to a thing of have, you know, big like they're not making any money on Amazon for. You see, you see that and mean a lot of the pretty high fees that independent brands are paying. They're definitely subsidizing the really crazy deals that Amazon's able to put out there. It's totally true. Right.

27:59
Leon Lewis
And so it's very interesting to work through that and some of the battles that it's like, man, this is just going to actually be impossible to be on parity with some of these big name brands and that is what makes us have to work much harder. Right. I've worked on a few conventional mainstream brands. I like the weird stuff, so not a ton. But it's very interesting to me how kind of much easier it can be than the premium or just the unknown or the really leading edge. It's like it's actually just much harder work. So if it feels like it is, it's because it know that's interesting.

28:42
Daniel Scharff
That honestly didn't even occur to me. I should have asked you before about it, but that, yeah.

28:46
Leon Lewis
Okay.

28:46
Daniel Scharff
Amazon probably is subsidizing that heavily. I'm sure there are a bunch of really happy consumers out there that are extra locked into Amazon because they're getting such a good price on that. Like, wow, Amazon's the best for everything. Then I'll get all my stuff from them, even the higher margin stuff. So that's very good to think about. Okay, so let's say you're a brand and now you have decided Amazon is going to be an important part of your strategy. How should you think about it? You know, when should you launch it and how much money are you going to need to make it meaningful for you so you aren't just kind of tossing it away and not investing enough in it or investing too much and probably not getting good ROI because you're kind of forcing it?

29:27
Leon Lewis
Yeah. I think we definitely tell brands you have to be in a position to spend at least $2,000 a month on Amazon ads, right? I mean, that's enough from our perspective, that's enough to learn and scale things and see if they work and keep going and build the momentum to actually get organic traffic growth, get a little bit of ranking and basically spin the flywheel, right of Amazon and get all the gears turning and anything less than that. It's like you may be successful but you can't get momentum and it just ends up being this very slow crawl. Right. The other thing is we definitely speak with brands that say Amazon has to be profitable from day one. And it's like, I just can't promise you that. I can't make an honest projection that shows that if you're a new brand, right.

30:20
Leon Lewis
If you can't say, oh, and by the way, we have 100,000 followers on TikTok and we're just going to push them all to you, right? I mean, that's obviously free traffic, free sales. But we try to build a model and a projection that kind of starts from scratch. And what we typically find with brands is that we can get them to profitable within six to twelve months while building a business that's going to get into five figures from zero within that period, spending that $2,000, maybe we increase it to 2500 or three k later in the year. And then the interesting thing is it's a lot about we can build that longer term plan because you get to the end of year one, it's like, oh, it's pretty good outcome. It's like, yeah, now let's just extend that twelve more months.

31:03
Leon Lewis
And it's like, hey, look, revenue is that much higher, subscribers are that much higher. And really having a firm grasp on the financials, the outcome, how that's going to develop over time and repeat, that's the stuff that you need to be paying attention to and be ready to look at.

31:21
Daniel Scharff
So we did a webinar with you recently. If anybody wants to check it out, it's on our Vimeo page, vimeo.com startupcpg. And went through the model that I've seen you go through before, and it's just a really helpful way to think about it. So you project out the twelve month sales and return for a brand by top line of the model is going to be how many people are likely to visit your brand organically? How much of that, what's your conversion rate expected to be for that? And then you can go into great. Now if you're throwing money into ads and then what's your conversion rate going to be for that? What is the average revenue that you can expect per customer? What is the typical cost per customer that you're going to get by month, which is going to change?

32:01
Daniel Scharff
So if you can imagine all of the columns that will go into this model, you can project out a pretty nice PNL for the year. That's going to be pretty accurate. That's what I'm talking about. When I tell people like Leon's very reasonable, the assumptions all make sense and they're not all going to be 100% true. But it's a pretty good roadmap.

32:19
Leon Lewis
Yeah. And we look at it that way because we want to be excited about Amazon and we are excited about Amazon and it is a big opportunity, but it's like, well, but all this stuff has got to come first. And month one is not going to be like month twelve. You have to really understand the difference. And then part of it's just an education aspect of it, too. Stuff shouldn't be.

32:43
Daniel Scharff
So what will be the biggest things that will change over the course of that year? I'm guessing you're not going to have much of a track record there, so people won't trust your product as much. So maybe initially the cost per acquisition of the customer is going to be a little bit higher. It could go down over time. Maybe you can also figure out how to get the average revenue up a little bit higher once people trust you more, get your retention up, hopefully conversion.

33:04
Leon Lewis
Rates, conversion rates really change a lot. Right? Because when you start off, you're not going to have many reviews. Right? I mean, you don't need to get hundreds of reviews to build any confidence. But 30 is a lot better than three. And month one, you're going to have three. So that's one thing that we see change pretty quickly, the cost of advertising. Because hey, you have to do testing for a little while, but then also as you start to find your niche and consistently buy against it, like I was saying, Amazon's going to help you. You'll pay less over time to buy the same ads because you're starting to get some traction. You can get some favorable treatment from the algorithm and stuff like that.

33:45
Leon Lewis
So, yeah, I mean, we really see conversion change a lot and then obviously top line traffic, that momentum that we should start to see, right? Because especially in CPG, it's like, hey guys, we use this in the webinar. It's like we make mushroom coffee. So it's like it's not a big mystery like the ads we need to buy and where we need to rank, right? So it's really about mining this deeply, this vertical. And as you work through that can definitely have a big impact in your total results and your traffic and stuff like that.

34:14
Daniel Scharff
Speaking of the reviews, I think I've heard from you and other people you need a critical mass of reviews as a shopper. If I look at something and it has a five star rating with 27 reviews, I'm like, well, those are fake and I shouldn't buy this yet, but okay, if I see 50, yeah, that's getting where I need it to be. If it's over 100, cool. It kind of depends on what it's up against, right? Like what's the other product? I'm thinking of if it has 500 reviews and it's a little bit lower, probably I would go with that one. So in the early days, what I see brands doing now is I hope nobody from Amazon is listening and reports them all.

34:50
Daniel Scharff
But basically you got to get those early ones and going out and basically just getting their friends to do it and saying like, hey, please leave a review and even reimbursing them for the product. I've seen a lot of that and just basically begging and pleading for actual reviews. Order it, wait for it to get delivered, hopefully you love it also, and then leave the review.

35:10
Leon Lewis
Everyone you're working with, your sales team, your brokers, stuff like that, just put it on our invoice. Like everyone open, take out your phone and buy it right now and stuff like that. We like to get to like 100. It's like once we're at 100, it's like, okay, this is going to be fine. The rate of review growth on Amazon has gone down quite a bit over time because it's a little bit less, people are a little bit more used to know. Frankly, it's hard to get people to say nice things in this country. It's very easy to get them to say negative things. So it's easy to get bad reviews if things aren't going well. But the other stuff can be like pulling teeth. Number one thing that we tell early stage brands is like QR code with a sticker on the packaging.

35:57
Leon Lewis
It's a pain to do. Your three PL is going to want to charge you for it. Just do it for your first couple of shipments and pallets and it's really going to help.

36:04
Daniel Scharff
So you're talking like if you're a beverage, you mean on the outside of the twelve pack? Something like that?

36:09
Leon Lewis
Yeah, for sure. One of the most successful things. I'll shout out Tyler Dooley from wake up water because he's such a great guide and an impressive businessman. And I think I told Tyler, I was like, hey, just make a review sticker that says a review would mean the world to our small business or something like that. So I made this giant sticker for this little bag of wake up water just said white paper, black text. Like a review would mean the world with the QR code. And we got hundreds of reviews in like a couple of, like, this works. So like, this is the best thing.

36:39
Daniel Scharff
It's so impactful. And if you're listening right now to this podcast, a review would mean the world to us. So please go into Apple podcasts and rate us and we see every time that you do it and we get so happy. So thank you. But back to the business at hand. Yeah, I'm sure it makes your job so much easier if a brand comes to you with those hundred reviews kind of ready to go, and then you've got the kindling all warm, it's ready to light up. Yeah, pretty interesting to think about. And then I had some experience with the vine program. Amazon has this program called vine where, hey, if you want, you can send people a certain number of free product. These are people who just love reviewing things on Amazon and they will give you some reviews to get started.

37:21
Daniel Scharff
But my experience was not so great on that program because you would send people a product and then their reviews are like, I don't like this kind of product one.

37:32
Leon Lewis
Well, don't do that, man, just because.

37:34
Daniel Scharff
You'Re not even the consumer for this thing. And so honestly, I really regretted it. Because if you send somebody potato chips and then they review it and they're like, I don't like high calorie stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's not for you. Please don't do that. So I think you probably would recommend people at least start kind of small if they do something like that to see how it goes.

37:55
Leon Lewis
Totally. I mean, look, Amazon has struggled with the vine program. I think most people probably wouldn't remember or even know this, but when the vine program was first introduced, I believe that the pricing was, you could get five reviews, and I think Amazon charged like $2,000 for that. It's like some insane amount of money. It was like, who would do this? And people were probably just signing up left and right, but no small brands were actually going to do that. So now they have this vine program, and it started out great, but then, like so many things on Amazon, a lot of strategies. Basically, once everyone finds out, and especially once chinese sellers find out and stuff, there's tons of volume of those types of sellers. They just run out of quality reviewers. That's what it is.

38:47
Leon Lewis
And so you definitely have people that are vine reviewers, they leave the minimum junkie reviews and then they own a convenience store or they just have some outlet to sell that stuff. So they're just getting free products from Amazon and selling it. We've seen a whole bunch of that because we've seen people leave reviews that are just not at all relevant. The interesting thing about that, know, we had some, know someone had a really bad experience. They gave away some product. They didn't even get the reviews. The reviews were not good. And Amazon said, they basically sent us a link to the terms policy and said, hey, whatever reviews you get or don't get, sorry. It's one to approach cautiously, for sure. You can get up to 30 reviews, start with ten, see how it goes.

39:31
Leon Lewis
Because you can kind of dig out from 1030 is harder.

39:35
Daniel Scharff
All right, now getting to the journey a little bit more. So with brands that you start working with, for example, what are the first couple of things that you're going to try to do for them to help them get set up, like looking at their listings or what are the first things you want to check?

39:50
Leon Lewis
Totally. We definitely look at if you're an existing brand, we'll use that as an example. Right. I mean, how have you been converting? Do we see that's healthy. We like to see consumable brands be converting at 10% or above, both for advertising and organic traffic. Right. And so if not okay, let's take a look at the listings. We've inherited so many businesses where it's like, oh, that ad agency is way bigger than us, probably does a great job. But they didn't tell your listings are awful. And so that's something we can just really kind of eye it. And it's like if you sell a drink and the second image is just the back of your can, it's like, okay, we need to work on this creative.

40:31
Leon Lewis
And that's a big part that we really look at is essentially that the other thing we look at with advertising and if you just have an agency brand of any size is like, hey, export the keyword report from last month and sort by spend because it's like, where's the money going? That's just my whole thing with my team. It's like where's the client's money actually going? And we want eighty cents or more of every dollar to be going towards things that drive sales. Right. So not wasteful, not testing too much. We want to move towards performance. So that's a big part of it too, because we just find a lot of ads that are not super active. The other one, and this is a fun one, I probably don't mention that much.

41:12
Leon Lewis
If you're on Amazon today as an existing brand and you're just kind of wondering what's going on, go into ads manager and click history. You can see every update that's being made there. It's timestamped, et cetera. On average, we're making like 2000, 3000 updates to ads over the course of a month. Right? I mean, for a brand that's probably spending, call it $3,000. I mean, it's a ton of optimizations that happen all the time. We don't use software, we're doing that ourselves. That's definitely one thing to really look at as well. And for a new brand, it's kind of about building that structure to be able to measure those things. Right. It's like we want great creative, we want to really look at those conversion rates early on.

41:56
Leon Lewis
It's probably not going to be double digits out of the gate, but we like 7% or 8%. If it's 2%, you have a problem.

42:03
Daniel Scharff
And generally great creative, it can look really beautiful, but also probably just needs to hit very hard and simply on the key attributes of a product is.

42:12
Leon Lewis
That really, I probably use the dating app analogy. It's like it's all about appealing to consumers and they're not going to give you a ton of time. One thing that we're super guilty of, or many of us are, we look at Amazon, we're at work, we work within it, we look at it on our desktop. No one does that. It's like it's all about the phone and mobile and everything. So I always feel the same way about web design. If I'm ever helping with a website development and I look at a desktop website, I'm like, why? Why are we doing this?

42:46
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, you're totally right. And I never think about it that way. But, yeah, I've almost never bought something on Amazon from my computer. I don't know. I would just never think to do it the same way I would never think to buy salad dressing on Amazon. I don't know why. It just wouldn't occur to me. That's pretty funny. I really like that point you made about sorting based off dollar spend. I've always done that in my life. Anytime, if it's like a consultant or a report brings me some kind of spreadsheet with numbers, first thing I do is just sort it based on dollar value. And then usually you can just look at the top ten rows and really dig into it and you're like, okay, well, here are the things we need to change.

43:22
Leon Lewis
Well, and especially when we have. Look at me. If you're a small brand, you're like, yeah, okay, yeah, we can spend $2,000 and that's like, look, in 2024 in CPG. That's real money for a new brand and you just can't do it, even if it is your main term, even if it is your mushroom coffee search term and it's your main thing. If you're not converting against it, pull back. Think about where else are we converting? There's got to be something. If not great. Let's go back to that creative discussion. Let's play with pricing and stuff like that. All of these things are very important, and price testing is an important part of it as well.

44:06
Daniel Scharff
Okay, great. So then let's say you fix up the creative, it's super good, and then now you're trying to figure out what are the right keywords I need to start putting in for my ads to be ranking against. How do you typically find that out? I know you can probably do a report and figure out what consumers are saying about it, but what are all the ways?

44:25
Leon Lewis
Yeah, I mean, we definitely look at. So within brand analytics, if you're brand registered on Amazon, you can get all the access to the analytics dashboard for brands and you can actually take any of your competitors know. It's like, this is who we want to be. It's like, cool. You can drop that into that tool and it will tell you all of the terms that they're converting against. Right. You can also use helium ten and stuff like that. That will show you. Here's where they rank. So that's pretty interesting too. But Amazon, the search query performance report, I think that's one, will basically show like, oh, these are the terms. And you definitely find sleepers in there, right? That it's like, oh, I hadn't thought about this one.

45:05
Leon Lewis
And so you can really understand, especially if it's a brand that is like high volume, but maybe they're not a big retail brand. So they're not going to have that high brand search volume, but we know that they're selling a lot. Okay, where is that coming from? Right? And sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes it's mushroom coffee. Sometimes it might be something a little bit more long tail that is a lower hanging fruit for you to go after as a smaller brand and stuff like that. And so that's a really good way to do it. And then we love the helium ten s of the world and stuff like that. That really give us a ton of extra data.

45:41
Daniel Scharff
What's that other one that you mentioned that brands can use now? And even they can kind of get like a little freebie peek at the data.

45:48
Leon Lewis
Well, Nozle is one for LTV, right, that we really look at. So we love nozzle because it gives us our, hey, okay, if anyone ever says, what's our repeat rate? That's like a 2d measurement, right? Because it's like, okay, great. In January we had 1000 customers and 10% of them were repeat customers. So is it everyone's second order or their third order? How is their LTV developing? And one of the main arguments that used to be more popular for d to c versus Amazon was like, you don't get any of that cohort data and you can't really analyze LTV. Well with nozzle. That all just goes, we get all of that data, right? And so it's very interesting because we have brands where it's like, hey, we know you're a d to c focused brand and we just run Amazon for you.

46:37
Leon Lewis
But check out our LTV growth on this channel. How does that compare to what you're seeing on d to c? Honestly, often we see that on Amazon it grows faster. It can be healthier. Why? Because Amazon's the grocery store and your website is a specialty store. And most people don't go to the farmer, the butcher and make all those stops, do their grocery shopping in real life. It's the same thing with Amazon. Right. So we love Nozle for that because it really allows us again to tie it back into our model. And is this moving in the right know?

47:12
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. Got. And can you give us just a little primer again on FBA and the distribution options and the costs for actually getting your product to people through Amazon?

47:26
Leon Lewis
Totally, yeah. I mean, look, Amazon remains far less expensive than the average three Pl. That has definitely changed over time, right? Because three pls have become much more expensive. So Amazon realizes, hey, we're somewhere between 20 and 30% cheaper. All these guys just got 20% more expensive. Cool. We're just going to keep that gap the same. Right. Which is very interesting. Most brands, I mean, look, if you are a shelf stable brand and your product has a six or twelve or 24 month shelf life, you need to ship in and do fulfillment via FBA. There's a couple of reasons. Number one, Amazon is never going to prioritize a product that isn't fulfilled by Amazon. You definitely are getting some level of punished by the algorithm for it.

48:16
Leon Lewis
The other thing and a part of the reason why they do that is conversion rates are just lower when you do your own fulfillment. And we've played that out. We've had brands that really wanted to do their own fulfillment. It's like, well, can we just try FBA? Okay. Yeah, we bring in the product FBA. It's like, hey, your conversion rate just went up like 35%. Like this business is just going to grow. Let's figure out how to get it in there. Doing your own fulfillment is definitely a necessity for some brands, but certainly if you're a beverage, if you're something heavy, you're just never going to be able to keep up with Amazon's costs. Right? Amazon has now been pushing their buy with really hard on brands. I understand why it's important. I understand the benefits of it. I think it's great.

48:59
Leon Lewis
But it's also one of those things where it's like, look, you should look at the rate card of standard FBA fulfillment versus buy with prime. Buy with prime is significantly more expensive. But you can keep your customer data, right? So you have to start to think like how much is that actually worth to me, right? Because you can just put a link on your website. Look, I mean, if you go to liquiddeath.com, where do they sell their water? It just says buy on Amazon and just takes you straight there, right through the Amazon brand referral bonus. When you do that and link directly to Amazon, you get 10% back. So you can do buy with prime and pay kind of a premium fee, but hey, you get to keep your customer.

49:37
Leon Lewis
Or you can just push people to Amazon, get 10% back and pay the standard FBA fee. It's a question that we ask, I like buy with Prime. I do. It has a reason to exist, but we just got to do the math and see what makes the most sense.

49:51
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, that's super interesting. And what are some other low hanging fruit type pieces of advice or things that people figure out working with you? In the early days, I remember one thing was basically just how to group skus so that you could consolidate reviews within a product line so that they'd all roll up to the same thing, which would help you get to that 50 or 100 number faster. Any other things like that?

50:15
Leon Lewis
We can do more targeted advertising and targeted promotions on Amazon now. So really if you have good repeat, it's like, hey, we can run a subscription only coupon and we can run ads directly to people that have purchased before to get them to come back and start subscriptions and repeat. Right. Often we find that a lot of agencies aren't building that out as much as they should, and we can do that and start to quickly grow that repeat and then you start to lock that in. The second purchase is a little bit harder than the third, than the fourth, et cetera. It gets easier every time. So we start moving that flywheel as one. The other thing is really looking at reviews and how we can start to pick that up quite a bit as well.

51:00
Leon Lewis
And then the other thing is we look at these benchmarks very seriously because we come in and it's like we'll look at the conversion and go, okay, yeah, we probably have a creative problem or a pricing problem and just get right to work with that stuff. And so it is important to have a partner or just take good notes for things like this and be like, okay, this is kind of where we should be, and if we're not, this is what we should be talking about and really looking at it there. The other thing is we do a lot of listing cleanup and stuff like that. Usually there's a lot of elements of the account that just aren't getting like, make sure every field in the back end and a lot of that super nerdy stuff is done.

51:41
Leon Lewis
It used to not be weighted as heavily on Amazon, but it's becoming more and more important as it becomes more and more competitive.

51:49
Daniel Scharff
Got it. Over time. Let's say the things that people need from you in the first couple of months go well and they're growing. What's the kind of stuff that really you're then going to be focusing on 6912 months down the line or that brands on their own, what are the different kinds of problems they're going to be facing at that?

52:10
Leon Lewis
I mean, you just start to see definitely just catalog systemic issues generally for a more mature business. On Amazon, it's like, no, we grow the way that we want to, but Amazon just breaks stuff like revisiting. You may have listings that you think are complete and they look really good. Go back and make sure everything is still there because the algorithm will just make updates for you because it thinks it's more accurate. That's one we really look at. If you are a more mature brand on Amazon or even if you're just a year or 18 months in. Again, I don't make any money for nozle, but you should go get that free 14 day trial and really check in on what that is telling you. Don't just look at your base number of repeat. But where's this really going?

52:57
Leon Lewis
We look at Amazon over time. One thing with most brands we work on, we kind of have like a 90 day engagement up front that's a little bit more expensive because we do a lot of the lifting and then we're off to the races and we have a plan and we know where we're going. And so 6912 months in, we're pacing towards that model and we've dialed it in and we've addressed the things and we just use that as our north star. Right. And then we're able to really understand where we're going. I think some brands are. It depends on your situation. They're going to want to iterate and try to drive that explosive growth. I get it. Some people have the money to do that. Not everyone these days.

53:37
Leon Lewis
And so it is about, is this getting healthier and then really looking at and looking at maybe some of the smaller ways that you can start to improve your P l and get a few more dollars back.

53:49
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so, Leon, because you see what happens across so many brands, you must have some ideas for if you were going to launch your own brand onto Amazon now, instead of just being the one who supports really well all of these different brands, what's an example of something that you would go for or know a key attribute you'd be trying to call out or something that you had learned about design and you'd really want to just make that part of your strategy as you figured it out.

54:17
Leon Lewis
Yeah, I definitely have a list of things I definitely wouldn't do. I won't get into those, but I think a lot of it, we see a lot of space in. Do you have products that are going to have good ongoing usage that you can actually have a pack size that is accessible to people and while still having some kind of product format that can drive trial and get people through the door? Right. I mean, we see that drink mixes obviously are a massive vertical on Amazon right now. There's a lot of reasons for that, right? I mean, it's like, it's so small. The cost of shipping is basically nothing for products like that. So it's great to have good margin. You're drinking one?

55:05
Daniel Scharff
I'm drinking one right now. I love it, actually.

55:08
Leon Lewis
Well, but then we look at brands like that, I think for me it's like I would really look at a space that has not been commodified and where someone has not introduced like mushroom supplements are a really challenging one for us. Right, because you'll have a brand that says, oh, we have this Rishi cordycep turkey tail supplement and ours is 59, 99. It's like, cool. This one is the exact same thing and it's 999 for the consumer unless they are really nerding out on ingredients or sometimes it's just that the brand is trying to get a crazy premium. We want to find a category that isn't that polluted and that we can definitely be in the middle. Right.

55:56
Daniel Scharff
It's funny that you say that because I got onto drink mixes, one of the tablets from a brand that had sent product into us. I was like, oh, this is cool because I should be drinking and hydrating more. And so I started drinking it at home. I like a little flavor. It's nice. And then one day I was like, oh, it's kind of expensive. And one day I went to re order. I think they were out of stock on Amazon, so the price was really high. I was like, all right, well, let me see what else is out there. And then I found a competitor that was way cheaper. I'm like, all right, well, I drink this now and I'm like, but I feel bad for these guys because they basically brought me to the party and then I just found a better option.

56:30
Leon Lewis
So I see what you're saying.

56:32
Daniel Scharff
It makes sense. So just so brands know, what does it typically cost for a brand to work with you? Obviously they need to have budget for the ad spend and all of that. But can you give kind of like a range just so people know? Yeah, sure.

56:48
Leon Lewis
I mean, we're definitely starting brands around the 2003 $2,500 range, right, to manage Amazon. And then we try to find efficiency over time. Again, there's a big lift that goes into it up front and then we try to say, hey, maybe we could take that down to 1800 or 1900 or something like that. It definitely varies based off of the catalog size and the ad budget and stuff like that. But I think it's important to remember that looking at for us, we're a full service team, right? We run operations and then we help with creative and strategy. So I mean, you're really for a super fair price in my perspective, just getting kind of like the full, like, okay, cool, Amazon check. And we have that taken care of.

57:35
Leon Lewis
And we feel better about that than trying to get 4000, $6,000 a month and saying we're going to blow this up. And then it's like we have to justify ourselves constantly and everything. So I would definitely, that's what I think is appropriate in the service space and that's the range that we typically try to be in. Yeah.

57:56
Daniel Scharff
And one thing that really impressed me about you is I was always kind of wondering how you could provide so much service at the low rate. And then I think, as I have figured out, you also have learned really to make use of incredible offshore talent where it can be much more affordable. And sometimes they just have so much more experience actually than people you might be able to find in the US. Is that right?

58:20
Leon Lewis
Yeah, definitely. I mean, look, our team is split between the US and mean, definitely some people have, they use that as a selling point. Like we're all based in the US. And I'm like, great, you must be really expensive to work know. And the interesting thing is that if we look at know from the.com bubble all the way up until now, it's just been looked at as like, oh, there's just tons of cheap labor here, right? I mean, there's been an explosion in cell phone usage and ecommerce and Internet access. It's a wild story if you look into it, but there's a ton of people know have been working in Amazon for 5710 years, but they've gained a ton of experience, but you don't necessarily get the opportunity to move up. Right? And one thing that's important india, right?

59:09
Leon Lewis
I mean, most people know it's multi generational living. It's a very tight family. So you know those opportunities may be in Dubai as a place that they're all moving to and everything. Or hey, you have to move to the US. Well that's really hard. I mean culturally, family wise. And so, you know, look, I'm just straight up proud of the fact that it's like we're able to take people that are very experienced, reward them with great jobs that they deserve. They've been working in this space longer than many people, calling themselves experts and stuff. And then that money is going to supporting a big family. It's awesome. And then our team is super dedicated, really passionate. Everyone sticks with us for years.

59:55
Leon Lewis
They're not trying to rapidly climb this thing and EcoM for me, look, I fully acknowledge I'm becoming like the grumpy old man in the space, but it didn't used to be as greedy. And I've looked at a lot of resumes and stuff of people in the space and it's clear people are just trying to climb that ladder as much as possible and that leads to more instability in my business. In supporting your business, right. It also just is a crazy amount of cost. If I hire four people that want to make 125 grand a year, it's like great. That's a half million dollars I have to come up with now. And those people wouldn't necessarily be able to support that many businesses, right.

01:00:33
Leon Lewis
I could pay an outside salary in the developing world and have a really passionate team and that's worked for us and we're really proud of that.

01:00:42
Daniel Scharff
Just having been a brand and worked with you and just being able to get that level of service and performance at a lower rate is really great. And then I think also as somebody who also has found some incredible offshore mean, it's really a pleasure to get to work with them. Know, including we have a couple people who are really part of our, really important parts of our startup CPG team who deliver incredible work and they're fun and enthusiastic members of the team and they want the same things all of us want, which is to provide for their families and grow in their careers and do interesting, meaningful work. So I hope that's a lesson that everybody can think about.

01:01:23
Daniel Scharff
And I always tell people, actually, hey, if you're thinking about that next ops hire or something, that could be somewhat routine but very time intensive, think about things like upwork because you can get just such incredible people. This is a big beautiful world that we live in and there is incredibly experienced talent all over. Many people, even abroad, will work on your time zone, but I mean, it can give you a huge lift so that you can focus your dollars these days on more other areas and just give your brand a better chance of succeeding. So I appreciate that. And I've taken inspiration from you on that as well. Leanne, I think that's a pretty good summary for now. This time is flown by, but I also have a special treat for you.

01:02:18
Daniel Scharff
I don't know if it'll be a treat, but I'll play it. I wrote a song for you in the minute while I was waiting for you to join the podcast here, so I think this is definitely going to become your jingle. So let me see if I can get it going here. Since you are the ukulele master, I've got my ukulele out here now. Well, I've got Leon from daybreak, and I hope I'm gonna grow and I know I'll do really well and the results are gonna show, and before you know it, I'll be selling really well, and I've got cash coming in and I'm ranking real high. Come on, ring the bell.

01:03:03
Leon Lewis
Love it.

01:03:05
Daniel Scharff
Okay, that's enough. I don't know if that's going to work out.

01:03:09
Leon Lewis
When we do that, I always have one within arm's reach, too. There you go.

01:03:12
Daniel Scharff
All right, let's get one from you also. Yeah, let's hear something from you. You can show us how it's really all right.

01:03:23
Leon Lewis
Thanks so much.

01:03:25
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. Hey, Leon, thank you so much for joining us and if people want to connect with you. So Leon's email is Leon at daybreak agency. You can also find him on the startup CPG slack. Any other good ways for people to get in touch with you if they're interested to chat more?

01:03:42
Leon Lewis
Those are definitely the best ones. So I try to end my day. I'm very proud of the fact that I end my days always with less than, like 20 emails on red Max. So I will always get back to people even if we get slammed. It takes me a little while. So, yeah, feel free to reach out anytime.

01:03:59
Daniel Scharff
All right, great. Leon Lewis from Daybreak agency. Thank you so much for sharing all of these insights. It was just fun to catch up with you, and I think anybody listening to this is going to have a much better chance of being successful themselves. So thank you, everyone, for listening. And don't forget, it would mean the world if you leave a review.

01:04:16
Leon Lewis
Please do it.

01:04:17
Daniel Scharff
Thank you so much. All right, thanks, Leon. Bye.