You spend hours scrolling through Meta’s Ad Library, taking random screenshots, and pasting them into some forgotten Notion doc— only to completely forget where we saved it and why.
I’ve been there too.
As a performance marketer who tests 1,000+ ads a month, I knew we needed a faster, more structured way to source winning ad ideas.
So we built a system that cuts ad research time in half.
Jack (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome to another full play fireside. I'm here with Shabazz from Adventure Beyond and we're talking about how to build a team that can launch a thousand ads every month. Shabazz, take it away.
Shahbaz (00:12)
Thanks for having me. And I always just appreciate your backdrop. makes me want to be wherever you are. We're in England at the moment. So keen to know where everyone is. I can see people are from all over the place. They've got NYC, Switzerland, San Diego, Ukraine, all over the place. So I'm very keen for these kinds of chats to just keep it live and flowing in the Q &A. So if anyone's got any questions, if anything pops up, I'm more than happy to riff on. Ignore my slides and kind of go on to the Q &A. I'm very much like...
Jack (00:17)
you
Shahbaz (00:40)
geared towards that, so if anyone has any questions, just feel free to shout in the question and answer, I'll keep my eye on it. So let me just present my screen. All right, let's see.
Jack (00:53)
I tell a lot of people that this is a virtual background and then a bird will go past or something like that. ⁓
Shahbaz (00:59)
Really? You could probably
fake it and tell people it was a virtual but I would have believed you. ⁓
Jack (01:04)
I need to
turn on that soft blur in the background so that it looks little bit glitchy.
Shahbaz (01:08)
Yeah,
exactly, exactly. okay. like Jack, feel free to stop me at any point in time if there's any things you want to clarify on or like you just want to riff on a certain part of it, like that's perfectly fine. Can you see my deck? Is that showing?
Jack (01:23)
Yep, it's on the screen.
Shahbaz (01:26)
Cool, cool, cool. So I guess I'll jump straight into it. The purpose of today is really to break down all the trials and tribulations I've been through over the last four five years building a performance marketing team. We have a team of 40 people. We're producing often a couple of thousand ads a month. And often they get asked the question, how do you build a team that consistently produces winning ads? And hopefully I'll be able to answer that today. So that's the kind of key thing I'm gonna focus on is around team, team structure, the different roles, what people do.
how we get into people in the right mindset of performance, right? I know that's something we, yeah, we riffed up. Yeah, go on, sorry.
Jack (01:57)
super interesting to me. To Shubhuz, by the way. Sorry.
I was saying this is super interesting to me because I've worked with marketing teams that get bottlenecked so fast. They're launching one ad a week, two ads a week. And the idea of being able to launch up to 1,000 ads is pretty impressive.
Shahbaz (02:16)
Yeah, yeah. And I'll caveat that it's not all AI stuff because, you know, people have got this idea in their head now when people say, I'm launching 10,000 ads, it's all AI generated. We do a fair bit of stuff that is completely AI generated. And then we interlace, and this presentation isn't about AI. I've actually got a separate one, which maybe we can do another time. But we do interlace AI stuff within some of the ads that we do. But I think I actually did a calculation. We've done at least 20 million in revenue with AI, completely AI generated images and videos, which I thought was pretty cool.
Jack (02:46)
source.
Shahbaz (02:46)
alongside all the other stuff that we're doing. So it's definitely like a mainstay in what we do, and it's definitely helped us to increase our creative volume. But this is more around getting each team member to produce as much as we can at the best quality. So any particular areas you want to cover off in specifics, because I've got a deck, but we can kind of go into anything. I can focus on one area more than the other if you want.
Jack (03:08)
Yeah, you know what? think that let's take a poll from the chat and see what people want to learn more about because I think the AI piece is going to be really interesting, especially for those teams with less resources that are a little scrappier. But yeah, I'd love to see what people are thinking.
Shahbaz (03:14)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, cool. Anyone got any team building issues or how to manage effective performance marketing team? Drop your questions in the chat. I can't actually see the chat while I'm doing the presentation. So, Jack, if any interesting questions come up, just literally stop me.
Jack (03:39)
We've got one interested about the roles at your company and how each one contributes.
Shahbaz (03:44)
Okay, okay, yeah, I can go into some depth on how we have like pod teams and I can talk about how that pod team is structured. And then we have like periphery teams that sit outside the pod, that kind of act as suppliers to the pod. And I can break that down for sure. Any other questions that are popping up? You just tell me.
Jack (04:02)
We've got quite a few. We should probably get into it. we've got one blogger here that says, I would like to understand how to scale ads with limited resources. And then Daisy.
Shahbaz (04:04)
Yeah? Okay, cool then.
I would also like to know the answer to that question.
It's what I'm trying to hack away at every single day. hopefully some of this will give you bit of an answer. Go on, what was the last one?
Jack (04:21)
Yeah,
to keep quality consistent when using AI. And then Sam, is this really live? Yes, Sam, this is really live.
Shahbaz (04:27)
Yeah.
Yeah,
we're live. We're in the UK. It's 3 p.m. over here. The ice cream truck just went past. Anyone from the UK who knows what an ice cream truck is? I don't know if they have ice cream trucks other places in the world. I literally don't even know. Yeah, I heard in America they sell like drugs to kids from ice cream trucks. But yeah, in the UK that doesn't happen as far as I know at least. Anyway, we should probably talk about marketing as opposed to contraband. But there we go.
Jack (04:49)
Jesus.
Shahbaz (05:00)
Cool, I'll jump into it and then if any questions that have come up that haven't answered, just flag them to me and I'll see what I can do. So I always have to start a presentation with some proof or screenshot, because everyone wants to know like, hey, have you actually run any accounts? Yeah, I mean, this is a peak month, of course. So we spent four million for this one particular brand. This actual brand, we got into the meta-disruptor category. There's around about 1,000 brands worldwide which are in this special team that got special reps in San Francisco.
Jack (05:06)
for
Shahbaz (05:27)
where basically the brand is scaled pretty significantly through meta ads. And this is one brand that we took from when they onboarded, they were doing around about 30K a month in spend. they're like, 4 million was the peak that they hit. And we consistently were doing 2 to 3 million a month. And the kind of brands we work with, generally speaking, we do Health and Beauty. We've done some fitness, some info products. But generally speaking, Health and Beauty is the two main verticals that we really focus on. And your typical kind of like direct response advertising is where we play best.
And we work on accounts anywhere from a hundred K a month in spend all the way through to three, four, five million a month in spend. That's kind of the gamut. We don't tend to go smaller because there's end up to end, ends up being so many operational issues on the brand side that I just can't scale the client. It's, it's always been a challenge. So we really focus on brands where they're usually at least five million in total revenue per annum. It's like kind of like where we like to start from. So kind of a key point I want to really drill home as to like why it's important to launch so many ads, like everyone.
kind of already knows that more ads is better, but like this little study that I did actually really helped me to demonstrate the point. So for this particular brand where we're spending, I think the number's actually wrong here. We were spending 2.2 million at this point per month. You can see the pink line is number of ads launched and the purple line is amount of spend and they roughly track each other. So you can kind of say, and again, if you look on the right hand side, which is the exact same data set, let me just shrink us down because otherwise I won't be able to see what I'm looking at. I'll move you up there.
I've got to keep your backdrop in my view because it makes me happy. Okay, let's move it like this, something like this, okay, in the corner. All so this, each purple dot on this graph here is a month and you can see number of ads launched per month and the amount of spend and there is a correlation, right? Now there's a bit of kind of like debate between causation and correlation between, does more ads equal more revenue? It's not really as simple as that. The more ads you make,
the more learnings you get because the more tests you're running and therefore you're able to figure out what actually works. And everybody knows this, right? The success rate of launching creative or the success rate of any creative in the industry is like kind of low, like only 5 % of ads really scale and do, you know, 10K plus in revenue. And then like the top 1 % of ads like really carry the account. They're the ones that are doing, you know, hundred K, 500 K in revenue. And it always ends up going that way. So you've really got to put in the reps before you get ads that are scaling and
The main point here is like the more volume you are testing, the faster your rate of experimentation, the more you're gonna learn and the more you're gonna figure out ⁓ what to build next. Now I'm not saying blindly just produce more ads. You need to make sure that your next ad is based on a learning from the previous ad. And that's the key difference, right? But in general, the principle is yeah, more ads equals more scale. therefore, if you wanna do more ads, you need to build a team. And so like that's the whole purpose of this presentation, right? It's like more ads equals more revenue.
need team to do more ads. That's really the general principle of what we're trying to get to here. And for this same brand, we produced, just to give you an idea, at the point that we were producing 400 new ads per month, we actually had, so this is just an export I did from Frame.io, we had 35,000 raw images and videos. And from that, we produced a total of 5,000 ads, split 50-50 between new concepts and iterations.
So I'm really just trying to hammer the point home here that you really need to producing a decent volume of ads to actually get an account to scale. And then, yeah, I guess a bit about my background. I'm the CEO, co-founder of Venture Beyond, we're a growth marketing agency. I say agency, but we don't really do much agency work. We have a few legacy clients. We're mainly working as an affiliate now where we basically spend the money on ads and then we get paid per sale that we bring to the client. We're often spending, you know,
a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, even a million dollars, up to eight hundred K dollars per month is the max we've spent actually on a brand, on an affiliate brand where we basically put the money in ourselves and then we just get paid an amount per acquisition. So we're spending our own real money. It's not just client money we're spending. So from that, we're even more stringent on getting our process good and making sure that things are being done profitably. Team of 40 of us, we're based in the UK. I'm in the office right now. We have around half the team here and half the team remote.
kind of chosen to have a bit of a hybrid team. I think it works really well for us. And then our main thing is, we grow e-commerce brands, which I think is probably the same as most of audience over here. Some of the brands we work with, we mainly work with direct response, DTC brands. We've done a few kind of more retail-ish type brands. And here's some of the team behind the scenes. And some of them are deep in thought. I wonder if that was just for the photo or if they were actually scaling accounts at the time.
This one is definitely posed. I know this guy, Lewis. If you're out there, Lewis, I miss you. This is our team structure. So I think this is one of the questions at the start. We have these pod teams. So each pod has a number of clients in it or a number of brands that we're working on. And typically speaking, it's between like one and three brands. We found that anything more than that. And it's really, really hard to give them focus and attention. The pod contains effectively a media buyer and a creative strategist. And
what we found is that the ratio can go up. So for example, we can have one media buyer to two or three creative strategists. But generally speaking, there's one person running the media, optimizing that. And then we have like between one and three creative strategists. Sometimes you need different creative strategists to cover different skillsets within a particular set of clients. So that's what we have like sometimes multiple. So the whole idea here is this is the core team that actually decides on the strategy, decides on the general direction of like where we're going with the brand and what's gonna move the needle.
They produce briefs that go to the post production team. The post production team gets assets from our production team. We have a small studio and content creators. Obviously we're working regularly with content creators. And then once the assets are made, they go back into the pod team. The pod then runs the ads in the ad account and then we extract the data using, we use Supermetrics and Windsor. We extract it into BigQuery and cheats. From there some analysis gets done.
our media buyers, I mean, we call them growth strategists. Our growth strategists are pseudo data analytics people. One of them actually comes from a data science background, which is like super useful. Every time I talk to him, I feel super educated by him, which is really cool. yeah, that's the general process of how this works. And this is a flywheel that just goes round and round every single week where we're cranking this process. And we'll just jump on to the next slide. So yeah, general process to get revenue growth, to really break it down into simple terms, right? It's like the number of ads you make,
times by how good each ad is. So we can call that ad quantity times by ad quality. And how do we measure ad quality, right? It's ads that have spent more than $1,000. That's just an internal metric that we came up with. We thought it was a useful one. And most of our reporting is built around that. Anything that's done more than $1,000, we'll call it a win. Now people always ask like, okay, what about the ROAS? Like what if it was profitable or not profitable? When you're testing using cost controls, if an ad is spending,
Then it's the media buyers job to make sure that that job is spending profitably. And what I say to the creative team is, Hey, if the ad is spending, like basically assume that you've done your job right. That particular ad is a winner. If we've spent 10 K 50 K, a hundred K on the ad, if the raw is below the target, that's down to the media buyer because sometimes there's intricacies around the reason why we might run at a slightly lower, lower raw ass for certain ads. So for example, if something is a bit more top of funnel, we might run at a slightly lower raw ass. something's bottom of funnel, we might run at a higher raw ass. So you can't really.
You can't really give a single figure always for one account and expect the creative team to run off the back of that. So we just tell the creative team, Hey, look at spend. That's the most important thing. So ad quality is literally like winning ads. So the ones that spent more than a thousand dollars divided by the number of ads launched. Right. And I can tell you, it's usually between five and 6%, you know, as I mentioned at the beginning. And we kind of track it on a time period. So every, every seven days or the last seven days and an ad quantity, how do you break this down? So each team member has got to reach creative strategies is responsible for delivering the number of ads.
The more ads you can produce and the more units of time you multiply that by the more quantity of ads you're get So if you really break down, it's it's a simple formula in the end, right? It's like quality times like quantity and the main thing I'm gonna focus on today is not around the credit strategy Which is the kind of ad quality part, but it's more around the process side of things, which is the ad quantity So that's the bit I'm probably gonna spend most time on today, right? So start with a problem statement So I kind of often
try to sit back and think about what is the main problem I'm trying to solve in the business, right? So as a CEO, I'm kind of like overseeing all operations. And sometimes it's really difficult to know. I get problems chucked at me all day, every day, right? Every angle, like small problems, big problems. And I often have to zoom out and I almost write down my own problem statement to remind myself and keep myself sane as to like, I'm fixing the right problems here. So when I was writing this, I wrote down this problem statement, right? It's like, it takes too long to get ads briefed, edited, approved and launched, right?
And then I had some follow-on thoughts like, Hey, I could just do this in my sleep. I could do mid-journey in Canva. Like why is the team so slow? Everything I officially hate my life. So this was just like a little, a little kind of thing I wrote to myself, which I'm sure a lot of people who are watching here or have run CREP teams probably go through these same sentiments. So I then kind of like broke down and you see I've specifically put here briefed, edited, approved and launched right. And then try to break down each one of these stages. And I try to understand where the bottlenecks were at every single stage and then from there optimize and improve.
So solution one at the beginning, you when you're a small team, you know, when we were just three partners and a couple of stuff, you do everything yourself. You know, that's that's stage one and a lot of people will be at stage one. And that's cool. You know, generally speaking, sub one million in revenue. And then option two, you know, you've got to then scale up your team, right? So you need a good process. You need to find the best talent. You need to incentivize them. That's really important, by the way, with growth marketing, you've got to give them strong incentives. And I'll explain what we do in terms of incentive plans a bit later on.
And then you kind of need a process of like testing strategies bottom up. So from your client facing or account facing teams and then taking those learnings and then distributing them across the clients or accounts that you're running. So we have a continuous process of doing this and sharing knowledge. Yeah, so injecting winning strategies top down. And we were always fine tuning, right? So.
Five key components I'm gonna cover today. I think what I'll probably do is I'll just pause at the end of each one and then we can just take some questions on each bit and then that'll probably be a good way doing it rather than waiting all the way till the end. Any questions so far by the way, Jack? Anything that you reckon we should call out on?
Jack (16:06)
Let's take a look and see if we have any questions. We've got a few, but we're probably going to get into it. Yeah.
Shahbaz (16:12)
Yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. Let's jump in
then. So team set up. So my goal is always to attract the best talent I possibly can. Right. And I found that the growth strategies, the best ones are from STEM degrees. They're from maths, engineering, accounting, just new highly numerical people. And generally speaking, they're not actually thinking about doing marketing. So I have to convince them that marketing is actually interesting. And a lot of them often think that, um, I don't want to say like marketing is beneath them, but they have this precept in their mind when they first
hear about e-comm and marketing that like, hey, this is not like clever work. I was meant to be an engineer. So I have to like reprogram them to realize that e-comm is actually super engineering. I don't know if that's a word, but like you can get like quite data, data, data focused and hacky with like, you know, building solutions. So once I've explained to them and educated them on what it's about, they actually get interested. So often I'm taking my growth strategies from being out of market to in market.
Can you remove the small window from the Google Meet? So I want to see Jack and his captive side. I can make it smaller. There you go. Right. So the whole idea is I'm basically taking growth strategists or media buyers from being non-marketing people to becoming marketing people. That's generally the process I go through, right? And I found that's like been the best way of hiring them. And then in terms of the creative team, I'm usually hiring people who've got background in either editing, ideally already in performance marketing, but if they haven't, you know, we can repurpose. Designing content creators usually make good, good credit strategists.
and copywriters. take copywriting is probably like the number one core fundamental skill that I'd prefer people to have. And then I can kind of bolt things around around them. Although I did mention that creative strategists within the pod often have different skill trees. I like to think about it as like, know, when you play Spider-Man on the PlayStation and you have skill trees of different skills. So each creative strategist might have a skill in editing or content creation or like design or branding or I don't know, something else. So depending on the clients they work with, need different skill trees.
And so sometimes we try to blend the different growth strategies together to make sure that we've got a complete set of things going on for the clients. then, so a key kind of way to get growth is we do a bunch of automation with our Mediavine. So we have a lot of things running with rules, not just inside Facebook, but things driven from a separate tool that we use. And I can probably do an entire presentation about that one. I can cover another time. And then data analytics. And then, yeah, like I said, building this elite growth team.
And then if I go on to the next slide, yeah, we have this constant, there's a constant friction between people who, like you don't want to put people into buckets, right? But let's just do it for the purpose of this argument. You have data people and you have creative people, right? And of course there's an overlap between the two of them. Often they're not talking the same language. So what my goal is really is to ensure that there's effective communication going on between kind of like data minded people and creative minded people, right? To make sure they understand each other.
It does help that we have a physical office because often I'll just get the creative strategist and the growth strategist to sit next to each other in the pods. And if they're sometimes talking in languages that they don't understand, if one's talking, you know, English, one's talking French. So to say then I'll try to help them decode what the other is saying until the point that they completely understand each other. And actually we have a creative strategy internship and that's how we've been hiring all our creative strategists. And usually during the process of that internship, and I handle some of the training myself, I try to like...
bring the correct strategies up to the point where they are media buying literate. So they don't have to be media buyers, but they need to kind of understand what goes through a media buyer's mind every single day. Why do they look at certain data points? We show them like GA, we show them like tracking, what does that mean? What is attribution? We try to give them a flavor of like, what's going on inside a media buyer's head, right? And then very simply small team structure. I think I mentioned when you first start, you wanna keep things really agile and small. So we have...
A pod team in itself, if you've just got a growth strategist, a credit strategist and a video editor, honestly, that's enough to produce quite a decent amount of volume and brands are usually ⁓ doing a million, two million in revenue. That's probably sufficient. You may not even need an agency. may not even need, you just have an in-house team. I think it's probably a good way to start. Small teams are super efficient. So I try to preserve them as long as you possibly can. Cause what ended up happening is when we scale the team up, we ended up in this situation, which is like we had...
pod team in the middle and then all of these people around them vying for attention, right? So we had a separate data team, separate CRO team, we have a post-production team, consecrate team, studio team, and constantly there was briefs going out and assets coming back in, right? Or things coming back in. And so the pod team spent most of their time in project management, know, wasting time in communication, you which was really not very efficient. So what I recommend is, and I've already talked through some of these points already.
Yeah, just to kind of draw, draw home the point about communication problems. Now this sounds a bit like soft, but like, like sometimes you've got to dig into these things to understand what the true issues are behind like scaling a team. Right. Well, there's two people in a team. If me and Jack are working together, it's like, Hey, Jack, have you done this edit? Jack's like, yeah, I've done this edit. Cool. Okay. I know that it's not, I'm not covering it. And I know that you're covering it. Right. So it's very simple. Things don't fall between what we, what we say in the UK is falling between two stools. I don't know if that's a saying worldwide, but
somebody who trained me up in my earlier career used to say that to me all the time. It's like, if there's three people, just make sure it doesn't fall between, there's two people, make sure it doesn't fall between two stalls. Ensure that you know who's responsible for what task. When you start to add multiple nodes, so when you have three people or four people or five people, the nodes end up multiplying the lines of communication. It's actually a formula, right? It says N times N minus one divided by two. I did math as a background, so I love just like nerding out over this kind of stuff. But in a team of 40, you actually have,
1,560 lines of communication, right? So if everybody's DMing everybody, you have 1,500 sets of DMs. Now you can imagine what kind of chaos that brings, right? So the solution, really simple. We have a leadership meeting. We have a head of each department or each team sat in the leadership meetings. And I'm not saying that these guys don't talk to each other, the purple ones, but the whole idea is they're represented by the green dots, right? And the green dots talk only to the purple dots in their sphere, right?
And that actually reduces the problem. So, and the way you can kind of think about this is, yeah, so just kind of explaining this in further depth. So remember that figure eight diagram that we had, the growth team is like the small cog that sets the strategy and kind of sets things into motion. We then have these wider delivery teams like the CRO team, the post-production team, content creator team who basically are running off the back of the strategy that is created by the growth team. And this is kind of how we have it at the moment, right? So we have the pod team here.
I put here full-stack Crep strategist. The reason is a lot of our Crep strategists also like to produce their own ads. So sometimes they'll jump in and do their own edits. They'll do their own designs. They'll do bit of everything. Often, you get the best ads through the process of experimentation. And sometimes if you leave all the experimentation to a remote team that's sat in a different country, you won't always get the result that you want. Sometimes you've got to go through this iterative process of just figuring things out as you're doing an edit. And then once you've...
nailed it, once you've got it, then you can maybe start to brief iterations across the post-production team. So within the pod team, we actually do some execution of briefs. We actually do some production of briefs, but the majority of our production is done by external delivery teams. And the whole idea what I'm trying to get to now is allow these external production teams to be able to brief themselves. And this is something we're continuously trying to work on, right? So for example, if an editor can do one brief a day, and so let's say in a month they can do 20 briefs, just...
Obviously in a moment, let's just say they can do 20 briefs. If they're only receiving 10 briefs or 12 briefs from the correct strategists, then they should be able to make up the remaining eight briefs themselves. So we've been actually trying to experiment with different ways of getting editors to be able to brief themselves, which I can talk about in a bit. But the whole idea is there's always gonna be a mismatch between number of briefs issued and number of briefs and the capacity of the team that's receiving them, right? So you need a way of balancing this out. And I always found this issue where like editors were either completely snowed under or
you know, didn't have any work to do. And it literally happened, I remember in January, one day I came in and like the whole production team had like one or two briefs in the system. And two days later, they have 34 briefs in the system. So how did this even happen, right? So it's about balancing resource between teams. We have covered this one. So yeah, two key roles within the, I'm happy to share these afterwards if anyone wants them, just ping me a message on LinkedIn or on X. So these are growth.
So our growth strategist and credit strategist who are the two main key members within the pod, we basically write a job scorecard, right? Which defines their responsibilities, what their targets are, who they're responsible for, and what kind of background they might need. So I'm more than happy to share that, which will help. I've kind of accumulated it between different job scorecards from other people and they made our own version. And I know those other ones were quite useful for me to define my thinking. So I'm more than happy to help other people define their own thinking with seeing how we do it.
Jack (25:10)
questions here
on Team SEPARATIS.
Shahbaz (25:12)
Yeah, any questions
on team setup before we jump into like the process of planning work, execution of work, KPIs and tech stuff?
Jack (25:19)
Yeah, for sure. We've got one here from Creighton. What are your thoughts on VAs? What type of roles would you use them for and if you're in favor of them?
Shahbaz (25:27)
Yeah. I mean, the very, the very terminology VA, ⁓ like for me always. Okay. So the terminology VA is basically saying that, I'm going to use somebody who can do some admin work for me or repetitive tasks. Right. That's my definition of like what a VA would be. So it's not somebody who's like, got a defined role. No, we don't have really any VA's in the company. Like I have an exec assistant, right? My ops manager who pretty much helps me out with all aspects of the business. But what I'd say is.
All of our remote team, you what you may be defining as a virtual assistant has a very defined role. So they're either a editor, ⁓ CRO manager, they're a CREP strategist, growth strategist. We don't have any like VAs. I think the terminology VA comes about when you're a founder with a small team and you're just trying to amplify your own time, right? So I understand the terminology, but also I think the terminology is...
I think a VA is used at a certain stage of business, right? When you're just a founder and you're too busy and you're trying to get some admin tasks done. So maybe when you've got a small team of five to 10 people, know, at that point it makes good sense. You know, we've got a team of 40 people, so each person in the remote team has a very defined role and has a delivery responsibility. The only person who I'd describe as similar to how you're describing a VA would be my exec assistant, but she's based in the UK. You know, she pretty much runs the operations of the company. So I don't know if that was a helpful answer or not. I didn't really answer the question.
Jack (26:53)
No, that was a perfect answer. Yeah, we got another one here from ⁓ Sam. How to evaluate creative strategies. Do they usually create creatives or just brief and add copy for statics? I mean, that's a bit...
Shahbaz (27:04)
Yeah, but very good
point. So what was the question? How to evaluate them? Yeah, so are you saying how to evaluate them in the recruitment process or how to evaluate them once they've actually started and they're working with us or both, I guess.
Jack (27:10)
Yeah, how are you defining them?
I think Sam's saying, what do they do?
Shahbaz (27:22)
What do they do? So our creative strategists, I mentioned, they're kind of like full stack, which means that they are most of the time writing briefs for our post-production team or our content creators, but they also execute on some of the briefs themselves. So they might go and literally shoot the content themselves as content creators. They may go and edit the clips themselves because they've got experience in prem or like they don't even need Premiere Pro experience, right? They just need, let's just jump into CapCut and chop some clips together. So some of the best winning ads we've actually had have come from the creative strategists actually editing their own stuff.
I think that in the past I've been very, probably overly dogmatic on defining roles and making them very precise and saying, hey, you're a correct strategist, you only write briefs. And like, I think over time I've kind of softened the, the, blurred the lines a little bit between like what the roles do. Like, yes, you as a correct strategist, you know, your job is to write briefs, but your job is ultimately to get performance, right? It's to get spend, you know, which is what I define their success metric as. If that means you're editing your own stuff,
or you found a different way of doing things, just do it, right? Like you wanna give them, you wanna give those kinds of people some freedom and capacity to figure out the best way of doing things. And we'll always continue to encourage them to use the post-production team, but often some of the best ads are coming from the strategist shooting and editing their own stuff. It does often happen. So what was the question again? I don't know if I answered it. How do I evaluate CSs?
Jack (28:42)
Yeah,
the question was, what is the growth creative strategy, And I think you hit the nail on the head, right? This is somebody who's in charge of the plan for creative. And the plan for creative is to achieve the outcomes, the goals, which are a lot of the time, e-commerce to sell more product.
Shahbaz (28:48)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jack (29:01)
So I like this loose definition around what a creative strategist is, because ultimately, when it comes to creative, it's not just briefs. There's so much that goes into it, and you're responsible for putting that plan together in a way that achieves that goal.
Shahbaz (29:01)
Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah, yeah. And like each growth strategist ends up taking on different responsibilities. know, like one of them is like pretty good at automation. So they've just built me like an NA 10 workflow, ⁓ to scrape trust pilot reviews. Right. And then another guy's sort of prompting GPT that is an entire research SOP. And so like the two of them are now working together to plug those and make something useful for us. So they're, they're doing more than just, like making ads.
I'd say the one thing that is uniformly the same across all CREP strategies is they all must be doing research. Every single one of them has to do a significant amount of research to actually get good ads. But often some of them are doing workflow building, some of them are doing editing, some of them are just briefing post-production, some of them are jumping on calls with content creators, speaking to them, interviewing them to try and get angles from the users themselves. So it's a mix of different things that they end up doing. You can't just say, hey, your role is to just make briefs and send them to editors.
That's what I used to think, that was maybe three years ago. Definitely now given them more onus to figure it out themselves and just to keep providing them the tools that they need to actually do the things right.
Jack (30:24)
Yeah, I love that. We've got two questions that are quite similar here. What are your KPIs for creative strategists, and do you have a SOP for team members? I think this is a little bit more broad. Why is it that everyone is not performing consistently? So sounds like at their team, they have some underperformers. Yeah, SOP for performance, KPIs for those creative strategists.
Shahbaz (30:27)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah...
There's a few questions. Which one should I do first, Gwyn?
Jack (30:51)
Let's do creative strategists. What are the KPIs, key performance indicators for creative strategists?
Shahbaz (30:54)
So what was the question again?
⁓ I think we'll, I'm gonna
cover that one. I'm gonna cover that one in a short while. So we can probably go into that one in a bit. Maybe we do another question.
Jack (31:05)
Yeah, for sure. So the next one was SOP. Can we give the same SOP to team members? And how do you identify when someone is not performing consistently?
Shahbaz (31:18)
Yeah, so SOPs man, I've been round and round and round and round with SOPs, right? I've gone from the process of thinking I need to document everything right and get everything perfect and everyone just follows this SOP. But you've got to realize your the job is not to hire.
like buffoons, right? You want to hire like smart people. You want to hire people who actually can figure stuff out. And if you have to write an exact process of like, hey, move this Lego brick from here to here, and then move this thing from there to there and type this message in this way and copy and paste this prompt over there, like forget it. That's not what you want. don't need those kinds of people in your team. If you want to get performance, you need to give them some freedom and some gamut to figure things out for themselves. So SOPs we have in place for...
I guess like sharing best practice. So I'll give an example, right? One of our creative strategists came up with a really cool way of doing research, right? Using GPT, a few different prompts, collating things together. And what we did is we actually gave that SOP to all of the creative strategists. Now, the ones who were already experienced kind of just ignored it. So like, hey, I've already got my own process. I don't need this. But the new creative strategists who started on the team, they read that, followed it, and it helped them to figure out a way of doing it for themselves. So of course, they all started from there, started from that point of reading the SOP and then...
re-executing it, but from there they've ended up riffing into their own research methods and they all do things in deviant way from that. So I'd say SOPs are good for sharing best practice, but it's not something that people should follow strictly to execute the work every single day. It doesn't always work like that. SOPs are mainly have in place for operating the business. Those are things that need to be done precisely the same every single time. In terms of creative strategy, I the word is in the title, like strategy.
How do put an SOP on strategy? You just can't. But of course, doing things like briefing editors, we have a process for that and our SOP is baked into our system. We have our own custom work OS that we built with the developer. And so they have to follow that process, which forces naming convention and forces that they have to fill in a bunch of things to actually complete on a brief. So I'd say some things get SOP'd, some things don't. Overall, strategists. ⁓
As a strategist you're just sharing best practice with other strategists but you don't have like an ABC one, two, three step process.
Jack (33:39)
like that. I want to come back to something you said at the start, which is that you want to hire smart people who don't need a checklist one, two, three to get things done. I think this is a big part of our conversation the other day on how some agencies drop the ball for their clients. If you hire a bunch of people that literally need an SOP, this is step one, this is step two, this is step three, and without that list, they have no idea how to get the job done, and you have a real problem.
Shahbaz (33:44)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah, look, I think every founder goes through this journey, right? Because at the beginning, they don't have the budget to pay smart people. So they have to hire people who are like VA's, right? Or people who can just like execute tasks when given tasks. The problem is you'll always be restricted to like, you'll never achieve that much doing things that way. It's better to have like one really smart person than to have like three task executors. Because that one really smart person will just basically help you to define the strategy and you know.
you can coach them as well and they can then become like, not necessarily a mirror image of you. You don't necessarily want that all the time, but they can also help with strategy and direction and they become their own profit center in a way inside the business. When you are just relying on task executors because there's not enough budget to do so and not enough budget to spend on skilled people, there's only so much you can achieve because as a founder of business, you're still then the botnik. That's the key thing.
And often you'd be surprised that it doesn't actually take a lot more money to hire a skilled person. And often you can just, you know, find arbitrage by finding people who weren't even thinking about e-comm and getting an interest in e-comm as an example, you know.
Jack (35:15)
Mm-hmm. Nice. All right, let's keep it moving.
Shahbaz (35:20)
Cool, cool, So that's team set up. We'll jump into now sprint planning, which is like how we actually plan a week on a week to week basis. key question I get asked by almost every single person I ever speak to in Ecom is like, how many ads should we produce? Okay, do need to make like a thousand or 10 or 20,000? I don't know. So how many should we make as a year in a month? And I like to kind of approach this problem by thinking about it as an equilibrium between volume,
quality and cost. All right, you can't have all three of these things. So you can't have high volume, high quality and low cost. It just doesn't work right. So you've got to pick two of these different variables to go together. And what I always like to kind of opt for is high volume, low cost, which means quality has to be compromised a little bit. Now this is just a general principle. Of course, there's space within your ad account to have some more high quality, high production stuff and then other stuff, which is lower quality and UGC and a bit rough around the edges.
But for most of the brands we work with, we're tending towards this side. I'd say like when you're working with fashion brands, you're be more like properly down here, But for lot of the health and beauty brands, we're more up in this section here. So how to actually approach this from a practical point of view, I'd say think about what great resource you've currently got in your team. So do you have any editors? Do you have any strategists? Like who's currently in your team? Without increasing costs, look at who's there, include your own time, and then work backwards to work out how many briefs you can actually execute on a week to week basis.
So look at how many maybe they're currently doing at the moment. And then before you start hiring more people and adding to the team, just identify how you can get efficiency from those, that existing process. If you add more members to the team, it doesn't necessarily increase the quality or output or the revenue of your business. It's 10 times out of 10 now, in hindsight, 10 times out of 10, try to increase efficiency before increasing volume. Because what happens is when you try to get, increase your team size,
any inefficiencies you have in the process just get worse. They get actually worse and worse, they get amplified and it's a race to the bottom, not race to the top. So I'd always say like, work on efficiency first, get things working to a point where you're really confident that they are working, you know, like a well-oiled machine and then add people to it right. And I think the common problem is, especially as an entrepreneur and a founder, you know, you're trying to move quickly, you're trying to, you make this like false assumption that you think that everybody that you hire is just going to be as hardworking as you are.
as driven as you are and like as much behind the mission as you are. And the truth is like, it just doesn't work like that. You know, as a founder of a business, you're basically like, you know, I don't know what you want to call it, but like, you know, like in the 300, you've got the dude at the front, right? He's like, whatever his name is, like, he's, don't know, the main, like the champion who's like worth a hundred people, right? So you've got to think about yourself as like that in a business and you cannot assume that you will ever hire somebody like that.
Now that's not me saying I can achieve a zillion things, but I can say for sure I'll put in a lot more effort than every single other person in the company, or at least if you're a founder of a business, you should be. If you're not, you probably will fail anyway, so that's like a given. yeah, always try and, point here is try and increase efficiency before trying to outsource your tasks to other people, you know, and always oversee, when you take, when you start to expand your team, try to oversee.
the work and make sure the work is being done to a quality before you move on to adding more people to the process. So where do I break this down? What was I trying to say on this slide here? I lost my train of thought, I went off piste. Volume equal, yeah, back to the formula. So volume equals speed of each team member times by the number of team members you have. And that's like a way of thinking about efficiency. So the ways you can increase the yield or of a particular sprint.
So by the way, for context, a sprint is either a one week or a two week period. We started off by having very strict like two week sprints, but then we realized some teams prefer to work in one week sprints just because their context is slightly different. A sprint is really simple. It's just the gap between the planning meetings. So, you you don't want to overcomplicate it with jargon and all this like agile methodology and stuff, right? It's all very fancy, but like, let's be honest, you have a fucking meeting and then you have another one, right? And the gap in between is the work you've committed to, right? And that's a sprint.
We just arbitrarily stick to the agile terminology to just define it separately to actually a week. So how do you improve the yield of a sprint? Use more of your existing assets, which means having good asset management in your system, good naming structure. Try to use tags if your asset management system allows tags. Have good folder and naming structure. Have somebody in charge of asset management.
That one brand that I mentioned had 35,000 assets. You can imagine how hard it would be to old assets and to reuse them. Have a good framework for iteration. So in our process, as soon as a MP4 file is uploaded in the final stage, we also have a link, also have a field that needs to be filled in to share the project file. So if another editor needs to pick up the edit, they can pick it up again, or they can do an iteration on it. Or any, let's say, amendments need to be made. It doesn't need to always be done by the same editor.
What else? I'm not gonna cover all these, but yeah, using AI, ⁓ of course, incentivizing content from real customers. And then, I mentioned about open briefs. you know, making sure editors are, making sure editors have the ability to come up with their own briefs when they've not been briefed by somebody else. You know, that's a key thing. And this is like a typical sprint plan.
Week one, if we have a two week sprint, week one might be spending more time focused around briefing of the post-production team and of content creators. And week two will be more focused around research and ad planning. Now, again, this is more like a framework than an exact SOP. Each team ends up working slightly different, just because their context is different. And one thing I will say is like, what...
I was actually looking at the sprint plans once and I realized that a lot of the planned work wasn't being executed. And I was kind of concerned. I was like, hang on a second. Like we planned all this work. We committed like, I don't know, 20 briefs in a week and we weren't going to get done. So for one particular client, I started to track how much work was actually being executed. And what I realized is there was a lot of unplanned work going on. So work that wasn't necessarily agreed on during the sprint planning meetings and was happening just as it was coming up.
And I realized it was round about one third of the work for this one particular client client. So this is over a data set of 1800 ads, around about 300 ad sets worth. So about a third of the work was unplanned. Two thirds of the work was planned. Initially, I was kind of concerned about this, but then I started to realize, hang on a second, some of these unplanned briefs are actually the best performers. And what's happening is that the pod team is being reactive to what's working in the account. So although you have these planning meetings,
But there's frequent communication happening within the week and day to day we get accounts, we get ads that are starting to pop off and scale. So like, why would we stick to the plan if we've got something that's working? If we've got something that's working, sometimes we just ignore everything else. We just start doubling down on that and iterating on it. And that's exactly what was happening in this situation. So I'm less precious now about sticking precisely to a plan. It's good to have a plan, of course, because we need to be able to plan resource, figure out if we've got enough people, make sure that the plan is going to hopefully achieve the strategy and to make everyone aligned right. That's the whole purpose of
plan, but to kind of apply the 80-20 rule, right, so like, I mean, in this case, you know, two thirds and one thirds, not everything needs to be planned for things to go successful, that be successful. And I think this is symptomatic of our industry, right, because performance moves so quickly. And so that's why I ended up in this situation. Another thing to think about is the impact of our work is actually deferred. And I think this chart probably describes it a bit better. So when we launch an ad,
Although good ad spend very quickly, as a percentage of the overall ad spend in the account, it takes time for them to warm up. So we did this analysis and we realized ads that were launched in January only took up 30 % of the spend in January. But then by the next month, they took up 40 % of the spend. And this is quite a consistent pattern that we saw across all ads that were being launched. And the key point here is ads fatigue, and they usually peak in the second month rather than...
in the first month. And so you need to be in this constant process of understanding that ads fatigue, winning ads don't last forever, you need to keep producing ads. in order for this, imagine you only produced ads in January, right? This would be your performance over the year, it'd be dead by July. So you need to every single month be like hiking this curve up so that you're always pushing performance up, which is another kind of thing about like, it's the reason why like speed of execution is a...
prerequisite for success, which is what I wrote here, because the more you can produce, the faster you can produce, the more you can produce, the less ad fatigue that you're going to be hit by. Any, yeah, cool.
Jack (44:07)
I like that. I think there's something else in that as well. I just want to ask you a question
and see if you're reading this the same way as I am right now. Imagine you had a team that was killing ads, you know, two days in, six days in, you know, within the first week. Would you also be potentially sacrificing by acting a little too quickly there if that peak is, you know, roughly a month later?
Shahbaz (44:13)
Yep.
Hmm.
So just to kind of clarify on what this data is actually showing so top forming as usually perform straight away So the best performing ads are usually spending, know within the first day two days Something like that. This is more so looking at how ads that were launched in January ⁓ make up The percentage of percentage of ad spend in that month. So I know that's a bit of a mouthful Let me say it again. So as launched in January made up 30 % of the ad spend in January
as launched in January, made up 40 % of the total ad spend in February. So it's not like an individual ad is taking time to warm up. It's more like the whole entire cohort of ads represents a higher percentage of ad spend in the following month. Does that make sense?
Jack (45:10)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, but if you were killing those ads, then they might not see their ⁓ second month. Like, let's say you did a flash sale over a weekend.
Shahbaz (45:16)
Yeah, yeah, but we, yeah,
I see what you're saying. Yeah, I got you. That's, I guess I said kind of a separate point, yeah. We try to give ads enough time, enough breathing space to actually perform. And often if an ad doesn't perform straight away, we might relaunch it. And we have a set of rules that gives a general best practice of how we relaunch ads, but then sometimes a media buyer will come in and make a manual decision. They'll override the rules and they'll be like, no, I am.
this particular ad has worked well in the past. I think it worked now because of this. They have a theory, right, and they override the rule system. So we often do give things, we do give things breathing space to perform and we're aware of delayed attribution. We do day surfing as well. So sometimes if an ad stops performing on the day, we'll slow it down and then the next day we'll relaunch. We have a bunch of different automations that run that do this, I totally agree with you. Yeah, you need to give enough breathing space for an ad to work.
Jack (46:10)
super interesting. you. We've got another question from Rob here. Where do project managers fit into the team and workflow?
Shahbaz (46:19)
Project managers, the term project manager just gives me the heebie-jeebies. ⁓ What does a project manager even do? Like, come on, let's just... We don't have project managers. We like to keep teams small and efficient. So the pod teams, like I mentioned, have between one and four people in there. So between all of them, they can kind of manage themselves. I'd say the growth strategist, the media buyer is the one who, let's say, has the final say in terms of the strategy.
Jack (46:23)
Same, no. Same. I was hoping for the same.
Shahbaz (46:49)
So if you want to say like, what is the closest definition to project manager that we have inside the company, it's a growth strategist. But I would not say that they're in charge of like making sure everything is done. Each individual person is responsible for their own thing to get done. The growth strategist ultimately is ⁓ in charge of performance. And then a subset of that obviously is creative. Subset of that is CRO and landing pages and the creative team. So the creative strategists are mainly in charge of, know, ⁓ ad spend, creative performance, know, getting ads that are working.
Jack (47:20)
I think there are a couple of ways where this just totally falls apart in teams.
with project managers. ⁓ I've seen teams adopt tools like Monday Asana, ClickUp, and don't get me wrong, they can be used productively for sure. But then they end up having to hire external consultants to fix their ClickUp or fix their Asana account because it's so overloaded with ⁓ project management, right? But nothing's getting done. They need an external consultant to fix their project management tool. And then the other side of it is brands really don't want to speak to that person on the team that doesn't
Shahbaz (47:33)
Yeah.
my god.
man.
Yeah.
Jack (47:54)
get it. They want to speak to the strategist, right? Not have like a lot of heart-waving about, ⁓ you know, I'll speak to the growth strategist, I'll speak to the creative strategist about this and get back to you later, right?
Shahbaz (47:54)
Yeah ⁓
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were saying all those things and it was like winding up my internal jack in the box. was like, ⁓ like all these things are like things that I've like, yeah, we started our process in monday.com and I built so many automations into our correct testing board that eventually I was even had like 80 automations running on one board. ⁓ and every like month we'd have to move all the items to an archive board because the board was getting overloaded and just slowing down to the point where it was unusable. I then tried to split a board between a briefing board and a post-production board. And that kind of made things even worse because all
Jack (48:12)
You
Shahbaz (48:37)
the items were linked together and linked boards perform even worse than single boards. And then I sat and did a lot of the automations myself early days and then I got one of the guy who joined me early days to work in the systems team and.
He just continued to build on it and build on it and build on it. And it got so complicated in the end that nobody really knew what was going on. We had all these different views, all these different filters. And at the time, when they didn't allow you to restrict the creation of views, I don't know if it's changed now.
And the truth is we ended up building our own software because like we just ran into a hard bottleneck in terms of what we wanted to achieve in mundo.com, which was, you know, tracking how long it took at each stage. So, you know, we have briefing, editing, approving and launching, right? That's the process that all ads go through. And we wanted to see how long it was taking in each stage and where things were getting stuck and who it was getting stuck with.
And I tried to build that entire process in Monday. And at the beginning it was working. And as we kind of added things to it, it just got very chaotic. And in the end, we completely abandoned it. So I have a bit of a love hate relationship with monday.com. Overall, it's a good tool. And I've used the others in the past as well. I take Clickop is like probably the most advanced. Asana's like probably fallen behind now. Yeah. And I personally use Notion and I sporadically use it as well. Like sometimes I'll go through phases of...
Jack (49:53)
Yeah.
Shahbaz (49:58)
putting everything in there and then other, other times I'll just come in on the day and deal with shit.
Jack (50:03)
If anyone's listening to this and they're thinking, know, Shabazz is talking a lot about process here, but suddenly we don't like project managers, I don't think there's anything wrong with process. I don't think there's anything wrong with leading indicators either, those inputs that are conducive of the outcomes that you want of achieving the goals. But.
I think there might be something wrong with the project manager capacity, especially in the context of ⁓ such a agile market like marketing and marketing services. It's very easy to project manage to death. And suddenly things aren't actually happening. There's just a lot of project management problems.
Shahbaz (50:36)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah. And like save yourself a few years of life, right? Because I wasted, I wasted, I learned a lot from doing this, but like I spent too much time trying to create a perfect process and try to build it into money.com.
just to get other people to do the work for me, right? When I should have just been hiring smart people, incentivizing them quickly and giving them a framework rather than a bulletproof process, as we've already mentioned. I'm kind of repeating the point, but I just don't want people to go through the same pain that I went through for, you know, probably just, I could have shortcut two years of my life, easy.
Jack (51:14)
All right. Okay. Let's do one more question before we move on here. Are your editors full stack where they can do video and, I guess, image design, or do you have specific video editors and designers?
Shahbaz (51:25)
Yeah.
Yes, good question. In the past, we had people full stack and now we tend to have designers and editors because like good designers are like so much quicker than editors who try to do design work. every editor will tell you, yeah, I can do a design, right? I'll jump into Canva and just do some stuff. And of course they can do some basic simple things. So if your design work is like just adding a headline on top of an image, like, yeah, okay, anyone can do that. If it's like doing some statics that are like very heavily branded and you want a good visual hierarchy, you want a nice headline,
and you want the viewer to be able to understand. You want to control the viewing order of the prospect. So they look at this first, then this, then this. Basically visual hierarchy, right? A good designer understands that. An editor who's trying to be a designer doesn't always understand that. So I'd say it depends on the type of ads you're trying to make as to like where you go. But as a team scales, you definitely want to like start to divide. I don't want to divide that out. And we probably produce like...
50, 60 % videos and 30, 40 % statics. But our team is weighted like 80 % editors, 20 % designers. I think designers generally can produce more volume than editors can. It also depends on the clients because like different clients have different needs in terms of what scaling. yeah, every answer is always it depends. It depends on your circumstance.
Jack (52:53)
Yeah, I think there's a little bit of a through line between what you were saying before about your creative strategists and how sometimes they create ads from start to finish. ⁓
themselves and they're editing themselves, right? These creative strategists who intimately understand, ⁓ you know, what goes into creative that makes it perform well can sometimes be their own editors, right? It's specialization, right? People specialize in certain things and sometimes that means having dedicated video editors and dedicated designers, right?
Shahbaz (53:24)
Yeah, totally, totally.
Jack (53:28)
Awesome, let's keep moving.
Shahbaz (53:30)
Cool, so what's next? Have we got a hard cut off on time or should we just keep going into them? Done, what do you reckon? Okay, cool. So add lifecycle problem statement. I'm a creative genius, I'll spray and pray. The universe will drop the perfect ad into my account. When you're grace with the creative genius that only I can comprehend, it'll work this time, promise. So then some nonsense is in my head sometimes and I just write it down because it just comes out and I don't know if it makes sense to anybody else but.
I think a lot of creative people think that they know the answer. And certainly me starting in this process myself four years ago, you know, thought, you know, I've got a good intuition as to what people would like. And then it's always the stuff that you think won't work, ends up working and vice versa. So you kind of like got to drop that creative ego and, you know, just test basically. And the key thing is like, hey, you to be systematic about this. You can't assume that you know best. And to be systematic, you need to process. And this is like our general, this is as close to your problem.
as close as you'll see a SOP around our entire process, as there is. And the whole process goes from like ideation to conclusion, right? So first you have ideas, you capture them and you present them to your team. You present them to a client. If there is a client, you prioritize them. So you figure out which ones are feasible, which ones have got the highest chance of success, ⁓ you know, what's going to take us the most time. And from that, you make a plan. You then brief out all the ideas. So for every single brief, we have a hypothesis default. There has to be a reason why you're doing something and you need to articulate that.
You then write the brief. It's either in a storyboard, so frame by frame, we lay it all out with the clip selected, or we give an existing ad and we say, hey, copy this ad and change this. And for image, sometimes we do a bit of a mock-up. So we'll just do a hand drawing or something quick on camera that a designer can then go and tidy up. The briefs then go across to the post-production team. Work gets allocated depending on who's available, who's best for that client, who's best for the skill set required within the brief.
And we have a post-production manager who coordinates that and decides which briefs go where. Usually the briefers have some preference over which editor they want to work with, but they don't always get the edges that they want. I'd say most of the time they do, but sometimes they don't just because of availability. We then go through an approval process. So have an internal approval process. Sometimes there's compliance involved in terms of copy and branding. So sometimes we'll have a separate compliance person sign things off and then external approval if required. So maybe a client will approve, approve. If you have teams, there might be multiple teams.
approvals. We then launch, so we have an automatic naming convention. So based on all the parameters within the brief, we actually have a add name that gets generated. And then that allows us to do reporting effectively once you pull the data through Supermetrics and Windsor. And then finally, conclusion. So we look at all the metrics. We go back to the hypothesis of the particular brief. And by the way, one brief equals one ad set. And within one ad set, we have four to six variations. Pretty standard testing process.
So we conclude every ad set as to what we learned and was our hypothesis correct? Was it wrong? Did we learn something? Did we not learn something? ⁓ And then we try to share wins and losses, right? So this is just an example from our software that we have for the brief naming. So you'll see that some of the parameters from the brief itself, like the client, the name of the brief, the product, the offer, the content creator, a bunch of different things go into the actual ad name.
and then the underscore becomes a delimiter that allows us to split the columns when we pull the data back in. I've talked about this one already, so I'm gonna skip past this around open briefs. And then conclusions, so at the moment we do this in a sheet, but we are moving this into our software. So what happens is, I already mentioned this, but we have the name of the brief, we have our hypothesis, and then from there we write down our learnings, we mark if it's a winner or a loser.
and then we try to kind of make that part of our planning for the next sprint to basically use some of the conclusions or learnings that we got and reflect that into the next plan. And that's pretty much the life cycle of an ad, so I'll keep this one on the screen, but anyone got any questions about this one in particular?
Jack (57:45)
We got a little bit of a question that kind of relates to that ⁓ last Google Sheet that you had. What's the feedback loop between the data and the ad briefs you create? So how are you getting that data back to your creative strategist and into your briefs?
Shahbaz (57:58)
Yeah, so
we typically use, and I'm going to mention one of your competitors now, so we typically use Motion, but Motion is one of the main things that the creative strategist used. Although you did show me the new tool, what was the new feature that you guys released? Lens. I was super impressed by that and I haven't had a chance to play around with it, but I think it may be a Motion beta, fingers crossed for you guys, but I think it's a pretty cool tool. So I'm definitely going be testing that one out as well.
We use Motion basically to look at what's working, what's not working. It's basically a simplified version of Ads Manager, right? The creative strategists can jump in and make their own reports around. So that's like what the creative team mostly looks at. Our growth strategists, they pull the data through the API. We use Supermetrics for Sheets to actually pull the data in from Meta. And then some of the heavier stuff we pull in using Windsor. It's a data connector. It's just significantly cheaper than Supermetrics BigQuery connector.
We pull the data into BigQuery and from there we make some custom dashboards, some custom sheets. We have like a standard sheet that we have and then from there people build their own reports and charts that they find useful. Sometimes if we're using a tool like Kairos, know, tracking or attribution tool, we'll pull that raw data in as well. So we'll have a developer build a connection and pull that raw data in and that might be reflected in our analysis. ⁓ Yeah, so.
So I'd say like it's client specific as to like what the data stack looks like, you know, if they're using a, you know, server-side tracking or if they're not using server-side tracking. But in general, we have a standard reporting sheet that reports on like last day, last three days, last seven days. It has a bunch of rolling averages, know, ton of things going on inside there. And then some dashboards that go off the back of that as well. And we actually have a dashboard for the TVs in the office, which I'll show you in a bit, which kind of comes into KTIs, which are the key things that we try to look at.
day today.
Jack (59:50)
Nice.
Shahbaz (59:52)
Any other questions on this process?
Jack (1:00:00)
Not yet. Let's take a look. Here we go. Just curious what kind of automation you mean for the launch phase.
Shahbaz (1:00:09)
Oh, okay. we, any make or LLM involved, so what I mean here is automatic ad launching directly into meta. So within our own software, have ad launching built out. Although we've not built it for scale just yet, so we use a combination of that and we use Birch. So there's a couple of tools that we use. So, but we're looking to migrate all of our ad launching into our own software. So basically things will go all the way from briefing into like the ad being made and then getting launched directly in.
So we've tested out a bunch of different things. We've tested out like other tools that do automatic ad launching, Kitchin, which is like, don't think that good, AdManage, tested that. And then yeah, just, we've got a developer, right? So like it made sense just to utilize them. So, and it just saved the process of having to download the asset, upload it elsewhere, and then, know, manually launch the ads. So for now we're kind of using Birch and then we're in the process of migrating to doing all the launching through our own software.
Jack (1:01:06)
Rob's asked, what do you guys use for storyboarding?
Shahbaz (1:01:11)
Storyboarding again, I keep because I should probably do a separate presentation about our tool We're not really selling it at the moment We just if if some people want to pay me for it, I'll happily take their money, but we're not really selling it at the moment We we do it in our own software so we have a table that's built out Within the brief, right? So it's got like the name of the scene the copy that goes into the scene any visual reference Some assets an asset field if you want to include some assets that you've already got in mind
And that is basically like a table that gets filled in. I know you guys have also got a briefing tool, which is pretty similar, I think. Probably follows a very similar storyboarding structure. So there's nothing complex about the storyboard. It's just a table, right? Like I said, we don't always use it for certain types of briefs. makes sense for other types of briefs. It's like, hey, here's a video. Just copy this, change that. So we try to keep it as simple as we can. don't force people to use a storyboard if it's not necessary.
Jack (1:01:53)
show.
I think that's the key here, right? Because we were talking about project managers, we're talking about project management tools, and the reason why that might not be the thing that works in the end, or SOPs as well, I think that's a very similar through line between all of these different ways to manage and create a team that can launch thousands of ads, is that if each of these pieces that you see on the screen right now came with an extra input for the purpose of only project management to satiate a project manager, like...
desire to manage the project, you would end up spending more time inputting steps for the purpose of steps or storyboarding for the purpose of storyboarding and fulfilling that checkbox in the process as opposed to actually creating the ads and launching them, right?
Shahbaz (1:02:45)
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And I think like online there's, um, everyone's just looking for a quick solution or a quick process, right? And you always see this comment baiting stuff on LinkedIn and X like, Hey, like get my entire process. That made me a million pounds in two days. The truth is like, you're okay. You can get that process. What you're to do, get the team to follow it exactly. And you're going to make a million pounds. don't think so. It doesn't work like that. Right. It's like, it's just like a, it's a one way of doing things, but it's not always going to apply to your context. So in the end, need smart people.
You need people who are like, and your job is to, as a founder of a business is to find the best people you can find. And in the end, they should be educating you. You should not be educating them. You should not be telling them what the process is. They should be designing the process, saying to you, hey, I haven't got time to go and get everybody else to do this, but here's something cool that I've made. Here's a workflow I made in NA 10. I think it'd be useful for other people. And we have a way of incentivizing that as well, by the way. So we have, and I think we mentioned this when we last spoke.
We have Matter App. I'm gonna mention it again. I'm not affiliated, but I think it's like an awesome tool. It's a Slack app where basically you have a coin allowance. Everyone has a set of internal coins or tokens. I think they're called coins, matter coins. And you can reward each other for certain things. So if someone does something cool, something good, you can give them some matter coins. And we have this internal currency and it ends up turning into a lot of banter and fun and like people just making jokes in there and giving coins to each other for silly things. But it's also a way of like...
I create bounties, for example. So I made a bounty for making an NA 10 workflow recently. And I basically made like a 750 coins for making something that gets used by somebody else in the team within NA 10. And I issued it out yesterday. So, which equates to like, I don't know, $75, I think, and people can go and redeem them on Amazon and stuff like that. it's just a way of gamifying it. And there's a Slack channel where everything is shouted out in terms of the rewards. And it just gamifies the process of sharing knowledge and sharing best practice. Otherwise.
It's like, it's not fun, right? It's just, it feels like extra work.
Jack (1:04:50)
Yeah, I love that. I think that's such a good idea. Right? Because otherwise, ⁓ like you said, it's a top-down imposition. It feels friction-full. It feels annoying. Whereas this gamifies it. It's fun. Right? We've got another question from. ⁓
Shahbaz (1:05:00)
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That's the idea.
Jack (1:05:05)
Creighton here. ⁓ General question, and maybe a bit too general. Are you seeing video ads always performing better than static, or is it an even split? Well, it's definitely not always performing better than static, but yeah, interested to hear your thoughts.
Shahbaz (1:05:17)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think you've already answered your own question by saying, I know this is a general question, because I think you know the answer. It always depends, right? It depends on the client, depends on the type of ads you're running. You need a mix of images and videos. You can't just rely on one specific thing in an account. I have seen accounts which are writing completely on images. It's really like 99 % images. And I've seen things that are still working with that.
But I'd say generally speaking, you want some diversity in your creative, right? This, I'm just talking from the horse's mouth, Metta says this all the time, right? Creative is the new targeting. You just hear it all the time. It's kind of obvious, right? But which means you naturally need to have like a big variety of different types of concepts. So images and videos, I can't say one works better or worse than the other. You need to have a mix and each one plays a different part in the funnel as well. know, often statics, especially offer statics and product statics are
like more lower funnel. So you'll tend to find on GA you have like a higher returning visitor rate on those ads. Whereas video ads tend to be higher up in the funnel. Again, I'm talking in general terms here.
Jack (1:06:24)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Meta even has a recommendation in their platform. If you launch a campaign with only videos, they'll say, hey, performance can improve if you launched an image. And Meta wants it to be profitable. They want you to be able to spend 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, if possible, today and tomorrow and next week. And the only way they're to do that is if they give you recommendations that net out positive for you. So yeah, I'd say that both pieces are pretty important in the media mix.
Shahbaz (1:06:33)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. If anyone has any like intelligent, smart questions they want to ask directly to matter, like we have some inroads directly to like really high level meta reps. Right. And I'm always like thinking about what I ask them. That's going to help, uh, you know, our own learnings and also like the learnings people we know. Right. So if anyone's got any interesting, very nuanced specific questions and they want to pass it on, I'm happy to like be the person that goes in between them. Cause it helps me to figure out stuff in the process as well. Right. I'm always going to their events. actually at one on Thursday this week in London. So if anyone's got any questions, just shoot them to me.
Jack (1:07:19)
That's an awesome resource. One thing that I'd love to add, Creighton, in case it's helpful, is that sometimes our beliefs can represent constraints. I've seen people who are very keen on creating video ads, maybe because that's specialization. They're really good at making video ads. So in their mind, video ads perform better than image ads. And that's just that represents a constraint. Because if image ads could perform better, if they could,
win spend against video ads, then it's not even a consideration in that strategist's mind. So I think that it's really well worth opening yourself up, exposing yourself to the opportunity that different media formats, image, video, carousel, dynamic ads, could outperform whatever it is that is the bias. ⁓ One more resource that might be helpful. I'm going to say it, guys. In 4Play's Spider, you can actually see the media mix for any brand.
Shahbaz (1:08:04)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jack (1:08:17)
All right, so if you look up a brand that's in your niche or is a market leader, you can see exactly what percentage of their ads are images, videos, and dynamic creatives. And pretty much no brands are all in on one format. The brands that are crushing it, they're doing very well. You are likely to put a spider on, have a nice mix of creatives across different formats.
Shahbaz (1:08:39)
Yeah, totally agree. And super useful tool. I like Spyder.
Jack (1:08:43)
Thank you. Appreciate it. Do we have anything else to go over or are we wrapping up?
Shahbaz (1:08:49)
what have we got? Let's see what we've got left. KPIs and then tech stack is just super simple one. So I'll just probably spend a bit of time on KPIs.
Cool, so I think we've got mentioned, was one of the questions that came out at the beginning actually is like what are the KPIs that you measure the team on, right? How do you make the team go faster, right? Like what are the things? So this is like two of our media buyers in the office. This is the TVs that sit like within 20 centimeters of their heads. Like the whole idea is we're trying to make data, the most important data as visible as possible. And.
What we do every single month is we have a target of, we have basically, we have like a four tier target system. So tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four. And it's based around, it's either based around spend or based around revenue depending on the pod we're talking about. So if they achieve a certain amount of, let's say, revenue for the client in that month, they get a bonus. So if they get a tier one, if they hit tier one, they get 10 % on top of their salary.
It's tier two, get 25%. It's tier three, they get 50%. And if it's tier four, they get 75%. So it's a potentially quite a significant high copy in their salary, right? And this is what incentivizes them and keeps them going and pushing, you know, to hit those targets. And they're always talking in Slack about like, you know, kind of gassing each other up and trying to say, Hey, oh, we're on track for tier two, we're on track for tier three, let's keep pushing, let's keep going. And this is how I've tried to kind of get like the, always in my head, I had like the mindset of like a trader or like a recruitment company, right? Where there's like a heavy incentive around performance.
and I tried to put that into the team. So we do that by having this data super accessible. It's based around, know, in this particular pod, it's based around spend, other pods is based around revenue, depends on how we're billing clients in that particular pod. And then underneath this, we have very simple, right? And I had a zillion different metrics originally, and I ended up like just scrapping them all and really simplifying it down. Because, you know, as somebody who's like, when you like...
When you think you're smart, you try to over-engineer the solution, right? And the solution ends up being the dumbest, simplest thing that you can think of. There's a number of ads launched, Spend and ROAS, those are the most important things in the end. And so we look at a number of ads launched yesterday, last seven days, month to date. We look at the Spend yesterday, last seven days, month to date. We look at the ROAS yesterday, last seven days, month to date. And that is literally on the TVs next to people.
so they can't avoid it and they can't miss it. And I'm pretty sure on a weekly basis, they're reporting on this now in Slack as well. They just started doing this recently. ⁓ So they kind of do a little bit of a report, the growth strategies do to say where we're up to and what the plan is. ⁓ Yeah.
Jack (1:11:19)
That is so cool. Shabazz, I'm not
sure if we talked about this in our last conversation, but I think this is such an unlock to incentivize your team members based on the results that you want for your clients and to create that really tight feedback loop. Incredible. That's so cool.
Shahbaz (1:11:34)
Yeah.
You have to, because you want MediaVice to be checking the account at the weekend, right? And driving the creative team, be like, hey, we need more ads. And we got fed up of doing it as partners. We're always saying the same things. We need the other people to do it for us, right? And the best way to do that is to have an incentive structure. And honestly, took us two years, or backwards and forwards, to try and get something that worked. We tried quite a few different things. In the end, this is the thing that's been the best for us. ⁓ Yeah, just on the screen here is a summary of what I've already said. So the output KPIs are ⁓ ad spend.
ROAS and then the input KPIs are number of ads launched, under landing pages launched as well. We do a lot of landing page testing as well as ad testing. yeah, in terms of the input KPIs on the Create Production team. So Create Production is post production and production together. Collectively, you might wanna call it production. Just number of ads that they've produced. This is actually a screenshot from our system. You can see the briefs underneath it.
who did them, the dates that things kind of passed, how long it took to get through the system. And then in the last week, how many ads were launched. And then the goal is to basically get my SLA service level agreement. My initial service level agreement or agreement between the teams was that basically when a brief gets put in the system, it's got to be executed, revisions done, gone through client revisions, gone through any further edits or whatever within seven days.
Jack (1:12:42)
Beautiful.
Shahbaz (1:13:03)
That was my first SLA. We actually achieved like three and a half on average, 3.4 I think it was. we're at about three to four days from start to end. Things are getting stuck, end up like lagging the average outwards. So you wanna really think about why things are stuck and can they just be sucked off? And to get to that seven day turnaround, you really wanna be targeting only one bit revision per creative. When you start to work with clients who are like asking for 17 different revisions for like one ad, you're never gonna scale that account because things are gonna go too slow.
Typical reasons why things like might breach this is if the brief is not clear, maybe there's not a clear match between the visual and the messaging in the ad. Could be a language barrier with your editors. Often that happens where they don't really understand the brief or the copy and they therefore can't match the visuals with the messaging. Quality control issues and then compliance around like wording what we can say, can't say, branding, getting involved. ⁓ So that's pretty much the targets that we use to track the team.
Anyone got any questions on KPIs or anything on that?
Jack (1:14:08)
We've got one here. How do you measure the efficiency of each step in the workflow? And how do you leverage efficiency with technology?
Shahbaz (1:14:17)
Yeah, so
as I mentioned, we have, I wish I had some screenshots of our actual software. Maybe I could do that on another one. If anyone wants to see the software, can just show you afterwards. can maybe do a little video. If anyone wants it, I'll do a little video and just share it to you on LinkedIn. Remember I said briefing, editing, approving, and launching. So we're tracking how long it takes in each one of those stages. So there's a start stamp and an end stamp. So we know total time spent in each one of those stages. And then from there, we can go down and break down.
look at the comments on the item and see where did it get stuck and why did it get stuck and speak to the person responsible. Each particular brief has got a person responsible attached to it, right? So we go and speak to them and be like, hey, why did this brief take eight days or like, why did this one get done so quickly? Why did it get done in like all your briefs are getting smashed out in like, don't know why, like what's happening. So that's how we track our workflow through the process. And then in terms of the KPIs with the spend and the RRs, that's just, like I said, coming through Supermetrics and Windsor.
Jack (1:15:17)
We've got a few more questions here. Which tools do you use that display the number of ads launched and active ads as your own software, right?
Shahbaz (1:15:17)
Yep.
Yeah, that's our own software. We call it AdSprint. Anyone wants to see it, just send me a message on LinkedIn, I'll show you.
Jack (1:15:35)
I'll drop Shabazz's LinkedIn as well for anyone that wants to get in contact. ⁓ I want to know how to create technical tasks for designers when creative needs to be made with Chant GPT or another AI tool, should I create it by myself?
Shahbaz (1:15:50)
how to create technical task for designer with, I interpreting this correctly, is they wanna know how to get the designer to brief themself or editor to brief themselves.
Jack (1:16:04)
I don't know what this is saying. I think that they're saying, how do I assign a task for a designer? But Yuri, if you could send a little more information about what it is that you're asking, that would be awesome. Yeah. Lucian here is saying, yes, please share a loom of your operating system. Yeah.
Shahbaz (1:16:13)
Yeah, it's not super clear.
Message me on LinkedIn, send it to you.
Eventually, one day we might actually sell it and get some customers, but I'm so focused on building econ brands that I don't know. The system works for us. It's one of the unique things that actually enables us to actually produce so much stuff and get it done quickly. So a lot of people from the outside have said, hey, can I buy this? Can I buy this? I've had lot of buy intents, buy signals.
Jack (1:16:28)
Okay.
Shahbaz (1:16:43)
We're not a software company, but I know that lot of software tech ends up emerging from service businesses. And so I'm not close to the conversation on it. I just don't think it's an immediate priority in the next, at least next month.
Jack (1:16:54)
Well, mean, this kind of reminds me of what we're talking about with project management. Instead of having that top-down projects being set by somebody who is non-technical, you have the team setting the targets. You have incentivization based on the outcomes that you want to achieve. And you're making it fun. You're gamifying it so that people are enjoying that process. I mean, that compared to project management is world apart.
Shahbaz (1:17:13)
Yeah. Yeah. Wait. Yeah.
The
amount of time I spend on ridiculous things, right? ⁓ I'm just gonna reel the inside of my brain now. You see this dashboard here. Do you how many rounds of revisions I went through personally with my data guy to actually get this to look exactly how I wanted it to look? The color selection, the way it all looks and it's laid out and it's slightly different for each pod. I was really, really, probably overly precious about this because I wanted to gamify it as much as possible. So even down to how these bars get filled up, you notice that you've got
projected spend, right? So people could be like 12 days into the month and be like, if we carry it at this run rate, you know, we'll hit tier three. And, know, that ends up being quite a nice interesting conversation with people and it keeps them going. Right. So, yeah, I'm massive on like gamifying the result and, you know, incentivising people around that.
Jack (1:18:05)
I like it. So do those bars at the top function like a progress bar?
Shahbaz (1:18:10)
So the one at the top is the actual targets. And then the one at the bottom is the actual amount. So far, whenever this screenshot was taken, this particular part had spent 400K in the month. And then projected spend was based on the run rate. So if they'd spent 400K over the course of, I don't know, what's this, maybe like 20 days, by the end of the month, they probably would have spent 670.
Jack (1:18:12)
Mm-hmm.
I
Nice. OK, so Yuri's followed up saying, yes, how to assign it correctly. And I think here, a big piece of this is the operating system is AdSprint. Did you say it was cool? So yeah, stay tuned. So let's on that one.
Shahbaz (1:18:35)
you
Yeah, yeah, it's just
stay tuned, drop me a message. If I get enough people saying, hey, I'll send you my bank details and I'll take all your money and give you access.
Jack (1:18:57)
Nice.
Shahbaz (1:19:01)
And then the final piece really, I've already kind of discussed this, like our tech stack, we have more softwares in the company than people, which I always like say this, but we, did a process of trying to clean this up at the start of this year and I actually then built a sheet and I'm happy to share this sheet by the way. I've got a sheet with like one of our software. It's a bit outdated. It's like from the end of the year, but we have like 80 or 90 different subscriptions to software in total.
and you need a lot of different softwares to run the process that we're running, including like operational software for the company. And this is just like a screenshot of the process I had mapped out in monday.com and it started to get too complex and that's why I ended up building Antiprint. Yeah, if have anyone's out there building like really technical stuff in monday.com, I'm also keen to like speak to you using automations in make.com and scripts, just because I've been there as well and I'd like to just see what you're up to. So if anyone's got anything interesting going on there, just drop me a message.
And that's pretty much it. So yeah, and a plug for us, like we work as an affiliate. If you've got a health and beauty brand, we're already spending a decent amount of money. You know, we'll probably spend our own money on your ads. yeah, we do agency ad accounts as well. We give cash back if you're spending money and you need additional ad accounts, we can give cash back on. yeah, but I'll be here just to like share and start the conversation going. So anyone who wants to chat, just talk to me on X and LinkedIn.
Any final questions?
Jack (1:20:29)
Do we have any more
questions before we wrap up here, guys? This was a wealth of knowledge. I'm super excited to hopefully poke around in AdSprint and check it out. And I imagine a lot of you guys are too. But if you have any questions, now would be the time to get them in before we wrap up.
Shahbaz (1:20:52)
⁓ infinity screen. ⁓
Jack (1:20:57)
I think you're good, don't worry. Awesome. Sarah's saying thank you. Okay, Rob said, what does your leadership team look like? That's an interesting question.
Shahbaz (1:20:59)
Yeah.
What does my leadership team look like? How do I get out of this view? How do I stop sharing? There we go. All right, there we go. What does my leadership team look like? Okay. So we have a head of growth. he was traditionally a growth strategist. So he's running some of our bigger accounts and then he has now migrated into a position of head of growth. So he's in the leadership meeting. We have one of the partners who runs the CRO team. So that's the person who, the team who builds out landing pages and is continuously testing different landing pages.
⁓ They're in the meeting. We have post-production manager or let's say creative production manager. So they represent the content creation process and the post-production process. They attend the meeting, myself, ⁓ and then ⁓ one of the other partners who is like probably the lead growth strategist in the company. So he's not like the head of growth. He's more so like the technical lead. So he's the person who likes to figure things out.
It's been the mastermind behind a lot of our account scaling, let's say. And then who else do we have? And we're in the process of bringing on, potentially bringing on one of our existing credit strategists into that leadership position so they can kind of represent the CSs. So at the moment there's five of us, eventually there'll be six.
Jack (1:22:23)
Nice. We've got another one here. Are you tagging metadata for ads?
Shahbaz (1:22:27)
This is super, got, super got zoomed into my face somehow. don't know how that happened.
Are we tagging metadata on meta ads? I mean, yeah, it goes into the ad name, right? So like we have a whole string of things that go into the ad name. The limit is 255 characters on the, ⁓ on Mac for file names. So we try not to go over 255. And we have to like.
shorten some of the fields to make sure it doesn't go over a certain number of characters, the total doesn't go over 255. Again, the kind of things you figure out as you break stuff, right? Because then you start to run reports and you're like, hey, why is my report broken? It's because the editor had a Mac.
Jack (1:23:08)
I was going to say that's the only sort of thing that you find out when you hit it, right? That the limit is 255 characters or whatever it was.
Shahbaz (1:23:17)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jack (1:23:21)
Cool, well we've reached the end of the questions. Shabazz, I want to say personally thank you, this was a really interesting call.
⁓ I'm super excited to see what you do with AdSprint and excited to see a little bit more about how this works for your brands because it seems like it's working quite well. I'd love to see how it works for agencies as well, how agencies can get in on this offering and potentially work with you at Venture Beyond. So I want to see some success stories come out of this because it seems like the perfect equation for doing great marketing.
Shahbaz (1:23:54)
Next time we're doing it in person because I'm going to come in wherever you are because it looks better than my place.
Jack (1:24:00)
No, no, no, we're going to play some of those arcade machines.
Shahbaz (1:24:03)
yeah, we can do that.
Jack (1:24:05)
Awesome. Thanks so much, everyone. Talk soon, guys.
Shahbaz (1:24:09)
Take care.
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