How HVMN's $70K Lost Led to Million-Dollar Partnerships with Huberman and Armstrong
Transcript
[00:00:01] Paul: Okay. All right. Great. We're live. We're back here again with another webinar. This is Paul here, CEO of archive Archive.com. We are building software to help influencer marketers. And on the side we want to add as much value, bring the community together and create awesome education. That's why we're doing these webinars. We're bringing some of our friends, some of our customers, folks in the community that we know are absolutely killer, really, really great at what they're doing, getting them live to unpack their strategies, their secrets, so that everyone can learn from their lessons and what's worked. Today, I'm super excited to do a webinar with one of my best friends and someone I've worked with for over eight years now. Michael Lee, also known as Mike, also known as Lee from Hvmn. We my Mike and I were super, super early at Hvmn. There were really five of us that helped build the company from the ground up Jeff, Mike Brant, Michael Lee, Chrissy. And so we went through tons of different products and it's just amazing to be here today with Mike seeing the success. Adrian just in the news all the time, crushing in retail, crushing on social. And so really been a breakout year for Hvmn, largely thanks to Mike Lee, CMO, who's behind a lot of the marketing, a lot of the growth and been just crushing it over there. So Mike Lee actually came on as a designer. So I was an engineer. He was a designer, and we both learned a lot, took on a lot of different roles at the startup that was, you know, Hvmn back in the day, which is now a real big, solid company. And then Mike Lee's in charge of. All things marketing, all things ecom, influencer partnerships, and all of that stuff. Super excited to chat Mycli excited to talk about some painful lessons, but also a lot of the great work you've been doing at Hvmn. So welcome.
[00:01:53] Michael Lee: No, absolutely. Thank you a lot for having me as well. Yeah. I mean, we probably have a share, a lot of shared experience and some of the painful painful lessons, but no super excited. I think we're obviously like a customer of archive. It's been awesome to use your product as well. I mean, we use it every single day. We actually used to have full time employees that are tracking you know, links of, of reels and reels are potentially a little bit easier, but like stories, you know, stories actually go away in 24 hours. So it really amazing to see how much progress you've made. Archive. Some of the new features that you guys are working out on are incredible as well. And yeah, really good work to you guys on product there too.
[00:02:33] Paul: Yeah, this is great. Before we kick off a little nostalgia, you remember when we launched the first version of the ketone page back when it was the perfume like bottle? So I was on the engineering side. Michael was on the design side, and I was still coding back then. Michael was still using Figma back then. I don't know if you still know what that program is now that you have a big fancy title. But for three weeks, Mike Lee and I would go into this conference room in our office from literally 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., 11 p.m. every day, including the weekends. And we were just like, grinding. It was an awesome experience. We got a lot of work done. And yeah, just fun to chat about some of the success after just a lot of grinding together. That was like an epic little sprint. So anyway we've got an awesome agenda today. We're going to talk about what it was like when Hvmn was spending a ton on paid social over 95%. And what happened with iOS 14.5 and the attribution changes? As Hvmn was testing out new channels, they burned about 70 K on their first podcast channel test. We're going to talk about that experience, what Mike Lee and team learned. And then we're going to go through the full reversal of how Mike Lee turned that into a massively successful channel, going from 70 K loss to over 165 podcast interviews. And at the highlight of that, working with some of the biggest podcasters, you know, celebrities really in the space Huberman and Armstrong. So stay tuned till the end to hear about how Mike Lee landed those partnerships. Obviously, we'll have a Q&A session at the end. So drop in questions in the LinkedIn comments. Throughout, we'll potentially answer some live, but we'll have plenty of time to go through some of these at the end. And before we start on to our regular programming curious to hear Mike Lee, before we, you know, again, jump in anything top of mind that's been keeping you up at night over the past week?
[00:04:30] Michael Lee: It's actually the same stuff. It's really fun to to be able to share our learnings. And it's it's so funny how cyclical these learnings can actually be because it's it's such an easy hole to get right back into. I think Paul just mentioned it, but we're at a point where 95% saturated in terms of marketing spend into paid social. And, you know, it's so easy for even going through those learning lessons to get back to a situation where you're creeping back into it. And yeah, just going through this was just a great another refresher of it's a it's a hard problem to solve.
[00:05:04] Paul: Cool. So before we jump in to talk about channel mix and all that good stuff for the maybe few folks listening that have not heard of ketone IQ this year what's hvmn what's ketone IQ? Give us a rundown of the brand, the products.
[00:05:18] Michael Lee: Awesome, awesome. So we actually purchased ketone com. So that's going to launch in May 1st. You heard it here first. But here's like two of the bottles that I drank today. We actually sell ketones in a bottle. And so normally our bodies we're all producing ketones. But we produce very little ketones as long as we're eating carbohydrates, which I'm sure we're all doing. If you ate bread in the last 24 hours or any carbs, then you're going to be producing very low levels of ketones. And so what we ended up doing is producing ketones outside of human body, inside of a laboratory, and at first, and figuring out how to mass manufacture that to a point where it can be cost effective. We have a $6 million contract with the United States military, and we are serving ketones to the world's best athletes. And now also we're serving ketones to everyone else. And hopefully working towards a journey where it's ketones will be as ubiquitous as electrolytes or probiotics. We think it's going to be incredible journey. We're constantly investing into clinical science and studies as well, and we're excited to see where it's going.
[00:06:24] Paul: And we're both ketones up for this webinar. So should be good. All right. So how is iOS 14. How was 95% paid social spend? I'm just curious what made you want to change? Was it the attribution issues? That, you know, threw a wrench and everything? Or were you thinking about diversifying even before then when you noticed you were spending a lot on Facebook and Meta?
[00:06:47] Michael Lee: It's actually a really good question. The one problem you don't have when you're 95% saturated with paid social is attribution. And so you know where all of your customer acquisition is coming from. It's actually when you start stacking on many different channels where attribution becomes harder and harder to, to, to figure out. But yeah, yeah, basically we were spending almost entirely all of our budget on, on paid social and we were already seeing some, some level of a decline. It, you know, we had no control over the CPMs. And so when the market gets incredibly saturated, CPMs go up. And that makes incredibly huge influxes in the overall business. And, you know, if you're you're one channel and it basically determines your entire destiny as a company. Right? And that's not what you want to do. So even before iOS 14 came out, that's when we first did our first channel test into podcast, and we put 70 K into it. I'll tell you guys a little bit more about what actual ROI we got from it. But you know, the test did horribly. And so we pretty much lost all that money. And it scared us in a sense. And it made us think for a while that like, podcasts, couldn't be a successful channel, even though we knew that, you know, other companies were having some level of success in it.
[00:08:05] Michael Lee: So hopefully, you know, the Learn Forward that I could share here is we lost 70 K. That was the first test. That's a lot of money especially at our time and our size of the company. But the amount that we learned through that hopefully I can share a little bit. And so a lot of people here can avoid some of those landmines. But it was when I was 14 happened. And Yeah. If you're a brand or you're an agency, you probably know a little bit of what might have happened. But you know, targeting became a lot harder. Attribution. Attribution became harder. Again, that wasn't as as much of a effect, but at the very least, the attribution that within meta or I guess, Facebook at the time became more inaccurate. And so, like our cacs were, were displaying as much more than it probably would have been, but it was still definitely higher. But all in all, we were hemorrhaging money. And so we, we were at a point in which we needed to make a very big decision in order to not just save overall performance, but in this case, the company. And so. Yeah.
[00:09:08] Paul: And, and and back then we were health CPG purely, you know, DTC on e-commerce and Amazon. Right, right. Facebook ads were clearly spending too much. What was on the docket for test partnerships, other channels. How did you land partnerships as the big bet or the big investment to go, you know, test? Maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe there were a few others.
[00:09:32] Michael Lee: Yeah. So I mean, it was pretty much like an incredible exodus, right? Like everyone at the time was thinking the same exact thing. What's the next channel? So we need to invest into is it connected? Tv is a linear TV, is it ambassadors? Ambassadors was kind of like the talk, the huge talk amongst all of the the growth marketers. You know, ambassadors in a lot of senses could be a very, very cost effective way of improving growth. But we also saw that although it could be interesting in that sense, we we wanted to try something different. I think we had an angle of novelty. We were coming out with a product that truly was never like introduced to the consumers before. And also we just nailed this, like $6 million contract, United States military. And so there's this enormous amount of social proof and proof that we could talk about. But So we we definitely wanted to think about podcasts. And when we thought about podcasts in the past as a channel, it was mainly on ad buying and ad reads and what we were, what we were not looking at at that time, which we found that was a huge area of success in the future, was getting onto those guest interviews, actually going onto the podcast themselves. You know, getting Michael Brandt, our CEO, or Doctor Mansoor, our research lead, who managed the $6 million contract, to talk about some of those things and educate the host that we later bought ad reads from for, you know, educate these hosts about our product and so that they could speak about it themselves in a way that we wouldn't be able to enable them if we just wrote them a script. And so some really interesting things there. But also just core efficiency that really improves when you get a, you know, you get a one hour free ad which is in the form of a guest interview.
[00:11:22] Paul: Yeah, 100%. Great. So, so this test that you ran, 70 K, $600 ROI, that's 0.010 was painful. What what happened? What was your expectation and what happened?
[00:11:39] Michael Lee: Yeah. I mean, you know, obviously expectation going into this is that, like, you can simply just buy ad reads from podcasts or work with an agency that does that and magically get the level of ROI and performance that some of these other brands are telling us about. And, you know, simply not true. And not going to call out the agency here because I don't think it's productive. I think what what's interesting, more that's more productive to learn from is potentially what I think the pitfalls is for working with an agency that's working within building up podcast channels for brands. Yeah, agencies aren't going to really understand everything that's coming, going on inside the company. They're not going to understand all the very unique chess pieces that you have in the company. That could be very valuable in securing guest interviews. And so for them, you know, it was a lot of. Dynamically inserted advertisements. It was a lot of. Pre-rolls instead of mid-rolls for podcasts, there's zero conversation or the level of education that's required near zero level of education required for a host to be successful. And the script itself. I think the biggest learning lesson for us, look, scripts work for some brands, but scripts are lame. You know, podcast hosts don't want to read them when they do read them. It's very evident to the consumers that they're reading directly off the script. And if you're tuning into a podcast and it's so easy, it's so easy for someone to just skip and ad, it makes a big difference for the person that you trust as a source of information, to also get the feeling that they're genuinely invested in this product that they're advertising about, because they are, they only usually take around like five, six brands at a time. And talk about their personal experience. And that personal experience is much more valuable than whatever that you can put into, you know, hiring a writer and writing a script.
[00:13:45] Paul: Yeah. And especially for the bigger ones. Right. Just like jamming that ad in right has not performed for you guys versus, hey, this is actually just part of the conversation. You've got a host that you're listening to because you literally like to hear them talk. You know, you like to hear them talk to other guests. So it's kind of, in hindsight, pretty obvious that the ad's going to work better if they're literally just talking like they are doing on the rest of the podcast. Totally. You kind of named it a couple different things podcasts, partnerships. When you think about different channels in the business, in the industry, what you guys are doing here is it is it podcasts, is it partnerships? Is it a mix? Do you guys have like this? Are you the only one that calls it that, or have you seen some standardized language or classification? Curious to get a take there. And also what you think is the difference between what you're doing with podcasts and partnerships versus traditional influencer marketing?
[00:14:42] Michael Lee: Yeah. No, absolutely. It's a good question. I think there's a lot of like ways that people are naming it. And, you know, we have our own system, especially because it's built in-house and because we saw the level of success from almost immediately from when we brought it from agency to in-house. We have like our own structure of, of naming things, of underwriting things of, of all those like type of systems. And so but but it all comes in like. At the top. There's partnerships and there's multitude of different types of partnerships where we're going to be talking about a lot on this call, you know, in this webinar is is podcast specifically, but we have, you know, all the other traditional partnerships that you can think about. We have partnership advisors as well, where we when we try to broach a new type of partnerships program, you know, we talk a little about it in actual actionable detail here. But yeah, we we do the traditional stuff. We're not just doing like podcasts. We have influencers, we have, you know, ambassadors. We have the different types of core foundational things that are also comprised in larger partnerships programs. But yeah, we do we do treat them quite separately.
[00:15:53] Paul: So it's basically I would say the way you guys are doing it now is instead of treating podcast as a almost direct response media buying thing where you're just like sending, you know, sending a script, sending an ad, and then have that get distributed on, on the podcast, you're saying, hey, for all of these meaningful things, if we don't treat it as a partnership, it's not going to perform. So we have to round up every podcast that's basically like a integrated collaboration, integrated relationship where we're going to educate them. We're going to sit down with them, tell them about the product, build the relationship so that when we do deploy ads on their platform, we're going to get better deals, we're going to get better reads, and overall, it's going to perform a lot better.
[00:16:34] Michael Lee: Right? That's a great summary of it. You know, very different from like meta. Right. Meta. You have, you know, let's just say like metaphorically, you have like little slide bars. You could spend infinitely as you want and very different. And well, it's it's a black box algorithm. They'll charge you whatever they think it's worth. And so very different for, for podcasts where you're doing single handed, one on one negotiations a lot of the times to, to. Work towards getting the level of underwriting that's going to be appropriate for your brand. And so it's definitely a different type of scale, but there's so much more that you can get from these types of relationships because it's a relationship and it's not it's not specifically a black box tool. But yeah, it's a good summary.
[00:17:19] Paul: Cool, cool.
[00:17:20] Paul: And talk a little bit more about what the. Initial idea of bringing that in-house looked like. What made you think you could succeed? Did you have, like, people on the team that you were like, hey, go work on the podcast stuff now, or did you have to do it yourself? Build a team from scratch? What was version one of the in-house team that let you kick off? What we're about to see was a really, really awesome turnaround.
[00:17:47] Paul: For the channel.
[00:17:48] Michael Lee: Question. I mean, obviously, you know, right now we're a whole different size brand. We have a fantastic team. We have some killer folks coming from a lot of different backgrounds. But yeah, once you lose 70 K and your initial thing, you're not going to get another 70 K budget, right? And so there was a lot of proving proving the channel could work. And at the time, we're such a small company, maybe we had eight people in the company. It became like my initiative to, like, make this work. And so yeah, I think we had some interesting ways to engineer, like, a path of success. You know, there's a lot of podcasts is a very interesting universe. Getting onto a podcast and getting a guest feature is is very difficult. An agency simply can't do it the way I don't think as efficiently as I think an in-house team can. And so what we ended up doing at first is acknowledging that we truly do not understand this channel, how it works, how to get to the outcome that we wanted to reach. And so one of my first things that we did okay, great.
[00:18:52] Michael Lee: We lost 70 K. We ended up hiring. We created this new program called Partnership Advisors. And so we were paying, you know, folks, folks that were actual hosts of successful podcasts. I think this is really interesting. Because podcast hosts really know how other podcast hosts think. And so what, a couple of really interesting things happened here. Like one, these advisors became the first couple of podcasts that we've guest featured on, and two, they ended up giving us intros that allowed us with a very high percentage of success to get additional guest interviews. Because let's say you're a podcast host, podcast host, no other podcast hosts. They have a much different level of leverage and Rolodex than than I or I have. And, you know, maybe, maybe a agency has Rolodex, but you definitely don't have the influence. And the leverage that a podcast host has. And so they they were able to seed probably the first 30 guest interviews, which was amazing because later on we'll talk about this, this more. But these became instrumental to how we ended up getting the huberman's of the world and the Lance Armstrong's.
[00:20:08] Paul: Yeah. Super cool. 165 podcast is a lot, a lot of time. And they're usually one hour. But we know that there's a lot of prep, you know, both for Mike Brandt, who was on the on the shows and had to get ready, had to prep, but also with you and your team. So, you know, call it five hours of team work per podcast. We're talking about 750 hours. How did you justify that time, especially as things were ramping up? And I'm sure the first five, the first ten were probably not breakout successes. So how did you you know, what was that conversation like with, again, the CEO, like, hey, this is a good use of your time. Was a conversation with, you know, yourself as well. It's like, hey, I actually want to go spend 50 hours this week jamming on these podcasts that are, you know, starting off, probably being on the smaller side. I don't think the first one was Huberman. So you really built up that, that, that, that volume over time and built up the quality over time.
[00:21:05] Michael Lee: Yeah. And obviously everyone that's going to try to maybe replicate this playbook or in completely different positions. But, you know, we were in a position of like do or die. And so like luckily I had very willing participants and I think it's actually a good thing that you start you don't get your, you know, if you have willing participants if or if that participant is yourself for whatever reason you know, you don't put them on Andrew Huberman or any of these giant podcasts as their first podcast. One. It's not going to happen, right? It is it is definitely a ladder. And you have to climb each rung and prove out that you can be on the bigger podcast. And, you know, there's all these tools out there. You can check out Onyx, you can check out Magellan might be butchering that, but there are ways to understand how many listeners each podcast has, right? Because it's not nearly as transparent as other things I can tell. You know, if if a influencer posts a real how many views that has and great, I can understand what type of expectations I can have for any episode. But that doesn't exist in the level in that sense of podcast, right? You get to see how many ratings and reviews a podcast has been given, but you don't really understand. Anyways long story short, you're probably going to start you know, guesting on podcasts with very little active listeners and participants and very much level your way up all day to the point where you're you're able to have conversations with much bigger podcasts where they might have 300,000 active listeners per episode, which obviously makes a tremendous difference.
[00:22:39] Paul: Awesome.
[00:22:40] Paul: So some epic guests. We've got a lot of famous people on here, not even the two big ones. Right? Dave Asprey is a big one. Anyone in health and wellness will see them. Tell us a little bit more about the process.
[00:22:55] Paul: Yeah.
[00:22:55] Michael Lee: So actually if you can go back to the other page. Yeah, there's definitely some, some other things missing here. But you see some names here. Yeah. Well, yeah.
[00:23:04] Paul: Humans 150 missing from here.
[00:23:06] Paul: Actually, there's.
[00:23:08] Michael Lee: A lot.
[00:23:08] Paul: A lot of.
[00:23:09] Michael Lee: Names missing. And so when you see this, like roster, you're like, oh, man. They definitely, like, caught all the Pokemon here. But that's that's not the case. Right. Like it was like the it was only until like the first 30 podcast before we got our first rare Pokemon. Right. Yeah. Just to use the metaphor here, like it took us many 30 different podcasts to guest on before we earned, like the level of Proof, social proof and build a one pager where we can get on Ben Greenfield. It took us maybe another 60 more partnerships before we ended up on Max Lugavere. Rich roll is really interesting where we ourselves, as in like, Michael Brandt or Doctor Mansoor weren't actually the guests that were on Rich roll. But because we have really amazing athletes that are breaking world records that are you know, qualifying for the Olympics ritual actually talked to several of our partners that we ended up getting into different podcasts. And so, like, you could see, like the, the bifurcation of all of how much you can use, use partnerships to facilitate more partnerships. Right? So it doesn't at a certain point, it doesn't have to be just, you know, your two participants. It could be other partners going on, other partners podcasts. And you're creating a huge well of opportunities there. But for any, any, you know, questions there a lot of people don't know this, but Andrew Huberman was like our 117th, like partner in podcast partner. And so it takes a lot to, you know our CEO is has a really funny metaphor. It's like it takes a lot of arrows to take down the elephant. And and so, yeah, just I think it's just wanted to, to say that, like, we have really cool people, but it wasn't day one. It's a constant grind to get there. If you could afford to, to stay alive during that grind.
[00:25:02] Paul: Yeah. And I was going to ask about scaling the channel. Right. Once you've done a partnership with Max, for example, how do you, you know, how do you scale that? It's not like Facebook ads where you can drag the slider. It's a little bit harder. Obviously you can keep going with the ad reads, but I'm sure there's diminishing returns and you have to diversify. You can always come back new products, new announcements, all that stuff. But actually just being able to bring on different guests to talk to the podcast is a really great way to, you know, double, triple, quadruple and massively scale, especially now that you've got the credibility, you've got the relationships with all of these incredibly well connected, amazing people in the space. You can now have your athletes, like you mentioned, go on some of these podcasts do a few. So really, really great way to just connect everything together. Get the athlete partners talking to the, you know, podcast partners and having fun on a podcast. And then of course, drinking some ketones and talking about ketones along the way.
[00:25:58] Paul: Exactly. Cool.
[00:26:01] Paul: Let's talk about the process. How did it happen?
[00:26:05] Paul: Yeah.
[00:26:05] Michael Lee: So we talked about that a little bit. We, you know, starting in house it takes an operator that is truly trying to make this happen, but here's like a little bit of a shortcut. Which is find other hosts that can help you, advise you on how to build this program, and most importantly, can intro you to podcasts to very successfully get, you know, willing participants that are that are going to do well. To be guest featured on other people's podcasts. So that's how we started. That's, you know, so you're.
[00:26:44] Paul: You're you're most so you're most helpful. People here were not so much people in the industry that maybe you would share learnings with like, hey, you know, let's go talk to our friends at other CPG companies. Your allies and most helpful people were actually some of these hosts that you maybe had worked with in the past or hadn't worked with yet, but they could help you navigate across like, their industry and their world.
[00:27:06] Michael Lee: That's exactly it. That's exactly it. I mean, obviously, you know, create the right incentives, find the the right hosts that really will understand your product and champion it and can champion it to other hosts. But that's exactly it. Like the the resources that were the most helpful for getting this stood up was not other people you know, not agencies or other companies. Later it became that, you know, like we were able to rolodexes, right. Like, hey, your company has been on like, you know, 50 guest interviews. We've been on this many like, hey, how about we trade some, some, some interview intros? But at the start, for us you know, you might be a different size company, but getting some advisors that are specifically hosts were was an instrumental strategy for us.
[00:27:52] Paul: Yeah.
[00:27:53] Paul: And talking about incentives. What do these hosts want? They want money. They want equity. They want clout. They want ketones.
[00:28:01] Paul: Yeah.
[00:28:02] Michael Lee: That's a really good question. I think there's a few things. I think all hosts want a story. They they want, you know, they have a constant appetite and need to create episodes. And so if you have a really cool story, they obviously want to have you as a guest interview on their podcast. I mean, that's they're living they are constantly needing to make content, right? It's no different from anything else except for a lot of podcast hosts. They actually need a guest in order to operate their business. And so that's that's a that's a big thing. It's, you know, somewhat. Yeah, it's a requirement for them. The other thing is, yeah, of course you do need to pay them. That's why we called it a partnership advisory program. And so we are paying them for successful interviews. We're incentivizing that outcome. And so relationship being able to have the right conversations, being able to underwrite what is the right amount to pay for a an opportunity and or intro to an opportunity. You know, you'll have to do that exercise. But just knowing that that is probably going to be your highest success rate of securing a guest interview it's good to know.
[00:29:14] Paul: And that's super important because there's a limited pool of podcasts you can go on. So if you're sending 50 crappy cold emails every week, that's actually going to reduce your chances, right? So if you can get a better converting intro, that's huge. Because otherwise you otherwise you're every every failed intro basically drops your chances even lower.
[00:29:38] Paul: One of the first.
[00:29:39] Michael Lee: Conversations that I've had with a partnership adviser was talking about the hilarity of how many companies inbound them with no, like, you know, generous frame. But just to ask, hey, can you put us on your podcast? The look, they're not looking at your messages. They're adding that to archiving it or spamming it or etc. just imagine these hosts getting a plethora of these inbounds all the time. And unless your subject line says we're athletic greens like they're not going to they're not going to hop on a call. Right. And so like if you are a smaller, less well known company you know, you have less social proof to immediately leverage, then make sure that when you're. Reaching out to them. You were putting your your frame in an incredibly generous frame, right? You are not. Your first request isn't taking value from them. It's giving them value.
[00:30:39] Paul: Awesome. I want to talk about one more tactic before we talk about the heavy hitters, the big boys. You're talking about buying baked in ads from hosts that you've won earn positions on. Tell us a little bit more about that, that strategy. Right. There's the education, there's the coming on the podcast and then there's the media spend.
[00:31:00] Michael Lee: Yeah. Okay. Paul, you're a host, right? Let's, let's let's say you started a really successful podcast or even like a.
[00:31:06] Paul: Webinar series.
[00:31:07] Michael Lee: Or a webinar series. If I said, like, hey, put me on your podcast. And it's probably you're not going to even look at it. Right? But like, if I say, hey, put me on your podcast and I'd love to have this conversation about like, you know, you seem like the right person. We'd also love to buy a package of ad reads to support your podcast. And we're on this mission to, to educate everyone in the world about this incredible novel technology. That's a very different conversation, right? Like, I'm number.
[00:31:39] Paul: Two is a lot better.
[00:31:40] Michael Lee: Number two is a lot better. Number two is like ten times better. And so and and hey, we want to bring you in as an advisor, right? Like, let me treat you out for dinner. Let me try to understand, you know, what's in your head and how podcast hosts think. And let me pay you for your time because your time is extremely valuable. And so and, yeah, look, you're going to get way further than paying an agency, but it's framed that conversation in a very different way, and you're going to get an incredibly different result.
[00:32:13] Paul: That's great. I'll make sure to send you an invoice and let me know where you're taking me out to dinner after this webinar. But no, I totally I hear you there. Yeah. Again, because it's all about the incentives, right? Everybody wants to get it. But these people are looking for consistent income. It's the same thing with influencers, right? If you can be like, hey, look, we want a little bit of the free sauce, right? But on the other hand, we're here with some real media spend. We're willing to commit back to you. We're willing to be a big partner there. That obviously aligns super well. And then again, the magic happens when you start spending that ad budget on the podcast. You've been organically the host, you know, in men's case and the ketone case drinks ketone IQ all the time. And so when they are doing the ad reads, it's just so much more authentic, so much more natural, and you're going to get way better return. So it's really just a win win win at the end of the day, just like a lot of things, it's all about, I think, doing it seriously and actually taking the time to go and educate each person and spending time with each person versus trying to do it in bulk too fast and then dropping the ball.
[00:33:22] Paul: Totally.
[00:33:22] Michael Lee: You gotta you gotta create a way. Yeah, your first strategy is not going to be the scalable strategy. Your first strategy is going to be really qualifying the the way. Yeah, a system that could be scaled eventually with some modifications. Yeah. It's a good way to put it.
[00:33:39] Paul: Perfect.
[00:33:40] Paul: All right. So the big boys, big boy number one, Mr. Lance Armstrong, I think a lot of people have heard of him. Tell us a little bit about the really, really interesting story of how you're able to strike that deal and lock him in as a partner.
[00:33:58] Michael Lee: Yeah. No, this is really funny. And yeah, for a lot of the people that you know, may end up reaching out to Lance's team because their podcast is incredibly good. And yeah, it's the first. They have an incredibly good manager on their team, too. Yeah. The first couple of times I asked to, for us to be on their podcast and also by ad reads Do the answer was no. Again, like a lot of these podcast hosts, they have their 5 or 6 brands that they're, they're, you know, talking about you don't have infinite space. It's not it's not meta or TikTok. You have you have a pre-roll and you have a number of brands that you could advertise in your pre-roll. You have a number of brands that you can advertise on your mid-rolls, and you have a number of brands that you could do that for your, your your, your end rolls. I don't know what they're called because we never buy them, but
[00:34:53] Paul: Good tip.
[00:34:54] Paul: Don't buy the end rolls. Everybody's gone.
[00:34:57] Michael Lee: Don't buy the rolls or whatever they're called. But yeah, we we actually got denied multiple times and they're like, hey. Go talk to us next year. And and this was a very expensive opportunity for us. And so but but we, we kept we kept hitting them with many different angles. It wasn't just our CEO or our co-founders. We ended up getting, you know, a whole crowd of, I don't remember, like, 20, 30 different hosts banging on Lance Armstrong's door and really just trying to try to, like, inch open this door and so that we can get some sort of way of having a larger conversation. And and of course, like, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't in this case. So at that time, there was mass layoffs happening and their partners coupled their partners canceled, including including their lead sponsor. And so you know, there was there was a interesting little moment there, like fork in the road for us, right? Like, do we do we interpret that signal as like, oh, shit, let's let's actually not work with them as well. It seems like all these other brands are running for running into the forest here. Or or do we double down? And so very interesting. A lot of these things, like your your biggest opportunities come and come in disguises. And so when this actually happened, it was a very interesting frame of conversation.
[00:36:23] Michael Lee: Not only did their lead sponsor exit, but a few other people. And so like, this made it really interesting. Not on the negotiation front, but for the relationship building front. It's like, hey, Lance, we're not actually just going to just come in as your low level sponsor. Actually, we want to take the head position here as lead sponsor, even though that we've heard that people are trying to get off of podcasts. And because we had our way of underwriting this, we were able to understand that this was a position that we could take successfully because we knew we had Michael Brandt, who was a triathlete who's a Boston marathoner can talk about this stuff. We knew that. Lance. Absolutely loved their product, and he was drinking this stuff, like, all the time, more and more than I was or anyone else in the company. And so we knew that this it would be a different type of partnership than the other partnerships that he had. And the, the window for, for success was, was definitely there. And so we doubled down on it. Maybe I could lost my job if this, this didn't go well, but fortunately it did. And we're still working with Lance today. We're the lead sponsor again for the third year in a row. And so super excited.
[00:37:34] Paul: Yeah.
[00:37:34] Paul: That's huge. Obviously a really big spend to do this on a podcast like that. And you don't get results, at least all of the results. You don't get all of the results for some time. Right. You May the 70th K bet, then go to, well, you've had some successes and then you're out here about to make a really, really big bet. That's scary, right? On Facebook ads, you can gradually ramp it up, build up the comfort level. But here you're like, hey, we got some big bullets of cash. Like, should we spend them? How do you build the confidence to deploy? And as we know, some of these big bets are actually some of the ones that pay the greatest return. But it is hard when you're getting those contracts and you're seeing those numbers and you're like, yo, we really about to make a wire that big. Tell us about that process. I mean, you talked a little bit about underwriting it, and there's obviously a little bit of, you know, Google Sheets math going behind it and some evidence, but a lot of it's still a little bit of a gamble.
[00:38:31] Michael Lee: Yeah, I know it does feel like that. It does at some sort of point, feel like you're somewhat of a degenerate gambler, but.
[00:38:39] Michael Lee: Yeah, I don't know. That's probably, I'm sure like all ad buyers and meta feel that way too. And so at, you know, ad buying and partnerships all feel that that way. But like, you know, you understand the game at a certain point. Just performance flows in the path of least resistance. And it's up to like, you know, people to make the best decisions on like you know, you could either see that when you go through this type of partnership, there's less resistance and better performance, or you can ignore that signal and you can continue to make the the, you know, wrong mistake multiple times. But we knew at a certain point that Lance was really interesting because he wasn't our first cycling based partner. Right. Like we placed several bets across the map. We saw, like where we were getting the best performance and customers were most willing to explore a very new novel technology. And cyclist was that group cyclist pay ten, $15,000 for their bicycle. And they're constantly thinking of, like, object objective figures around their numbers, their VO2 max, their this and that. They're paying $80 for a screw that's like weighs 30% less than another one. Cyclist like really care. And whenever we put a bet on cycling, it always worked for us. And so by the time we got to Lance Armstrong, it wasn't a question of if it was more of a question of how do we engineer this deal? To make sense. Exactly.
[00:40:05] Paul: And top three most successful podcasts of the year. How did it feel? How did it go?
[00:40:11] Michael Lee: It's always like the biggest point of of our year when the tour de France is happening and Lance covers the tour de France. Actually, I want to say more people tune in to Lance Armstrong's podcast called We Do. Then they might tune in to NBC or etc. to watch the tour de France. And so you know. It's it's incredible opportunity to for us, when we have identified that cycling was a key audience for us, that we we have one of the. Coolest chess pieces in in that that vertical.
[00:40:52] Paul: That's awesome. Yeah.
[00:40:53] Paul: Exciting times.
[00:40:54] Paul: All right.
[00:40:55] Paul: Another big podcaster, Mr. Huberman. Definitely one of the hottest podcasters. Everyone wants to work with him. Everyone wants to get a good deal. A nice little plug from Huberman. How did you make that happen?
[00:41:09] Michael Lee: Yeah, I want to get ahead of it here because I know anyone that's watching this. You're going to email me and ask me for his introduction? If you do, just know that, like, I get this email all the time. Okay. There's very little likelihood that But anyways.
[00:41:24] Paul: If you're an archive customer, you can email me and I will nudge Mike Lee to make that intro for you.
[00:41:28] Paul: I'm just kidding.
[00:41:31] Michael Lee: Yeah. No. Doctor Andrew Huberman. Look, there is some right, that we're incredibly smart, partnered with them very early on. And just like, you know, how
[00:41:45] Paul: I don't know.
[00:41:47] Michael Lee: Actor managers are able to snipe out like who they think the next rising star is like. You know, momentous props to them were able to snipe out. Doctor Andrew Huberman as like a growing, growing star. Right. Same for on it and Joe Rogan and so like, look, we were not that lucky like we were we were pretty late in the game. And so that's something like he's he's already became like a huge star in, in the podcast world. And so one thing that a lot of people don't understand look, every company has like, different types of commodities that they could trade for leverage. Right. And like for us, at the time, it was we had to pay money for for advisors. But like, you know, maybe you have a whole different circumstance. You have like a email newsletter that has like a million subscribers or you have like, you know, a platform yourself that you could trade as if it was a commodity for, for different things. But for Andrew Huberman, like what? We were able to do the same thing that we did for Lance is we took all the podcast hosts we had that had any level of a connection with either Andy Huberman or someone in his circle or his manager and Yeah, we bothered the heck out of them in a way where, you know, hopefully it was productive and effective. And I think it was since we won them. But it took. Many, many months. It took over a year to end up getting Andrew Huberman and from the beginning of the conversation to actually. Getting him as a partner to that just took six months, literally just from talking to him and his his person. So it took us six months to get into conversation after we, you know, we've gone over 100 different partners in the podcast category. And then it took us six months after you even have a conversation with him to close the deal.
[00:43:37] Paul: Yeah, that is relentless work. I mean, a lot of people would give up after two, three intros, but you literally were like, hey, you know, we have our eyes on the top, you know, targets, and we're going to keep working on them for a year. And again, that army of hosts and partners, partnership advisors built, we were able to tap into that to just kind of like get another intro every week in Huberman's inbox that he would read and see. And at some point he was probably like, damn these HBM, these ketone people are just everywhere. Like, let me finally talk to them. And it worked, right?
[00:44:10] Paul: Yeah. So this is.
[00:44:11] Michael Lee: Like an interesting like little chart here for people that are not actually familiar with the podcast landscape. There is a long tail performance and that's, that's like the only thing I'm trying to share here. You know, obviously we censored out some of the other things. We're not trying to show you our channel mix or anything like that, but when when when Andrew Huberman is active, he's our number one response of, like, how they've heard about us in the company and, you know, our. Our acquisition funnel is incredibly diverse, right? Even when Andrew Huberman is is a partner of ours. And so when he is, he's definitely like top dog, always on the top of the charts of our post purchase survey. But even when he's not, even though, you know even let's say we're not active with them for six months, we still have 8% of our new customers telling us that they found us, that they heard about us through his podcast. And that's something to really interestingly take away. And so like, I think the the message here is like there's all sorts of different ads that you could buy on on podcasts, try to stick to pre-roll and mid-roll. If you can get mid-roll, go for Mid-roll. If you can go for the first position on Mid-roll, go for the first position on Mid-roll and stay away from dynamically inserted ads. If they don't perform the same way because you are paying for that instance for it to be shown and it'll never be shown again after your budget's up. But because, you know, these episodes are on the internet forever and the biggest hosts only get bigger. A lot of people are still tuning in to their older episodes, and it's constantly becoming a source for long tail performance.
[00:45:52] Paul: Amazing, awesome value. This is really, really great. We have about 4 to 5 minutes left for questions. And then we're going to wrap up. We have a couple of questions from the audience I'm going to run through. Thanks again, Mike Lee for sharing a lot of this awesome success. This really, really great playbook. Tremendous value here. Feel free to drop in some more questions. And I'm going to get going with some of the ones we have. Someone asked, how important is it to create podcast clips, and do you usually create them as the brand, or do you rely on the host to create them?
[00:46:27] Michael Lee: Very good question. Both. And so podcast hosts will almost always create a clip. Because they have an Instagram and so like, you know, it it's it's just. How much can you distribute, how many impressions that you can make because that's how they, they create value for, for other brands. Right. And so if you get someone to guest feature on their platform, they will create clips. Not all the time are they going to create the same clip that you want them to create. And so you do both. We in almost every single instance, we at least try to test the clip that they created as a whitelisted ad or a branded ad. And of course, also we create our own and I think like take both approaches. And when you create your own a lot of world of possibilities, you can create mash ups you know, imagine multiple different hosts talking about it. And so, yes, you definitely want to do both.
[00:47:28] Paul: Great. Another quick question. We try to create deals when we work with podcast hosts. What kind of offers have you seen work best?
[00:47:38] Paul: Yeah. This is a.
[00:47:41] Michael Lee: Lot of interesting learnings there. We've decided for attribution sake for a lot of reasons, that. We wouldn't offer our podcast hosts. A promotion that is unique and better than anything else that we give to someone else. And and.
[00:48:06] Paul: It's for a few.
[00:48:07] Michael Lee: Different reasons, but basically it does break your attribution funnel. And Any of the codes that you share that is the best will be shared with everyone, regardless of where it's coming from. And so our good.
[00:48:28] Paul: Friends at honey make that really easy.
[00:48:30] Paul: Yeah.
[00:48:34] Michael Lee: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, you'll you'll see this across a lot of senses. You'll be like, oh, man.
[00:48:40] Paul: That sounds like a really dope promo.
[00:48:42] Michael Lee: And when you're listening to an ad and then you go on their website and it's like, oh, what? Dude, this is the same exact problem. It doesn't matter. Who cares? Like people that listen to podcasts really want to attribute their sales to the podcast host. And so you will not have a problem with like people saying, hey, in your post-purchase survey, I heard about this from Andrew Huberman. I heard about this from my favorite podcaster, basically. And yeah, so for a few different reasons, it's up to you. But I would say give them the same best promo that you provide to everyone. Have one promo that just works for everyone, because whatever promo that is the best, if it's not shared amongst everyone else, will be the dominant promo and it's just going to be distributed all over the internet.
[00:49:24] Paul: Gotcha.
[00:49:25] Paul: Another question here with X supporting long form and a lot of podcasters posting their videos on X, where do you think the most important platforms are for podcasts and long form discussions next year?
[00:49:37] Paul: Yeah.
[00:49:38] Michael Lee: Interesting. Long form. When I think about long form, I always think about like, well, you know, Apple podcast, Spotify podcast. Youtube is very interesting. Always comes down to like a simulcast type of situation. And Their their view through times are insane. People don't watch podcasts necessarily, just for entertainment. They're really trying to learn something. And so you know, they're really listening to like 50, 80% of this podcast. That could be an hour long. And I think X is really interesting. It could be an arbitrage. They're CPMs are at an all time low, and they're obviously really hungry to bring brands in. They have some amazing incentives. We're definitely looking into to X, but
[00:50:27] Paul: Yeah, I think.
[00:50:29] Michael Lee: Actually, I don't want to share the beans of where we're exactly trying to mix.
[00:50:33] Paul: Our channels. Right.
[00:50:34] Paul: That's the secret.
[00:50:34] Paul: Sauce.
[00:50:37] Paul: Great. One. Let's see. I'm gonna do one more question from the mix. This is an interesting one. When you think about redistributing content and increasing distribution for some of your best podcasts and clips, you talked about whitelisting. Do you guys spend a lot of money on those? How do you spend more to get more distribution on those clips?
[00:51:00] Paul: Okay, so.
[00:51:01] Michael Lee: It's a really good question. And it's working back from the same exact fundamental of why. A ad read from a host that knows about the product and, speaking from their personal experience, will perform better than a script, right? So it's working from that exact same fundamental. And so, you know, white listing in a lot of senses. What's the difference? Right. The difference is the little circle profile photo in the top left corner of the ad either has the face of the partner or the logo of your brand, and the same fundamentals always exist. And so whether it costs the same amount to distribute and in the case if it does, it's always better to whitelist because people want to know that it's it's coming from their favorite person. So yeah, we, we do white list a lot. I think white listing is a huge part of our success and our performance, especially when trying to connect that to the performance of a host and a guest feature or etc..
[00:52:04] Paul: Awesome.
[00:52:05] Paul: Amazing. Thank you so much, Mike. This was great. Really appreciate you taking the time. We're going to wrap up here with a couple quick updates. Again, thank you so much. This was really amazing. Where can people follow you? Where can people find out about Hvmn to learn more?
[00:52:21] Michael Lee: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, this is my first webinar. So if you have any feedback, any thoughts, go ahead and connect with me on LinkedIn and message me. But yeah, I think that's a that's a good way to start. I'm not super active on my, my social media. But I, I do check my LinkedIn every single 90 days, so.
[00:52:40] Paul: That's pretty good if you want a chance. Yeah.
[00:52:42] Michael Lee: Anyways, feel free to connect with me. And super excited to connect with some of the community here.
[00:52:48] Paul: Awesome. Thanks again, Mike Lee. So we have two amazing webinars planned for May. Stay tuned. Follow us on LinkedIn and we'll be announcing those shortly. If you want to learn about archive that Mike Lee kindly shouted out as a great way to capture content track influencers, head over to archive.com/demo. We're super excited to walk any of you through the platform live. We can show you an amazing demo with your own content. We'd love for you to give it a shot. And we work with over 2000 brands now. A lot of happy customers, so hopefully you can potentially become one as well. We've got a QR code that you can scan if you want to get access to the deck, some of these great notes that Mike Lee put together. And we'll also do a recap post with some of these resources. So again, really, really appreciate your time. Mike Lee, this was great. I'll send you the invoice and let me know where you're taking me out to dinner for coming on the webinar. All right. Thanks, everyone.
[00:53:49] Paul: Bye bye. Cool.
