Episode 147

Scaling US Operations to +$100MM/Year with Gabriel Medeiros (VShred, Performance Golf)

About This Episode

In this episode of the Vturb podcast, João interviews Gabriel Medeiros — a Brazilian performance marketer who built his career in the United States and operated at the highest levels of acquisition.

Gabriel has led acquisition at companies like VShred, known for scaling massive VSL funnels, and currently serves as Acquisition Director at Performance Golf, another nine-figure business.

This conversation goes beyond tactics. It reveals how high-level operators think about leverage, structure, and scale — and where most people misallocate their attention.

The Real Game: Leverage Over Activity

One of the clearest patterns in Gabriel’s thinking is his focus on leverage.

He doesn’t try to improve everything. Instead, he isolates the variable that actually drives results and concentrates effort there. This reflects what João connects to first-principles thinking — an idea popularized by Elon Musk and discussed in the biography written by Walter Isaacson.

The principle is simple: break problems down to their core truths and rebuild from there.

In practice, this means ignoring noise. Most marketing activities produce marginal gains. The real growth comes from identifying the dominant constraint and pushing it aggressively.

Cold Traffic as the Core Engine

A major structural insight from the episode is how acquisition systems actually function.

Cold traffic is the engine. Everything else supports it.

Remarketing, for example, is often overvalued. Gabriel reframes it as a mechanism to “squeeze remaining juice” — useful for improving efficiency, but not capable of transforming a business. Google Shopping and native ads play similar roles, capturing intent or reinforcing exposure, but none replace the role of cold acquisition.

This is why companies like VShred focused almost obsessively on VSLs and cold traffic. Everything else was secondary.

The Illusion of “Cold” Audiences

At scale, the concept of cold traffic itself starts to break down.

Gabriel mentions that users were exposed to ads dozens of times — sometimes up to 60 impressions. This reveals a deeper dynamic: cold traffic becomes distributed remarketing.

People don’t convert from a single exposure. They convert after repeated contact, when timing and readiness align.

This shifts the strategic question from targeting to exposure frequency: how many times does someone need to see your message before acting?

Why VShred Dominated: Testing Volume

VShred’s advantage was not creative brilliance. It was operational volume.

They tested more ads than anyone else.

Their internal structure evolved to support this: faster production cycles, tighter collaboration between media buyers and editors, and constant iteration. The goal was not to find the perfect ad — it was to increase the number of attempts.

This aligns with a probabilistic model of growth. The more you test, the higher your chances of discovering high-performing variations.

The ICE Framework and Decision Clarity

During the conversation, João introduces the ICE framework (Impact, Confidence, Effort) as a way to prioritize decisions.

While Gabriel doesn’t explicitly rely on it, his thinking naturally aligns with it. He consistently prioritizes high-impact actions with clear expected outcomes, while avoiding low-leverage activities.

This becomes especially evident in the Performance Golf example. The team was optimizing campaigns based on CPA and ROAS, but the company actually made decisions based on Net Loss Per Trial. Once this misalignment was corrected, performance increased significantly — without changing campaigns.

This is a critical insight: many inefficiencies are not tactical, but conceptual.

Creative as the Primary Lever

Creative is treated not as messaging, but as a financial driver.

The first seconds of an ad determine attention. Attention influences CPC. CPC determines how much you can scale. A small change in creative can unlock exponential growth.

At VShred, even unconventional elements — like visually disruptive food scenes — were used to capture attention. These tactics may seem random, but they reflect a deeper principle: attention is the entry point to the entire system.

Authority and the Spokesperson Effect

Another major lever discussed is the spokesperson.

VShred’s success was heavily tied to Vince Sant, whose presence significantly increased conversion rates. Later, adding a trusted authority figure — a well-known doctor — further boosted performance.

This reinforces a key idea: trust can be imported.

Instead of building credibility solely through copy, associating with trusted figures accelerates the process.

This is a model used by companies like Guthy‑Renker, which João references. They consistently launch products with celebrities and authority figures, reducing friction from the start.

Product Neglect and the Limits of Performance

Despite its growth, VShred eventually faced decline — not because of acquisition, but because of product quality.

The company focused heavily on marketing optimization while neglecting the product experience. This led to negative reviews and declining trust.

This is where the contrast with companies like Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft becomes important. These companies prioritize product, which drives word-of-mouth and long-term growth.

Gabriel highlights that word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of marketing — but also the hardest to control.

Branding as a Performance Multiplier

The episode also touches on branding, often misunderstood in performance-driven environments.

Brand is not separate from performance. It reduces friction within it.

If your company has strong reviews, positive perception, and trust, your ads convert more easily. If not, acquisition becomes harder and more expensive.

João references Russell Brunson and his company ClickFunnels as an example of combining direct response with branding — something still rare in the market.

Other Episodes and References Mentioned

Throughout the conversation, João references other relevant content from the same ecosystem.

He mentions an episode with Brian Kurtz, known for his work in direct marketing and his involvement in the Titans of Direct Response mastermind. This reference reinforces the importance of long-term thinking in a space often dominated by short-term optimization.

Additionally, Gabriel mentions the The Diary Of A CEO, using it as an example of a mindset where mistakes are incentivized — reinforcing the idea that rapid testing and iteration drive progress.

Books Mentioned and Why They Matter

Two books are explicitly referenced in the conversation.

The first is the biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. This book is used to illustrate first-principles thinking — the ability to break problems down to fundamental truths and rebuild solutions from there.

The second is Overdeliver by Brian Kurtz. This book represents the long-game perspective in direct response, contrasting with the short-term optimization mindset that dominates much of the market.

Final Perspective

What this episode ultimately reveals is not a set of tactics, but a way of seeing.

Most people operate at the surface level — optimizing pieces, following trends, reacting to data.

High-level operators step back and ask: what actually drives the system?

From there, everything becomes clearer.

Cold traffic is the engine. Creative is the lever. Product is the foundation. Brand is the multiplier.

Everything else is secondary.

And the difference between average and exceptional performance lies in having the clarity — and discipline — to focus only on what truly matters.

Full Transcript

Timestamps are clickable — click any time badge to jump to that moment in the video.

00:01:40INTRODUCTION

Today, I’m going to talk with Gabriel Medeiros.

Guys, Gabriel is a bit of a different guest because he doesn’t know much about our Brazilian market.

He’s never run any offers here in Brazil, for example, and actually, most of the companies he’s worked for have been in the United States.

But don’t think, for even a moment, that he’s a beginner.

In fact, everyone, he has led the acquisition team at VShred, which for a long time had the biggest VSLs in the world, reaching two hundred million dollars in annual revenue, and I think it still does.

And today, he is the acquisition director at Performance Golf, which is another company that generates over one hundred million dollars a year.

In other words, he knows a lot. A lot, a lot. But really, a lot.

And that’s why, everyone, I brought Gabriel here so he can share some of that knowledge with us from these super solid, high-revenue companies, so you can pick up one, two, maybe three tips, apply them to your business, and scale it too.

And if you don’t know, this podcast was created by Vturb.

Vturb is a video hosting platform that increases the conversion rate of your sales video.

If you have a sales video, a VSL, and you want to increase its conversion, then you need to host your video on Vturb.

And to show you how Vturb works and how it can put a lot more money in your pocket, I’ve prepared a video, and this video is called “Seven Easy Ways to Increase Your VSL’s Conversion.”

And the best part is, you’ll find the link to it here in the description. Just go to the description, it will be the first link, click it, and apply all the content from that video to your sales video.

Because, man, if you do that, it will sell a lot more, you’ll have a lot more profit, and best of all, without spending an extra cent on traffic, and without changing a single comma in your copy.

So, if you have a VSL or a sales video and you want it to sell more, click on the description and check out the video, okay?

But now, without further ado, here with you: Gabriel Medeiros.

00:03:24Gabriel’s Trajectory

Man, Gabriel Medeiros.

Bro, thanks for coming from the United States to give some support here on the Vturb podcast.

So, welcome.

Pleasure, man.

Man, what can I say, dude? You, for me, I, João, you are a completely unknown person to me.

And, and for those who know, right, the people here who follow the podcast and even the market as a whole, Anderson, see if what I’m saying isn’t true: I’m known, I’m not. I’m not. Tell him, man.

People come here, everyone knows Vturb, they know a bit about me and my history in direct marketing.

And, and man, I’ve never heard of you. But then, damn, you’ve worked at V Shred, ah yeah, now you’re at Performance Golf, two nine-figure dollar companies in annual revenue.

Yeah, that’s kind of surreal, dude.

So you, you weren’t aware of the Brazilian market at all because you kind of started in the American market and, and you went, right, you had no idea that the Brazilian market was developed in the first place, or did you have any idea about it?

It’s been a long time, right. I’ve been out of the Brazilian market for… yeah, it’ll be eleven years since we moved. Wow.

I kind of distanced myself from the market and put my head down and followed the American one, right.

And then, until you found me, Gabriel, let’s talk a little about you there on the podcast, right.

Do you have any idea of what the Brazilian market is like today, or are you still kind of studying it?

I’m out of the loop.

I learned a little bit with you here before the podcast, but very much unaware of what it’s like today.

How has the Brazilian market evolved?

Yeah, over here, we are evolving, yeah. We’re not there… yeah, we’re not even getting close, I think, I’d say, to those companies you work for, but we’re, we’re improving.

And, but man, I wanted to understand, dude, how this thing went, you know, like you taking your career and managing to get to these huge companies.

Later, I want to talk a bit about them too, about how things work there, etc., so the folks here in Brazil can understand.

Yeah, but man, just so everyone understands a bit more about your background there. Tell the folks how you ended up in the United States, how you got to V Shred in the first place, which is a big reference here for people in Brazil.

Yeah, we went through my wife.

My wife got a job offer, and I ended up going as the husband. It was two thousand fifteen. Two thousand fifteen.

And, I arrived without a visa, it took three months to get the work visa, and I was already a marketing manager here in Brazil.

And then we got there, I tried to position myself, right, in my work field there, because a lot of people go to the United States and end up abandoning their careers, right, because of the language, there’s a huge difficulty in continuing in the field they had here in Brazil.

I didn’t want to abandon it, because I’ve always been passionate about marketing, and especially performance marketing.

And then, yeah, I found some jobs that were quite stable, pretty crazy. We moved to Las Vegas. Las Vegas didn’t have many technology companies, and so I’d find jobs where you need marketing, but it’s not the core of the business.

And then, through a lot of persistence, positive results, right, I slowly climbed, finding better companies.

And then I think things turned around really quickly after I got the job at MGM, which is one of the largest casino companies in the world, there on the strip in Vegas. There are eleven casinos there.

And then, yeah, my name started to become more known in the United States.

Man, I didn’t even know there were eleven casinos total.

Yeah, man, I’ve been there a few times, and they’re always building a new one there.

I don’t know if you saw, there’s one now called The World. No, I don’t know.

And honestly, it wasn’t a job that appealed to me much because I’m practically promoting gambling, right, a lot of people are addicted to gambling.

So, it wasn’t the ideal product for me. And the hospitality part, yes, but it didn’t appeal to me that much. After six months, I was “bored.”

Yeah, I said: well, because even because they spent a lot of money inefficiently, you know. Yeah, let’s invest in native and the conversion sometimes is “double counted” and they don’t worry about that.

Sometimes there’s a conversion where you see the person didn’t even scroll the page, the conversion happened down below.

I mean, it’s a “view-through conversion,” but people don’t count it as real money in the bank account.

Because it’s a lot of money, right. It’s an eleven-billion-dollar company, tracking must be difficult, right.

Yeah, and then I lost interest. Yeah, and then I looked: I said, what is the next reference company in the digital marketing market here in the United States where I can get a job?

And I discovered Zappos. Zappos was bought by Amazon, and I discovered there were some top guys there doing incredible marketing work, because with e-commerce you can’t mess up, you either sell and capture the money or you don’t, right.

Yeah, and Zappos, maybe it was, it was, right, I don’t know if it still is, but it was the best customer service company in the world. It was a reference with Tony Hsieh.

I said: damn, this is the place I want. Man, I think there’s even a book, right. There is. Something like: “Secret of Happiness.”

Yeah, he passed away five years ago. I got to meet him in person.

He had this obsession with happiness. Like, he wanted to discover what the path to happiness was.

And I think he died because he sought an artificial happiness, drugs, you know, and he ended up using a lot.

And he had, he lived in the RV Park, in downtown Las Vegas, old one.

Have you ever been to Fremont Street? I don’t think so.

Yeah, it’s the “bad” part of Vegas, it’s really crazy, only crazy people there.

He lived behind that street in a trailer. The multi-millionaire lived in a trailer. Holy shit.

Inside an RV Park there. And he had many friends with interests, right, because a guy with so much money…

I’ve seen stories like that where he had a bus he’d put his friends in and drive around the United States, you know.

And, anyway, he was searching for happiness, but he unfortunately didn’t find it, you know.

He was there when you went to work there, or not?

Zappos, he was alive. And they have Zappos, with this customer service thing, any person, regardless if you’re an intern or president, you go through a month of training and you have to talk to the customer and you have to know how to serve the customer as if you were working in customer service.

And then, at the end, you have a day of interviews with Tony Hsieh. And we spent a day with him and stuff. The guy super simple, jeans, black shirt and sneakers. I asked him, I even said: how many sneakers do you have, right, owner of Zappos? Two. The guy is incredible like that.

Anyway, but then it was the company I thought would bring me professional happiness, but it was a bit disappointing, because I had a bad manager, a bad manager, and my team wasn’t a very friendly team.

They were a bit stuck-up, and it was hard to feel like I was part of it, especially as an immigrant, right. Everyone American, and sometimes I didn’t understand their jokes in English.

A bunch of people with very strong backgrounds, Stanford, you know, top-notch guys.

And I never felt part of that team. But it was very good because it taught me what I didn’t want in a manager and how I should treat people, right, for them to feel part of the team.

Yeah, and then I got the offer from VShred when I was there.

Man, let me ask you a quick question.

So, remember I said this was going to happen, right, that we were going to go into the topics and stuff.

Yeah, man, giving a bit more context here, okay, for the folks at home. For those who don’t know, folks, Zappos is, maybe, as you said, right, maybe one of the most successful e-commerce sites, right, in the world, at least in terms of performance, and everything.

And without a doubt, you must have learned one thing or another there to the point where you got good enough for V Shred to call you, I believe.

What do you think V Shred saw in you that made them say: man, this skill here is what we need, that they didn’t have yet? Because I want to understand what you learned at Zappos that caught their interest.

Yeah, actually, they never interviewed me technically, you know.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, actually, I had a meeting with Kevin Pern, my boss, who was, was the guy running the media there at V Shred.

He, I sat with him in his office for half an hour and we talked about a few things.

But since it wasn’t a mega-strategic position, I didn’t need to convince them much.

The fact that I was at Zappos maybe was the biggest selling point, because Zappos already had a very strong status, you know? Got it.

It spoke for itself: this guy is managing millions of dollars a day at Zappos, he’s going to do something really good for us.

And I managed Google Shopping for them. But Zappos’ Google Shopping is maybe one of the most complex Google Shoppings in the world, because you have all the shoe brands, all the sandal brands, all the shirt brands, pants brands, everything they sell.

And each one of these products has a size, a seven, a SKU, there. Yeah, so you’re talking about thousands of products. How do you initiate that on Google? It’s an incredible complexity.

It’s real engineering. How are you going to organize that, optimize it, bid for each product to make the CPA worthwhile?

You know, that’s why they, these, my team was very data-focused, and these guys are top-notch in marketing, you know, because they were complex mathematical equations to be solved.

So, I think that’s what V Shred saw.

They said: this guy organized this immense volume of products.

We need him to do our retargeting, because retargeting isn’t cold traffic, it’s more about organizing very well-structured campaigns where you can optimize for each person who passed through your funnel.

And then, right, if you organized a Google Shopping with thousands of products, you’re going to be able to organize a retargeting campaign very well.

V Shred has dozens of products, you know.

And that was it. I think they found me and believed I could deliver great value for them, you know.

And do you think it was very different from what you did at Zappos versus when you got to V Shred? From what I understand, the difficulty kind of decreased a bit.

Decreased a lot, man. Decreased a lot. Yeah, it was very different. And like, really, dude. Zappos is much harder.

So, and how is this normal? It’s more complex than the guys in the traditional direct market, VSL and stuff, etc.

So, let me give you an example that will illustrate this well. Black Friday. Zappos’ Black Friday. What time do we get to the office? Four in the morning. Holy shit.

Everyone from the marketing team arrives at four in the morning.

Why? Because there are peak hours that generate a million in sales.

So, you have hours of a million, hours that reached two million, and you have to optimize the bid on Google to optimize each hour.

So, an hour closes, download the data, put it in a spreadsheet. It was manual, the whole thing.

See what the approximate ROAS is that we’re achieving and adjust the bid. Wait for that hour, close it, help, adjust for the next hour.

The thing, you guys did optimization by the hour? By the hour. Damn, dude.

On Black Friday, it was very intense, you know? Adidas selling like crazy, Nike booming, increase the bid, decrease the bid.

This one isn’t working, ROAS goes down, decrease the bid on this one. So, it was a very manual thing, you know?

Yeah, what I said, thousands of products. And then you have another thing which is seasonality: winter, summer.

You sell sneakers, right, in the summer, sandals. Then winter starts, boots start to rise and sandals start to fall, you have an inverse curve.

Then you have to start adjusting the bid. Yeah, and then you have negotiations with companies that want to join Zappos, because it’s a big marketplace.

You see Zappos, it’s like an Amazon for shoes, you know. It has a very large volume of products. The complexity is gigantic.

When I went to V Shred, you’re talking about… there was Fat Burn, PM, Testosterone Booster. Those were the capsules there, yeah. And you have the digital. I mean, I had four products. There were three nutraceuticals and one, three main ones. Uh-huh. There were more, but the ones that sold well were Burn, Test Boost, and the Quiz.

There wasn’t a clothing store there, anything like that. We launched, yeah, but it was after three years that I was there. The owners made a mega investment in apparel, but it didn’t work, it didn’t work, right.

I think they lost about two million there. Holy shit. Putting inventory, yeah, they did a million-dollar photo shoot for Nike, you know. They hired Nike’s photographer to do it. Damn, but it didn’t work out.

Got it, man. And so you went to V Shred. So, from that, from that social proof from Zappos, the guys threw you in there to set up their remarketing. Was that technical knowledge to set up remarketing? Is that something you picked up from Zappos or something you already had in you?

I think it comes from an engineering mindset, right.

Focusing on results and understanding exactly what’s working, what your levers are, and trying to implement that in the most efficient and fastest way possible, you know. Uh-huh.

Yeah, and this lack of form, professional mindset. And then when you talk about remarketing, remarketing is a Lego set where you have to put the pieces in the right place.

Once the structure is assembled, there’s not much more to do, you know.

You put it there: add to cart, minus purchase. So, it’s everyone who added the product to the cart but didn’t buy.

This is the main audience. Then after that, you have there, you do this for each funnel.

Then after that, you have the folks who watched five minutes of the VSL, ten minutes of the VSL, fifteen minutes of the VSL and didn’t reach checkout.

So, it’s just you going back, one step back, and setting up these campaigns. You know?

Yeah, it seems obvious, but like, no one was doing it, you know. So, what I did was assemble this Lego for them and I delivered a result very quickly, you know. In two months, I was already looking for something else to do there.

Yes. This thing you talked about, looking at the problem and you mentioned an engineering approach. Do you know the term first principles thinking?

I’ve heard of that, no. I’ve heard of it. Yeah, that’s exactly what you said, man. It’s this approach of looking at the problem, understanding what the truths of that problem are, and going from there. And it’s Elon Musk who talks about that. I tried it in his book, the biography by Walter, Walter Isaacson, which will appear on the screen.

Okay, folks. I highly recommend you check out that book, I’ve read it, no, I’ve listened to that book twice. This guy is crazy, man.

This guy is crazy and Elon Musk, who is crazy, he breaks down principles to their most basic point. To, exactly, and then deduces from that. Which, whether you want it or not, from what I understood, it’s what you said. That you said: man, I’m going to look at what needs to be done and think: okay, what needs to be done? This, what are the most important things? It’s this, this, and this.

00:21:38The biggest point of success in his career

So, I think that maybe this was the biggest point of success in my career.

It’s being able to identify these points, you know.

It’s about the biggest levers, like, where do I need to focus my time here to get the biggest result in the shortest amount of time possible.

Do you have a framework you use to help you select which lever is the most interesting?

I don’t know if you have anything formal.

I don’t have a framework.

I have this way of thinking.

I can give you another example that will illustrate this well.

It was when I joined Performance Golf, they had a target, it was CPA or Net ROAS.

Net ROAS is the ROAS after all costs.

The return is the return on ad spend.

We call it here, we Brazilians get here and say ROAS.

For those who don’t know, it can also be ROAS, the good old ROAS.

There’s even a guy who sat here, Tiago ROAS, that’s his name.

A shout-out to Tiago there.

Yeah, go ahead.

There’s his podcast, folks, it’ll show up on the screen for anyone who wants to see it.

He’s a cool guy, for those who are into products, Tiagão ROAS.

Yeah, man, yeah.

That was my problem when I got to the United States.

I would say these words, and people would be like, what the hell are you saying?

Seriously?

Yeah, uh-huh, like, how do you say “boing” in English?

Ah, “Boeing”.

I don’t know.

So, there was this one time I said “boing”, and people started laughing, saying, what are you saying, dude?

I said, that airplane brand that makes airplanes, or Boeing, Boeing.

I said, ah, ok.

This happened several times, you know.

Man, this is something that sometimes gets me upset, ok, when I speak there.

I say like, it’s not… ah, I don’t know, for example: ah, do you have the internet here so I can get on Instagram?

Then the woman: on what?

No, on Instagram.

What’s wrong with Instagram?

There, oh, Instagram.

My people know.

Like, does it make that much of a difference, man?

Is it possible you didn’t understand me?

It’s complicated.

Yeah, finishing the thought about Performance Golf.

So, yeah, they had this target, CPA or Net ROAS.

Net ROAS is the ROAS after costs.

If you have a cost of forty dollars to produce a golf club, you simply reduce that cost from your ROAS.

Also refunds, you take that out, it’s net, it’s what’s left, yeah.

So, we had this target, either CPA or Net ROAS.

Then I was talking to my boss, who was the CFO, and I said, what’s the metric that matters most to you?

What metric are you using to drive the company?

He said, it’s “Net Loss Per Trial”.

Then I said, how’s that?

He said, and then he explained what Net Loss Per Trial was.

Basically, it’s how much you can lose to acquire a customer.

If your customer costs a hundred, you can spend up to one hundred and thirty to get them.

So, the Net Loss Per Trial was minus thirty dollars.

I said, damn, if you make all the company’s decisions based on Net Loss Per Trial, why do we have a CPA or Net ROAS target?

The guy before me was managing the media team through CPA and Net ROAS.

I said, no, but let’s change this metric to Net Loss Per Trial.

And then, just with this step, we managed to boost performance by thirty to fifty percent, because we got closer to the key metric for the company.

Offers that had died were reborn.

Yeah, we brought them back, because we said, damn, they were hitting the Net Loss Per Trial, but were failing on CPA and Net ROAS.

Few people have this vision of leverage, you know.

Because it’s a business, I think it requires experience, it requires a certain mindset for problem-solving that is hard to find, you know.

Without a doubt.

Yeah, it goes back to the basic principle.

This is the breakdown of the whole problem you’re seeing in front of you.

Let’s, let’s go back, right, to the basic principle and see what it is that we’re failing to see here.

Do you think this is something that happens in every company you’ve worked for so far, this inefficiency?

I wouldn’t say it’s inefficiency, I would say they are opportunities that are hidden behind something, and you require a person with a more strategic and analytical vision to see them, you know.

There are many hidden opportunities in every company. No doubt about it.

All of them, all the ones I’ve been through, there was some small change I made that generated a lot of results.

Man, I love these things. I love finding a small thing like that, like a small adjustment you make that goes boom.

That’s my story, it’s wonderful, you know.

There are some decisions I’ve made in my career that are very elegant, man, like, if I had gone down path X, I would have completely screwed my company, and path Y was like a small adjustment, it’s a change, one word you change on your site that unlocks a whole upsell there.

I’ll tell you about that later.

But man, I have a framework and I wanted to share it with the folks at home, which is the “ICE framework”, which helps me in this decision-making part, which is Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

And then, basically, when I’m going to decide something, I look at, man, what is the impact I think this will have.

For example, I’m going to do marketing at Performance Golf.

I have two decisions.

Number one is to create a VSL.

Number two, hand out flyers on the road.

Man, I believe the VSL will have much more impact than the flyer.

So, the VSL gets a few more points.

Then the second is confidence.

How confident am I that this impact will work out?

Then, again, with the VSL I have much more confidence than with the flyer.

And the last is effort.

So, which one will require more effort?

Man, I think the VSL has… I don’t know which one has more effort.

Handing out flyers is a pain too, right, but I don’t know, let’s say the VSL because there’s more technical knowledge involved and stuff.

So the VSL loses, it has more effort than the flyer.

But in the end, adding up those three, the I, the C, and the E, then we can go with the VSL.

And then, obviously, right, you want to do things that have the biggest impact, with the highest confidence and the least effort possible.

The ideal would be to just press a button and the result you want happens.

So, this is a good framework, you know, that I use when I’m going to make some type of decision to know: man, is this really what I should be doing?

Something that has a big impact, I know it will work, and it costs nothing.

Great, I’ll do it.

What is something I’ll do last?

It’s something with low impact, I don’t know if it will work, and it’s still damn hard to do.

In other words, effort is high.

Yes.

And do you have a high success rate with this framework, or what’s the percentage of hits and misses that you think happens?

I can’t tell you the percentage of hits and misses, because in the end it’s kind of an art, you know.

We never really know if we actually hit the mark, because I see it more as a spectrum of success and error.

But what I can tell you is that we’re doing well, Vturb, we’re growing every year.

So, like, it hasn’t been bad, you know.

I think there’s also a framework you have to put in your head that there is no bad decision.

You will learn whether it works or not.

Yeah, and you, we were talking about other podcasts before we started.

There is “The Diary Of A CEO”, I don’t know if I heard him talk about this, but he has a reward program for his team: whoever makes the most mistakes in the month.

Wow, he gives a bonus to whoever tried the most.

Whoever made the most mistakes, naturally the person who made the most mistakes tried the most, you understand.

And I think the main, the way to achieve exceptional results is to first test a lot and with intention, of course.

You won’t, right, do something randomly.

Maybe your framework comes in, let’s use this framework, but let’s test with intensity so we can reach a result faster, you understand.

And there’s no bad test, you’ll always be learning, whether it’s positive or not.

Without a doubt, it requires a mindset shift, a change in perspective, to be able to see that.

Because, it’s easy to get frustrated with mistakes, you know.

I have difficulty sometimes remembering words in Portuguese now that I’ve been living like this for eleven years already abroad, folks.

I’m already more American than Brazilian, you know.

Yeah, sometimes I’ll get stuck.

But the worst part is there’s this woman who, we have, um… I also recorded a podcast with Gabi Loto, from that company I was telling you about, Ship Offers.

She works there and she also, man, podcast.

She’s tricky, right, it’s half Portuguese, half English.

00:31:36Remarketing Structure

Let me ask you a question about that remarketing that you did, that they called you there to create.

I found it interesting when you said that you said the main one is the audience that got to the checkout but didn’t buy, that this is the 80/20 of remarketing.

But it seems like there are also other phases of remarketing: remarketing for those who watched the video, watched like ten percent, five percent, etc.

Yeah, can you tell me a bit more about how you structured this remarketing in terms of, of this, how granular it was?

Because there at Vturb, for example, we have a function that allows you to put a pixel on your video and every five percent, if I’m not mistaken, one percent, I don’t know, we send the data of who watched the video to Facebook, to Meta.

But I think people don’t use this. So I don’t know if this is really that important.

What do you think a well-done remarketing can increase offer performance by? Would it be like ten percent more revenue, twenty, thirty? If you could explain a bit more about it.

Yes, sure.

It was, it was even a point of disappointment for me, because I thought remarketing would add a lot to VShred, at Bottom Line, but no, it didn’t happen.

Yeah, it increased by twenty percent, but like, it’s good already, right, it didn’t exactly pay my salary, damn, but it already did something.

But I thought I was going to blow it up.

Man, I said, wow, I’m going to double this guy’s revenue, because the traffic volume was so huge, right, damn.

I got there, some days V Shred would invest five hundred thousand dollars, holy cow, and I said, damn, that’s a lot of people, conversion rate one and a half percent, a lot of people, right, not buying.

So like, I’m going to be able to leverage this a lot.

But no, it didn’t turn out like that.

Remarketing is more for you to squeeze the remaining juice that’s missing from the fruit, you understand?

Yeah, and then I think it’s very worthwhile to do, but it’s not something that will completely change your business.

It will help, it will help with your CPA, it will help you to put more money into cold traffic, by having such profitable campaigns, you understand?

Uh-huh, understood.

That makes sense, man.

And after that, that remarketing you operationalized in a few months there at V Shred, what did you do next?

Right, so then I talked to my boss, I said, man, marketing is running smoothly here, yeah.

What else is there for me?

I need to speed up, speed up, let’s go.

Then I said, there is, I’m seeing here that, man, we don’t have Google Shopping. I used to do Google Shopping in apps, so let’s, let’s try it.

He said, let’s do it, go for it.

And so I picked up Google Shopping, yeah, set it up in the structure I thought was ideal and it started generating… We always talked about ad spend because, if I’m spending, it means I’m generating.

I would never, ever spend money without achieving the expected result.

So, all my communication with my boss was about how much we were spending.

Which is strange, right, uh-huh, a lot of people have difficulty because you talk about how much you’re spending?

Because I don’t spend money without being efficient. So we didn’t talk about revenue.

So what I’m saying is that Google Shopping, in two months, was spending five to ten K per day, meaning we were generating more, um, three hundred K in ad spend per month.

And what was the result of that? Remember ROAS?

Against that, the net was different for digital and physical, right. For physical, you have to take into account logistics, production cost, refunds, all that.

So for physical it was point six, and for digital it was point three.

So in the beginning, you kind of worked on supporting cold traffic.

Cold traffic generated the remarketing audience. This remarketing audience also includes Google Shopping.

Google Shopping was for traffic, in theory cold, from people who were searching on Google only.

Google Shopping hits both, right, it’s people who sometimes watch the VSL, they want your product, but they’re not totally convinced.

Then they go to Google and type in the name of the product they just watched on V Shred.

And then you catch them on Google Shopping, yeah.

But Google Shopping is only for physical products, right, you can’t put a digital product there.

So, it’s more or less the final punch there, right, the person arrives on Google already with a very strong purchase intention, typed in the keyword, then you catch them with the written link or the image link from Google Shopping.

We were present in both.

Interesting, man.

But not only, in fact, we wouldn’t be able to do Google Shopping without having the cold traffic running, right.

It was one proportional to the other.

Every time we increased the volume of cold traffic, it increased the volume of Google Shop.

It was very easy to identify, the trend was very strong.

I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, ok, because you worked there, I don’t know, but I believe the main engine is precisely cold traffic, because from it you generate these audiences for remarketing, Google Shopping, etc.

And then, if cold traffic is mastered in principle, the rest tends to perform well too.

Is that correct?

That’s one hundred percent correct.

Let me ask you a question then.

Let’s go.

Besides remarketing and besides Google Shopping, is there any other structure you used there at V Shred that serves as an auxiliary structure to cold traffic, that is, that leverages it more and that people here watching us at home could do?

I know many don’t do any Google Shopping at all, so I think we’ve already given an interesting tip there.

But I don’t know if a company of this size, man, nine-digit dollars multiple, folks, not reais, nine-digit dollars multiple. Holy crap, that’s billions of reais, right, damn man.

That’s crazy, damn.

Anyway, a company of this size, I don’t know if there are other structures, other systems that also help cold traffic.

Yeah, I think remarketing, Google Shopping, Native Ads, are all, they are all support for the volume we generated on Facebook and Google.

He’s talking about Taboola, Outbrain.

Yes, there’s a lot of traffic overlap, you know.

We had reports showing that some people saw our ads up to sixty times.

Holy crap.

Actually, the cold traffic campaign was a huge remarketing campaign.

Yeah, the number of impressions we could get per day was like a Super Bowl per day.

So like, there’s no way, everyone in the United States has seen us by now, you understand?

Yeah, so the question is: at what point, how many impressions do you need to convert this person?

And you’ll catch people at various different stages of their fitness journey, right.

So damn, there are people who buy several fitness products during the year, they start, stop, come back.

So like, it’s important that you have ads always in front of them, you understand.

That’s why Nick and Kevin, the owners of V Shred, focused all their energy on VSL and cold traffic, because that was the engine, the rest was a distraction.

Yeah, when I got there, their website looked like a Clickbank offer, you know, nothing special, a pretty amateurish thing, you know, but they didn’t care about that.

They cared about conversion with the VSL, with Vince Sant.

Vince Sant, perhaps, was the biggest point of success for V Shred.

Vince Sant, for those who don’t know, is the face of V Shred, a guy who is extremely good-looking, to put it mildly, folks, very handsome.

We said, man, how do I say it?

How do I say this guy is handsome without calling him handsome?

Nice hair, put a picture of him up, Tiago, for the people to see.

There he is on the screen, folks.

And he’s also very shredded, like, he only films without a shirt.

The guy is smooth.

Oh yeah.

And then Nick worked with him for years to make him really good on camera.

Then you put a guy who’s damn good-looking, really good on camera, speaks super well, naturally, the ads started performing really well.

If you took Vince Sant out of the ad, it was bad, it was bad, there was no performance, you understand?

He was magnetic. Very much.

It’s like this, but maybe this is a leverage point that’s important to mention to the crew.

Vince was the main one.

And then later we signed a contract with a guy named Doctor Drew, who was also famous in the United States.

He was a doctor who was on Ellen, the Ellen Show, well, I don’t know if he was on Oprah, but he was on several very famous shows.

And he’s a guy people trust, he conveys trust, he’s an older guy, still a doctor.

And he loved V Shred, he agreed to work with us. The day we launched him in the ad, our performance increased.

We managed to double the investment.

So like, you say: ah, what the hell is the leverage point?

Let’s improve this copy here, let’s improve the headline.

Why don’t you make a partnership with a badass guy?

It’s that thing we talked about: the basic principle, you know what is your biggest leverage point?

If you get a guy, damn, put Brad Pitt to promote your company, you’ll sell a lot, right.

But like, you don’t need to go that far.

Which guy is closest to my product here that I can make a partnership with?

Uh-huh, no, without a doubt.

And in my time when I was running my own cosmetic brand, I remember that one of the biggest leverage tests was precisely changing the avatar, the spokesperson.

Nowadays, people running things with artificial intelligence avatars have a lot of ease in doing these tests, because you don’t need anyone to actually appear on camera.

Man, put ten avatars there, run them all, and go, it might be messy, but in the middle of that mess, one will stand out.

And then you go with the least messy one, yes, and it tends to work, you know, tends to work out.

That’s it, this is a new thing, right, in the last year, because it’s very new.

When I was at V Shred, it didn’t exist, we weren’t at that point yet, no, not at all.

Many companies aren’t doing this yet.

And without a doubt, it’s something new, but I don’t know if it surpasses a real-life video, you know, I don’t, like, have no idea.

But what I know is that it exists, people are already testing it.

And man, there are many people who, as you said, we were talking before the podcast, you said: man, like copywriting, I’ve seen a lot of VSL, but I can’t say it’s my skill.

And then there are many people who have no idea what’s going on there, they just look at the ROAS itself.

Uh-huh, and then the guy puts ten avatars there, tests them all, and then sees, man, which one performs best and goes for it, you know.

Nowadays it’s much easier, much simpler.

I don’t even know what’s going to happen, because there’s a benefit that everything is tested very quickly, but there’s also the part that because everything is tested much faster, there’s much more speed to invalidate things.

The public will become much more skeptical, yes.

And then, it could be that the market’s conversion rate as a whole drops because of this volume of sales messages appearing everywhere.

And the people who are already famous, who already have credibility, will become more valued, you understand?

Doctor Drew, we paid a small fortune for him per month, but like, he was real, everyone knew he was real, not an avatar, no doubt.

Yeah, but man, so besides remarketing and besides Google Shopping, do you believe there isn’t any other interesting structure for the folks at home to pay attention to that you say: man, figure this out, invest in this?

Assuming they are in the same model as V Shred, running VSL, cold traffic, etc., and they want to optimize the overall campaign ROAS.

I think there’s company branding, which is what image do you want to build around your company, right.

But this is a difficult metric to measure.

It’s something I’m even working on this year, one of my projects is working with my CMO there to identify the impact of branding campaigns.

But what I mean by this is: how are your reviews?

What are people saying about your company?

Are you close to four point five out of five, or are you burned in the market, you understand?

These are important metrics that you sometimes can’t say exactly how much they’re generating in sales, but they help the person make the final purchase decision, you understand?

Saying: man, I liked this product, let me see how it is on Google.

Then they go on Google, they see how many stars you have on review sites and on Google Review too.

And like, this wasn’t in our favor at V Shred.

At V Shred, there were some pretty bad reviews, because as we were a fitness company that wanted to serve everyone, we’re talking about three hundred and twenty million inhabitants in the United States, plus internationally, we sold globally.

You’re going to acquire people who hate the brand, you understand, no doubt.

And so many people bashed V Shred because the product wasn’t for them, you understand.

Yeah, but like, I think V Shred also failed by not updating their flagship product for a long time.

Yeah, Nick and Kevin, they were very focused on performance, optimizing the VSL, optimizing ads, and being the best media buyers on the planet, that was these three, you understand.

And then they neglected the product for a long time.

Get this: the most famous V Shred product, which is Fat Loss Extreme for Female, it had Nick, who is the head of the company, wearing a tank top in a gym in Los Angeles training with Vince next to him.

And each video was in a different gym, because they didn’t have money to have their own gym, so each time they filmed in a different gym depending on where they were, you understand.

So it was very unprofessional, you understand.

So like, damn, you bought that product, you go through upsell one, upsell two, spent, I don’t know, two hundred dollars, and then you start using the product and you have the experience of the guy, each video different, not produced professionally, a visual mess.

This generated negative feedback.

So like, I think what people need to pay attention to is the brand as a whole, what your brand is doing and what its image is on the internet, you understand.

Take care of that, yes, because if you have a brand that you want to live for many years, you have to worry about the image it’s conveying to people.

I think so.

When I left V Shred, its revenue was falling.

I don’t know how it is now, but I think it’s largely due to this lack of attention to the product.

If you look at the most successful companies in the world, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, they all focus heavily on product.

And then there’s word of mouth that does a lot of marketing, you understand?

Word of mouth is supposed to be the best marketing, however it’s the hardest marketing for you to influence.

Which is complicated, man.

But I confess I only saw this power after I started VTurb.

Man, I never spent a real, well today I spend, folks, brought it here and stuff, the whole damn plane.

But until recently, we didn’t spend anything on marketing, it was just word of mouth, just referrals, all because people liked it.

And it’s surreal how this is a “virus”, man, because if the product is good, the person shares it in a WhatsApp group, then someone picks it up there and shares it in another.

So the business spreads much faster, you know, once it’s good.

But I think it’s hard, man, it’s not impossible, right, but it’s harder for a direct marketing company, using VSL, to manage the brand and such because, man, it’s a type of brand that is already more aggressive, you know.

Exactly, I think that’s also the case.

But yeah, but I think there at the Apples of the world, man, it must be very different, right.

E-commerce is very different.

Tony Hsieh spent a good part of his time giving lectures across the United States, teaching people how to promote excellent customer service.

It has nothing to do with e-commerce, it has nothing to do with shoes, it has to do with customer service.

It was the brand he wanted his company to take to the rest of the world, you understand.

It’s an intrinsic value that takes time to be generated and goes against the grain of our performance marketing market, you understand.

So it’s very hard for us to think about it, but it’s extremely important for the longevity of the company.

I agree.

You understand, there’s a saying that knowledge in one industry that might be common knowledge in another industry is an extremely powerful atomic bomb.

Then Elon Musk himself, that we were talking about, he said, man, we take car manufacturing technology and apply it to rockets, it becomes absurd.

We manage to greatly reduce the cost of rocket manufacturing.

Then we take the material science technology from rockets and apply that material science to cars to create different materials, boom, super powerful too, yes.

And this is very real, man, taking things from certain industries and applying them to others.

And now I’ve been here for eleven years, kind of, I’ve been in the digital market as an entrepreneur for eleven years.

I’d say I’ve been at it for about seven, eight years.

And I saw clearly, man, that I spent like four years with a direct marketing company, a V Shred from Brazil, let’s say, and I’ve been with VTurb for three and a half years.

Man, there it was VSL, ads, performance, it was all day thinking: man, how do I make better ads, better VSL and traffic, traffic, going at it hard, and didn’t focus so much on the product.

Here at VTurb, it’s the opposite, man, completely opposite.

Like, forget marketing.

How do I improve the product the most, product, product, product?

And look what you created.

It’s crazy, man, you understand.

And then there’s a guy who I think did this very well in the United States, which is Russell Brunson with ClickFunnels.

Because he combined direct marketing, the way of selling from the performance crowd, which is very good, very scalable, but he combined that, bought technology, good viral, and man, he’s there.

This guy was a producer, he was just like us, he was there with his hands dirty, a lot of people didn’t like him, he wanted to, damn, he shoved products down people’s throats, a hardcore beast.

Yeah, I remember that, damn, he sold infoproducts, right, until he must have had a realization: he said, damn, now I’m going to unite branding with direct marketing.

And I think this is greatly lacking.

I don’t see in the market, man, even in the United States, it’s very hard.

Maybe Golden Hippo has one or two brands thinking about this, you know.

Do you know Guthy‑Renker?

I’ve heard of it.

They say they are the biggest in the world, I think they make two billion dollars a year, as far as I remember, that’s Greg, Greg Ranker and something.

Gucci, I forgot the name, forgot the name there.

But there’s a guy named Brian Kurtz, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him.

He had a mastermind called Titans of Direct Response.

And interestingly, folks, we have a podcast here on YouTube with Brian Kurtz, it’ll show up on the screen.

He also has a book called Overdelivery, playing the long game, in direct marketing.

It’ll show up on the screen too, a very good book.

So I recommend his podcast and his book, ok.

For those who don’t, who didn’t want to see it, actually for those who want to see it.

And there at his Titans of Direct Response event, he calls, I think it’s Greg Rinker, who is one of the partners there at Guthy‑Renker, and then tells the whole story of the company and such.

They launched Tony Robbins, holy cow.

And it’s old, very old.

But they run their whole business there with infomercials on TV and Google Display.

And any brand they launch is with a celebrity, like, oh, they launched the Jennifer Lopez skin care line, or what’s the name of that woman, Cindy Crawford, who is that famous actress there.

But they already start one step ahead, because they already have the celebrity we were talking about, you understand?

Yeah, they’re on another level, another level.

They manage to combine it very well.

But they advertise even on TV, right, so that’s another thing entirely.

I think it’s not a, not something so tangible for us to, like, easily apply.

But man, and this branding thing is extremely important for the longevity of the brand.

There, I agree.

Now, if your business is to stay in this, this optimization of VSL and ads and you enjoy the game, just know that you’ll have to do this every day.

You have to be willing to do it.

But man, I’ll tell you that the vast majority of people in Brazil do this, ok, and they’re willing to do it.

And they know that man, it’s a cash flow game: we’ll do this for two, three years, we’ll make some money, then I’ll do something else that might be bigger.

I think people are aware of this.

But now in Brazil, there’s this movement of people creating more brands, which may or may not involve VSL, as we were saying, because people running e-commerce in the United States, for commerce brands, usually don’t use VSL.

So this is happening a bit in Brazil too.

Let’s see if people will care a bit more about the brand.

So I think so, but I don’t know, let’s see what happens.

It’s a slightly different game, you have to really want to create a brand that prevails over time, right.

It seems like that’s not the case nowadays.

What attracts me more are these companies that want to create a strong brand, because in the beginning you’re just learning marketing, you want to make money, you want to grow professionally, you have other motivations, right?

I think I’ve reached a point in my life where I care a lot about the brand I’m representing.

Yeah, I’m not a golfer, but I’m a sportsman, I’ve always liked sports, and I know that the guy behind Performance Golf, he’s making products of excellent quality and he really cares about the guy who wants to improve his game, you understand.

And that counts a lot for me nowadays.

And I know he’s investing very heavily in his brand, because it makes my life as a media manager much easier, you understand.

Because if the brand isn’t established, isn’t strong, doesn’t have good reviews, and people aren’t saying good things about it, I’ll have a much harder job converting my traffic.

Without a doubt.

Another indirect benefit, man, of this branding thing, is precisely being able to attract professionals of your level, because if the guy doesn’t care about what he’s selling there, not everyone will want to work with him, you know.

Yes, he would have to pay a lot for the guy to overcome his ethical barrier to go work for him.

You know what happens?

I won’t lie, it happens.

But it’s hard to convince the guy, it’s hard.

And it’s also hard to have many like that, because you’ll pay a lot of money to many people, maybe you’ll have one or two, you know.

It’s hard to scale too, yes.

And the guy will think twice because it’s a house of cards, you know, you join a company that’s only thinking about acquisition, how long will that company last?

Not long.

What’s the risk, right, for the guy accepting the job?

Often they don’t even realize it, they just accept it, and that’s it.

00:59:08Evolution at VShred

But man, going back to your story there.

After the remarketing system you created, what do you think was your next significant step you took at VShred? Because you evolved a lot, man. You went in there as a marketing assistant, and you ended up becoming the VIP of the whole thing.

Yeah, my first role was as a Facebook Marketing Specialist.

And it’s exactly that, Facebook Marketing Specialist.

Fancy, huh?

It really is.

Then I said: well, remarketing, Google Shopping, what comes next, right?

I told my boss, I said: man, is it possible for me to run the cold traffic acquisition campaign?

Because we already had six media buyers running cold traffic, and what I had to do, I had already done, you know.

And I think that also generated… he, as a businessman, I think you can recognize this.

If a guy comes to you and says: “Hey João, I’ve sorted things out, it’s crazy! Can you give me more work, please?” I think you’d like it, right, damn.

Oh, for sure, man.

It’s crazy.

I think when a guy shows proactivity, and sees things as if it were his own company, that owner’s mindset, he grows much faster.

So then I took the first cold traffic campaign.

I think you guys call it cold traffic, right?

That’s what traffic is… and then I scaled it to a hundred K a day.

And like, in a month, I think it was less than a month, man.

And so, that thing about breaking principles back to the basics again.

Because at the time, the media buyers at VShred, they all edited their own video.

So Vince… wait, hold on, what’s a traffic manager?

He made the ad he was going to run.

That’s crazy, man!

They had an account for… what’s the name of the video editing software?

Adobe, it’s from Adobe.

And they all had to have basic video editing knowledge.

Then my boss said: “Alright, you can, but you’ll have to edit your own video.”

I had zero video knowledge.

Then I said: no, but let me see what I’m going to do here.

And then I started looking at historical ad performance analysis.

And then I found: damn, an ad that had performed well a year ago and wasn’t being used anymore.

I sent it to him, I said: can I use this ad?

He said: yes, no one is using it.

I said: okay, where do I find it?

Talk to so-and-so, tell them this.

So I got the file for the ads I wanted to use, I think there were about three like that, and I launched them again, you know.

I just went back there to run it and that was it.

I never edited a video.

I just used the ad that was dormant there, that no one was paying attention to.

And then, damn, I remember I went to sleep.

Man, I think the campaign was spending ten thousand, right, it was a Friday.

Then I said: man, this is performing really well, you know when it’s in the flow?

Like that, the campaign is generating a lot of sales.

I said: it was ten at night, I was going to sleep.

I said: man, I’m going to increase this budget here to a hundred thousand.

Then I looked at my wife and said: look, two things can happen: tomorrow we go back to Brazil, this could go very well, or I could get fired.

And then it went very well, thank God.

And it was the first time I generated a top cold traffic result there, and he was impressed by that, right, man.

He said: damn, I have six media buyers here, the guys are editing videos, they’re doing all sorts of things, and they never scaled to a hundred.

And Gabriel got here, damn, in a month, he’s spending more than everyone else.

And so he basically had no other option but to promote me, you know.

There was no manager, no guy managing the team, it was just him and all the media buyers under him.

I said: Kevin, let me make your life easier, go take care of the company and let me manage these folks here.

My copywriter is the seller.

I added my copywriting there, leave it with me.

And I said: you have much more to worry about there.

He said: okay, what position do you want?

I said: I think director is good, right.

Alright, cool, easy.

And so that was my first high-level position, man.

Let me ask you a question, okay?

Actually, a few good questions.

Man, I found it really crazy that the traffic managers at VShred edited their own creatives.

Everyone, isn’t that crazy to you?

Look how crazy.

Yeah, here in Brazil, how does it work?

Generally, the vast majority of companies have a creative asset production pipeline.

The pipeline starts with a copywriter creating the briefing.

So he creates the briefing for what he’s going to do, whether it’s a creative, a VSL, or something else.

Then he writes the text, delivers that batch, let’s say it’s a creative, he creates ten creatives, delivers that to a video editor.

Then the video editor will edit it, then it goes back to the copywriter, he’ll review what was done to see if the ad meets the standards he specified or not, if the hooks are there.

A hook is a visual appearing correctly, those things you put at the beginning of the ad to grab attention, recipe, you know that thing, anyway, something that catches attention.

Then after that, it goes to the traffic manager.

Weird food, that kind of stuff.

Then it goes to the traffic manager, and he uploads it to the traffic source, with the ad ready, all neat, with the tags and UTMs correct.

And then they test it with a traffic framework, which I’ll ask you about later, but generally, they let that ad run for two to three days, spending a CPA per ad, to see if the ad has any legs, if it will take off or not.

And that’s it.

From what I understood here, it seems like your managers were a bit more independent there, they didn’t need the video editor as much, because they made their own ads.

So that was the beginning.

When I took over management at VShred, that’s how it ran.

But it evolved a lot in the six years I was there.

And what was cool was that Kevin would call me to his house.

It was cool, he lived on the strip, he lived next to the area, he had a residence next to the area.

Damn, in the penthouse there, it was mirrored.

The whole house you had a view of the entire strip.

He lived next to the area casino, from his house you could see the area pool, and if there was police there, you could see all the commotion.

It was crazy.

And so I’d go to his house and he’d say: Gabriel, come over so we can brainstorm.

I’d go to his house, and we’d, damn, you know those whiteboards?

Let’s put it like this: what do we envision as ideal for our department?

And we started to envision a change, and in this change, the ideal was to create a pair: you had a media buyer and a video editor doing everything that media buyer wanted.

So, how are we going to speed up the testing process?

Because in his mind, the more ads you test, the more chances you have to scale.

Uh-huh.

And since he had… he was the one who launched this format with food in front of the ad, you know?

Ah, yes, he created that thing.

He’d put an egg with avocado and… actually, you want to give a tip to the people: egg and avocado.

Everyone, just put that in the ad, millions of dollars, my friend.

Like, I don’t even know how to explain it.

Man, look at this, this market is very funny.

Are you saying you would never imagine that: I’ll put an egg and an avocado there, crazy rich people stuff.

Like, what is that, man?

The guy breaking the egg, putting it on a tray, something… man, it’s impressive.

Because the game was this: how do you reduce the CPC to the point where you can scale it to a hundred K a day, you know?

Because with a CPC of two reais, two dollars, you can’t scale.

If you reduce the CPC to fifty cents or seventy, you can scale that ad a lot.

In Kevin’s mind, he said: the first three seconds of the ad are what matter most to me.

So he did everything he could to reduce the CPC, and the CPC is eye-grabbing, right, scroll stopping.

So, in this case, Kevin was a copywriter?

No, he was a media buyer.

I understand.

The copywriter was Nick, I understand, who is the CEO.

Yeah, but Kevin… he even hired a guy, man, I don’t know, I think it was in the Philippines.

He would send this candle to the guy every week saying: go to the market and buy the craziest things you can imagine, put a camera in your kitchen and film everything, man, anything you could imagine.

So the guy would go, crazy with this stuff.

He was there with really crazy fish, fish is lettuce, then he’d put it in a frying pan, like doing things you wouldn’t imagine, you know?

Frying lettuce.

And he had a whole team for food, man.

I couldn’t believe it when I got there, I said: what is this, man?

He said: don’t believe it? It’s the formula.

That’s why he didn’t go to events.

Then he said: people, no one hires a guy from the Philippines, tells him to buy stuff and film.

That’s the secret.

And what works best is egg and avocado, there’s no other, man.

You can test it.

People use Baking Soda a lot, you know?

Here in Brazil, it’s a success.

I mean, that’s what people in Brazil use, right?

Apple cider vinegar too.

Well, avocado and egg, I’ve never seen anything like it, but that’s it.

It has a shelf life, I think, because there comes a time when it gets saturated.

But that’s it.

So, going back to the structure we wanted: a media buyer, a video editor, and then we put the copywriter at the beginning of the process, because he would make requests to Vince.

Sometimes the media buyer had the most requests for Vince, but then we’d go through the copywriter first.

We’d say: look, we’re seeing, for example, the idea that actors, like actors, lose weight so fast to film a movie is booming, you know?

Perhaps this was the biggest successful script at VShred.

Then we’d say: say, ask Vince to record something around this, starting with this.

You know, then the copywriter would fix the script, send it to him, he’d record, and then send… most of the time it was the phone and Vince talking on the phone.

Then he’d send the recording to us, to the editor, and the media buyer would request all the changes he wanted.

And it moved very fast.

We tested more ads than any other player in the market, you know.

And Kevin would always say: and we’ve already seen a small change in the ad, the ad goes from five K to a hundred K a day, you know, with a small change like that.

An egg avocado there in front changed everything, split screen, you know.

It was really impressive.

We apply this same concept at Vturb, which is with aviation, it’s altering the turbine there, in the same way that this beginning of the ad is a leverage point.

The beginning of the VSL page there is also the headline, that turbine that appears there.

But of course, it’s not as much as the ad, right, because the ad is seen by many more people.

So if you only have to change one, it’s worth changing the ad.

But there is… I even think Golden Hippo is doing this now, they realized this about changing the VSL thumbnail, so that the thumbnail is something very eye-catching.

We did this, I think recently.

A lot of people are doing it.

The people who are more adept at testing new things, and even a very big client of mine who is near Romania, they also started doing it recently, it’s working very well.

Here’s a tip for you all, okay.

And there is a Vturb function.

Vturb is the only platform in the world that has this.

If not, you’ll have to ask a programmer to do it.

But if you put it on auto-play, you’ll have the option to add another video.

And then you can create an exclusive video to put on your timeline there, which is not the video of your VSL.

Look how interesting.

So you can say you’re a video editor, man, create something very crazy, crazy, fill it with egg and avocado, I don’t know.

And then you put it on the timeline.

It’s serious, it can be done.

And it’s very good.

And you can also test everything there on VTurb, you don’t need to use an external testing tool.

So I recommend it.

It’s a pre-video within the video.

Before the person clicks, when the person is going to be on the VSL, there’s a little thumbnail that has a little video there, showing something strange and such.

But man, what is that process like, to scale a hundred K dollars a day? Do you have any traffic framework that you use?

And you increase the budget, ad.

Here in Brazil, people do some things… actually, there are several schools, but the people who were scaling the most until recently were the ones who duplicated the campaign.

So the guy would create a campaign, like create ten campaigns, set them to go live at ten at night.

Then in the morning, early morning, the campaigns would start delivering at nine in the morning.

He would go there, look at what was happening, like your Black Friday, for example.

Then he’d look: ah, this one is good, it’s rubberbanding; this one is bad; kill this one, it’s whatever with rubberbanding.

Then after nine in the morning, look at eleven in the morning.

Then: ah, this one I doubled, it maintained the CPA; double it again.

This one I doubled, did the CPA maintain or go up?

Ah, it went up, so I’ll leave it as is.

And so they kind of do this daily management.

And it’s kind of a job, like, almost slave labor, you know, the guy is in front of the computer all the time.

So there are these guys, the duplicators. And let’s say they just do that.

And then there are the guys who are not duplicators, there’s a guy who sets up the campaign and he looks at its performance, and if it’s performing, he increases the campaign’s budget, little by little.

These duplicators are the ones whose accounts usually get banned, you know, it’s a different type of traffic.

And the guys who increase the budget little by little tend to be more stable, more lasting, you know.

Did you work with any of these things or any third thing I don’t know, or how does it work?

I have time, since I don’t run campaigns, right. I’m just managing, I try to find the right people, you know.

If I need to, I will do it.

When I joined Performance Golf, I had to manage until I hired someone because it was just me.

They hired me to build the team from scratch. So, when there was no one, I ran it.

But things change very fast in this market of ours.

And I don’t exactly know what strategy my media buyers are currently using.

What I can tell you, the analogy I like to use for Facebook and Google, they are by far the ones that generate the most revenue for us.

It’s that Facebook is like a speedboat.

What does that mean?

It’s a fast boat that you can turn right or left whenever you want, and it responds immediately, you know.

Meaning that if I see my campaign is performing well, I’m increasing the budget and Facebook is delivering.

If you’ve already reached the point I told you about, putting in a budget ten times bigger, and the campaign holds the performance, you know.

Speedboat, I can make very drastic changes and it holds up, if it’s out of the learning phase, if it’s performing great, it can hold the performance.

Google, it’s like a cruise ship, it’s much slower, you know.

Uh-huh, you want to turn right, you have to plan it, you’ll turn there, slowly.

It will move in the direction you want by morning.

So you have to be much more careful with managing campaigns on Google than on Facebook.

When I managed the campaign, I liked to do something called “Lifetime value”.

Where you set the duration of your campaign, let’s say, it’s going to last three months, and a budget.

Then you multiply how much you’re going to spend on this campaign: ten thousand a day, multiply ten thousand by the sixty days of the campaign’s lifetime or ninety days.

And then put that total there, which is sometimes a scary number.

And then it arrived at VShred, in the case of VShred, Saturday and Sunday were the best days, right.

And we knew that on Saturday, in the first few hours, you had to have the largest budget possible.

What did we do?

We reduced the lifetime, or increased the budget a lot, or both.

So instead of ninety days, we set it to thirty.

That he would… he would calculate that total budget, let’s say, one million.

Instead of dividing by ninety, he would divide by thirty.

So he would spend a lot more on that day.

When Sunday arrived, from Sunday to Monday, Monday was like a strong curve that you had to manage, because performance dropped a lot from Sunday to Monday.

What did we do?

We extended the lifetime from thirty to ninety, back to ninety days.

And then Facebook held the campaign’s performance much better, you know.

But that was a change you made directly to the campaign itself.

Wow, man!

That’s something I haven’t heard.

Oh no, interesting, no.

People usually change the budget, change that, but changing the time…

You create a lifetime campaign, and then you set an end date starting today for ninety days from now.

Then when you want to blow it up, you reduce the date.

And then Facebook does the calculation for that reduction, and the performance holds much better than increasing the budget.

How interesting.

And it’s VShred, damn.

We, I think we were one of the first to implement this.

Today it’s quite popular in the United States, man.

Here in Brazil, it’s not popular.

Hey everyone, here’s some very hot news, straight from the American market, okay.

Someone test it, tell me what happened.

There must be someone already doing this, it’s not possible, man.

I know a lot of people, right, Gabi.

He doesn’t realize.

You sit down, a lot of people here, a lot of experts, Facebook, no one has done this yet.

Everyone, this isn’t being used.

Then the last thing they are using there that I discovered is that the name is kind of funny, but they say they’re calling it “escala do baiano” (the Bahian’s scale).

It’s slow.

They say a guy from Bahia created it, they named it that.

But in fact, it is, and he basically launches a thousand campaigns, and each campaign with like one dollar, or ten thousand campaigns.

And then like, there are a bunch of campaigns, some don’t spend, but the ones that do spend, sell, you know.

And then the thing is to have multiple accounts, each account with… I think I don’t know, I don’t know how much it is.

If it’s two hundred and fifty-six pages or campaigns that can be in an account, I don’t know, but there is a limit.

And they scale horizontally with these very low-budget campaigns.

And then man, it’s crazy.

Then you need to hire a bunch of people in the Philippines, I don’t know what they do there, they’re awake at dawn, it’s crazy.

But that was the last alternative traffic method I saw for Meta.

I had never heard of this thing about changing the date, man.

Man, it works really well.

We still use this, in fact I implemented it on Google too.

Yeah, it started… it started working very well on Google because it’s what I was telling you.

I like to have a very close relationship with the Google and Facebook folks, because there are certain mechanisms I see working on one that I want to apply to another, and it’s not necessarily available.

This one on Google wasn’t available, but we had a meeting with their engineering people, and then I had the opportunity to ask the guy, the Google engineer, to make it available for us.

And so we implemented it there and it worked really well.

And it’s part of the strategy, it’s not just this, this type of campaign that we use, but it’s still strong.

Cool, I’m going to ask you about that.

Yeah, but man, what else do you credit for that crazy scale of a hundred K a day, considering you surpassed all the other media buyers there? You said you used an old creative, so it’s a creative that in theory already worked.

If you made a slight change to it or simply ran it as is, since it worked last year and the audience renews, in principle it could work. But you, out of nowhere, already stood out. What do you think was your main factor to achieve that result?

It’s a combination of things, right.

It’s not just the fact that I managed to scale more than everyone else and spent without… I think it’s the way you also communicate with your boss, with your manager, the confidence you convey, your problem-solving vision.

Yeah, all that I think in the eyes of the CEO, in the eyes of the business owner, is highly valued, right.

Uh-huh.

And it’s with that, I think with experience you can deliver more and more, you know.

Managing a crisis, for example, is something that is super important in a company and will happen to any company.

What do you mean by managing a crisis?

Yeah, someone doesn’t agree with the direction being taken in some department, or two departments aren’t communicating well.

How do you resolve that?

As a CEO, you don’t want to get involved in every crisis that exists in the company, right.

Yeah, you need to have managers there who solve problems without needing to call you.

And that’s another thing my boss, I think, saw a lot.

He said: damn, the department is running and I have to get involved very little, you know.

And so you gain trust and grow.

But what did that allow you to do? Because, like, to be able to put a hundred K a day, did your boss give you any input?

I don’t know if I… no, the hundred K a day was more about the strategic vision we were talking about, principles, about how you have that 80/20 vision.

What are the twenty percent I need to tweak here to generate eighty percent of the results? And how do I do that faster than anyone else?

Yeah, I didn’t even have that much experience with Facebook, but… I think it’s an engineer’s mindset, I don’t know.

I think that time solving problems in college is there, right, to graduate, I wanted that solution-oriented mindset.

I think I know… I think I have that same vision, man.

Because bizarrely, I was even talking to someone about this the other day, I remember when I was in college I thought: man, what the hell is this, I’m never going to use this.

Now that I’m a bit older, I’m thinking: yeah, this stuff is… now that I’m a bit older, I’m thinking: wow, man, those silly things I really won’t use, but the reasoning, you know, the insight, you put cognitive attention there and you solve the problem, it is indeed useful.

It’s very useful.

And I spent several nights studying, hating calculus, not knowing how it was going to serve me in life, you know.

But today I see that, damn, it helped me a lot: logical reasoning, strategic.

People have a lot of difficulty, man, analyzing data, a lot.

So what did you do then, from what I understand, was that you used first principles again to see what the guys there were doing wrong, and then you fixed it, and because of that you managed to stand out and become the main media buyer, let’s say, which led to your promotion.

Then, from what I understand, the result was one thing, the way you communicate is another that also generates trust with the manager.

If my boss had seen that my communication was weak, that I didn’t know how to deal with people, or that I had no experience, it would have been very difficult for him to put me in a management position, you know.

And there were six media buyers there, some of them for over two years in the company, and no one had ever been promoted, because he had no one to promote, you know.

There was no one who had the strategic characteristic, the marketing vision, the communication vision, a calm, centered person, who doesn’t explode.

Damn, I’ve worked with many top people who had absurd communication difficulty.

Man, imagine, they create drama in the company, which hinders the daily flow a lot.

If you get a person who causes conflict or who doesn’t have an ease in solving problems, it really slows down the company’s life, you know.

Especially in the media area, even more so, those who are generating all of the company’s sales, then you need to move fast, right.

So this trust is what he had in me, and we became friends.

I think that gave him a lot of confidence, you know? To say no, go ahead and change that.

And then, with things running well, he sort of went to take care of another area of the company.

At that time you went there, do you remember how many people were in the company?

Man, when I joined, I think there were forty or fifty people.

Were you already in the nine-digit range per year?

I don’t think so, right. Already?

Ah, yes, already.

Ah, so it was already quite big.

So it was. When I joined, I think it was at a hundred million.

Damn.

Kevin and Nick ran the operation very “lean” for a long time, you know.

And then they started investing heavily in talent.

And it’s funny because not every talent generates the result you expect, right.

Sometimes he’s there, the guy is very good in the market, you expect him to deliver the world, and that person ends up being fired after a year.

So it’s a learning experience, even for them.

Undoubtedly, you never know if that person is going to deliver, committed is… I don’t really know how that works.

But man, how interesting.

So you went in there, started doing remarketing, did Google Shopping, then you said: man, I want to run cold traffic.

You went to cold traffic, had success with cold traffic, scaled it to a hundred K a day fast.

Then because of that and the trust you generated with Kevin, who was your boss, he decided to put you as manager, as the leader of that squad, of that sector, which was the media buying sector at VShred, correct?

Exactly. I understand.

And then, man, you said you wanted to be director, you used that word.

Yeah, and what did you do then?

Because you stayed there for six years, did you scale your team to how many people?

Twenty.

And how many did you have in the beginning?

Six.

Yeah, wow, man.

And which networks did you run?

We were present in all of them, man.

Google, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Native.

We tested anything that made sense.

And did you know… actually, you didn’t know how each of these media worked in depth, right?

No, not in depth.

As I told you, we made very good partnerships.

One of them was in Israel with Kendago.

Yeah, they, without a doubt, were the best agency I’ve ever worked with in my life.

I’ve worked with many, I’ve even been an agency myself, a few.

But a performance agency, I’ve never seen anyone like the Kendago people.

Why do you think they are so good?

Yeah, I think they have a very big difficulty in their country regarding war, and they value results a lot, right, because if they don’t deliver, they die.

It’s literally, they have an incentive front and back.

It’s the guys hitting one missile with another missile, man.

Wow, man.

It really is, man, how do you develop technology like that?

It’s people, so if where you are with traffic, there’s no missile flying over your head, then man, it’s easier.

Exactly.

The Kendago guys are running ahead of you.

It’s a theory I have, man, because the amount of talent in performance marketing that exists in Israel is absurd.

It’s surreal.

It’s true.

Even the support, the Facebook and Google support is much better in Israel.

I had Facebook and Google support in the United States, and it was very annoying to get on a call with them, because it was like: how are you going to put more money here?

But they never talked about what I wanted to hear, which was performance. How are we going to improve the funnel? Who’s delivering the best in the market? Outside of VShred, who are the competitors performing best?

What are they doing?

It was a waste of time to get on a call with them.

We switched to Israel, and the conversation was completely different.

The guys at Facebook would do presentations like this: “Here you go, these are the five main competitors of V Shred.

This guy is scaling with a quiz, here’s his quiz, each page of the quiz.”

Then we created a quiz score.

Then they would analyze the quiz and give the competitor’s quiz a score from zero to one hundred.

Basically, which quiz are you going to use as a reference for your own.

Got it?

Damn.

So, like that, the conversation changes, much more useful now.

My time goes to the Google and Facebook representatives.

It’s what I told you, I’m going to meet with them again in February.

The Meta team.

Why?

Because I know it’s very worthwhile to spend time listening to the information they have.

01:32:34The importance of the relationship

So, if there’s anything else to recommend to the audience, it’s relationships with people who can actually impact your business.

Got it?

Even when it comes to approving ads.

I’m sure there are many players in the market who have trouble with disapproved ads, especially on Google.

For sure.

Just think about everything, all the time.

Man, shit. It’s tough.

Fitness, the health market is very annoying in this regard, because it completely breaks the rhythm of your campaign.

This relationship we created with Google, we had a process where none of our ads would stay disapproved for more than twenty-four hours.

Got it? They had a way to escalate it to their more senior people to get it approved quickly.

No other advertiser has this benefit. This is a huge competitive advantage.

But, you know, it’s a relationship.

I have to maintain a relationship with this guy.

Got it? Yes, for example, let me give you another example here.

Facebook is much better for performance traffic, because you can set your attribution window to one-day click.

You can remove view-through and have one-day click. Google doesn’t have that option.

When you set up the pixel, it only has the option for one-day click, one-day view, and one-day engagement.

That’s the minimum you can count. I don’t want to know about view-through, I don’t want to know about engagement.

I know there are many people who will see my ad multiple times.

What matters to me is last-click attribution. I can’t change that on Google.

So I talked to the engineering team at Google and said, “Man, can you change this for me?”

They made an adjustment in their back-end that only our account had this setup.

That is the extreme of what you can achieve with a close relationship with them.

Was this relationship developed because of ad spend, or is there something else you think is interesting?

There’s spend and there’s growth potential. Those are the two factors.

If there’s a brand that spent ten million on Google last year, but this year is on pace to spend twenty million, they are a target for the Google team.

They will put resources behind them.

Put people behind them.

It helps if you have the potential to double or even triple that.

The minimum I know today for you to be serviced by Google Israel is forty million dollars a year.

I had this access through VShred, lost it at Performance Golf, and I’m trying to regain it now with the relationship I already built there.

But, thank God, today our Google reps in the United States are good.

They’re not at the Israel level, but they are good.

And on Facebook, man, it’s similar too.

The policies are a bit different, but they are similar.

Another thing I do that’s very valuable in having a relationship with them is the following.

We just put a contract in place where if I hit a certain spend number for this year on Google, they give cashback to the account.

And then I can earn up to two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars in cashback returned to the company.

How are you a unique person in the market? You not only generate profits and incredible results, you also return money to the company.

When my boss found out, he said, “Holy shit, how did you do that?”

Through relationships. I knew the possibility existed when I worked at VShred.

When I went to Performance Golf, I started the conversation: “Do you know how I can get cashback?”

Then you create a target. It’s not easy, but if you hit that number, that’s three hundred K returned to the company.

Got it?

Yeah, man, for sure, having these relationships seems like a really interesting thing.

But it’s very expensive.

Man, damn, forty million dollars a year.

I think it’s difficult, guys.

For us mere mortals, you need cash, man.

You need cash. And maybe go for Israel.

You need to start building relationships there.

Maybe there’s a cheaper way, I don’t know.

Got it?

When you started at VShred, did you already have these relationships, or did you create them from scratch?

We created them, man.

You know how?

Through Kendago.

Since we had an agency in Israel and the Kendago team had a relationship with Facebook and Google Israel, they introduced the representatives there.

Kevin and Nick got on a plane and went to Israel, spent a week there drinking wine with the Google, Facebook, and Kendago teams.

That was probably the best investment they ever made for the company.

Interesting.

So, basically, from what I understood, there was Nick.

He made a killer copy.

Vince, who is very good on camera, recorded that copy.

That worked like crazy, which was enough to grow the company, bring you in, and so on.

Then they handed that over to Kendago.

Kendago blew it up even more and created these amazing relationships, which are now competitive advantages with high barriers to entry, because not just anyone can spend forty million dollars.

Furthermore, not just spending, but having to build the relationship from scratch in the first place.

So it becomes a very high protective barrier, yes.

Do you think that explains VShred’s success?

VShred’s success started way, way before this.

But this reinforced it. It was like an insurance policy. It greatly strengthened the brand.

And, you know, it gave us a lot of security, because every now and then we would have our Facebook account canceled, you know, out of nowhere.

Even with this relationship, it still happened to us.

But we could turn things around much faster. It would get canceled and in one day it was resolved, it was back up.

Now, imagine a person without a relationship, their account gets canceled and it takes a month to come back.

Business is over. If it even comes back.

I’ve had some of my own accounts that are still waiting to be reinstated.

And man, Facebook, I don’t know about you, but for me, when I was anonymous, it was like a crazy dictatorship.

And I never had a good relationship with them. I would talk, at most, to a support agent on chat, and they had no idea what they were doing there.

I don’t think they even knew what was happening.

I remember one day I was so frustrated with the ban that I said, “Man, I’m going to run the ad that they say is allowed in their help desk.”

There was an example that said, “Look, this one is not allowed, this one is allowed.”

It had a little green checkmark.

I ran that exact ad in my account, and then my account got banned.

Then I was like, “Damn, screw this.” Then probably some flag on my PC, my IP, something like that.

And then I could never talk to them.

With Google, I could reach them by phone. And then Facebook, man, in the end, since they never offered us good service like that, it was this madness of creating accounts and getting them banned, you know?

It goes back to what we were saying about the brand.

If they perceive that you have a strong brand, that you really care about your customer and your product, they will make more of an effort to give you VIP treatment.

That’s why it’s another benefit of having a strong brand, of caring about your product.

You can create these relationships within the platforms that help a lot.

Now, if you’re an affiliate, just doing black hat stuff trying to acquire customers at any cost, you’ll never get support; you’ll suffer.

Never.

That’s why, you know, what game do you want to play? What level do you want to be at?

When I tell you I don’t accept work from products and brands I don’t like, that I don’t trust, it’s also to make my job easier.

I know that if I go for a serious brand that’s playing the long-term game, I’ll be able to deliver much more.

Because when I went to Performance Golf, they didn’t have a relationship with Israel.

Another thing I brought to the company was this relationship, these Israeli reps.

I’m also bringing an insurance policy to the company, which makes my life much easier, which makes my team’s performance much easier.

And for them, it’s much more fun to work this way.

So, I’m very selective about where I work now.

Man, I have a few more questions for you.

I found this evolution really interesting, you know, you came in as a remarketing specialist, got promoted to director, you started with six people and grew to twenty. And you started running all the traffic sources out there, from what I understand.

So, man, my number one question is: how did you build this traffic team? Did you have leaders there? How did you organize that structure?

That’s an excellent question.

It’s a question I asked myself for a long time, how to structure this.

And the best way I found is to really identify talents, people who deliver at a level far above others.

I had a manager below me. He was a really good guy.

He had a sense of media and performance that is hard to find even in the United States.

And we compensated him accordingly. He was an outlier.

And he managed my team. He was very good with creative, he was very good at brainstorming ideas.

And we launched, for example, the first podcast ad in the United States that exploded.

Vince, with a microphone like this and a red background, and no one was interviewing him, but he was answering questions from Christians.

You guys created that?

Holy shit, man, that became famous in Brazil too.

That was Mike, my manager, who had that idea.

And then we created that, everyone started copying it, it scaled a lot.

Then we even brought in Doctor Drew.

I don’t know if I mentioned Doctor Drew here, but yeah, I did.

So he also completely changed performance, and we were like, let’s put him in the podcast.

But then afterwards we got serious, we put him in a small room like this with the two of them talking and gave them script points.

And we really used that in all the ads.

So he was very good at that.

And he basically handled creation and the idea part.

So he wasn’t just a traffic manager, he was also…

He had his own accounts.

It was even a point of discussion I had with Kevin, I said, “Should we let him keep running campaigns or should we remove him from the operational part and let him just have ideas and manage the team?”

But he was also very good at media buying.

So we left him.

As long as he had the time, honestly, I think it was good for him, to keep his finger on the pulse to see how things were changing.

Facebook is changing all the time. Yeah, man, every six months there’s basically a new source.

So it was good for him to understand if someone was slacking or missing opportunities, or failing to test.

And we left him there. So I had this guy.

And over time, we also identified other people who were exceptional, and we placed a supervisor and a lead.

So, for a team of six people, we had quite a bit of leadership. And then I had six video editors, each one paired with a media buyer.

And then we felt we needed someone to lead the video editors, because I’m not an editing guy, I don’t have copywriting experience, I don’t have… I can’t tell you visually if an ad is… influencers we worked with like Doctor Drew, communication with the copywriter, communication with the media team.

But this person was on my team.

Do you call her a product manager or a project manager?

Ah, project manager.

Yes, projects.

So she helped things get done within the department.

Even things like creating Facebook accounts for us to run ads, or if a credit card got canceled.

To avoid distracting the team, we had this project manager who kept things running smoothly.

And we even hired an assistant for her. So we had two project managers. That’s how we got to twenty.

We had two project managers, I had a data analyst who implemented all the reports the way I wanted to visualize them.

And that was basically the team: the editing team, media buyers, project managers, my manager, and the data guy setting up reports.

We didn’t have a copywriter; we did, but not in my department.

But the ads were already coming to you, so… Yeah, Mike had our team, he had most of the ideas.

We tried to split it, because the copywriter wants to create his own ideas, but the ideas from the media team had a much higher success rate than the copywriter’s.

And so we reached an agreement: half of the implementations would be ideas from the media team, half from the copywriter.

Then we tried to organize it in a way that everyone was happy. I imagine the media team would have more intimacy with what is working right now.

So initially, they will be able to create more predictable ads.

And the copywriter, since he’s not as involved, he should be, but because he has this outside perspective, he can bring innovations that have a much lower chance of success, but if they work, they tend to explode.

I know that here in Brazil, when people create ads, they divide them like this.

They say, “Man, we’re going to create predictability ads and scale ads.”

Predictability is more of the same, variations of what we already know works.

And scale are completely new concepts that will probably fail, but if they work, they really take off.

We had a lot of that too.

It was more or less how we organized: iterations of the same and net new, completely new angles.

Net new is interesting.

Ah, cool, man.

Yeah, guys, we’re not that far behind.

Just a few things.

But man, how interesting.

But so initially, from what I understood, you had squads where each traffic manager had a video editor to work with, who would then make changes to existing ads, meaning scripts already recorded, already existing, that Vince recorded, to then, for example, create various variations of the first few seconds to give to the traffic manager so the campaign could move forward.

In addition, there was the project manager, two of them, whose job was to lubricate, to keep the whole operation moving, connecting all the parts.

But you also mentioned there was a guy who was the leader of the video editors.

I thought the editor was…

So I thought the editor was within that squad.

So in this case, did he lead all the squads or how was it?

Yeah, he provided direction to the editing team so things didn’t get messy, because before this person joined, the editing team basically had the freedom to do whatever they wanted, and there was no quality control.

And then the media buyer had to give them feedback, and it was a bit disorganized.

Got it?

This senior guy was a quality controller for the editors, like: “Look, this one isn’t fitting.

I know there’s a part here that’s too slow, no sound, no action.

Let’s cut this clip here.

You know, that kind of direction?

Let’s make this ad perform top-tier.

What do you need to do with it?”

We hired this person, and it helped a lot.

Was there any specific hire that you think was the game-changer, that took the team to the next level, or something very important that you think other performance teams out there should pay attention to?

The game-changer.

Man, we’re talking about at least a twenty percent gain in my opinion.

I think Doctor Drew, the fact that we worked with an extremely recognized guy, was one of them.

It’s avocado with egg. Avocado with egg, guys.

That one for sure. It’s using food in front of fitness offers.

I think there’s no better recipe.

It’s impressive how well it works. We’ve tested many types.

I think you guys also use exercises, guys.

I remember seeing some ads with people moving like that. But then you would have, for example, certain images.

You would zoom in on the most interesting parts of the body, butt, the part that draws the most attention.

And then Facebook would say no, disapproved.

Google, forget about it.

Like, you just can’t. Then you have restrictions. You can’t zoom in too tight.

You have to stay more zoomed out. There’s one thing.

I was watching one of Amanda’s podcasts. She was talking about how she breaks the logic of the ad, sometimes making it not make much sense.

You drop random phrases like that.

That works incredibly well, man.

Man, when she said that, I was like, “Damn, that’s it.”

And you’re saying it works too, damn.

I think that’s crazy, man.

Avocado and egg.

That one, look, put them together, it’s going to bug people’s minds: “Man, what the hell is this? I have to click, man.”

We used to change it like that.

What was the genius of Kendago?

Creating Frankenstein ads, man, you’d look at that thing and say, “No way you’re going to scale this.”

And then it would scale.

It made no sense.

If I looked at the ad, it would cut from the celebrity to Doctor Drew, to Vince, to the woman in the gym with different exclamations, different vibes, question, statement, curiosity, all in the same ad.

And you’d say, “Damn, this doesn’t make sense.”

But it worked. It works.

I think people here call it stacking hooks here in Brazil.

I remember there was a creative podcast with Diogo Kobata.

Guys, it will appear on the screen.

Man, I have a podcast here about creatives.

Did you know that if you watch one hour of the V-Turbo podcast every day, it will take you over a year to finish?

That’s a lot of content.

Look, you guys are producing a lot of content.

It’s one episode of two to three hours per week, for two years now.

Gabi, how long is his episode there?

Two hours and eight minutes.

Yours is also going to be another one.

Two and a half hours.

It seems like it’s only half an hour, but we’re here, man, we keep talking, time flies.

Got it?

It’s kind of crazy.

Guys, if you’re enjoying this podcast, what are you going to do to show us some support?

Share this in a WhatsApp group.

You know that WhatsApp group you have where you network with digital marketing people?

Just grab this link here, drop it there, and say, “Man, João brought in this guy, he says he’s a foreigner.”

But he’s not from Rio, but never mind.

The guy came from the US, works at Performance Golf, used to work at VShred, etc.

It’s nine-figure dollars.

Copy that and send it to those guys.

It will help us.

01:57:15Structuring the team

And another question I have is that you started with a few people, around six, from what I understood, and grew to twenty with a much more multidisciplinary team.

And then you mentioned you started developing relationships with traffic sources.

You said you also advertised on various traffic sources: TikTok, Native Ads, etc.

And I assume, correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume there was a point where you had to kind of unlock that traffic source in the first place, meaning learn how to run it, because despite being media buying, there are specific nuances to TikTok Ads, for example, YouTube, and even Facebook itself, Meta.

How did you do it, man, not only to select which media to test, because that’s also important, but to unlock that traffic source?

I don’t know if you had a testing budget, testing to see what happened, or if you just went and hired some consulting.

This skill of unlocking acquisition channels is very important, you know?

Very valid.

Because sometimes, imagine a guy only runs Meta.

If he can make the same offer, the same funnel work on YouTube, man, it leverages another business, adds so much more to the company.

For us, you have two options.

One is to acquire that talent in-house, which is expensive and uncertain.

Or you use a partner. In our case, we used Kendago.

They had a team there, I think around one hundred and twenty people.

And I found out that at least forty of them worked for VShred.

Holy shit. It’s what I told you.

We paid them a lot of commission because they were very good on Google.

And they probably hired the top TikTok and Snapchat guy there at Kendago, in Israel.

And they managed to scale both to twenty K per day. Both.

I remember they would compete like this: TikTok, Snapchat.

To the point where sometimes one would reach thirty and drop to twenty.

Then the season would slow down, it would go to five. Sometimes they would just compete with each other.

Today, Snapchat is no longer very relevant in the US, or is it still?

It is.

You can still spend there.

In Brazil, it kind of died down, but there it still has life.

And then the other thing I did was allocate a Facebook media buyer who wasn’t performing well to explore Snapchat and TikTok.

Because, you know, when you manage several media buyers, they will inevitably have good and bad phases.

It’s very hard to find a media buyer who is always consistent.

You think you can, but they are outliers. And so, when a media buyer wasn’t performing well, you had two options: either you fire them or you find something else for them to do.

And since Kendago was running Snapchat and TikTok, I said, “Why don’t you explore a new platform? It gives you a new challenge. You start figuring it out.”

And at the same time, I can save on commissions.

Instead of paying ten percent to Kendago, which is a huge amount, I’ll use my internal media buyer who already has a fixed salary.

And so I would kind of reassign the team over time, based on performance and each person’s interest.

So sometimes I did both, and it worked. It worked.

You have to have some insight, though. You have to have patience, man.

This woman, for example, that we allocated to TikTok and Snapchat, it took her six months to figure it out.

But she eventually surpassed Kendago.

As a manager, you have to try to see that too.

Is the person really trying? Are they just slacking off?

This woman had already been a top performer on Facebook. I knew she had potential.

But sometimes the person is going through something in their personal life, they’re distracted, they’re suffering from some family situation. You have to have some tact.

When you, again, the brand issue, when you’re trying to build a long-lasting brand that will last for years, you want a team that stays, you don’t want a team that’s rotating all the time.

You want people to feel secure there and to be delivering their best. Part of that delivery is keeping the person as long as possible.

If you know they can perform, you’ll try to find ways to keep them on the team. But you have to be patient.

Sometimes it doesn’t happen overnight.

This woman, in this case, took six months. I had a Google guy who took seven or eight months to completely unlock Google.

But again, it happened, we eventually surpassed Kendago in Google spend again. This guy knew nothing about Google.

I simply transferred him from Facebook to Google. And he was struggling for, I think, about five months.

Until it got to a point where I said, “Man, I’m going to help you. I’m going to get into this with you.”

So I would spend thirty percent of my time on calls and analyzing the account with him.

“Let’s do this, let’s tweak that, let’s test this.”

You also have to resist looking at what Kendago is doing, because we had access to their account; it was our account.

So the team would be tempted to: “Let’s copy Kendago, because what they’re doing is working.”

I said, “No, let’s not copy Kendago. We’ll end up competing with them. We have to find a new way to scale.”

And then, going back to our previous conversation, it’s about going back to basics, logical reasoning.

What are the levers we need to pull here?

And we scaled Google in a completely different way from Kendago, and much more sustainably.

In fact, I just found out that VShred lost the account, Kendago lost the VShred account recently, because the team is now running everything in-house.

And man, how do we balance this investment of time? Because one thing is to keep someone on a fixed salary for, say, six months, and then the person unlocks the traffic source. Great, wonderful. It can be worth it.

But what if the person stays, say, a year and still shows no signs they’re going to make it? If it’s a good person, how do we make that balance, knowing how much to invest, how much to cut my losses, and then reallocate that resource, that person, to something else?

I know there’s some art to it, like you said, seeing if the person is dedicated or not. But I don’t know if you have any criteria. For example, you mentioned these investment periods. I found them very long. I’m not sure if I’m being too hasty; I usually give three months. Man, I give three months to figure it out here. If it doesn’t happen, forget it, friend. But I don’t know if I’m being too aggressive with that. And that no, in reality, it actually requires more time. How do you measure it to know, like: “Okay, I’m going to invest this much time in this with this much money?” Or is there no such thing? As long as the person is dedicated.

I think there are signs of life.

You see signs of life in their work.

Maybe they have a day, a week where it goes well, and another week it drops.

So, you’re seeing signs of life, showing it could work, but it’s not consistent.

And then the other thing I used a lot was how Kendago was performing during that time they were managing.

I always considered Kendago as a kind of insurance, because, you know, if Kendago isn’t doing well and the internal person isn’t doing well, okay, something’s strange.

It’s not working for anyone. Now, if Kendago is doing well, but the internal person isn’t, we’re missing some detail in this business that is possible to fix.

So it was a lot about analyzing like this: are they both failing, is one doing well and the other not?

And if I keep seeing those signs, if I see signs of life, I continue the process.

And also, talk to the person, see if that’s what they really want. Do you want to continue in this media buying life?

Are you happy? Do you want to go somewhere else? Do you want to do something else? I was always very open like that.

You know, what do you want to do with your career?

He missed deadlines. He didn’t stay on top of the team, but he focused a lot on the report.

Then I transitioned him to the data area, because I saw that was what he wanted to do, and he became an incredible person who generated a lot of value.

So, sometimes, you can reposition a person into another area. Or the person is sick of Facebook, has been doing that for five years and wants to change platforms a bit.

Then you see if they don’t want to move to TikTok, Snapchat, try something new.

But you have to – it’s what you said – it’s an art. You have to, but you also can’t operate in the negative.

It’s not that the person failed for six months; they didn’t deliver consistent results for six months, but there were several delivery points there, and they certainly more than paid their salary.

But it wasn’t consistent. I had weekly losses, monthly losses. Sometimes, very good results that would drop right after.

It’s interesting that you mentioned that this internal person discovered a completely different way to scale on Google.

That exists. So there are different types of ways to scale. There are, but they are – like, I’m not a media buyer, I don’t have that.

I, like, I don’t know, I spent five hundred thousand reais on Facebook when I was a mentee, in the easiest way possible: set it up and that’s it.

I didn’t even look, didn’t even touch the computer again, because I was afraid the account would get blocked.
Then, once the ROI was there, I’d close the laptop and that was it.

Done, the offer is just good. Thank God.

02:08:45The Meta adjustment that increases campaign performance

But, man, this is like… There’s a lot of variability in this business.

Are there several ways to scale, or are there like two or three? In your experience, as you see a lot?

I don’t know, but there are definitely more than one.

Can you give me an example, to provide some context for this, of two distinct ways that worked?

We even talked about this earlier, which is lifetime versus duplicator versus the basics. “The Baiano method” as well. There are several methodologies.

And when you start analyzing the data, you start finding points of inefficiency too. For example, we noticed that many ads we launched on Google were being disapproved.

What do we need to change in the process so they get disapproved less?

Google is much more annoying than Facebook in terms of disapproving ads.

You know, sometimes what did we do?

We’d take the Facebook ad and put it on Google, but the disapproval rate was very high.

So we said: we can’t do this transfer one-to-one. So what we did was: let’s adjust these Facebook ads and prepare them for Google.

So, when there was a more sensual image of a woman or a man, we’d put text over it.
Let’s add the subtitle, make it wide and put it in front of the sensual part, and then Google would approve it.
So we started identifying what Google’s approval patterns were to have a much higher approval rate.
Which means our campaigns were much more stable than Kendago’s, because we found this point of stability.

So it’s not just – I’m not just talking about campaign strategy, I’m talking about everything, the operation in general.

Sometimes, for example, the angle of talking about celebrities, how celebrities lose weight so fast to film a movie, worked much better on Google than on Facebook.
So, sometimes, an angle works better on Google than on Facebook.
Then it’s good to allocate an editor focused on Google.
Leave that editor focused on Google, because then he’ll know everything about Google and will move much faster on these changes.
He’ll know exactly what to change.

And then you also have to change the ad: sixteen by nine to nine by sixteen.

What formats work best on YouTube?

So there are these leverages, these specifics.

Here, the information I get from people who come on the podcast is that Google is very picky with flashy editing.

So, generally, people approve ads that are as dry as possible, maybe just with cuts, to have a certain fluency in the person’s speech.

But the simplest video possible is usually what people tend to launch and get approved.

At least it was until a few months ago, when I did the YouTube podcasts.

Now I don’t know anymore, man.

The Google team – we always had – Facebook was always responsible for about sixty percent of our spending, and Google, forty.
The Google team was always upset because we didn’t make Google come first.
Why does Facebook spend so much more than us every month?
It’s the same thing.
I said: man, approve my ad.
I have much more freedom on Facebook than on Google.

So, if you can find mechanisms – whether through relationships with the Google team, through blurring the video, through subtitles over parts that can’t be seen – if you find your formula there and you adjust your process to solve this systematically, you’ll have much more success with Google.

The issue with Google is why it’s so picky. Generally, people launch ads that are more boring than on Facebook.

If you could use the same ad you use on Facebook on Google, you’d have much more success with Google.

So, I think the reasoning is: what do you need to do to keep your ad super attractive and still run it on Google?

Because you’ll leverage it, you’ll unlock all the potential Google has to offer you, but you need creative freedom with it, otherwise it gets too boring.

Then YouTube is harder to convert, but the ROI is much higher.

People coming from Google – historically, I think so, everywhere I’ve worked, the ROI is higher, much higher.

Historically, for me too.

Google traffic, especially YouTube – actually, YouTube, right, which is what we’re talking about here – cold traffic, etc., it’s much more premium traffic, much more qualified, the ticket is higher. It’s a more constant traffic source too.

There was even something that people – sometimes I create some things in Vturb and people innovate with it.

Like this: when you create something, you never know what people will use it for. Then I created a function there which is a traffic filter. What was happening?

There was a lot of trouble with plagiarism on Vturb, and there are still people there downloading videos, etc.

Then I created two functions.

The first is Fake Download.

So, when someone goes to download your video, you don’t download the video that’s there; they’ll download another video you selected. And so it’s a way for the plagiarist to think they’re downloading your video, but they’re not.

It’s Fake Download.

If you don’t know this function, folks, it will appear on the screen. Just use it, it’s pretty cool.

Then what I recommend is: put a video that’s similar to yours, but not yours. It’s not the control video that converts the most; it’s just a variation there.

That way the plagiarist will download it, think they downloaded it, test it, it will go badly, and they’ll try to copy another.

Because if we prevent the download, they’ll find a way to download it. But if we deliver the video to them – like: there you go, my friend, download it here – then they screw themselves.

And that was the first thing we did to combat plagiarism.

Then the second thing, we created a traffic filter.

What is that?

It only shows your video, your VSL, if the traffic arriving at the video meets certain criteria, like a cloaker, but for the video. What was the idea behind that?

The idea was for the person to select there that traffic will only come from Google, that it will only come with this tag in the URL.
That way they’ll be able to access the main VSL. Otherwise, they’ll access a fake VSL, which is the other one that isn’t the main one. All to prevent plagiarists.

Now the guys are using this traffic filter function to upload VSLs on Google and put another video there for Google’s own review not to catch it.

Oh, crazy.

And so, basically, the rejection the ad would get wasn’t because of the ad; it was because of the landing page.
But, since there’s a different video there because of the traffic filter, it passes.

It’s a bit of black hat, right. It’s black.

I didn’t even know this thing would exist in the first place. People, they have this mischief.

Better to build the relationship. If I can get that, then, folks, without a doubt, it’s more long-term.

But there are many of these little hacks like that, man.

And the problem is I don’t know how sustainable these hacks are, you know.

Like: put a thing there, do this thing here.

That’s why it’s better to build a brand.

It’s sustainable, long-term.

But I understand it’s not for everyone.

But it makes our lives much easier, way easier.

And yours too, right, because you don’t want black hat people using your platform.

Yeah, so. It’s something for – I don’t know, man.

I’m afraid that, someday, I’ll pick some Vturb link and they’ll ban a traffic source, you know, something like that. I’ve already thought about that.

I think even – I don’t know, I’m not sure if it happens. It must happen, right. The guys banning specific links from platforms.

Ah, no, it does happen. Because every now and then, checkout links for platforms end up getting blocked.

We had the physical account and the digital account for VShred. The physical account was for supplements; the digital account was for a fitness program you watch. Very low risk.

Supplements are a much higher risk. We paid a much higher CPC for traffic coming from the physical account than from the digital account, precisely because of the risk.

So, like, for sure, Facebook will ban it if they understand that site is violating the rules. Every now and then, I know there are banned Hotmart checkouts.

I don’t know if you know Hotmart. Then, every now and then, these things happen. But then you go in, send a message there – at least back when I remember this happening. But with YouTube it never happened, thank God.

I have a few more questions here about your day-to-day. You mentioned you had a data guy there who was creating reports for you.

Sometimes I think about hiring a data guy. But your guy is a data guy. Did he just do that all day, making reports?
But it’s endless reporting. So, what did he do?

No, man. Believe it or not, no. Because there were many things he had to figure out how to do. He spent a lot of time discovering how to structure the information the way I needed it, how to get the data in the first place.

And we had a pretty cinematic group in terms of data engineering. Naming conventions are super important: how you use names so nothing breaks in the data flow.

And a question: for example, I want to see – I think, actually, Brazil is a bit ahead of the United States in this regard, because I don’t see anyone complaining about this here.
I don’t have a report I can trust, and so on.

I’m giving an example. Since we had a quiz in front of the VSL, at VShred, I wanted to see – it was a quiz.
The quiz had six or seven pages. And then, after that, you’d go to six different VSLs. And then you had a crazy mess there, right, because later you had upsell, downsell. Whatever.

I wanted to see the performance of each of these VSLs.
And I wanted to see by gender, I wanted to see iOS, Android, I wanted to see state, I wanted to see country.
So, it was very granular.
How do you analyze each VSL, each segment?

So, it’s complex.
You have to – sometimes you dive in, you go so deep you think: damn, I’m not seeing anything at all.
I think I’ve gotten lost here.
And sometimes you can’t find an optimization point like the one you were looking for.

So, many times – it’s what we were talking about – it’s your hypothesis.
I start with a hypothesis.
What’s my hypothesis?
That, I don’t know, male 55+ might generate a much higher ROI than male 35+.
Then you dive in to try to find that hypothesis.
Sometimes you find nothing.
That doesn’t mean you failed; it means your hypothesis wasn’t validated.
And then you go and try to find another hypothesis.

But each time you have a hypothesis, you have to ask this guy to create the report that gives you that view.
And his job was to figure out how to put together what I wanted.
I gave him the problem, he said: okay, now I’ll go and figure it out.
That’s what he was passionate about.
He spent the whole day doing that.

Got it.

Yeah, folks.
There are many people I talk to who have this limitation of hiring this data guy in the first place because they think the guy will be idle, doing nothing.
But there’s a lot of work.

In fact, at Performance Golf, today I have a Data Scientist on my team. He’s more senior. And there’s a guy who’s super senior. He’s sixty years old already. But, damn, he manipulates the Domo platform. He knows everything that happens at Performance Golf.

And what we work with is very complex. The e-commerce platform is Shopify. The VSL platform is Checkout Champ, because I can’t work with Shopify, as they don’t accept the ecosystem we have.
So you need two.
And then you imagine the amount of data there that needs to be organized and generated in different ways.

Undoubtedly, in Vturb’s case it’s much easier, because it’s a recurring model. The person pays monthly.
And, actually, there are even tools that already do all this analytics. You know? For SaaS.
So that’s it, which I think is much more straightforward that we need to find.

That would be really good, man. There was a tool back in the day called Hyros. I don’t know if you know it.

I’ve used Hyros, but it doesn’t even come close to what I need. It didn’t work for me either and it was expensive, right, man. It’s expensive. Then, because I used – for me, given Brazil’s reality – I think I paid ten thousand dollars. So for us it was expensive.

I think we’re paying three thousand dollars a month.

Because Hyros is good for those selling high ticket. We have a much longer sales cycle. It tracks a click, it appears on the click or not, then it converts within a period of one to seven days.
And then Hyros gives you that visibility: even if it converts on day seven, you can assign attribution to day one.
Then you can see exactly what return you’re getting.

But for auto-scale traffic, like we have with digital and physical, Hyros doesn’t help much.
It’s more for long windows.

Yeah. Here, I think people are using RedTrack more. I don’t know if you know this tool. It’s not Brazilian. I think it’s from Lithuania, I don’t know, somewhere over in Eastern Europe.

There. I don’t know that one.

It’s pretty famous. RedTrack. Here in Brazil we use UTMify. But it – I don’t think it does the same job as RedTrack.
I think it aggregates the UTMs and stuff. I don’t really know how it works.

These platforms, I think they’re more for campaign optimization. What I’m talking about is more advanced opportunity analysis, like what you want to try. Which is LTV by channel, in this case. The LTV of the person who came, LTV by channel, LTV by gender, by age, by device.

I’ve already – damn, we’ve seen iOS or Android perform completely differently. We even had campaigns dedicated to – it performs. On Vturb, their performance is also very different. Generally, iOS converts more.
Exactly. From what I, at least historically, it depends on the product.

At Performance Golf, for sure. At VShred, on Google, Android was better.

Interesting.

Yeah, man.

But what was your day-to-day like, being the vice president, the marketing director?

What did you do? Wake up, just look at reports? How does it work?

Lots of reports. Lots of conversations with other departments, especially technology. Because, as I told you, unfortunately VShred’s technology broke down a lot.

And there were four partners.

Nick, who was the copywriter; Kevin, media buyer; and Roger, who was the tech guy.

But he wasn’t formally trained in technology. He learned to build out of necessity. They got together and he started building the site.

And then VShred started to grow. And then he really built a house of cards. Because, imagine, several offers, VSLs, those crazy paths. If the guy doesn’t know, that’s really complicated.

And then you’d change something completely unrelated to the VSL and it would break.

Then you’d have to figure out which VSL broke, on which browser, and for all channels. Then I, damn, I spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out where it had broken.

Because an offer that was performing great, spending fifty, a hundred, two hundred thousand a day, sometimes would drop to ten overnight. So, for sure, something broke.

What’s the biggest value I can generate for the company at that moment? Restore that performance. Right.
There was nothing else I could do.

So, I didn’t want to know about ads, I didn’t want to know about versions, I didn’t want to know about anything.

I just wanted to figure out where it had broken. And I spent hours, a lot of time, investigating that.

That’s why I needed that data guy too, so he could set up all this visualization according to the hypothesis I had about where, what had broken. And many times, we saved the company because of that, for being able to fix what was broken and restore performance.

Do you think this is a normal thing for a big company, or were you guys really messing up?

I think it was a very serious problem at VShred. It’s not that – it’s not common for it to be that serious. But it’s because we grew a lot on a system that was completely like a house of cards, as you said.

That wasn’t fixed, that didn’t have proper structure. It wasn’t scalable. It didn’t have consistency. You couldn’t rely on it.

And it was a very serious problem for them. It could really end the company.

Yeah, I remember when I had my traffic company there, we had some okay servers that could handle it.

But as we started scaling, it all went to hell. Then we had to create our own structure there, etc., starting from scratch.

That’s exactly what I think they should have done a long time ago. I found out after I left that it happened other times and no one could fix it.

Wow, man. The data guy there even said: man, I wish you were here again, because we just can’t figure it out.
You know what’s happening?

My God.

Yeah, it was serious.

Just to show, right, folks. Even huge companies out there, everyone has their problems.

So, if you have a problem in your company there, man, it’s normal. I have in mine, you have in yours. Vturb has problems with the site. So, damn, everyone has to solve them.

And, man, so you stayed for six years in this VShred thing?

That’s crazy, man.

Stayed six years.

At VShred, isn’t it the biggest VSL direct marketing company in the United States? There’s Golden Hippo.
I think they’re the same thing for VSL. Yeah, it’s what we were talking about.

This information comes from the Meta guys, which they provide to us. We were the biggest VSL traffic company. However, there were some guys spending much more sending traffic to the quiz.

I’m talking about BetterMe. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them.

Sure. Yes.

They sell an app. And what did they do?

They created skeletons of the same app focused on a certain group of people.

Male 55 plus.

So they’d put a fit older guy, an older skeleton, aimed at the male audience.

And then they did the same thing for the female audience.

And they used actors and influencers at the age they were targeting.

So they segmented everything very granularly like that.

And Facebook showed us.

And so, another thing: they are app subscription. Their retention is six to nine months. They can afford to lose a lot of money on customer acquisition. Because we didn’t have that luxury. So, while we had to hit a ROAS of point three, they were able to scale with point five, some even with point three.

Man, holy crap. How much money can you spend if your target is point three?

Yeah, I’ve heard of two million a day.

Because it’s much easier, you know. I’ve heard they are really big. I just didn’t know it was that much.

It changes the game a lot when you can lose money on acquisition. Changes the game a lot.

That’s insane, man. It’s basically increasing the budget and stuff, right.

And when there are investors too. These companies they work with outside money.

Ah, yes. VShred never had outside money. It was all with Nick and Kevin’s money there.

Tougher.

There’s another one too called Kilo Health, which is also doing pretty well.

I don’t know it.

This one is quiz-based too, man. There are several of these quiz companies. These long quizzes to sell an app at the end.

Every now and then someone is talking about this here in Brazil too. It’s starting to stir up, man.

This is very strong.

We had a meeting with the Facebook guys just now. They said: focus on this.

And today I’ve placed three significant resources within the company just to do this quiz. We have a quiz already working that, when I joined, didn’t exist. It’s our funnel that’s performing best.

And we’re creating a long one that was based on Simple. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Simple Piano, which is an app for learning how to play piano.

They are huge and they have one of the best quizzes Facebook has identified in terms of performance. And they said: if there’s someone you should be inspired by, it’s these guys here.

So we took it, dissected their quiz and adapted it for golf. And now we’re working on building that.

But isn’t this quiz the one that’s working?

What’s working is a short six-question quiz that leads to a VSL. It’s similar to the one VShred had.

And there are six questions, but one of them is the one that directs to the correct VSL.

So, it’s like a trigger.

I’m making you understand that these questions will direct you to a product customized for you.

When not all of them are important to us. The question that determines which product I will recommend to you is flexibility, in our case.

Because we talked to a golf instructor, and he said: this for me is the most important factor.
So, it’s not that we just made it up.

Flexibility. With what? How flexible the person is?

See, that’s one where I really don’t know anything about golf.

Me neither. I had no idea that was important.

It is important.

Man, there came a time, however, when you wanted to leave VShred and received an offer to go to Performance Golf. Damn, man, you’re in demand, huh? Left VShred for Performance Golf.

But I stayed six years there, right. So, six years there was a good time. It was the longest time I’ve ever stayed at a company. It was the necessary time, I think.

Generally, the contracts for you to become a partner in the company, the cliff vesting is five years.

So you stayed one year of cliff to earn and then four years there with dividends to earn your partnership, your equity, as you progress in the company. So you, in theory, you’ve vested everything you could in standard contracts.

Yes. It’s a very good time. Not everyone stays that long at a company.

It was very good, man. Very good. That says something too, right.

Yeah, I think people are more comfortable hiring when they see you were someone who stayed in one place for a certain amount of time and that you were in that role during that time.

Because what I look for – here’s a tip, folks – I look first: was the person promoted? Or did they stay there for so many years and never did anything?

Then, second: how long did they stay at the company? Are they jumping from branch to branch or do they stay at the company and get promoted?

Then, but man, the coolest thing for me is rehire. Like, if you’re there in your little toy, like, he went to VShred, went to Performance Golf, came back to VShred. The VShred guys liked him so much they hired him back.
Man, then you’re a beast, top-tier.

Because you have the second hire from the same company. So you are proof that you really delivered value.
Otherwise, they wouldn’t hire you back. That’s a good one.

Yeah, man.

02:37:13How VShred Grew in the Market

What could you say was something different – actually, was there any differential, anything you think is important that you learned at VShred that isn’t said in other places, other companies, about this media buying part?

From what I understand, man, I don’t know if I’m correct, but from what I gathered here, I think the most important thing, at least what I learned here, is the importance of this relationship thing, man.

Because it seems your relationships were so strong with everyone – not just with Kendago, but also with the traffic sources, Google, Facebook – that you had these unfair advantages.

So that even if you, I don’t know, like, even if you make a mistake, like, damn, I made an ad here and it wasn’t approved, man, but I have this secret weapon here, the guy goes and approves it for me.

Ah, I don’t know how to run this traffic source properly, etc., but we have Kendago here doing everything and it’s working, we can also manage. So it seems to make things much easier, you know. That part.

Would you say that was the main differential from those years you spent at VShred, or is there something else that made the company succeed so much?

Vince, for sure. He was a talent out of the curve. He’s both good-looking and good on camera. That’s hard to find. The offer was very good. Nick was a very good copywriter. He created a product that, damn, was very successful.
And the quiz, for sure, helped.

An interesting piece of data here: the VShred quiz remained the same for seven years.
Damn.
Without any testing.
Holy crap.
We couldn’t test because the system was completely unstable and the VSLs didn’t have any A/B testing.

We scaled to three hundred million dollars a year without running A/B tests on the VSLs.
Damn, man.
It’s almost unbelievable.
That’s surreal.

And when I left there, we had started doing A/B testing.

Man, that’s really crazy, man.
That’s just too surreal.
That’s like: if you guys weren’t testing, what was happening?
Nick nailed a killer copy and Vince is a monster.
He’s a monster.

Look at that, folks, how eighty-twenty is important.
The guy nailed a copy with a few things, a killer persona, and never tested a product again.

I can’t say it’s a crap product, right, since there are many people who used and liked it.
But it could have been improved a lot.
Yes.

Yeah, no.
For you guys out there, folks, man, very interesting.

Yeah, and then you left.

VShred was billing like three hundred million, two hundred million dollars a year. Then you went to Performance Golf, which is still in the nine digits, a lower revenue, right. And, man, what differences did you see when you went from one to the other? Did you find Performance Golf was more prepared to scale or was there a lot of work to do? How was that process?

So, there was a VP of Growth before I joined. He left. And, on the same day he left, the only media buyer who was there with him left too. Meaning, I joined the company and it was just me running the media department with eight offers, with physical, digital and high ticket – three lines of business – and huge.

I said: damn, I need to hire fast.

But wait, it was just you? There was no one else? No one else, damn.

So I started everything from scratch. How was the company running? I had two Facebook accounts, damn, with all these offers. So, it was a chaotic three months like that. You know, I thought: damn, where did I get myself into, man?

And, besides having to manage all that, I had to hire. So I had to start looking for talent and fast.

I started. There was a guy who worked with the company who was actually the one who found me, a headhunter, who went after me. Exceptional.

And then I got a good process that I implemented: I don’t enter the interview as the first one. I come in after a filter has already been applied.

So the headhunter guy already did the filtering. And when I had my manager, he would also come in and do the interview. I only came in afterwards.
So you kind of manage to get only top candidates that you will talk to. Do that screening. And I would also send an assessment to the candidate.

So, if he didn’t pass the assessment, he wouldn’t talk to him either.

Then I hired these people and I restructured the entire media account for Performance Golf.

It was a mess, it was really messy.

It goes back a bit to what we were talking about, you know?

I think it’s about having focus.

The guy who was there before me, he was the VP of growth, and he got involved with copy, he got involved with CR, he got involved with media, he got involved with everything.

In other words, his time was completely scattered and he didn’t have focus on one thing.

When I came in, the team came at me with the same mentality: you’re the guy who’s going to solve everything.

I said: guys, pause, wait a minute, time out.

I’m not that guy who was here before.

My role here is media buyer, I’m going to focus on media buying.

I have a lot to do in this department.

So, let’s hold off on these requests that are coming in, you know?

And it’s hard, man, to say no when you’re new, you know?

Like, this guy just came in new, and he’s already saying no to us.

You have to have personality, you have to know what you’re doing, you know?

You have to be from Rio, you have to be street-smart, figure it out with him.

It’s hard, you know?

And even more so when no one knows if you’re going to perform, you know?

No one.

Everyone is watching, the spotlight is on you, but you have no track record to show.

But man, let me ask you a question: why do you think Performance Golf had such great results, even while struggling with things, sort of, well, leaving a bit to be desired, perhaps lacking a bit of organization?

Undoubtedly they had good things too, right, to be able to achieve such an absurd result.

What do you think was the fruit of their success there?

They had nine copywriters.

Damn.

I think they have a bit less now, but they focused a lot on copy, you know?

And they created offers that produced a lot and they had good products.

If you look at Performance Golf on Google Review, it’s top in several different channels.

We had a good product and they had very good videos.

Like, we would go to the golf range, to the golf club, we would do top shots, you know?

Product zoom, really nice quality.

So, even though the ads were messy and the account structure wasn’t good, the ads were good, the copy worked.

It worked, you could see it was good.

There was a lot… Have you ever seen that one-legged golfer copy?

No, one-legged golfer?

I’ve never seen it, no.

That one is crazy.

By John Carlton, that copy, very famous.

It’s an advertorial that said: “Amazing secrets discovered by one-legged golfer.”

Yeah, it does away with slices, you know?

So it’s an advertorial that talked about, it’s very interesting.

I’ll send it to you later.

I think this angle could be adapted to do something, ok?

We’ll definitely explore that.

That’s a hell of an angle.

Surely someone at Performance Golf must have, because, like, they are really addicted to golf, man.

That ad is definitely very famous.

But man, then you took over.

You went into Performance Golf, things were disorganized, you decided to organize things, and you had that copy team there.

And in your opinion, was Performance Golf working because of that copy team?

So, even if the traffic wasn’t organized, man, the message was still being delivered, it was still a good message, the video was good, the ad was good, it still sold.

You notice that this is kind of the same thing you said there about Wishfred, that the guy had Nick who was at Bank Prairie, had Vince, sometimes the site went down, but it still sold like crazy.

From what I’m understanding here, you worked with two excellent copy teams, both at Performance Golf and at Wishfred, right?

Do you believe that is the eighty-twenty for both companies?

I believe that copy propelled them, because they are today, without a doubt, if it weren’t for the top copy, they wouldn’t be what they are.

Performance Golf I think has a stronger focus on product, which I think helps a lot too.

The company will be more stable.

Undoubtedly, it is more stable.

Is it older than Wishred?

No, newer.

Newer, six years, I think.

Seven years.

But yes, the copy, man, for sure.

We’re trying to change that now.

What I’m telling you, I think the VSL needs to be renewed a bit.

For example, I think it needs to have an interactive bias, you know?

Where you can, within the bias, direct the guy to different paths, like a quiz based on what he answers.

Within the VSL, you know?

You do the pitch and you give him an option: what level of golf are you at?

Are you playing at Top Golf?

Do you know what Top Golf is?

You just whack the ball.

It’s a range, you just keep hitting the ball and there’s a giant net at the end.

In Vegas there’s Top Golf.

The guys never actually go to the course to walk, play with a golf cart.

It’s just drinking beer and hitting the ball.

Hit it.

That’s one type of golfer.

Are you at that level?

Or you… I would be at that level, I think.

Yeah, me too.

It’s fine for me.

I think I’ve played golf about five times.

The more beer, the worse it got.

And then there’s a guy who goes to the range with friends, but it’s crap, he wants to improve his game.

And then there’s a guy who, damn, has been playing for five years, already at what they call par.

What’s the name?

Handicap.

Already has a handicap level out.

And you can’t communicate the same way to these three different types of golfers.

If you can ask him what his case is and then direct the rest of the VSL to communicate with his case, it’s much more powerful than a generic VSL, you know?

That speaks to everyone the same way.

There’s an American tool that does that, it’s Vung Le.

I don’t know if you know it.

It’s already… I knew they talked about that?

They did that.

I think Vime does it too, but Vôlei, he’s the white wrestler.

The headline was like: “Create interactive videos.”

I don’t know, but so far I haven’t seen that work.

That’s why I never did it on vector.

Yeah, I don’t know.

I don’t know if it’s going to work.

I think that, well, something different has to exist.

Today, the quiz, by far, is what scales the most in the United States.

But then we’re also talking about apps, and apps that are subscription-based, and you have to consider that people stay there for three to nine months, depending on the app, and most of them can afford to lose money on acquisition.

It’s a different game.

Because it’s like this: we’re assuming the person is going to stay that whole time.

Then for the person to stay that long, there has to be something in the app that is good, top-notch.

So the app itself has to have some engineering, some gamification, something that generates that retention in the first place.

So the guy who is very good at marketing is not necessarily going to be good at creating the app.

So you need to have a product team, you need to have something that really makes the person stay.

We hired the top guy in the market to create the Performance Golf app.

But is he a programmer?

No, he’s a marketing guy, but he knows how to organize the app’s features and how to make it super easy to use, the skills, and how to direct app optimization towards what’s getting results.

He did My Fitness Pal.

I think that, well, it might be the most famous diet app.

He was the guy, the director there used that app.

Everyone has used it.

I think I’ve used it.

I’ve used it.

It’s very easy to track calories when you’re consuming, the macros there.

Yeah, and he’s worked on other gigantic apps too.

We hired this guy to change the Performance Golf app, to make the best golf app planet Earth has ever seen.

That’s the CEO’s idea, you know?

And community, you have to have it.

We have one-on-one support there.

The guy can record his swing, upload it to the app to get immediate feedback from a coach.

So, you have several.

It’s what I told you, man, it’s the product, you know?

How much you invest in your product.

It’s expensive, it’s very expensive to invest in the app.

It’s a strong investment, but it’s a product that can generate, in the long term, incredible revenue for the company.

Man, today, your main funnel, as far as I remember, is still quiz, VSL at Performance Golf?

For digital, yes, for physical, it’s advertorial.

Ah yes, to sell the clubs there, those things.

And there at Wishred, there as far as I remember, it’s still quiz and VSL.

As far as I remember.

And it’s just that the biggest advertisers in the world today, look, without a doubt, not the biggest in our niche, of performance, that thing.

They don’t have VSL.

These quiz people.

02:50:40Future of the American Market

What are you seeing, man, in terms of the future of our market in the United States? What do you think is happening? Are people really going to these apps, or do you see people innovating in terms of VSLs, creating these interactive VSLs you mentioned? I’ve seen one or two testing, ok, but I haven’t seen that many.

What I can tell you from my numbers, man, is that we’re only growing, especially abroad, ok. Every month it’s growing. So it’s today, ok. I think we are the largest VSL platform in the world, at least in terms of website traffic and volumes of sites out there.

Verified by external tools, we are. So I think we’re a great thermometer for the VSL market to see if the market is going or not. But I don’t know. It’s just that the VSL market is a sub-niche of a sub-niche, it’s very small.

What do you see from these big companies, serious companies that have brands like VShred, Performance Golf, Golden Hippo?

What do you think they are moving to do in the near future?

It’s like the guy knocking on your door to sell or the guy who does personal selling going to the physical location?

It’s the VSL. It will always exist on the internet, in my opinion.

What I think we should do in this market is diversify the funnel.

You have a VSL funnel that works, create a quiz too.

Create a… For example, Golden Hippo has many successful funnels where the VSL, the VSL is the ad and the guy puts in fifty minutes there on his bear, full of energy.

He throws the guy to checkout, you know?

I’ve seen another funnel.

If you can get multiple funnels to work, you protect your company.

You have multiple ways to capitalize, you know?

You won’t depend on just one.

And the quiz gives you another opening of doors.

In the case of VShred, for example, I could if I didn’t have a VSL.

Because what happens when I use Vince in the ad and if I don’t use him in the VSL, it doesn’t convert as well.

When you go Vince to Vince, it converts top. When you go influencer to Vince, it doesn’t convert as well.

If you go from influencer to influencer, like an actor, in the VSL it won’t convert as well as Vince.

The quiz gives you the opportunity to diversify your ad a lot. You no longer need to link Vince with Vince.

You can test as many avatars as you want. So, you protect your company by creating different funnels that perform, you know?

I think that’s how you shield your company. And, without a doubt, this is a fact.

Facebook shows us this. Today the funnels that scale the most in the performance market are quizzes.

There’s no debate. Sometimes quiz to VSL, sometimes just quiz, but the VSL is there.

It’s also a top funnel, you know? Yeah man, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

I’m, I don’t know.

More and more, it’s that this artificial intelligence thing, man, is going to change a lot, man.

It’s crazy.

It’s going to be a bucket of cold water.

We don’t even know what’s going to happen.

Maybe in ten years we just press a button, then a Tesla robot jumps out, and it will do everything for us, you know?

I think.

Ok, we’re going to buy a box like this, we’re going to press a button, a robot is going to jump out and say: man, go do that thing, I don’t know what.

But you still have the human part, managing people and stuff.

I don’t know if people will like being managed by a robot. That wouldn’t be ideal.

This interpersonal part will always be present, you know? Without a doubt.

Yeah but man, what did you think of the podcast? Did you like it?

Really cool, man.

Did you think you’d be able to talk for three hours?

Yeah, I still can’t believe it was three hours.

Oh, Gabi, it was three hours and one minute.

No, it wasn’t, three ten, ok.

But it’s a lie, it was three hours and one minute.

Because we started at two forty-eight, now it’s five forty-nine.

Incredible.

Yeah, but that’s how it is, ok.

The podcast is really a longer podcast.

I try to have a longform conversation, like the Diary of a CEO there, like Joe Rogan.

It’s the only direct response marketing podcast in the world that has, at least I don’t know, ok.

Another one that’s as long as this one?

I don’t know.

There’s one from ClickBank, but it’s not that much.

I think they talk for like forty minutes, an hour, and it doesn’t have that much impact.

I think most views are probably five hundred views.

Here it’s ten thousand.

Yeah, you’re innovating in the market.

I am.

And now we’re starting to translate everything into English.

We already have two episodes in English, using AI, right, we were just waiting for that YouTube function to have multiple audio tracks on the same video.

Then, initially, God willing, we’ll be able to take the content global.

Then it will be really cool.

Let’s see if we grow even more this year.

Yes, imagine.

All podcasts translated into all languages of the world.

Now it’s going to be crazy, right?

A big hit.

But if you want to record one in English too, let’s do it.

Man, it’s possible, ok.

I want to go to the United States to do that tour there.

As I told you, we could record one in English.

It would be good.

02:57:28Closing

But man, I wanted to thank you for your time.

Man, you came from the United States, guys, came from the United States, to give us this support here on the VTurb podcast.

Wow, my pleasure.

It’s really good.

And man, I thank you, ok, once again.

And I always end the podcast by letting the guest give a message to the VTurb audience.

I’m going to give you that message now, ok.

Before that, I just wanted to say that guys, if you have a direct response marketing operation here in Brazil, it’s Gabriel here, he does occasionally, ok, consulting.

And it’s not for just anyone.

We were talking about this at lunch.

There it’s something that only he, he chooses when he wants to do it and stuff.

And we kind of thought about saying this here, because I don’t know what might happen in the future.

But at the moment, right, from what I understand, you don’t do it, it’s not your standard to accept.

Not looking for it.

Of course, if some crazy guy shows up and it’s a very good toll, you’re willing to talk.

Just like I am too, if someone wants to buy VTurb, I don’t know, we’re here, paying well, what’s the harm?

Exactly, right.

But it’s rare.

If you think you’re at that level to talk to someone who is ahead of acquisition teams that bill nine-digit dollars per year, then man, there’s a chance here for you to talk to Gabriel.

And he doesn’t use Instagram, ok.

He uses LinkedIn.

So you’re going to have to go there on LinkedIn to call him, which is how I did it.

I called him there.

That’s not true.

Now he’s here.

So man, the LinkedIn link will appear here.

Actually, there will be something here on the screen, ok, like a print, something from the LinkedIn page.

And here in the comments, the LinkedIn link will also be there, in case you want to get in touch with Gabi.

Yeah man, there were people, is there a way to put automation on LinkedIn?

There isn’t.

There is, there is.

And for someone to send you a keyword and receive an automation?

Ok, there are people doing that strongly.

That’s actually it, the tip I’m going to give you, ok, if it bothers you, ok, because sometimes I’ve already received feedback that the guy did an RT here and it filled up with messages and the guy couldn’t keep up.

Yeah, guys, if it’s the tip I give, ok: go to Instagram and type there on Instagram in the link, type VTurb.

If automation comes, then follow the automation.

If it doesn’t come, then you go normally, because I don’t know what’s going to happen, ok.

And I don’t want to ruin your toy.

It’s happened a few times where the guy comes and does the pitch, then the podcast becomes infinite, right, because the control gets recommended and it keeps falling, people keep pinging there.

So the link will appear there, ok, in case you want some kind of consulting with the person who led the Wishred acquisition team and now leads the Performance Golf acquisition team, two companies with nine-digit dollar annual revenue.

Yeah, here it is, you know?

If you say that we don’t bring the best people not only from Brazil, but from the world, to the VTurb podcast, it’s a lie, because Gabriel is here.

And man, finally, ok, I wanted to let you send a message to the people at home.

Some people talk about God, some people have everything.

Some people send a motivational message.

Some people talk about the consulting they do, for example.

Then man, politics is also, there’s everything.

Look at the camera there, for your Brazilian friends there.

Say something to them.

Yeah man, it’s a little hard to get into the United States now.

I don’t recommend it.

It’s a topic we discussed here that I think is important to reinforce.

It’s the issue of relationship, right.

I think that was perhaps the key point of our conversation.

It’s the issue of branding, right.

If you want to create a long-term company that lives on for many years, I think you have to worry about your branding.

It’s that eighty-twenty mentality, right, of identifying the problem.

And man, don’t be afraid to fail, right.

Everyone will fail.

See it as an opportunity.

Take the learning you can from that failure, adjust and move forward, you know?

I think the secret to success is to walk, learn from mistakes and walk fast to make things happen.

And I think, if it wasn’t clear from our conversation here, I think it’s important to repeat: if you focus on relationships with traffic sources and with strong agencies.

But that’s it, man.

People focusing on relationships, I think it creates a very strong shield for your company.

It’s like you’re adding insurance.

So, I don’t see many people doing this here in Brazil, but it was certainly something I learned abroad that is very, very valuable.

Good, very good, man.

Once again, thank you very much for taking the time for us here on the VTurb podcast.

A big hug, everyone.

See you in the next episode.

And thanks, man, thank you very much for watching another episode of Secrets of Scaling.

If you liked the episode, don’t forget, ok, to like this episode, to subscribe to the V-Turbo channel so you can receive more episodes in your inbox.

That’s it.