Happy Sunday! If you're new here, the rules are the following: to enjoy this email, you must be feet up, a beverage in your hand (hopefully a BARCODE, maybe some 21 Seeds tequila mixed in), and feeling cozy. I don't make the rules.

Before we get into today's newsletter, I just wanted to thank everyone for reading this newsletter. The concept of writing articles has always felt daunting (unless done with David Perell), but writing this newsletter is like writing to friends, and your responses all make it worth it. So with that, do you have one person I should email and pitch to get on this newsletter? Just give me their name & email... I'll personally write them a note this week and pitch them why they should subscribe to this Sunday email. I'll make you look good too 😉 unless you don't want me to mention you.

For today's email, I wanted to dive into something I'm seeing more and more. As of now, May 16th, most brands are beginning to think about going into the first real shopping season of the year: early summer. That means there are more products launching, news feeds are getting more crowded, and what worked creatively in the winter/spring months of the year won't necessarily work through the summer.

A good DTC team knows that you should be testing new creative every couple of weeks at the minimum, but you also need to be pushing new messages, testing new benefits/value props, and getting more creative. The beautiful and festive photoshoots of the Winer/Spring months won't be as effective, and your shopper's intent is in high demand, so you need to work harder.

One thing that we see do well, almost always, is properly crafted UGC videos. UGC stands for "User Generated Content" or put simpler, just a video testimonial/review from a customer or user of your products. Naturally, when people talk about why they love something, they're always focused on outcomes, and secondly, they address a problem, one that many probably share. They're tremendously relatable and cost almost close to nothing to produce.

If you do it right, you can also make these pretty cheap — free if you do the editing yourself, or just film the initial video in the Tik Tok app (it has an easy way to start, stop, and stitch everything together).

Carly and Bailee on the Sharma Brands team put together a UGC Playbook for how we think about UGC creative with the brands we work with. We have some examples in there too, from Poo~Pourri, Orgain Protein, and BEHAVE candy, all brands you probably know or have used!

Check out the UGC Playbook here

Software/App of the Week:

Batch — The easiest (& most fun) way to reorder products.

Batch is a company I invested in a few months ago, and they finally put their splash page to begin conversations with brands around using their re-order technology.

You might be wondering HOW can you possibly make a re-order easier than emailing someone a link (which exists today), or texting a user a link with a pre-loaded cart URL (which also exists)... well, Batch is that new way, and you've probably never seen it before.

Let's take House of Wise, for example, imagine inside the gummies, when you get to 3 gummies left, there's a small card dividing the gummies, that's NFC enabled, where you can tap your phone, and instantly reorder? Or if you're NUGGS and you realize you're almost out and want to re-order, you scan the QR code on the box (try the one below) to quickly initiate an order.

Sign up at the bottom of their site to be one of the first brands on Batch: getbatch.com

Brand of the Week:

GrowthAssistant — Not actually a brand, but incredibly useful for this audience: A full-time, college-educated growth marketing support person in the Philippines for only $2500 per month.

One of the biggest mistakes I see growth teams/DTC brands make is having their US-based teams working on routine, manual tasks. They are everywhere in growth marketing. Pull together reporting, sit there for 2 hours while a bulk sheet uploads, format an image 10 different ways to test, emails to hundreds of affiliates anytime you make a change, etc.

If you want to see an immediate team productivity boost, get yourself a (or a few) GrowthAssistants! I use them off and on to staff and quickly get things done. It was founded earlier this year and is backed by Jesse Pujji of Ampush, who uses Growth Assistants within his companies too.  

They've had a lot of demand, so they put up a Typeform waitlist on their website. Reply if you're interested and I'll get them to bump you up the waitlist!

That's all for today! Hopefully, you're just about finished with your drink. If you have something you'd love a deep dive on, just reply with it — I always love taking ideas from those who read it. Thank you again for getting all the way to this sentence, it means the world to me!!

PS — get those 9 hours of sleep tonight!!

🤗🙏