Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from. This week, I spent time learning mostly direct-to-consumer and marketing strategies.

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• TikTok Shop goldrush is changing marketing – YouTube interview with Rob the Bank. I’ve been learning more about TikTok Shop and its popular affiliate program. Rob explains how the affiliate strategy works and how he used it to scale his ecommerce brands. Rob does a good job of explaining why this strategy is effective and how to execute it.
• ButcherBox founder turned a hobby into a $600M-a-year business – YouTube interview with ButcherBox founder Mike Salguero. Mike and his friends acquired their first company, and it did well until they raised VC funding, which led to the company losing its way. He left that start-up and started a passion project involving quality meats. Very candid interview with transparency around numbers, which I really enjoyed. One interesting figure he shared is that they have 3% monthly churn, which is 36% annual churn. His success with a barbell strategy of hiring people who are very young or out of retirement caught my attention, too. His hack of reverse engineering someone’s influencer database was smart. Mike recently acquired a media company to drive growth and retention. Hormozi’s content strategy around using free content that’s demonstration-oriented (not selling-oriented) to retain customers while simultaneously driving top of funnel for new, high-intent customers who are preconditioned with how they’ll use your product when they purchase stuck with me.
• Howard Marks builds institutional knowledge through lifetime analyst positions – YouTube interview with Oaktree Capital co-founder Howard Marks. Interesting interview. He incentivizes analysts to build up excellence, which creates institutional knowledge, and to stay in that position throughout their careers. The company gets decision-making stability during periods of extreme ups and downs of the market, which has led to superior returns for the firm. Counterintuitive, given that many organizations are essentially up or out, which decays institutional knowledge.

That’s what I learned from what I consumed last week.