Episode 20:

How Tru Earth scaled to 8 figures in less than a year through the power of video ads with Ryan McKenzie

About The Episode

In this podcast we cover:

*When to invest in highly produced ads vs DIY ads

*How to decide when to go in-house or ad agency

*How to deal with competitors and others copying your ideas

*How to create a community of raving fans.

*Getting investment - how to find the right investor for a mission-driven brand

*What's coming up on the marketing landscape

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Full Episode Transcript

Awesome. Ryan, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you inviting me out. Yeah, no worries. So I would love for you to tell our listeners, those who haven't heard of you, cause we've got listeners from all around the world and some of them may not have heard of your brand and your amazing story.

So tell us like where you are now with, with True Earth, your brand, what kind of, what your brand's all about, and how did you get to where you are today? Yeah, so we launched true Earth. Decem, no, April of 2019. But probably about 11 months before the, the big pandemic kicked off. But yeah.

Yeah. So when we originally launched the business, we, we were trying to build a a platform or a medium where people could make, make it easy for people to make choices for selecting. Consumables that were plastic free. And our first product that we launched was a laundry detergent strip. We were, there's a, there's a bunch of people doing it now, but we were the first ones to the market with a, an actual patented product.

Manufactured, yeah. In North America. Mm-hmm. . And we rose. We grew from like, from, from, from nothing completely bootstrapped to mid eight figures in revenue before we eventually did a a raise earlier in 2022. And yeah, now we're, we're continuing to grow and release new innovative plastic-free products to help people.

Help people clean their house without a bunch of extra waste and yeah. Take care of the future for our kids. Yeah, because you've got three kids, is that right? I do. I have three kids. They're actually upstairs running around. Can hear making some noise, making lot fun. So, so right, so within, what's that, the space of two and a half years, was it, you got to eight figures, is that correct?

No, we, we were, we had, we were there less than a year actually. So less than a year. You got to eight figures. Well, we, sorry that, that, that's, that's a lie. We, we were at an eight figure runway run rate within, I think about eight months. By eight, eight months. So even before the pandemic hit and gave you that nice.

That nice wind to . Yeah. I, I, I honestly don't know if the pandemic like actually helped us or not. Like, I know people needed, we're piling up on cleaning supplies, but I think like the steep increase in additional advertisers showing up to, to, you know, try to. Pivot their brand from local businesses to people that delivered and whatnot.

I think, I think it offset any real benefit for us, to be honest. But interesting. We still grew, but I, you know, I can't really, I feel like that probably didn't. More or less just neutralized itself. Interesting. Yeah. We get a lot of brands coming to us saying, we had great performance during the pandemic and now we don't.

Please help us. But I guess it depends on the category. There's certain categories that people really were sitting at home buying a lot of food and drink as well. Sorry. Toilet paper. . What's that? Toilet paper? Yeah, toilet paper at the beginning. But like, interestingly, like some of the categories that did really well for my agency during the peak of like, lockdowns was like jewelry and fashion.

Not party going out fashion, but more like soft, luxurious sweaters. Lounge wear, that kind of thing. But jewelry weirdly, people were just like, I want something nice to cheer. So, yeah, but maybe not laundry stuff. Like once you've got enough, you know, you might, yeah, you might be shopping around a bit more, but that's interesting.

So eight figures within a year. Tell me how you did that. Firstly from a marketing perspective, and then I'd also love to hear from a logistical PERS perspective, how you set up the systems behind the scenes to be able to scale that quickly. Cause it's really impressive. Yeah, I mean, you know, truthfully, in the beginning we, we mainly focused on a, a couple of major growth levers being like Facebook ads, Google ads some subscription boxes and, and a little bit of influencer stuff, primarily like micro, or maybe they're considered nano now.

I don't, I don't even know. But yeah, , you know, we were primarily focused on, you know, the core growth levers. Yeah. And those, those, those core growth levers and I think that's actually where a lot of like one to 3 million. In revenue range businesses, actually, I don't wanna say screw up, but they tend to at least in my experience, chase after too many different things.

And like, you know, strategy is the ability to allocate resources or finite resources to a limited number of tactics. And I think where I see a lot of, like, I don't wanna say smaller, but like, you know breakout brands. Struggling is they're trying to do too many things. And whenever you're trying to do too many things, it usually comes at the expense of doing something else.

Well, and anyways, I, I'm kind of rambling here, but you know, we, we did focus on like three or four things before kind of going deeper into stuff like retail and Amazon which we eventually did. Yeah. But those, those were kind of the, kind of the big ones out the gate. We actually did do Amazon about four or five months in, but that was more of a demand capture.

Yeah. Thing versus like a growth thing. Yeah. And were you, you're a Canadian brand. Were you focused just on your local market or did you instantly go into the US as well? No, we went into Canada and the us but like the one interesting thing about when we were, when we launched is the election and stuff was was, was starting to heat up and In the US Yeah, in the us.

And so Facebook started rolling out all of these new rules tied to oh yeah, I remember this political stuff and specifically,  because Donald Trump stated that global warming was, was made up, or, or didn't, wasn't real. Basically anything environmental became a political, political campaign.

Yeah. So since I'm Canadian, I could only really advertise the environmental side of things inside of Canada, and, and it, it worked great. Where I could do it. Yeah. Because environmentalism was hot up until the pandemic when, when people were worried, more worried about survival than the survival of the planet.

Yeah. But we had to focus on like we, we. Initially there was more focus in Canada and, and we did solely migrate to doing it considerably more in the us Yeah. But we had, we had to approach it differently because like I said, we couldn't do anything tied to environmentalism. Facebook's totally reduced their They're, they're not as strict as they once were, you know?

Yeah. Back then, yeah. I remember it was a nightmare. Like, cuz we work with a lot of mission-driven, like sustainable brands and we'd get these like political ments of the ad account shut down completely. And these lovely little, you know, environmentally friendly  brands going what , this is crazy. And as we know, it's a real hole to try and dig out of once your at account gets shut down.

Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've luckily only ever had like accidental or programmatic ones that, that were, that were like a glitch. So knock on wood, I've, I, I haven't had to experience the battle of digging yourself outta that hole, but I've heard, I've heard it sucks. Yeah. It, it doesn't seem to be happening as much anymore.

I think Facebook meta, the company is much more. You know, conscious of serving their customer base as competition has increased for them from TikTok, and their revenues have gone down. I think they're much better at like letting people advertise. Mm-hmm. , but man, it was difficult, especially Yeah, pre pandemic and during that election time and then during the pandemic itself, when they were understaffed and things weren't getting reviewed.

It was really bad. Awesome. So you focused very much on Facebook and Google and what was, well, Facebook and Instagram, obviously Meta and Google what we now call meta. And what were the, what were the tactics that were working for you back then? Like what was the, what was the approach to the ads, if you can remember?

Yeah, no, I, to, I totally remember and in the beginning, You know, I, I've been advertising on, I'm never gonna call it meda, but I've been advertising on Facebook for like, near about a decade now. And, you know, until true Earth, I'd never had like, a ton of success with video ads. And that was primarily because image ads got such a higher click through rate.

Mm-hmm. . So when we, when we, when we launched the brand, like the first. Ad that we ever created was literally at my old house, add like an old style washer and dryer with like the, the top load. And there's my hand holding a strip out to the camera with a pa, sorry, holding it out. And then there's a package of true earth just sitting on the dryer next to it.

And y you know, people are wondering what this, this thing is right? And that, that ad honestly, like it was. Insane how well it did like, and it's funny because it didn't do well, like day one. Like I put it out there and I made like four different pieces of creative and the first day was like crickets.

And I was like, ah, shoot, this is . I get, maybe this isn't gonna be successful. And then the second day you know, all of a sudden, Facebook found its, its footing and, and they started ripping and I was like, whoa, this, like, we were hoping to sell 150 packs in the first month and our subscriptions and we wound up doing more than 1500.

So yeah, it was like, so you just hit a harm run straight out of the park, like, wow. Yeah, and it was, you know, there wasn't a. The, the webpage, like I didn't put, like, I've put effort into building it and I wrote the copy and everything like that, but it was, and this has happened to me before. It's like whenever I've noticed that if I spend a whole bunch of time like going over and over and over and editing and cleaning it up and making sure that it's really good, usually I launch and then it's like crickets.

And it's the ones where I like write the copy and I'm kind of writing it with like snap. Like snap decisions. I'm like, not really. I'm just trying to get, get it done quick and get it out the door. Like it's happened to me a few times. I, I write that, submit it. I'm like, well, I'll edit it after if it's not perfect.

And I'm like, holy crap. I can't believe how Well, well, like the, yeah. So that, I would put that down to like the 10 years of experience that you have and then you mm-hmm.  that instinct that's built in. Have you ever read Malcolm Gladwell's book? I think it. I dunno if it's tipping Point or Outliers. One of it, there's, and he talks about experts who've done something for a really long time.

Yeah. And then they can like, they don't even know why they know something. They just know it. Yeah, I bet it's that. Right? You're like instinctively. And I've had that as well before I had a, one of my early ad accounts I worked on, I just slammed out some copy one day and I. Put it up, shut the computer, left the building and the next day, yeah, it was just absolutely, it was going nuts and we were just scaled the business like so significantly just off that one piece of copy that was just, it really resonated it like it touched a nerve.

That  people just, yeah, they were having arguments in the comments. That's the other thing that's quite good, right? They were having arguments in the comments and they felt some kind of intense lack of something from the copy, and they just. Bought the product. It was a kids' education product, so we were kind of agitating a pain point around what knowledge and words your child knows, which I, it feels a little evil sometimes, but the product was really amazing.

So I always say you have to use your powers for good. In this industry because the powers are there for sure, right. To make people buy stuff. So it better be good stuff, . Totally. Yeah. I think I'm, I'm, I think I rely quite a bit on intuition, which is a challenging from like a leadership perspective because I feel like I almost need to, before I can delegate something, I, I feel like I need to fully understand it because typically, , you know, when I'm ripping through doing something, I don't think I'm, I don't realize a bunch of the steps that I do in order, or like my thought process or my judgment process to, to delegate and mm-hmm.

it's like I need to go through it and make sure that I fully understand everything in order to be able to ask for somebody else to do it the way that I want effectively. Yeah. So in terms of creative then that was you at home creating the creative yourself on a phone? So like, A kind of early style like U G C type ad, which probably there weren't a lot of them around then.

What's your process now for creative? Like have you got a whole system built out? Like how's that working? Yeah, I mean, we do a few things. Like, we have basically a constant flow of like U G C and like scrappy type material. And then we do like these bigger production videos. I don't think any of 'em are actually online right now for a few different reasons, but.

I don't, I won't get into exactly why, but we've, we were pretty well known for like our Harmon Brothers style videos, which have had like hundreds of millions of views. And that process is a little bit A little bit longer. You know, we come up, we, we work with the producer to come up with like four or five different ideas.

And then the producer works with like a handful of writers. They they, he creates basically the core direct response style script, kind of like the Harmon Brothers style. And then he'll have the comedians come in and like, funny it up. And then we kind of go back and forth, make sure the claims are all on point, and go through talent, hire the talent they film.

Edit it, send it over, and yeah, it's, it, that, that, but I mean, this is, we're talking productions that are, you know, closer to I don't know, $50,000 plus. And I don't think a lot of a lot of businesses can't justify the cost associated with that when the incremental lift of, of the higher production value doesn't necessarily.

Work out, like the numbers don't back out, but in the event that you get something that goes viral, then of course it makes sense. Yeah. And I presume you are producing those for like other channels as well, like YouTube, TikTok, like you're repurposing that content so it goes a little further sending it out an email, like Yeah.

Yeah. We're, I mean, again, we're Facebook, YouTube, sometimes we, we'll put 'em on TikTok. Yeah, it's a bit different. TikTok doesn't really love, it's different that stuff. Yeah. It's not, we've tried it. They've done okay. Like we've, we've written a rap song once. Did, did okay. But yeah, the, that, that's kind of like our, that's kind of like our, our standard process.

But, you know, even that, the size we're at, we still use a lot of agencies for creative. Even though I have a pretty good, I have a pretty good grip on how, how to, how to do it. It's just, it, it just makes sense to have people that. Constantly looking at other creatives and seeing what's working for other brands to also contribute to what you're doing.

Because, you know, I, I like to use this quote, but like, sometimes you're too close to the sun to see the stars, and that's about to say, yeah. So, you know, it's nice to have other people who do see the stars to contribute. What they've learned from other businesses to your business. Totally. And also just as you know, it's a fresh set of ideas.

It's a different person. They're just gonna have a different. A different idea, strike them. And if they're in the idea generation business for a living and that's what they kind of do day after day, then you'd hope they'd be pretty good at it. At what point did you start doing the more high production value type of advertising and what drove that decision? And then, Kind of, what data did you see to prove that, that it was worth investing in? So originally, actually I took the Harmon Brothers course, and this was like before Covid where still kind of at that scrappy phase where, you know, the founders did a lot of it.

Yeah. And I'd actually produced a video in like a similar style, but without the, without the jokes. Without the humor, but just like using their f. And it worked pretty well. And I actually, the person that did the video for me or have done like, excuse me, that have done like probably, you know, done like eight of them that's done the videos for us.

actually met them inside of the Harmon Brothers group and he had done a video for Russell Brunson and I'm just like, how much, how much you charge for this? And he is the time. He gave me a quote and I'm like, well, It's probably, I think that's probably worth, worth, worth, you know, giving a shot and then covid hit, so it delayed it.

And we wound up getting our first one out September of 2020, I guess. Yeah. And. Oh my God. It went like off the rails viral right away. It was being like, talked about in like direct response groups everywhere. It was all over Facebook. It was this it was called 10 Things. You Should Never Mix With Water.

You, you won't be able to find it unless you're Yeah, I'll share, I'll share the link. You won't, you won't be able to find it as well. Oh, I won't be able to find it. It's not on, it's not on, it's not online right now. Like I said, we're, we're, we had some things that happened that we took 'em down, but it like, I don't even remember like, it, it was like a million views within a couple of hours of publishing.

And the CPAs were incredibly cheap. So like we pretty much immediately went and booked another one. Which we used another, we used the same actress in the background and then we had introduced like her husband kind of thing. And the second one was like called Real Men Do Laundry. And it was kind of a playoff of The gel or the old Spice ads back in the day?

Yeah, the flows and again, off the rails. Viral, like insane. This was like in January of 2021. And it like, just nothing like any of the other stuff we'd ever produced. And and then we had one more that went like super crazy viral in. Of that year as well. And it was like a, a game show version with the two of the same characters.

And like, we haven't had quite that level of success with the other ones after that. But those three, which were like three of the first four I wanna say that we did mm-hmm.  were absolutely bananas. And the, the one thing that I, I would suggest, like, so we actually launched another one in there with this Bigfoot character, which was like, It did really bad.

And we launched that one like three weeks after the real men do do laundry. And the one thing, the one piece of advice that I would give that I kind of learned the expensive way, cause the ma just the mask for this video was like $3,000 is that don't go spending a whole bunch of money on a piece of creative until you've validated that you can sell that product.

like at a reasonable c p a with, you know, your regular scrappy ads, you're not, cause you're not gonna get like a 300% lift in conversion when, when you, when you do something high production. Mm-hmm. . So we, the stake stake for higher too. Right? The investment is higher if you fail. Yeah. And then people hated, they hated this Sasquatch that we had in the video, that there's somebody that wrote, like said, wrote in saying like, oh my God, he looks like he's gonna die.

Like you should like . I'll volunteer my time to write a script for you and film it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because I can't believe that you would have this character that looks like he's two steps, one foot in the grave. Like, I'm like, oh my God. But yeah. Wow. And in this process, like, so this was still fairly early days of your business, like are you still kind of creative director on these?

Are you co-creating with this, with this filmmaker, or are they kind of coming to the you with the ideas and you're just signing it off and tweaking it a little bit? Yeah, so the first two the first one was a hundred percent their idea. And then the second one, I think we were kind of like noodling around ideas.

The, the Sasquatch idea was 100% my stupid idea. , I'll admit it. And then the game show one was actually their idea as well. But yeah, like w like basically we bounce around ideas. We, we hop on the phone and like, see, see what we come up with. But even still, I still like, I'm still participating in some of those conversations, but.

Not everything, just like, kind of like the, the bigger, the bigger, higher end stuff. I'll still, yeah. You know, contribute my, or if I come up with a really, what I think is a cool idea, then, you know, You'll throw it in there. Yeah. Yeah. And tell me, just switching tack a little bit, so in those early days like that ad you put up, you put it up yourself, like you had been running ads for 10 years, so you were, as the founder, doing the media buying in-house.

At what point did you either hire in-house or get an agency? I always think it's a really interesting to hear how different brands kind of decide the in-house versus external. , right? Yeah. So I mean, I ran the Facebook ads and the, and the Google ads initially. And then we hired another company to do our Google ads, probably like three or four months in, But with the, with the big goal of adding, like, layering in YouTube, which actually was pretty successful for us in the beginning. I continued to run the Facebook ads and, you know, Snapchat and all the other stuff until. We brought on our media, our, our media buyer that's in house now in I think October of 2021.

And he took over. It's actually crazy cause he, he lives like two minutes from our office, which, you know, that doesn't happen with, with media buyers very often. But he he took over then and he took over Google BA basically took over everything. So he's been he's been great and. I still kind of dig around the account and, and, and work with him on strategies and stuff like that.

But he, he's pretty much. Taking the ball and run, which I, I really do enjoy media buying. It's like, it's a very, like, dopamine rich diet of data and feedback loop of results. But it's, it's also nice to, I feel like my life has less highs and lows than it did when. I was always in there, you know? Yeah.

The emotional attachment to your ROAS can be challenging at times. . Mm. Yeah. I remember, especially in my early days of freelancing and like that brand I mentioned about where I got the great copy, like there would be, yeah, so many highs and lows and I would feel so. It's like low, when it was low and

Yeah, it's tough. Cool. So you've got a media Byron house and he is been working with you for a while, like, and does he get involved in the creative side or is that a different team? Yeah. How does that work? Yeah, he, he so we have, like I said, we have a couple different agencies that, that produce content for us.

And like agencies kind of have, they, they understand the guardrails of, of the claims and stuff that they're allowed to make, but he does work with them. And like if we're having like a sales event or we have new products coming out or we have like a couple ideas, well, he'll he'll coordinate with that with them to, to produce that.

So yeah, he's, he's definitely pretty hands. Yeah. And how are you guys dealing with, now? You mentioned you were a, you had a first mover advantage when you started, but now there are competitors, like how has that impacted your marketing strategy? How are you defending your space? I mean, everybody just pretty much copies most of the stuff that we do.

So I mean I just. I don't really care that much about what they're doing, quite frankly. Like, I don't know. Yeah, maybe that's, maybe that's ignorant, but like I, you know, I pay attention to some extent, but for the most part, like, I'd rather, I'd rather focus on what we're doing and being the best that we can be and innovating new products and.

You know, there's always gonna be copycats and like, Hey, you know what, it's flattering. There's like 20 brands that have copied all of my my copywriting, all of my hooks. Like, you know, it's, I don't know. It, it used to bother me in the beginning, like I was like so irritated, like I'd even see. Our packaging on a few of these brands, like they would use, they would buy our stuff, sneak it underneath their, whatever, their one Alibaba drop shipped package that they ordered and they like stuff like that.

And it would drive me nuts. I would stay up at night like, like being angry and then I'm like, whatever. You know what? It's always gonna happen. If you're successful something, there's gonna be people copying you. I'm friends with other people like in, in cell phone, like in environmentally friendly cell phone cases with like p Pila case.

My buddy Matt, and he's like, you told me in the early days when we were starting that, like that industry is so cutthroat and I think at the end of the day, I think the truth is, is that every industry's cutthroat. If you're doing something while there's somebody else that wants it, they're gonna come after you.

They're gonna copy you. They are gonna do what they already know is working and. You know, sale avi, build your moat, build a community, figure out things that you can do to separate yourself from the other guys. And you know, we've got patents we're manufactured in North America, everybody else is manufactured in China.

Nothing wrong with China, but it's just people like to support. Yeah. And the shipping, you know, is less far. Right? So that's gotta have an impact on the environ. Totally. Yeah. Cool. So what kind of things are you doing, like on the community building side, therefore to like, build loyalty, retention, you know, build your moat as it were.

Yeah, we've had, we've done a bunch of different stuff, like, we've had like community challenges where we've built like Facebook groups. We've, we've we've done a ton of stuff locally with the community. Like we support and donate so much product to like, whether it's like food banks or to like new mothers in Ghana or nurses or like, I think, I don't even.

The exact number, but we've donated millions of dollars in laundry detergent to people around like North America and like. I was dropping my daughter off at school one day. This was just to give you an example, and there was a guy and he came up to me and he's like, Hey man. He's like, I just wanted to thank you for that, like, donation you made to our church's food hampers.

And I'm like, my head, I'm like, I, my, I have no idea what he's talking about. , we donate lots, right? I, it's not that I'm not trying to be involved in everything, but, and he is like, there's a lady that

like, she. Had she, she was going through a tough time and she had to choose between washing her kids' clothes before sending her to school and washing her own clothes before going to a job interview and choosing to be able to feed the family. And he's like, I just wanna thank you because he's like, because it's something you, you don't realize how important being able to wash your clothes is to somebody who's going through a difficult.

Phase and like food banks don't usually carry laundry detergent because of these big, huge jugs and they have limited space. So these people, people have to like, it's just not some, it's like a luxury and everybody takes it for granted. And he's like, because of you, this woman was able to go and have a job interview.

Get a job and has, was able to send her kid to school without having to wear dirty clothes and like we were both sitting there and I'm like trying not to tear up while he is saying this. And he's tearing up and I'm tearing up and this guy's like six five and he's like a Reverend . And I'm like, oh my God.

I didn't realize how much impact you could have. You could have and it might not, your, your moat might not be. Like a community in the, the traditional internet sense. It might be how you're contributing to the communities around the world and when you can make impact to people who are in a position to not be able to afford to use your product.

You know, when they get back on their feet, you know who they're gonna, they're gonna obviously, like they're gonna talk about it and yeah, they're probably gonna choose. What, what they've been using. Right. So I mean, there's, there's a lot of different ways that you can build a moat and mm-hmm. , you know, we've chosen to do like contributing, giving back, and making sure that people who can't afford our product or can't afford laundry detergent as a whole are taken care of.

That's awesome. You've, I think you've mentioned you've recently. Gone for investment. Is that right? Yeah. Last, last April we closed, closed our series A. Awesome. Congrats. Thank you. How does that process work when you're a mission driven brand? Like, you know, finding the right investments, investors that care about your, your mission, like making sure that you don't lose sight of it.

Yeah. That's, that's a great question. Like, you know, we worked with we worked with kpmg, which is like, you know, massive global accounting firm or whatever, and, and we kind of gave them our, this is kind of like our hygiene factors for who are willing to play with mm-hmm.  and, you know, ethically, morally, Where we want them to stand and where they want to prioritize what we're doing.

And in the end, we wound up going with a company or a, a venture capital firm out of Vancouver here called renewal Fund, which Oh, cool. They, they organized the the capital and they've, they've worked with like seventh gen and a number of other kind of eco, environmentally focused. Brands. So we were out really lucky that we found a group that has sustainability as one of their top priorities.

And yeah just, just want to be in a good fit. Yeah. That's awesome. And how does it feel not being boots strapped anymore? You know, I don't have a lot of feelings about anything anymore. I think I've burned them all out with Facebook ads and all that dopamine  It's funny, I'm not, I'm like, I'm kind of joking, but I'm kind of also not like y you know, you  For me, I think I actually feel better just being at peace.

Like before I, like, I love chasing the dopamine of, of making sales and doing better and launches and all that stuff. And just recently we, we launched our. Our dishwasher detergent, like, I think it's like two weeks ago. And I like, I went into that day feeling like just really neutral. And the midway through the day when I started seeing the sales numbers, I started getting like that feeling again.

But at the end of the day, I wasn't like hyper, I wasn't like bouncing off the walls. I didn't have like that dopamine deficit feeling that you have after you, you, you know, black Friday or, or a big sale. I just felt like, like the first time I felt like like mentally stable and peaceful about the whole thing.

And I think in the past that probably would've bothered me that I wasn't like high off the sale. And this time I was like, you know what? It feels good to just be like, To not have fluctuating emotions. Yeah. And feeling face of a rollercoaster. Yeah. And like, I think Naval riv, I think it's how say his name said it, but like, like happiness isn't about like feeling elated and excited.

Happiness is like really, it's about like being at peace so that you're not like looking for something else to Yeah. Make you happy, you know? And. I would say that the biggest thing for me that came out of all this is not that I wasn't at peace before, but I feel like I'm just a little bit more at peace inside my head than, than I've been in the last decade.

That's awesome. That's so good to hear. Like sometimes you do hear of people like losing. Yeah. They just kind of lose their mojo completely when. A big change like this happens in their business or they reach that success that they supposedly were aiming towards. But that's awesome. So what's, what's next?

More products global domination. What's the plan? Yeah. You know, just like one step in, one foot in front of the, the last. Try to have fun along the way and yeah, more, more products help eliminate more. Plastic wrapped consumer goods and, and provide effective solutions for, for people who wanna be like, basically be a medium to help people make decisions, to live a, a cleaner.

Healthier life for the planet and, and the future, future generations ahead of us. But yeah, just, you know, keep on moving, keep on growing and try not to be too stressed out. Yeah, it's important. So, and then final question from me is what about, what do you see on the horizon for marketing? It's been a bit of a rough year.

I mean, it's been a bit rough since I was 14. I don't know if it's been like that for you, but generally it's. Tougher trading, I think, on those platforms. What do you think is gonna happen next and what do you think is gonna work and or be more difficult? Yeah, I mean, I think with all the AI stuff that's coming out right now, I think that there's like a, a lot of big shifts on the horizon.

I think that from an organic perspective, I think. That you're gonna see a lot more platforms move away from like a social graph where it's based on how many people are following you and, and move more towards like a content graph like TikTok and YouTube shorts are using, where they analyze how people react to your, to new content when it's published and open up more exposure based on how it's consumed which I think.

Is valuable for people who are like, or, you know, for, for brands who don't have this massive reach. So it really levels the playing field in terms of you know, how much money you spend or how much time you spend growing an audience and opens up an opportunity for people to just create really great content.

But I guess the people that have a leg up there are the people that know how to make great content. Yeah. So I think, I think that's the, like short term. I don't, I don't, I don't know where things go, like, you know, in, in a year or two. Like with the AI stuff, I'm just like, in my head I'm thinking like, is like, like blogs, are blogs dead.

Like if AI can just write any information at any given time, is there any value even in, in somebody's opinion, like, and how do you tell whether it's written by a computer or it's written by a person? I didn't care. Yeah. I guess for me, I think about this, like it becomes more about who's saying the thing.

Mm-hmm. , like the per the per, whether you trust the person's opinion. So like I would read a blog written by, Someone that I've, you know, that I trust in my industry. Cuz even if they had used ai, they would've like, you know, curated it. Tailored it so that it was like valuable content. But I don't think, yeah, I think the value of like random blogs on the internet from publishers that you've never heard of.

That really goes away pretty fast, doesn't it? Yeah. And like, how do you like, as an like whatever, I'm not an influencer, but like, as, as an influencer, like, or somebody that wants to be a content creator or aspiring influencer, like the initial phases of building an audience are gonna be like, almost impossible because like, how do you separate yourself from everything else that's going on?

Like, how do you, you know, if, if everything's being mass produced by machine, , how do you build that initial audience when there's, you know, everything's the same? I dunno. No, it's, it's, it's definitely gonna be so interesting these next few years for sure. I mean, the SEO industry must be the content-driven SEO and the content shops must just be freaking out right now.

Either that or they're deep diving into how they can harness the technology. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. How are you using chat G B T in your business? You know, I use it like, so we're not like using it a ton on, on the, on truer side. Like I'll use it for sometimes to like, think up ideas or do a little bit of like, research on like emotional behaviors and stuff like that.

But I'm using it a lot personally for things like like I'll take like 10 things that are similar if I'm, like, if I'm trying to think of something to, to write about or think about, like, I'm using it as a brainstorming tool basically. So I'll take like 10 things. I'll post it in there and say, give me 20 things.

that are like these 10 things. Mm-hmm. . And then I review all the output from it. I'm like, oh, that's a really good idea. That's a really good idea. And I've played with it a little bit for like image manipulation. Like I've got a couple superhero images of myself where I'm like 10 times better looking than in real life.

and not possible. No. Maybe. Okay. Maybe 1.2 . No. But. You know, I, I, I think, like, I'm really excited about video. Like I wanna, I know people are paranoid about give, putting their personal assets out there, but like, tools like Descript that you can teach your voice and then have it output your, like, like for podcasting's amazing, but like, I really wanna make like a deep, fake version of myself, like a video that I can go and then like, Program to say whatever I want so that I don't have to say it, you know?

Yeah. You don't have to set up the lighting and like do your hair and . Yeah. Yeah. That's the worst part about it. Like, honestly, like to be on video. Like if I had shoot a video, I'm like, oh my God, I gotta shave today. I should probably do down my hair and try being a woman. We've gotta put makeup on. And it gave me like a whole new perspective.

Like, I, like I, I complain about brushing my hair like one day a week. I can't imagine having to deal with. Real hair and makeup  like, you know, the struggle is real, I'm telling you. And I'm, I'm not even, I don't put any near the, the effort that a lot of people do. So awesome. Well, it's been so great chatting to you.

Is there, where can people follow you, follow your journey by your products? Oh, link. Yeah. Yeah. So you can, you can, if you wanna check out Tru Earth, you can go to www.tu.earth. There's no.com. Yes. And if you wanna follow me, I'm pretty active on, on Twitter. My Twitter handle is @ryemckenzie.

And yeah, I'm a, i I post YouTube videos periodically too. I'm sure if, if you google my name on there or YouTube my name, you'll probably find it. Awesome. Yeah, we will link to all of those in the show notes so our listeners can follow you and find out more of your great tips. You definitely share lots of great content on Twitter that I follow myself, so thank you.

Yeah, thanks for, thanks for contributing back to the marketing community. It's appreciated. I appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks for coming along.

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