How To Build The BEST Performance Marketing Team EVER

Shahbaz Khokhar: The thing I'm going to be talking about today is how to build a team that launches a thousand plus performance creatives every month for each brand.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Well, we don't do it for every single brand. We have a very a varied number of creatives that we launch per brand, but um for some of the bigger brands we work with, we're doing over a thousand per per brand. Um and it isn't just using AI. It's kind of doing, there are is a lot of manual work involved. So this is not some kind of software kind of thing. Um, yeah, so I'm just going to unpack exactly how we've done it and I go through like all the kind of like stuff I've learned over the last kind of few years of doing this.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And if I didn't show you an ad account, it means it didn't happen. So here's a hook to kind of get you in. Uh here's one of our clients who spent uh 4.1 million in 30 days. Um this brand actually was profitable on first acquisition, got into the Meta Disruptor category, um and we're pretty proud to say we scaled this, you know, over the course of two, three years working with them. Um pretty crazy result overall. So I'm just going to unpack like some of the strategies that we've used to get to this point, uh where we can get some growth, um you know, get kind of results that we have done for this kind of brand.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um and I I'll just start with some like charts. I love charts. Um I used to be an accountant, so charts are like my my my thing. Um I just want to kind of hammer home the point of like, basically the more ads you make, the more revenue you're going to make overall. And this is like an interesting kind of like zoomed out perspective on things. Um so for this particular brand, you'll see, uh this is over the course of two and a half years. You'll see the number of ads launched in light pink and you'll see the amount of spend in purple. Um you can see these two lines kind of roughly track each other. So as new ads are launched, as the volume of ads launched increases, you know, you see it kind of follows uh in line with spend and of course revenue. Uh and this point on the right here is just kind of a similar thing to what's on the left, but is done by um each point is like a month. So basically, number of ads launched in a particular month on the X axis and on the Y axis you've got amount of spend. So you can see like literally the more ads you launch, the more we're spending. Um and there's a pretty pretty strong correlation over here.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um so for this brand, we were launching 750 ads per month at 4.1 million in scale, which is kind of peaking out around around here.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um so yeah, this is a common question I always get asked a lot by kind of clients who are coming on board or like just generally in people like, how many ads should you make? It's like a it's such a difficult question to answer and nobody nobody ever has like a precise answer to this. There's no we've tried to calculate it. There's no real formula. Um but you have to come up with some kind of like guesstimate or some kind of way of thinking about this.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um what I will say is like you just need to launch a lot a lot of ads to get to get scale. Um for one account we had 429 ads per month and that peaked at 2.2 million in spend. So again, just another example of like how how many ads you need to launch in order to kind of achieve that kind of level of scale. And if I was to break that down, so number of raw assets, I did a little, we made a little script in Frame IO which actually showed you how many assets we had for that um how many assets we had for that particular client.

Shahbaz Khokhar: We had 35,000 raw images and videos, which was insane when I saw the number. I couldn't I couldn't believe it.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And uh when we broke that down, that kind of ended up launching, obviously we didn't use every single asset, but from that we we used those to launch around about 5,000 ads in a year.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um and that kind of broke down in terms of actually it was quite an even split between new concept and iterations. Um so yeah, you can see like just sheer volume is important. I'm just trying to get the point across here that like it's a volume game. Um so everything I'm talking about today is like how to achieve volume, how to build the team structure, how to kind of like how we've done it. Um so hopefully you guys can take something from it.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um yeah, I've already been introduced, but this is just there for like housekeeping, I guess. So I'm the CEO, one of the founders of Venture Beyond, growth marketing agency, team of 40 of us in the UK. Um we have clients worldwide. Most of our spend is actually in the US. Um and our main thing is growing e-com brands. We work in partnership with some brands as well as an affiliate sometimes on an exclusive basis.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um just a bit about what we do. You guys can check this out afterwards, look at our website, all that kind of stuff. But in general, we're full we're full service. We work with a handful of clients, we don't work with loads. Um but we do everything from growth, creative, CRO, retention marketing, uh the full stack basically.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Some of the brands we've worked with. Um Evan mentioned a couple, Jeep, Delsey, Benetton, Peugeot, there's some of the like more blue chip type brands. And then we've got some of the other kind of, you know, founder driven e-com brands kind of underneath here.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Some of the team, I have to give them a shout out. I thought it's worth kind of putting them on the screen because, you know, I couldn't have done this without the team. Super proud of what the guys have achieved and uh I can't take all credit for this. Like this is the work that's been kind of contributed by everybody over the last few years to to get us to this get get us to this point. So a big shout out to the team. Anybody who's watching, any of the team are watching live now, just want to say big massive appreciation to you guys. And anybody of you who are watching afterwards, just again, another shout out to you guys because I know uh I know you'll be gassed by that.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um and here's I'm going to unpack this one in a bit more detail. People always love this kind of a diagram, so I I will go into it in a bit more detail in a second, but this just gives an overview of like how our team is structured just to give you a flavor of like how how um we achieve, you know, the things that we do.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um so like the key kind of principle underlying all of this in my head is like revenue growth is basically the number of ads you make times by the quality of the ads, right?

Shahbaz Khokhar: So like how do you measure each one of these? So ad quality is pretty simple. It's like, okay, how how many winning ads have you got? So one internal metric that we came up with was like ads that spent more than $1,000 divided by the total number of ads. Um and to kind of caveat that as well, we do look at like are they spending within seven days? You know, are they getting to $1,000 spend within seven days? If they're not, we might not consider them to be a to be a winner. Um and typically, you know, we're around about 5% success ratio. It does go up and down month by month. Um but effectively, this is one part of the formula to increase your revenue. You got to look at the, you know, the quality of your tests and what your success rate is.

Shahbaz Khokhar: The next thing is around ad quantity. So I guess this presentation I'm mainly going to be talking about how to achieve this quantity. Um quality stuff, I can do this on another another time. I'm sure some of the other speakers have spoken about how to, you know, improve success rate. The main one I'm going to focus on today is around ad quantity. Um which as a formula, you think about it as you break it down further, it's basically how many ads can each team member make times by the number of team members you have, times by the amount of time that you have, right? And that kind of gives you an overall uh quantity and the number of ads you can produce.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um like where did this first start? I guess like three, four years ago I started to unpack the process of like how to really produce creative at scale. Um and overall this was the main problem statement, right? It's like, okay, it takes too long to get ads briefed, edited, approved and launched.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um it's a serious like when you look at all the project management involved and all the different steps and stakeholders and people, it's actually a pain in the pain in the backside. Um and yeah, I just wrote this because it was like top of my head. I could you always get that feeling like, oh, I could just do this in Midjourney and Canva. Like, why why is everyone so slow at everything? Like, why isn't it working?

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um so I really tried to attack this problem in the last few years to figure out, you know, the perfect way to to solve this. So hopefully I'm going to share some of this with you. Option one, if you're an entrepreneur, this is where everybody starts, you know, you do everything yourself. Not sustainable, you're going to burn out. There's a cap to what you'll earn, um cap to what, you know, you can physically do yourself.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And then kind of like, this is obvious business stuff, but I I thought I'd lay it out here. Like, what is the actual way of actually scaling up? You've got to engineer a good process. You've got to find the best talent you can find, mentor them, incentivize them as well, give them some upside, give them some portion of your profit. Um and then you really want to kind of like test strategies bottom up, like, you know, get small teams to test things and then once you get something winning, kind of inject it into the whole team top down. Um listen to the market, listen to the data, Motion, I got to plug you guys, you know, you're great for that for for providing us like data visibility day-to-day. All of our team use it every day. It's, you know, super useful, super useful tool. Um and then just keep fine tuning, you know, keep fine tuning on what is working. Our techniques and things are always changing, you know, it's it's a moving beast.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um and if I'm to break this down into like five key areas which I'll cover today. Um I can't see the comments by the way, so like I have no idea what's going on in the comments. I think uh if there's anything interesting, Jem, you'll have to shout at me. Um but I'll try I'll try and grab the comments afterwards because I've um I've got it on full screen. So yeah, first I'm going to go through like what is the team setup, then how we plan our work, then how a specific ad or asset is produced, and then how do we make it all go faster? So like what are our KPIs or, you know, service level agreements that we have internally. And at the end, I'll just give you our tech stack. So you know, you can go and replicate a lot of this stuff yourself. Um I'm not going to hide anything. You guys can have all this stuff. I've given a lot of documents in the um doc section. So like I will um touch on some of the documents as I go through this. Um but you're more than welcome to just use those, ask me questions afterwards about it, you know, if you need anything, just just shout me. Um so breaking down the team setup.

Shahbaz Khokhar: So first to kind of think about this in in principles like how do you actually scale accounts predictably? Um it's a what we do is a combination between, we do the creative production and the media buying, right? So we have a lot of automation that runs our media buying. So whilst we have some things done manually, budgets and bids adjusted manually, there's also some automation happening which kind of keeps things ticking like throughout the night, certain times of the day, um you know, gives us gives us the opportunity to actually scale when uh a human being is not looking at the screen effectively. You couple that with the data that is actually fueling that process. Um and then on top of that, you've got a growth team and a creative team who basically makes the whole thing tick. Um so the way I think about it is like our growth team, we've got growth strategists and creative strategists, which I'll explain in a in a bit more detail in a sec, but our growth strategists are usually STEM grads, so they're people who've done like a science degree, engineering, maths, usually super data people. Um and then like creative team tends to be people are more like copywriters, editors, designers, content creators, and then they want to become a strategist, you know, so we do kind of upskill people internally to become that or we hire people directly into those roles. Um and then I say like key other things, I mean, this is like obvious stuff, but I got to say it is like you've got to have the right product and offer and price. If that stuff is wrong, you're never going to sell anything. We've taken on clients in the past thinking, okay, we can do this, but the product offer has just been wrong. So that's like a base fundamental in my opinion. Um and then just, yeah, I think I've touched on the other couple of points here.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And I I just playing with Midjourney, made some images. Another kind of like key problem I think that always comes up in in teams is when you've got um my business partner here looking at my face. We've got media buyers, he's our head of growth actually. I'm going to put him on the screen. He's he's running away. Um so media buyers, dear sir, I'll fight you with my data, you are wrong. Creative strategist, dear sir, I'll fight you with my ideas, I am right. It just came to my head something to write down and that's like the sentiment of like there's always this kind of clash between left brain and right brain. Um people talking almost in a different language. Motion really helps with that as well because it kind of makes uh data really super visible and accessible to creative teams. Um but yeah, just kind of trying to overcome this by having a good team structure and good communication is is absolutely essential in my opinion.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um where did we start? Like we started with small scale teams. So we used to have like a pod team which had effectively everything planned and executed in one place. Um so the work was planned and edits were made, approvals were done all in one in one spot. Um and it was like super simple and like very efficient. You can run a pod with three people and you can crack a million in spend. It's completely it's completely possible if you get the if you get the right kind of formula.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um the problem is as we were scaling up, we realized that like this is not scalable. You actually need to you need to specialize. Um so basically like how I think about this is like as you scale, you require lots more diverse skill sets and specialisms and then each specialism needs to kind of like branch off into its own team. Um which is how we ended up with like different teams like data team, CRO team, post-production, content creator team, um a physical studio team. And this pod soon became it soon became quite difficult to run because each of these lines going out here was essentially a request form. We had request forms going out for each of these and then we're waiting for things to come back from each one of these teams. And in the middle, basically there was no strategy happening. It was just pure project management and communication. People were just trying to chase deliverables, not knowing where things are up to. We have several pod teams, right? And so the pods were actually sucking on resource from all these kind of sub teams. Um which meant that like the pod team never had predictability on like, you know, when they were going to receive things back. So this is kind of like where we were maybe two years ago, a year and a half ago. Um and I had to relook at this and think, okay, this is not working. How do we fix it? What do we do to improve this?

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um and yeah, kind of like key issues that were coming up were, you know, dependency on the pod team initiating all the work and reviewing all work from other teams. They became the bottleneck very quickly. And and a lot of the times there was an underutilization of these sub teams. Um people not using their skill, they weren't using their time, their capacity. Um and yeah, the biggest problem overall was like communication.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And I love this diagram. It's from Google, but I think I'll just share it because it really hammers home the point for me. It's like when you've got two people in a team, there's one line of communication and it's very easy. It's like, okay, did you do it? No, okay, I'll do it. And communication, project management, super, super easy. When you get three lines, it even starts to get more complicated because you've got three lines of communication. Four becomes six.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And then there's actually a formula, right? So it's n times by n minus one. We've got a team of roughly 40 people and that actually calculates to be 15, 1,560 lines of communication. So imagine you've got Slack DMs with 1500 sets of Slack DMs going on. You just can't have that, it doesn't work.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um so trying to avoid this as much as possible and minimize the kind of lines of communication. So kind of thinking about how to actually improve this. I remember seeing this diagram and thinking, okay, you've got clusters and you have key people in those clusters who communicate with the other people and nobody else communicates.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um and how this kind of pans out is, and I'll I'll show you in a second is, we have a core growth team and they kind of like are the small cog that has the strategy and then you have delivery teams which deliver on the actual executables, things that need to be done, deliverables. Um and the whole the whole idea is you've got um multi multi-skill small delivery team, which is way more efficient, or you have a single skill large delivery team which can do more volume. So for example, when you've got a post-production team with 10, 20 people in there or whatever, um it's much more efficient to have them in one team because you build best practice, you have management, you can give people pay rises, you can you can kind of like really customize like the way that people do work, you can manage it in a in a singular way and it creates a lot of efficiency. So to achieve the hybrid between these small teams and big teams working together,

Shahbaz Khokhar: we ended up a bit more like this. Um so we still got that pod team. Uh the different one of the differences is you've got the creative strategist who can kind of almost do a bit of everything. So some of our CSs are producing stuff in Midjourney, they're doing a few edits. Um they are shooting content if they need to shoot content. Um and that kind of makes them full stack. So they can do a lot of the, let's say concepting and things like that inside the pod itself. So strategy and execution is still happening inside the pod at a smaller scale. And then you've got these external delivery teams. Um but the difference now is like they should not be you shouldn't they should not be reliant on the pod team to actually say, hey, I need this stuff. Instead they're giving insights, quotas, constraints, and overall priorities and these guys should be able to produce on their own and give deliverables back to these guys without these guys initiating the work. Um I hope that makes sense. It's a bit of a mouthful there. Um there's one caveat here that like usually these teams are not so great at copy compliance when it comes to certain kinds of brands. Uh you know, copy compliance becomes an issue because they're in a regulated industry or you know, they're selling supplements. There's only some claims you can make and can't make. So it has to pass through, we have a compliance uh manager internally. So we usually kind of pass them to him and that usually gets them to the point where they are launchable.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And then kind of like, just yeah, breaking that down, I guess back to the diagram we had before. Um the way I see it is like this growth team is that kind of small cog which sets the strategy, sets the direction, does some small amount of execution. And then you have this kind of like larger creative production team with the sub teams over here. So you have um you know, content coming in from our studio, we shoot that in person, we bring models in if we need to. We do a lot of point of view UGC stuff as well. We work with content creators, you know, hundreds of content creators just to produce content on a regular basis. They bring raw assets in to the creative production uh to the post-production team. Um these guys actually do their some of their own open briefs, which means they're not always waiting for briefs from the growth team, but more often than not, the briefs are coming from the growth team itself. They're sending assets in to the growth team. These guys are launching them into the ad account, they're running tests. We extract the data into a warehouse, and then we've got a small data team who basically um provides all the kind of, let's say, data in a cleaned up way, uh accessible to the growth team. They've got some, you know, dashboards and and charts and things that they build, which I'll show you some of in a second.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um and yeah, I'm going to be giving tons of giveaways, so I'm just going to do this. Um I thought I'd give away our job scorecards for like two of our key roles that are inside the growth team. So the growth strategist and the creative strategist. Um this breaks down exactly like what their targets are, what their key responsibilities are, um who they report to, which team members they interface with, and what kind of people we're looking for uh when we take on these people. So these are in the doc section, check it out. Um I've given both docs. Um I wrote this almost myself, my business partner wrote this one um for creative and for growth. So like, you know, I'm always like open book, just take it, do what you want with it. Um if it's rubbish, don't use it. If it's amazing, send me a message and tell me it's amazing. Share share something about it. That'll be super cool.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um so second aspect, again, like I've only got a short amount of time today, so I I could talk for ages about team setup, but I'm just giving you a kind of a flavor of like, you know, what I've been thinking for the last the last few years.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Next step is like, how do you plan work? So we plan work in sprints. A lot of people are using sprints right now.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um we're at the moment we're doing two week sprints. Um so like, how do you plan a sprint? The first thing you need to think about is like, how many ads do you need to produce? And here's a picture of Elon Musk saying as much as possible. Um and the answer is, well, that would be nice, but it's just physically and practically not possible, right?

Shahbaz Khokhar: So you've got to think about, I think about this as like an equilibrium of like high volume or low cost or high quality. And you can only choose two of these elements. So you can't have all three of them.

Shahbaz Khokhar: So either you're going to be high volume and high quality, but it's going to be super expensive, or you're going to be high volume and low cost, but it's going to be low quality, or it's going to be low cost and high quality, but you're not going to get the volume, right? Um so like where should this equilibrium point be? Should it be in the middle? I don't think so.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Like my my point is it should be kind of up and left of center there. So you want to kind of deliver high volume, low cost, lower quality. Um this is on average. So for some brands, we have to produce like some high quality stuff, some low quality stuff. There's a mix, but on average, I'd say you want to be definitely kind of up and left of center there.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um so how do I think about like how much creative we should produce? So I'd start like backwards instead of looking forwards. It's like, think about how much team resource you currently have. Like what are you currently paying for? What are your overheads? Who do you have access to practically? Like who tomorrow can you go to and brief stuff to? And work out, work backwards to figure out how many briefs they can take on and go backwards to then work out like how many should you do in the next week or two weeks. Um and then incrementally increase resource after efficiency has been increased.

Shahbaz Khokhar: I made the mistake actually of adding lots of people on top, being super inefficient, um and then realizing, damn, this is this is terrible. This has given me a super big headache and all the partners of the business had to just jump in and do everything for a few years to the point where we realized, okay, we just got to keep leveling up on efficiency. So that's what we've been doing since. And our head count hasn't massively increased in about a year, a year and a half because we've been improving the quality of the team, improving the efficiency of the team, kind of upskilling everybody. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. Um and yeah, efficiency is basically broken down into those two original things I was talking about, which is ad quality and ad quantity.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um I hope everyone's still alive by the way because I'm just talking and talking. I'm running out of breath here, so Jem, is everything okay over there? Everyone all right? Cool, cool, cool. All right, sweet. I'll I'll carry on. I'll have a little sip of tea for a second. Okay. So, um I think I've covered this point already.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Cool. So, how to increase the yield of a sprint? So this is like thinking how do you actually reduce the cost or get more volume? I've given a bunch of things here. Um I will just quickly skip through a few things. Um utilizing existing assets is a definite way to keep costs down, which comes down to good asset management. We have one person internally who basically looks after the folders, rearranges things, ingests new assets as they come in, um to basically make sure that like old assets keep getting used because we were running into this habit of producing, producing, producing, but we weren't using some of the old assets which were still pretty good. Um having a really good framework for iterations. So the way I think about is like, can I get an existing project and just like quickly iterate on it? So we started to as part of our process, we actually force everyone in the post-production team to upload their project files. So if it then needs to be rebriefed, it's just a single click of, which I'll show you in our system in a bit, single click, rebrief, the project file is there ready to go. Um keeping costs down, everyone knows this now, but I'll mention it, hire from cheaper countries. Um we have some lead editors in the UK just because it's quicker for the CSs to communicate directly with them and sit down and talk through the ideas together and things like that. Um but then the bulk of the um post-production team is actually remote and they handle the heavy iterative work. Um the next way is a really simple way, it's just an obvious thing, but just reducing downtime of the editors, um by just, I think time tracking is number one because um often people are not working their full hours when they're working remote, so start there is a really easy win. Um the second thing is like just giving them ability to do their own open briefs. So allow them the uh ability like I said to to kind of write their own briefs from scratch rather than waiting for a creative strategist.

Shahbaz Khokhar: We made a tier system. Um I've actually given a link to this doc here so you can take it, but these are the screenshots of the doc itself. Um in essence, like tier one brief is like completely open. So we give an angle, a rough direction um for what the editor should actually actually kind of work on and they come up with everything else themselves pretty much. Um it's good for like lead editors, people who are a bit more experienced. Um so they can actually change the copy if they want to. Sometimes the CSs do provide copy. Um and then all the way through to a closed brief where basically it's done like shot by shot, everything is like laid out. Um I'll see if I can see an example of a closed brief in here actually. It'd be good to show you one.

Shahbaz Khokhar: A closed brief is like every scene is completely laid out. You've got the copy, you've got the action, you've got the assets, and you're almost kind of doing the the storyboard for for people like um step by step. So it's pretty prescriptive for our editors. It tends to be our junior editors take this on board. Um and the more the senior editors take take these ones on board and and do those.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And then yeah, there's a screenshot of our conclusions uh spreadsheet. Um so we've currently got a a status thing here which kind of allows us to tag winner, loser, inconclusive. I think we can do this in Motion as well. So I think that the um I'm not sure why we're still doing it in a sheet and not doing it in Motion, but um for now we're running it in this way. Um with the documented learnings as to like why it worked, what are what are we thinking, what what should we do next with this?

Shahbaz Khokhar: So that's kind of like that's kind of my what I'm thinking about planning a work. Next thing is like, how does the work actually get executed? Um I'm sorry if I'm rushing this, but this is like, this is like obviously me trying to go through as many things as I can to pack in as much value. Um ad lifecycle.

Shahbaz Khokhar: I'll start by saying like, this is my problem statement. Like a lot of people start thinking this and this is where I was like four years ago, five years ago when I started to do the creative stuff. Like in my head, I'm thinking, oh, I'm a genius. I'll just come up with stuff and wait for something amazing to happen.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um it doesn't it doesn't work like this. You've got to be much more systematic about this.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And so I actually ended up breaking it down into like a step-by-step stages, like what do you actually need to do to make ads perform, uh to produce ads at scale? Like what do you consistently need to do day in, day out? I ended up breaking it down into these multiple different stages. Um so like, capture the ideas, present them to your team, figure out what the priority is, put it in a plan, right? Next step is, brief them, right? Build a storyboard, do some layouts, make sure things are compliant, um and then name your ads correctly.

Shahbaz Khokhar: We actually have an auto naming uh functionality that we've built into our uh own work OS that we've built. Um we we've got a basically a software that we built that runs this process now. I started in monday.com, realized that we reached the limitation of what was possible with it, and we ended up building something internally called Ad Sprint. Um which at the moment we just use internally for for ourselves. Um we have thought about actually, you know, seeing if other people want to test it out for us and give us some feedback, but um this is basically what's enabled us to produce like thousands of creatives per month. Um so I think like I'm keen to just put it out there for the first time and see like, you know, what what do people think of it? And I want to know how other people are producing, you know, creative at scale um outside of kind of AI. Um and then yeah, like I've also given a link to people who want to have access to this and and just test it. Uh we're not charging for it right now. We're selectively going to choose some people to test it out. Um just to kind of see like what the feedback is like. Um and this is basically what's enabled us to produce like thousands of creatives per month. Um so I think like I'm keen to just share that.

Shahbaz Khokhar: And the last thing, just plug working with us. Like if you want to work with us, we do work on a pay per sale basis as an affiliate. So if you've already got an ad account running and you want us to run in tandem to you, we want us to do some additional work and you're already spending like at least 100k a month, uh at a bare minimum. Um we're looking to we're looking to take on more affiliate deals. And we can work as a full service agency if you're spending at least 100k a month. Um and we've also got agency ad accounts where we can give cash back. So that's my little plug. Um so if you want 5% cash back on agency ad accounts, you know, you basically get for every million you spend, you get 50k back, um which is always going to help and you can, you know, bump up your uh your targets if if you're getting that as well.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Um and that's pretty much me, that's it. So that I know that was I blasted through as much stuff as I could as fast as possible. You can find me on X, you can find me on LinkedIn. If you really want to contact me urgently, there's my WhatsApp. I'm a bit nervous about putting my WhatsApp out there, but I do have a business one, so I switch it off after hours. Um you can hit me up on there. Um don't send me long messages, don't send me long voice notes, don't send me dodgy pictures, just like only hit me up if you want to talk about creative at scale or if you're doing something cool or you want to talk about Ad Sprint or whatever. Um I'm I'm keen to have a conversation, so I'm I'm open to that.

Evan Lee: And that's pretty much me done. I I think I've blasted through that. I don't know if I it's been like how many minutes? 52 minutes. Oh my god. I love taking Q&A as well by the way, so I've only got eight minutes for Q&A, which is a shame, but uh let's see what let's do.

Evan Lee: We're going to have to jump to the next one. But Shahbaz, you talk about this stuff so casually and it's just gems on gems on gems. You want to stop sharing your screen real quick?

Shahbaz Khokhar: Oh, sorry. Yeah.

Evan Lee: You're good. You're good. You're good. Man, holy gosh. Everyone in the chat is like, I could take a full day of this essentially. You crushed it, man. You crushed it.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Amazing. Thank you, man. I just I always want to just like contribute to the world, man, of e-commerce and see what other people are up to. So I'm I'm always game. Anyone wants to talk afterwards about this stuff, just hit me on WhatsApp or or wherever. I'm I'm always game for a chat.

Evan Lee: And then everyone else, like I said, check out the docs tab. Everything that Shahbaz had mentioned is all there, okay? So you want early access, you want all the docs, it's literally all there. So go check that out. Please, please, please. So Shahbaz, you want to do some rapid fire? Try to get some some

Shahbaz Khokhar: Go for it, man. Let's we'll go through some stuff.

Evan Lee: Okay, you've done a really good job of answering a lot of questions as you proceeded through your presentation. So I think I'm just going to stick to the ones where it's just a little bit different. And the first one is a recruiting question from Alex.

Evan Lee: So would love some tips on recruiting folks for the data team? Is the question that Alex has.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Oh, I I can't say I specifically have an answer for this because I'm not a wizard at recruiting data people. It's just we've happened to upskill one guy who's still in the office, like he we managed to upskill a grad by just keep giving him spreadsheets and we keep giving him uh challenges in Looker Studio and he just learned SQL off his own back and he's just been amazing. He's been with us for like two, three years now. And so he kind of built himself up. And then we had somebody else who's based in Pakistan who basically just like has experience doing SQL, building databases. He's a developer. Um I can't say like I had a strategic way of like finding them. I just got introduced by an existing staff member to that person. So I don't have a really amazing answer for that one. Um but other recruitment in other areas I can probably help. Message me afterwards about that one. But yeah, hit me with the next question.

Evan Lee: Perfect. Systems combined with amazing people always seems to work well, I feel like as a common theme.

Evan Lee: Okay, Dima has a Dima has a question. Shout out Dima here. So this is going back to the triangle you had of low cost, uh high production, and then just like high volume. So you were talking about picking two. If you have a big enough team, could you do all three?

Shahbaz Khokhar: It's a very theoretical question. I'd probably just say no because like you always have to compromise, right? It's just there's always some element of compromise in every industry this triangle exists. So like I'm going to I'm going to go with no.

Evan Lee: Dima also has another question talking about like the creators that you start to leverage. So is it better to build your own roster of people that you've built up through like recruiting on Instagram or do you lean heavier into the other services like an Insense?

Shahbaz Khokhar: I got it. Uh it depends on the client, depends on the project. So like if it's something new that we need, so for example like we had like um we're working with Jeep and they needed like a specific type of travel content creator that we didn't have on our books. Um so we had to go on Insense and put a new thing out there, right? Um but then we do have like a roster of people who work with on a regular basis. And honestly, the best thing I recommend is like have them in a WhatsApp group. It's super annoying to have a zillion notifications, but that's why I have two WhatsApps. I have one with like all my zillions of like groups with people. Um and one for just my like personal peace of mind where my mom messages me about like, have I eaten today and that kind of stuff. So like the the one one with business is basically has all the groups with content creators. We're probably in, I don't know, we're in like maybe 30, 40 groups with content creators easily.

Evan Lee: Nuts. Nuts. Last one here and then we'll then we'll wrap it up.

Evan Lee: So it's just dealing, JL asks, how do you deal with unreliable creators holding up production, late work, poor work, not following instructions? You have your KPIs, but what do you do when things don't happen the way you want?

Shahbaz Khokhar: I'm not going to swear, but don't work with them again. I had an answer in my head, but it didn't it didn't come out because I'm like, there's too many people listening here. My mom's going to watch afterwards, so I've got to like, sorry, mom. Yeah, just don't work with them again. Honestly, it's just it's just about like, when you start working with people on a regular basis, you get to know who are the good ones and who are the slow ones. We don't have a bulletproof way of like holding them to account in the way in the same way we have with our internal team because with our internal team, I'll be like, yo, why haven't you done the work yet? Okay, I'm doing it. Content creator, oh, why haven't you done the work yet? Oh, sorry, I haven't done it. Oh, you know, I'm busy doing blah, blah, blah. You can't hold them to account in the same way. Um I think eventually we'll probably give people specific SLAs and say, okay, you got to we do say to people, hey, give us the content within two days normally. Um they don't always hit it. The ones who are good do consistently hit it. And the thing that speeds it up is the WhatsApp groups. I can't say this enough, but like just pinging them the brief in WhatsApp. And what I have is I have my content creator uh team assistant in the WhatsApp group. So she can put the brief that's gone in by the creative strategist into our system. So like I'm kind of using WhatsApp as like a unsystematic way of doing things to communicate fast with the content creators, but I've got an assistant in every single group that extracts the brief, puts it into Ad Sprint, make sure it gets done, and then make sure it gets paid, puts the budget in there and all that kind of stuff.

Evan Lee: I love it. Oh my gosh. Shahbaz, I think it's so cool because like I think we've known each other for what, like three years now maybe, surprisingly, over time. And just everyone in the chat, just know like watching this, I I know where this started, you know what I mean? And like the systems are so much more impressive today. So you see like the the skill evolve over time. So man, shout out to you. Thank you for sharing so much with the community today, man.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Thank you, man. I appreciate it. I've been working on this every single day of my life for the last three, four years since we first met. So like I'm hoping it's improving.