Real, Battle-Tested Marketing Playbook [TBS 49, Sponsored by WorldFirst]

The process of doing B2C business and B2B business, they are very different i think my take is just choose one and focus on it a very clear indicator it's if you are not from that industry it's a fresh brand new industry to you don't choose the b2b route because you have no network inside you don't know who to call you don't know who's the decision maker after that you have cash flow issue there's a whole tons of problems over there marketers we like to have funnels because we have more control over it there's awareness there's a consideration then there's a purchase but in reality most of the time it moves like a spaghetti right like maybe they see the air that has an offer they ignore it then they see some other ad and they hear from their friend and eventually they buy but as marketers why we like it is because then we have more control over it and we can also know okay this is how we can tackle the problem welcome to tfc business show live cny special together in partnership with world first can we give everybody a round of applause It's fun, it's the start of the year I think a lot of the Taukes here are very interested to try to update their business refine their funnels or you know even say like the funnel is broken so the funnel doesn't exist right so we're trying to share with a lot of people laughing because you know right so the who's who of the industry is all here so Wei Tian from Presto Dry Cleaners I think they're the biggest dry cleaners in town he's like why you call me because he's laughing he knows yeah yeah we have the pink shirt franchise guys here right Andrew from OUE restaurants so a lot of the who's who are all here so you can get to connect with all of them I think everybody is here because they all struggle with some sort of a marketing update right so so that's why we are here with our astute panel to understand you know what is the next frontier what is this playground so yes just take us off uh before before that i need to introduce myself to all of you because i'm quite new to the show i'm judson i am Co-host, he always insists that I'm the host, but I'm only the co-host. Because I want to retire, right? He will never retire if I'm here. I'm also a marketer in practice. So when he approached us to do this whole thing, I'm like, okay, let's just do marketing, right? Because a lot of SMEs have their marketing little pain points. And so the first thing I don't believe in is that there is no such thing as a funnel. Because I mean, all of you, when you do your businesses, you would have known that when you run your ads, right? your customers don't immediately come sometimes they will look at your ads and then they will never return sometimes they will click on your website and then try try a bit you know hang around on your in your shop front for six months and then they don't buy anything why is it like that because there's no such thing as fun now there's no such thing as awareness consideration blah blah blah no such thing every everything is very messy that's why we call it playground you just shot down all the big six agencies sorry but no but we have an agency owner here who who has seen so many different playgrounds but this is enough about me right today we have Jake co-founder of Ergotune I think they are the, in recent times, one of the biggest exits in the D2C consumer brand. And then we have Marcus. Hi guys, good to meet you. Who is the, who runs a digital ad agency for 17 years with how many clients? 500 plus clients so far, right? Over the years, yeah, more than 500. Who has not gotten a single award and only cares about performance. That's what we talked about, yes. I see a lot of giggles. I know what you're thinking. And then we have Caleb, who runs an AI agency and also runs an AI startup, who cares a lot about product management, the data behind your consumer, and how you can monetize them. That's why I got him here, Caleb. All right. Hi, everyone. Nice to meet you. Don't be shy. Everybody here is all here to make friends. By the way, today is the actual new year. The new year is not. February 17. The actual new year is always on February the 4th. That's why I think World First has a year. Yeah, today is the actual new year. That's cool. It never changes. So why we got the three, our three guests here is because they have been there, done that. Jake started his business with $500 and then exited with eight figures. Marcus, as I said, has 500 clients and Caleb understands how you monetize and everything. So to set the ground here today, I want to... introduces imagery of playground all right because the traditional funnel is always people are aware of you first and then blah blah blah blah but actually if you go and flip things around and you think of your whole product as a playground the gate itself is the brand awareness then when people step into the playground you have different rides sometimes you marry go around you have the monkey bar you have the slides and then that's where the messiness comes in some people don't like monkey bars some people will go for the slides some people go for merry-go-round and each of these things are specific things you do in marketing that people will love so for example right if you get influencers it's an influencer engagement kind of thing a merry-go-round thing or is it a slide right and it differs from business to business and so here we're trying to unpack with an actual business case with an agency and with a product guy here so first things first right um i want to ask marcus here right 500 plus clients b to b b to c right does the funnel really exist to you or not uh not really so it's my mic picking up yeah it would be funnier if you say it exists but i think in in the real uh answer is that it Marketers, we like to have funnels because we have more control over it. You know, like what you were talking about earlier, there's awareness, there's a consideration, then there's a purchase. But in reality, your customer journey is more like, it's not linear. It's not like they are aware, then they consider, then they buy. Most of the time, it's most like a spaghetti, right? Like maybe they see the ad that has an offer. they ignore it, then they see some other ad, then they hear from their friend and eventually they buy. So no, I think to answer your question, the real answer is that it doesn't really exist. Real marketing journey is more like a spaghetti where it's all over. But as marketers, why we like it is because then we have more control over it and we can also... like you can you can have that kind of discussion a bit clearer like we want to have this message for awareness for this market you want to have this other message for uh consideration because it's more more middle of the funnel where they are aware just that they don't buy why and then we know okay this is how we can tackle the problem but the reality is that when it comes to tracking and seeing success from your marketing you shouldn't look at it from a funnel standpoint you should look at it really more like okay what in general has worked based on the data that you get. And the word work is also work for what? Like work for people seeing your ads or work for people coming to your store or buying your products. So yeah. Yeah. So this is where I want to go over to Jake, right? When you first started Ergo Tune, what was your marketing plan like with $500? Was there a marketing plan? To be honest, we didn't come up with a plan, right? I think the background story was that me and my founders, we were all fresh red. We have no industry experience at all. So whatever we see on the internet, we see what people are talking about, then we try it on ourselves. There was no marketing plan, but I mean, picking up the point on the different funnels and also on the different stages of funnels, like awareness, consideration, purchase, right? Initially, we bought into that story as well. Because that's what... I learned in NTU, right? That's a marketing playbook that shared to me from my prof, right? But the funny story was, okay, me and my founders know that we need to gain awareness first. So the first thing that we did was we created a quiz. The quiz title was why you should buy an ergonomic chest. Okay, so inside the quiz is like- You mean people click into those quizzes? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a thing, you know. It's really- Yeah. I only click into the what Pokemon are you for a quiz with. I don't know. You reviews your age as well. Oh, sorry. Sorry, yes, yes. Okay, so the quiz, we're sort of creating a quiz, so we think that, okay, it's so personalized, right? So we will capture the unmet needs, then people will realize that, okay, they need an ergonomic chest for their health. right so we pushed a quiz on our website and we direct traffic from facebook from instagram click-through rate completion rate was awesome 60 oh that's amazing right 60 of the people who landed on the quiz completed the quiz precisely okay okay the funny story was after that we say okay the click-through i mean the completion rate was 60 but then when we take a deeper dive into what's the purchase rate less than five percent Is it because you're expensive? No, but we were like suddenly that we asked ourselves like, why is it happening? Right? So we dive deeper into it from people who actually purchased but didn't complete a quiz. So they were telling us that actually I saw your ads on Instagram and influencer was promoting it. I suddenly felt that I have a need to buy it also. right? Because it looks professional, it looks nice, it looks classy, right? Then I look at my chair in my office, in my home office, it looks so ugly, then I suddenly wanted to buy it. So what we realized over here is that actually, consumers doesn't move through the different stages of the funnel, right? And a sudden pop out in Instagram that tell like an influencer showing a product review or a simple recommendation from their friends and family actually helps a lot more, right? So we were like messing up with, we were getting so obsessed, like we have to settle the awareness stage doing a personalized quiz so that we can get them to realize that they have all these needs, right? Then they will consider us, right? So I think... All these are bullshit. So just so I push that, right? Essentially for most entrepreneurs, marketers, you kind of think of like, okay, you now have a pool of people in this list. Let's engineer them to move further down the list, right? And then you do like promotional coupons, you send it out to them or something. That's kind of how most, at least that's hype. I think that's how most people think about it. And you guys tried that. It didn't work as well. So I want to understand, right? Because is it a situation where... you try promotional tactics to move them further down the funnel from awareness to closing it didn't really work but then when you did like a social media campaign on the side which is this whole concept of the playground right then ended up convincing the original audience without really needing to activate them i think promotional like discount code and promo codes right have a different use case right especially we will definitely see an uptake in two two three three four four five five sales definitely And the reason for that is because if you are going to buy an economic chair or any kind of like one-time purchases that, if you suddenly see a promo code and it's time-based, you're rushing to it, you have to higher urgency to buy it. But then, to be honest, you are repeating that campaign month-on-month also. I mean, to be honest, you go to any other companies in Singapore, they are doing it on a month-to-month basis in terms of promotions and discount codes, right? But then we realized that actually a lot of consumers don't actually will come back. Like once they purchase the chair, they wouldn't visit my website a year later. So they wouldn't even realize that we are doing this on a year, a month to month basis. I don't need three chairs, right? Yeah, precisely. Okay. So it doesn't overwhelm the consumer by virtue that, you know, people buy and then that's pretty much it, right? It's not like a recurring, you sell facial cream, sell dots, you know, all those kind of, you don't know what I'm talking about. But consumers don't really realize it because I don't spend. my entire day looking at your promotional campaign okay okay so that's a fallacy broken yeah yeah because sometimes you feel like you're drowning the consumer too much you know yeah yeah i think what he's saying is that um what he's also trying um in summary it is also to design around the natural consumer behavior right because you started off with facebook thinking that that that would drive a lot of um purchase conversion and then you along the way you found out that actually most of your not most but many of your consumers respond well to influencer so actually there is some form shape and form in terms of in your industry and specific to your business your natural consumer behavior somehow fluctuates between facebook and and influencer something like that yes yeah right and between industry and industry it changes all the time right yeah i believe so Closing the sale is very important and I think a lot of SMEs, once you close a sale, it's like a kid goes into your playground and then takes a slide and then enjoys himself and then exits. But the point is that you want the kid to come back again and again, week after week. And I think when it comes to capturing this kind of consumer data... might not be that strong in terms of what we are trying to do here. So I want to go over to Caleb, based on your experience in working with different enterprises and different startups and also in SMEs, how would you build a easy to use kind of data capture process whereby when people come in and make a purchase already, then what do you do to them, with them? the word that Justin uses right is to get players inside your playground so for context I am an agentic AI startup founder and these are all the marketing experts my specialty comes in trying to help to make your product sell itself right I mean all of us here we all know that the cost of acquiring a new customer is always way more expensive than trying to upsell an existing customer and so I want to cover a couple of topics first of which is as a product guy myself right and once the marketers have sent all of the traffic over converted they actually start to become customers they start a buyer journey your first step is onboarding right did the customer get the product that was sold to them right was what you advertise what they got as well because I think returns and cancellations refunds are very very big deal in e-commerce and I think market average is what 10 to 15 to 20 percent of the purchasers end up becoming returns so you want to drive that percentage down as much as possible and also at the same time right you want to make your onboarding journey unboxing or so on and so forth right such a joyous experience that the buyer is so happy once that product arrives at their doorstep. Now that's the first part. The second part I wanted to share as well is about retention and trying to make, I think in the modern day, right, e-commerce businesses have to turn their buyers into promoters as well, into people, you know, walking testimonials, right, people who will give your product a very good review. And at the same time, you can try this out as well. I think a lot of software SaaS businesses in the US, they are doing this already, which is to call up happy customers and form a community with them, right? They add them into, in tech, we use a Discord channel or Slack channel, but you could do the same with a WhatsApp channel, right? Basically, turn every of your new buyer into a promoter inside a channel such that you can call them up anytime. And I think very important in the age of AI as well, where there's so much content, authenticity is very important. So you have to get your happy buyers to create user generated content about your products. Let's say if you sell an airfire, you add all your hardcore buyers into a WhatsApp group chat and then you organize a cook-off tournament. Get them out, share their recipes, make them film themselves so that you can have all of these free content. Because we all run marketing teams, we know there's limited budget. You cannot produce all content yourself. Who are the best people who can give you high quality content? It's your happy customers. So I think retention, I want to cover. And then finally, of course, try to upsell, build an ecosystem around your products. What are complementary things? If you sell a charity, can you sell the speakers next? Can you sell the tables? Which is exactly what GoTune has done, right? You sell the standing tables and all. People buy because of the vision of themselves, right? They perceive themselves to be this kind of persona. so if you already have the kind of cool chair your next step is i need to fit my persona right is to have a cool table to have cool speakers and there you go that's so that sums up the the playground concept right they are all now very engaged activated community members of your brand right rather than a one-time sale with a discount it's great you close them but yeah you gotta think about how you continue to keep them and double and triple right they are card size Yes, so that's my take on that. Sorry, I'm very soansial, but I think a lot of the Taukes, they've heard every element of that in different, different forums and how to grow the ticket size, how to drive your ROI and all that bit. People have heard it. cannot say it's common, but it's a talk of the town. Anybody that's a worthy entrepreneur knows these things, right? And we run the whole machine, right? We got the website, we got the conversion rate downwards, you know, we got the email list pusher, we got the podcast back air, we got the, you know, community, you know, all the buzzwords that people do, right? I have the whole bit. This event is a community. Yeah, exactly. So I have the whole bit and I am very clear on like... Where is the marginal upside? Where is the cost and all that bit, right? Because I think for a lot of people, it's just all about, okay, if I'm going to invest more in this, where is the parts that, you know, maybe open question to you guys, like where are the parts that is like easy to tap, that you observe, that you think like most entrepreneurs in the market today are not doing? Highest ROI, easy to do things, you know, you must do immediately. you know yeah i can answer that question first so you're asking like what's the magic bullet uh so so i think one point i want to make uh working with different companies you know helping them out with their marketing play over the years is that um The biggest mistake that I see, and sometimes as agency, we make the mistake of doing that for our clients as well, is that we say we want to try two or three different things at once, which is a big mistake when you think about doing marketing because when you are running an SMB, you don't have a lot of flexibility and margin of error to play around with. It's go time and you need to think short term in terms of results. The problem with sometimes working with a lot of marketers is that you cannot just think short term, you got to think longer term. But from the commercial standpoint, you want to be able to see some short term result. So both sides has valid points also. Like marketing, sometimes you got to think about, OK, maybe for what I'm building here, I need a great brand for people to trust me, especially if I'm in finance, for example, if I run a fintech platform. I cannot ask you like put your thousand dollars or five thousand dollars and invest with me when you don't even know anything about me in the first place and I could be the next crypto platform that just taupi and run away with all your deposits in there. So in some cases that trust needs to be built and that awareness has to be, you have to invest in that. But if you talk about magic bullets, I would say it's not about looking at at a few magic bullets and say, okay, I want to do so many things in marketing. It's more like as SME Thaukes, I would strongly suggest to invest the time to at least learn the pros and cons of each channel of what you're doing because there's SEO, there's performance marketing that you can buy out of home media ads or so, which actually is quite inexpensive nowadays. Yeah, it's gotten cheaper. so cheap that they asked me to buy yeah i see the brown line one is great so what i'm saying is that is that you can you need to invest the time to learn the pros and cons of each platform i'm not asking you to spend like a year but at least spend you know two three hours just listening to different people with different points of view then you make the assessment yourself right for the products and solutions you're offering the market that you're going to and the channels or different marketing tactics that you can deploy which one fits your thing best because you can also do you know outreach as well. If you're running a B2B company, I can just deploy outreach and target like, you know, 200,000 people over the next six months. I just deploy outreach, just whack them. Like SPH, just whack on it. Just like, you know, mass send. Sorry, I don't mean to offend anybody from SPH here. But as long as you know the pros and cons, then you just invest in that one thing that you feel has more pros than cons. Then you see, if it turns out that you were wrong, then, you know, three months it's not too late to make a pivot um after all do you have an example i mean you work with so many people let me think okay well i have many examples yes jake you're a live example yeah so especially for the audience have not they have not heard your episode i think it just went out today today yeah it just went out today so after this i expect 1000 downloads share 10 friends okay before that happens yeah I think I speak from the perspective of a lot of SMU owners and Thaukes here, right? Is that we have limited time, limited financial resources, not even have enough manpower to do all at one go. I don't have the capability and timeline, everything I'm so caught up with operations, right? So I don't have the time to test. But then I think throughout the business of Ergotune, what we have learned is just do one channel, be good at one, dominate it, be the very best, make the very best of it before you move to the next one. Right? So I think back in the days in Ergotune, we tried many different things, right? Because suddenly I go to this event, this guy tell me, hey, you try this quite good. I have results. Is it like one of these events? Yeah, maybe. So be careful of who you are speaking to later, right? So I go to another event, that guy tell me, I did B2B partnerships, right? I put my furniture in some stores, right? So that my customers can go there and buy it easier, right? You should try it also. So we're like, ah, we were naive also, right? So we say, ah, okay, we all try the next week, right? So we are like, we're running a headless chicken, right? on one end we are focusing on google ads the other end we are doing meta ads instagram ads the other end we are focusing on influencers we even have a team that does b2b partnerships which is that we are going to all the different chiropractors clinics telling them that hey can you put my chair there right then if your customers comes in right your patients comes in help me to push a bit right so we are running all over the places right but we realize that actually meta ads give us the highest ROI. So from you founding ErgoTune to you realizing that this is that channel that worked, how long did it take? I think within a year. One year. It took some time also, but it's like suddenly I woke up in the morning, we woke up in the morning where I slept in the face like, why am I running like a headless chicken? Why am I pursuing so many different channels, right? Why not we just see like which one is giving us the highest ROI? We ignore everything else. We just focus on that, right? And it appeared to be true, right? That we managed to bootstrap all the way. No angel investors, no VC capital. We do Ergotune with just 1,500 in capital, right? We grew from zero all the way to 20 million in yearly revenue in just four years because we focus on one channel. And what's your sale price? I even see businesses, right? That does a flip marketing only and grew it up to a nine figure business. A lot of fintechs started with that. That point, right? Marcus? Yes. Yeah, you've done your homework already. I've done my thinking. I want to rephrase the question, right? Everybody here, no time. No time to test here, test that. If you have only 5,000 to 10,000 bucks, right? And just go and do marketing, what would you recommend us to do? Most companies, I would say, look at performance marketing, so paid ads, if you have not already done so. If you've done it and it didn't succeed, then I would look into, let's say B2B company, the one that is really yielding the best result right now. Best result in terms of like highest yielding effort to reward ratio. uh is using like ai then you use like sdr to outreach i know how you feel about that judson you wrote linkedin post that you're so against it using ai to to reach out on the b2b front so using like uh sending out emails uh and linkedin messages uh on your behalf as well i think that's using the the highest effort to reward ratio uh now now of course some people deploy it like badly but i think that channel alone has been working out very well for us and many of our B2B clients. The second thing is creative, right? So performance marketing and creative, they go hand in hand. So how you run your ads, the type of like creatives you push out. I would say these are the two most the things that move the needle the most uh are these two okay okay maybe i can share some yeah so okay then i open my books because this will affect my client conversion rate you know yes because we run the whole gamut right so if you're super into this whole like Content marketing, because that's like paid marketing, right? If you're very into content marketing, I think there are a few things that work really well, to date still works very well, which is like written social media content converts to long form articles very well. So the click through rate is very high. Okay, so if you write a carousel post on Instagram or whichever, from there, click into a long form article is very high. Then it falls into an email funnel at the bottom, right? Put something, something, something, and then you can reverse target later, right? So that... conversion is very high short video conversion is actually not as good from a from a click perspective because people are really in that kind of like just consume consume consume part especially when you expect short video consumers to change to another medium right like listen to the podcast or you know follow on socials or read an article that is abysmal right but i think some of the youtubers are doing a great job when they run like a whole like 30 minute video thing and then they they cut it out and then they kind of hook you want to know what i bought blah blah blah yes but that will mean that the kind of production cost goes up a lot when you try to do that bit yeah and audio retention is the highest to date right so podcast audio retention is the highest um on average if you see a video podcast on the internet that's 50 as compared to an audio only podcast right so yeah i gave you everything In the future, I tell the client, I thought I heard your podcast that day you say this one, why you sell me this? No, but amongst all of these, you put in all these efforts into your channels. Ultimately, actually, there's one thing my gut says that a lot of people don't pay attention to is how a customer navigates throughout your website. do you pay attention to that or not yeah we got put some effort but limited yeah so if i were to if i were to ask him saying you need to improve your website very simply and briefly right um for all because all of us here have websites and we put in money maybe five thousand ten thousand dollars on youtube whatever whatever to drive people to the website to understand your product the moment a person lands on your website you your attention span should should should deepen and look at how a person navigates the website so Caleb what are the best some of the best practices in terms of tracking or in terms of encouraging a customer to stay on the website as long as possible and don't leave because once you once a person leaves that's it really they won't come back okay um before i deep dive into that right and if i go into very specifics i'm going to name some tools and companies so um first things first right is that building websites landing pages even e-commerce stores nowadays right is ridiculously cheap if you use the ai tool builders right ai website builders a couple of the tools that my team uses right and you can build beautiful beautiful websites right like as though a designer with 10 years of experience crafted them and so not just the beauty but also as what Justin was saying, the utility of this website. Now, I'll give you an example, right? You want to look out for intent signals, very strong intent signals. So if you have an e-commerce store and you see this website visitor, they already click three or four products and then they even click, let's say a reviews page on your website. Now, nobody goes around reading reviews for fun, right? Like you probably think that... Yeah, there's something that you are already interested in this. And now you're looking at the reviews and then you look at different products in the catalog, but why are you not adding an item to the cart? This probably means maybe the pricing is something a bit too expensive. So then you offer very quickly a last ditch discount code, right? Like, hey, you have been looking at a page for 10 minutes. Do you want this voucher? And then you see if that works. to build this kind of customizable websites it used to be very expensive in the past you hire a web design agency but nowadays you can use tools there's one called v0 it's like just called v0 ai you search for it and there's one called lovable as well lovable.com i think and these are incredible tools and you can already generate a first version of a website right with the free kind of free credits that they offer to you and afterwards you start to configure it more and more and you can even add in actual features so you can add like a reviews page you tell the AI this is how I want the reviews page to work I want also a discount to pop up I want to create on the same landing page I want to create a content hub where you got your how-to articles you know support articles how to use this product and what other people are saying about this product right you can build all of these with Lovable and vZero within 30 minutes and the additional credits that they were charged to you I cannot confirm the exact number but so far at least for us right we pay at most another 50 to 100 dollars so it's a lot more affordable than having even a full-time web developer or web designer and so these are the two points that I covered the third one would be the actual content right which Reggie and the rest of the panel were talking about writing blog articles nowadays with AI is of course very effective we use one called WriteSonic and you can write a lot a lot like 20-30 articles very quickly and my favorite topic right is also to help the potential buyer to do comparison, right? I would say like, hey, okay, if I sell this air fryer, why is this air fryer? Why is our air fryer better? I'll choose three or four air fryers, right? And then just compare them and use AI to write this article. And AI is really good. It will tell you, it will actually do the research for you. It will go and scan other people's reviews, right? And then summarize it and then say, okay, this air fryer A is good at one, two, three. Air fryer B is good. And then finally you say, why is your air fryer? not say the best but why is it the best for you right most suitable for you so you don't try to sell so blatantly but just educate educate your website visitor and now that's the written one and then now for video there's another one that we use called GenSpark AI so you can film let's say a very long session I do a workshop right of one or two hours and GenSpark AI actually helps you to clip it to very very short you know you can tell it I want 60 seconds and you tell GenSpark AI go and find a moment where our customer was very happy on the panel and they shared they were so happy and excited about the experience of using our product GenSpark will actually clip 60 seconds for it and then you just do your final edits you can tell the AI to add the subtitles as well so that now you can post on TikTok all over you can even make them do a voice over and and so suddenly you are able to my question that since you talk about usage of gen ai right yes how has the output been like for for you the output honestly over time right it has you can see dramatic improvements like one year ago if you use the same products that i mentioned you'll be like oh still have to edit and curate a lot of things but now fast forward one year later man the the improvements are like dramatic one year ago i was telling my guys use this you know ai stuff they're like oh it's not good enough you know one year later it's like why you're not ai-ing it you know like it's like all your everything you see on our carousel it's all ai i mean we prompted we do the research but there's a lot of designing element it has gotten so much better even some of the other ai tools they learn over time so like internally there's a lot of deployment and if you don't do it then you're it's all cost right at the end you want to compete you know, to, to stay relevant on that front. I love the false dichotomy of comparing other products. Because the more Caleb went into all these AI tools, I guess the question in Marcus's head is like, oh shit. Yeah, who's going to find the agency? Nobody needs an agency anymore. What is my value proposition? No, I'm not worried about that. I still remain AI skeptic. My team uses AI a lot for like making videos, articles and so on. But I always have the belief that today I think we are all smart enough to know whether a piece of content is made by AI. and typically if it's made by AI people like to brag they make content with AI but people hate I give you a little thing on this. So you all know this company called Eleven Labs. My team, because we do like hundreds of podcasts, has fed the Eleven Labs all my voice. So every ad that you hear on TFC is AI generated. so i'm shopping i'm not sitting in the studio to say like right yeah so they have fed my whole stack of course uh you have to do final podcast right you know you know you know right but you need enough to feed the ai and then the ai will study the nuance of it and it has improved over time yeah right so but but you you you can't run a whole like 15 minute podcast with that but you can run a like one minute ad insertion on that front right and then people will be like oh okay know and then they just kind of move on they think you know Reggie is just high you know something like that right so so that's the that's the part that I think you got to use it smartly exactly yeah yeah so that's exactly my point I feel AI is kind of overhyped especially when you're a practitioner you will know like what can what cannot right yeah so exactly so bottom line is still need agency I think agencies right in today's world will be even How can I say this? The agencies that adapt and apply the most tools, the fastest, right? It will become a narrower and narrower pyramid, right? The strongest ones will get the most business and those that are average, right, that used to have business will now lose all their business because you cannot do it faster, better, cheaper than someone who already mastered all of these tools and as well, right, is an architect, right, in terms of their strategy. right and the creative soul as well right it's really important so for example right like i was saying just now even all of these use lovable right you can turn a business like your aircon you sell aircon right can transform your whole website into like an apple store you know that level of quality the aircon come out then got outer space at the back and like some or everything ai generated with your product so it's um you just have to join this battle right it is quite crazy so bottom line speak to market is very fast because of all these AI tools if you want some human touch right and you don't have enough big enough team then can outsource to you know who enough marketing but I only have two more categories to touch upon right one is because amongst us because amongst us we have B2B and B2C different types of businesses. One last one, yes. Yeah, so in terms of, because you also done B2B and B2C before, right? So I want to understand, right, does the playbook, how does the playbook change when it comes to B2B and B2C? Okay, so I think it changes a lot, right? So I think we ask this question ourselves, even though I'm selling office chair, right? The natural inclination of an office chair is that I need to sell to B2B. in the end thankfully that we chose the b2c route right which is we are targeting consumer first so our natural thinking is that if we sell it to b2c all of you guys over here business owners leaders in your company love my chair you'll go back to your company and tell your boss that we want this chair also right and then you'll send about order to us and we'll fulfill it right so we had this thinking um initially so thankfully we went through that cycle But then as our business grow bigger, trying to tackle B2B, it's something that we have to do also, right? So as we go into the B2B market, what we realized was the sales cycle was so long, right? And then it impacts my cash flow a lot also, right? Because I have to tender for a project. Before I tender for a project, I must prove to them that I have enough inventory to fulfill it. After that, even I've delivered everything into the office, it takes three months for them to pay. So I'll say that the process of doing B2C business and B2B business, they are very different. So I think my take is just choose one and focus on it. And a very clear indicator is if you are not from that industry. It's a fresh, brand new industry to you, right? Don't choose the B2B round, right? Because you have no network inside. You don't know who to call, right? You don't know who's the decision maker. After that, you have cash flow issue. There's a whole tons of problems over there. But of course, if you are an experienced veteran within a certain industry, you decided to start your own business within the same industry. I mean, go for it. Yeah, you'll find it a lot easier because you know who to call. you know who to tackle yeah yeah yeah it's true like when i do the podcast when i first started i always complain i don't do it but the more i do the more people i know the easier it gets you know so that's the whole the whole b2b business every time i see you say you want to retire every time which is true right yes this will be the last and i was like any other thoughts b2b b2c if not i want to open i think it would be the so b2c competition is always a lot higher B2B from a marketing standpoint, there are always things that you can do that maybe isn't very scalable, but it's highly profitable. So for example, like one of our clients, also in the office furniture business, the B2C route was like never a play that they wanted to do. But B2B, you can go to websites and you go scrape all the architect and designers. uh interior designers so you can go and scrape all their contact details um and then you know like nobody will want to do this kind of thing because you know in a traditional world you have to hire an intern you have to tell the intern these are the websites to go for go and find a contact person working there go and reach out go and research on them then you reach out so it takes a lot of time to do so uh but from a marketing standpoint it gives you an edge over competitors in my point of view because nobody is doing it And by the sheer fact of you reaching out, if you reach out at the right time with the right message, you get an incredible high amount of response rate from there. Fair. Caleb, anything? Yeah, no. Just to wrap up a little bit on this topic, right? It's that all of us business owners, we know, right? If B2C, you know, you're catching small fishes. At some point, right, you catch so many small fishes, it's going to get harder and harder to catch more small fishes. and um once you reach enough scale you got your b2c engine working very well your cash flow is good you know couple of low millions and all that then i think the next step for those that are considering strategy right is you gotta go whale hunting right you you have to go find the big ones you have to go for enterprise let's say even like let's say banking or what right you have so many small customers in the end you still have to go after the ultra high net worth because one will be enough to cover your your deals for one year already But as what he said, Jack said, you really have to take care of your cash flow. You got to make sure your business goes on, life as usual, while you are hunting for whales. Because as the word whales goes, there's not many whales. And to hunt a whale, you need a lot of resources. You need to form an entire team, some division to go and attack just one client. yeah like if you're microsoft microsoft does the deals 10 million dollars you need solution architect you need this and that you need people who give technical people then sales people and even the sales operations process right invoicing them it's not an easy thing um so like when i sold some software to nus the the process to even become a vendor right it's it's a nightmare yeah it already takes a lot of time and then after you register as the vendor that's just the beginning of the sales process you have to send a couple more documents, send due diligence, send your Acura BIS file, back and forth, back and forth. And then finally, that's when you can send the purchase order, the invoice, right? And then they will confirm the purchase. And then you wait another, as what Jake said, three months, four months. And finally the cash appears in your bank account. So it's actually great business. The good thing is NUS is not going to close down, right? So you don't have to be afraid that they won't pay you or they will run away or that the account will close. But it just takes a while to close them in the sales cycle. And it takes a while to get paid. And yeah, it's been great. Business has been very consistent. Yeah, I get it. But when you have too many whales, the whales also fight, you know? Yeah, that's a different story. That's another discussion. If you have too many wills on your accounts, I think that's a fantastic problem to have. No, no, no. There are other problems. Okay, okay. Can we give the panelists a round of applause? Thank you. Awesome. So that's it for the Financial TFC Business Show. You know, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week. I'm glad to do this with our friends from World First and we'll see you at the next TNY Low. Hey, bye-bye.

Funnels are dead.

“Best practices” might be costing you money.

And the strategy that built an 8-figure brand started with just *$500.*

In this episode, we go deep with battle-tested operators who’ve actually built, scaled, and exited, not just theorised on slides.

Here’s what you’ll hear (without giving away all the secrets):

- Why your marketing “funnel” might be completely wrong, and what to think about instead
- The $500 experiment that turned into an 8-figure exit (and the early mistake that nearly derailed it)
- How to stop doing “a bit of everything” and find the ONE channel that actually grows your business
- The hidden profit most SMEs ignore after a customer buys
- What AI can really do for your marketing right now… and where humans still win
- Marketplace vs your own website: are you stealing from yourself or unlocking new buyers?
- The tiny post-purchase detail that quietly turns customers into your best salespeople

*Meet the Guests*

- *Jake Tan,* Founder of *Ergotune (Marvable),* who scaled a consumer brand from scratch and exited with an 8-figure deal
- *Marcus Ho,* Managing Director of *Brew Interactive,* a performance marketing agency founder with 17 years and 500+ clients under his belt, is obsessed with results, not awards
- *Caleb Khoo,* AI startup CEO *(Saleshero.io),* helping businesses turn customers into communities (and communities into revenue)

If you’re an SME owner, marketer, or founder tired of vague marketing advice, this episode delivers real-world lessons, honest mistakes, and strategies that actually move revenue.

Hit play. Your next growth idea might be hiding in this conversation.

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00:00 Intro
4:25 Does the funnel really exist to you for B2B or B2C?
07:27 What was your marketing plan like with only $500?
13:00 How would you build an easy to use data capture process?
26:31 If you only have $5k to $10k to do marketing, what would recommend us to do?
30:20 What are some of the best practices in terms of checking or encouraging a customer to stay on the website
42:25 Final thought on B2B and B2C

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⚠️ *Disclaimer:*
_The content discussed in this episode is intended for educational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. The information provided is based on our understanding at the time of recording and may not reflect the current regulations or market conditions. The opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily represent those of The Financial Coconut. Please do your due diligence before making any investment or financial decisions._