Wie man 2026 wirklich eine Marke aufbaut

0:00Unternehmer/Gast What you're lacking is a brand. Like you developing more products does not make a brand. You developing associations that are premium is what makes the brand. And so the AI influencers and all that stuff that you're going to go do, that's fine, but they don't have brands. And so you have a lot of people you're basically just getting free clicks. That's what this is. But if you want the the value of the association, that's where there's probably one or two, three, maybe big Mexican female influencers they need to recruit, give tiny tiny slivers of the company or not at all pay them to be the face of the company to get the associations in place.

0:44That's what has to happen. So said differently, if school were to have just gotten a bunch of AI affiliates to go make content about school, that does not do the same thing for school as me investing in school and then talking about school. Because I have trust, the AI avatar doesn't. And so that that's the problem you're trying to solve is you're trying to solve a trust issue with more products, which is just irrelevant. It doesn't it doesn't actually translate.

1:15Now the product itself has to be exceptional, that reinforces the brand, that's good. If the product sucks, it doesn't matter what happens after that, right? You'll get the first purchase and then that's it. And you won't get a good person to go promote it cuz they know the product sucks, it'll hurt their brand, right? And so people will then say, "Okay, well, there's a zillion lotions and potions on the internet. I trust her cuz I've consumed her stuff and I know she wouldn't sacrifice her reputation just to make a quick buck." And that's what reinforces and elevates the brand. Okay. Okay. So I'm fine with the AI thing.

1:42I think it's cheap clicks. I think that if you want to solve the brand thing, you need two to three premium associations. And here's what's going to get Here's where it gets really interesting. If you get those two to three premium associations, guess who else will want to promote your [ __ ] The people who are not as cool as them, but wish they were as cool as them.

2:13What you're trying to do is capture the cool. Yeah. And you don't get that with AI slop. You'll get impressions. People have heard of you, but they will not have positive association. They will have heard of you. Mhm. So it's a reach play, not an influence play. You want influence. So the like the real real the real real is that you have an arbitrage business. Yes.

2:38And it's very difficult to turn arbitrage business into a strong brand because the arbitrage stuff, all the huge amounts of content that you're pumping out, typically are not cool. And so cool people don't want to associate with it. So they don't. And so the harder the harder way to grow this into a true brand, which is what you want, I think, right? Is to build like we want to be the number one thing. Like name a single skin care brand that is big that has grown the way you've grown.

3:09That's grown the way I've grown? Mhm. Grown on road to fame? What is it? Road road? They have like how many big They have like you would know better than me. But they Isn't that a Hailey Bieber and Kylie Yeah, it's Bieber. Yeah. Oh yeah, I mean it's the same thing minus Hailey [ __ ] Bieber. But like >> [laughter] >> It's her brand. Yeah, I know. I know. The point is that you probably if you were to name a bunch of skin care lines you would literally just go down the line and start just be like, well there's Kylie Cosmetics, there's Hailey Bieber's, there's You just start naming people. There's Fenty, there's Like you just start naming the people who represent the brands.

3:47That's what you're missing. And so what's difficult is I think you can actually over I think you I think with a couple of premium brand associations you can cover it. You can't be discount-driven. I know. I think our I think our product is that good. I mean, it's >> Right. No, no, this is this No, this is important cuz like This is actually almost the same conversation I was having with Matej, but you're just selling a product.

4:15Right now, you have the e-commerce equivalent of an info business. It's more scalable. There's There's numbers that goes up and down. It's all arbitrage. It's just buy clicks for X, sell them for Y, make the spread, and that's it. That's the game you're in. If you want to build a brand, you have to build it differently. You don't need to necessarily do that though. I'm not I'm not telling you that's the the answer, but I'm saying if that's what you want to build, you have to play it differently.

4:41So, it means you have to get two to three premium brand associations. The content you're putting out, it's not like, oh, we should make as much content as possible, you know, featuring the product. It's like Are the people in the in the in the ads representative of the avatar and the values that we want this company [clears throat] to stand for? And so, then it starts to rein- cuz like if you think about it this If you're like, "I want to have 100 different avatars for 100 different demographics so I can cover every single type of person." You just communicate to the market that you are for everyone, which means you are for no one.

5:15And so, no one knows what you stand for, which is why you have no brand. And so, you have to You have to kind of like the focus thing. You have to You know, with a concerted effort saying no to all of this like we have no men, we're not doing men, we're not doing young women, we're only doing women that are older, and they have these three problems, and every single video is going to hit on one of these three problems over and over and over again, and we're going to get the aspirational hero to those ladies to say that we're the best. And then, in order to get that lady to say we're the best, we have to be cool. In order to be cool, we have to make sure the product's good.

5:46So, right now you're like, the product's It's like you own the [ __ ] product." Like you should be the biggest like >> [laughter] >> the product's amazing, right? Um but the product has to be exceptional. Like you have to be you have to look at the Miss Universe and she has to get it and be like, "This is amazing." And if it's not amazing, she's not going to rep it. If she's not going to rep it long-term, there's no brand. That's the reality of it. I'm not saying you have to do that. If you want to build the brand, that's what it takes.

6:13It will take longer. And that is why brands are valuable. And arbitrage businesses are not. Yeah. It's just that there's going to be a trade that's going to happen with short-term cash. I have a friend who has a $300 million a year business that does weight loss related stuff. No one will touch it with a 10-ft pole because there's no brand. It's just pure media-performance-driven marketing the whole way through.

6:39All they have is just gurus online saying that it's a [ __ ] scam and it's and it's horse [ __ ] That's all that the all the videos online are just that. There's no one saying it's good. But that's all it is because they just make so much money, but they have no margins because the cost of acquisition is super high. Their months and no one will buy them because the months are like you go 14 million, 8 million, 30 million, 22 million like it's it's all over the place because it's all driven by what your cost per click is.

7:05And so the the the metric that becomes your North Star has to be revenue retention. And not subscription arbitrage, which is different. Yeah, so like a subscription arbitrage is like, "How do I get someone like if I have like a buy one lotion and then it says buy three lotions, buy six lotions, buy 12 lotions and I have enough like, you know, CRO around it I can I can get the average order to be four lotions or whatever." That's not getting people to That's getting people to buy more [ __ ] not more times.

7:34The end of the way at the end of the day we can't The thing that makes the brand valuable is that that you build a distribution base of customers who trust you and come back to buy. That is what builds the brand. And so to your point of like when you build a brand, the person who buys it is happy to buy it cuz they can launch more more products because there's trust in that distribution base. So, the distribution is what the brand builds. My brand is meaningless without all the business owners who follow my stuff. The distribution is the value of the brand.

8:00Alex So, you have no distribution. You don't have a huge base of customers that are always willing to buy whatever you whatever you do next. You have a small base of customers. You have a huge base of new customers every month, a very small base of recurring customers. You need that base to grow. >> [snorts] >> And it's not just recurring cuz you're billing them, but people who trust you and are willing to take a shot on your next product. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as head count increases that you need to get through.

8:35And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh service businesses, brick-and-mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you, all free. I'd rather you just start a new brand refresh with the new product.

9:03You think? Yeah. You said you already have like a you have like people online who you have a lot of a lot of heat already. A lot of what? People are like not stoked about the product right now. Right? It's harder to it's harder to do a rebrand. It's harder to It's harder to move a brand that like there's a reason that some brands at some point are just like, "Fuck it. It's better to just be brand new. Get two people who are badass to associate with it. This is awesome." They're like, "Oh, wait. They're that old company?" It's like, "Really?" And it's like, "Yeah, that's if you get that reaction, it's good because the old one was bad.

9:37Okay. So, here's the playbook. Is it you have you have to sell through your existing inventory. Right? And let's just call it what it is. You're just going to smash and grab, make the money that you can. With that cash, you're going to fund the legit products. Part of that is going to go to two to three premium influencers. The people that are the most Literally just go for the biggest person you can get. Who will who will agree to to to sponsor it.

10:03Leverage that person to go get the other levels of affiliates underneath of them that are not as legit as them, but you can leverage their name. And then that is the direction that the brain needs to go in. And then the all the AI affiliates, influencers, whatever that you're going to build, you have to make sure that they're not representing everyone. They have to only represent that specific avatar. Otherwise, it'll look like AI slop. But you're going to repeat the same mistake.

10:28So, it has to be everything has to be on message, everything has to be on brand. It has to be aspirational. Like people buy North Face jackets because they're like, "Oh, the jacket stands up on the peak of Everest. It'll probably keep me warm from the car to the building." Right? And so, people discount big aspirational things and then say, "Okay, well, if the guy jumped, you know, give him energy to jump out of outer space down to the Earth, it'll probably, you know, my Red Bull will probably like wake me up for my meeting in 30 minutes." Right? Like the Range Rover can can go off-road and and go up mountains and all this stuff. It's like it can probably get deal with a little bit of snow.

11:04Uh here in, you know, Vegas. So, it's like it they'll always discount. And so, the idea is like we have to have these big Like why do I do a hundred million dollar launch? Because somebody would think, "Huh, I don't think I can do a hundred million, but like he could probably help me make an extra million." So, it's like I have to go all the way here to prove to somebody that they're like, "Okay, he can probably help me get to here." And so, that's what the like brand has to be aspirational. Think about it as an ideal that no one will ever achieve.

11:28And then you want people as close to that as you can. And the people that you're like, this is who we want, these people are cool. They capture our essence. Okay. That's what that and then you can use them to run ads them like whitelist them, right? Um as both affiliate side of getting more affiliates and then also just direct direct to consumer. That's long term how the brand gets built.

11:53Okay. And so for me I just became that brand. But like Layla's there, Sharan is 100% aligned with how we do business. And so he's joining. So like ACQ is the larger brand that over time the association ACQ has with me, why I wear it in every [ __ ] video and I will for years and so Layla. And like that imprint that association eventually gets built so that ACQ can just run its own ads.

12:16Doesn't need me cuz I've transferred that. Have the best product. Uh-huh. And then go get the coolest person to talk about the best product. And that is how you build the brand. To make the decision of do I rebrand or not, if when you go to have these discussions with the premium people they're like, I think you're a scammer and I don't think this is legit, then you probably need to just rebrand it. If they're there and they'll take it and they're like, oh this is really good product, then you're probably fine. And then it'll the brand will shift. I want you to get to the point where you love the products.

12:44Okay. That's what I want you to do. As soon as you love the products then you can actually build a business around it. But until you have good products it's all it's all [ __ ] anyways. Also you're not emailing at all so you should email more. Please do that. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, what percentage of revenue is email? I mean in Shopify and it's Shopify is only like 45% of our revenue. >> Huh? Like 15%. Yeah, so it should probably be closer to 40. Email 40?

13:09Alex Yeah, yeah. I mean Yeah, so you need to email more. Mhm. Um and you probably need to have flows for each of the kind of like decision paths. Like a bit obviously abandoned cart flow, you need two to three emails a week that are going out for regular value. E-commerce done well is 50%. >> Yeah. Yeah, so basically half of your revenue comes from email. If you do it right. You're saying Yeah, you're not emailing enough.

13:33It's free. It's free. Okay. Yeah. So, a lot a lot of the big brands will actually just lose money on their on their straight store and just all literally 100% of their profits email. They just look at what they generate from email, that's their profit. Okay.