The link to the podcast can be accessed at the top of the page. A full transcript of the podcast can be accessed below. Thank you for listening, and happy marketing!
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Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Agency Founder Podcast. Are you ready to grow your marketing agency? We pull back the curtain to show you how real marketing agency founders struggled, built, and scaled their agencies. Practical advice, lessons learned, wins and losses. We hold nothing back. Now your host, Jeromy Sonne.
Jeromy Sonne:
Welcome to the Agency Founder Podcast by Moonshine Marketing. Every single week, we interview successful founders of marketing agencies at different points in their journey to pass on their victories, defeats, challenges, and lessons learned to help you take your agency to new heights. This week, we’re speaking with Dan Snow of The Snow Agency, an agency focused on rapidly growing and scaling e-commerce brands profitably. Dan, thanks so much for being here with us.
Dan Snow:
Thanks a lot. Glad to be a part of it.
Jeromy Sonne:
Besides running The Snow Agency, are you the King of the North? I’m sure that’s the first time you’ve heard that joke.
Dan Snow:
Yeah, believe it or not, my brother, literally his name is Jon Snow, who is also my partner on the agency.
Jeromy Sonne:
Oh, that’s amazing. Yeah.
Dan Snow:
So I guess you could say The Snow Agency is the Kingdom of the North.
Jeromy Sonne:
Okay.
Dan Snow:
But yeah, I like it.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s cool though. I’d love to learn a little bit more about your background and how you got into marketing in first place?
Dan Snow:
Yeah, so I had a, I would say, pretty unique way of getting into the online marketing space. Prior to any online marketing related stuff, I was in college studying to be a dentist, believe it or not. I was in the accelerated dental school program at Ramapo College. And how I got into marketing was, during the winter break of my sophomore year, I had a simple conversation at the gym with one of my high school friends. During it, he told me that he was making $45 a week from a Twitter account. And as a typical broke college kid, I was completely shocked. I said, “I did the math. You’re making almost $3,000 a year on your phone. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” I was just blown away. I thought it was fake. I literally didn’t believe him.
Dan Snow:
This happened at the gym. I left the gym and I literally made a Twitter account in my car in the parking lot, and I was just mass following people, followed 1,000 people, what Twitter maxes you out, and I gained like 300 followers. I said, “Wow, this is going to be so easy.” Eventually I found out Twitter blocks you from mass following continuously, and they have their algorithms and ratios between your following and follower, how many people you can follow and so forth. So it became a lot harder than that. But yeah, that was how I got into this space.
Jeromy Sonne:
Interesting. For context, what year is that that we’re talking about?
Dan Snow:
That was December of 2012.
Jeromy Sonne:
It’s pretty early days, right? Facebook ads were pretty new at that point, and I don’t think digital marketing definitely had the following that it had now, you know? Would you say that was kind of fair? Like it was a little more, kind of figure it out on your own back in the day? What was that experience, learning from that point where Twitter shut you down for mass following people?
Dan Snow:
Yeah. To put things in perspective, there was no gurus. The online marketing space really wasn’t mature. It was completely in its infancy. If you remember even during that time, Instagram definitely didn’t even have advertising capabilities at that time. Instagram as an app was super small, it was still in those early phases itself, and same with Facebook. So just the whole landscape of digital marketing was completely different. And that in itself was why I was so blown away when I found out you could even make money online. Now, I think everyone in the world knows that it’s a thing. But back then, I was just shocked that that’s even a reality. Is that, you can actually make money online. So yes, the landscape was completely different. I didn’t know a single person other than my one friend who was leveraging social media and digital advertising.
Jeromy Sonne:
So what does it look like after that in your personal journey?
Dan Snow:
So in my personal journey, for one, I became pretty obsessive with being able to grow a following and what you can do with it. Literally, essentially, having thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of people at your fingertips was just crazy to me. So I became completely enthralled in it. And I spent literally countless hours all day, even when I’m in class, is that just thinking, “Grow my following, grow my following.” And I remember even during my birthday, all my friends and family were yelling at me for being on my phone too much. So I even went to the bathroom just so I could like mass follow some more people, gain a few more followers.
Dan Snow:
Yeah, so to make a long story short, within my first year, I believe I had gained about eight million followers on Twitter organically. I would say the first eight months I had only gained about 50,000 followers. I eventually gained enough momentum and had enough Twitter accounts at that moment, where I began, when I had new ideas of new Twitter accounts and new themes to push, I had enough followers and I could do enough promotions with the other Twitter accounts to rapidly grow that one account.
Dan Snow:
So I went from taking eight months to gain 50,000 followers or 100,000 followers, whatever it was, I really don’t remember the specific ones in that moment, to then being able to grow a Twitter account to 100,000 followers in one month. Then being able to do it in one week, then being able to do it in five days, then being able to in three days. And eventually, just having that massive momentum, that I was able to just create these massive followings at the blink of an eye, essentially.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s pretty interesting. So is that kind of like the moment where it shifted from, because it sounds like at first you were trying to be an influencer, you know what I mean? You were just trying to build a killer following and make some money. But that moment where you realized you could bring these different things together, is that kind of in, mentally, when it shifted to, “Oh, maybe more this kind of marketing agency,”? I mean not explicitly agency at that point obviously, or maybe, maybe it was. Is that kind of when your brain started to head in that other direction, when you saw the network power? I don’t know.
Dan Snow:
No. So to put things in perspective, so I’ve told you I’ve been in the advertising field for nearly eight years now. I’ve only been full time on the agency for about six months. We’ve been doing it for a little bit longer than that, been in the background for a year prior to that six months, but it wasn’t the focus. So agency was not even a thought yet. One thing that was kind of agency in a sense was, I was seeing the platform as a whole and how people similar to me that had these large followings, had no idea how to monetize it. Keep in mind, there was no drop shipping back then, there was barely any e-commerce stores. Shopify, I didn’t even know what Shopify, no one even knew what Shopify was back in 2013, 14. I don’t even know if they were a publicly traded stock even at that time.
Dan Snow:
So anyway, I figured out a way to monetize my following in an extremely efficient manner. And that was through affiliate marketing. So once I figured it out, I’ll never forget. I had this one Twitter account called Jim Bible. This account would typically make like $50 a day. When we launched these ads for it, it made $2,000 in, I want to say a three hour time span. So obviously I knew, we knew, I knew that we had something at our fingertips. And I was always looking for a way to bring easy monetization to the Twitter influencer network, so to speak. And I initially tried it with I think, a Buzzfeed style news blog, and allowing people to have their own sub domain to drive traffic, and they can keep track of how much money they’re making through the content website. But long story short, development didn’t work out.
Dan Snow:
So I found this new way to monetize the following that was amazing, and quickly, once again, realized that I could bring it to the whole community. That’s what I did. This was now the summer of my senior year of college. I was going to the library every single morning at 8:00 AM studying to be a dentist and launched this platform called Caffeine Digital. And that summer we, I believe already had a few hundred influencers using our platform to monetize. And I believe we already had it done like $300,000 in revenue or something along those lines, and realized, “I do not want to be a dentist. The platform is taking off enough where it doesn’t make sense.” And even before that, we had really big successes already. But this I could see being big.
Dan Snow:
So, decided I’m not going to dental school. After college, I’m going to pursue full time entrepreneurship. And then, fast forward to the end of my senior year of college, we were doing $100,000 a day. We had over 4,000 influencers on the platform, we had moved from Twitter to Instagram. We had celebrities like Cardi B, Blac Chyna, Amber Rose, Rob Kardashian, all the reality show people you can think of, using our platform. As well as all the meme pages, the funny comedy, the makeup pages, the fitness pages, using our platform to monetize. So it was a huge, huge win in that perspective. And I guess that, it’s kind of like an agency model, being able to bring together advertisers and build landing pages and presale articles and, into tech and allow the influencers to just take it, post, and it was a revenue share. So you’d be able to see in real time how much traffic and sales and everything else they were driving.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s pretty cool, [inaudible 00:09:45], right? To see it just growing exponentially like that right in front of you. And I mean, it’s just such a different plan too. Obviously, you’re a good student, at least way better of a student than I was, clearly. If you’re hitting the library every day and going from like, “I’m going to be a dentist and do this,” and then just suddenly having this, kind of stumbling into this and like this platform for these influencers ahead of you. That’s quite the ride, you know? Do you ever stop and be like, “What is going on,” in the middle of all of it?
Dan Snow:
Oh yeah. I definitely remember one specific moment. I was just walking to the gym and I’m like, “This is,” in college, in the parking lot, and I’m like, “This is just crazy. This is literally crazy.” And at the time, it was kind of a very lonely feeling. Because, I really didn’t tell many people about the success I was having. Even my parents and friends and all my college friends, I essentially employed all of them, but I didn’t really let everyone know the full extent of what was going on and how I’m dealing with thousands of people every single day, communicating. And yeah, it was kind of a interesting scenario. Because especially, after I decided not to go to dental school, definitely had a lot of resistance from my family. Because they didn’t understand, as you can imagine, what internet marketing was. Who would quit a sure thing like going to dental school to just do this internet thing? That doesn’t make sense.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah. No, that’s crazy. Yeah. A parent’s worst nightmare, “Oh, he’s not going to dental school anymore. He’s going to do something with Twitter that I don’t understand.”
Dan Snow:
Yeah.
Jeromy Sonne:
We get it, but it’s got to be terrifying for somebody that doesn’t get it. So you have this platform that’s just raking in the cash, right? You’re working with these huge influencers, you’re making all this money, you’ve got this awesome affiliate sort of thing going on. Tell me what happens next?
Dan Snow:
So next, I realized that the platform and just dealing with so many people, like I said, thousands of influencers and affiliate managers and advertisers, it just, to me, wasn’t really sustainable over a long period of time, because of the nature of the type of advertisers we had. And I wanted to build a longterm business. And a business that I had full control over. So naturally, this is now, I graduated college 2015. During that time period, I’m thinking, “What can I do?” So I launched two small e-commerce brands. One with my partner of the platform called Arrows Brand, and another little jewelry company with my brother.
Dan Snow:
The first one, we were fulfilling all the, we used my condo to, as a warehouse. That was not fun. And luckily for the second one with my brother, we used his garage in Louisiana as the warehouse. So at least I got out of it a second time. And then the third one, launched a brand called Goat Case, where now I was, I decided to leave, stop doing the platform, and go all in on an e-commerce brand. And that was really where we grew pretty exponentially once again. Within our second day, we had already done $65,000 in revenue. Our second day. We initially started, tried drop shipping and realized we can really, seeing the vision of it, “We can really create a brand out of this.”
Dan Snow:
So we decided to order 50,000 units from China. We didn’t even have a warehouse, an office, employees, nothing yet. And we had 50,000 units on the way without even an end address to give them. So I had to find a makeshift office warehouse to use, as well as hire a big staff to fulfill at the time, probably like 500 to 1,000 orders a day, a customer service team. I was heading the marketing operations, so trying to hire other marketers who I could teach quickly to learn and train and oversee and put this all together in a very quick manner.
Dan Snow:
So that was pretty significant. To give you perspective, we were doing 50 million organic impressions a day on Twitter, and about another 50 million a day on Instagram. So we were doing about 100 million impressions a day organically. We had a team of six, literally just buying shout outs all day. We were doing about 150 deals a day with all these different types of accounts, influencers, celebrities, whatnot. We had gained 900,000 followers on Instagram for this phone case in only six months, which is pretty unprecedented. We’d done $6 million in revenue in only six months. And at this time, this was mainly all organic. We didn’t even really even have the capacity, as you can imagine, because we’re doing all the fulfillment and everything, to even learn Facebook ads yet. We had done a little bit of it, but we didn’t have enough time to really just get deep into the weeds.
Dan Snow:
We were focused on what was best, which was the organic influencer shout out. This was prior to the algorithm change. So in a sense, it was very predictable. We had it down to literally a science, a calculation, of what to expect. We were buying these shout outs from these different pages, especially since I had the platform, we were able to quantify really everyone’s true worth and what our worth would be relatable to that shout out. How we got really big into Facebook advertising, was when we launched our next brand, The Perfect Sculpt, which was now in February of 2017. With the same infrastructure, now just knowing more and having more people at our disposal, we launched Perfect Sculpt, and I believe our third month we were doing $3 million in revenue.
Jeromy Sonne:
Very intense. That’s wild that these e-commerce brands keep blowing up over and over and over. That’s really impressive, honestly.
Dan Snow:
Yeah. So now in the first six months of that brand, now with adding Facebook ads to the mix, we did $12 million in the first six months. And just continued that process until 2019, where we decided we wanted to exit the brands and focus on the agency. Because it was just where, at least me and my brother, our strengths lies. Growing the brands on the advertising perspective, and not having to worry about developing new products and customer service and logistics and everything else, where we just really had no interest and no passion. And it was not our strong suit. So we figured might as well, let’s partner up with these people building the great products, and who can handle that end, and we’ll grow them the same way we did ourselves. And that’s where we are today.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s a wild journey. Honestly, the wildest journey I’ve heard. But that said, I’ve had a number of people on here, and you’d be surprised at how common some of the sentiments are that you have. Like, got their start in affiliate marketing, grew an e-commerce brand, but didn’t like the logistics side of it, really just wanted to focus on the marketing. It’s kind of funny how that kind of ties all of these really successful agency owners together, is that this very similar sort of background, you know what I mean? Some obviously, like huge brands, you were able to grow very, very quickly. And others at a little bit smaller. But just kind of that common thread. It’s really interesting to me.
Jeromy Sonne:
So you’ve started the agency. Obviously, you have a lot of business experience at this point, and obviously you’re very good at what you do. But how do you take that first step and say, “Okay, I’m going to go out and I’m going to actually approach clients,”? Because that’s a little bit different of a model than e-commerce, where you’re selling B to C. And now you’re going out and you’re pitching people and you’re saying, “Hey, I’ve done all this cool stuff.” Talk to me about that sort of shift and how you went about that in the early days?
Dan Snow:
So in 2019, like I said, maybe end of 2018, we decided, “We’ll see what it’s like to take on some clients.” Because at this point, we just had people coming to us, and me, saying, “We have this product, can you run our ads?” And I had this happen over and over and over again, because people had seen what I’d done with my platform. Keep in mind, we had 4,000 people on that platform. So I had rubbed elbows, so to speak, and put a lot of money in many people’s pockets. Then they saw what I’d done with my own brand, then again, then again and again. So I already had many, many, many people coming to me asking if we could help with their products, consult, advertise, whatever it is.
Dan Snow:
And I always turned it away, because I said, “I’m trying to focus on our brands. I don’t have time for this.” But eventually, when I was building a bigger team and a bigger advertising team, I noticed that we had some capacity. So I started taking on clients in the background, seeing how it would kind of work with the, as an agency, how I liked it, seeing all the nuances of it. So I already had begun building the agency in the background without even a name yet. We were just taking on clients, but they were coming to us. We weren’t even going to them just yet. I just kind of put it out there to some friends who I knew were growing brands, and it worked pretty seamlessly. So we had about six brands in the background for about a year.
Dan Snow:
In June or July of 2019, we decided we’re going to go full time on the agency. Starting September 1st, we went full time on the agency, and that’s when we really started ramping up. I hired a sales person, I already had my whole marketing staff, because we had already built the infrastructure from our e-commerce brands. And we started going after them. But for me, it really wasn’t, it wasn’t very difficult. Because even with our e-commerce brands, we were always looking at, “What’s the new trend? Who’s doing what? What’s going on? Who’s doing the best creatives? What do the best creators look like?”
Dan Snow:
So we essentially had completely quantified “What does the ideal client look like to us?” Because the ideal client was things we were looking at, creating our own brand of it. So it was really going out and trying to get companies. It was really not too hard, especially because a lot of these clients believe it or not, had either been affiliates on Caffeine Digital, believe it or not or had seen Perfect Sculpt or seen Goat Case, explosive advertising with all the influencers and ads and this and that. So we didn’t even have to pitch ourselves, they already knew it. Now they put the brand to the face and some of them, it was pretty funny, some of them said, “Thank God for allowing you to come to me.” They said we had actually inspired a few of our clients to create their first e-commerce brands.
Dan Snow:
So it was pretty crazy. But going out and getting clients, figuring out what they want, it’s just an ongoing process. The same way figuring out how to advertise is. What do people want? Why? But at least we already had so many crazy case studies from our own brands and clients, that even though we’re super young relatively as an agency, why people want to work with us in my opinion, is pretty self explanatory.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah, it’s self explanatory to me. I get it. I’m kind of like, “Aw, I wish I had an e-commerce brand.” But no, so that’s fascinating. I guess my question would be, you did all this cool stuff on your own. Was there a transition from when you owned the brand and you could do whatever you want to working more with a client where it was kind of more give, take, and kind of figuring out how to manage multiple stakeholders and stuff? Was that a transition at all for you?
Dan Snow:
No. My brother has been my partner on Goat Case, we had another partner on the brands, but we had never raised a single dollar of investment, or to even taking debt in terms of a loan or anything like that. So I never really had to report to anyone ever along this path. Now recently, we have someone else who’s a majority stakeholder in one of our brands, Perfect Sculpt. So now that’s the first time we’re kind of reporting to them. But yeah, that’s really it.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah. Yeah. So I’m basically saying that, “Yeah, I hear that that’s the case, right?” You’ve always been the head honcho, done your own thing between you and your partners. But has that dynamic shifted now that you’re doing client services?
Dan Snow:
I mean, it’s definitely shifted. But because, once again, we had that platform where we were dealing with all the, like I said, we had 4,000 affiliates. The client is always right in that sense, so I had already started, I already had a lot of experience in that realm. So it really wasn’t too unnatural to me. I mean, sometimes it really is difficult and it’s always going to be difficult where we’re truly trying to do what’s right for the client’s best interest and they give us a lot of resistance. Even when it’s pretty significant things that, you know, there’s complete certainty that it’ll help them out financially and grow and everything else like that, and they give resistance. But at the end of the day, like I said, the client is always right. It’s their company, it’s their brand. We can only bring what we know to the table, but they have the right to accept it or deny it.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah. No, it’s interesting. Yeah, that’s kind of the dynamic that I was, I was sort of getting at. Obviously, you have a ton of client services from, you’re kind of managing all of those different stakeholders from early on and stuff. Agencies bring their own unique challenges. Speaking of, I was curious, what is the biggest lessons learned so far in your agency journey would you say? Good or bad.
Dan Snow:
The number one lesson learned is that one bad mis-hire can have very, very, very bad repercussions. And you need to be very, very, very, very careful with who you let in your company. That is definitely something. Because at the end of the day, that’s been the biggest transition, right? Is scaling from products where we scale through inventory to scale, to agency, we scale through people. Now scaling through people, being very, just understanding your culture, what you stand for, what your values are. And even if people are talented, can they fit into that? Yeah, so that’s really truly been by far the biggest learning lesson.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah. That’s interesting. I’ve heard it said that, by like a really, really smart leader, like a CEO of a pretty good sized software company that I had the opportunity to meet. And he said, “I will take a B+ player that can play as a team player every time over an A+ player that can’t get along.” Would you say that holds true in your experience?
Dan Snow:
A million percent. Absolutely.
Jeromy Sonne:
No, it’s definitely interesting. It’s kind of like the whole is more than the sum of the parts a lot of times. I think that you’re speaking a little bit to culture. Do you have any lessons that you could impart about team culture and finding people that are the right cultural fit?
Dan Snow:
Before we even get into culture, the one thing that I found, is that people want to know what their future looks like and what they need to do to grow. Because at the end of the day, especially you know, we’re in a performance marketing business. And before, in the first year or two or so, it was just everyone was a marketer. And it took a while for us to understand it and put levels and what we call these transparent growth positions in place, and what it takes to achieve those, what are the roles, responsibilities, and everything else like that that goes into it. So they can see themselves growing within the company professionally and personally, and that, just being able to fulfill them so they know what’s going on.
Dan Snow:
And then culturally, the same thing is being able to be transparent with what your company stands for and your values and why it’s important and how people are evaluated. Not just on their performance, but also the company values itself. Because exactly like you said, even if you’re the top performer there is and you’re not getting along with people, you’re causing chaos and whatnot, then it’s going to be tough to have that person in your company because they’re going to make other people uncomfortable and whatnot. But at the end of the day, the key word between both of those, is just having transparency is really the key.
Jeromy Sonne:
No, I love that. I think giving people, like you said, letting them see what their future is and giving them that incentive to put in the extra mile, I think is a really kind of underrated thing. A lot of people treat it too much like mercenary work, where it’s that team building and that personal growth path I think is incredibly, incredibly powerful. And it’s really thoughtful of you to just say it in the way that you did. This has been wild. I loved hearing this story. Hearing like, you’re just one day at the gym on your way to being a dentist, turning into this massive affiliate platform and then rolling out these huge e-commerce brands.
Jeromy Sonne:
Honestly, this was crazy but I’m really glad to have gotten to know you a little bit better and to learn all of that about you. I want to say, I really appreciate your time today. I know it’s super valuable. I do give all of my guests the opportunity to pitch anything they want at the end of the podcast for just like, one minute or so. So I’ll let you go ahead and do that now.
Dan Snow:
Yeah. If there’s any brand owners out there who are looking to, looking for someone to help them grow on, whether it be Facebook ads, Google ads, email marketing, creatives, that’s what The Snow Agency stands for, and we’re happy to help. And that’s what excites me and our team. So please reach out. You can find me on Instagram. My Instagram is @dapper or @thesnowagency, whichever one you want to follow, or you can do both.
Jeromy Sonne:
Well, if you all don’t hire him, I’m going to. I really, really appreciate your time, again, today. For everybody out there listening, take these lessons to heart. I think there’s a lot to unpack here and a lot to internalize and learn, so that you can grow your own agency, your own brand, whatever you’re working on. I think a lot of these lessons are universal. So thank you again, and happy marketing.
