Build a community of influencers on giving, not asking.
In today's episode, we learn a sane and accessible influencer marketing strategy that has worked for brand and big small: product seeding.
We're joined by Cody Wittick, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Kynship, an influencer marketing agency.
Prior to co-founding Kynship, Cody worked at QALO, the brand that created the silicone wedding ring, where he built out a robust influencer program of 500+ influencers, all through the foundation of seeding. This included contracting thousands of micro-influencers in a variety of industries to produce monthly UGC and organic posts, while also working with household names such as Lebron James, Jason Aldean, Mike Trout, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
5/17/2022
Kurt Elster: So, one of the things I get asked about a lot is influencer marketing. How do you go about it? How and where do you identify influencers? How does it work? And we’ve talked about it in the past, but it’s still such a grey area. It’s still a thing I think a lot of people have just not dipped their toe into. Or if they’ve had, they’ve done it as a one off and then not pursued it as a big formal program. But I think now, as we see people looking for alternatives to some traditional online marketing, okay, so I’m talking about Facebook, of course. As we see our ROAS dropping on Facebook, we’re looking for other channels where we can see better returns, where we can launch new products whether we’re an existing brand or a new brand.
And so, I have a gentleman here who is going to talk to us about his experience doing just that, a man who eats, lives, sleeps, breathes influencer marketing, Cody Wittick, co-founder and co-CEO at Kynship. It’s an influencer marketing agency, but all right, so clearly he has an agenda, but he knows what he’s doing, because listen to this. He began his journey at QALO, which is the brand that created those silicone wedding rings. I’m sure you’ve seen these before. And while he was there, this is where he cut his teeth in eCommerce, built out an influencer program with 500 influencers through a concept called product seeding, and contacted thousands of micro influencers, resulted in UGC content, and then ended up working with household names like Lebron James, Jason Aldean, Mike Trout, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and so he knows the ability of influencers to build trust and sell product, and how you can leverage that to make your Facebook, Instagram, your Meta ads work better.
Yeah, I’m just going with saying Meta. It’s easier than saying Facebook and Instagram. I’m not gonna fight it anymore. Just Meta. So, Cody, Mr. Wittick, how are you doing?
Cody Wittick: Kurt, thanks so much for having me.
Kurt Elster: My pleasure, because this is… I’m happy to have you here both… for two reasons. There is an overlap here. People ask me about influencer marketing. I have never done it myself directly, so it’s not something I’m really comfortable speaking to, but I know the power of influencers, and you, having done it and had tremendous success, and seeing that success going all in on it with your own influencer marketing agency. So, all right, I touched on how you got started with influencer marketing. Tell me that story in your words. I’m sure you do a better job than I do.
Cody Wittick: Yeah. What was missing was all the mistakes that I made, and money wasted, as well. Very crafted bio by me. But no, nonetheless, yeah, we worked with a lot of those macro names. I came from an athletic background, so I kind of just was always interested in influencer marketing. It wasn’t really a term when I started, so that kind of just shows you the growth that we’ve had in the past eight years or so, but yeah, 2014, 2015, the rise of Instagram itself, kind of paired with that was the explosion of influencer marketing, and so back in the day, almost like back in the day on Facebook when ROAS were like 11, and it was easy to do Facebook. Same thing with influencers. It was the opportunity to see an audience and pair that with giving them a discount code and seeing all these thousands of dollars of sales. What happened was, though, was I got pretty addicted to that thrill, and we got… I mean, it wasn’t just me, but also our marketing team, of just working with macro influencers that cost a lot of money back in the day, and some worked, and some didn’t, and hopefully they all averaged out.
But yeah, my last year at QALO we had a $1 million influencer budget.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Cody Wittick: And I think that would be large today. It was definitely large back then. That just shows how much we were investing in influencers and how integral it was to growing the brand.
Kurt Elster: And so, you mentioned mistakes. What mistakes did you find you made, hindsight being 20/20?
Cody Wittick: Yeah. The example I like to bring up is we had an opportunity to work with Bryce Harper, who’s still a major star in Major League Baseball, and there’s something on Facebook that they don’t have any more called Audience Insights, and you can go into Audience Insights and you can see based on all your past purchasers and all your customer data basically everything that was available to you at that time, and it showed a lot of crossover with Major League Baseball.
Kurt Elster: Audience Insights was so cool, and so powerful, and I’m so sad it went away.
Cody Wittick: Yeah. Exactly. It was just interesting. It showed you all these related stores, and it informed retail decisions for us, but anyways, we had a lot of interest in Major League Baseball. We had an opportunity to work with Bryce Harper. And yeah, it flopped big time. It was just something that I thought was gonna kill it. We were gonna make so much money. Like I mentioned, we were doing all these macro video testimonials, leveraging that on Facebook, and it flopped. And I think a lot of people think that just because you have a macro name it’s just gonna do well. You’re gonna get all these sales. I think people still think that way and I certainly did with that, and I was making certain decisions based on some data with Audience Insights and things of that nature, that it was telling me that Major League Baseball would be a huge interest for the audience of QALO.
But what happened was the creative sucked, which is the biggest variable to success, and the name wasn’t enough to leverage sales.
Kurt Elster: I think that’s been my experience too, is people assume that if you have a big name, especially if you have like an A-list name, a household name, that that is just instantaneous success, that just the sheer fact of having a celebrity near, associated to the brand, just people are immediately hypnotized and they’re gonna hand over their wallet, and it just isn’t the case. You still have to do the work and the messaging, positioning, product-market fit. All the same things still matter, you just have… If you get it right, you have access to this person’s audience and endorsement, and suddenly it clicks. But it is no guarantee at all, and it certainly just doesn’t work on its own.
You’re right. That is a huge misconception.
Cody Wittick: Totally. Totally. And it worked back in the day, but it just doesn’t work anymore, and so what got you there isn’t gonna get you where you want to go, and that’s the trap that I certainly fell into my days at QALO.
Kurt Elster: So, what year was that?
Cody Wittick: When we worked with Bryce? It was like 2016-17ish.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so we’re about five years later. How have things changed?
Cody Wittick: Well, certainly the social algorithms have changed, so it’s harder to win organically, and so that’s why I’m such a believer in leveraging and repurposing content other places for brands, just because you have so many more places that you can place this content versus just one audience, and with the social algorithms and the percentage of the percentage of the percentage that actually see that organic post, it just… It’s a lot harder. You have to be way more consistent with that person, so hence why you need to create a community of people that are gonna be consistent with your product.
You’ve seen certain things like influencers partner with brands, and equity deals, and those are certainly things happening at the macro level, like MrBeast starting their own brands and stuff like that, so what’s changed is certainly the market, influencer marketing landscape has grown considerably. It’s just gonna continue to grow from here on out in my opinion.
Kurt Elster: You’re right. I think we’ve hit a new stage where now it’s not just like… I don’t even think influencer is accurate anymore. I think the broader term that I’ve seen and liked is creator economy, that just combines everyone who’s creating content, and it’s just… Because essentially, we all have access to the same tools. You have a smartphone and that’s it. Now you have access to be a creator here. And with enough consistency of posting, you achieve this influencer status, which really we’re just saying you have an audience. That’s all influencer means.
Cody Wittick: Right.
Kurt Elster: You’re a hired gun. You rent out your audience a little bit. So, you mentioned content, community, maximizing it. I like the direction you’re going there. How? How do I maximize the value of this content? And the value of the time I’m spending building out relationships with influencers?
Cody Wittick: Well, I’ll start with that second question you mentioned there of how to start with influencers. I would say it’s through influencer seeding. You kind of threw that term, but all that essentially means-
Kurt Elster: Seeding. Yeah. What is seeding?
Cody Wittick: It’s sending out product for free. So, it actually comes from the term broadcast seeding, where you’re… It’s a farming term. I’m from Orange County, so I have zero personal experience with this, actually, but what I hear is that broadcast seeding is literally you just throw seed on the ground. Some will sprout up into crop and some won’t, but the more that you do it, the more crops that you have. So, essentially it’s the same thing with influencer seeding, is the seed is your product. A free gift to the influencer that you hope to sprout up into crop, meaning you hope that that product is the initiation, that it turns into a long-term relationship.
In my opinion, and what we’ve found, and what I found in my days at QALO too, like even the Bryce Harper example, but we worked on a cheaper deal because it started with seeding. I was seeding him product for a year, building that relationship, and it ended up working out. Same thing, Dale Earnhardt Jr. You know, it ends up in cheaper deals because the macro loves the product. So, tying it back into just your normal everyday influencer, kind of like no matter the tier, I would still say start that relationship by getting the product into their hands, because you want the product and brand to be the thing that drives advocacy, and that’s what I think leads to authentic content, so when… You know, your first question of just actually leveraging the content, it’s actually leading to that authentic content because they’re posting on their own free will.
And we can break down exactly how seeding looks like, as well, but essentially, but it is sending out your product out for free to initiate a relationship with an influencer.
Kurt Elster: It sounds like, yeah, you sent the product for free to Dale Earnhardt Jr. for a year, and that turns into content, but also an authentic long-term relationship and potentially a partnership.
Cody Wittick: Exactly. Exactly right. And it all goes back to exactly how you start, too, that initiation. It’s like, “Hey, Kurt. I’d love to send you my product for free, but in exchange you owe me 17 posts,” or whatever the number is. And that’s how most people go about it. And so, what we would say is actually not asking for anything, but just letting the product and brand speak for itself, and in the same way that some seed doesn’t rise to crop, but the more that you do it the more that you have, some influencers are not gonna get it and they’re not gonna be a huge fan. Just like your customers, FYI, but the more that you bring in sales, the more that you advertise, the more customers and community that you have. Same thing with influencers, as well.
It's like you’re gonna identify true brand advocates the more that you can get your product out there.
Kurt Elster: So, some people receive the product and it’s just not for them. They’re not gonna get it. Others will get it, receive the product, and they’ll like it, they’ll understand it, and if you believe in the product-
Cody Wittick: Right.
Kurt Elster: You should be able to do this with confidence, send it out to influencers to see.
Cody Wittick: Let’s hope so.
Kurt Elster: I mean, in theory they could get it and be like, “This is the biggest piece of garbage I’ve ever seen,” and it turns into some horrible campaign for you. I don’t think that really happens that often. Has that ever happened?
Cody Wittick: No. No.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so really the only risk is I send the stuff out and they don’t post about it, I never hear again. It’s just gone.
Cody Wittick: Right.
Kurt Elster: But if I’m doing it at a large enough scale, I just need to be hitting more wins than losses.
Cody Wittick: Totally. Totally. Yeah. And what we’ve found is you should expect 20% of your outreach, people should say… So, for every 10 people, you should at least have two people that are interested in your offer. And again, your offer is completely palms down. It’s a free gift. There’s no posts required. You’re mentioning that in your outreach. So, you should have at least 20% of the people saying, “Yeah, sure. I’ll take it. Here’s my address.” That type of thing.
Depending on the brand, like we happen to have the pleasure of working with M&Ms. You have some credibility there that maybe you’re getting more opt-in at that point.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If you reach out to me and you’re like, “Hey, I want to send you some personalized M&Ms.” Like, “All right, deal.” And that’s what it was. It was personalized M&Ms, right?
Cody Wittick: Correct. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so if the strategy is like product seeding, hey, reach out to a bunch of influencers, offer to send it to them no strings attached, and we assume one in five is gonna take it, and then we ship it out. Who do I know is the right person? How am I finding these people and deciding?
Cody Wittick: Yeah. Great question. There’s a couple free tools at your disposal, so Meta for Creators works with like Instagram and Facebook. That’s free that you can look up. It used to be called Facebook Brands Collabs Manager. TikTok Creator Marketplace for TikTok influencers. And Instagram itself, I mean, I used to spend hours, like days before all these free tools or discovery tools were out there that was my only tool to find influencers to seed product to. But dropdown arrow, so you go to a specific profile, and it feeds you algorithm-picked influencers that are all posting similar things. And then there’s obviously paid tools that you can find influencers on. There’s thousands of them.
Yeah, that’s where you find them. How you actually pick them when you get there is a whole different question, and I would just say that you definitely need quantitative metrics that match your brand demo and your customer demographic and things like that. Those sometimes aren’t on the free tools themselves. They are on Meta or TikTok Creator Marketplace, but when you find them you want to prioritize them as being great video content creators. That’s the number one thing that you should be looking for. That’s like a qualitative metric, so checking out their YouTube, checking out their Instagram story highlights. How good are they at creating content? Because it goes back into several minutes ago when you brought up actually repurposing content and placing the content elsewhere.
So, that’s how they built their audience, right? That’s how most built their audience is based on their video content creation ability.
Kurt Elster: Interesting. So, a lot of it is subjective. It’s gut feel. I go and if they have an audience, it feels like the right fit, and they have… They’re good at making content. They have good, polished content that gets engagement, like I see that with my own eyes. If I engage with it, other people will too.
Cody Wittick: Yeah. It’s thumb stopping. Are they thumb stopping to you?
Kurt Elster: I love the phrase thumb stoppers.
Cody Wittick: And are they doing it frequently enough? Is it not just like one time, but you see it all over their feed? You have proof of concept so that if I seed you my product, more than likely if they love it they’re gonna get on camera and talk about it in an authentic way, and that’s when you can leverage that content elsewhere.
Kurt Elster: And part of it is because people like that. I think two things are going on with the creator or influencer themselves, is A, they have built that habit of when something is interesting to me, it’ll probably be interesting to my audience, and so I’m gonna create that content and share it, and so you want people who are in that habit, that flow, and those people also understand, maybe not consciously, the content hole must be filled. You just have to keep… That’s the catch to being one of these influencers.
Cody Wittick: Totally.
Kurt Elster: You really just have to keep posting.
Cody Wittick: Yeah. Content is king, right? It’s what Gary Vee preaches all the time.
Kurt Elster: It’s true. Yeah. I’m not about to question Gary Vee. All right, so I reach out. I identify these people. There are tools to find them, free tools to find them, probably paid tools to deeper analysis. There’s some gut feel here. But really, I’m looking for do they make solid content.
Cody Wittick: Right.
Kurt Elster: And then I reach out. “Hey, I want to give you… We like you. We want to share our product with you. No strings attached. All you gotta do is give us your address. We’ll send it to you.” That’s all I do?
Cody Wittick: Yep. Yeah, and then there’s steps after that, so you send them the product, they get the product, you can track that, obviously, on the back end. And then you can follow up. How are you liking the product? Maybe three days after they get it. Also too, there’s tools such as there’s a great tool that we use as an agency called MightyScout, and it’s a social listening tool, and it basically… You would upload the influencer profile, their handle into MightyScout, and it's gonna start tracking them. And so, if they mention your brand handle or hashtags that you feed it, it’s gonna pull that content and even stories, it’s gonna keep that content past 24 hours. And at that point, that’s when you can reach out for content rights.
“Hey, Kurt. Thank you so much for posting.” Again, it was their own decision, and then you can ask for content rights to leverage that within Facebook and Instagram ads, which is what we would recommend. Or you know, wherever, places that you’re currently winning on paid search, or paid social, just asking that explicitly.
And what we’ve found, just because we start the relationship the right way, we see like 90% of influencers will grant those rights for free. Again, we’re not forcing them to do anything. We’re just simply asking. So, it’s a yes or no question at every step of the funnel. It’s like, “Hey, do you want to receive this free gift?” Yes or no. If they opt in, great. We send them the gift. If they post, that’s completely up to them. There’s no pressure. There’s no requirement. There’s no contract. Yes or no. When they post, when we reach out for content rights, completely up to them. We see 90% say yes and then that’s when we leverage that content within ads.
Kurt Elster: All right, so once I have that content and they’ve said, “Hey, yeah, you can reuse it.” Then I’m gonna… Let’s say they posted a story. I can cut that up and use that in a story ad. I could use that in Instagram and Facebook ads, that story placement. I could probably, depending on what it looks like, I could probably crop it and reuse it inside other ad placements, and then maybe I could pull a still frame from it and now that’s content that I could use in a product detail page. You’re right. I could really get a lot of extra mileage out of this, can’t I?
Cody Wittick: Right. Yeah. And I just think about it in the sense that going back to them as a social audience on their organic feed, it’s just like one place that you can place the content. That’s the influencer’s only place that they can place it, but you, the brand, have at least three to five other places that you can place content. And so, if you wanted rights to all of those places, like email, or a PDP page, or specifically Facebook, Instagram ads, then that’s where you need rights to use it. But it’s like a more diversified portfolio versus like one stock, so that’s why we want to diversify and place the content elsewhere.
But you brought up a great point about reformatting the content. We reformat the content 9x16, 1x1, depending on what it currently is in, and then caption the content, because most of it is video. Going back to you’re picking these people based on their video content creation ability, so if you send product, you’re sending it to great video content creators, so the majority of the content that you do receive back should be video content, so hence why you should caption it.
Kurt Elster: And then how are you… For captioning it, video, you’re right. Most people… Video has high engagement, but also most people are muted, so when I do video we burn in the captions. I use Rev to do that. Is that what we’re discussing here?
Cody Wittick: Yeah. I mean, we use… There’s a great, cost-effective tool called Kapwing that does captioning. I think it’s like 20 bucks a month or something. Something pretty low end. There’s obviously like Adobe Premiere for editing content or things like that. But yeah, 92% of consumers watch video without sound, so you gotta caption the content. That’s super, super important.
Kurt Elster: It’s funny. You’ll see comments on Reddit. An interesting video will be there. It doesn’t have captions. And there’s lots of people who are like, “I watched it, but I don’t know what they’re saying.” And they’re asking in the comments as opposed to listening to it. And then I was like, “Those people are idiots,” and then I realized I started doing the same thing. Yeah, isn’t that bizarre? But I guess I’m not alone.
Cody Wittick: Yeah. You’re not. You’re in the vast majority of people.
Kurt Elster: So, if you’re not going that extra, like with the video content, if you’re not going that extra step of making sure, like does this absolutely make sense without sound? Does it make sense muted? You’re really shooting yourself in the foot.
Cody Wittick: 100%.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so I’m able. I like this strategy a lot. What’s the next step here? You also make it seem very easy, like I know there’s a ton of work here.
Cody Wittick: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Spreadsheets are getting updated daily. What’s the next step?
Cody Wittick: Next step with the influencers or with the content itself? Because-
Kurt Elster: Oh, man. All right, so at this point I’ve got this content. It’s in ads. I’m guessing, and maybe it’s in my emails. Can I turn this… Can I leverage this further? Is there any… Yeah. What else am I gonna do with this?
Cody Wittick: With the content itself?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Cody Wittick: I would say, again, it goes back to we’re only explicitly asking for rights for Facebook and Instagram ads, so that’s where we place them on behalf of our clients and where majority of people do it. But again, it goes back into like that message needs to be clear and asking like, “Hey, we want to leverage this within email, or on our website-“
Kurt Elster: Oh, so you do specifically call out like this is the placement we’re asking permission for.
Cody Wittick: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Because in theory, they could say yes to a blanket request and then suddenly it ends up-
Cody Wittick: Hey, can we reuse this content? It’s just not really-
Kurt Elster: It ends up in a TV commercial. I could see where it could go wrong.
Cody Wittick: On a billboard. Yeah. Billboard on the side of the freeway. Yeah. No. That’s why we’re explicitly clear. Again, it goes back into the relationship building, right? We want to be authentic throughout the whole process and so if you’re really caring about like the long-term side of these relationships and seeding product and wanting to leverage this within a community, then you just gotta go about it the right way at every step. So, that’s why we’re explicitly clear, so there’s no misunderstanding of how we’re using this content.
Kurt Elster: So, I heard that keyword, community. I have become incredibly convinced that community is paramount to these big eight-figure brands. Many leverage community. Either it happened organically, or they were able to foster it. How does this strategy play into community building?
Cody Wittick: It’s more human, right? That’s the thing about influencer marketing, it’s like it’s human compared to going into your Facebook dashboard and clicking a bunch of buttons or drafting up an email. You’re dealing with human beings at the end of the day, so you’ve gotta treat it human first and relationship first, and so I think… You know, I talk to brand owners all day long, and they all want community, but they all… The system to create that outcome is a bunch of one-off posts and they think that’s creating community. Oh, look at all these people that are posting about me.
It’s like, no, the thing that happens is you have a one-off post, you reach out and say, “Hey, we want to test this first before and then analyze performance,” and then you realize that you’re underwhelmed with the performance because you’re putting all their stock in the organic performance of the content. And it’s a bunch of vanity metrics and no sales come in, so then you just move onto another person, and you just say, “Oh, she didn’t work. Let’s try him. TikTok didn’t work. Let’s try Instagram.”
All these comments reflect just a transactional nature. And so, getting on the products, having the crops rise to the top, and see exactly who’s the big fans, so like let’s say for example the people that end up posting for free without you even asking. They’re clearly a fan of yours at this point. Now, you have a pool of people. Let’s say you seed a product to 30 people. Six of them end up posting. You have six people that love you that didn’t before. How that builds over time is a pool of people that have proven to be a big fan of you. How you leverage that pool if people is completely dependent on the brand, so some of it… Sometimes it’s affiliate program. Sometimes it’s an ambassador page on their website and that’s how it practically looks, but I think you just continue to foster that relationship. You give them a seat at your table. You say, “Hey, what are some other influencers we should be working with that you know?”
Or you include them in on product feedback. This is all things that are maybe later down the line, but how you start is very important. That’s why our strategy I think works for brands long term, and in the short term you’re getting a ton of content and leveraging that, and a ton of UGC, which is super important, but the long-term effects is it actually is providing… It’s growing a pool of people that love your brand without money or a contract driving advocacy, which I think all of the brand owners would admit that they don’t want those things driving advocacy. They want actually the product and brand to be the thing that drives advocacy.
Kurt Elster: You know, what’s interesting I find about influencers, I think part of what’s going on here is an influencer creator does develop a relationship with their audience, assuming they’re not like a total sociopath. And I think most people aren’t. I think part of the attraction here is seeking human connection. I was lucky enough to speak to someone who worked at Cameo, and they said, “Hey, a lot of this is not about the money. It’s about this is an easy way to connect with fans.” I thought that was interesting.
Cody Wittick: Right. Right.
Kurt Elster: And so, I think with influencer marketing, part of what’s working here is no one wants to come across as inauthentic to their own audience, and so if they got that product for free, and there was no strings attached, and they genuinely liked it, that then has the highest chance of creating the best content versus it’s a contract, I have to fulfill it, you paid me to do it, I’m gonna do it, and I always feel a little wrong about it. Because I’ve talked to other people where they say like yeah, you get in these relationships, and the influencer will post the story, fulfill the contract and make the post, and then 24 hours later they delete the post because they will only go so far as they have to. They don’t want to risk alienating their audience.
Where the audience doesn’t necessarily know like I got this thing for free and just like it versus it was an agreement. I suppose with FTC rules you have to disclose it, like #sponcon. Yeah. I hadn’t thought of it, and I think you’re absolutely right.
Cody Wittick: It’s just short-term thinking, right? You’re just settling. But if the brand owner is basically saying, “Hey, I don’t give a crap about community. I just want as much one-off posts and I’m just trying to get as many sales as possible,” then sure.
Kurt Elster: But it’s myopic, right?
Cody Wittick: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You gotta have that… All right, so we have brands. Everyone says, “Oh, I want to be data driven. We want to make data-driven decisions.” And what you’re saying here is look, for something like this it is human, and humans are squishy. There are some things you can’t… just won’t work quantified as data and give you a good result. Just pursuing this as a long-term… I get the individual posts are the influencer marketing. Done over a long enough time, say 12 to 24 months, the end result of everything is the community.
Cody Wittick: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that’s what I was touching on earlier, is like what that practically looks like is completely up to you. That looks different brand to brand.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s very brand dependent.
Cody Wittick: Right. You know, so affiliate, or like Gymshark for example has a massive affiliate network and they make a ton of money off their affiliate network, but guess what? They started with seeding. I mean, you read Ben Francis’s story on Gymshark, all he did was seed fitness influencers and go to fitness events and just get his product into the hands of fitness influencers at expos and things like that. It’s just it’s the right way to go about it. You just gotta start the right way.
Now, if he started with, “Hey, I’ll pay you a bunch of money,” maybe he gets some ROI in the short term, but he doesn’t end up with the community of influencers that are obsessed with Gymshark that he has now.
Kurt Elster: You know, you could do worse than Gymshark. They did… Famously, they have a billion-dollar valuation.
Cody Wittick: There you go.
Kurt Elster: If it worked for Gymshark, maybe it works for other brands, as well. I’m feeling pretty good. Feeling inspired here.
Cody Wittick: I love it.
Kurt Elster: Well, let’s talk about Kynship. This is your agency. Why the name Kynship? I like it. It’s K-Y-N-S-H-I-P.
Cody Wittick: Yeah. That’s because we can’t do the normal spelling, right?
Kurt Elster: It wouldn’t be an internet business unless it had a goofball spelling or strange name.
Cody Wittick: Right. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: One of the two.
Cody Wittick: Yeah. I think essentially it just comes down it’s within the name, right? It’s a good reminder for how we want to treat our employees, how we want to go about treating our… when I say our influencers, we don’t represent any talent, but just like the influencers that we do interact with on behalf of brands, and then just the brands that we have the pleasure of servicing. I think that’s Kynship and why we’re trying to bring in a different philosophy on generosity, not asking, not transactional. I think the ideal, most families probably are not super, super generous, but the ideal of family is that you are generous with one another, and so I think that goes into the name.
Kurt Elster: And one thing I just noticed, so the agency site, it’s kynship.co, but more interesting to me, I see you have a Shopify app that has… It says Kynship Influencer Seeding. What’s this thing do?
Cody Wittick: So, all it does is essentially zeroed out orders at scale. So, if you’re familiar with the Shopify ecosystem, then you know that to send out a zeroed-out order it’s incredibly manual, so our app just eliminates that process, and so when we… Most of the time, we’re just downloading it onto our client stores for free and then actually taking the influencer send outs off their plate, and so when you have the scale of which we do seeding and identifying 500 influencers, for example, you get 100 influencers opting in, that’s 100 products that you gotta send out. Well, the app is essentially you could send out, in theory, all 100 at once. Zeroed out completely for free, obviously, since you’re sending it for free.
On a one-off basis, obviously that’s not as laborious for 100 orders going out, but essentially it just does it in three steps.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s a workflow tool for the specific task of I need… Because normally it would be like, “All right, I gotta create draft orders.”
Cody Wittick: Right.
Kurt Elster: And then use that for fulfillment. And even if I have to do 50 of these it’s gonna be time consuming to copy and paste one at a time versus this looks like I can upload a spreadsheet.
Cody Wittick: Yeah. You can upload your customer data, or they’re basically customers at that point, but all the addresses, things of that nature. You could do it one by one, too, so if you have a new address, or if they’re already in the system it’s just gonna pull them as customers, so it’s just pulling in that data. So, yeah. The zeroed out drafted order is like you have to go get their address, you have to find the product, it takes like 15 minutes, 20 minutes times how many influencers you have. Just do the math on that.
Kurt Elster: Right. And so, a lot of time saved there if you have that pain or problem in your life.
Cody Wittick: And I guess painting the picture too for like if you’re gonna reach out, do all the labor of outreach, identifying influencers, outreaching to them, and then they finally give you the key information that you need to send out the product, even if you’re paying them and you need to get them the product, even if you think our strategy is stupid and you’re gonna pay them to do it, the timelines of your influencer campaigns are very, very important. And so, the quicker that you can get them the product, the quicker you stay top of mind, so that’s why our tool was created.
Kurt Elster: And so, you’ve given us the playbook, the strategy, but let’s say I don’t want to do it. I want this off my plate. I can hire you to do this for me?
Cody Wittick: 100%. Yeah. We handle everything, A through Z.
Kurt Elster: So, just the entire process we discussed; you could implement.
Cody Wittick: Yep. Basically, from all identification, outreach, sending out the products, tracking organic posts, reaching out for content rights, reformatting the content, captioning the content, getting the content into your ad account, we run add accounts as well, so that’s our other service. And then our last step in our process is we sound out an NPS survey to all the influencers that do receive product. NPS, net promoter score. Usually for customers, but we applied it to influencers.
Kurt Elster: And if I wanted to DIY it, it looks like you have a course that’ll teach me this in depth. Where do I find that? Tell me about that.
Cody Wittick: It’s at Kynship, K-Y-N-S-H-I-P.podia, P-O-D-I-A, .com. So, that’s the hosting website. That just gives you details on our course. But yeah, we just poured in every template, every video, creation, lessons that we do as an agency, and just wanted to give it away.
Kurt Elster: That’s pretty good. And there’s some quality testimonials stuck on here. And I even recognize several of the names. Some good-
Cody Wittick: Yeah. We gotta get you on there.
Kurt Elster: Some good people on here.
Cody Wittick: I’ll pay you for a testimonial.
Kurt Elster: Oh my gosh. No.
Cody Wittick: That would be inauthentic.
Kurt Elster: You could not possibly pay me for a testimonial.
Cody Wittick: But isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that interesting, though? That kind of brings up a side point is like you can’t pay customers for reviews because it’s illegal, but we think it’s different with influencers. I’ll just leave that mic drop.
Kurt Elster: Oh, man. I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, what a strange distinction.
Cody Wittick: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: What I want to end on is we are on video. I could see your whiteboard behind you and there’s a quote on there. It says, “Be quick but not in a hurry.”
Cody Wittick: John Wooden.
Kurt Elster: That’s written on a whiteboard. What’s that quote mean to you?
Cody Wittick: Typically, it’s applied in sports. Obviously, John Wooden was a famous basketball coach, so like in basketball it’s like when you’re in a hurry you make mistakes but be quick in decision making. Don’t overthink things. So, I think it applies to entrepreneurship, too, where it’s like you don’t want to be hurried, but you want to make quick decisions and fail fast, and don’t overthink things. I think that’s a lot of the advantages of probably your listeners, too, of like taking the leap on entrepreneurship, starting their own business, doing what you’re doing, Kurt. There’s just… There’s a lot of advantages of maybe people hesitate on quick decisions because they think they’re… they overthink it after the fact. But you end up learning so much more because you just made that decision and then you’re better after the fact, even if it was the wrong one.
So, I think that’s what Dr. John Wooden was getting into.
Kurt Elster: I love it.
Cody Wittick: He wasn’t a doctor, but I just added that for fun.
Kurt Elster: I’m sure he’ll appreciate it. So, let’s see. We’ll wrap it up there, but Cody Wittick, this has been valuable, inspiring, and thought provoking. I think this really makes influencer marketing in the long-term and short-term approach, and like the individual steps to it seem much more accessible, which I’m thrilled to have to share with our audience. And if people want to learn more about you and your services, where should they go?
Cody Wittick: Twitter is probably honestly the best place. I’m active there, so @cody_wittick, and yeah, you can DM me and happy to connect. We can talk further about agency, or course, or anything. Pick my brain. Ask me free questions. I’ll answer.
Kurt Elster: I will include it in the show notes along with a whole bunch of other links you mentioned. I got quite a bit of stuff in the show notes. Tap or swipe up on the show art on your phone to get to those show notes. Cody Wittick, kynship.co, super valuable. Thank you so much.
Cody Wittick: Thanks, Kurt. It was a lot of fun.
Bill & Ted Sound Board Clip: Excellent!