The Only Two Questions That Matter for Brand Builders

On the road to the IPO, getting to the point where we could answer the following 2 questions with a resounding and unequivocal YES had a huge impact on incremental and sustained profit growth - a huge contributor to the exit.

Here are the 2 questions, 2 reasons why they're important, and 2 things you can do today to get to YES faster.


* The 2 Questions to be able to answer ASAP  

In the last 90 days...

1. Have you generated more total contribution dollars from new customers acquired via owned and organic channels compared to last year?

2. Is the percentage of total new customer contribution dollars coming from owned and organic channels larger than last year?


If the answer to these two questions is, in fact, a resounding and unequivocal YES, then I tip my cap to you.

You're doing it right.


For far too long at Chubbies, we didn't even know what those numbers were, much less whether they were higher or lower than LY.


Unfortunately, I'm seeing the same thing at most brands I meet with.


  2 reasons WHY these questions are important  

1. THIS is there the growth comes from: Real contribution dollar growth does not come from zeking out small improvements in your CTR, ROAS or CAC. It comes from more people purchasing from you without even going through your paid conversion funnels at all. Rather, they purchase from you without being prompted by an ad. They purchase from you because you're the brand they remember when they are in-market for whatever you sell.

2. NOT A BLACK BOX: Many digital marketers think about unpaid new customer acquisition as a black box. However, I've learned that's largely due to a lack of sustained, focused attention devoted to increasing these 2 metrics. We improve what we measure, and there are few metrics more important than these two numbers.


2 things you can do today to get to YES faster *

1. Close this tab (after liking, commenting, and sharing this post obvi), get into GA (or wherever you get your new customer acquisition traffic source data) and find these numbers. Manually check these numbers every Monday morning for the prior 7, 30, and 90 days, and report the numbers out to your company.

2. Set a company-wide goal to ensure you can answer YES to these questions by the end of Q1.

have fun
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Thanks for reading. If this post was helpful, here are 4 things you can do right now to 

• Get more strategic + tactical nuggets on brand building, 

• Tactics on connecting brand building to financial impact, 

• And specific things you can do to build strong emotional connections with your audience: 

1) Subscribe to the Brand Builders podcast on YouTube or Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 
2) Apply to join our brand builders slack community (suuuuper small group exclusively for brand founders and operators), 
3) Follow Tom and Preston on Linkedin for regular posts on this stuff
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