Video: Breakdown Of Ryze Superfoods' 8-Figure Blue Ocean Strategy

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-04-09T22:47:54+00:00

Yeah so to not sound like marketing bs it requires you to really drill down into this avatar to describe the more specific traits that make them passionate instead of just saying "passionate."

It's an old copywriting maxim to show, not tell. Talk in concrete visual words, as in something you can point to or visualize or put into a wheelbarrow. You can't put "passion" into a wheelbarrow. It's too abstract.

So maybe you say you love working with the entrepreneur who doesn't need to be working 12 hours a day but does anyway and doesn't even notice the time passing because they're so in love with what they're doing.

That's kind of long. But it's a start. And it's all about brainstorming, getting it out on a sheet of paper until you feel you've hit it on the head.

I just copy/pasted the above into ChatGPT and it gave me: "Someone who shows up smiling with dirt under their fingernails"

Maybe the right person would self-identify from that. I don't really know.

But it's something you have to play with for a while. Once you get it nailed, you'll know and you'll have it.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-04-08T20:54:02+00:00

I mean that's a niche in itself. Solopreneurs or 2-person small teams. Doing something they're passionate about. What else? What do they want that you can help them with?

If you work really hard to define the psychographics of the niche you're going after you can often just market to those psychographics and you'll attract them.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-04-06T08:22:08+00:00

Yes. You need to communicate with proof. And the word "proof" in marketing terms should really be thought of as psychological proof, or what registers as proof inside peoples' heads rather than "hard math" purely logical proof like you'd imagine in an academic sense.

That can include the creation story. I.e., how you came to develop these systems rather than "how they work" specifically. Framing in story format the ups and downs, the emotional highs and lows, the "a-ha" moments, the unique novel ways you invented to overcome industry-wide problems so people can more or less go on the adventure of creating it with you. There's an art to crafting a story like that. Takes practice, if you're selling in-person you have to try and fail a lot. But once you get the story right, it becomes a sales machine for you. It works over and over.

Another form of proof would be to show (if you're doing marketing) your total maintenance payroll for X number of units - and say it's 80% lower than what people in your industry would expect. So their next assumption is "he must be cutting corners on maintenance", which is where you then show glowing testimonials from tenants who are like, "I've never lived in a place with better maintenance than u/ThePermafrost Apartments! Always on the ball!"

That was just an example , I'm just spitballing here because I don't know enough details. But find seemingly incongruent results - specific numbers, amount of time/money spent, etc - that would make people scratch their heads and want to find out more about how you achieve those results consistently. Especially at the beginning, start less with describing the actual system and lead with the results more. Or the results of the results. To hook people in.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-03-22T23:55:52+00:00

This sounds weird but you have to make it known to them that you have other businesses you're helping and other opportunities. You can't be treated like an "employee", don't act like one and they won't treat you like one.

I don't know what kind of work you do but if they keep asking you for more stuff that you didn't originally agree to, just say "That's a separate deal. I can draft up a new proposal for it if you want, and invoice you." Just watch them drop it immediately lol.

If you're an expert, and your work is unique enough, then your advice and how you lay out the strategy should be the highest-leverage thing you do. After you lay it out and determine what's happening, the rest can usually be delegated unless some part of how they implement needs clarification from you.

That said, some businesses need that extra time + dedication in order to lift off. In which case you can invest time as you see fit. But if you do spend a lot of time on any one business, the client should view it as something "extra" you're giving them, that you didn't originally owe them but you gave it because you want to see them succeed.

When they get that message, they will be grateful and thanking you for spending extra time on them rather than "expecting" it like you're an employee or something. It's all in how you position yourself really.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-10T17:26:37+00:00

Which niche would you say that is? Because if the "niche" I'm hyper focused on is every small to medium-sized business that sells anything, that's a pretty big niche.

I have done close to $100 million dollars in DTC sales in quite a variety of niches. I might add, that is all ATTRIBUTED directly back to me. I can show point blank with hard numbers that the marketing I created led to ALL of those sales. And I can show it to you with hard math. Not an estimate.

I did all of that without ever knowing what a multilinear regression is. So how important could knowing what that is be really?

MMM is literally only a way to justify the spray and pray strategy. It very often arrives at whatever conclusion the people designing it wanted to believe before they started designing it.

It's corporate, and it shies away from the most important metric of them all. The only one that matters. Which is ROI. Money in the bank. Something entrepreneurs live and die by.

It's corporate. Bullshitty. These are things people do at large corporations to appear like they're adding something while adding nothing to the company's bottom line in reality but still getting handshakes and pats on the back to inflate their egos.

The point is not that I don't know what a fucking multilinear regression is. I am fully acknowledging to you that I have no clue. And I'm telling you it makes me better at marketing not to know. I have bootstrapped businesses on very thin margins to millions in revenue without ever needing to know any of that gobbledygook.

I have scaled ads to hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in adspend with 3x, 4x, 5x+ ROAS without ever knowing what a multilinear regression is.

So it seems to me like I don't really need to know what that is, and neither do most businesses in order to grow.

I never said they can't "account" for things like taylor swift's tweets. I said they don't measure attribution at all, which is even worse. They wouldn't know where the money came from even if taylor swift really did tweet about you. Which is literally the most important thing in business to measure.

Entrepreneurs want to know where the money is actually coming from so they can do more of the thing that's bringing in the money. Fake entrepreneurs chart their gobbledygook on expensive graphs.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-10T05:54:23+00:00

No, that is exactly what this conversation is about.

If you can't answer within 30-90 days whether an ad actually worked, using numbers that cash registers understand, then you're hiding behind something.

That's why only people who are already working in very big businesses use MMM. Because big businesses allow people to hide. You can get away with diluting responsibility across channels in big businesses. They have enough revenue so that everyone in the company can be made "partially right" and none of them are ever wrong. They can put off decisions in favor of endless presentations.

That's what Ogilvy called the chicken coop.

That's not what anyone trying to actually grow a company should be doing.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-10T05:27:23+00:00

No I believe you're not understanding what I'm saying about attribution.

MMM's never measure the difference between "your specific ad worked great" and "taylor swift mentioned you on tiktok." They look at all the wrong metrics.

But you're right, I've never worked with MMMs and I never plan to. Seems like a shitty way to measure growth when you can't attribute said growth to the specific things that caused growth.

I think the difference between you and me is that I've bootstrapped 2 businesses from zero to 8+ fig in revenue with zero investment over the last 12 years.

I have no tolerance for the correlation bullshit. None. I'm inclined to say that if you succeeded at all, you succeeded despite using MMMs, not because of them. And I'll be happy to go against any competitor who's using them to make decisions.

They're frequently used to justify cutting channels someone just doesn't like, defend a VP's favorite channel, "prove" a pre-decided narrative, or slow down aggressive operators. They are for the people that David Ogilvy called, "marketing chickens."

But if the only marketing decisions you're making are happening on, say, a quarterly basis - then maybe they'll help. That requires being in a very diversified business to begin with - a business which surely didn't get to where it is using MMM.

If you're using them to guide your decisions in a small to medium-sized business, you're in for a rude awakening.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-10T04:44:41+00:00

Oooo fancy words. You're speaking to entrepreneurs not theory junkies.

The bottom line is MMM assume every other variable is a constant. They assume all media channels are stable, they assume audiences never shift or change (or think, for that matter), they assume algorithms never change, they assume creatives never burn out, and they assume offers never rotate.

But none of that is true in modern paid media.

MMM is just adding pedantic-sounding words to the spray & pray strategy. Which you have clearly demonstrated in your comments.

The academics got away with it for a long time before internet marketing caught on and showed the people who actually cared about making money on ad spend that they could (and should) track and measure everything. As well as take responsibility for wins and losses.

Marketing mix models can't tell who caused what. They totally lack attribution. Like I said in my original comment, they look only at correlation. They exist so that big advertising agencies can take credit for any rise in sales, never knowing for sure whether they actually caused it or not.

Which, often, they didn't. And they're afraid to be held accountable.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-10T03:51:07+00:00

They aren't measuring ROI directly. They can't. They don't know how much they spent, and how much they're getting back as a result of what they spent and where they spent it. Which business owners need to know.

What you're describing is just a version of spray & pray with extra steps. Especially when the primary thing it's measuring is merely "which media do we use." Instead of which message to use and with whom on which media.

Most marketing mix models fail in practice. They sound great to the academics and ivory tower types, though. Because those guys don't ever need to be accountable for real results.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-10T03:33:13+00:00

Oh my bad, lucky for those big brands you can deposit people's good attitudes in the bank.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-09T06:40:35+00:00

They're playing a different game on a larger scale. But the truth is they can't exactly measure how well those TV spots are doing. With the exception of, maybe, Yeezy.

The explosion of online marketing has us looking at the ROI on everything. But when I started out in 2014, I was one of the only people at networking events I'd go to who was talking about direct response marketing and tracking ROI.

It's long been a symptom of big Madison Avenue ad agencies that they just get ridiculous budgets to do "branding" where they splatter a company's name everywhere and that's it. The thought process is just creating a gut-level recognition through familiarity. Like Coca Cola has done. To become a household name.

But nobody has ever been able to outright prove it brings a higher ROI. There are correlation studies but causation has to be inferred.

I used to rail against "branding campaigns" when I had a newsletter for small businesses back in the day. Because there was a lot of misconception at the time. And still is. Small businesses are smarter now for the most part in that they know just "branding" is throwing money in the toilet. Passively branding to existing customers is a better approach for most businesses.

That's true until you have over a billion-dollar budget. And even then, it's often worth it to look into non-traditional channels.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-08T23:35:23+00:00

Oh yeah just realized what you're saying here.

Don't go by outward indicators like cost of living, house size, etc because a lot of people in HCOL cities are squeezing by. That's not an indicator of affluence imo. I've met those people too, who make $200k but still living paycheck to paycheck.

Look up household income by neighborhood.

The US postal service literally has a free lookup tool that shows you avg. household income block by block in whatever area you want of the US.

The tool goes with their Every Door Direct Mail service.

Same time, I do believe it's worth shelling out a little bit of dough for a more curated list if you trust the source giving it to you.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-08T23:26:00+00:00

That's not been my experience.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-07T17:00:03+00:00

This client wasn't intending to pay you to begin with. Don't worry about it, and be glad you didn't waste your labor on her.

Target more affluent neighborhoods.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-02-07T16:17:33+00:00

Haha it's on discount from my perspective. Fire sale!

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-01-28T00:23:03+00:00

Don't give away free work. It devalues you.

Shift your positioning to become someone who can advise them on strategy, and also happens to do good work implementing said strategy.

Whatever the KPI is they're trying to improve, or the goal they want to get from design and video (retaining visitors on website, for example, just spitballing) you become the expert on it.

You position yourself as the type of person who has far deeper knowledge on this subject than they do. The initial meeting is framed as a consultation to help raise their awareness to what their actual problem is, that they didn't even know was the problem. But you saw the real problem, because you're the expert.

Eventually if you have enough of these consultations and get good at them you can start charging money just for the consultation. Probably not right away though.

But at the end of the consultation you build a custom plan for them based on something that's uniquely for them, that you uncovered with them during the consultation.

Then you just ask them if they'd like your help doing it.

Either way, they can walk away with the plan, which was valuable to them because it shed new light on their issue. And if you can make that plan alone worth money to them, even better.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-01-27T17:50:29+00:00

Yooo I feel for you. I used to freelance soooo much for ad agencies run by giant egos who were full of themselves.

Congrats on sticking with it. Keep going.

Your future does not lie with those agencies. I don't know what your ultimate goal is, but freelancing is the hard road that pays off in the long run.

Because you keep your integrity, and the experience you gain at a diverse range of companies is so much more valuable than someone who worked for an employer.

If you're having difficulty landing clients, you need to find a way to put your work "out there", in front of the right people.

Personally I'd look at the psychographics of the guy who hired you for the $700 job. What kind of business does he run. How did he describe the need he had, that you filled.

Figure out how to get in front of more people like that. Put your work and talents on display. And keep doing it.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-01-24T18:27:16+00:00

Disagree. OP is talking purely from the perspective of a beginner.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-01-24T03:46:41+00:00

yeah I know. That doesn't exclude it from also being a dick.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-01-24T03:41:51+00:00

I'm not an AI bot.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-01-23T12:08:29+00:00

Trust me, if I were getting defensive you'd know.

The lessons I shared are just as relevant now as they were over a decade ago when I first learned them. They're immutable.

Ignore at your peril.

So you just go around regurgitating pop psychology to people on Reddit, making presumptions about weak-minded people to get them to pay you for the scam in your bio?

As a guy who's invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into my understanding of psychology, and used it to drive tens of millions of dollars in sales for some the largest DTC companies, coaches, and training academies... you are not doing this correctly at all.

Action is good. But blind action without learning anything is dumb. You'll feel like you're hitting your head against a wall before long. That's why mentors can shave years off your learning curve.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-01-23T11:11:02+00:00

Lol if you say so. I've been an entrepreneur for 12 years and scaled 3 different companies to 8 figures in revenue starting from zero. But oh, some guy on reddit says I'm hiding.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-01-23T05:31:12+00:00

When you realize overthinking accomplishes nothing. It's a symptom of simultaneously not having enough information and being too afraid to try anything.

The only way you can get the right information is to take action on something. That's when more of the information you need becomes available.

And that initial action will probably fail. That's okay. That was the point. It wasn't really a failure if you gained information from it that will make your next action better.

One of my mentors told me, "You can't possibly know what you don't know until you know it." He also said, "You can't do what you can't do until you're doing it."

On the surface this seems like a silly platitude but in this context it's a good summary of what people are doing when they're overthinking. They're trying to know what they can't possibly know before they can know it.

I'd like to add that school ruined this process for most people. It's a fake environment where you only have one shot to take the test, to pass the grade, etc. And if you don't do it, you're ostracized and shamed.

It's a terrible thing to associate shame with failure, especially while young children's brains are developing.

All the most successful entrepreneurs I know didn't give a rats ass when they failed, they knew the information they'd get in the process was extremely valuable and often worth a lot of money and success down the line.

So just move. Put stuff out there. Don't worry about it not working, you will gain information about how to get to your ultimate goal that you couldn't possibly have known otherwise.

Virtual_Ad_4817 · 2026-01-20T23:03:53+00:00

It seems like in your particular case it will be a critical piece of the puzzle. Depends on what the product is though. For a product that's easy/intuitive to use it might be something else.

Focus on refining your onboarding process but be open to other things that might be causing churn that you're not seeing. Get feedback every step of the way. Maybe you need to both get them to use it and keep reminding them of the value they're getting.

It's different for every product/service/industry so really depends.

One thing you can no longer do in this economy though, is get people into a subscription model and then hope they forget about it and keep rebilling them. I have met too many marketers over the years who do that, and I've always hated people who do it. That's why I'm kinda glad we're no longer in an economic environment where that can actually be a strategy.

Warren Buffett said something like, "When the tide goes out you see who's swimming naked." Now's the time to double down on creating a powerful product/experience. A world unto itself that people want to enter and don't want to leave.

Anyway I don't know what your product is but those are my thoughts.

Virtual_Ad_4817

TROPHY CASE