15 minutes of eComm Wisdom: Kent Wilson from Snappad

I'm here with Kent from SnapPad. Super great to chat. And I'm really looking forward to learning about what you're building. maybe could you give us a quick overview of, of what you're selling on the internet?

Yeah, it's it's not going to be intuitive unless you're an RVer, but it's an RV accessory called a permanent jack pad.

We call them snap pads, because they're rubber shoes that kind of snap on to the bottom of metal feet that are RVs, for background if you're not an RVer. RVs come with leveling systems and stability systems. It makes sense if you're out on camping surfaces, you need your living space to be relatively level.

So,they have these metal feet that come out to stabilize or level RVs. And for years, people were carrying things around to put underneath them because metal feet on gravel on sand, sometimes on rocks or roots. also on board services like asphalt or concrete, they could do damage there. So there's a lot of reasons to carry around what were called jackpads back then and still are. I saw someone using cutting boards once under a 275, 000 class A motorhome. so we just made rubber shoes. They're made out of recycled tires. They snap on once and they stay on. So that eliminates a lot of hassle that goes with, jackpads.

And yeah, we, we sold one on the day that we launched it. And then, found product market fit ever since. We've just been iterating on that angle.

Do you guys have like a patent on the technology? Is this something that's quite novel or is this something that's like a pretty pretty easy to find across the industry.

It's just that you guys have one of the best products out there.

'No, we created the category. So we have design and utility patents on everything. And we have trademarks around the sort of that snap pad, name, which we think may become the name of the category down the road.

Very cool. And, yeah, tell me about your role on the team. It seems like you're handling a lot of the growth stuff, but you've also been there since day one. Tell me a bit about, About your role at SnapPad.

Sure. Yeah. So I came out of a digital agency background. I was the lead strategist for social for an agency here in Calgary, Alberta, where we're out of.

so I was the head of marketing when we started. It was I think late 2016, the glory days of Facebook when it was a lot easier to market there. So,yeah, I think I mentioned, or maybe not, this is a family company. So my middle brother is the CEO and he was the co founder as well with my dad. And my youngest brother is now the head of marketing because he came from an SEO and web design background. So I've moved out of the marketing I've gone into the operations because as we've grown, we have, 15 people in the office now, several suppliers, we're sold across North America and Germany. So that piece is getting a little bit more, complex. I'm still doing a little bit of the paid growth stuff because that's where it came from and I still have my hand in it and I'm doing more of the finance stuff now.

So we are growing, but it's still a multi hat, small team thing as well.

I want to know about the channel split. Because you are in a lot of retailers at this stage I've seen that on your website, but I also see you posting a lot of really strong results on Performance on amazon, but also performance on meta and I also know that you do a lot of influencer stuff. So what's the breakdown of where you guys are getting a lot of your growth?

Yeah. So we started life DTC, naturally just our own little website. We didn't have any money to market. So it was a lot of, community outreach, grassroots, and influencer seeding in the early days. So just sending out our product to people, getting feedback, having them post about it. The other thing about RVing is there's still a lot of message boards because there's a lot of, Gen Xers and baby boomers. So they still hang around, but seems like anachronistic technology to everyone below those age groups. But those are very active. So we actually literally went into those message boards, introduced ourselves, talked about the product and had people give us feedback directly. So there's a lot of that in the early days, but, yeah, ever since we've gone Omnichannel.

Dealers started, RV dealers started approaching us because they saw it in the field. So we started selling directly to them and then through distribution. So we're offered in probably 700-800 dealerships around North America at this point. And then Amazon came online a few years ago.

We actually sold to a third party reseller for a while. He was an RVer. He bought the product, but he also had an existing store on Amazon. So we asked him if he could start selling. And then, at the end of 2022, we started doing the math and he was outselling our direct to consumer store on Amazon.

So we took over the store last year because, feeding 2 mouths is either the feeding 3. that has been a major, growth path for us. I think it's up 120% this year. it's easily crushing everything else. We are not quite certain why, but maybe RVers just love using Amazon because that's the one that's really exploding for us.

So as I said, I think I posted on Slack, we did over a quarter of a million on Amazon prime day. So that was probably our biggest, single sort of 24 hours in the history of the company so far.

that's insane numbers. what are people searching for on Amazon?

I think it's a lot of brand at this point because as I mentioned, we're category, we own the category.

We've been around since 2016. and we have really strong NPS. It's around 90. We have a really strong word of mouth. It's usually top three for awareness. And we've, we have dozens, if not hundreds of YouTube videos and reviews at this point, because we've been seeding for so long. So there's this, just this building momentum for what we're doing.

And we keep adding. To the product line, because there's so many different kinds of RVs and leveling systems. So we're always developing new shoes, basically. So we're unlocking different segments of the market every so often.

I feel like you've done a tremendous amount of work from, influencer seeding standpoint to get the word of mouth out there. And that mustn't have been easy.

And there must've been a lot of learnings along the way. What does that program that's super dialed in right now? What does that look like? What are the steps in there? Maybe If you could give us a quick overview and are there a couple of things that you, that are specific to SnapPad that allow you to be more successful than others in that channel?

Yeah, it helps to have a very unique product that solves a real pain point. So it was relatively easy in the early days to get people to say yes. It's a high AOV too, it's around $150 and some of it can be closer to $300. So it's, if we're offering to send you something out like that, it's got a high perceived value.

It's not a $5-20 item. So when we send it out 99% of the time, people use it, get back to us and actually make content, which is great. And especially in the early days. the other thing we did is. We do micro influencers. One of the reasons is there's no macro influencers in our being.

There's a handful of channels that have two, three, 400, 000 followers, which is really good, but it's not the Kim Kardashian, Mr. Beast. Millions and millions of players that does not exist in RVing. there's nothing like that. So we started at the micro level, even at 10, 000, 5, 000, and a lot of it was just about getting a sea of UGC done, not just one big one, but dozens, if not hundreds of reviews.

because that you have different kinds of RVers, people are full time, people are digital nomads, people who have families, people who are single, women, men, it's, there is a mix of personas in the industry, but also use cases. So some people have Class A motorhomes, which are huge and expensive.

Some people have small, trip, travel trailers. They're 20 feet. Maybe they're 10 grand versus a million dollars. So there's, once you get that mix going, when people start searching for you, if they encounter you on Facebook or in the wild, and they look you up and they go to YouTube, not only do you have a lot of UGC and social proof, but you probably have something that resonates with them specifically, depending on the RV they have and the use case that they have.

So that was a massive way to get into the market without spending.

So let's talk a bit about Youtube because YouTube is not, that common of a channel for DTC brands. But, but for you guys, I feel like it makes a ton of sense to have a strong presence on YouTube because I imagine RVers are looking up RV related videos all the time.

yeah. what's the content strategy like then on YouTube? Is it? Is it just around the product or have you've expanded to have a bit more storytelling around RV lifestyles or, like technical parts of an RV vehicle that are outside of your product offering? Is it really just geared around how SnapPad fits into an RV?

It's still about 90 to 95%. it's very much like a review or retrospective. So sometimes we'll go back to someone who's had the snap pads for 3 months, 6 months or a year, so they can come back and cause there's a lot of we got it, we installed it and now we like it, but our viewers want to know, did this actually work?

Are you still using it? did it change the way you RV? So there's a little bit of retrospective over time. No, we've started to get. Some, influencers and creators on retainer because the fit is really good. We like their content. They like the brand and the product. So we're starting to work on briefing, doing monthly stuff, seasonal stuff, a little bit. Sometimes it'll be offered like prime day. We did a sort of a big run with them, but yeah, we will probably get more into here's how to level your RV properly. If you're a class, a motor home, if that's what they have, and here's how to back it into a spot and here's how to avoid this and that. Cause yeah, there is a lot of do it yourself or lifestyle or how do I do this?

Searching going on in YouTube and that's definitely why it's been so powerful for us.

Switching into the learnings on the meta side of things, which was,when you came in 2016, it was a very different world, from a paid ad standpoint, paid acquisition standpoint. And that's when you came into the business, but you had prior agency experience at a high level.

So you've seen the evolution of the Facebook ads platform over many years.and now you guys are still running ads on Meta and you're posting some good results from a ROAS standpoint, et cetera. And you, you're very in tune with how the platform still works today. So what's the state of paid advertising on Meta today?

Is it feels like it's still some, a channel that works for you guys quite well. Is there a specific ad account structure that you're following? Are you following best practices from a creative standpoint, or is it really still a case of. Hey, some days stuff works other days it doesn't, and it's still somewhat a bit of a black box.

Yeah. Yeah. that's a big question for sure. And everyone who's on meta right now has their days of frustration. No doubt. We're the same back in the day. We used to do the, two or three step funnel, which was. Relatively elementary, you do your acquisition stuff, that would be a campaign or an ad set, and then you do your marketing, your middle funnel, and then you do bottom funnel, and you had those orders all spacked out with the content that made sense for it, and then you'd have your separate ROAS or CPA for each of those, that stopped working for us 2022, I think.

And it probably would have stopped earlier than that, but we had to turn off marketing a lot of the time during the pandemic because our demand spiked so much, we couldn't keep up with it. We had to completely redo our entire supply chain, different story. But, once we turned it back on, we found out.

meta Facebook marketing had changed quite drastically. So that's actually when I jumped in after 2022, cause we were still doing lookalike audiences, interest stacks, all that kind of stuff to get after people who said they liked our being, But we exhausted those audiences very quickly. so it got very expensive that year to, to advertise on Meta.

So in 2023, I jumped in because I'd had it off at that point. I was doing other stuff. I'm embedded in communities like Limited Supply and other stuff. So I've got my ear to the ground the whole time. So I went back, I consolidated everything. I went broad. I simplified the entire thing and now the focus is very much more on creative diversity, finding new audiences with new hooks and angles, looking at what's resonating in terms of engagement.

If that's not leading to conversion, why, what is our post click experience going to be? So we're starting to develop new landing pages with, which is something we didn't even bother with back in the day. Cause we didn't have to. We recently tested.

remarketing audiences and lookalikes again, it just didn't work for us again. So it's totally broad for me. and then, scale the winners out, test other guys. That's about it.

Yeah. Yeah. We're hearing that a lot.

and then interestingly on the creative front, Some folks are keeping assets on for an extended period of time. But you hear that equally as much as you hear people having. Incredibly sophisticated, creative testing, and creation, systems.

So they're churning out lots of new creatives, every week and testing those out and, scaling the winners. So it's still, to me, at least it still feels like an area wherewe're all testing, trying to crack the code and the code changes all the time.

Yeah, exactly. It's been really, the stability was great for us last year.

we reduced the spend as I was experimenting, but I think I reduced our CPA by over 30% and it was extremely stable most of the year. This year is It's about March for us, specifically, all over the map. Weeks of 50 percent CPA spikes, even though nothing has changed in the account.

So yeah,it's frustrating for us, but I don't think we're alone.

Awesome. Ken. much appreciated for jumping on and sharing those insights. excited to see you guys continue to grow and, yeah, let's stay in touch. Yeah. Thanks so much. it was a pleasure.

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