Under The Hood: Paul from Sandland

Welcome Paul. So first question: Sandland isn’t your first rodeo. You previously founded a successful D2C with Buffy. What were the biggest learnings from Buffy, going into Sandland? 

I’d say there are a few big learnings that are at the core of the way I approach starting and scaling a D2C business. Obviously circumstances don’t always allow us to apply everything we learned into new businesses because market dynamics change, team changes, and of course brands and products are not the same. 

But one key learnings is the importance of leveraging customer insights. When we started Buffy, we were laser focused on understanding the market from the customer’s perspective. I’d say that bottom up focus was key in helping us build that business and has also been key to Sandland’s early success. 

A second core learning from Buffy was how to fill in a lean marketing team that knows how to apply customer insights to creative growth. They need to feel empowered by customer insights, not scared or threatened by the signals they get from customers (and trolls!) You need to be able to get the right team in place who understand the channels involved and then orient the whole org around a few key shared goals so that things feel clear and manageable to everyone involved. There’s so much to strive for and want to build but without clear focus and an experienced team it’s extremely difficult to move at the pace required.

Let’s jump right into the Sandland story. What's been the growth like from day one to today?  

Growth was relatively slow at first. One of the first things you want to get right in a company like this is Paid Social and Paid Search - But we launched just a few weeks after the iOS 14 update - so that really fogged up our ability to interpret early signs of success and led us to scale a lot more conservatively than we had planned.

But eventually we embraced the new dynamics, meaning we basically had to accept much fuzzier signals. We stuck to the game-plan of iterating quickly and listening to customers and eventually the tides started to turn and we’re now on a very healthy trajectory. 

Curious to dive deeper in the “tide turning” - what did you unlock to start succeeding? 

At the micro-level, we basically came up with a set of creative angles in ads and an array of landing pages, and eventually we landed the right 1-2 punch. 

I came into the brand when the product had already been developed. That was quite a different experience than with Buffy, where we started with a lot of customer insights - and folded those into how we developed the product. 

But at Sandland, we launched at a time when meeting people in-person was to say the least, confusing. Our product is an ingestible sleep aid which requires building trust, and there are obvious legal considerations that make it tough to just send it out en-mass and trying to get feedback. So, as I said before we had to move slowly and build our audience size to the point where we could really start seeing meaningful trends to work off of.

As a marketer, I might have a top down playbook. But at the same time, if you’re going to rely on data to drive your process, there are only so many corners one can try to cut.

It’s tough to swallow that pill. That’s why the second part of your job is to listen. So I spent a lot of time building a process that tries to mine insights  around customers’ frustration with not being able to sleep. 

What’s the right team structure to speed up this optimization cycle? 

I’ll frame this in terms of Sandland, which is an early stage CPG brand which is trying to achieve exponential growth year over year. On the marketing side, I try to split up the org across 3 pillars: Organic, Performance and Retention and those all have to be very in sync with CX.

For performance - which is where that cycle of optimization is most crucial, you need a media buyer type that understands the channels they’re working with really well. And then you need a copywriter who is experienced with creating and iterating on ad concepts for DR ads. Then you’ll also want a great creative producer and photo/video editor who can help create what’s needed.

The key thing to note is that what separates an excellent media buyer and creative from the rest is their ability to work together. The media buyer needs to help the creative understand what they're seeing in the data. And the great creative, very much has a strong understanding of design, strategy and copywriting - all at the same time. 

In D2C, you have to crank so hard with iteration and optimization, that both of these entities need to be constantly in sync - working together and not in silos. 

If your creative gets offended when they’re told that “blue” isn’t working - and is impacting Click-Through-Rate, you can’t move as quickly as you need to. They need to be able to take that as truth and implement it. But of course, you can’t lose sight of your cohesive “brand” aesthetic as a whole. 

Organic and Retention both play extremely important roles in the company lifecycle but they’re not really directly related to speeding up optimization. 

Let’s dive into the stack: What are you using and how? 

On the Digital Product side – our ad landing page tool is Unbounce, I’d also mention we also work with Malomo as a sort of landing page for shipping status.

Our storefront is headless, we use Prismic for our CMS and Shopify Plus for checkout. On the backend we work with Shipstation, Authorize.net. 

For performance analytics, we rely on GA and Data Studio to get a read on the storefront metrics business day to day since the performance team is still quite small. We’re in the process of getting Mixpanel and Segment implemented so we can start having a more sophisticated view of those metrics that can serve a larger team. Relatedly we use Microsoft Clarity for site behavior analysis. 

We use Peel for CLTV. It has a really nice interface for building high level dashboards as well as detailed double and triple clicks when needed.

Elsewhere on the Retention side it’s a mix of Klayvio, Voyage, Aircall and Gorgias. We also use Kno Commerce to help us glean customer insights, as well as Recharge and Judge.me.

One last question: What would you attribute most of your success to? 

I attribute most of our success to “trusting the process”. I’ve learned a lot over the years about the importance of figuring out what the customer truly wants, and then working relentlessly to ensure product development adapts and our customer journey molds to those needs. 

The foundation of that “process” is knowing how to listen to your customer and what to do with their feedback once you get it. 9 times out of 10 - they don’t want to talk to you! So you need to be really sensitive about how you “go to the well” to get what you need. 

Thanks Paul - appreciate you sharing your insights!