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[00:01:58]
Joe Casabona: Exactly how important is your marketing funnel? Ask RT Custer who’s built a funnel that allows his company the Vortic Watch Company to routinely sell out of watches that are priced between $2,500 and $10,000.
In this conversation, RT tells us all about how he and his business partner came up with the idea to repurpose old pocket watches into all American-made wristwatches and how his 200-day email funnel is the key to their success. A 200-day email funnel. Part of the secret sauce, getting influencers to drive traffic not to buy the watches, which are usually only available one per day but to sign up for their mailing list and get notified when new ones drop.
Their mailing list is the lifeblood of their business. And it’s really refreshing to hear somebody talk about selling a really high end product primarily through their mailing list and how they’re spending money getting people to that mailing list. So what a fantastic conversation. I think you are really going to enjoy it.
This conversation by the way is brought to you by Riverside, Ahrefs, TextExpander, and Nexcess. You can learn about them and find all of the links we talked about, including the ability to sign up for Vortic Watches mailing list over athowibuilt.it/254. But for now, let’s get into the intro and then the interview.
[00:03:31]
Intro: Hey, everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.
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[00:04:35]
Joe Casabona: RT Custer How are you today?
R.T. Custer: Hey Joe, I’m great. Thanks so much for having me.
Joe Casabona: My pleasure. Thanks so much for being here. I will say that I make a big deal about pitches to the show because I get a lot of them and most of them are bad. But the folks who pitched you did a really good job. I feel like they captured kind of what you’re about really well and they understand the goal of my show, which is really important, right? Because it’s not just about the platitudes of the guests. It’s about the value. And I know that you’re going to deliver a ton of value because of our pre-show conversation.
So let’s dive right into it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
R.T. Custer: My name is RT Custer and I run Vortic Watch Company. Vortic stands for Vortex and tick tock, a beautiful clash of old and new. And what we actually do is we salvage and restore antique American pocket watches and turn them into one-of-a-kind wristwatches.
Everything inside is about 100 years old, all from that old pocket watch, including the face, the hands and the mechanism, all the gears and parts that make the watch tick. And that’s all from an antique pocket watch. And then we manufacture, right here in Colorado, all the exterior components, the case, the crown, the glass, the leather to make one of the only truly American-made wristwatches.
Joe Casabona: That’s amazing. Gosh, that already sounds amazing. I have a few pocket watches because I like to pretend they are fancy. I remember the first time I wore a pocket watch was at my college senior formal. And I asked one of the chaperones, like the vice president of something, of the student engagement or whatever there, I said, “How do I wear this?” And he goes, “You need a three-piece suit. It hooks into your jacket and it goes into your vest.”
And I was like, “Ah, so I’m not wearing the right equipment to wear this pocket watch.” So now they just sit in a nice case in my office. Let me ask. What gave you the idea to do this? And follow up, how do you find these antique American pocket watches?
R.T. Custer: Yeah, two great questions. The original idea actually came from my business partner, Tyler, and I were playing round of golf after college classes one day back at Penn State where we went to school. Basically, we were having a conversation about things that were not made in America now that maybe could be.
And we had been talking about watches earlier in the round of golf because he really liked watches. And he was trying to explain why. I’m an engineer, but I was just like, “What’s so cool about watches? And why do you wear them?” He was wearing one while playing golf. And I think that it started with like, “Isn’t that annoying on your wrist when you’re swinging a golf club? That kind of seems out of place.”
Pretty much by the end of the round, we decided we were going to start a watch company. And we had a bunch of different ideas. And we did a bunch of pitch competitions in college and all that stuff and started down this rabbit hole of research trying to figure out, if we wanted to make a watch, could we make everything in the United States theoretically?
Because this was like 2011 to 2013 is when we were kind of in the idea phase. And American-made was really starting to come back as far as people are talking about it a lot and media and everything like that in that timeframe.
So it was like, okay, well, from a marketing standpoint and just like ethical, integris standpoint, “Let’s make it in the USA. That’d be awesome.” And we walked into a pawn shop and we talked to this guy about where we could find people to make watch parts. Because he had a bunch of watches and a pocket watch and stuff.
And he happened to be a watchmaker and spent his whole life in the watch industry. He told us the history of what we call the Great American watch companies. A lot of people don’t know this, but 100 years ago, really from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, America was the Switzerland of the world. We made all the best watches. And at that time they were pocket watches.
And there were 10 companies, and we call them the great American watch companies. But those 10 companies made over 100 million pocket watches in the United States in those 100 years. And today pocket watches are scrapped for the gold and silver of the cases at pawn shops.
We realized if we took those old pocket watch insides and turn them into wristwatches, we could much more easily make the bigger outside parts, right? The case and the crown and the glass. We’ve figured out suppliers for those things. But making all the little gears and stuff inside, we’re like, “Ah, we’re going to have to go to Switzerland to Germany for that stuff.”
And we realized that if we took the insides and we made the outsides, we would have 100% made in USA watch. And that’s what we did. We put that idea on Kickstarter in 2014. We called it the American Artisan Series, watch that was actually made in USA using old pocket watches. And we’ve sold every watch we’ve ever made since.
Joe Casabona: Wow. That’s such a cool idea. So when it comes to sourcing the pocket watches now, have you kind of made partnerships with pawnshops? Or is there a more sophisticated process now for getting those old pocket watches?
R.T. Custer: Sorry, I didn’t answer that question. But that’s another great question. It’s kind of become part of our initial supply chain because we basically network with pickers. If you’ve seen American Pickers on the History Channel, there’s people like that, and they’re always finding and looking for certain things in these random places.
But quite literally, we get the pocket watches from estate auctions. So every day in the United States, a jewelry store or a pawn shop goes out of business or relocates or liquidates a bunch of inventory because they’ve had it for so long. And there’s always a box of pocket watches in the back that somebody forgot about. It’s been sitting there for years, people have been scrapping the gold cases and just throwing the guts inside this box, because like, ah, they feel bad about throwing this little piece of American history away.
And we buy hundreds of them at a time and basically save them from those estate scrap yards. And these pickers, they’re always out looking for… I mean, they’re looking for very valuable things: diamonds, gold, jewelry, stuff like that.
But they all have my business card. And when they find pocket watches, I’m the only person in the United States that buys more than 100 pocket watches at a time. And so they make their way to Fort Collins, Colorado, and cherry-pick the best ones and turn them into wristwatches.
Joe Casabona: Gosh, that’s super cool. And I’m sure it’s great for the pickers too, right? Because now that’s like almost guaranteed sell for them, right, as long as they are still are in working order.
R.T. Custer: Well, it’s trash to treasure, right? I mean, for us it’s upcycling. I mean, these things would maybe trashed, they would be thrown away. And it’d be a shame because a lot of these 100-year-old pocket watches, they were really well made back then. I mean, this was the iPhone of the day. I mean, if you had a job that you need to know what time it was, which a lot of people did, like the early 1900s, you’re a banker, you’re an attorney, you have meetings, you gotta be on time, there’s only two ways to tell time in the early 1900s, pocket watch and the clock.
And so if you’re on the go, you had a pocket watch in the pocket. And that was just normal. And so there was millions of them. They worked really well. And they just need some love and attention and restoration is what we literally do and then a new case that can survive day-to-day wear. And that’s what we manufacture.
Joe Casabona: That’s so cool. Gosh, I could probably talk to you about this all day. First of all, you went to Penn State. I live near Philadelphia. I’m from New York, I live near Philadelphia.
R.T. Custer: Cool.
Joe Casabona: And I went to the University of Scranton. So I am familiar with some of the early statewide business plan competitions that maybe you also heard of. But we had one in kind of northeastern Pennsylvania that was big in our area. But that’s super cool. I’m also a Giants fan. So hopefully Saquon will find his way very soon.
R.T. Custer: Amen. Yeah, for sure.
Joe Casabona: So you make these American-made watches. You’re right you found that there was a resurgence of kind of American-made things. But in general, things that are made in America are more expensive than things that are made elsewhere.
And in the pre-show you were saying that your watches can go for anywhere from what, $2,500 to $10,000? Is that right?
R.T. Custer: That’s correct. Yeah, that’s our price range. Average purchase price is around $3,200 to $3,500.
Joe Casabona: Okay, okay. I suspect that just taking out an Instagram ad probably wouldn’t work too well for you. Or maybe it does.
R.T. Custer: I mean, we’ve tried. We tried it all. We launched on Kickstarter in 2014. And since then we’ve done literally every form of marketing that exists. So we’ve refined what works. And what works for us and the funnel that we’ve built is we do a lot of content creation first, and we try to take a lot of pictures, take a lot of video, put everything that we do on the internet within reason, because it’s really cool. And people love to see the behind the scenes, how it’s made type of thing.
Starting this coming January we’re producing a show called Custer and Wolfe—which is my last name and my business partner’s last name—building a watch company. We’re going to do a weekly YouTube show where we document what we do and put it out there.
And then we built a really cool email funnel. So when you subscribe to our email list, you’ll get 20 emails. So one email every 10 days for 200 days, that teaches you all about what we do, who we are, what we stand for, what nonprofits we give to, how the watches are made, all that kind of stuff.
I’ve found that by about the 15th email, people are ready to purchase. So, you know, it’s a four to eight-month selling cycle. And we nurture that through not only the email journey upfront but also consistency in communication. So every Tuesday at 12 noon Mountain Time, I send an email to our list, which now has tens of thousands of people on it.
Our business model is fairly simple. We can only make about one watch every day. And so we call it the watch of the day. It goes live at 12 noon. And when it’s sold, it’s gone. It’s one of a kind. So that’s it. So every week, I send an email called the weekly roundup. And so it’s the last five watches that we made, usually two or three of them are left and they get sold every time I hit send on an email. That’s pretty much it. Email marketing.
And to your point, we use some ads, Instagram ads, Facebook ads, things like that to fill the funnel and just try to collect email addresses. But I don’t calculate return on ad spend in stuff like that. It’s almost impossible. I just say, you know, an email address is worth $1 or $2. So let’s get as many emails on the list.
Joe Casabona: Right, right. You know, kind of like the lifetime value of email subscriber, you know how long it takes. This is interesting. 20 emails, one every 10 days for 200 days. My email funnel, I sell a sub $200 membership or whatever. It was courses for a while. Now it’s the membership.
I have a six day email, just six straight days talking about the benefits. That sale is a lot easier for me because it’s less than 200 bucks. And I basically tell you you’re going to make that money back with what you learn in the membership, right? The every 10 days for 200 days, I suspect that was an intentional interval, because as you’ve said it’s a four to eight month sales cycle to convince somebody to spend three, four grand on a watch, right?
R.T. Custer: Absolutely. I mean, they’ve never met me, they’ve never seen one of our watches in person. They have to have a lot of touchpoints with us. Maybe conversations with us, either over social media or via email.
My target demographic doesn’t want to get an email every day for six days. I do. I am absolutely a customer of things like that that you sell. And I get those emails and I love reading like, “Okay, great, I get a little more a little more information today about this thing that I should really buy.” That works for less expensive products. And especially educational products, that makes total sense.
But for us, we’re curating an experience and a story around why you should buy this watch. And that takes a lot of time. And we have to build trust with the client. It’s one of the reasons that our return rate is almost zero. People think about it before they buy a Vortic watch. They’re like, “This is really cool.” They see the watches coming out every day on Instagram. They miss most of them because half of them sell in like two minutes. They’re like, “Gosh, they got that one.”
They start a conversation with somebody in our workshop. You know, one of our customer service people via email, they ask a couple questions. And then they get constantly and consistently educated through our email journey process and our weekly emails.
Because average is out to two emails a week, basically. If it’s one every 10 days in the journey and then a one every Tuesday. They get about two emails a week. And I think that’s the right amount. I’ve never had anyone complain that we send too many emails. Certainly, I could probably speed that up. But we also have no reason to. We’re almost constantly sold out. I think I have three watches in stock right now. So there’s really no reason to rush anyone.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, again, to your point, you know, you say you’re crafting a story, you’re showing people that you do make these quality watches, right? Again, my product, for example, information products are generally a lot lower risk. I have a 7-day refund or a 14-day refund policy or something like that, but it’s an annual membership.
So even if people are like, they spend 200 bucks, and after 12 months, if they’re like, “I got no value out of this,” they could just not renew it. I just signed up for your mailing list because now I’m curious to see… I mean, I’m interested in watches, but I want to see how it all works.
R.T. Custer: Yeah, let me know.
Joe Casabona: Absolutely, absolutely. What do you use for your email service provider?
R.T. Custer: Right now we use Campaign Monitor. We’ve used that for years just because it’s really easy. I do it all myself because, I don’t know, I like to… It’s the one thing that I know works. And so I like to have control over it. I’ve delegated pretty much the rest of the business at this point to an awesome team. But I like to be able to type my words every week and send them to my community that I’ve built around all this stuff. And it’s fun for me.
We are seriously considering switching to HubSpot for a number of reasons. You know, all the other features that they have and all the other awesome things that they do. It’s a little bit overkill for what we do, but our business plan involves a lot more, you know, coming down the pipe in the next one to two years, so we’re going to need a more robust CRM especially. So I’m in the process of thinking about changing but yeah, Campaign Monitor right now. It’s basically MailChimp. Very, very easy.
Joe Casabona: Nice. I use ConvertKit and I basically signed up for their automations and sequences, but that’s like its own other kind of set of work, right? Because you got to make sure everything’s running well and you got to update your sequences because if you sign up by October 31, and it’s like January or December, or whatever, like whoops.
R.T. Custer: Hopefully I’ll fix it by the time you get it. But there’s one email, I don’t know where it is, but one of the 20 emails, one of the images is loading… like it just gives a little error. And it’s something that I did wrong. I clicked the wrong button, or whatever.
And I’ve been meaning to fix it for a long time. And I keep getting like there’s… it’s not meant that many people in the funnel, but I’ll get like an email every week of somebody just forwards it, which is really cool when your customers are looking out for you, and they’re like, “Hey, I found this thing. I kind of want to see what this image was supposed to be.” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, cool. I’ll fix that. Thank you.”
But yeah, keeping it simple is one of the keys to I think being consistent. Because if you try to set up all those automations and you try to overthink the whole setup process, then something’s going to go wrong. And every time something goes wrong, it messes with your schedule, it messes with your head and it’s hard to show up. For me, as soon as we hang up from this podcast, I’m going to hit “send” on email. It’s that time. It’s sitting on Tuesday at noon. So here we go.
Joe Casabona: Absolutely. You’re right. I’ve made complex automations. And when they work, it’s great. And then when they break, it’s like… I don’t document my automations. And I’m like, “What was I thinking here?” Now I need to like relearn what I did and why I did it. And then I need to fix it. So I totally get that. automations are great. I have lots of them. But if you only automate as much as you need to, I guess is the lesson to take away here.
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Joe Casabona: You mentioned that you are an engineer?
R.T. Custer: Yeah, I studied Industrial Engineering.
Joe Casabona: Oh, wow. Nice. Industrial Engineering for those of us who can’t clearly define it, right?
R.T. Custer: Sure.
Joe Casabona: I am a software engineer, I’m familiar with mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. Industrial engineering is?
R.T. Custer: So Industrial engineering is what my mechanical engineering friends at Penn State called imaginary engineering.
Joe Casabona: That’s what all engineers call software engineering. So I feel you.
R.T. Custer: Actually some industrial engineers are literally Imagineers. Like, you can go work for Disney and design lights and lines and processes.
Joe Casabona: Very nice.
R.T. Custer: So it’s all about systems, processes, supply chain, you know, those kinds of things. So that’s kind of what led me into consumer products. I also have a YouTube show called Products Worth Talking About where my friend and I just basically do unboxings and reviews of physical products. I’m just a product guy.
If it’s a real thing that you sell on the internet, like if it’s a Shopify or Amazon-based business, I just want to know all about it. It’s really fun for me. And that comes from my supply chain background. My job out of college was with Walmart in logistics.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
R.T. Custer: And I helped renovate distribution centers for the world’s largest retailer for a few years. And that was really cool. It was like such a dream job because, I mean, I was in my early 20s, and they gave me a $25 million capital budget to go install robots and conveyor systems.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
R.T. Custer: …in million square foot buildings. So I love that. The whole how it works process is fascinating for me.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s funny you mentioned Imagineering. My brother is a cast member at Disney World and he originally wanted to be an Imagineer. But now he’s in the hospitality side kind of working his way up on that, and then he really loves it. So that’s awesome. Cool.
So let’s get into the influencer marketing stuff, right? Because it sounds like you got a really great email funnel. I’m excited to get these nurture emails, because, again, I’m very interested in watches and kind of how stuff is made. That’s why I started the show. But there’s another aspect to kind of developing that trust, right? Because you don’t have any retail stores, right? Are your products sold in any retail stores? It sounds like no, because you make them and then sell them.
R.T. Custer: We have tried that and it doesn’t work as well. It’s not very profitable to go that way. So we are currently 100% direct to consumer.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha. And so you need to develop that trust some way. And it sounds like you have found the way to develop that trust with influencer marketing?
R.T. Custer: I mean, part of the arsenal is influencer marketing. Like I said, I’ve tried a little bit of everything. And influencer marketing, the thing I would add to that is product placement. They can help create credibility, they can help create value and they can, you know, that perceived value from the customer and what is this thing and what is it worth.
We have I would say 50% to 60% of our customers or small business owners, are entrepreneurs. And I think it’s just because of the funnel that Tyler and I built and who we are. You know, we are entrepreneurs and we are small business owners and we started this company basically right out of college.
And so I think people that are entrepreneurs and small business owners really relate to that and they kind of want to support that. And they like watches and so they buy a watch from us instead of Rolex or Omega or one of these other massive corporations.
So we went down the path of finding influencers that had followings that were entrepreneurs and small business owners or people that would be interested in those things. And so the first one that was effective was Lewis Howes. He has one of the largest podcasts called the School of Greatness.
And I just sent him an Instagram DM, and I was just like, “Hey, Lewis, big fan. Love your show. Really enjoyed the interview with Kevin Hart, you know, whatever.” And I said, “I’d love to make you watch, but only if you’d wear it. Check it out. Here’s our link. Let me know if you like these. We take old pocket watches, turn them into wristwatches. We’re one of only a couple American watch companies. Do you think you’d be interested?”
And he immediately wrote back and said, “Dude, these are the coolest watches I have ever seen? How does it work?” And I was just like, “Well, I’m just going to scroll back through some of your pictures of other watches that you have, the things you tend to wear, and I’m going to pick one out and design one just for you that I think fits kind of your style. And I’ll send you a picture of it. And if you like it, then I’ll mail it to you.” And he was like, “Sweet.”
And so he got it and then immediately posted on Instagram. We had a huge spike in traffic, sold all the watches we had in stock. You know, got a bunch of signups.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
R.T. Custer: And then he went to a Lakers game that night after he got the watch… and he did a really cool unboxing. All the watches come in a wooden box. They’re wrapped in parchment paper and wax sealed, like the parcels on the railroads in the 1800s. It’s an experience to unbox of Vortic watch.
So he filmed the whole unboxing experience because he was like, “This is so…” He said he took it out of the box and then put it all back in the box and then hit record because he was like, “This is so cool.” And he’s wearing it at a Lakers game, and his friend Chris Harder was sitting right next to him—And Chris also has a podcast. And Chris is a watch guy—and he was like, “Hey, tell me about this thing.”
So then I made one for him. And then that worked. And then I reached out to Dave Hollis, a husband of… ex-husband at this point, but partner at the time with Rachel Hollis, who’s huge author back a few years ago. And I said, “Dave…” Dave, just a really cool guy on Instagram, got a bunch of kids, I’m a dad as well. So I just sent him a DM but I said basically the same thing.
And him posting about it, he has more… I think at the time, he had 600,000 followers on Instagram. And he told me probably 500,000 of them were women. And so we had a huge spike from him posting about it doing an unboxing right before the holidays. And we had a bunch of female entrepreneurs, small business owners either buy it for themselves or buy it as a gift for their husbands or partners for the holidays. So that worked out. And so it’s just kind of this chain reaction.
And then I think the biggest one we’ve had was on my podcast because… it’s probably worth talking about. We talked about physical products. I brought in my friend Anthony, who runs a company called MC Squares, and they make little whiteboards, and basically reusable sticky notes is his new thing. And he was on Shark Tank.
And so he pitched the sharks on Shark Tank, got an investment from Kevin O’Leary about three months after I interviewed him on my podcast. And then he emails me and he’s like, “Hey, Kevin O’Leary just invested in my company. I’d like to send him a watch as a gift and a thank you.” But I need one in 48 hours and it needs to get to the Venetian in Las Vegas before they start filming season 13 of Shark Tank. And I was like, “Yeah, drop everything.”
Joe Casabona: Wow.
R.T. Custer: So if you watch the first… I think it’s the first and third episodes of… I think it’s Season 13 of Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary is wearing a Vortic watch. And he did an interview with one of his friends on Kevin’s YouTube show.
And they looked at a bunch of watches and he was just like showing off some of the new watches he just got. And he was talking about a $1.2 million watch and then put that down and picked up the Vortic watch and was like, “This is one of the coolest watches that I’ve ever received as a gift.” And he held up our sticker that we sent.” We send them a personal note and all the stuff. And that blew up.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
R.T. Custer: So what I’ve found in influencer marketing is, first of all, it’s all flash in the pan. Like we’ve gotten a huge spike when they post about it. But every influencer we’ve worked with, they post about it once. And we get a huge spike in web traffic, a bunch of email signups and then basically nothing. That’s how it works.
Unless you pay the influencer to do ongoing promotion, there’s no what’s in it for them. There’s like excitement when they get it. And then we’ve gotten a few follow-ups from the YouTube video that Kevin O’Leary did. That’s on YouTube. So we get kind of trickle from that.
And then people have noticed the watch on his wrist on Shark Tank. That’s really cool. Dave Hollis wore it on the cover of his book, “Get Out of Your Own Way.” So he’s wearing a watch on the front cover of his book that now has sold million copies or something. So that’s really cool. But for the most part, you get like a flash in the pan type thing.
Joe Casabona: Interesting. And so as a brand, what do you look for in a relationship with the influencer? Just as kind of as simple as “we’ll send you a thing and we want you to post about it.” It sounds like you looked for pretty well-known influencers. If somebody has maybe a smaller following, what would you tell them to kind of find brands that they can kind of be influencers for
R.T. Custer: Since my products are so limited and so expensive, I kind of have to shoot for the stars. And that’s just where we are. If I ran like MVMT watch company, they make like $200 watches, more like a Fossil, you know, a watch of that value, they can send 100 a week to influencers if they want. And so they could spray and pray.
And if you want to be an influencer for a brand like that, the amount of followers really doesn’t matter. It’s that they don’t want splash in the pan. Because if you just post once about it, and then never wear it again, that’s not a whole lot of value for them. It’s plenty of value for me in limited quantity and stuff like that. But for brands like that they want ongoing promotion.
And we’re getting into this a little bit… I’m trying to wrap my head around how to do it, since we don’t have a lot of inventory. But right now the biggest thing that’s working in influencer marketing is tagging in affiliate programs. And so if you want to be an influencer for a brand that has unlimited supply of product, the what’s in it for them and what’s in it for you is the constant promotion. You know, one post a week.
But they don’t want to pay for it, they don’t want to pay you to promote because that gets really expensive really fast, and it gets muddy. And it’s like, you know, like how long you need to keep the post up. And there’s all this other stuff.
Joe Casabona: Right.
R.T. Custer: If you say, “Hey, I’m selling this watch,” or “I just bought this watch for myself,” or “I got this gift from this company, it’s really cool, swipe up or click this link and use code JOE for 10% off,” then you get 10% probably as a kickback, the customer gets 10% off as a discount, and then the brand keeps the other 80%. And that’s great. And they ride off all that for marketing promotion.
So I think that’s really the best way to set yourself up for success as an influencer is to optimize those affiliate relationships. Like if you can say, “You know, I started working with this other brand, and I sell two pairs of shoes a week for them and I get 15% affiliate kickback for those two pairs of shoes. And it’s not a whole lot right now, but I’m going to do another video about it next week. I’m going to do another post next week and…” If you have 10 partners like that, that adds up really quick, honestly. So that’s the path I would go is the more of the affiliate route instead of trying to get paid per post or whatever.
Joe Casabona: I think that’s a really great point. This is something I teach in my membership in the Creator Crew is in my nurture sequence, I basically say, “You know, this membership is going to cost you whatever. It is 199, will say, at the time of this recording. You’ll make that back in a year.” I made more than that over black Friday from my gift guides are my affiliate sales during that time. So I made that back in one weekend. If you use affiliates, you can generate decent income worth your time income. So I think what you’re saying is a really good point.
Spray and pray brands I really like that term. Followers don’t necessarily matter, but they want that ongoing promotion. And so you could probably get the product for free, especially if… In my field, I do a lot of software. So they’ll just throw me a software license, and I get to use it and whatever and I get the affiliate marketing.
But on my podcasting YouTube channel, people send me microphones and I get to test them out. And then I’ll usually do like a giveaway. In your case, it sounds like the crucial part of the flash in the pan is getting people onto your list onto that 200-day nurture sequence. Does that sound right?
R.T. Custer: 100%. It’s a numbers game. So the way I’m trying to figure it out is… and maybe there’s someone in the software world that can help me solve this. But what I’d love to do is say, you know, I value an email address between $1 and $2. And a strong lead like that is… if it’s a man who likes watches in their 40s to 60s with six figure income or seven figure net worth, then that email is probably worth, gosh, maybe $5 to me.
So what if instead of giving you 10% kickback on the watches that you sell, which doesn’t really make sense, because I don’t have a lot of… like it’s not a scalable process, you know… like let’s say, I have this system set up somehow, you’re interviewing me on your podcast, Joe, and we said, “Go to this website and sign up for Vortic Watch Companies email list and somehow use code JOE or whatever.” And then I pay you $1 for every person that signs up or 50 cents. Gosh, that…
Maybe that does exist and I don’t know how to do it. But that I think is the future, especially when you tap in text message marketing. We don’t do a lot of text message marketing, because my target demo doesn’t really want that. But there’s a huge amount of brands that, I mean, they would pay a lot of money to get quality phone number of a lead. And you have to do it all the right way. They have to sign up themselves. They have to check the box that says they’re subscribing, do all that stuff.
Joe Casabona: I can’t just feed you contact booklist.
R.T. Custer: I’m pretty sure that’s bad.
Joe Casabona: And it’s illegal in the United States.
R.T. Custer: That is bad. Don’t do that. But there are good ways to do that. That’s really my focus, to answer your question. We’re trying to fill the funnel. I’ve built this funnel of all these signup journeys, the emails, we have a beautiful website, we have an amazing product, we can tell your story really well on podcasts like this. And I want you to join my community, which is my email list. And I literally pay Facebook to try to get me more emails. I literally pay influencers by sending them watches to try to get traffic to my website, to try to sign up my email. It’s all part of that funnel building process.
Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. I made a couple of notes. I would encourage you to check out SparkLoop, which is like an email referral service. And so you can associate prizes or other benefits with email subscriptions.
R.T. Custer: Cool.
Joe Casabona: So it’s like a referral program basically for email list building.
R.T. Custer: That’s awesome.
Joe Casabona: But I also have a couple of friends in the developer advocate space that are kind of like brand advocates that I think probably have similar systems in place. So I can put you in contact with one. This is like networking on air, everybody.
R.T. Custer: There we go. This is how it works. I would definitely be interested in that. A lot of people say text message marketing is the future and email marketing is kind of outdated. But I couldn’t possibly disagree more. It’s not one or the other. For my brand, I choose email. We’re not going to get into text messages.
But if I had to choose email marketing against any other form of digital marketing, like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, whatever, email marketing all day. I mean, I would put 150% of my budget into that, because I just know it works. Like Apple changes stuff and Google changes stuff but people still open the emails. And they will if you tell a good story. It all goes back to…
I mean, five years ago, my business partner Tyler and I read “Start With Why” and “Building a StoryBrand” at the same time. Those two books caused us to redo everything on our website. If you hit the homepage of Vorticwatches.com, it literally says, I typed it out myself: who we are, what we do, why we do it, how to buy it. And it’s all right there at the top, front, home, center. If you read the entire homepage of my website, you don’t know what I do, it didn’t load properly for you. Like that’s not my homepage. Right?
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
R.T. Custer: And we weave a story into all that stuff because that’s why people buy. The other thing you talked about, networking and partnerships. One of the best ways we found to grow our email following and honestly our social following is we host and partner on sweepstakes. Not just a giveaway, not those everybody likes the same page on Facebook or Instagram, that doesn’t work.
Joe Casabona: Like it now, unlike in five minutes.
R.T. Custer: Yeah. For the last three years in a row, we did a Father’s Day sweepstakes. And so we partnered with a bunch of other brands that sell luxury men’s goods: shoes, hats, shirts, you know, socks, right? Like all stuff that dads want, like watches.
The last one we did I think was like a $15,000 giveaway worth of stuff. And it’s all the cool stuff that you want for Father’s Day. I mean, we got probably 10,000 email addresses, people signing up and entering to win. So that works. A lot of people are using two email addresses, a lot of people are using their old email that they never really check.
But some people, let’s call it 10%, you know, if 10,000 people enter, I bet 1,000 of those people are potential customers for me. I think I spent 600 bucks on Facebook ads for that. So, I mean, that math adds up very nicely.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
R.T. Custer: So anyway, we do a lot of that stuff. I just know it works. It’s nice to have marketing in your arsenal that you just know it works. And then you’re just consistent with it.
Joe Casabona: I will say right, people have been saying email is dying for like 15 years. So it’s not dead yet. It’s not going anywhere. When Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp all went down a couple of months ago-
R.T. Custer: My email still went through.
Joe Casabona: ..email didn’t. Yeah, exactly. I love what you said there. Email marketing is definitely not outdated. I will say “Building Your StoryBrand” is one of the few books that made me act immediately as I was reading the book. I redesigned my landing page as I was reading it.
R.T. Custer: Oh, shout out to Donald Miller. Like literally changed the trajectory of my company with that book. So amazing.
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Joe Casabona: I want to be cognizant of the time. Now I will tease here, in Build Something More, RT also has an ad agency where he and his company build websites. So we’re going to talk about kind of that and what it’s like kind of pitching a digital versus physical product. So if you’re interested in that, you can sign up over at howibuilt.it/254. That’s the show notes page. And it’s just 50 bucks a year. That’s less than five bucks a month.
But I do want to wrap up here and I do want to wrap up by asking you about the pricing. Because most people you know, I see a lot of Casio watches out there that are like 10 bucks. I have a couple of Skagen watches. I don’t know if I’m saying it right.
R.T. Custer: Skagen.
Joe Casabona: Skagen, right. You know, that can range from around 300 or 400 bucks. My Apple Watch is 500 bucks. And then you have these upmarket pricing for watches. What’s it like setting a price that you know is valuable? And then convincing people that it is it’s worth the price I guess is the nugget of knowledge I’m looking for there.
R.T. Custer: For sure. So setting the price is hard. Figuring out what something is worth in the luxury industry is nearly impossible, especially for a brand like us where there’s almost no one else doing what we do. There’s only two or three other companies even trying to make watches in the United States and then have them take old pocket watches and turn them into wristwatches, which is our niche.
The other value proposition that we have this, we share everything. We’re just hyper transparent about how it’s made, where it’s made, why we do it, what we stand for, you know, all that stuff. I mean, today’s Giving Tuesday, so in the email today, I’m announcing our… we’re donating $30,000 to a school in Delaware called the Veterans Watchmaker Initiative that teaches US military vets to become watchmakers.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
R.T. Custer: This is what we do every email, everything that we post on Instagram is a story. And so we use that to prove our value. We also just know our worth. That’s kind of how we figured out how to price the watches.
And our prices have gone up. I mean, everyone’s price has gone up this year for everything. But when we first launched on Kickstarter in 2014, you could buy a watch similar to the one on my wrist. I mean, it was version one very different than what we do now. We call it minimum viable product. But back then you could buy a watch for $750. Today we’re selling… It’s the same thing, but it’s very… not the same, it’s very different for 3,000.
And it’s just because we’ve refined our process and we’re also winning the supply-demand curve right now. There’s almost no supply and there’s demand like crazy. So that’s nice. But we’ve done it for gosh, you know, eight years. So we’re not new to any of this stuff.
So we’ve been artfully trying to figure out where that price lands. And the bottom line is the bottom line. Like we as a watch company. We’re not just a manufacturing company. We’re really a marketing company that sells watches.
Think of Rolex. Rolex sells billions of dollars worth of watches every year. The margin on a Rolex is north of 90%. So if you buy a Rolex for $10,000, 9,000 of that is profit for Rolex.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
R.T. Custer: And that’s because they sponsor everything. They spend probably 50% of their cost on their watches on marketing. And that’s why everyone in the world knows who Rolex is. It’s one of the most powerful brands in the world next to Coca-Cola. Like everyone knows what a Rolex is. Because for 100 years they’ve shoved their brand down our throats.
And to do that, it takes hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in advertising and marketing. And so yeah, we need to make profits so that we can pay ourselves, keep food on the table for our families, and pay for all the awesome marketing that we want to do. That’s where it all comes from. Everybody’s got to make money but that’s our direct reasoning behind all the costs and everything is most of it goes into marketing and me showing up. I mean, I had to pay the person that connected me to you today.
Joe Casabona: That’s all part of the marketing. Yeah, absolutely. I like what you said about kind of “we know our worth.” I think something that people in my space struggle with is knowing the worth of things.
As I record this… I won’t grandstand too much about this. But as I record this, there has been a little bit of drama about a product that had a lifetime price, now they’re trying to kind of move away from that lifetime price and people are mad about it. But it provides so much value that I will gladly pay a subscription a year for that. Especially if I’m doing client work, if I’m paying 100 bucks a year for this thing to generate thousands of dollars for me per year in client work, that’s an easy sell.
And I think a lot of people still in my field, or in my former fields maybe, have a hard time seeing that. And I always say if you can’t see the value in what you pay or what you’re not willing to pay for, how do you communicate the value that you provide to your clients? You know, you need to understand what you’re worth.
And I’ll just end with recently somebody asked me, what’s the difference between a $200 price course… Because I create and sell courses as well? What’s the difference between a $200 course and a $2,000 course? And it’s that extra zero. If you’re selling to the right people, they’ll gladly pay $2,000 for that course, because they see the value in it. So knowing your worth is super important. And it’s obviously working for Vortic Watches.
R.T. Custer: Thank you. Yeah, so far so good. Knock on wood, right?
Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Knock on wood. RT, this has been a great conversation, I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is do you have any trade secrets for us?
R.T. Custer: Trade secrets. I think I gave them all to you in this podcast, I mean, where we find the pocket watches, how we do email marketing. I told you everything I do. Copy it, please. You know, it works.
But besides that, I would say another thing that I shared is consistency. We do the same. We make one watch every day, Monday through Friday. We posted it at 12 noon. And that’s it. Right? We send an email every Tuesday at 12 Noon-ish now. I gotta send mine today. It doesn’t matter, right? But it’s every Tuesday afternoon, I hit send an email. And we post all that content. And we just were super, super consistent with all that stuff.
And it’s not a secret, but it almost feels like it is because not many people do that. So that’s probably all the trade secret wisdom I can get off the top of my head for you there, Joe.
Joe Casabona: I love it. I love it. And consistency is so key. People ask me how I grew my show. And consistency is it, right? People can reliably know that every Monday morning they’ll have this episode and it’ll be good quality conversation in their pod catcher of choice. So consistency is super important. That’s why I try to teach in my membership as well, how to be a consistent creator.
RT, this has been such a great conversation. If people want to learn more about you and your company, where can they find you?
R.T. Custer: Yeah, thank you. It’s been awesome and fun. Vorticwatches.com. Vorticwatches.com and you’ll see everything you need to know. Definitely put yourself on the email list so you can see everything we talked about.
Joe Casabona: Like I said, I signed up really easy. I went there, a couple seconds went by, a little pop-up came up. People say they don’t like pop-up models, but they work. And it was really convenient for me to sign up there. So there you go. There’s a little extra for you.
I will include that and everything we talked about including the books that we talked about over athowibuilt.it/254. And if you want to hear the rest of our conversation, if you want to get ad-free extended episodes of this podcast, you can sign up for the Creator Crew right there. Again, that’showibuilt.it/254. RT, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.
R.T. Custer: Thank you. It was fun.
Joe Casabona: Thanks so much for listening, everybody out there. And until next time, get out there and build something.