E38: Unlock The Secrets to Successful DTC Marketing with CEO Nikita Vakhrushev: Email, SMS, Community Building, E-commerce Tips

Jim: What is up Remote Start Nation. Let's get something started. I'm Jim Doyon, your host, and I wanna welcome you to another episode of Remote Start. Remote Start, Let me ask you something, what are you currently doing to turn your cold traffic from your website or from a list into a new client? Do you have a direct to consumer brand and are you looking for ways to increase revenue? Well, on today's episode, we are going to be talking with Nikita Vakhrushev, the CEO of Aspect on direct to consumer email and SMS best practices. In addition, we're gonna look at what it takes to build an online community and retain it. We'll also be hearing Nikita's journey in starting aspect and what it takes to start an e-comm brand from scratch. Without further ado, Nikita, welcome to the Remote Start Nation.

Nikita: Thanks for having me, Jim, it's a pleasure. I'm definitely happy and excited to share a lot of knowledge with the Remote Start Nation, and I think a lot of people are gonna get value from this podcast, not only just for on the email and SMS side, but also on just the general business side of things. So I'm happy to get into it.

Jim: It's an honor to have you and you know, we got to have a little conversation before, and I'm excited, I mean, you talk value, like I think, you know, direct to consumer brands, DTC and you know, it's something that I've done in the past with my previous brand and listening to you talk about how many clients you've helped and what you've done. I'm really excited for this. So, you know, let's get started. To get this going, like I'd love for you to tell something about yourself that we wouldn't know if we just met.

Nikita: Yeah, definitely. So I'd say the biggest thing is I'm an immigrant, so I'm a US immigrant. I came to the US when I was eight years old, with my parents. And I think having that, like being an immigrant has definitely left like a chip on my shoulder constantly in my life, which is constantly pushed me to like do more and like try to outwork everybody weirdly enough. I know the hustle culture is here and there, so I try to not overextend myself, but at the same time, you know, it's like I gotta prove something to other people. So I moved here when I was eight, I started my business, it was formally RP and media, but now it's aspect we rebranded about three years ago. I started that business, which was a marketing agency in about, when I was 19 in, around like 2016 or 2017. So I'm relatively young in business, but I dropped outta college, I fully focused in on the business, and in the meantime I was also doing an e-commerce store that I eventually sold off, and focused purely on the agency ‘cause I just had, I got so much fulfillment from helping others build their business, and you can also learn so much from other businesses versus like trying and failing and burning your own money, doing it yourself. So I'd rather help them out with like help out businesses in the DTC space that are already established, did everything from Facebook ads to websites to email to conversion rate, landing pages, everything and anything under the marketing sun, and eventually landed onto email marketing mainly because it was just a lot easier to fulfill for our team and at the same time, every single client that we had for email, we were knocking it out of the park for, so we're like, this is an obvious no-brainer, obviously we, there was a chunk loss of our like Facebook ad clients or Google ad clients that we didn't take on any longer, but we were able to recover from that, and we now have a very successful email and s m s marketing agency where clients come in and they're like, Hey, we could do better here. And you know, we take a look at the backend, see what needs to be improved, and actually go ahead and improve them. And most times people don't realize how much money they're losing out on email because they don't think email as like a marketing channel, but it's like most people, or most brands usually have or at least the most of the brands that we work with, have at least 20 to 30% of their revenue come from just email marketing and their owned audience, so if they don't have that, we help them get to that point, if they're at that, we help them squeeze out as much revenue as possible, ethically, of course, with our tactics.

Jim: That's awesome, and I appreciate you sharing that with us. And, you know, I want to get more into, like, we'll start with building a list and then get into the different steps that, you know, a client should take, but something I want to go back to what did you do before? I mean, you started at such a young age, what was it that made you know, really decide that you wanted to get started in the agency route? And I know you said, you know, even your e-commerce brand, like your, the first start of doing something on your own, what was it that that helped you get there?

Nikita: Yeah, that's a really good question. So it actually kind of goes back to high school. So in high school I was part of the print media club and there we learned everything and anything that has to do with like graphic design as well as making that graphic design into physical design. So I know before we started recording, you talked that you had, you talked about having your own clothing brand, and you had everything in-house. So I knew like from start to finish, how to do all the vinyl printing, creating the stickers, heat pressing, everything. And anything that has to do has to be done there, like what it's called vertically, I know how to do everything vertically from like idea to physical shirt. So that led me into, obviously, like it led me into doing engineering work. So I was in college to study mechanical engineering, but I stumbled across like a Reddit post one night, I was like, Hey, you can make money online by printing your own t-shirts, by like having, like a manufacturer fulfill for you, it's basically drop shipping or like print on demand, whatever you wanna call it, I'm like, shit, like I can have, I can do this, I have all the designs, I have all the illustrator files. Let me go ahead, see if this works. And slowly I figured out my own niche, it eventually led into like rapper t-shirts, like t-shirts based off like rap quotes, so I started doing really well, I think I was making like five to 7k a month, about like 1-2k a month in take home, and eventually I was like, oh, how do I improve my own, like how do I improve the sales that I'm getting? Because it was all from Amazon, like how do I do it on my own website? And that led me to down another rabbit hole of watching like videos from Alex Becker where like he, ‘cause at the time he was doing SEO, I'm like, oh SEO, that's really interesting, like you can make an agency out of this. So I started an agency, not started, but not started where like I would just help out people that I know that needed help with e-commerce and eventually turned into paid gigs and sort of grew my way that way and eventually started to figure out lead generation, figured out customer fulfillment and got a team behind my back now. So like it all evolved, naturally, weirdly enough, it took a while. It took three years of just failing of like, I wouldn't say failing, but like, just stagnant growth to where like in 2020 when people needed a lot more digital help and it was more, I guess, widespread needed, like I was able to excel in that and build a solid foundation of clientele.

Jim: That's awesome, that's a great story. And did you said you had sold your e-commerce brand?

Nikita: Yeah, it was nothing big, it was like a couple grand, but I'd say it's a win.

Jim: That's a huge win man. To be able to start something and learn from it, and then jump onto the next thing and keep growing and be able to sell it, that's huge, man. I mean, very similar to our backstory, and you know it's exciting and to be able to have that passion to help others and you know, learn from what you've learned in all the past, like, that's huge.

Nikita: Yeah, absolutely.

Jim: And congrats at starting at such a young age as well. My first business was when I was 19 in college, and I always look back and say, man, if you know, that was 20 years ago. And if I knew then what I knew now, what, you know, where would I be? But you gotta start somewhere and thank you for sharing that story with us. So let's get back to, you started getting a little bit about the steps that you walk clients through and, you know, I wanna start from the very beginning. Like, let's talk about the importance of building a list as a company, as a brand, we tell us a little bit about that.

Nikita: Yeah. So I don't know, like, I dunno if your audience is familiar with it, but there's like a whole graph of like different ways that you can market your business. There's like paid media, there's own media, there's shared media. It's pretty like well known, or may maybe not, but there's like paid media, which is like Facebook and Google and TikTok ads, and then there's shared media, which is like your Instagram follower account, your LinkedIn follower count, whatever. And then you have your own media, which is like people that you have direct access to and we focus on that own media, which is your email list. And the big thing with email list is that you own that media own as in like you have access to those people so you can reach out to them whenever you want, whether they're gonna reply or not, it's up to what the messaging is within that email of course. So we focus, like that's one of the things that we focus on at aspect is not only, you know, writing the emails, writing the text messages, designing the emails, and sending them out for you, but we also focus on building that list, and that list is important because once you have that person's email and their contact information, you can keep remarketing to them over and over again until they unsubscribe, and the big part about building a list, I know you wanted to get into like how do you do it or like what the intricacies are. It's a big mix of, number one, people that have purchased from you in the past, like customers, a lot of the list, like that's the best part of the list because you already know what they purchased you have that data on them so you can market to them more effectively, but there's also people that might have shown interest in the past, whether they subscribe to your newsletter or they collect or they submitted info through a popup, and the popup is like our best, I guess best tactic when it comes to getting new people on the list. I guess the way I'm gonna explain it now is gonna get into a whole bunch of weeds here, but when people sign up through a welcome popup, that email is then taken to a welcome flow, which is like anywhere between like five to 10 nurture emails where people learn more about the brand they learn more about the history of the company, they may get an incentive or a discount code where they can purchase on the store. So that's what essentially we help too. So anyone that joins the list, they go through that welcome flow and those emails are, they're automated. So we don't do any manual sending, those automated emails go out to people and they're more likely to buy because they like you keep following up with them as a part of that welcome flow, and obviously it's nothing nefarious, it's not like, Hey, bye bye bye, you know, giveaway, giveaway. It's more teaching the person and having them be more familiar with the brand that they were thinking of buying or they wanted an incentive from, maybe it's like a 20% off coupon code or whatever. You build that trust up with them and then they're more likely to buy. So that's one part of building a list is you want to have that like, I guess, automation to keep following up with them after they submitted their info.

Jim: And that's two things I want to hit on there, number one with, you know, you kind of said it in the beginning, but the, the list you own is so important. I think with like the popularity of TikTok and, you know, social and people getting so many leads from or interest from those, we have to remember that that could change at any minute. But if you own that list, if you own those contacts where it is, they've given you your email, they've given you the consent to email them or text them, it doesn't matter what happens to TikTok or or Instagram or Facebook or any of these other channels because you already have started a relationship with that person that's either a client as you said or somebody that's shown interest in your product or your brand. And so, the owned list, I think is something that is so important that a lot of brands don't think about. They think, how can I get more, how can I get more leads? How can I get more people? How can I get my name out there? But once you bring in that list and you have it now, the nurturing and you, the second thing I was gonna say to that is you hit on the, you hit it on the head, that I think is so important that people don't think about, but the communication doesn't have to be about a sale, it really shouldn't always be about a sale, it's nurturing as you mentioned, it's understanding the history of the brand, it's understanding the values of the brand, what you stand for, why they're there. And so I just wanted to stop real quick and, you know, really hone in on those two points for the Remote Start Nation, because really everybody, it's not just about pushing your message, it's about nurturing. And so, Nikita, thank you for sharing that, I'll let you continue, but I definitely wanted to hit on those two points.

Nikita: Yeah, of course. I'd say the big thing with that, like with not pushing sales content all the time, is we have like a 80, 20 as everything else does, but like an 80, 20 of like content and information and nurturing, and then 20% of sales. So pretty much three out of the four emails that we send out, it's usually just informational content, that content, you know, possibly break objections. Like, it's like maybe objection handling content, but it's not like purely selling them, it's like, Hey, we have this discount code or we have this sale. It's more so like educating them on the brand or educating them on what's like the information behind the brand. So that's huge, especially for our clients that are not that are all sell, sell, sell. They may not understand it at first, but once we get things rolling and understand and explain to them the system, they're like, oh, that makes sense, because, you know, put them, when you put yourself in their shoes, it's like, I don't wanna be getting sales emails all the time. So it's like so don't your, like, your subscribers don't want that either, so. And like to piggyback off what you said with the own list, like it could be like, we work with DTC mainly, which is just a widespread business to consumer. But this is the same thing can be done with B2B. Like, I guess a good example of it is myself, because while I'm also building out all these social networks, like the podcast, the YouTube channel, Instagram, whatever, I'm also building up my own email list because, like you said, you never know when that's going to go away. So once you have that own list and you have an audience of people that are opening up your email every week because you provide value to them, they're gonna trust you, they're gonna keep following you, and then eventually they'll do business with you, you know, the life cycle of content takes a lot longer, to convert a customer, like if you're posting YouTube videos or if you're posting Instagram reels or Tiktoks or YouTube shorts, like you can keep posting for months until that customer converts, but they might convert faster if they are on your listing, they have a direct voice with you because you're writing something more valuable in than like a 15 second video, soI'm noticing that as well on my own end, I have about like a thousand subscribers on my email list now, and a lot more people are reaching back to me and replying to the email like, wow, this is very insightful or like, Hey, like we should sit down and chat Q2, you know, that sort of thing, and more opportunities are opening up because of my own, I'm practicing what I preach essentially.

Jim: That's excellent. So let's start with how to build a list, like what? Let's talk about all these other channels, and Remote Star Nation, Nikita's got an awesome YouTube channel where he has a lot of information on how to grow your brand through exactly what we're talking here today as well as some other areas. So I know that's one area that you're bringing in to build a list, but let's can you kind of go in deeper on how to do so?

Nikita: Yeah, of course. So a lot of the list building that has helped me is going through Twitter, so like I'm very active on Twitter, providing value on like things that I'm learning about the industry or a new way, or a better way of doing something that's already existing. So I have a decent following there and I'm using that following to get them to like own that media. So it's shared media on Twitter, like Twitter owns the data behind those people, but I want them to be in my list ‘cause you never know what's gonna happen with Twitter now, Elon Musk doing things and whatnot. But, anyway, I use mainly lead magnets to get subscribers on my own list, for DTC brands, we mainly use incentives or discounts or bonuses, to get people on the list, but from personal experience, like if I have like a cheat sheet that has like 51 headline, um, formulas on it, like I'd put that up like, Hey, if you want a piece of this, like here's the link to go get it. It goes to my website, they submit their info, and then now they're part of my list and they get an email every week about like, new in email information or it's basically the same thing I put up on Twitter, but yeah, on the newsletter, but you never know if they're gonna see it on Twitter, but they're gonna see it on the newsletter.

Jim: And so like basically you're going out through different mediums, whether it's Twitter Yep, whether it's YouTube, whatever it might be, and your call to action is to go do something which leads them to your website. Is that what I'm understanding?

Nikita: Yeah, that's the best way to do it because no, like there isn't a platform. Twitter used to have it before, I think Musk took over, it was called Review or Review or something, or Revel, I don't remember what it is. But you used to be able to subscribe to someone's newsletter by providing them your Twitter email. That's not existent anymore. So now you'd have to go to your website, go to that specific page and submit your info. The cool thing is I make it very easy for people to do that ‘cause all they have to do is just submit the form and they immediately get redirected to that resource file, but, for the most part, it's, you would have to have it captured on your website, for that, we use active campaign internally and for DTC brands, we use Clavio or Attentive, they have native pop-up builders that we can, get customer info on based off of like user activity on the website.

Jim: Okay, that's great information. And so when you have a client come in, do you start with showing them how to build a list and how to put that content out there?

Nikita: Yes and no. So most of the time, like actually one of the lead qualifications we have internally is we don't work with brands that have less than 10,000 email subscribers. So we don't usually work with startups, we mainly work with already existing brands that have gone through like, they're doing anywhere between like 40 to 70 k a month in revenue, and email is like that missing channel or SMS is that missing channel that they need help with, so while they may have like 10,000 subscribers or sometimes maybe even eight, depending on the case by case situation, they may still have a bad way of capturing those customers. So most of the time we don't work with them on the content, we mostly work on the popup itself and optimizing that to increase like the conversion rate of people opting in. So for example, we had a brand that signed on about two weeks ago, their conversion rate was 2%. So out of a hundred visitors, only two people would sign up for their email list. We were able to take them from two people out of every a hundred to 10 people out of every a hundred. And that significantly improved everything else across the board without us even touching it. So while I think with their flow revenue, so like they were making on their automations that they have set up, they were making about 500 bucks a month, we were able to take them to like 6.5K a month.

Jim: Excellent.

Nikita: After that switch in the next 30 days.

Jim: So for the, so for the Remote Start Nation who might not have an email list of 10,000 or 8,000 that can hit you up and say, Hey, let's work together. What are some things that you can provide right now that, some value that say like, Hey, listen, you kind of hit it on the head earlier and I just want to get it back in more detail, but what value can you give them that says, Hey, like this is what you should be doing to build that list? For me, I right away think, how are you, what can you provide that is going to resonate with your perfect customer, right? Like, what is it that you offer that you want to provide them, that then you can get them on when you're emailing and it's something that you can continue to give them value in. Am I following that?

Nikita: Yes. So it's different for BTB and different for DTC, I'll go over both of them here ‘cause I know like your audience is a little split, that's not everyone does DTC and not everyone does B2B. So for B2B I would say the big thing that would help a person sign onto your list is some sort of information, like you just have a piece of information that is valuable to that person that they would want and that are willing to give up their email or for that piece of information. So for example, if you had like the fast, course to scaling an email marketing agency like that's really relevant for me, I'd give you my email list and phone number to find out that information. And same thing goes for the specific niche that you work in, whether it's like insurance, like how to get the lowest insurance rates possible, here's the guide, and it's like, put in your email list, you'll get the guide and you'll figure out how to get the lowest insurance you know, for DTC side of things, it's completely different because a lot of people that are shopping for specific products in brands, they don't really go for the information side, like you can do the information, but for the most part, the big thing is just going to be incentives or discounts. So there, it's anywhere between like a 5%, 10% free shipping, you know, what have you. That kind of, and that's usually what leads people in. The funny thing is when we work with DTC brands, we usually don't tell the customer what the discount is. And that's why we have had a really high success or high success rate in getting a high conversion rate is because we say like, sign up for your special surprise offer and then people are like, what's the surprise offer? And then they put in their email and then it's like, you know, they get the discount code. So adding that error mystery also helps out on the DTC side. So I'd highly recommend that, but for the B2B side, keep it very straightforward and make sure that like it's something that a person would want.

Jim: That's great advice, yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. So now let's talk about the clients that have a big enough email list to come to Aspect and, you know, Hey, Nikita, we wanna work with you. Like, let's walk through the steps of what you would take somebody through that comes to work with you.

Nikita: Yeah, of course. We have a very quick onboarding process actually. So usually they would come in, booking a call. We have a call, booking page on our website where they can, where we sit down, chat through what's going on, what do they need help with, where are they missing things, I'll walk them through like a live audit, you know, go through their Clavio account or their active campaign account, whatever they're using, and I'll see like, okay, they're missing design, they need a better design to email, they need, they're missing copy or like they're missing revenue here. So there I get a sense of what we need to work on, if everything's good, they want to, you know, go through and work together, great, we'll send them out an email, we have like an onboarding process, it's like a five video part series hosted by yours truly, where we go through and I explain to them like how the working relationship is going to be, we have a call, about like a few days after the initial sales call where we sit down and chat through the entire email marketing plan that my team has put, we also sit down and get a better idea of what their ideal customer is. So finding out more like how, like what kind of voice are we using? Is it cheeky, is it serious? That sort of thing, find that out more, find out who their competitors are, find out basically any information that we would need to fulfill successfully for that client. And most of it is just customer information. We get access to all the tool or all the software that they have, all the tools that they have attached to their email marketing, and then we start working on concepting. So what emails are we gonna be sending out this month? Is 4th of July coming up or is Christmas coming up? Like those things we need to be prepared for in advance so that way we know what to focus on. So once we have a general scope of work outlined with like what emails we're gonna be sending out, we let the client know they approve, great. If they don't approve, what do we need to revise? Revise that, then we start working on the copy and the designs. We usually do three to four batches a month. So like one to two emails or two to three emails at a time, we don't wanna overwhelm the client. So, we send out the first couple batches, if everything's good, we set them up and send them out at the discussed time. If not cool, what do we need to revise? Revise it, resend it, and then send it out to their list. And usually that's all done within a month, and then after that first month of, you know, understanding the client and understanding their customer, it's pretty much smooth sailing from there on out, and the client gets to make a lot more money from their email account.

Jim: That's awesome, yeah, I saw, uh, on average you help clients grow by, what, 30% their revenue through their email?

Nikita: Yep. Yeah.

Jim: That's a big number.

Nikita: Yeah especially, and the thing is, it scales. So we've had clients that are doing like 70K and they're only bringing in like 15-20 K in revenue. But then we also had clients that are doing 400 k a month and a hundred, is their email revenue. So it scales very well as the bigger your brand gets, which is great, and at the same time, it's a really good way to stabilize your cost per acquisition because you're running Facebook ads, it costs you like 30 bucks to acquire a customer, most, like most of the time you're gonna be losing money on that first customer and emails. What's gonna help you get that second, third, fourth, fifth purchase from that customer, you know, sort of leveling out that cost requisition that you pay to Zack.

Jim: Yeah, do you have a certain amount of emails that you find work? Like, I'm always, for me personally, like I'm always worried, like I know I have emails that come in that at first I'm all about a brand, and then after like 15 emails in a week, I'm like, I'm done. Like delete, like I can't handle this, is there a certain number you think fits really well with the amount of emails the branch should be sending out per week or per month?

Nikita: Yeah, of course. So we do, it depends on the brand and it depends on the size of the brand because the smaller the brand, the less we have to work with and the bigger the brand, the more we have to work with. And I'll explain that in a second here. Because let's say a brand has like a list of like 10,000 emails. We can only stretch that list so far and stretch, I mean, segment the users. We can only do so much segmentation of that audience list, like let's say we usually segment it out to like people that engaged, most recently, people that have not engaged, people that are male, people that are female, people that have purchased, people that haven't purchased. You can only stretch that so far because you have a limited size of audience. So there, I would recommend anywhere between one to two emails a week. But when you get bigger, like if you have like 50,000 emails, you can segment, you have bigger pockets of audiences that you can hit at multiple times. So there you can send out four emails a week, but the thing is not every single person is getting all those four emails. One of those emails could have went to like past purchasers, one of those emails could have went to people, you know, bought product Y, but then pro by Product Z, you know, so that like the more, the bigger the list, the more creative you can get with how many emails you send out. But I guess a general rule of thumb is you don't wanna hit up the same exact person more than twice a week.

Jim: That's, I like that. I think that would be a pretty good number, as far as for D to C for sure. Do you feel from a B2B standpoint, it's even less than that?

Nikita: It depends. I usually, like, for me personally, I send out one newsletter a week. And I think that's just a good medium. And if sometimes, like sometimes I follow up with that list, like let's say like all the people that opened up a newsletter that I sent out this morning, right? I'd follow up with them like tomorrow or on Friday to see like, Hey, what'd you think of the newsletter just to get some feedback. But for the most part, I think B2B, like once a week, twice a week is sketchy, it depends. What kind of brand you are, I guess.

Jim: And do you still follow, like what B2B, like for your own agency, do you follow the still 80, 20 rule where you're 80% of your content is more educational and 20% is sales?

Nikita: For the most part, it's been like, if anything, a hundred zero, like I've been providing more, it's all sales, I'm kidding. It's more value, like I've rarely asked for like a pitch. The only pitch I've asked for is like, Hey, follow me on Twitter or like, Hey, if like what do you think of this newsletter? Versus like, Hey, do you want to raise your bottom line or whatever. Like I've used to do a lot more of that, but for the last like three to four months I've been focusing more so on, like building good engagement with the emails and getting good feedback before asking for like like a pitch.

Jim: And have you seen that? Is that proved to be more successful?

Nikita: So far, yeah, like I obviously like the more you ask, the more you're gonna receive. I haven't asked as much in the last three to four months. So I haven't received as many, like people that are interested, but I know when I do hit them with it, probably in the next two to three weeks, it's, I'm gonna get a big, like a good reply from it, like people, a lot of people are gonna be interested in working together.

Jim: So Remote Start Nation, get on his list right now and in two to three weeks, he's gonna send you the information and go sign up and get into his system and learn about being a client.

Nikita: You can just go on the website and book a call there.

Jim: There you go. Do you do a lot of initial consults just through your website? Is that the main way you start a consult?

Nikita: There's, that's the only way to contact me. Like, honestly, unless like, there's no phone numbers, no addresses, no emails that are out there, the only way to contact us is to book in a call or if you already have my email, you email me. So, or DM me on all the other social platforms. So I've had a lot of leads come through Twitter, I've had some leads come through Instagram, some leads come through YouTube, but yeah, that's the only way to contact me is through that like Calendly form.

Jim: That's Fantastic. We're doing something very similar on our end. So we've talked a lot about building a list. Let's talk a little bit about building a community, and just, through Twitter you said you've seen a lot of success and, you know, obviously you've built your YouTube channel hit on just building an online community a little bit.

Nikita: Yeah, I'd say it depends on which platform you're talking anout. Because LinkedIn and Twitter seem a little bit similar, but LinkedIn is way more business and like way more corporatey, you can't have as much fun, I think, with Twitter it's like a good way to think about it is like you're, you provide really good value, but you're like, it's like a boys' locker room on in the comments section, you know, like that's the way I see it, like everyone's goofing around in the comments, but like the value is there to back it up on like on the first thing. So I think building a community is easier when you can do back and forth chats, like with people like Instagram, it's a little bit harder cause you have to make a photo post and it's a lot harder to engage with people there, but with Twitter you can, you know, DM them immediately, you can reply back to their comments immediately, and I've had decent success with building a community there because a lot of people, like, they know that I'm gonna be releasing a, like a thread this week because I announced it or because I hyped them up about, or there's like go-to people that I DM there, so like you're building it, like they're still engaging with your content there, so that is very, it's relatively easy to do and then you can just transfer that community over to your newsletter and then you can have fun there.

Jim: So get engage them where they're at and then every once in a while I'll just drop or is it on every post you're dropping? Like, Hey, come join my newsletter, type thing.

Nikita: It's very, it's mostly on the lead magnets that I put out, and it's whenever I drop a thread, and I have it in my bio. I don't put it out on every single post, like some people, I don't, I just think that's like people get desensitized to it and then they skip, ‘cause I've seen myself do that, like, I follow one person for a specific piece of like advice on whatever they're doing. And then after every single tweet I see, like, Hey, if you wanna learn more, join the newsletter, if you wanna learn more, join the newsletter, and it's like, okay, I kind of don't want to anymore because I've seen this like on every single tweet. So I do it very sparingly, so like, it's like if, the way that Twitter works is when people see a piece of info, they immediately go to your bio or they go to your profile to check it out. And they're usually, they read through my bio and it like, I think the call to action I have is like, if you wanna learn more about email or SMS, subscribe here and it goes to the newsletter signup form.

Jim: Excellent, thank you. Well, I know our time's coming to an end, I had a couple more things I wanna talk about, but the first thing, before you, we let you go, will you let everybody know where they can find you? What your handles or, you know, where they, the email that they, or the website that they can go book an appointment.

Nikita: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for letting me do this. I'd say website is aspektagency.com. That's A-S-P-E-K-T agency.com, my Twitter handle is just Nikita Vakhrushev, v a k h r u s h e v is the last name, you'll find me, I have like a green profile photo, same thing with Instagram, same thing with LinkedIn and same thing with Youtube.

Jim: Awesome. And I'll put it in the show notes as well, so you'll be able to find it there. If you're following along, the last question I want to ask you before we l let you go, if there's one piece of advice of something we talked about today that you really want to hit home for the Remote Start Nation, what would that be?

Nikita: I'd say don't, like everyone says email is dead, everyone says like, oh, don't, like, email is like old, like no one uses email, it's like people use email, like get in touch with it, like get familiar with it. Get familiar with how to build a list, get familiar with how to manage that list, send out great valuable content that people would wanna come back to, I guess a better way to like curate that content is like, think of who you watch on a regular basis on YouTube or think of who you read on a regular basis. Why do you keep reading them, and just be that person, like provide that much amount of value and provide that much, I guess tho like that many resources out there that people want to follow you there, like you're, there's a reason why they subscribe to you, and the same thing, transfer transfers over to SMS. Like, take advantage of SMS while you can, before things get more what do you call it? Bureaucratic on the SMS side of things, so SMS is purely just emails, but shorter, so, get in touch there as well.

Jim: But SMS two is text message, right?

Nikita: Yes, text message.

Jim: Okay, yep. Well, awesome. I appreciate your time, I really do, it was awesome. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing all your value with Remote Start Nation.

Nikita: Yeah, it was a pleasure, Jim, very glad you had me on and I think a lot of people got value from this.

Jim: Definitely I look forward to staying in touch and with that said, Remote Start Nation, I hope you learned as much as I did today, and I hope you could put some of the value Nikita shared with us to work for you. So, from the bottom of my heart, as always, thank you for joining me on this journey as we help you to start a business, grow your brand, and create your desired lifestyle.

So remember, leave a comment, subscribe, most importantly, share this episode with your community who you think could learn from what you heard today. So until next time, go start something, start today, go build a lifestyle you desire by taking action. Until next time.