The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Rohaan Khan, CEO & Founder of Orange Trail Discusses Marketing and Ads In 2023

Episode Date: February 12, 2023

Rohaan Khan, CEO & Founder of Orange Trail Discusses Marketing and Ads In 2023 Orangetrail.io

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Oaks Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here.

We're going to be talking about how to run better ads on social media today. And we've got an amazing CEO and founder with us. We're going to be talking about that and how to protect yourself from having your ad account suspended or different ad issues that you can run into. It happens a lot lately. I see it on social media. We're going to be talking about that and getting some insight on how to run safer ads and and uh and uh also set up your ad sort of things and you know it's 2023 it's the beginning of the year and uh you can find out some strategies

to map out what you want to do to be more successful online with your advertising uh coming up uh in the meantime refer the show to your, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss. See our big group on LinkedIn. There's 130,000 people over there. Also go to LinkedIn, 4chesschrisvoss. See the big newsletter and all that sort of great stuff going on. Today, we have Rohan Khan on the show with us today. He is a founder and CEO of a company called Orange Trail. And he has a master's degree in psychology with five years of experience scaling up multiple six to seven figure e-commerce brands with a collective revenue of over $10 million. In 2021, he founded Orange Trail, an agency that helps advertisers navigate through advertising bans by leveraging his strong industry contacts. He's formed partnerships with major platforms and got 400 clients and built a team of 20 full-time employees within 12 months and became one of the fastest-growing annual recurring revenue in the advertising industry. He is well-known for helping marketers advertise with stability and scale their business without bans.

Welcome to the show, Rohan. How are you? Thank you very much, Chris, and I appreciate that intro. I'm very well, thanks. Thanks a lot. Yeah, it's been a bit of a wild journey so far. There you go. It sounds like you scaled up quite fast. Well, you know, here's the thing. I think perfect product, perfect timing, perfect audience, if you can get that congruence, you know, the sky's the limit.

And I feel like that's something that we have right now at Orange Co. And with COVID, I mean, it's a whole lot of people, hey, man, you need to be online because sometimes being in person, I know a lot of companies are scrambling to move from brick and mortar. You know, they're used to getting their business through customers coming in. You know, they said, hey, you got to go online. Give us the.io for your website, please. So, yeah, it's orangegrill.io.

And, yeah, just adding to what you said about COVID, I think it was a real wake-up call for a lot of companies, but also employees and workers alike. They realized, hey, I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket. So now what you see is a lot of companies are saying, okay, now we are allowing work from home. I think the Netherlands recently allowed a mandate which said that there is mandatory work from home for, I think, one or two days a week, which is insane. It's mandatory. So companies need to abide by that whether they like it or not. There you go. So give us an overall arcing of what, in your words, of what you do with your company. Sure. So Orange Trail is an agency that provides whitelisted ad accounts to advertisers. What is a whitelisted ad account? Well, everyone has standard ad accounts.

You go into a Facebook profile, you go to the homepage, you go to the ads manager. You have an ad account there. But this is just a standard account that a personal profiler can have. They're missing out on a lot of benefits and features, such you know with our accounts we have unlimited spend from day one you don't get banned as easily we have a direct line of access to reps which guarantees you an answer within 24 hours and we all know how facebook support is you know it might take weeks just to get a response from them oh yeah if at all exactly if at all so you know i wouldn't get my hopes up on that so how we started was basically I just realized there's a huge pain point in the industry.

Everyone was struggling with bands. We had a $40 million brand that came to us and said, hey, guys, listen, you know, we're in trouble. We have our Facebook ads page gone down, ad account gone down. Can you help us? And I was just thinking in my head, like, you're a $40 million brand. You would imagine you have some kind of contingency or backup plan. So, you know, that's how wide the problem is on the spectrum. You have small advertisers, large advertisers, and everyone was struggling. So I kind of put together this agency based on a problem. And as Elon Musk always says, you get paid in proportion to the level of problems you solve.

The bigger the problem, the more you get paid. So in this case, obviously money is not really the biggest factor, but it was more so how can I solve a pain point in the industry,

get fulfillment at the same time, and also make a ton of cash? And yeah, the answer was Orange Trail. Now we provide these whitelisted premium level ad accounts to advertisers which are direct from like meta facebook google tiktok snapchat twitter all the asvs as well um and these accounts just don't go down as easily you know they are much stronger and in the event that you

know they do rarely go down we have our reps that just pull them back within 24 to 48 hours and you're live advertising again. That's awesome. You know, that's been a concern of mine for the longest time. You know, we've had, we have, you know, authors of all sort of shapes. And we have people that come on, they've written novels and fiction. And then we have great nonfiction writers. You know, yesterday we had CNN's Ellie Conaghan. And we had, and sometimes these authors talk about politics. uh, Kona gone. Um, and we had, uh,

and sometimes these authors talk about politics. Well, these are books, these are historical, uh, you know, things where people are talking about what's going on in history and, you know, we'll, we'll get, we'll get buggering from Facebook over, well, this you're running political ads. No, no, we're, we're talking about an interview we did as somebody who wrote a book, man. And we'll have to fight through the you know just try and just get an ad just we're advertising really the podcast um in the interview we did we're not we're not trying to get elected right exactly so those algorithms are crazy man you know how it works right you

understand how that how the flagging works, right? For those who don't, let me just briefly explain. So irrespective of, you know, Chris, you're advertising something which you're not a politician, you're not trying to sell something political. But even if it has a hint of politics in the copy and the creative and the headline, even on your landing page, Facebook has tools that scan all aspects of your ads, your landing page, your creative. And if there's anything that triggers this, oh, this is a political or social impact ad, it will automatically just restrict it or disable or just disapprove the ad. Now, this is, again, it's AI. It's an algorithm. And they put into the machine like, okay, if X and Y is hit, then that's a trigger.

So it's not always an individual or a person viewing your ads. And that's where the problem is. For the company size being so big and there's a lot of advertisers, they just simply don't have enough manpower. Especially now with the layoffs that recently happened. I wouldn't get my hopes up anytime soon. So these problems will continue, I think. Yeah, it's crazy what's going on. So you guys offer these by having these agency accounts or these, what would you call them again, white label accounts?

Agency accounts, whitelisted ad accounts. There's a lot of names for them. Yeah. And so they can use these and i guess you guys run the run the ad making for them right you probably don't turn them over to me so i can play with them right no so a good question this is a common misconception we don't run any ads for the clients we kind of just provide you the platform the ad account okay you you do everything yourself and oh the what we assist with is for

example with um setting up the accounts then the ongoing maintenance of the accounts for example if you need to top up the funds agency accounts you can't really put your cards on them it's more so a prepaid model where our finance team would issue an invoice and you tell us how much you want to load it up like a phone like a prepaid phone okay and you load it how much you want to load it up, like a phone, like a prepaid phone. Oh, okay. And you load it up with credit. And then it's just like a constant topping up. If you want to add media buyers, remove people, that's all processed through us. So that's like the ongoing maintenance of the account. There you go.

There you go. Pretty interesting on how to do that. And you've scaled up quite fast. I mean, what do you assign the success of scaling up so fast within the year or two of your business? So what are some things you attribute to the success of that, too? You're asking for the secret sauce now, Chris. Well, I mean, yeah, sure, man. Or you can tell me on the side after the show. Well, my competitors are probably going to be listening but um luckily there's not many of them because um one thing i i didn't mention is that this service we provide

is highly exclusive one of a handful of agencies worldwide that can actually provide this um the service uh reason being is because you really need these industry contracts you need to have direct contacts in reps and platforms that not everyone has and the only way i got access to them was by me myself spending millions and millions on ads myself of my own money and getting connected with the right people um and after that we you know just put pen to paper so now i'm proud to say like orange trail has contracts and agreements with asps from facebook google tiktok snapchat twitter bing so i did a deal with microsoft as well uh I'm proud to say like Orange Trail has contracts and agreements with ASPs from Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Bing. So I did a deal with Microsoft as well, Taboola and Outbrain.

So it's like pretty much 360 every ad platform you can imagine. Nice. In terms of our growth, yeah, it's a good question. How the hell do you grow to seven-figure annual recurring revenue in just 12 months and a team of now it's 24 full-time and you know we did 18 million revenue last in the last 12 months alone so how do you do that well we have multiple funnels the funnels are in terms of client acquisition so let me talk about the client acquisition side first so you know obviously you have ads you can run ads to google facebook tiktok and try to acquire clients through there so top of form cold traffic and through there we're getting leads

the leads are booking calls with our biz dev team and then biz dev team are getting around the call checking if they're eligible or not close or you know disqualify so that's one funnel a second which in my opinion is largely underrated, is partnerships. We had to, like my business partner and I, Ari, we flew around the world to many events like Dubai, Barcelona. I just came from Texas last week. We were at a Triple Whale event in Austin. And we're flying to these events because we understand there's huge companies there. Triple Whale, you know, they just did a 25 million Series B funding.

It's a nine-figure company. We met the guys from retention.com, Georgia. So like all of these huge companies, we meet the founders, we meet, you know, the CEOs and we're like, hey, listen, you know, there's an opportunity here. We have over 400 clients spending quite a lot of money. You guys are, you know, need an X and Y. And then it's become a partnership where you exchange leads. they might send us leads we'll send them leads so that

was the second uh very big part of our success is that we just like front loaded bootstrap everything we're just going hard on partnerships um third would be that there's a lot of a lot of large communities within facebook i don't know if you've seen these groups that are like ad leaks, ad buyers, e-com empires, these huge groups that have like six-figure members. I know you have groups as well, so you understand these groups are out there. What we did was, first of all,

we got our team to offer value in the community with no expectation or return. It was just, let's offer value. Let's get noticed. And when people notice that you're just providing value, you know, assisting wherever, you know, not pitching your services, but just assisting with advice or feedback, they start to notice you.

And I remember, you know, I was just adding value constantly to the groups. And one guy who's the admin of the groups, he said, hey, man, I noticed your company. What are you guys doing exactly? So we get on a call, we get on another call. And then eventually who's the admin of the groups, he said, Hey man, I noticed your company. What are you guys doing exactly? So we get on a call, we get on another call and then eventually he's like, Hey, we want to make you an official partner for our groups. So now we have, you know, partnership with ad buyers, ad leaks.

These are Facebook groups with like large member base. And because we're an official partner now, we can actually pitch our services in the group without getting kicked out. So, you know, that was another great lead lead source and then there's another one is referrals now we're very generous with our referral commission we give 15 15 lifetime as long as the client works with us you're getting a check every month some of our biggest referrers we're sending five figures a month just you know as a referral commission there you go yeah and that's great because when they see that money they're even more motivated like oh orange trail is gonna pay me out a bunch

it's gonna cover my bills let me you know send more people so we're selfless on that regard because we understand like i'm fine with dropping the margins because i want people to feel that okay we're providing value and they appreciate the value um and then aside from that, it's just we have a few other funnels which I can't mention because they're a little bit off the grid I would say, but it's that's the secret sauce.

I always call that proprietary. It's always funny to me how many people don't understand what that means. People ask me, oh, what's your business model, Chris? And how do you all your different revenue streams? I'm like, that's proprietary. And it's like, and it's like, they're in shock. They're just like, what do you mean it's proprietary? I'm like, you know, I come from a world of brick and mortar where you didn't tell people your business model, you know? Uh, and that's, that's, that's the world I came from. So, you know, I learned a

long time ago in brick and mortar, you don't tell people, you know, I had enough employees that would, you know, copy whatever our model was and go start their own brick and mortar company. And so it's funny to me when I tell people that. And, you know, so there has to be secret aspects of your business that are proprietary because, you know, I mean, sometimes that is the secret sauce, right? Absolutely. Now, I know you're not a competitor, so I'm happy to tell you aside, you know, but I'm writing this down and I'm going to, no, I don't have bandwidth. But yeah, there's always someone who's going to be listening and they're going to be like, oh, you know, I can do this and we don't do the same. And it's just some things better left untold. That's okay. And then when they fail, then all their clients come to you.

So it sounds like you're doing a lot of – you know, like I say, I have a lot of friends in the space that you're in, not the exact space, but, you know, trying to help run ads for clients and stuff on social media. And constantly, like I said, I see them. They'll post, another client's account suspended. This guy, what is going on with Facebook? Is that Mark Zuckerberg? Blah, Zuckerberg blah blah blah you know and constant complaining about it and I just always see it

I'm just like god damn I gotta be careful with my account and you know I kind of wonder you know we've had we've had our accounts my big Twitter account got suspended because I was friending too many people one day I was building a list of journalists because, you know, we interviewed them a lot on the show.

I sent too many friend requests, and it was like it kept sending me warnings. I was like, you sent too many friend requests. And so I stopped, and the next morning someone signed up to be interviewed. And so I went, okay, well, let's friend them on Twitter. Hit the friend button, uh, so I went, okay, well, let's friend them on Twitter, hit the friend button. Boom. The count gone. Um,

and, uh, same thing with like Instagram. I don't know. We, we had our Instagram hacked by a Chinese company. Can't ever get it back. I saw that legal stuff.

I need to send a Facebook to try and get their attention on it. Um, even applied for their, uh, to try and get the Instagram account back. Cause it was responding to us in Chinese. It was coming back that we got hacked by some Chinese and it came through a third party app.

Cause we had, we had two factor idea, but we lost it. And we even sent the required legal stuff to the mediation to try and get them to turn it back on and no response. Like I, I'm literally going to sue Facebook at this point and of a 30-day notice of intent um yeah and so it's just on that you know note you can imagine if the ad accounts themselves are getting banned it's

it's nothing but if you have hacks this is a different department altogether it's the integrity account integrity security team that's even more serious so you can imagine on the ad stuff which they're making their revenue from that's how make facebook makes its money if the support is so bad here now you can imagine the other departments it's going to be even worse so go figure you know go figure go figure uh so what sort of uh other things have we do we need to touch on about who you guys are and what you do? So, you know, I'll go a little bit deeper into giving some advice to any advertisers out there who are currently advertising and how you can basically make your setup bulletproof in terms of protecting your business.

So let me just go a little bit deeper into that. Right now, when you said, I need to be a little bit careful, you're probably running ads to something or you know you have a business on the side well let's let's look at that a little bit deeper you know do you have one business manager containing the ad account and that's it that's just all it is because what can happen there is if all your eggs are in one basket and one business manager imagine that business manager gets disabled your ad account's gone your page will be potentially restricted and your business suffers as a result so one little strategy that we created at orange trail is it's not really a strategy it's just what we've found to be the

safest way to make uh your advertising setup decentralized which is using multiple business managers this is completely allowed it's it's allowed in the eyes of Facebook. For example, if you have a friend or a family member and they don't run ads or never have, you can create a business manager from them and share the assets across each of the BMs. So let me explain. Imagine you have an ad account where you're running the ads,

a page, which is, you know, Chris Voss show, and then the business manager that contains these two assets. Okay. What we suggest is to make sure that your risk is as limited as possible. You have multiple business managers. So two or three, they would act like satellite BMS, satellite business managers, where each of the BM has one asset. So this BM is only for running ads. Second BM is only containing the page. And the third BM is only, for example, having your media buyers as admins through which you're running the ads. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.

Okay. And I'll tell you why we do this. Imagine one of the BMs go down. It doesn't impact the other two. And what you can actually do is log into one of the VMs go down. It doesn't impact the other two. And what you can actually do is log into the other two VMs and remove the third VM. So that way, you still have the two VMs, and you can work on getting a third replacement as well. At no point will each of these VMs affect each other if one goes down, even if two go down. You still have that aspect of having one backup at the safety net. That is brilliant. That is brilliant. And then you're never risking your main account.

I mean, people do this kind of with email too as well, where if they send out email marketing, they don't use their main account sometimes and they use a separate account. Yeah, similar domains. They might buy multiple domains that look alike. So, yeah, it's a similar concept. It's crazy to me that brands came to us 40 million dollar brands everything in one bm and i'm just like whoa you're like you're one down away from completely collapsing your online advertising uh yeah i mean you can you can be run out of business if you're not careful yeah absolutely here's another thing we see time

and time again businesses built entirely on one traffic source. How does that make sense? You're putting all your eggs again in one basket. So what happens when one of those traffic platforms, let's say Facebook, decides to restrict you, you have no traffic coming in. So you have no visitors, you're getting no sales. You have no business. So another common rant I go on is that it's 2023, guys. Don't be a lazy marketer. You need to diversify your traffic sources. You need to at least try other things. Okay, you have Facebook. Try TikTok. Try Snapchat. You should definitely have Google.

Diversify your traffic sources because at the end of the day, if one goes down, you still have some revenue and some stream of traffic coming in. It just makes a lot of sense. Where do you find the best places for ads nowadays, if you want to share that with me? What seems to be the best place to put your ads? So this is a very difficult question to answer because there's a lot of factors at play here. What is the offer? What is the audience that you're trying to reach um i was speaking with vince varnock last week and we discussed how the setup and the division of your traffic sources should be and there's no one answer all i can say is check what is your

offer and who is your target audience and then you need to align this with the platform so let's imagine your offer is for a product that's maybe targeting elderly people above 50 plus well it wouldn't make much sense to launch that on tiktok now would it because tiktok's demographic is is young right so you're probably going to be pissing away money in the way you know and that's not really something you want to do. You want to find the demographic data from each platform. And these, these are available readily on the internet, you can check, you know, TikTok's demographic breakdown, you can see what the user base is, what age per country, how many, how many in each category, so 18 to 25, 25 to 34, you can check the categories and see what is the percentage of users in there and then accordingly run ads to that now facebook has always just been the best bang for buck i

think it's like the undisputed king yeah but i do feel like tiktok is slightly you know it's coming up it's taking over the demographic is is younger but even my own mother was like oh check out this reel and i was like you're on tiktok i was shocked know, you're on TikTok. So he knows, you know, we have a paradigm shift coming up now. And, you know, I think TikTok is winning in a lot of different aspects and they're garnering attention. And I think in this current day and age, attention is the biggest commodity. So I think TikTok is winning on that. But aside from that, again, it's a very difficult question to answer.

I would need to know what is the product, what is the audience, so it needs to have congruence on the traffic platform fit. Yeah, definitely. And then the format of it. That TikTok is really turning into something, man. I mean,

I'm even a TikTok addict. I'll admit it. I have a problem. My name is Chris Voss, and I am a TikTok addict. Welcome, Chris. It is – I mean, you can spend hours on that thing. You get lost. Right. It's hypnotic.

Did you see the way that it's structured, the feed? Have you seen that? Let's talk about that. Yeah. I mean, have you seen how, like – the i mean i could open mine up but the the slides between different posts there's no divider it's just like an endless loop you're scrolling and it's like new real new real there's no white line in between there's no dividing between posts they're designed in a way where it's like an endless loop of just nonstop. You're almost like brain dead and you're swiping.

And to be honest, they're investing big time into the design, the UI, because it's the user experience that leads to these platforms making or breaking it. And I think TikTok has just crushed it. And now Instagram copied it as well. Go on your instagram homepage check when you go between posts can you see how it's divided up often it's not it's a smooth seamless scroll so that way you can continuously go and 30 minutes have gone by and you're like oh my god what i've done you know so you know it's funny because it feeds you your

algorithm so whatever you're watching i have to be have to be careful if I end up seeing something that's kind of stupid or outside what I like to watch. But, you know, maybe it's really dumb. And you're like, oh, watch a person crash into a wall or, you know, some sort of car crash joke. And then you have to be careful because you're like, oh, crap, I'm going to get more of that. And I really didn't want that. It was just kind of like whatever. Yeah, it's so addictive and uh it's very entertaining um and the content's very good i thought it was kind of interesting elon musk was talking about uh about bringing back vine which technically was the original tiktok when you really think about it. Yeah, in a way, I think quite similar.

Yeah. And there's so many opportunities Twitter missed that they left on the table they could have been the leader of. It's kind of funny how that whole thing played out. I know, right? I feel like Elon came in at the right time, and I think he's trying different things to monetize it now. Did you see that obviously there's the verified eight dollars a month but he's also saying that companies need to pay a thousand

dollars a month to uh really keep their uh blue tick i read something about this so he's trying different you know radical strategies and look this is what you have to do um i think a large contingent of twitter were just sitting on their asses making tiktoks every day a day in the life of a tiktok twitter employee and they're just sipping starbucks and you know eating donuts in the there was literally no work being done and i i just realized that like he fired a lot of the workforce and to be honest to make the platform profitable that's what you need to do yeah and now the other platforms are following suit amazon just let go 10 of their um you know workforce and Meta 10%. So there's quite a lot of layoffs happening.

And I think the pendulum is swinging back now. It's like we don't care. We just want profitability. We want success. So it's interesting what's going on now. Yeah, it definitely is. Do you think that he can – I mean a lot of advertisers ran away from Twitter when he took over and they were concerned about it. Do you think that maybe, do you think he'll recover it?

Do you think he's doing the right steps? So there's two ways to look at it. As the user and as the company itself. From the company point of view, I think it required radical change. And I think if I look at at it if i was on the exec team i would say go elon from the user point of view um i still appreciate what he's doing he's allowing people irrespective of whether people like them or not or you know they're controversial figures in the industry um because what what is it what is twitter it's like you know you have to

respect the free speech and if you're just going you know, block out people that you may not agree with, because I think the Twitter sphere was run quite, you know, radically by the left, if you ask me. And they were just banning people they didn't like. And now I think Elon's like, no, wait, that's wrong. It doesn't matter if you like them or not. We still have to hear them out because it's free speech. So it's hit and miss. In terms of advertising revenue, actually, I'll give you some inside information.

So with our Twitter reps, we recently found out that they've enabled conversions without needing to meet a certain minimum threshold or ad spend or criteria. And actually, Twitter is really, really get good bang for buck on the ads. to meet a certain minimum threshold or ad spend criteria. And actually, Twitter is really, really, you get good bang for buck on the ads. So I think they've enabled this now because they want to open the floodgates, more advertiser revenue. Anyone interested in Twitter advertising,

I would highly recommend that you test it out. Again, it depends on what your offer is, what your industry is. But I think that people are actually coming back to running Twitter ads because they've unlocked conversions and, um, your CPMs are quite low again. So I would, I would recommend going back to Twitter. There was a great time when COVID first hit that buying advertising was really cheap because everyone pulled back their ad dollars and, uh, the CPM costs got really cheap because everyone pulled back their ad dollars. And the CPM costs got really cheap and really low. So what's the best way for clients to work with you, reach out to you,

get to know you better, get that first initial handshake to find out if maybe your service is right for them? Well, we're visible on Google. If you just type in Orange Trail, you know, you'll see some of our links. But if you want to go direct to our website and book a call, it would be orangetrail.io. And I just have to say that, you know, not all advertisers are eligible. We do have to check, you know, if you would be eligible to run. For example, we don't tolerate any, you know, black hat ads or you know gray hat

anything that's risky or like a fraudulent or scam we had one chinese company come to us and they were like hey can we run a video with elon musk's face uh doing a tesla crypto scam and we're like get out wow so you know there is there is advertisers like they're like this um they exist and you know aside from our morals and principles we don't want to facilitate any of that. It's also our relationships with these platforms and the reps. We don't want to jeopardize that. So you can book a call at orangetrail.io. You can reach us on Instagram, orangetrail.

And yeah, if you're eligible, we can definitely see if we can help you out with agency accounts. That's awesome, Sauce. Check it out, folks, orangetrail.io. It's been very insightful, Rohan, to have you on the show with us today. Thank you, Chris. It's been a pleasure being here. Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in.

Go to youtube.com for Chess Chris Voss, goodreads.com for Chess Chris Voss, all of our assets across the social media sphere there. Even on TikTok, we're trying to be cool over there, but we're still trying to figure it out. It's hard over there. Those kids are young. Yeah, absolutely. I'm just like, what is this old guy doing on TikTok?

Anyway, thanks to everyone for tuning in. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you guys next time.