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Ashley Stanford

Ice Cream Social

Ashley Stanford


@0:02 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hello everyone and welcome to the Shades of Entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Flores. Today I'm here with Ashley, Stanford. Ashley, how are we doing?

@0:11 - Ashley Stanford

I'm doing great, Gabriel. Thanks for having me.

@0:15 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

No, thank you for joining the show. So we're going be talking quite a bit of different things because Ashley, she's the Executive VP at Client Strategy for Ticket Socket, as well as the Co-Founder and VP of Ice Cream Social, which is a ticket widget up with that streamline and maximizes ticket revenues for clients.

So we're going to get into a lot of that. But first, before we jump into all of that, Ashley, give us an introduction.

@0:41 - Ashley Stanford

I really love that question. Start out right up the bat. All right, I mean, from an entrepreneurial perspective, I've been doing digital marketing for about 17 years now, have always done built-up relamps career during that entire time.

I've, of course, do work. with companies. So I kind of like to say that I'm just prenuer. And that can be, you know, I do have a lot of entrepreneurial endeavors.

I have intrapreneurial where I'm working inside of companies. And then of course, I've always just got some fun solo or projects going.

And I live in Orange County, California, in Huntington Beach. And I've got two and a half kits, one on the way.

@1:29 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it.

@1:30 - Ashley Stanford

Yeah.

@1:32 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Love it. Yeah. Good old sunny California. I was down there a couple months ago, and I got to tell you folks, if you have not been able to visit Orange County, please do.

It is gorgeous. It is usually the weather is pretty good.

@1:45 - Ashley Stanford

So, and complain.

@1:47 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So let's get into it. Let's tell us about your current venture ice cream solution. Love to learn a little bit more about that.

@1:55 - Ashley Stanford

Tell us what it is and how you started. Sure. as you mentioned, I work with a company called Ticket Socket that does white label ticketing, and my role essentially at Ticket Socket was to help all of our clients sell as many tickets as possible without spending more money in their marketing budget.

And, you know, we just kind of got to a point where we'll have all different marketing channels deployed. We've got a great strategy and things are running, but you kind of hit a plateau and it's like what more can we do to drive sales, but we also just don't want to keep spending more money on Facebook ads.

And that question, which was poised to me by a couple clients, really got us thinking over there of like, what could we do?

And that's where the idea for ice cream social was born. And essentially what it is, is a widget that you can bolt onto any website or check out flow and it incentivizes word of mouth marketing.

we're all familiar with word about marketing. We're familiar with influencers. And this basically gameifies it and turns every single customer into an influencer.

And I am popular opinion, but I would like to say that every single person, whether you know it or not, is an influencer, even if you're not on social media.

@3:24 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

This is very true.

@3:26 - Ashley Stanford

We all have friends and family that we to.

@3:28 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

This is very true. And it's interesting. I think what you're doing essentially with this ice cream social is you're kind of helping the ticket company with their sales funnel, essentially, to create a loyal consumer.

@3:44 - Ashley Stanford

Exactly. Just helping events take their existing customer database who are the best people to ask who would want to come to the event because they've already bought a ticket and are going and probably have friends and family.

with similar interests that would want to go. So we're just, you know, pulling that lever and making it so easy and incentivizing them for just inviting people.

@4:10 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it. You know, folks, I think we've talked about this before. So let's kind of just, you know, quick overview of the referring provider, the referral, the referral, funnel, marketing funnel.

is it so important? I keep on saying referring provider because I work in the healthcare world and I created one for healthcare specifically, but the sales funnel.

So think of the sales funnel is, you know, the first thing you want to do is awareness stage, right?

You're trying to get individuals aware of that's, that's where Ashley wasn't mentioning Facebook really comes into play, right? You're building your brain and then you want to get them down to the consideration stage.

Now they're starting to consider purchasing your service, your items, or whatever that may be, right? And then the third stage is the actual purchase.

Okay, now they made a purchase. They now have your product or service in hand. And what Ashley is now trying to do is now helping you create a loyal consumer, which is the fourth stage in your funnel.

the last And the reason why this is important, the reason why Ashley would mention, you know, everybody is in fact an influencer, even if you don't have social media, because your words, if you go out and you tell one of your friends about the copy shop that you just went to right down the road, they may be more inclined to go to that copy shop.

Now, the beauty of it is the copy shop actually wants more and more people to talk about how awesome the copy shop is because it's free, right?

It's free marketing for them. essentially, you just created a way to incentivize those people to talk about it.

@5:30 - Ashley Stanford

Yeah, exactly.

@5:31 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So tell me, how does the incentive piece work?

@5:34 - Ashley Stanford

Sure. So we customize that for each client that we work with. And if it wasn't obvious, this tool worked out very well to the point where we peeled it off as just a feature of ticket socket and became its own standalone company, which is why it's now called Ice Cream Social.

And essentially, we work with each client and there's some different factors that we take into consideration. What are they selling?

What's the average cart total, what's their demographic, and will craft an offer? A lot of times what it looks like that we see perform really well is, hey, invite your friends.

If you get five friends to buy a ticket, we'll refund you for your ticket. lot of times that cost to refund somebody for a ticket is way lower than the cost prequisition on your other marketing channels.

@6:31 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That's a smart endeavor, and I really like how, again, it's kind of like encouraging. That's the point system, right?

know, people want to kind of get to that point. Now, let's take a step back. would love to learn how you got into the ticket market, like this industry, this kind of, this, you know, tickets.

@6:53 - Ashley Stanford

How did you get into that? Well, actually, the company that started the people that started ticket socket. That was my very first job 17 years old.

Another company that did website development. And so over the years it morphed into ticket socket. There was a period of time obviously where I went out on my own and consulted with other companies.

And I still do all of that. But you know, once you meet great people and you stay connected and network like some relationships never die.

when the time was right and the opportunity was there, I came back to work with them again in a much larger capacity than I had over the years.

But in my consulting, I worked in a lot of different industries. did focus a lot in healthcare. very interesting.

Actually medical device more specifically for about 10 years and then did a lot of FinTech and then kind of morphed into it.

to events. And that was so intriguing to me to make that jump because in, as you likely know, because I'm sure it's very similar in healthcare, but with medical device, you do so much marketing, digital marketing, but because of like, compliancy, HIPAA, all those things, and the fact that big medical device brands are marketing to consumers, but their actual client is doctors.

There's this whole process where you actually don't always know if your marketing's working other than just watching upward trends.

So that's as much as I love the red tape because it forces you to be so creative. I did want to really play in the world of marketing where you can immediately track that return on ad spend.

So that's where I got really excited about trying my hand in events.

@8:58 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That, you know, I think you brought up a great point in the end. the healthcare world, it is extremely difficult, especially if you're an academic medical center, that's where I work in.

Because, you know, a lot of the times you're, it's very, usually the patients that come into our hospital are referred by another provider, they're not self-referred, because they're super complex cases that are coming up to us.

And so just trying to figure out, okay, who's that referring provider, then where the referred providers sold, are referred to the general cardiologist, then came up to our advanced heart failure, trying to track that journey, trying to see which patients are coming to our website for why, but to your point, the patients aren't my target, it's the referring providers.

So it's very, it's very difficult, it's very difficult. Now, one of the things you also mentioned Ashley was, which I thought was really cool, you're not an entrepreneur, not an entrepreneur, you're a brand new, because you've been doing a lot of things.

fact, folks, an entrepreneur just for general definition is exactly what kind of Ashley explained where she was with TicketSocket, and then created an entire new business line that is now a standalone company, an ice cream, social, so you're working with a network.

organization, you create an entrepreneurial endeavor that spins off. So tell us a little bit about how you kind of decided, because you mentioned you went from working with ticket socket, then you went to consulting and came back.

What ultimately decided, like made you decide, and what I'm going to go ahead and do this consulting stuff? Because that is a true entrepreneurial endeavor.

@10:20 - Ashley Stanford

Yeah, well, I would say the biggest factor that has always kept me wanting to be, I use consultant loosely, consultant could be a freelancer, be, you know, just an independent contractor, an entrepreneur, a solopreneur.

So whatever you listening are just no consultant, same thing. So essentially, the reason that I really focused in on that is freedom.

There is a book, but now I moved my office around to my shelf.

@11:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

way back there.

@11:01 - Ashley Stanford

There is a book that I would recommend to a lot of people and it's called The Desire Map by an author named Daniel Lepore and this book is really more of a workbook and I like to do it every three, four years or just when you feel a new season of life coming on and essentially this book takes you through a lot of different exercises in every aspect of your life to essentially get to the end where you have what she calls these core desired feelings and it's really just like what do you want to feel every day when you wake up and you come out with you know three to five words whatever you narrow it down to and one of the biggest words that came out for me was just freedom and at the time that I did this um financial freedom was really important to me.

me, I was really young, wanting to make a name for myself. I moved from a small farm town in Ohio to you know, California, which is no joke.

So, yeah, like, I wanted to make money, essentially. And you know, time passes, you establish yourself a little bit in your career, and you I've done it again.

And every time I do it, a lot of the words change for me. That word freedom always stays, but it has a new definition.

And so, I would say, you know, the second or third time that I did this workbook, the word freedom for me was really time.

I had two kids, I was working a lot, just like fitting everything you can in the cracks, of reaching that burnout phase of entrepreneurial.

And that became like a new shift for me. And then fast forward, even And further a year's on the road and you kind of figure out, okay, you get a little bit of that financial freedom, you get that time freedom, you figure that all out.

And now, for me, it's really all about like that opportunity freedom, that choice to take on the projects that I feel passionate about, really.

@13:21 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And I really like that, the desire to have to get that book, because it's kind of interesting, we're doing something similar, we want to accelerate a program, we're basically going through the business canvas, right, which is, which is very similar, because essentially what you're trying to do is you're trying to do one identify who, what do you want, what is your true north, your business true north, what does your business want to do and what do you want to accomplish, and then operationally tactfully, what do you need to do, what do you mean operationally to succeed in creating accomplishing those tactics.

And so it's very interesting because that's essentially what the desire map is, but for your own personal growth, which is really cool.

@14:00 - Ashley Stanford

Exactly.

@14:01 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, kind of sticking on, you know, you're, you're the marketing, you're, you're, you're doing a lot of the marketing stuff.

You're really understanding this. let's, let's, taking with the marketing, the mapping theme. How do high marketing strategies and mapping implementations and communication strategies?

Like, how do you, how do you use these strategies to maintain a relationship with your shareholders or your consumers?

So you can bring them down that reform down that funnel.

@14:27 - Ashley Stanford

Yeah, great question. Again, early in my career where, you know, you just learn how to do something, something tactical.

It was difficult for me to learn to use that side of my brain that could think strategically. But when working in medical device and, you know, there's a lot more people to answer to than, you know, necessarily in a small business, you do need to function.

From a strategy, like a real plan that is not only less. up to, of course, your marketing goals, especially when you can't track revenue, but laddering up to like company goals, even bigger.

So having just that bigger vision of, hey, how is this that I'm executing? How am I going to put this into a report that CEO can read in two minutes and it's going to make sense to him and see that it's moving the company forward?

And so I think that is where a lot of smaller businesses could benefit is thinking strategically first before diving into marketing.

And you know, it can just be a plan on a page, but just understanding not just what your marketing goals are and how much money you need to make, but like what is your real plan?

What is going to move your business forward? What what is your branding? is your messaging? All those things that, like, if you're small and scrappy, it does take a minute to figure out.

and think about, but you'll be in a better place because once you've taken the time to build the strategic plan, what's going to happen is you from there turn it into something tactical that can execute that includes things like Facebook ads, email marketing, SMS, influencer marketing, whatever is a part of that.

You're going to get three or four months down the road of execution and something's not going to work and you're going to be like, shoot.

Now what do I do? Knowing what your strategic end goal is is going to help you pivot or push through in the right way without essentially just that shooting from the hip mentality, which you have a lot as a entrepreneur, small business owner and needing to be able to take a step back and look at picture, I think.

@16:58 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So it's helpful. That's such a great point. I think one of the things you mentioned too is like, you have to, so when you're presenting this information to an executive team, you have to be able to present it on like a one pager.

So they have all the information on one page where it's easily to understand and consume. One thing I created was this target readiness.

Essentially, it's the referral, it's the funnel, right? Your sales funnel. And so it's each level of the funnel. on the left side, it's the markets we're trying to target.

And essentially it's saying, where are we at in that market on the funnel? Okay. And where do we want to go in the next five years?

And then determining on that market, is that a one year two priority two, three or four or five year code, right?

And then basically going back to that one pager on a quarterly basis to kind of see check our progress is, you know, Ashley's mentioning.

But the unique thing about it too is essentially the, if you use the funnel in a way to track what you're doing, it will also provide the tactics and what you're trying to do.

Because if you're, if you're at the awareness stage, then you know, you're going to be doing just general. marketing and branding, things of that nature, versus if you're at the, you know, the conversion stage, then you're going to be a little bit more granular on what you're trying to do, trying to create a contract.

mentioned customer conversion rates, right, trying to get that consumer to be loyal and actually purchase an item. And then same, once the purchase has been made, then again, your strategy is completely different, right.

And so understanding that folks is really important. And I really love what Ashley said, before you do any marketing.

It's really important you do the strategy first, you know, the first strategy retreat you should have is really trying to figure out your true, right, what is your value proposition, what does your company organization, whatever it is you're putting together.

What is it you want to do? Okay. So that's, that's the who. The next is that, how do you want to do it?

Or the what? do you want to do? Okay, now you know who you are, what do you want to do?

Okay, well, I want to do this and this and this and this. Okay, now you have your kind of goals of what you're trying to do.

then the third retreat is like, okay, how are we going? going to do it. This is where Ashley was mentioning talking about the tactics, operations, things of that nature.

And this is important to do because what you're going to notice is some of the goals that you might put in front of you, you may not be operationally ready to actually implement, right?

And so sometimes scaling too quickly will happen. So just be mindful of that operational cost. I was actually writing the blog post earlier today about the coolest The coolest cooler was released here in Lake Austin, we go work and had all these bells and whistles of the $185, $15 a ship.

had Bluetooth as a cooler and it had a Bluetooth speaker, had a blender, it had all these cool things.

But unfortunately the cost to actually make the item supersede the actual cost that he was selling it for. So the production costs, right?

And then it's just tripled down from there. grew too quickly, realized I had way too many orders to produce, couldn't do it.

so, you know, making sure you're doing that before you get into the market. phase but once you get into that tactics, once you kind of get into the operational tactics area and you're needing marketing, how do we, how does an entrepreneur leverage digital marketing to help their grow tactics?

@20:14 - Ashley Stanford

Sure, I almost exclusively only do digital marketing, although when I started my career it was still yellow pages so I was helping my dad's business like secure their yellow page ads which is crazy to say and so with digital marketing, I mean again it's just it does go back to that principle of knowing who your demographic is and knowing where do they hang out.

Everyone of course always mentions Facebook, Instagram, ads also known as and you might think oh well my target market is not on Facebook anymore or they're not on Instagram and yeah.

Those are things you have to consider, but with that being said, unfortunately, I still find no matter what you're still getting the best bang for your buck and a lot of your marketing there.

So it's definitely a great place to start because you can get so granular reaching the right audience and their arms do reach further than just those two platforms.

But I would say, again, it goes back to having that tactical plan and strategy because there's going to not be one channel that works for you.

And you don't want all your eggs in one basket. So you do want a robust digital marketing strategy where you are running paid ads, you are doing email marketing, you are doing SMS, you are doing influencer, refer little content marketing, and essentially, sure, you might find that meta ads or TikTok ads or wherever you're running paid ads shows you that immediate return on ads.

spend or might look like it's performing best for you so you should ignore everything else. But what you'll find is when you turn off everything else, the results will go down on your ads.

It's just that idea of all boats rise with the tide and they all do work together, even if you can't always see it in all of your tracking.

And in some of my consulting days, that's kind of been one of the things that have been hardest for me is working with agencies that maybe focus on just one thing or they're super broad.

You do want to find the right team that can work together and know it's not emailed against Facebook ads.

They can work hand in hand in ways that you can't even believe like, I'm a big fan of a super tactical on you guys here, but I'm a big fan of an email marketing tool called Active Campaign.

You might be able to do this in other tools like Clavio or HubSpot, but I'm mostly working active campaigns.

I'm going to speak specifically to this. We tie that to our tating system, but you can tie it to anything, Shopify, WordPress, all of that.

What happens is when a customer makes a purchase, we send all that purchaser data to Active Campaign, an active campaign can see exactly what that person purchased.

So then what we can do is have an automation set up that publishes them to Facebook audiences, so we can run the most specific ad to them that says, hey, we're so glad you're coming.

You should upgrade your ticket to VIP or hey, click here to get a cut the line pass because we know they already bought this, now we want to upsell them on that so you can get so specific and it really does feel like a one-to-one marketing ad.

experience and that's where you get really great results.

@24:03 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, you know, I got to tell you folks, I'm a shot out of Veronica who sits on our board for Latino Founders.

She has gotten me into active campaign, so I've been using it and learning that, you know, really kind of diving into it.

And the beauty of it, you know, actually you wear a lot of hats and so do I, right? all wear a lot of hats.

work in health care full time. I do the podcast and then we run a nonprofit and I have two kids at home as well.

Now with that said, active campaign, the beauty of what this thing does is it really helps me create my true, it helps me to identify my true actual audience and segmentation.

So for example, with our nonprofit, we're going to have alumni, so individuals that he either gone through or accelerated programs on a pitch competition, right?

So they're a part of our alumni to actually his point. Their message is going to be little bit different, right?

We're going to try to continue to have and go through programs, mentorships, networking events, right? And then there's the philanthropist, the individuals that are donating,

and funds to us. Again, different message. Hey, noticed it's giving Tuesday. We loved it, know, they're going to get those messages directly, right?

Versus a consumer, somebody that's just wants to, you know, hang out. Hey, did you know we're having an event that another event or, you know, and also possibly having a grassroots effort in philanthropy to those individuals as well.

So, active campaign, I've just been using for the last three months. It's really good. I'm still starting to get into it, starting the segmentation piece.

But it has been, it's like, it's like a freaking Ferrari from what she used to be.

@25:35 - Ashley Stanford

It is for sure. Definitely don't let that intimidate you. It sounds like you've got a great expert on your team.

So, it's, it's a Ferrari, but definitely.

@25:48 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

It's great. I love it. Now, speaking kind of on that, you know, you know, because essentially, I love how you segment your folks and you really focus on the, the marketing piece.

How do you, how do Does a entrepreneur take a contract, right, or a client in tournaments?

@26:04 - Ashley Stanford

Well, lifetime client. You good work. Honestly, that's what it is. Do good work. Be a good person. Always do the right thing.

And I think that part can get tricky, especially when there's money involved and maybe what you're doing, you thought would work and it didn't.

And just being able to say, this did not work. And I'm so sorry. Either, hey, here's your money back or two, we're going to pivot.

We're going to do this instead. I'm committed and I'm going to see this through to success for you. You know, whatever the situation is, whatever feels right, that has always been priority to me.

Over, you know, just making lots of money is just doing the right thing, doing good work, making when I work with people.

I personally think and some feedback I've gotten that I am like a part of their company. Even if I am a contractor like I like to function as if I work at your company and your end goal is my end goal and we're in this together so it's just doing good work being passionate and you know just being responsible, communicating very simple things but it can get tricky as you get overwhelmed and you're growing and you're figuring things out especially in marketing and digital marketing where you could have the most perfect strategy plan and sometimes it just does not work and you really it's a great point it's not always the marketing there there's so many variables that occur in market like I don't know

@28:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

for a good pandemic, right? Might just do some things up, be just mindful and always continue to track what you're doing.

And I really like what you mentioned too, is just being able to kind of get out there and meeting with people networking is so important as well.

with your marketing thing, understanding when to pivot and when to not, I think is also important. Now with your experience, you've been doing this for some time, what would you say is, have you seen some of the, one of the biggest mistakes or things that people repetitively do, that they should stop doing in the marketing room?

@28:36 - Ashley Stanford

I would say kind of what we touched on earlier is doing your marketing without a plan. know, functioning without a plan, shooting from the hip, because when you do get to that point, because it's gonna happen no matter what, like something's not gonna work, sales aren't gonna be selling, the ads aren't gonna be converting, and there's a lot of things that you have to.

analyze to figure out why, and I'm sure you deal with this in healthcare, but one thing that was really important for us to know in medical device or even events is guess what?

Your product has a consideration cycle, especially if it's a higher end cost, something people have to think about, you know, what is your business's consideration cycle when someone's buying?

So just because you get a lead and it doesn't turn into a sale in a week, that's okay. Maybe your consideration cycle six months and you need to know how to nurture them for six months.

Maybe in events what we find, especially in a post-pandemic world, is timing. know, people do not buy tickets as far in advance as they used to, and you have to build a plane around that knowing, hey, majority of your money is going to come in in the last 10 days.

before the event which is a very stressful situation to be in if you're an event planner and you have to know how to do the right marketing so that you do have these big bumps of sales and you do know it's coming and can plan and all of that.

So I think having that plan and strategy and understanding of foresight to know how to push through those tough moments.

@30:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah that's such a good point because I think that's actually you know unintentionally to a lot of people especially in the health care world I think that's what we're facing quite a bit right now is just the things have changed in a way that has made a lot of things difficult and why you want to market to things or who you should be marketing to versus who not you should be marketing to right.

There's been a huge consolidation in the health care world where you're seeing all the independent clinics kind of you know kind of disappear really.

But one tactic I would tell you folks, if you do do events and you're probably asking yourself, well, how do I get all this contact information?

Well, there's a few different tactics you can do. If you're in the healthcare world and you're able to provide a continuing medical education, but what I recommend is after the lecture, tell them, hey, in order for you to receive CME, here's this evaluation that you have to do online, and then you can capture their information that way.

That's one. If you're doing an event, like you're just out in an event, one thing you can do is a giveaway.

You know, hey, your business card here and we're gonna give you, we're giving something away. And why you're at it, would you be interested in checking in on our newsletter?

The folks that are on your newsletter, right? Now you're, those of you mentioned, actually, the ones that starting to intrigue a little bit more, right?

now you know, like you got some contact with them. The folks that didn't sign up for your newsletter, okay, but you still have their contact information.

So later down in life, all of a sudden they do pop up on your newsletter. You're like, oh, man, what's your CRM?

saw that they contact them at this event, and then go, going back to Ashley's point, you can begin to create, you know, really targeted messaging to them.

So they really feel that because I think a lot of people right now want to feel that, you know, personalized concierge service when it comes to everything.

It comes to my coffee when it comes to the way my grocery line with the way it comes to just driving in general, right?

There's a lot of things where it's really you want concierge leading a massage chair in your car when you're driving.

But again, it's just constantly trying to think of different ways that create value. And it's just very interesting because marketing plays such a big role in trying to get individuals to purchase your item, become aware of your item.

But it also plays an immense role in keeping them as well, them a loyal consumer.

@32:54 - Ashley Stanford

Totally agree.

@32:56 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Now, what is your, what is, let's talk about, you know, ice cream social

@33:00 - Ashley Stanford

What, where do you see yourself in five years with ice cream social? What's the plan? Sure. Well, we did get an investment from NBC Sports Comcast.

@33:11 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So that was really exciting. Nice.

@33:14 - Ashley Stanford

Congratulations. Thank you. Just want to encourage everyone out there. We talked a little bit about pivoting and COVID. Obviously, working in events during COVID was not a great time.

So that was the time where we pivoted and we thought, you know what, this feature inside of TicketSockets working really well, e-commerce is still live.

Events might not be, but let's peel this off and make its own standalone product. so just that creativity and thinking, just when I encourage people when you do have to pivot, like there's always something.

So our vision with that right now is, yes, continue expanding, reinventing the product and how we gamify it to get people to always want to share, always want to do that word of marketing, turning customers into advocates, but also creating a marketplace essentially for people to come to, to find really cool offers and incentives for things that they're already sharing and talking about and kind of bridging that together and creating, you know, like its own little search engine.

So we've got some cool things planned over the next five years. And who knows how that will pivot and change as technology keeps progressing so quickly.

@34:39 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and folks, you might maybe one day see the shades of entrepreneurship on their encouraging you to share the podcast, right, to get some more listeners, which look for more revenue, right?

So there's definitely ways, and you know, one of the things actually you mentioned too is being diversifying your marketing avenues, know, all the different platforms.

Folks, I got to tell you, I'm on LinkedIn and when you to Instagram, Facebook. It is time consuming. It is.

I will admit, TikTok has been the one platform I have not done the best on. Surprisingly enough, LinkedIn has been the one I've done the best on.

And so like to Ashley's point, you just don't know where your audience is at. You just have to put out content and put out information out there and really begin to test the waters.

sometimes you might realize that you've actually have a completely different target audience than you've actually been targeting originally. Or you might have a problem to a solution that nobody actually has a problem for, right?

maybe your own problem that you create a solution. And so that's also a good way to kind of identify if you have a mental viable product, anything to actually take to market before you should even market as well, right?

Just getting out there, talking with people, getting a good understanding of what do they like, what do they don't like?

Because then you can kind of create your custom ideal customer profile and then really focus that marketing on those individuals.

@35:57 - Ashley Stanford

Absolutely. Yeah, welcome the feedback. in the criticism and take it and learn how to work with it.

@36:03 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, exactly. And folks, it's not easy sometimes taking the criticism. But if you, if you take it with knowing like, hey, someone's trying to help me out and trying to provide some insight, that is your consumer at the end of the day.

So take that and, you know, take it with a grain of salt if you have to, but they are, at the end of the day, they are your consumer.

They're the one that are willing to reach in their back pocket, pull out their wallet and purchase something from you.

So, you know, taking that feedback to harp sometimes is very important.

@36:35 - Ashley Stanford

Yeah, for sure.

@36:37 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Now, Ashley, for the folks that might be listening, they're interested in learning more about you, learn about more about ice cream so how can they connect with you?

@36:44 - Ashley Stanford

How can they find you online? Sure. Ashley Stanford, you can type it into LinkedIn, TikTok, wherever and find me.

Ashley N for Nicole stanford.com. Fortunately, I can't just get Ashley Stanford. uh ticket socket dot com ice cream social dot IO uh find me wherever connect with me however it doesn't matter i love it and folks if you forget all of that information that is a good idea for you to subscribe to the shades of entrepreneurship news letter you can do that by visiting the shades of e dot com i will have all of ash's information on the website as well as nudes letter there'll be a blog post about this conversation as well as transcription in an audio version and video version of this conversation on the website so please visit the shades of e and subscribe to stay up to date you can also follow us on the social sites at the shades of e on youtube instagram facebook tiktok and linkedin so again feel free to connect with us actually i really do appreciate the time the conversation is there any last words you like to say that listen before me uh i don't know i would say get the desire map book yes it's on my it is definitely on my page uh list of things to do now okay great

@38:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So if you hear that, folks, the desired book, I might even make sure I put that on the newsletter for those individuals, although first I got to get through my dragonlands book that I just purchased because I'm a big nerd.

So I'm reading a fantasy book and once I'm done with that I'll definitely juggle the back to back to some business education.

Love it. Great night. Good job.

@38:34 - Ashley Stanford

Great.

@38:35 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Thank you.

@38:59 - Ashley Stanford

Thank

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