Behind the Numbers: How to Build a Brand From the Ground Up

Audio by Marcus Johnson, Suzy Davidkhanian, and Jeremy Goldman | Mar 14, 2025

On today’s podcast episode, we discuss how Mint Mobile was able to stand out before a celebrity like Ryan Reynolds joined the team, how he helped them break the marketing mold, and lessons learned along the way to becoming a billion-dollar valued company. Tune in to the conversation with Director of Podcasts and host Marcus Johnson, our Senior Director of Briefings Jeremy Goldman, Vice President Suzy Davidkhanian, and Strategic Advisor to Mint Mobile Aron North. Listen everywhere and watch on YouTube and Spotify.

Transcript

Marcus:

Hey gang, it's Friday, March 14th. Suzy, Jeremy, Aron, and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER video podcast. I'm Marcus. Today I'm joined by three people. Let's meet them.

We start with our Vice President, Principal Analyst, and Head of our Retail Desk living in New York. It's Suzy Davidkhanian.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Marcus:

Of course.

We're also joined by our Senior Director of Briefings based in the same city. It's Jeremy Goldman.

Jeremy Goldman:

Happy Pi Day.

Marcus:

Oh, it is. Yeah. Okay. I should have known that.

Jeremy Goldman:

Are you sad? Do you dislike Pi?

Marcus:

No, I just, I should have known that was coming 'cause you know the theme for every day of the year somehow, and yet still it surprises me when you bring it up on the show.

We're also joined by the Strategic Advisor to Mint Mobile living life in California. It's Aron North.

Aron North:

Hello and thank you for having me.

Marcus:

Yes sir. That was a more normal acknowledgement, Jeremy, just in case.

Jeremy Goldman:

I'll take notes.

Marcus:

For next time. Okay, good. We start with a speed intro to get to know our guests a little better.

Most of these questions are for Aron 'cause you already know Jeremy and don't care that much about Suzy.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Oh, my God. Did you actually say that?

Marcus:

The first three are going to be for Aron. Everyone can answer the last one. Let's do it. Ready Suzy?

Suzy Davidkhanian:

I have a fan base.

Marcus:

Still there? Of one.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

No, now there's two.

Marcus:

One person messaged you on LinkedIn once.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Now there's two.

Marcus:

You are out of control.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Not including my family.

Marcus:

Let's do it, Aron.

Aron, you are based in California, but where are you from?

Aron North:

From Orange County. I have lived in every county in southern California and I now reside in Orange County again. So found the best living life and loving it here.

Marcus:

Very good. What do you do in a sentence?

Aron North:

Well, after creating and building Mint Mobile into the juggernaut it is, I took a step back and now I am a strategic advisor to the company helping with new product launches, helping assist the transition to the new CMO, and helping sort of provide digital insights for the broader organization.

Marcus:

Very good. What's your morning drink?

Aron North:

Americano and then quickly followed by a big jug of water.

Marcus:

Does no one drink milk anymore? That's always the answer. Oh, I can't get behind it.

If you could start a business tomorrow, what would it be?

Aron North:

Milk business. No, just kidding.

Marcus:

Yes. Finally. You have a customer of one.

Aron North:

No, I think if you're going to go into any dairy product, you might want to go into eggs right now. There's big money there.

Marcus:

That's very true.

Aron North:

No, I guess if I could start any business tomorrow, I think I would probably start a destination travel business and have it be just pure fun and get to sort of roam the world and have great vacations.

Marcus:

Very nice. It sounds like you're just going off on a trip around the world by yourself. Is this a real business idea or do you just want to go traveling? That's what I'm hearing.

Aron North:

We're starting to plan our summer vacation, so I'm working with someone who's helping us, and she is like, "Oh, I'm not available this week 'cause I'm in the Scottish Highlands, doing research," and I'm like, "You have the best job. Period."

Marcus:

That's true. Very good.

Suzy, if you could start a business that wouldn't be quite-

Suzy Davidkhanian:

We get to answer? We get to answer this one?

Marcus:

Just this one. This is the only one.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Oh my gosh. So I have two, but I'm not 100% sure how we would monetize them.

Marcus:

Of course you have two.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean-

Jeremy Goldman:

Is it a business then? I'm just saying.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

I mean ...

Jeremy Goldman:

Non-profit. It's not a non-profit.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

It is like most internet businesses where it starts off with an idea and then you figure out how to make money on it. I think it's verging on non-privacy, so I understand it might not be doable, but I think there's something to be said about being able to click with your phone on someone's face and know how you know them, that your phone, now with all this technology that your phone understands exactly who they are to you and where you've met them.

I just came back from eTail not that long ago and you meet so many people over and over again, but can't always place them because it's a new context. So that's what I would do as a business.

Marcus:

You want to take a photo of someone's face and then say one second-

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Covertly.

Marcus:

Look at it, and then figure out why you've forgotten who they are.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

No covertly take a picture.

Marcus:

That's a terrible idea.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Take a picture secretly, and then you know how you can snap a picture on Amazon and then it'll tell you if they sell it or not. Like there's all this search.

Jeremy Goldman:

This is a good idea.

Marcus:

Jeremy, don't do that. This is not Shark Tank. Okay? This is way too long of a pitch.

Aron North:

Actually, I think I've just figured out how to monetize this.

Marcus:

No.

Aron North:

This feels like an in-app integration for the new Meta glasses and then you don't even have to snap a photo. It's already taking visualizations and then giving it to you on the screen.

Jeremy Goldman:

Oh, this will exist.

Marcus:

You're killing me. You guys are in on this. I'm out on it. You're not getting my investment. That's madness. But Aron and Jeremy apparently are business partners now.

Jeremy, what's yours?

Jeremy Goldman:

It's like CubeSmart, like storage, but the idea is, except for the fact that it's actually you cryogenically freeze people and then you just charge them a monthly fee-

Marcus:

Much better.

Jeremy Goldman:

And since they never technically die, so you can just keep on charging them.

Marcus:

There we go. That's what we're looking for, Suzy. Well played, Jeremy, you win.

That's it for the speed intro, what we're talking about. That went on for ages, but it was really interesting. Fact of the day we go as quick as possible.

America used to have a $10,000 bill. Why? No one knows is the answer. So it's the largest denomination ever printed for public consumption. Its value, you'll be pleased to know, outstripped the net worth of the average American during the time that it was available. So that'd be like pulling out a $200,000 bill in today's money.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Oh, it's a crypto. I thought that was crypto.

Jeremy Goldman:

That's like five dozen eggs right there.

Marcus:

Roughly, a few less. A $10,000 bill was in circulation up until 1969. Businesses have a heart attack today if you pull out a 20, but you could use this, you could still, if you have one, you can still use them.

Jeremy Goldman:

Yeah, the $2 bills, they get really annoyed at you for.

Marcus:

Those, yeah, and for good reason, Jeremy, put those away. Use real money. Anyway, today's real topic, how to build a brand from the ground up.

All right folks, so budget, cell service, Mint Mobile, which folks might know from being a customer, or if you are less familiar with the brand, maybe you know them from their funny commercials featuring actor Ryan Reynolds who was also investor in Mint. That company was bought by T-Mobile in 2023 for $1.3 billion. Not bad for a company that had yet to reach its 10th birthday.

Today we're joined by one of the chaps who was responsible for building Mint Mobile into the company it is today. And as Aron mentioned, he was with the company, is now the strategic advisor. But when you joined Aron, you joined Mint Sim, I believe they were called and you joined. They started in 2015, 2016, 2015.

Aron North:

2016. August of 2016 we launched Mint Sim.

Marcus:

And you joined?

Aron North:

July.

Marcus:

In July. Okay. Okay, so from the very beginning. But you were telling us before on our chat before last week on the prep call that when you joined you noticed something about Mint Sim or some things that told you it wouldn't work in its current form. What were they?

Aron North:

Yeah, I mean it's sort of a wild story because it was my first day on the job. And I met with the president of the company. We were sitting down, he was giving me a lay of the land. Mint was not part of the conversation during the interview process. It was quite the surprise when I got there. He said, "We're looking at doing this digital brand called Mint Sim." So the name and the Mint fox, who's the mascot existed. He goes, "I want you to take a look at the website." So I got the website in PDF form, printed it out, small format. We didn't even have a large format printer and taped it up on a glass wall.

And really where this starts is one of the things I've learned in my career is that whatever you're doing, whether it's marketing or a business or a program, an initiative, we always start with this phrase and the phrase is, what's the habit, perception, belief you're trying to build, change, or reinforce? And you need to have a clear definition and a clear answer there.

When I looked at the website, I could not understand what we were trying to do, what we were selling, or what we were asking the customer to do. So I red-penned that sucker from top to bottom every page and went back into the office of the president and said, "This seems very, very cool."

I mean you got to remember nine years ago, Dollar Shave was hot, Warby Parker was hot, Casper was hot. These brands were just starting to really blossom. So this is early on in the D2C days and I just looked at it and I said, "Look, there is something promising here, but the way this is being executed, it's not going to work. We can fix it. I think this has got potential, but we have to do some things before this launches because this will fail straight out the gate."

You didn't know what to do. You honestly got to the website, you weren't really sure what we were selling, why it was important, why you should care, why you should be driven further down the purchase funnel. There really was no purchase funnel. There was just a bunch of interesting creative sort of crafted together to try and tell a story that I thought we could do a much better job of.

Marcus:

Yeah. So what needed to change? What were some of those things, some of the main things that you were like, "This needs to change before launch"?

Aron North:

Well, the first thing was we're selling wireless. I needed people to know above the fold that we were selling wireless direct to consumer.

Two, the price point was really the special sauce of the brand and the way you bought it. So nobody was doing all digital. In fact, at the time we went and looked at AT&T's website and did one of those chats. And they would not sell you wireless online. They would only tell you to go to a store. You could not physically buy online.

And the reason for that is 'cause they have so much investment in the physical asset of the store, and this is again nine years ago. So you'd think everybody's digitizing their businesses, but in an oligopoly where some of the rooted industry players aren't really driving change, the market was primed for disruption.

So we got in there. I'm like, "We got to know what we're selling, how we're selling it, talk about the special sauce." And Mint's real special sauce was because it's online, our cost structures are different than a retail business. We take those savings, pass them onto to the customer, and two, sort of like the Costco model built into there, the more you buy, the more you save.

So we sell wireless today in bulk, 3 months, 6 month, 12 month packages. You prepay for those packages, and when you buy an annual subscription, you get the absolute best rate. You get to lock it in.

Now Mint has never raised price over that $15 price point. So yes, you get to lock it in, but we have been steadfast at holding a $15 price point ever since we launched it.

Jeremy Goldman:

I think that Aron, it's really interesting as you're going through this and talking about what made the brand succeed at the beginning, and I was just going through our database and found some good data from M Booth about brand values that are culturally impactful in this case for US consumers. And purpose and direction, how well the company lives up to its stated values and the principles that guide its decisions and actions, those were the top three. And it seems like almost on a subconscious level you were able to tap into that really from the get-go.

Aron North:

Well, we've always talked that one of the key brand distinctive features is that we want to save you money. So when we launched, we did not have an unlimited plan because the honest truth with the American marketplace is that most customers, and I mean the vast majority of customers don't need an unlimited data plan, but there's this belief that there's a safety blanket with Unlimited.

During Covid we heard from our customers loud and clear, "We got to have an unlimited plan. There's so much uncertainty in the world that I need a certainty that my wireless service is going to work and never run out." So when we launched Unlimited, we actually launched it as Unliminted. And what that means is as you access Mint, you buy your first three months as sort of like a trial period. You get the best rate on that three month plan, but then you need to renew. When you renew, what Mint does, and we've done this since day one of launching Unlimited, is as you approach that 90 day marker, we send you an email that says, "Jeremy, you have used this much data, this much data and this much data over the last three months. We believe we can save you even more money if you switch down to one of our metered plans at a lower monthly cost. Now Jeremy, if you ever need more data and you want to go back to Unlimited, we will just prorate the delta between the term you have with us."

So that is so customer beneficial and so good that that really roots into our promise of always looking for ways to save you money. And I will trade longevity for a customer over short-term margin 10 times out of 10. And that's really how when you have a subscription business, you're constantly bringing people in at the top of the funnel. You create a smaller and smaller hole at the bottom of the funnel so your aggregate business grows and you really grow revenue much, much faster than those which have a high throughput of customers churning out.

Jeremy Goldman:

And you're saying transparency without saying transparency. And I think that that's something, Suzy, I know that the brands that your team covers clearly show that consumers are gravitating towards brands who have transparency in mind.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

That, and also I find for me, I mean there's so many cool things about Mint Mobile and what you guys have done, but starting from, it sounds like you were starting from a very scrappy, maybe inefficient, although it's not the words you used, brand story that you've moved into really good brand storytelling but also leaning into the cultural moments in an authentic way and using a spokesperson who is also a part owner to do all these meme-like sort of memorable ads.

I think it's really an interesting sort of brand building exercise because you are, although there aren't a lot of providers, it still feels like there's a crowded marketplace and it's a commodity product that everybody needs, but people are very price sensitive. You took all of the important things and figured out how to bubble it into one brand, which is kind of awesome.

Aron North:

It's so funny you call out transparency because we have these core tenets of the brand and one of them is transparency is revolutionary. So one of our biggest reasons to believe and when it comes to how and why we're different is that it's our promise to our current customers and our promise to future customers, and we just feel that this space had and has an opportunity to really be transparent. So we've really, really pushed hard on that.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

And as an outsider for me it also feels like you're pushing on the respect, the consumer and respect that they have limited budget but also limited time and that they are interested in having a one-to-one dialogue. It's a really important value too, in addition to transparency is respect.

Aron North:

I agree. And we used to have these shirts that we would wear all the time. And Ryan said this casually and I was like, "Oh, can I put that on a shirt?" And it's very simple, and the phrase was: At Mint Mobile, we don't hate you.

You get a lot of these businesses that treat their customers poorly. And I remember during the pandemic. Post-pandemic Verizon and AT&T created these things called inflationary adjustment fees. That's, I don't know, it felt very much to me like that was made up.

So yes, we want to be optimistic, we do want to push off some of the wrongs we see in the marketplace, but transparency and honesty is key.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

As a side note, I was at a restaurant in California and I ordered huevos rancheros and I got charged a surcharge for eggs. That is definitely zero respect or transparency, just saying.

Marcus:

It does ...

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Critical.

Marcus:

It does. I mean transparency, if you offer it up, it builds trust real quick. And it's so interesting 'cause it does seem like while most companies are zigging, you are zagging, you are tracking consumer data to help. Most companies are tracking it to help sell them more. You are tracking it to help save them money. You mentioned ... Well, let's start with, so Ryan Reynolds got to the company 2019?

Aron North:

November 25th, 2019, we announced Ryan.

Marcus:

2019, okay. Before him and then also when he got there, I want to talk about that. So how did you get the brand to stand out before a celebrity like Ryan Reynolds gets involved? And then, what happened when he came on board? And talk to me a bit about the ways that Mint Mobile broke the marketing mold after he joined.

Aron North:

Yeah. I mean, we had to build the brand before he got there. We didn't have him from the start. And a lot of it was, I mean I can talk to the executional considerations that we were very consistent with. So we went with a color scheme that was very different in wireless. We used mint green. We had a mascot, which at the time was not very popular. They had sort of spokespeople exclusively. But we used language and we screamed our price point.

So we used profanity in a way that was meant to shock and then at least create interest and engagement. So very much top of the funnel stuff. We use the word fox, but it was F, Shift8, Shift1. So F, star, exclamation point as if we're saying earmuffs (beep) right? So we used to say that everywhere. And we would also put our $15 price point, big, proud and bold. And when we do that, we could stop people.

Now the trick after that is to get them to go one step further, right?

Marcus:

Mm-hmm.

Aron North:

When we were small, we were running lots of digital ads, display, search, things of that sort, trying to get on these competitive terms like affordable wireless and things like that. And when you have some profanity mixed in, Google would not let us do it, but you could do it on display 'cause it was a placed image. But when you have those things working together, you can start to draw attention in.

And the trick to Mint was really this idea of never stop testing and never stop optimizing. So even though we started very, very small with budgets around $10,000 a month, we were constantly tuning. And Mint was, Suzy, you said this early on, Mint was 100% bootstrapped. At the time our company had two brands and still does. It had Ultra Mobile and Mint Mobile. Ultra was the fastest growing private company in 2015 on the Inc 5,000. It was number one. So that business was humming right along.

It was hard to get Mint to come in and get the attention internally because it was going into a space where other brands had tried and failed miserably. So we had to get very, very scrappy. And the one thing I knew better than anything was marketing, creative and media, and how to put those mechanisms in place where we were constantly tuning.

So as Mint was growing, we'd create media efficiencies and optimizations which would allow us to then spend more media. We would then have e-commerce optimizations that would allow us to get more efficient. Well, we didn't take that efficiency and just be sedentary with it. We took that and we were like, "Now we have more room to put more money in media." And that's how you sort of, we've shown charts before, but Mint was growing linearly. And of course when Ryan came on, we started to move exponentially. That linear growth curve was very, very steep. And as we had success, we kept reinvesting. It was never stop reinvesting in the brand and the business.

And that's not to say we didn't fail constantly because that's one of the things I'm probably most proud of, is I built a team of insanely smart people. The people who work at this company are brilliant.

But we've also given them an ecosystem where they're expected to push to the boundary and beyond. And when there's failure, it's rewarded, not punished, because when we fail, we fail fast, we fail smart, we fail small, we fail cheap, and we're failing forward. And really, I've said this a million times, failure is a synonym for risk. And we want people taking risks, smart, calculated risk. If you have a great squad, they're not going to do dumb things. They're going to do smart things that drive the business. They're just not all going to work.

So we would put, you hear in social media, it's like start lots of little ad campaigns or little fires and hoping one grows and becomes viral. We did that exact thing to our business. It's just that when we found something that worked, we pushed in big because now we had data that drove decisioning that said this is a scalable event. Now you can grow the business even faster. That's really the secret sauce at Mint.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

For me, the most interesting thing is that business owners or people who run businesses forget to reinvest the optimized dollars back into their business.

Because you were in all these different touch points, it really felt like you were, I didn't really think about it as a budget brand necessarily, being bootstrapped quite as much as it was because it had a luxury feel like you would thought about all the different touch points and connecting the stories.

Aron North:

One of the human truths we found with this brand like day one, this is the insight that we built all of our campaigns on, and that is how can it be any good at that price? So for $15 a month, how can it be any good?

So what we did to fight that directly head on, and I laugh because when we made this up, I'm like, "This is never going to pass the sniff test," but we call it premium wireless for 15 bucks a month and that's everywhere.

Now the truth is we run on T-Mobile. So we are on the biggest, baddest, fastest, most 5G awesome network in America, which is great, but it's colorless, odorless, tasteless. You just want it to work in your phone. How is it premium if it just works? But we knew we had to constantly compete against this notion of how can it be any good if it's that cheap? So we went square at it and said premium wireless, and we have done a million things to really push that.

Our app is incredibly slick. When it started, it was just a web app and I created a program internally that we called the Sexy App Initiative. We wanted the app to be world-class. We send high quality packaging to people. We put a lot of investment internally into our own agency so that way the creative the customer touches is exceptional.

The customer care group is five star. We get ranked either number one or number two in customer care across all wireless brands and we are the absolute low cost leader, and it's this oxymoron of price value. We want to give you the best service possible at the lowest cost we can. And that I think has really separated us from the marketplace.

Jeremy Goldman:

I love the whole culture that you had of iterating and continually improving, but at the same time, even looking back, what's something where you're like, "Man, I know we could have done better at a particular facet of building the brand."

Aron North:

Yeah, I talk about this mistake I made a lot. So one of the things that's really hard to do when you're growing and you're having success is to be measured and not just go all in on everything. So when we were launching new tactics and new vehicles, we did them singular, one at a time so that way we could get high quality attribution. There have been a couple of times in this brand's history where I just get too excited and I push in on multiple things and we have mixed success and then we can't tell why.

So I raise my hand and say, "Look, I have made a critical judgment error. We did this and we're having mixed success. We don't know where the attribution is. We have to start turning things off to see the impact." I think that's one thing I could have done better.

Another thing I could have done sooner is as the company grew and we were having success, it's just natural that you want that success to spread everywhere you can. And as an MVNO, sort of like our business model was to find untapped opportunities in the marketplace and go get them.

So Ultra really was built to assist the immigrant diaspora in the United States and give them one touch international calling. Before Ultra it was like calling cards. You dial the calling card, you dial the number. Ultra solved that. Mint was D2C.

We started doing other things and I got distracted and I was being pulled too far apart. I rose my hand at one point and said, "Look, I should be doing less and being more focused on Mint." I think had I done that earlier and not been so excited about the new shiny thing, Mint could possibly be even bigger than the $1.35 billion acquisition. But at the same time, when you're an entrepreneur thriving in an entrepreneurial environment, it's just natural that you want to go get the next big thing because those first two, three, four steps are such big leaps, the company could really grow as a result of them if they were wins.

Marcus:

It's interesting 'cause it feels like you've changed a lot of the thinking around "conventional" wisdom, which doesn't always prove out to be true. And what I mean by that is, like I was saying before, most people track consumer data to sell them more. You did it to save them money. There's this notion that if it costs more, it's better. You changed that mindset. You talked about the word failure and trying to adjust or reimagine that word not to be a negative, but to associate it with risk and to associate failure with trying, trying new things.

Where did that come from? 'Cause it feels like there's a culture there of not only doing things differently, but trying to think about concepts and how you do business differently across the board.

Aron North:

Yeah. It is very different from the brand and the business. So from the brand perspective that was about, I used to say my team is sick of hearing it. I'm like, "If everybody is over here doing this, let's be over here doing this and just by virtue of being different, we're going to get some attention." So that was really the brand solution. That was a way we helped get this thing noticed, was just by being a delta to the marketplace.

Now from the business, I think some of this stems just from sort of my work experience. I came from Taco Bell. So what does a guy slinging tacos know about wireless? Legitimately nothing. Our CEO and founder David would come up to me and give me a hard time because these things have SIM cards in them. Now there's eSIM. But I didn't know it had a SIM card in it. And he would open my phone and pull the SIM card out. I'm like, "Dude, you're going to break my phone. Stop. Stop. Stop." But I didn't know anything about wireless.

But what I did know at Taco Bell is we used to say we're a taco stand in a burger society, so we are ... Taco Bell was like 96 share of Mexican QSR, which makes it feel like you cannot grow to 97, 98. That's impossibly hard. But then it's a framing exercise. If you look at all QSR, I think Taco Bell was like 3%, maybe 4% of all QSR. And I used to say to people, "Look, McDonald's sells more drinks than Taco Bell is big. Now, it feels like you have an opportunity to scale."

So I think when you talk about doing things different, like at agency, you have to come up with creative solutions. At Taco Bell it was about being different and embracing the uniqueness of who you are. I think that translated over at Mint. And when you have early success being disruptive and setting yourself up as the disruptor in the marketplace, you want to be doing things different.

And if you can post a couple wins and it feels good, the momentum just carries you forward. And our company, testament to the founders and the leadership team, we are just like growth maniacs. I had never heard of the term hyper growth before and we sort of coined it internally and set a five-year vision around hyper growth where we wanted to be the billion dollar challenger. We finished it a year early and we beat it by 350 million. So we became the $1.35 billion challenger in four years.

And that ecosystem and environment is fun to be in, but it's not easy. It's been one of the most fun places I've ever worked.

Marcus:

Yeah. Amazing. It's a heck of a brand story. I really appreciate you coming on to tell us all about it. That's all we've got time for, unfortunately for this episode. Thank you so much to my guests. Thank you first to Aron.

Aron North:

Thank you. This was fun.

Marcus:

Yes sir.

Thank you to Suzy.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Thanks for having me.

Marcus:

And of course to Jeremy.

Jeremy Goldman:

I'm pumped up. We're going to go have some Taco Bell now for lunch.

Marcus:

And thanks to the whole editing crew, Victoria, John Lance and Danny Stewart who runs the team and Sophie who does our social media. Thanks to everyone for listening in. We hope to see you on Monday for Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER video podcast.