#052: From New York to Hong Kong: How Michael De Santis Scaled Doris Dev to Success

Having engineering chops, having contacts in China, figuring out how to actually set up a supply chain is really challenging and it requires boots on the ground and it requires some like insider knowledge, so to speak. You know, you need to budget at least $150,000 to $350,000 for simple product. And like the second you start to get into a more complex build, like you're easily in the $350,000 to $550,000 range.

That's crazy.

You need to hire a content person early. You need to hire somebody whose job is to ship 25 pieces of content every single week. There's also a bunch of decisions that you can make early on in the product development process to say, I need to keep my BOM as low as possible to keep my landed cost as low as possible, to give myself as much money as possible to play with on the marketing side of things.

Michael DeSantis, managing director of Doris Dev, leads a company that specializes in innovative product design and development, helping consumer brands bring their concepts to life. With teams in New York and Hong Kong, Dorisdev manages everything from initial design to supply chain setup, working with both emerging and established brands, including successes like the Canopy Humidifier. In this episode, Michael shares his journey from finance to the consumer product industry, discussing the challenges of scaling a business in the evolving e-commerce landscape. He emphasizes the importance of a systematic approach to product development and Dorisdev's unique ability to incubate new businesses, blending creativity with rigorous process management. Welcome back to Season 2, Episode 15 of the Turning Pro Podcast. Today we have Mike DeSantis, who is the managing director of Doris Dev. Thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me on, guys.

What a small world. We were just sitting here 2 minutes before we started and I saw that he went to Northeastern. I'm like, yo, you went to Northeastern? So did my sister. He's like, how old is she? I was like, 31. When did she graduate? I don't know. You do the math. He's like, who's your sister? They went to school together and they were friends.

Homies.

You never know who you know is the moral of the story. Be a good person.

Strong start to the pod.

Strong start.

Love the overlap. I love that.

Maybe just give a quick background on what you're working on.

Yeah, for sure.

I'm managing director at Dorisdev. Dorisdev is a product design and development company. So we work with a bunch of consumer brands, businesses, help them bring product to life. So practically what that means is we have about 30 folks on the team spread out across New York and Hong Kong. We do industrial design, so upfront design of the actual product. People come to us with a concept, hey, want to build X, Y, or Z. They come to us to make it look cool, Then we've got an engineering team who takes over after that, builds out all the internals, and we kick it over to our team in Hong Kong and help them set up supply chains in China for scale. And then we oftentimes will help them continue to manage that process after the product's been launched. If they're a successful business, launch product number 2, 3, and 4. Generally long-term embedded partners of our customers.

Hell yeah. All right, I want to hype you guys up for a second, and I need you to hype yourself up.

Do it.

Because there's kind of two components that I've always found interesting about what you guys do. One is you're not just working with small brands, you're working with some of the most well-known consumer brands, not only out there today but over the past 10 years. So definitely like catch us up on some of those names. And then two, you have a very unique model around incubating both CPG and software businesses, which are two completely different businesses than agencies. And a lot of agency owners talk about that a lot, but in practice it's really hard to do because they're different disciplines. Catch me up, one, some of the big brands you work with, and then two, how you guys think about incubation and what are those incubations?

Yeah, I mean, maybe roll back the clock to the starting of Doris to provide some context. But when Justin started Doris Dev, I had originally met Justin at a company called Raiden, which was a smart luggage company. Away and Raiden launched right around the same time. Fun times in consumer. People were raising a lot of money. We were off to the races. Justin and a couple of the core members on the Hong Kong side of things at DorisNow were full-time employees at Raiden. Once they got to the end of the process of standing up the supply chain for Raiden, they were like, "Okay, now what? We're not launching another product right away. We can templatize this process." I think product is a big black box for a lot of folks. Having engineering chops, having contacts in China, figuring out how to actually set up a supply chain, is really challenging and it requires boots on the ground and it requires some insider knowledge, so to speak. And when Justin spun it out, given the fact that consumer brands were still aggressively being invested in, he got connected to a bunch of brands that some of them we still work with today. By Humankind, Blueland, Lalo is an early client of ours, Fable. And I think over the years, basically, we We got in really early with a lot of brands that ended up becoming really big. So that's one piece of the puzzle, right? It's we get in early, we support businesses in their growth, they end up becoming big brands, and we continue to service them, which is always a win. We love that. And then, you know, on the flip side of that, as time has gone on and less money has been injected into early-stage financing for these consumer goods brands, the client base on Dorisdev has started to shift and move, right? A lot of our clients now are businesses that have already been in market, that have found success. They have a niche, they have product market fit, and they're looking to continue to build for those folks. So, I mean, we have the— I'm struggling to think about like some things that we can talk about right now because we have a bunch of stuff in the hopper that's coming out in the next 3 to 6 months that we're super, super excited about. So we're working with a brand called Roro right now. I don't know if you guys have heard of them, but the water filtration— Yeah.

George's company.

Yeah, yeah. Berkey competitor. Super cool. Really high design, really excited about that and the progress we're making there. We have— we just launched a product with a brand called Good Time, which Good Time is a subsidiary of Who Gives a Crap. Who Gives a Crap is a toilet paper company that exploded during COVID like no toilet paper on the shelves. This like kind of small bamboo toilet paper company grows to be a gigantic business. They launched another brand that does Their whole point is like getting rid of single-use plastics in the bathroom. So all bar soap, so shampoo, conditioner, face wash, everything is a bar. And we built this system in the shower for essentially like organizing your soap bars. It's a strip that gets attached to your wall and then you can magnet the soap bars. Honestly, super simple product, incredible game changer.

It's huge. Dude, that is such a category that needed to be innovated against.

Yeah.

Instead of just sitting in the corner of your shower.

Exactly.

Any space you could find.

I mean, there's also like other pieces of the puzzle, which is if it's just sitting in your shower, the soap bar degrades faster because more water's getting on it, et cetera, et cetera. So it is part of their entire like eco approach. We just helped a company called Flouse launch their V2 last year. They had originally launched, they had some challenges with their V1. We kind of took the reins over, redesigned it from scratch, helped them relaunch.

I use it every day.

Do you? I'm a big fan.

Yeah, Sam's a killer.

Sam's incredible.

Is this like a Waterpik?

No, it's a floss. It's like an electrical flosser.

Yeah, it's an electric flosser. So there's these individual floss heads that you snap in. A lot of people don't like sticking their hands in their mouth. They don't even like flossing. I'm a big floss guy.

Big flosser. I wasn't.

Yeah.

I actually was not a big floss guy until I got one.

And now you're—

And now I do it every day. Now it's part of your life. Genuinely, too. This is not an ad. I'm being honest. I actually was not— something about like ripping a string and like, I don't know, it just was a lot of work.

Yeah.

Like, no, it is. If you, if you, if you use this and compare it, like you grab it, it's like the size of a toothbrush. You just turn it on. It's electrical flosser.

It's easy. It's easy to get in your mouth.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's, it's great.

People love it. I mean, the other thing that, that is super fascinating, they have a huge cohort of folks with dexterity issues, right? So like, if you're trying to wrap floss around and actually floss in your mouth, if you have dexterity challenges, you can't really do that. This device unlocks that for them. So that's super cool. They were just on Shark Tank, which like was really awesome for them. Yeah. She got a deal. She was like the last, uh, the last person to go on this season of Shark Tank.

So she's a serious founder. She also is intimidating. I'm like, you are the definition of like a bad bitch founder.

I'm a big fan of Sam.

She, she can be intimidating, but she's, she's coming on in like a couple of weeks.

I saw her on the calendar. Oh, that's awesome.

I love that. That's fantastic. Yeah. And so big, big fan of Sam and Flouse and going to continue to help them build. Canopy, another one. I mean, maybe we can take it over to incubations. I think that on the Dora side of things, we've always thought about the business as a beacon for building and not just building physical products. It's like, how can we leverage the secret sauce that we know to build brands and both on the software side of things and on the actual physical product side of things. We launched Canopy in 2020 and the idea was, Nobody had taken a fresh look at the humidifier. It was all like old technology and there's no brand loyalty really on anything. Maybe if you're a Dyson user, but like, you know, that's kind of a pretty niche use case. Um, we repackaged, we, we redesigned the humidifier, made it dishwasher safe. That was like the first thing that we were like, okay, people hate cleaning their humidifier. And then kind of, uh, Lucas, who's one of our co-founders, he his, um, his partner would clean her humidifier every single week with like white vinegar and Q-tips. And it was like a— he was like, this is crazy, I can't believe I'm watching this happen. And like, he's a product engineer as well, like product designer, and he's like, this should not work this way, I'm going to change this. But the reason she was using it was as part of her skincare routine. So we kind of repositioned the humidifier as like, hey, this isn't just something for like when your allergies are bothering you or you're sick, this should be an always-on part of your skincare routine. And that really started to resonate. We then learned after we launched the business that new and expecting parents always put a humidifier in their baby's room.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, me neither.

For skin health?

Yeah, I guess like helping keep the baby moist. You know, diaper rash is a thing. I'm not a parent, so I don't know.

We're dropping knowledge.

We're now venturing outside of my realm of expertise.

Um, it's, it's discovery.

Yeah, exactly. But then we found we have a huge new parent cohort, so we've been building for them as well. Since we launched the first humidifier, we've launched a diffuser. We have an aroma portion of our business, which is pretty successful. We launched a portable humidifier earlier this year. A lot of people were like, hotel rooms are gross and dry and want something that I can bring on the road with me. It's also great for just desktop as well. Last summer, we went into the showerhead category as well. So shower, we have a regular showerhead, a handheld showerhead. The thing that holds all of these pieces together is there's filters in all of our products as well. A big subscription business on that. And I think just helped us build a really sticky relationship with customers. And as we've continued to launch products, we've definitely kept that as the core of the ethos is how do we continue to build products with a replenishment component? And yeah, I mean that business launched in 2020. We've got about 16, 17 people full-time on the team now. So fully spun out of Doris Dev. And launching in a couple retail locations later this year, Target, Sephora. So we're really, really excited about retail expansion opportunity. Launched on Amazon last year. That's been an insane channel for us. Yeah, we work with Crush. Is that what you just said?

No, I said it's probably Crush off Amazon.

Shadow Crush. They do a good job.

Yeah, for sure. Love Matt. And then after we got through the process of getting Canopy off the ground, we started hiring folks in. We were collaborating with a team that had come out of Y Combinator working on a project called Workbench, which was a product lifecycle management platform. We were kind of like beta testers for them. Prince can tell his own story on like what—

He was our first guest.

Yeah.

Was he?

Okay.

So like—

I feel like he said doorstep 7 times in that episode.

For sure.

100%.

So we were kind of like, hey, listen, like not sure that there's a ton of room to grow here or like what the path forward looks like on this, but we had an idea. Which was we kind of wanted to build Flexport for quality control. So for those who don't know what Flexport is, essentially a managed services SaaS platform that overlaid on top of a bunch of freight forwarders. So it was a super legacy system back in the day. It was like pick up a phone, send a WhatsApp, like pick up my shit somewhere in China and move it to New Jersey. They built out a tech layer. It's super seamless. It makes the whole process of freight forwarding a lot easier. So we were like, why doesn't this exist for quality control? Like, at the end of the day, the amount of folks that come through the Doorstep doors who think they need engineering help when in reality they need quality control help was really high. And we had a quality control team sitting in our Hong Kong office. We were doing quality control for all of our businesses because at the end of the day, there's nothing worse than placing a $150,000 PO only to land them and learn that 25% of them are defective and like, what are you going to do now? So the idea is you need boots on the ground before product ever leaves the factory floor. We chatted with Prince and his team about it a lot and ended up launching Factored Quality together. And what that meant was we spun out our back office quality control team on the Hong Kong side of things, built out a tech platform. I helped Prince with some of the zero-to-one work out of the gate. And again, that business is now off and running. Really do think about DorisDev as like, we love servicing clients and are going to continue to do that forever. I think the differentiator between agencies, you mentioned agencies always want to do this. How do you actually get it done? I'm definitely talking my own book a little bit here, but I think that DorisDev doesn't execute on commoditized work. There are not a million folks that you can go to to design, engineer, and set up a supply chain for a product end-to-end. You can certainly find some people that'll design a product. You can certainly find some people that'll engineer a product, and you can certainly find some people that'll set up the supply chain. But these things are so disparate and disconnected. I think that having this robust 360 view of how do you actually get something from this is a napkin sketch and just an idea to you've sold a million units of a product is a really interesting point of view and perspective into the consumer goods landscape. And I think that our secret sauce is something that makes it very easy for us to then go in and pull in more commoditized work. And I'm not trying to denigrate anyone by any means, but there's probably 50 branding studios within a few square blocks.

Probably more.

Probably more. Um, and it's like, okay, great. You have a creative perspective and you can build beautiful brands, but like, how do you put the other pieces of the puzzle together that, you know, are a bit more of a black box? And I think that's kind of like the differentiator on how we've actually been able to do it. Um, as opposed to just really wanting to.

I have a question. So I think what's unique about your business compared to like agencies or Adrian's business as an example is Adrian's doing the same thing over and over and over and like refining it a little bit and getting better and better. You guys are directionally playing in the same world, but every problem you're facing is not necessarily the same when you think about a new product category with new SKUs, et cetera. With that, how do you think about focus and prioritization? I think you guys go against this common notion of like a master of all is a master of none, but you guys have successfully been able to do everything from like spin up a humidifier to like spin up a a QA— QC, sorry, uh, software company and everything in between.

Yeah. Um, so I actually think this is like when Justin— when I, I joined DorisDev full-time in 2020, Justin and I started working together again in 2019. I think—

when did DorisDev start, just for context?

DorisDev started in 2017.

Okay.

So I think that it's, it's, it's, it's somewhat a function of Justin and I, which is to say Justin and I are jack of all trades and masters of none, but the people around us are not. They are experts in what they do, right? Our design studio led by Joey Guerra, you know, he's been designing products for the better part of a decade and like has done so many incredible things that like we've, probably everyone listening to this podcast has bought, owned, used, et cetera, right? He is an expert in product design and is fantastic at that work. Justin and I couldn't design a product. Like that's not what we do, right? We have an engineering team who are, experts in mechanical design, electrical engineering, like they are focused on the things that they are focused on. And then, you know, members of the leadership team who at the end of the day are not these skilled technicians who are not like deep detailed experts in a specific part of the process. We have the opportunity to kind of like take a step back and say, okay, how can we apply these things that we've built a machine to do to these other areas? I think that that was only afforded to us after years of working on Dorisdev, right? It took a lot of time for us to get to a point where we have a stable process, we have the experts in-house that we need to be able to trust that the work is getting executed on at a really high level. And then like, you know, trusting those folks to execute. And that doesn't, like, if anybody who works with Dorisdev will tell you, Justin or I is riding shotgun on every single program. Like we're never fully removed from the loop. We're on every single client call. We're never actually taking a full step away from any project-based work. At the end of the day, Doris is my focus in particular. I think that that is the key piece, is pull in the experts to do the deep work. I can get a lot of things to 80%, not technical work on ID or engineering, but on the Canopy side of things, when we launched, it was me, Justin, Lucas, who's one of the other co-founders of Doris, and a guy named Eric Nehr, who we brought in as CMO, brand marketing focus. I had done work in e-com, I had done some work in paid advertising, I had run a CX team before, so I was like, okay, I stood up the CX team, I stood up the marketing funnel, I pulled in the partners that we needed to be deep experts in it, and I knew just enough to be dangerous and be a thought partner, but I'm not the one who I'm like, oh yeah, I would trust me to drive strategy if you're trying to build a business from 2 to 10. But if you need to get from 0 to 2, I can probably figure it out for you. I also think there's a lot of people have a, especially founder types, like a perfectionist mindset. They want to get something super, super dialed in out of the gate. And I think one thing that product teaches you is like nothing's perfect ever. Stop pretending like it's going to be. Apple launches new products every single year because they're never going to get it 100% right. I think the Scrub Daddy is a perfect product, but I think it's the only perfect product.

I haven't used the Scrub Daddy.

Oh, it's the best one.

I'm going to reframe. I'm going to reframe. To reframe the question a little bit. How do you think about prioritization in terms of opportunities that come your way? Yeah, like your, your vetting process for like, this is worth the limited resourcing we have to allocate against it.

Well, I mean, I'll say like the biggest gating piece of the puzzle is, is money, right? Setting up a supply chain is very expensive. It's not just paying Doris Dev services. I guess like Doris Dev is a service provider. There are other folks out there that do trade, which is essentially they put up a steel curtain, they mark up your cost of goods sold. That's how they make their money. We make our money as a partner, right? We think about ourselves as, you know, your outsourced VP of product. And in order to stand up a supply chain, not only are you paying for design services, engineering services, supply chain setup services, but you're also paying for an immense amount of prototyping, 3D printing. We're getting samples from, you know, 5 suppliers out of the gate. We're paying suppliers to build hand— essentially handmade benchtop works like, looks like prototypes. Then you're cutting steel for tooling. Tooling can cost anywhere from, you know, $5,000 for something cheap, but like I've seen tooling bills come in well over $200,000. And that's before you've placed a purchase order. That's before you've paid duties and taxes on importing goods, right? Like I always tell people, if you're trying to launch a new product that has any level of sophistication that isn't just like, hey, we've got a plastic bin, You know, you need to budget at least $150,000 to $350,000 for simple product. And like, the second you start to get into a more complex build, like you're easily in the $350,000 to $550,000 range. That's crazy. To get through the first production run.

Wow.

Right? So that in and of itself really starts to shrink the kind of the types of folks that come in the door and work with us. That's not to say we don't work on things that are relatively simple. We work with a bunch of skincare brands on helping them procure vessels and making sure that their designs are being executed on at a high level and like it's not nearly as costly to get off the ground, which is why I think you're seeing a lot of skincare brands winning and still raising money because the CapEx just isn't as intensive. Like if you, if you launch a successful product and you're turning around to launch another product, there's not like all of a sudden this cost savings that has opened the door, right? You're investing another quarter million dollars, half a million dollars into getting a supply chain off the ground. So that in and of itself definitely shrinks the folks that come through the door. And then I think there's, there's like a tricky part, piece of the puzzle, right? Which is to say, I've seen brands come through our door that have gone out and gone on Kickstarter, scrapped together $100 grand, launched a business. It's incredibly successful. I've seen folks come through the door that raised $3.5 million pre-seed, launched their business, fell flat on their face. So capital allocators aren't great at picking them. We're not necessarily in the job of like picking the product. If somebody has conviction, and a vision, we'll likely support them as long as it can be real. Like, I've had people come and ask me to make something that I was like, listen, if this could exist, the US government would have made it because this is the sickest technology I've ever heard of in my life and I don't think it's real. Um, but you know, we work on everything from like really sophisticated appliances that are actually going to be category-defining that'll be coming out in the next couple of years to You know, simple and straightforward products like the Good Time Soap Bar, where it's like, nope, just nobody's thought about it. And like, they had a vision and an idea. And it's like, well, yeah, of course we can help bring it to life. And the— I think the one— like, this is a common question, especially like when you're talking to branding agencies, people are like, oh, they don't have X or Y or Z in their portfolio. They've never worked on a CPG brand. I don't know if we want to work with them on the branding side of things. It's a common question I get asked, like, have you ever worked on cookware and in that example, the answer is yes, for sure. But sometimes somebody comes to us and is like, oh, you've never worked on this type of product. What we've systematized is a process. We don't need to be experts in electric flossers. What we can do is we can tear a bunch of electric toothbrushes apart, figure out exactly how they work. How do these pieces come together? What's the size of the componentry? What do we need to be thinking about to build that product? And then use the process that we've created to commercialize a product.

Do you actually— I want to, I want to walk through that process as someone who's so curious about this. I think there's this running joke that the grass is always greener on the other side when you're a software founder or brand founder. It's like every brand's like, I should have built the software company, and every software founder is like, I should have built the brand. Yeah, I'm scared of building a brand. Like, the thought of it just seems very daunting.

Terrifying.

Yeah.

I call, I call you, I say, yo, Mike, I want to make an electric flosser.

Yeah.

Where the hell do I start?

Yeah, I mean, the way— so the way that we would generally approach something essentially, especially something that is net new, but honestly pretty much across the board, this is the way we approach it. We start with what we call an engineering exploration. So what we do, we spend anywhere between 2 and 2 weeks and 2 months basically defining all the subassembly systems inside of a product, right? Sometimes that's simple. It's one like, hey, we need an electric flosser that's vibrating and driving that force up into the head to make sure that you have, you know, the desired experience of helping kind of remove gunk from your teeth. So we'll tear apart a bunch of toothbrushes. Well, for, for Floss in particular, like, how does the floss, the floss head snap in, right? That's a big piece of the puzzle. You put a flosser in your mouth and that, that thing pops out like now you have a choking hazard. So really defining kind of the key constraints, tearing a bunch of products apart, understanding exactly how they work in detail. And then we provide essentially block CAD, which is to say, hey, this is about the sizing and spacing you need to the design team, right? So that way when they're designing, they're not designing in a vacuum. They know what the size of the componentry is going to be about. And then they step into a really robust process, start with foundational strategy. It's— if you've gone through a creative process in the past, you've gone through something similar, except now we're designing something in 3D. So upfront strategy work, we'll step into concepting, give you 3 to 5 to 10 concepts depending on kind of what it is, downselect into kind of preferred versions of it. We'll 3D print them so you can hold them in your hands, get a sense of how it feels. If like weighting is a consideration, we'll like give you a bunch of different weights of the product so you can feel how it actually operates and then kind of go through a bunch of refinements around, you know, obviously visuals, color, material, finish, but also user experience and user interface, right? You got to think through how is this person going to approach the product? How are they going to pick it up? How are they going to turn it on? What does that entire experience look and feel like? And then once we get to the end of that process, it gets kicked back to the engineering team. The engineering team starts building out the internals in detail, right? How does this product actually come together? What are the components that are required? And then the Hong Kong team gets spun up. They're going out finding factory partners that would be a good fit for execution. We bring back a big list of factories. We then shortlist them and say, okay, we—

Dude, this is just to floss your teeth. Yeah.

This is crazy.

Create. I had no idea that this workflow was so in-depth.

I mean, I, I had a feeling. I mean, if you just— if you think about it like a dummy, it's like you come up with the idea, you have to understand what goes into it, design it, and build it. But that's at like a very surface level, for sure. But I think the level of detail and discovery that needs to go into building like items— when I just look around the living room that people use every day, and it seems so simple, but yet it's so sophisticated. And the craziest part to me is that it's very hard to like test something at scale until you actually have the product.

Yeah, you have to have conviction.

Like, you— like with the concept of like testing a software concept, like my favorite story of all time is the BarkBox founding story where like they go to the park and literally get people to put down their card at this hypothetical idea of like, I'm going to deliver you a box of toys, but that's the extent of it. But to be like, I'm going to make you an electrical flosser, you can't— okay, like, what does that mean? What is it going to look like? What is it going to feel like? You have to go through this long-ass discovery process to get an MVP to then put it in someone's hand.

Yep.

There's such a gamble in that.

100%. And that's where, that's where, like, going back to like, how do you weed them out? It's like you have to have conviction. The founders, the founders, the businesses that we work with, they have to have a really high level of confidence in what they're building. Because at the end of the day, if you go through this entire process and you come out of the backside and you weren't actually as excited about it as you thought you were, like, You've spent a lot of money and like you don't have much to show for it.

But throughout that workflow, it's so complex. It's so deep. As you were walking through it, in my mind, I was just imagining like price tag going up. I was like, it makes sense why you guys are premium.

Yeah, 50 more K. 50 more K.

Just 50 more K. We haven't even gone to Hong Kong yet. That's like the more expensive part. And something that I've gone through, Ben used to run an agency before Platter, is, you know, if you started an agency in 2017, by 2020, I'm sure you look back and you're like, wow, we didn't know what we were doing back then.

Yeah.

And even today, like, you know, we've been around like 2.5, 3 years. I look back even 3 months ago and I'm like, what were we doing from like a workflow perspective, from an owner's, from a process? And so walk me through how you— I'm sure you guys experience that every day, but you've consistently produced great work over the past 7 years. How do you look back on ensuring that there's constantly workflow and process improvements?

For sure. Yeah, I think this has been like a big thing. When I first joined Doris, you know, we were maybe 9 guys split between New York and Hong Kong. Everyone was on every single project, essentially, right? Everyone, everyone knew what was going on on all the work that was happening. And then all of a sudden, you're a 20-person company, and that's not the case anymore. And you're, you're sitting there and you're like, oh boy, like, how— what are we gonna do about this? Um, we, we brought in an engineering director, uh, you know, about 3 years ago who had a lot of experience kind of in larger corporate structures where they're, they're developing a ton of products, right? Like in-home appliances. They're doing this day in, day out every single year. And like every year they're launching a new version, right? Like V2, V3, V4, right? So he had a really regimented system that he had kind of like brought over with him and like it layered on top of what we were doing. We just built out a much more aggressive system to be able to get our arms around all of those things. And at the end of the day, the answer is also partially it never stops, right? You never stop iterating on process and how you stay organized and how you can like manage something that is complicated and sophisticated, especially if you're like, we're working on 20 new products right now across, you know, 15 different categories. How do you keep your head on straight? Honestly, on our side, it's been like a big ClickUp implementation. Same. Yeah, that's been huge for us. As we've like moved through these processes, We get to stages and we're like, oh, this issue happened last time with this client. Okay, how do we work to mitigate this? So then there's like, okay, we're building out these other types of trackers to make sure that everything is getting logged and detailed. And I think the Doris dev, we work to provide an immense amount of transparency to our clients. We have to deliver bad news all the time, right? Physical product is not— it is not a straight line to launching your product. We'll get a prototype and we'll be like, this doesn't work the way it needs to. Like, and sometimes it's like, oh, I actually don't think it's ever been not close. But it's like, okay, there's still a lot more work that we have to do here. We need to do another round of works like looks like prototyping before we step into like actually cutting a tool, which is, you know, one of the most expensive parts of standing up the supply chain. So it's like, we have to have a very rigorous process. The way that I think about it is like, go to Suitsupply. Like, they've got a bunch of suits, they're going to custom tailor it to you. And like, we have built out essentially 3 or 4 versions of our process depending on the complexity of the program and the complexity of the build. And then we custom tailor those processes to that, to that specific workflow. Then a lot of components of it are essentially cut and paste. It's like, okay, if we need to do a second round of prototyping, we can slot it in there. Here's what the timeline implications look like. Sometimes, given the fact that we're talking about a global supply chain, we're talking about so many physical humans in the loop. On the software side of things, you can throw bodies at a problem. We've got crunch time, we need more dev hours, we're going to grind this out and get it across the finish line. There's no way to do that on the product side of things. Like, product takes as long as it takes to get made.

And I will— I want to— I want to add one point to what you just said, though, because I think there is a misconception that I've only started to learn recently, is that there is absolutely a point where you hit diminishing returns by putting too many engineers or developers against the problem.

Sure.

And I think I used to fight with my co-founder about this all the time. Like, dude, how in the right mind can you tell me that, like, having 2 engineers building a product can compete with the team somewhere else that has 15 engineers?

Yeah.

And he's like, you don't understand. There's like, he doesn't need to go talk to everyone. There's not as many stakeholders. There's not as much context switching. Like when you can just let him, our lead engineer, like disappear for 12 hours and not have to talk to a single person. The amount of progress you can make is actually crazy. It took me forever to actually wrap my head around that.

Sure.

Until I saw like some other companies in our space who have raised $20 million plus, have 50 engineers, and like we have a couple engineers. I'm like, why are we shipping product faster than them? I was like, oh, it's actually a real thing.

Yeah, for sure. No, there's definitely like a little bit of like a contradiction in that reality because like smaller stage software companies are shipping product faster. They can move more quickly. And like, it's also like the nice thing about it for you guys is you can ship and like if something's broken, you can kind of fix it.

You don't need like 7 layers of like submit a ticket, talk to like the head of customer support who needs to like Slot it in the product roadmap for the engineer to look at it when he gets a chance to fix like a bug that might take 10 minutes.

For sure.

I think there, there are some— we're going through this right now and I know you guys are too, so I'm curious to get your take around adding kind of pairing young, green, ambitious talent. Yeah, we're really willing to grind with some senior folks who are— that's where systems and process really, really matters. Yeah, like I was interviewing an editor this morning who's great and fingers crossed like we'll land on her. And she worked at ClickUp.

Yeah.

And which is obviously our project management tool too. But even just the way she was like walking me through throughout the interview process, systems, process, delegation, how you handle bad news, how you put people on PIPs if things aren't working out, when things are working well, how do you think about performance incentives versus if I'm interviewing someone a couple of years out of college, they're green and ready to go, but they do not have that experience. So I feel like early days of a service offering, you don't want any of that like senior leadership and systems.

Yep.

But we're like 26 people now and we're hitting that point that like we need those folks. And I know you're literally going through this in real time. So how do you think about hiring?

I would say that we got to the point where it was very clear that parts of the business were going backwards at the expense of like not having enough process, which like I was—

will—

I wanted it to be the case. I think a lot of founders fall into this trap of like we're going to staff up to solve a problem before a problem actually exists. And then you can never actually predict if that's the thing that actually happens.

Yeah.

Versus in the case of what you're alluding to, my co-founder hasn't been able to like think straight or proactively in the last 3 months because we've grown so much. He's like, I need people to help like unblock this. At which point I was like, all right, like I'll hire people then because it's very clear that you don't have a free minute to think. It wasn't like, I know we're going to be busy in 3 months, so can we just staff up a bunch of people? So I think the main thing for us is waiting for a problem to happen versus trying to get in front of it. And I, I mean, some people would probably disagree with that, but in the spirit of like early stage startup, didn't raise a bunch of money, being scrappy, you don't have the ability to go make bets in situations like that where you can just lose a bunch of money, whereas larger companies can afford to be like, oh, I anticipate this is going to happen, let's go hire a VP. Oh, it didn't happen, let's let go of this person, we lost a couple hundred thousand dollars. Like, we can't afford to do that.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

What has been your experience staffing up across Dorus Dev can't be.

I think like we've been on the Doris side of things, we have some pretty incredible retention. The engineering team is the engineering team.

From 7 years ago?

Yeah, I mean like the core team and like we've built on that and like that means there's been guys that have been around for 6 years and 5 years and 4 years and 3 years, right? And I think that's also, Doris offers a pretty unique opportunity to the guys on the engineering team. We move fast, we build a lot of products, they get a ton of exposure. And a lot of folks that work in engineering don't get to see the entire commercialization process end to end. Like if you're working at a larger company, you might be siloed in, okay, post-industrial design, I do this, this chunk of work and then it's handed off and I never see it again. Whereas our guys are like, they're in it from the second it gets handed off from ID and they're responsible for making sure that we're shipping product in 6 months or 8 months or a year later, whatever that is. So I think on the, the engineering side of things, that's been really nice. On the design side, like, we, we essentially merged, uh, with, with Guerra Office, which was Joey's studio at the gate, or that was Joey's studio. He, he ran a studio called Visibility. It changed to Guerra Office, and then, you know, we, we kind of entered into this partnership a little over a year ago. So, um, you know, he— design is an interesting thing. Folks want to come work for somebody who's done who has like a great portfolio and like they want to come in and learn. And especially on the industrial design side of things, I guess I should say there is like this big mentorship mentality. At the end of the day, the creative director is the head chef and everybody else is the sous chef, right? Like they— you need to work, you need to learn. Like, how does, how does this process actually work? How do we, how do we make good product at the end of the day? And then on the Hong Kong side of things, honestly, kind of same thing. Team's been the same. Like, we really haven't had much turnover. So maybe the answer to the question is more like, spend a lot of time on the hiring process and like, make sure that you are making the right hire. And supply chain is not for the faint of heart, right? Like, we're up early in the morning on the phone with Hong Kong, we're up late at night on the phone with Hong Kong. So you're also kind of like already self-selecting for a type of person who's down for a life like that, which is not come in, just roll into the office at 9:30 with a coffee in hand and like, you know, leave around 5:30 and like go on about their day. It's like, no, calls start at 8, leave the office at 6:30, like head home, cook yourself dinner. We've got calls with Hong Kong tonight. Let's go. So yeah, I don't know. I think it's spent a lot of time.

You're either in or in the way.

Yeah.

I'd be remiss to ask you this since you've been in the space for a while. I know we were talking about what we do with Platter before we started, but Want your broad perspective on where e-com is shifting over the last couple of years and where you think it's going?

Yeah, I mean, I think that launching like innovative product is going to become more and more challenging for, for net new folks. Like if you have an awesome idea, your ability to go out and fundraise against that is going to be limited. I think that we've seen a lot more privately funded companies like folks that have essentially pulled together family money, pulled together money from their friends to be able to get something off the ground. Nobody really wants to invest in product until you have product market fit, and even then they're not exactly getting the most fantastic terms. I think the biggest shift is really, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020, even into 2021, there was still enough money flowing into the space that you could grow unprofitably. It's not tenable. You have to out of the gate figure out a profitable business model and like, how do you build a really lean team and then hire in experts to do niche and specific work. Like, I think that's the name of the game. It's, it's not, oh, I need— sure, you're gonna hire a head of marketing, but like, do they need to be in Facebook and Google deploying the ads themselves? No, they— that's a waste of their time. Like, bring on an agency to execute against that. Like, maybe, maybe at a certain point you're bringing on a designer to execute internally, but you know, work with a freelance shop. I think the The, the big, like, early stage hire that I think a lot of folks should be indexing towards if they're not already is kind of a function of the shift in, in ad spend on, on Meta and Google being— you used to be able to generate alpha inside the platforms with talented ad buyers. And like, and that's not to say that you can't do that at all. It's just to say it's not as big of a thing as it once was. It is— the algorithms are doing the work. Advantage+ is doing a lot of work, right? And What that means is these systems are now so content hungry. So it's, you need to hire a content person early. You need to hire somebody whose job is to ship 25 pieces of content every single week. Like, sure, maybe you're only shooting 5 videos, but chop it up 5 times. Like, how are they contributing on the copy side?

I'm gonna double that number from what we've heard from some of the brands we've been working with.

100%.

Which is crazy.

It's a function of how much you're spending.

Like, net new creative every single week. Yeah. You have to.

We have a couple of brands that are like, yeah, 50 pieces a week minimum.

No shit. Yeah.

Like, who the hell?

Static video and everything.

Yeah.

I want to talk about margin ruthlessness.

Yeah.

Because I feel like the most ruthless people when it comes to allocating spend, number one is bootstrap founders. I put you in that camp or raising like a small amount of capital. You just have to be or you're going to go out of business. Two is venture-backed founders that have gone through big layoffs.

Yep.

Once you go through that period. And then 3, from day 1, all my brand founder friends, absolutely ruthless. And if they're not, they're going to die.

Yeah, for sure.

And, you know, they'll be— maybe I'll grab dinner, you grab a drink with them, you know, happy-go-lucky on the surface. The minute you start talking business, incredibly ruthless capital allocators. So I'm curious, from your experience at Canopy, has that been true? And then how have you— obviously you help run a bootstrapped agency too.

100%. I think like if Justin scrutinizes every dollar and cent that comes in and out of the business, right? Like, and I think if you're not doing that, if you don't have your, like, your eye on that ball consistently, it's just a matter of time until the bucket starts springing leaks and like, you've got money going out the door that is like, on a platform that you're not using anymore on Shopify or something along those lines. I then think there's, during the product development process, I mean, the amount of folks that come to me that start with, and connectivity needs to be a part of this. And I'm like, why? You got it. You got to give me a good reason for me to not talk you out of this right now, because nobody has an app on there. Like, why does my Oral-B toothbrush have Bluetooth connectivity? Please tell me. Like, what am I going to do with that? I have no idea. So there's also a bunch of decisions that you can make early on in the product development process to say, I need to keep my BOM as low as possible to keep my landed cost as low as possible, to give myself as much money as possible to play with on the marketing side of things. Because especially when you're just launching, you need to test and iterate and move fast and spend money to do it. And like, if you've spent all of that on a feature that is like a real nice to have on your product, it's like, probably not the best money spent. It's like, but if you find product market fit and you want to launch a prosumer version of your product, great, we can plow that new feature in. Like, why start with like the, every single bell and whistle possible. So I think absolutely, there's no question, every, every dollar and cent has to get scrutinized going in and out of business.

I think the takeaway is that the nice-to-haves come way too early in the product lifecycle for a lot of brands.

Yeah.

Which ends up them not being a brand anymore.

I mean, we were, we were talking about your guys' approach to, to developing websites. I think like one thing that on the Canopy side of things that we've definitely felt is we had a limited budget. We had to build the way that we had to build. And as a result, we've had tech debt that we've had to work through, right? We've had to like restart the website from scratch. Like we have these complicated scripts on our backend to help manage all of the subscription variables that we have going on.

And you still have those scripts?

Still have it.

Oh God.

We're like working on getting out of there, right? But it's like once you kind of push the boulder down the path on something like that, it's like, well, we're just building on top of this now.

Yeah.

And it's like, now you find yourself in a situation where you're like, now we have to spend money. So there is like a flip side of this, right? It's like, sometimes if you're like, I need to be as scrappy as possible, you end up doing something that is semi-suboptimal that you have to build on top of. Eventually, you might have to go back to scratch. But like, you know, I think there's areas to invest in and areas to try and be as scrappy as humanly possible out of the gate. And then, you know, you can always go back in time and fix things like a website.

Yeah, I love it.

Turning pro. So the premise of this podcast is to double-click into the turning pro moments in your life. Looking back on your journey, were there any particular moments that you would draw upon that were like game-changing for you?

Interesting question. I mean, I think that I like stumbled into consumer at the end of the day, right? Like I was working at Morgan Stanley out of college and just was not enjoying myself. And one of my good friends—

That sounds crazy.

I know. I know.

Could you imagine someone not enjoying themselves at Morgan Stanley?

Yeah, they made me cut my hair.

Damn. And he hasn't cut it since.

Yeah, man, they do buzz cuts when you get there. It's like the military.

They actually told me, don't come in with hair that long. I was like, okay, so go get a haircut. But I like, I stumbled into it because I had some friends like working at Casper. Like they were, they were there early and they were enjoying themselves. And I remember going into the Casper offices and this is like peak Casper as well and being like, oh, I want this. This is, this is really awesome. And like, New York is the consumer hub. It's— I don't have any interest in moving out to the West Coast and like working in tech. And I literally walked into a pop-up that Raiden was doing and was like in a suit and tie after work. And I was like, I'll literally do anything. Like, what do you guys— are you hiring for something? Like, I'll just come in and do whatever you guys need to get done. Got a job at Raiden and like, that was, that was literally how it started. I did it the old-fashioned way, straight up walked into a place and asked for a job and Honestly, like that was the big turning point, I think, for me was simply like I knew I wanted to change the relationship that I had with work. I knew I wanted to care about my work. And I think like in product, it's like a sophisticated enough machine. There's a lot of levers, there's a lot of dials that you can play with. And also having the opportunity, like working with someone like Justin who values a generalist and I think that was also a really unique opportunity for me. I found myself in a place where the guys that I was working with early in my career in consumer were started as generalists themselves and were like open to bringing somebody up and just being like, yeah, you just, I need somebody to get shit done. Like that's, that's the name of the game. And I think that was, that was the big turning point for me. It's like just walking into a startup and not caring and asking for a job and And two is being in environments where you don't have enough money to hire people to do like the specific role. You need somebody who can spend 45% of their time on it this week. And like, that's—

I think that's advice to everyone at Morgan Stanley right now.

I think more people need to look, not even just Morgan Stanley, like that really should resonate with a lot of people who are sitting at a desk job right now, hating their life because they're too scared of like where to go or what to do. Walk through the front door of the company you want to work at.

For sure.

Swing by Ben's apartment.

Yeah, there you go. We're hiring.

No, this was a great place to wrap. Can you talk to that camera?

Yeah, sure.

Tell them where they can find you, Doris Dev, Canopy.

For sure. Yeah, you can— I mean, find me on LinkedIn, Mike DeSantis, Doris Dev, DorisDev.com, and Doris Design, Doris.Design, if you want to check out kind of our design portfolio. You can check out Canopy at GetCanopy.co and Factored Quality at FactoredQuality.com.

So yeah, thanks for coming on, man. This was great.

Thanks, guys. This was a lot of fun.

That's a wrap.

I love this.