1 Million Per Month On Shopify Alone: How I Started Selling Online Without Touching Amazon w/ Garret Akerson #BrandBuilderPodcast

Our average order value on Amazon is about $30 where our average order value on Shopify is 70 plus. So big difference there.

Welcome to the Brand Builder podcast presented by capitalism.com I'm Max Kerwick and I advise physical product brands to find their story.

I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and I invest in physical products brands. A physical products brand is arguably the most predictable path to a seven figure business. And, and we advise them build them, buy them and sell them.

The show goes behind them, tracks their success and hands you the keys to what's working.

Let's dive in. Hey, a quick note for you Amazon sellers and brands who want to be on Amazon and haven't made it a priority yet. I am often asked about changes with reviews or changes with Amazon terms of service or changes with what's working with ranking and all of that kind of jazz. And I'm proud that I have partnered with one of our backroom members. His name is Jeff. He runs an agency that specializes specifically in optimizing your Amazon presence. So if you're a brand that is neglecting Amazon and you've heard me talking about and you're like, we know we got to get this together, or if you're an Amazon seller and you know you need to turn your attention to audience building and funnels and the stuff that is really going to grow your company, I would recommend that you give a quick shout to my boy Jeff at Turnkey Product management. They're@TurnKeyProductManagement.com and as I said, they're in the back room. They work with my team and the rest of the big companies and equity groups that are involved in our little circle. And they're usually ahead of everybody else in terms of what's working, what's compliant, what review strategies are cool and kosher and are actually effective and they're not out there hawking a bunch of info products, they're out there actually doing it. So they're an implementation agency that just handles it for people and they run their own businesses, some of which they have built and sold, kind of like yours truly. So I feel really good about partnering with them and recommending the big companies and the brands that I work with to outsource their Amazon management over to Jeff and his team. So if you're looking to add some automation into your arsenal, I would recommend the good folks@TurnKeyProductManagement.com and Jeff and I are on speed dial with each other and are collaborating on what's working. So you're Always getting what's the latest and greatest in the Amazon world. So contact those guys if you're looking to outsource, automate and optimize your Amazon presence@TurnKeyProductManagement.com.

Morning, everyone. Good to see you. We get a big round of applause for the event staff here. They've done an amazing job. I just want to thank them. And thank you to Ryan and the rest of the team for the invite today. And let's dive right in.

So a brief history of how we started and where we came from. So my wife and I founded kinder bravely three years ago and it all started with a pair of black pajamas. My wife was breastfeeding our youngest and it had been on our Christmas list two years in a row to find something comfortable. If any of you women in the audience have given birth, you know that comfort is like what you're after.

And it's really hard to get comfortable, apparently as a pregnant mom or as a breastfeeding mom. And so black pair PJs, we launched only in four color, just the one color, four sizes. And it did okay. We launched on Amazon and we launched on Shopify at the same time. And then we followed that up in October with a French cherry bra, which is today still one of our best sellers. And from there things just continued to grow. And so I'm going to dive in today. Our seven takeaways on how we scaled from zero to seven figures. In September 2017, we won the Shopify Build a Bigger Business competition as one of the eight fastest growing online retailers. As Shopify's choice won ManyChat's chatbot shortly after that for our chatbot content and how we interact and provide content to moms. And then we just launched our first of two patent pending bras this August. Actually just this last week.

So I went for a run this morning and this was the path and it got me thinking. You know, it's not always this clear. I think when, when we start, maybe it is.

But it's not always this clear and it's definitely not always this smooth starting out and I think it often feels like this.

So you're going to get a lot of advice. I know over these two days and I know Jeremy just mentioned you're going to have pages of takeaways. And the question I always walk away with from a conference is which ones do I implement and when? Right. It's a matter of timing and execution and so I'm going to try to give you some pointers. There hopefully some takeaways.

And I think if I can give you anything, it is focus for me. There's a lot of shiny objects out there. What worked for us was to focus.

So going to cover seven takeaways. Brand.

How we tell a story, our vision, a bit on timing, hiring, culture and remote teams. So this is going to be macro. I'm going to try to get into some details, some. So you have some takeaways there as well. So brand matters. If you didn't know.

And I find it ironic that you look at the Amazon brands, this is our space, and none of them, to me look like brands that you would actually want to buy outside of Amazon. So you might buy them on that platform because of their ranking or where they're at. But at least in our face, in our space, none of these brands really connect just from the beginning brand design. So I think when you're starting out, branding is key. The takeaway here is don't be afraid to change. So we actually launched as Davey Gene, that bottom one you see there. And it did not feel right. Our first product was called Davey Gene. All the tags on it were Davey Gene. And it just didn't have the feel or the connection that we were looking for. So we ended up rebranding about three months in. So it didn't take us too long. We pivoted pretty quickly and renamed Kindred bravely, which we felt did a much better job of communicating what our brand was about. So Kinder Bravely. Kindred stands for the kindred spirit that moms have or women when they give birth and enter motherhood. And then bravely. We believe it takes a lot of bravery to be a mom. Bravery is often associated with men, and that bravery you think about in war times or other times. But it takes a lot of bravery.

To be a mom.

And so we talk about that and our brand embodies it. And so that brings me to the story part, which I think is the bigger part of the brand. So your brand.

Has to tell a story if you're going to get off of Amazon. And I know, I think a lot of brands in this room are exclusively on Amazon or mostly on Amazon. Your brand has to communicate a story. That's the only way you're going to get there. So here's some stats that I pulled on Millennial Moms, and I titled it Millennial Moms Care More and Less. So Millennial Moms, and I think this applies to men as well. They care more about you as a brand and what you stand for. And they care less about big brands. So I think one of the advantages and why we've seen so much growth in Amazon and in E commerce is because millennials do definitely care less about the big brands and more about if you're connecting with them. So understands me. So understands what matters to me as a parent. This is a big one for us millennial moms there compared to Gen X. 58% care if you understand what matters to me. And then next shares my values. So are you communicating as a brand those values 49% compared to 38. A couple other ones here. Real time customer service for us also is big. I think nowadays everyone expects immediate response 37% compared to 28. And then gives back socially responsible gives back to the community. Ways your brand can connect and tell a story and through story. So we do that through imagery. One.

Our imagery is obviously of moms and it is of real moms. We don't use models. It's everyday moms. It's friends, it's family. In fact, we started out with my wife asking her best friend to model for us. This picture is actually my wife and our second and my wife and her sister breastfeeding. This is right after we launched kinder bravely. And the story is very much about the journey and my wife Deanne, her journey as a mom.

So we have that everywhere. So you'll see it across social media and you'll see it most prominently in email. So getting a little bit into the weeds here. This is kind of my first tactical is copy. When we're communicating with moms, it is personal, it feels personal. It connects on a personal level. And we want that emotional connection. So you can see this one of these here, this note to self. Something we started early on where it's just a note to your future self. And it was just my wife talking through and writing these to herself. What she would have wanted to hear. So today may have been tough or it may have been a beautiful easy day. You might not always feel like it, but I know you're doing your best. This is just your future self reminding you to give yourself more credit. You're enough. You're the right mom for your little one. Be you bravely, Deanne. And even down to the details of sent from my iPhone. So this was sent from Klaviyo, not sent from an iPhone. It's just plain text though. Feels very personal. So brands, I think too often a note on the branding side is you want to get all big brand, feel like a big brand and put all this around it, but certainly millennials and I think in general, wider population wants to connect on a personal level. So just take it down, like, take the logo out, have emails that just feel like somebody just shot you an email from their iPhone. In this case, we still have the branded emails as well, so there's plenty of those flows. And the copy in these two is very much designed to connect with moms. Social media, we put out videos again, encouraging moms. Dear mom, you're doing a wonderful job. This was a Mother's Day one we did. And then we do helpful content and tips, so pregnancy tips. Some women experience an increase in shoe size during pregnancy. So if your feet are swelling, it's a fun and easy excuse to go buy new shoes. So it can be all the way from simple to a longer story there. But don't be afraid to tell your story. In fact, you have to tell your story if you're going to compete and grow. You don't on Amazon, but you have to have a story to start with and then you're going to have to tell it.

Instagram, we do a lot of empowerment, just our brand. One of our core values is obviously bravery, and another one is encouragement.

This was us when we just started out and shopping. So don't be afraid to get real and post images of you working or behind the scenes.

Again, it's all about that connection and that relationship with your brand when you're telling your story and who you are.

Which brings me to Vivid Vision. To your vision. Now, how many have heard of Vivid Vision? So I see a few hands here. A few hands here. Awesome. So if any of you know Cameron Herald, he spoke at Freedom Fast Lane two years ago, I think it was, and wrote a book called.

Oh.

Bigger, Bigger. I want to say.

Double Double. That's it. Thank you. Double, double. Not bigger, bigger, double, double. And he goes through how he writes a vision. And it's not a simple vision statement. It's actually a long document.

And it explicitly lines, line by line where you're going to be. So I thought this quote from a Milne was appropriate. Pay attention to where you're going, because without meaning, you might get nowhere.

So for a vivid vision, it's going to be in the future, I would highly encourage everybody, look up, double, double, look up. Vivid vision. There's lots of examples of them. I'm happy to share some examples if anybody wants to hit me up. So we created this when we started kinder bravely. Vivid vision. December 31, 2019. So you'll notice we're not there yet. You write your vivid vision as in the future, this is us. This is where we're going to be looking back and it outlines all the key areas of our business. So this is one of the pages in it and notice it has copy. It's entirely designed. We share this with the entire team. Everybody knows where we're going and what our goals are. So this talks about our brand, that we've launched a mid tier brand, our customers, what they feel, what they view us as and our customer service.

And where they talk about us. So it's even outlining, they talk about us on BabyCenter, Reddit and their mom groups. So all of this is great, but a little bit about timing.

I don't know if it's, I'm going to slaughter this quote, I don't know if it's a Sun Tzu quote, but if you try to cross all bridges at the same time, you'll die on all bridges. So I want to talk a little bit about timing and chasing shiny baubles.

So.

This slide here is for us when we launched, so we launched June of 2015. And I want to talk, since I think most of the audience is on Amazon, on when to actually implement some of this stuff, because I think that would be most helpful.

Everybody is talking about, you know, funnels or Facebook this or that and I feel too often worried about, hey, I have to get off Amazon. So I know brands that are on Facebook again exclusively with Shopify and they've seen their sales get cut in half because of the recent changes in Facebook's algorithm. So it's no guarantee getting off Amazon is going to make it where nothing's going to happen or that you have a secure path. The grass is not always greener on the other side, but for us, so we had 16 months where we were just on Amazon. We, we launched on both platforms at the same time. I think you need brand presence both places. But we didn't push any traffic to our own site. We didn't work on it at all. We just left it there. We put up some social content a little bit, but I would say if you're less than 215,000amonth, less than 200,000amonth on Amazon, don't bother with anything else. If you hit at least 100 to 200k a month on Amazon, then it's probably time to start up or think about starting to build out Shopify and your off channel. So for us, that took us 16 months to get to 250,000amonth run rate on Amazon and we had launched by then 12 products. So I would say the other thing there is on a product mix, you're going to be, you're going to, obviously I'm going to talk about product more, but you're going to want to launch more products. So we launched Facebook ads in October of 2016 to our Shopify site. The other takeaway here, and I think why you want to wait longer is you're going to need some deep pockets. I know I've talked to a few attendees already saying, oh, I tried Facebook, I tried Shopify, I tried ads and it didn't work. I just spent a lot of money and I didn't get any return. So I'm just going back to Amazon because it's so easy and Amazon in many ways is like that. So you're going to need to build up a cash reserve and a bit of a war chest. I would say don't start Facebook ads with less than, say, 100k in cash ready to spend, not immediately. Don't spend that all in 30 days. Take your time. But you're going to burn through cash to test your funnels, test your ads and get your audiences right and everything else. So we knew up front that it was going to take three to six months of us just losing money and Amazon paying the bills and making up for that. And it's not overnight. There's no, like, quick success. I'm not going to dive into, like Facebook ads and how they, how to do that. There's plenty on that. But for us, we knew we were going to launch in October and start pushing traffic to our Shopify site. We then launched Google Ads in February, January, February of the next year. So we did Facebook first in our sequencing. Then we launched Google Ads, built those up. We heard about this little competition called Build a Bigger Business. Got an email about it through Shopify and we thought, oh, what the heck, Tony Robbins is going to be a mentor. Tim Ferriss is going to be there. We'll go ahead and enter. So we shot a video, my wife and I, and we submitted it and then we forgot entirely about it other than my wife got an email like once a week with Tony saying, like, oh, you should do this. And like giving typical Tony encouragement. And.

Yeah, we didn't really think anything more of it. And then I was in Target shopping with our two boys and I got a call on my phone and it was like, hey, this is Marco from Shopify. You won the Build a Bigger Business competition. And I Thought somebody was pranking me or something. I was like, wait, what are you talking about? Who is this? He's like, no, no, it really is. It's Shopify. And you're one of the winners of Shopify's build a bigger business competition. And we need to verify a few things just to make sure it's like legitimate that you actually you grew.

So that suffice it to say was amazingly exciting trying to talk on the phone with two kids shopping Legos in Target. Not exciting.

But.

It was, it was kind of an inflection point. And for us, we found it afterwards. There were Shopify stores that turned off all their ads, that turned off their store like all kinds of ways to try to game the system to win it. Because it was based on your growth from February through July of 2017 and how fast your store grew. And for us it was just luck. So I would say the other part of it there is part of it's just going to be luck in life timing and where you're at if you're in the right place at the right time. We happened to have a store that we had just left alone for a while and then we kicked in Facebook ads and we kicked in Google Ads and we had a lot of money to spend and we cranked up sales on Shopify. And so we ended up being one of the highest growth stores on the platform, which qualified us. That's about timing. Don't try to do it all at once. Don't try to do it too early. I wanted to talk also here about employees and hiring.

In a bit, but first I want to cover products. So for us, I think the other big thing is I only know of.

Maybe theragun. I'm sure there's some other examples that are running one product Shopify store successfully. So I think another reason to launch on Amazon, grow your brand and continue to launch products there is if you're gonna have a successful Shopify store, you need to have a way to cross sell upsell and merchandise. And for me, I think the number is about 12. That's, you know, you'll see here when we launched we had about 12 products. That's still on the small side, I feel like only now we're getting more traction where we've launched.

This year alone, I think 12 products or 16 products. But certainly in the beginning, launching a Shopify store, driving traffic to it with funnels. If it's just a one or two item store, unless you're very high in they have a very high price Point, I think it's going to be very hard to compete.

That also brings me back to price point. In general price point, our average order value on Amazon is about $30, where our average order value on Shopify is 70 plus. So big difference there. So you need that multiple products to support the ad spend. And I know Ezra talks about this too, because you're gonna be paying 20, $30 to acquire a customer, which is very different than the entire game on Amazon.

So we could not have done this without a team. The other part I wanna talk about here is hiring and how we did that and kind of how it progressed.

So if you can hire people whose passion intersects with the job, they won't require any supervision at all. I don't know if that's entirely true. They will manage themselves better than anyone could ever manage them. Their fire comes from within, not from without. And their motivation is internal, non external. Nice Covey quote. Our team, one of our missions and part of who we are came out of hiring. And it was not intentional. So our team right now is at 32 and it is entirely remote and it is almost entirely work at home moms. So it didn't start this way in the beginning when we had the vision of the brand and the company, but it was just kind of a natural outgrowth of who we are that when we posted up our first job postings, we got a flood of applicants and it was a flood of our customers. It was a flood of moms saying, hey, we want to be part of this brand. We want to come work for you. So hiring and recruiting has never been an issue for us. We get floods of applicants anytime we have a position that opens up. And it is typically 90% customers who want to come work for us. And it's moms. And it's a way for our mission to extend who we are so that moms can continue to stay at home with their little ones, but then be part of something bigger, give back and then contribute to their family. So most of our team, I would say about half and half, is actually part time with flexible work hours. So our team works all hours.

Some in the evening, some in the morning, some throughout, before school, drop offs after. And the advantage we get there is.

That when you're on, you're on, and then when you're off, you're just with your family. And so I think we actually get an efficiency benefit as well. So how we do this, how we hire is. This was an example of one of our recent ones, Facebook Marketing assistant posted up On Facebook. And this is an area where I want to get into a little bit of tactics because I think it's hard or a challenge to hire, especially when you're starting.

And so we drive from Facebook to, in this case a Google form. And it's a long form. It will take about an hour to fill out. Like we have people comment, wow, that took me like 45 minutes. That took me an hour. And it's very specific the questions we go into on what we're looking for, just to screen out everyone else. Because.

To my point earlier, we get so many applicants on a recent, not this one, but another recent one. Recently we got over 400. And screening over 400 without having really good questions becomes very difficult. So for us it'll have email, phone and all of that. But then we use a lot of questions from top grading. If you're familiar with top grading, I would take a look at that. And then we use a lot of cultural fit ones as well as some really basic ones. So we do a typing test and we do a phone typing test. Both of those we say, go to this URL, take a typing test on your phone and. And you may think like, why to do that? Because it'll screen out like half the applicants right away. We want to see if you are actually tech savvy, can take it and are really quick.

We then do group interviews. And again, this came from Cameron Herold.

And the way he interviews. So once we screen applicants down, we take that 400 down to about 30 or 40 applicants and then we'll do group interviews of 10 people in an interview. So there you can see a screenshot of a recent one. We do all our interviews remote. So this is on Zoom and we'll have 10 applicants show up and we only go through five or six questions that we ask here. So.

We get a sense. And this is one of my favorite hacks that we have on hiring. We get a sense immediately how everyone interacts and what they're like compared to each other. Because if you're doing one on one interviews, in my experience, it's very hard to tell is this A, candidate A better than candidate B, better than candidate C? If you put 10 people in a room, you can immediately tell that one's my favorite, that one I would never hire. This one's okay. And you just get this much, a much better sense. And one of the questions we ask here, I don't think you can read it on the screen towards the end is we ask if you were to hire anyone Else here today out of this group, who would you hire? And it's a pretty brutal question. Like we're not easy on the interview. So they have to. And we say we don't want any explanation. We, we just want you to tell us like this is our lightning round. If you had to hire anybody else in this interview, who would you hire? And just boom, go around and you'll see some people a stutter. Some people make decisions right away. So you're already seeing how they make decisions. If they're comfortable with that. Some of them try to, they'll try to explain away why they chose somebody. All kinds of very interesting things, but it actually usually confirms who you already thought was the top candidate in the room.

Room.

So that brings me to culture. And by the way, happy to share if you hit me up later some of the Google forms we use. I have a sample one I can share with anybody if you want. Happy to share that. This leads to culture. And I loved this quote. This was a recent one by Lynn Doty. If leaders wonder whether they're talking about their values too much, that's probably when they're talking about them just enough.

So this is again a slide from our vivid vision. What we believe. We believe no mom wants to buy a bra. What they want to buy is comfort. There are no problems, only puzzles. And your value is always a 10 out of 10.

By attracting applicants from the beginning that embody our core values and who we are that identify with our brand, it's so much easier to build that internal culture and brand that we're after. So we have an entire slide in our vivid vision about culture and our core values. So we are grateful, brave, generous and encouraging. Those are our four core values. We state them, they're posted, and we talk about them regularly. And it's really neat to see what our team has done around those as well and how they've embodied them. We have a giving program so every employee can give $50 every month as a random act of generosity. And we actually notice if employees aren't. And those employees usually actually don't stay around that long.

And it's just a big part of who we are is building that culture.

Again, posted on the wall for those that come in, but then just talked about. Since most of the team is also virtual.

And so since we're virtual, most of our conversation is in Slack, we encourage meetups in the real world. So here's employees, employees posting their desks and then just encouragement. So we have a water cooler channel in Slack. And one of our employees one day just took it upon herself to every week start one thing, one post with our core values. So on Monday it'd be like, hey everyone, who do you want to send encouragement to today? And so people would just get in and start posting, oh, I want to send encouragement out to so and so. Oh, I want to send encouragement out to this person. And then on Tuesday she'll post today I want to talk about bravery. Like how have you seen bravery in life recently? And.

The team would just start posting. And this was just an organic outgrowth of our culture and our values and of who we are, not something that we even had to start. And that took probably, I would say nine months to a year before that employee started that. And that was kind of an organic start, which was really neat to see. And it continues. And if that employee happens to be out or sick, somebody else will post. Now this is a total again shout out to Ryan and a total swipe for from Ryan back in the day. How many of you remember Ryan's like card of five things? He had a different acronym. Kevin. I see a hand there. Anybody else? Few others. So I loved that idea. I was like, I'm totally stealing that idea. And we have what we call our own brave cards. So part of our culture obviously being brave. So the acronym remains the same. If you were familiar with Ryan's Body Relationship Assets Vigilance in time and expansion. We believe as a company that we want you to be the best, you, the most healthy, the most happy and these all contribute to that. So every week it's actually a physical three by five card. We have a welcome package that goes out to every new employee. They get clothing, gift cards and they get a stack of these cards. You can carry it in your pocket. And on Monday people will post these in the slack water cooled water cooler channel as well. Pictures of theirs. On Monday I fill it out for the week. This one was drink water. This one wasn't mine. Mine's actually on the table there. Mine was workout 20 minutes. So anything for your body. It could be any, anything you want to post. Drink water was this one Relationship huggles.

Mine was 60 Minutes with Deanne Assets Emails like what? This is our email manager. Updates to Asana and Slack Vigilance and time and then expansion. Any way you're learning. So body relationship assets for us is how you're building assets in the business and then vigilance and time. In Ryan's that's actually time. So since ours is a V, we had to make it vigilance in time and then expansion. And this is just a way for us to stay grounded, keep our team grounded and accountable and a way to generate and make small habits, daily habits. Because it's really the daily habits that lead to success and these get shared. We do fun giveaways now and then based on the team and how everybody does. And it's not a competition for like perfect score. Usually we'll just, if you post, we'll send you out like this last week with Starbucks gift cards. More about culture here in teams. So we're very cognizant about meetings and meeting bloat and we want to make sure we don't have too many and that they're very functional. So this is just a quick slide on how we break down our meetings. I thought it might be useful for some teams. So we have a weekly all team meeting. Any training opportunities. We talk about departmental updates, tips and tricks. And then everybody shares their Brave card. What, what their Brave card is for the week. Just their score usually, like, I got a 15 on my brave card. This week I got a 20 as well as like the one thing they accomplished that week.

We do, our managers now do weekly one on one meetings with their reports and they, they start out with what's one thing you're excited about, what's one thing you're worried about? And then what's one thing I can do better to help you with your job? And what's one thing you can do better to improve your job?

And then we just started. Since we've got big enough, we actually have employees now that I haven't met, which is kind of odd. Like I've met them once but I haven't worked with them. So we started a new thing recently called a weekly random 10 minute pair share. Just since we're all remote, you don't bump into people in the office. So now we just randomly pair people up and you just share a quick high low for the week. Here's a puzzle I'm facing at work and a closing icebreaker. So part of our culture as well is we don't believe there are any problems. We actually don't even use that language. We say we believe there are only puzzles. So we reframe what puzzle are you working on? Not what problem, because puzzles are always solvable. Some more on remote teams. I think there is often a fear of accountability on remote teams. Or like how, how do I know that people are actually working? Are they doing what they're supposed to be doing? And I find it kind of odd because I never have that worry. Maybe I just intrinsically trust people. But I also know that our team happens to be highly accountable and on track. So here's how we do accountability for remote teams.

Quick quote from Dan Sullivan, who I love. For a company to grow 10x, it doesn't need you managing it, it needs self managing. So I think that's another reason for great for remote teams is if you're having to manage your team, you're probably not going to grow 10x. You're going to be the bottleneck. It's not just not going to happen. I think our company, the biggest holdback is me for sure.

Highly recommend the one thing. So why I recommend this is because this is actually how we base our entire. We do sprints, we do quarterly sprints and and it's how we base our accountability. If you haven't read it, definitely go read the one thing. So out of the one thing we developed what's called a 90 day sprint.

And every employee does this. So we have 90 day goals that are then broken down. Every employee has them. They report on them regularly. You set your one thing, your most important thing. And if you've read the book, you've got to it gets small, right? So the 8020 or the 80 20.

The example they cite in there is somebody their 80. Their one thing was putting their running shoes by the front door before they went to bed because then they went and worked out, they got thinner and they got more leads at work. So total non, non related work. One thing.

For our team, it is.

It is a goal that they want to accomplish in work. You then break this down into two outcome goals that are six weeks each and then those get broken down further into process goals. So then you have two weeks to accomplish each thing.

And a little bit on our management philosophy. So we use an app called.

Get Guru. Anybody heard of Get Guru or use it. It's like a wiki. It's where anybody can reference any of our company documents and who we are. So everything is in there like what we expect, how we run meetings, managers, what we do. Managers are really there to clarify and help team members set goals, not set goals for teams. So every team member comes up with their 90 day goal. They do approve it with their manager. But it's not like your manager saying you need to do this. It's like actually driven from the bottom, like this is what I want to accomplish. And everyone knows our vision and where we're going. Therefore they know what aligns with that within it.

And then the whole team just getting together there and focusing on the goal at hand and. And that's really fun to see. This is when we were doing a big sale. Everybody was nerding out on Shopify, Live View and all of the sales coming in.

So this is just kind of the big overall timeline here. And I wanted to wrap up and maybe leave a couple minutes here for Q and A. So.

Some more details. I'm happy to dig into some of these. I didn't earlier. So we launched June 7th of 2015.

You see the nice. Almost ran out of cash. We just almost ran out of cash again. So I think you're going to get a lot of like the rosy pictures here and like all the easy part, but it's not, it's not without stress. It's not without, oh my God, we're going to run out of cash.

And Amazon only. We stay on Amazon only for the first 16 months. Then you see there where we launched our ads.

And how we did a lot of that. So I hear a lot of founders talking about like, well, where do I get cash or how do I do it? Sba. Like when we launched, we launched in June there and we had an SBA loan by October. So right away, I know if anybody here done an SBA loan, it's gonna take you about four months. It's not rocket science. It's not that hard. You just fill out the forms. You have to have a business plan together. You should anyway, and you walk through it. So we got 125k SBA loan when we launched. There's no way we would have scaled this quickly without funding. We then went back to the SBA and got a 350k SBA loan once your sales get high enough. I'm sure you've all seen Amazon lending in there. Amazon lending lent us 700k in 2017 and then we refinanced all that, cut it all out and did a million in traditional bank financing. But it's going to take you three years of financials before any bank's going to look at you. So the easiest way to bootstrap from the beginning, I think if you don't have cash. I had cash out of a prior company I ran, but then SBA loans, great resource. I also showed here on the bottom hires. So our first hire wasn't until.

All the way.

A year later. Over a year. It was February of 2016, so it was just myself and my wife running the company for 14 months. So you Don't. If you're just on Amazon, you don't need a lot of hires. Then our second and third hire, you'll see there. And then all of a sudden you'll see massive hires. So we went from 2016, we only had second and third, and then 2017 when we expanded into Shopify and won the bigger builder build a bigger business competition. We, we went, we had three employees all the way. By the end of the year we had 19. And so we tend to hire in like tranches. I think it works better. It works better for us. We get a bunch of good candidates. For example, we'll interview, like I said, four rounds of 10 each of 40 applicants. We only pass one applicant through on each round, but that still gives us four good applicants. So, right, right. In February of 2017, right when we were about to scale Shopify, we hired four hires all out of one interview pool. And I would say we use an outsourced ad team, but you're going to need all the content in house. If you're going to communicate your brand, you can't rely on somebody else. So we hired immediately. We hired an Instagram manager, Facebook manager, Pinterest manager, email manager. That was four people all in one round. And then we hired an outreach coordinator. Sorry, that was five. We hired five right away. That way we could just blow up on the content side because you're going to have to feed your ad team with content.

So hiring has been nuts. It's crazy to look back on the team now and think, wow, like two years ago there were only like three of us around and then all of a sudden there were 19 of us. And then this year we went from.

Early on 20 to 23 early in the year and then just recently 23 to 33. And now we're kind of, we're going to take a breather for a little while, regroup and then start growing again. Now this year has been more focused on hiring managers and upper level to take some of the load off us. And that's it. Thank you everyone.

Give it up for Karen and everyone.

I don't know if we have time for any questions. We got like a minute left. Maybe we can do one. 2.

When you take a million dollar loan and you have 33 employees, that money can go pretty quickly for salaries alone. How do you figure out the ranges for these full time or part times? Just out of curiosity? Because they're from all over the country, potentially all over the world. If they're working remotely, where do you go to find that source to figure out, like we should offer somebody in Kansas city, you know, 40,000, but in San Francisco 60,000.

Or how do you do that?

I'm just curious to know. And that million seems like it could evaporate quickly with 33 employees.

Yeah, I think it's about zero right now.

So the million, just so you know, is actually for product. So we don't need it for. We've been profitable from day one. You have to be profitable if you're going to hire. Certainly. And we certainly hired ahead. You can see it in that trajectory before, and that has probably been the biggest impact is we try to hire ahead for future growth. The million was just for inventory. Inventory just eats up cash. So we have, I don't know, two and a half, three million in inventory right now.

On the wages side, we actually ask in that interview form there how much you would expect to make for this position or how much you would like to make. So one of the advantages definitely of being remote is we can go to lower cost labor pools. If I had to hire everybody in San Diego, it would get expensive quick. We do have employees in San Diego, but then we have employees all over the US and then in the Philippines and Canada. And it just allows us to get the best at the best rate all over. And we just ask and then we do a thing where we say, how much would you like to make now? Or how much would you expect to make this position and how much would you like to make in a year? That way we can negotiate a little bit and say, well, we can pay you this now, but we can get you to that in a year. Thank you. Thank you, Gary. Thank you everyone.

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Builders. We hope you enjoyed this podcast by capitalism.com. check out our website for upcoming events and additional content about building businesses, building brands and investing. My name is Max Perwick and my mission in life is to transform businesses into brands. If you have any feedback about the show, any guests you want to see, case studies covered, topics explored, or frankly, just any questions about branding in general, just shoot me an email@maxmaxrandbuilderstrategy.com again, that's maxrandbuilderstrategy.com and I'd love to hear from you. One quick note, if you could subscribe to the podcast or even leave us a review on itunes. These things really do make a big difference in helping us book amazing guests and then also helping people just like you find the podcast. So thanks and we'll see you next time.

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