How I Went From 0 To 1 Million Per Month Selling On Shopify w/ Garret Akerson #TheOnePercent

If you're going to 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'll see here. When we launched, we had about 12 products. That's still on the, on the small side. 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, 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 going to be paying 20, $30 to acquire a customer, which is very different than the entire game on Amazon.

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Hey capitalists. Happy 2020. Happy New Year. And to kick off your new year, I want to share with you a keynote that was given at one of our events by tribe alumni Garrett Ackerson, who grew his business off of Amazon, focusing mostly on Shopify with a really responsive team that did most of the work in automation for him and just scaled really profitably and really sustainably. Hit over a million dollars a month doing so. And he shares the whole formula, the whole system in this. So where my content has mostly been going from zero to a million, Garrett's has gone from zero to a million a month on Shopify. And I thought for those of you who are actively doing E commerce and building businesses, this would be a great way to kick off your year. Enjoy. Sometimes people ask me, how do I actually make my money? And this is a funny question because I know there's kind of a weird difference between having multiple streams of income and being just a distracted maniac. Some people call them the same thing. The truth is, I have a variety of different streams of income, but they're all around one central idea. So I make my money building product brands on the Internet. So I built and sold a couple. I still have a few. I'm starting one right now that I'm really pumped about that, really excited to track with you live here on the podcast as it develops. It's just, it's not official yet and I'm waiting for some documents to file before I talk about it. But it's, it's really, it's gonna be really fun to do. I also have an investment fund that I'm really pumped. It's launching at the end of this month it's called the capitalism.com fund that is investing in brands. So that's how I actually make my money. And I tell you all this because this month's theme on the podcast is all about this. It's all about building physical products, brands, creating products and selling on Amazon.com, because that's how I got started and that's how I think most people should start taking sales. And I think most people are doing it wrong. I think most people are doing it in a way that is a copycat approach rather than a real entrepreneurial approach. So after you listen to these episodes and you see the free content that we do on YouTube and on social media that's all about creating products and selling on Amazon, I want you to at least consider joining us inside the 1%. It's at capitalism.com number one, capitalism.com one. You can see all the details of what we do inside the 1%. But if you just want to see what we're doing for January about creating products and selling on Amazon, you can go over to capitalism.com January and and see the trainings and the resources and the community calls that we're doing specifically on this topic to help you get off the sidelines and moving forward in this direction. I know a lot of you are setting New Year's targets or decade long targets right now and this is gonna give you an amazing launchpad to be able to do that. So I'd encourage you to at least consider hanging out with us inside the 1% over@Capitalism.com January to see what we're doing this month. For now, ENJ, the podcast and all the free stuff we do here at capitalism.com, we really try to far out give everyone else in the marketplace because I just believe in entrepreneurs like you. So I appreciate you listening and enjoy today's episode.

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 of 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 gonna 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 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 gonna 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 gonna cover seven takeaways. Brand.

How we tell a story, our vision, a bit on timing, hiring, culture and remote teams. So this is gonna be macro. I'm gonna 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 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 Jean, that bottom one you see there. And it did not feel right. Our first product was called daveygene. All the tags on it were daveygene. 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 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, deann, 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, 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 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, deann 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 site 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, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 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 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 gonna make it where nothing's gonna 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 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 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 just spend. Not immediately. Don't spend that all in 30 days. Take your time. But you're gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 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 Pro 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 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 gonna 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 and got us in. There's another winner here, by the way. I know Catherine's talking later. Good friend. So.

Yeah.

That'S about timing. Don't try to do it all at once. Don't try to do it too early. Wait.

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 going to 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'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, you have a very high price point, I think it's gonna 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 want to 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, not external. Nice Covey quote.

I think this is true for the most part.

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 you may think like, why did I 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 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 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 will stutter, some people would 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.

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 so just a big part of who we are is building that, 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 had just started posting and this was just an organic outgrowth of our culture and our values and 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 from Ryan back in the day. How many of you remember Ryan's 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 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 B, 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.

For your Brave card.

More about culture here and 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 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 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've 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.

Then we have a weekly manager meeting and a few other meetings. There some more on remote teams. I think there's often a fear of accountability on remote teams or.

How do I know that people are actually working? Are they doing what they're supposed to be doing?

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 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 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 it. It's get small, right? So the 8020 of the 80 20.

The example they cite in there is somebody, 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 related work. One thing.

For our team.

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, on the goal at hand. 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 gonna get a lot of like the rosy pictures here and like all the easy part, but it's not without stress. It's not without, oh, my God, we're gonna run out of cash.

And Amazon only. We stayed 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 gonna 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 Build a Bigger Business competition, 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 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 gonna need all the content in house. If you're gonna 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 gonna 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 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.

And that's it. Thank you, everyone.

Give it up for Karen. Everyone.

Guys, girls, if I've ever done anything that was meaningful for you or your life or your business, I'm asking you to go over to Amazon.com, search my name and place a pre order for my first book, 12 months to 1 million. It's due out May 5th. And it's the thing that I'm most proud of, that I have ever put together. Half because the content's amazing. It's going to help you create a business that has a shot at hitting seven figures in your first year, maybe sooner. And second, because people like you are in it. Podcast listeners, our students, our community members, guys and girls we met at our events are in the book as case studies teaching stuff that they've learned along the way. So this is written by myself, but it's really written by the community. So it would mean the world if you went over to Amazon, search for my name, and place a pre order for 12 months to 1 million. I'm so proud of it and I can't wait to bring it to you.