Rohan Gilkes of Web Shave Club on Leveraging Instagram to Reach $350K in Revenues

Damn. So that's, that's kind of, that may be a tough social media.

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to 33444 to get the free resource now. Again, it is 25, the number 25, tips, T-I-P-S, to 33444, and you'll get the free resource. Hi everybody, welcome to this week's edition of Growth Everywhere, where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we have the co-founder of Wet Shave Club, which delivers shaving goods monthly to your door. And his name is Rohan Gilkes. Did I pronounce that correctly?

Yep, perfect.

Alright, Rohan, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well, how are you?

Good, good. Thanks for being on the show. So why don't we start off with a little bit about your background and how it led up to what you do right now?

Sure, sure. I guess if I went back just a few years, my background is more in accounting, pretty weird, but I started kind of teaching myself internet marketing about 5 years ago and building online businesses and trying different things from dating sites to affiliate marketing, kind of like the whole standard process for learning internet marketing and trying things. Along the way, I had some failures and some wins, and Wet Shift Club is kind of the latest project that I'm working on right now.

Got it. And, you know, what Shave Club— I mean, how are you doing right now in terms of revenues and number of customers?

Sure. So, this month is the end of our first year, and we will end this first year of business at $350,000 in revenue, and that equates to about 1,500 or so subscribers.

Wow, okay. It's incredible. It's only in year one.

Yeah, yeah. This is year one for us. Uh huh.

Cool. So why don't you tell us? You know there's there's a backstory behind this, and this all starts with Reddit, right? So can you tell us about the Reddit story?

Sure, sure. So I you know I really love Reddit, our entrepreneur, and I hang out there almost every day. And I was on one day, and there was a guy that had started Wet Shave Club, and wanted to sell it. I think at the time he had about 40 subscribers and he was doing about $300 per month. And I guess it wasn't really taking off as well as he would have liked. And he just made a post saying, you know, talking about the company and saying that he's looking to sell it. And I saw it and I figured, you know, I could probably give it a shot. And we wrapped it up the same week. I made an offer. We exchanged the passwords and stuff for the website and that was it. And I started rebranding the company and completely retooling it and relaunching a month later.

Wow, okay. Well, that's awesome. So, I mean, you don't often hear about stories like that. So, I mean, Reddit often— I'm reading, I love r/entrepreneur, I love r/startups. There's just all these subreddits, but there's just so much noise and it looks like you're a heavy Reddit user. What do you usually read and then how do you filter out the junk?

Yeah, so yeah, I am a super heavy Reddit user. Yeah, I'm usually between r/entrepreneur, r/entrepreneurwritealong, which is a subreddit I started where I talked about building local businesses, and then also r/startups. And I usually just end up on the first page like most people. And I'm kind of looking at posts that include metrics. Those are the ones that interest me the most. So posts like, you know, I have a really nice idea for this business, I probably would not click on those. But posts that say, you know, I'm 6 months in business, $100,000 in revenue, And here's what we think we can do to get to the next level. Posts like that will be ones that I will spend the most time checking out and engaging with folks there. So, yeah, I just look for the ones that have some type of metrics and those are the ones that I kind of spend some time reading. Got it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Now, with Reddit, I mean, are you constantly trying to evaluate other businesses to purchase right now or is this more like a one-time deal?

Oh yeah, so this is more like a one-time deal. Like for me, yeah, so I spent time on Reddit just to hang out and exchange ideas about business. So this was just like a, you know, a lightning strike type thing. It could happen again if I ran across something like that again, but yeah, this is more of a one-time thing.

Got it. Okay, so after you acquired the business, I mean, how did you go about acquiring your first 100 customers after you bought the business?

Sure. Our first 100 customers we got from finding influencers and sending them a free wet shave box. So those influencers, they're like 2 groups. One group would be people that are really, really deep in the wet shaving community. So they're like people on forums and people on Instagram and Facebook that love wet shaving and they have a lot of followers. We would send them a free box and say, hey, you know, we would love you to take a look at our box and let us know what you think. And if they like it, they will write a review for us or mention it on their social media. And that's where we kind of got our first set of customers after we took the company over. And the second group of influencers for us were people that were not primarily in the wet shaving community, but these were people that were subscription box reviewers. So there are all these blogs and YouTubers that all they do is write blog articles about subscription box companies and also review their products online as well. So we just sent those people boxes, you know, take a look. So each box would probably, you know, let's say the box costs us about, you know, $10 to $12 at the time. We would benefit by getting a lot of traffic sent to us from those influencers, and that was our initial push.

Got it. Okay.

Yeah.

So, how do you go about finding these influencers? What tools are you using? What does your process look like? How does the whole shebang look?

Yeah, this is going to be pretty— this part is going to be pretty boring because, I mean, all we did was Google. We Googled for subscription box reviewers, subscription box blogs.

Mm-hmm.

We also went on Instagram and did some like, like kind of like searches for like wet shaving and so on. We also went on Twitter and searched like some of the like the top hashtags for wet shaving and found the people that interacted with those most. So it's kind of like very low-tech stuff where we just did searches on these platforms. As we became more popular, then one person would refer another person or people would actually find us and reach out to us with offers to review our products. But the initial push was very, very low-tech, google.com and start searching.

Okay. So, can you kind of walk through that process a little more? Maybe how many people are involved, things like that? How many reach-outs you sent per day? stuff like that?

Oh yeah, okay, cool. So yeah, we created a spreadsheet on Drive where we would just first go out and try to get as many as possible. We ended up probably with about 200 people that we wanted to reach out to, and then we would probably say, you know, if we can get to like 10 or so per day, we can wrap it up pretty quickly. And then we had a separate column where we would track if people responded or not, what the response was, and where they were in the pipeline. Did we send them a box yet or not? Do we have their address? Did they respond? Did they receive the box? Did the review go up or not? So we kind of had this We had a pretty big spreadsheet where we tracked all of this, but just all on Google Drive. And so I would say for about every 100 people we contacted, probably about 25 or so of them would end up actually posting a review for us of some type.

Okay. And what did that outreach email look like? Because I mean, 25% conversion rate, that's pretty damn good. So what did that outreach email look like?

Oh, yeah. So, super, super short. It was something like, you know, hi, you know, I'm Rohan from Wet Shave Club. We are launching our men's shaving box in a few weeks and we'd love you to take a look. You know, if you're interested, shoot us your address and we'll get a box in the mail for you by tomorrow. Something really, really, really short like that, straight to the point, and we included a link to the website. And that was it.

Got it. Okay. Yeah, so you asked them to pretty much check it out, and it doesn't seem like you were very aggressive with it either, right? You were just, hey, just check it out, and then it's not so much, hey, you have to leave a review.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's absolutely right. So you don't want it to be like, hey, um, confirm with us that you'll leave us a review, and if you say yes, we'll send you a box. No, you definitely don't want to do that.

Got it.

You want to be more like, you know, if you like it, you know, if you say a few words, we would appreciate it. And just make it more of a more friendly thing that is a win-win for everybody involved and no pressure at all. And that's really how we still do it to this day. There's no pressure. If you like it and you feel motivated, you know, we'll definitely appreciate the shoutout.

Okay, so now that you guys have gotten to 6 figures in 1 year, and again, major accomplishment, right? So are you guys still doing this outreach type of stuff or have you guys moved on from that?

No, we still do this. So this is probably the thing that gives us the most predictable subscribers. We still do traditional Facebook marketing. Well, we're not doing as much Facebook marketing now, but we ran Facebook marketing, we did retargeting, we did all of the other traditional internet marketing things, but doing this for us allows us to kind of reach a large customer base at a very low cost. So, yeah, it's something that we're going to continue to do. All the time, and we still send boxes out even now.

Got it, okay. Yeah, cool. So do you have like a— I mean, now that you guys have gotten bigger, do you have a specialist dedicated to it? And if so, is this person more like part-time? Are they like overseas, like a VA doing this? What does that look like?

Yeah, so we have Taylor. She's here in our office. She's full-time, so, you know, she would send out As many emails as possible during the week, but then she works on other things as well. She will work on getting us press, getting us hooked up with people that we would partner with in our box. So say you're another subscription box company and you would put a flyer in one of our boxes and we would put your flyer— we would exchange flyers and cross-market to our customer base. So she would look for those relationships for us and then help pack boxes. We're a small company, so we kind of do everything. So that's kind of how it works. That's not the only thing she works on, but it is a big part of her role.

Got it, okay.

Yeah.

So people have been— I mean, you hear a lot of grumblings about people talking about how subscription box services are dying. Why do you think this sentiment is, first thing? What are your thoughts around it?

Yeah, that's a good question. I'm always really wary about the ideas around subscription box companies in general. People will say subscription box companies are oversaturated or they're dying or something else. But when you think about it, at the core, a subscription box company is just an ecommerce store where you have customers that have agreed to purchase from you every single month. But they're not that different from just an online store. We send the product and this person has said, you know what, next month I'm going to buy from you again. So, when people say stuff about subscription box companies, I kind of say, you know, you can say the same thing about ecommerce stores, but then it becomes like a very weird conversation. So that's just like a major caveat that I have to mention before I even think about if they're dying in general. And so yeah, for us, things have been okay because If you have a company that allows you to have recurring revenue, you can do a lot with your customer acquisition, i.e., your customer acquisition costs can be a lot higher because the lifetime value of that customer is going to be higher. And, you know, most of our customers are going to hang around from 3 months to 6 months, 7 months. We have customers that have been here from the for the life of the company. So, that allows us to be a lot more creative with how we find these customers because they can pay quite a bit more. And you can't beat that. You can't beat that in ecommerce to have that type of built-in recurring revenue. So, that's kind of my general take on that. It is the best situation you could be in as far as online ecommerce goes.

Got it. Okay. So, what's working? I mean, you guys started with the outreach stuff first and you guys are still doing it. What's working for you? What's the major user acquisition channel for you guys right now? How has it allowed you guys to get to the scale that you're at right now?

Yeah. So, beyond the reviews and working with influencers, we're doing really well now on social media. So, we started out using Facebook ads to get folks to the website and get them to convert, and then we used retargeting in case they did not convert the first time. They would still see our ads on other websites they visited, and maybe they'll come back and convert. So, those work well, but the acquisition costs for Facebook has been trending upwards, and that's probably standard for most ecommerce businesses. Facebook's competition is getting a little bit tighter. So, we didn't— but during the time we were using Facebook as a customer acquisition spot, we were able to build up our Facebook fans, followers, and also our Twitter and Instagram people as well. And now we have a pretty large social media base, and now we're able to leverage that social media base to drive customers. So we would run contests, like our last contest we ended with 20,000 entries using Gleam.io, if your folks want to check that out. So what that does is says, enter our contest, but in order to enter you need to Follow us on Facebook or retweet our contest on Twitter or follow us on Instagram, something like that. So, it really allows us to leverage our social media, leverage their social media, and really get a lot of people looking at our product. So, yeah, social media for us now is probably the number 2 thing and number 3 for us Okay, great.

So I'm looking at your Instagram page right now and you guys do a really good job. I mean, you know, the quality of the pictures is exceptional and you guys are doing all this text all the time. So what's the whole process around this? How do people get their Instagram page to look like yours?

Oh, okay, cool. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. For us, we try to do, you know, because Instagram is like super, super visual. So, if you have a product that connects visually and appeals to people on some type of emotional level, you can do really, really well on Instagram. So, what we did, we went on Amazon and we bought like a little photo booth thing. I don't know if you've ever seen one where it's kind of like a white photo thing with a light and you can put your products in there and it comes out really, really professionally looking. So, we take some professional product pictures and we also— Julia, one of our employees, she's really, really good with graphic design. So, she will help us create contest-looking images or regular Instagram quotes that would work well or things that people would like to share on Instagram. And if you create a really, really high-quality image, Images, they're going to do well. So we post every single day and kind of engage with our people and try to make it as full an experience as possible.

Okay, are there any tools that your designer uses around this? You know, Canva or anything like that?

I think everything is just regular Photoshop.

Got it.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah, this looks good. I wish my Instagram looked like this, but it's a personal one. But everyone, this is Instagram.com/whatshaveclub, spell it all out. And I'm noticing here, okay, so you have 11.8K followers. I usually don't talk about Instagram much which is why I'm interested in this but you have 12,000 followers but then you have 7,500 that you're following at the same time. So, are you— you know, feel free to, you know, if this is a trade secret, you don't need to reveal it but are you using some type of software here? Because usually when the follower count and the following count is kind of close, you know, there's some form of automation here.

Yeah, so yeah, I have no problem revealing it. So one of the things that we use is this product called Instagress, but there are like a whole host of them that do pretty much the same thing. And what it does at its core is say, show me the people that are using keywords that may relate to our product. So, some person may mention wet shaving, or some person may mention shaving brush, or something along those lines. So, these are people that we would be very, very interested in engaging with, and that program would reach out and follow those people, and quite often enough, those people will follow us back. And that's how we were able to— that's one of the ways we were able to build our Instagram following.

Got it. Okay, so I'm looking at Instagress right now and Instagram, I mean, they've had to deal with spam words and stuff in the past. So is this against their terms of rules or does this work?

I think that the problem is the number of API calls. So for people that use Instagress or use any social media tool that has any automation, I would be very careful in making sure that you spend time building the account organically first, and then maybe you can start trying your hand at some automated products. But if you just create a new account and just plug in some automation tool, it may create some flags and it may cause you some problems.

Okay, so at what point should an account start following? Like, what amount of followers should someone start, you know, automating?

I mean, that's a good question. Like, for us, we would probably look to get to like 2,000 and probably that number for Twitter as well before you start trying some additional things. It's kind of tough though, man, because, you know, I would rather not Give like some specific number and then people like follow that and then they get crushed because all this stuff brings some risk. Someday Twitter may wake up and say, hey, all these auto-follow tools that you guys are using, we're going to suspend your account for a month or something. So, all this stuff could happen. So, there's risk involved if you're going to use any automation tools at all.

That's totally fine. I mean, we'll just go off based on your experience and they can, the audience, whoever wants to try it can do it at their own risk. I think it's always good to just experience share.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Okay. So, I mean, the challenges, a lot of tech people that listen to this, they're probably involved with software companies, right? So, tell us about some of the challenges with shipping out a physical product and really how you dealt with it.

Oh yeah, absolutely. So, shipping, Shipping can be, yes, it's a challenge and it's kind of like a black box for people that may be new to ecommerce, which we were when we started. We were lucky enough that when I bought the company, it was already on Cratejoy, cratejoy.com. They're kind of like, for users that have never heard of them, I guess I would equate them to They are to subscription box services what Shopify is to ecommerce, like regular single product ecommerce. So they're really, really good. It's a really good platform for subscription box services. And so using them, their platform ties into ShipStation and Endicia. So Endicia allows us to pretty much buy shipping online, and that integrates perfectly with the actual ShipStation that deals with your addresses and the shipping information and the product and so on. And it's all fully integrated. So all we need to do is log into our account, print the shipping labels, it has the address on there and the postage and everything, attach it to or boxes and USPS shows up every day and takes them. That's kind of where people should try to get to where you just print it out, ship, and you're done.

Got it, cool. I remember reading your Reddit post. You guys have a warehouse right now as well?

Yeah, we have a warehouse here next. It's connected to our office in Tampa. And it's right by the airport so it works well. So the USPS guy comes, he picks up the boxes and then heads straight to the airport. We're like one of his last stops before the airport so it's pretty awesome.

Got it, okay. So backtracking a little bit, why don't you walk us through how you got to the $300K mark? I mean, how many months did it take you to get to the first $100K and what did you do after? Can you just walk us through that trajectory?

Yeah, sure. So, we got to the first $100K at the 6-month mark, and— but I'll actually take a step back and say that when we started in May, I think we may have done like $6,000 in May, actually, and then over the next 2 months, We did about $40,000 or so, and then we finished that up over the next couple months. By about September-ish, we got our first $100,000, and that's when I made the post on Reddit. So what was happening was each time we got a box to an influencer, We would get signups from that. And then some of those people that signed up, they would become influencers as well in some way, where they would either tell a friend, some of them would make a blog post for us even though we didn't request it. They would send in pictures of themselves with their box, which we would then repost on social media. We created a a private group for our customers so we could build deeper relationships with them. It was almost like if we had like a focus group of people that would tell us things that they liked, things that they did not like, and we would be able to make those adjustments on the fly. So as we were growing our customer base, we were also growing the depth of the relationship. And having a 2-way conversation with them and taking all this information and sourcing really, really good product. So all this activity kind of grew and grew upon itself. The more customers we got, the more the word got out, the more customers we got, and it kept going like that. So like $100K by September-ish, and then we did another $200K or so between September Okay, and what was the main driver behind the additional $200K on top? I would say the 2 things that are probably most important for— probably the 3 things was we started to get really good at social media and we really started churning out contest after contest after contest. Like really take a look at Gleam if you guys are gonna, you know, kind of try to like really leverage social media. Like Gleam did a really good job for us.

Gleam with the N at the end?

With the M. G-L-E-A-M as in Mary.

Okay.

.io.

Got it.

So we would start to do contests and, you know, like the first one was like 10,000 entries. Now we're up to like 20,000 entries with the latest one. So Gleam really helps us by Making our contests go viral.

Interesting.

Yeah. That really helped out quite a bit.

Would you say that's the main thing, doing these contests and generating that virality for you guys?

I would say that that may be— it's probably in the top 1 or 2 things.

Okay.

Yeah.

Got it. Yeah, I mean, a product like yours is inherently social, right? I mean, people like sharing stuff that makes them look good.

Yes.

What about software companies? I mean, how would they utilize contests like this? Because you don't hear a lot of software companies talking about contests too often.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. So, like, for software companies, it probably would be tougher. It would be tougher because there isn't the, here is the thing and here's what it looks like, right? So that, here's the thing and here's what it looks like and here's what it's going to look like when you put it on or when you wear it or when you or when you spray it on your body or something, so it becomes a little bit tougher. But I think that you can still do some stuff with software companies if what people use the software for kind of solves some type of major problem that people would like to share. So say you're Shopify. I mean, it's at its core a software company, but the result is a business that can change your life, right? So, for me, if this were me and I were creating a social media campaign around Shopify, it would be— it would show people on a beach somewhere relaxing, sipping on some margaritas or whatever, and kind of like, this is the end result of working with Shopify. and building a business and being able to have financial freedom and being able to have, like, to work from anywhere or something along those lines. So I still think that there's opportunities for software companies to leverage social media if they end up talking about the result that that human being is going to get by using their software. Got it.

Okay. So going back to your contest, when you're using Gleam, are you promoting it through Facebook or— Facebook advertising, are you driving traffic through that? Is that kind of the main thing, or?

Yeah, so, super question, because with Gleam, you can't just set it and forget it, right? So, I mean, this is an awesome question. You have to kind of seed the contest a little bit, and you can seed it in quite a few ways. So, if you have money, that's great. If you have money, then you can do a simple Facebook ad for a couple dollars. You could boost a Facebook post. You could post it on a relevant subreddit on Reddit. So say we're a shaving company, there are quite a few shaving subreddits, so you could post the contest on there.

Don't they hate it when you do that though, when you're self-promotional?

They do, but there are ways that you can do it and there are ways that we did it. You go like, we have— we're thinking about launching this Wet Shave Club company. What are some of the products that you guys would like to see in a company like this? So instead of it becoming like, you know, I'm really self-promoting and I'm trying to sell this product, you're really kind of engaging with the community to see the things that they like. And, and, you know, because folks in general, they want to help, and people would give you advice and say, hey, you know, I really, really like This soap, it would be cool if you guys have this in the box. And if you do, maybe come back and post it and we'd like to take a look. So you can kind of like really build a relationship and engage more before you actually say, hey, here's my contest. I would love you to enter, you know what I mean?

So you want to build— okay, so you're building a relationship with that subreddit and trying to get people to know you first. And then once you're confident that a good amount know you, then you don't have to worry about all the downvotes.

Exactly. Exactly. If you just go in like from day one like, hey, buy this, or hey, jump onto this contest, you will probably get crushed.

Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Got it. Okay, cool. So everyone, I'm guilty of this too. I mean, when we get these interviews out, I just have my editor drop them on Reddit and sometimes it just gets destroyed. So that's just the way it is. Okay, so you talked about the challenges of shipping out a physical product and how you dealt with it. Can you tell us about one more big struggle you faced while growing the business?

Oh, okay. Yeah, actually, the other big thing, probably the other biggest thing was product. So we started by going after finding product on Etsy. Kind of weird, right? It's kind of a surprise for a lot of people. We found product on Etsy because if you are a super small company starting out, you're not going to be able to get in front of very, very large companies and have them work with you. It's going to be very, very, very difficult. But you could reach out to Etsy.com, find people there and say, hey, we have this Wet Shave Club company. We love your soaps or we love your aftershaves. And we'd love to carry you in our box. What would be the best wholesale rate you can give us?

Huh?

So that's what we did and it worked very well, but the problem then becomes what happens when you go from needing just 50 aftershaves to needing 500? I mean, you go from needing 500 to needing 1,500. That becomes a problem because most folks are creating this product in their homes or they have very, very small production facilities. And they're not accustomed to providing product in the thousands. So that's kind of— that was the biggest challenge for us where we had to then have very, very, very long lead times, which obviously is going to hurt cash flow. So it's something that if you start a company like this and you deal with small production folks, it's going to be a problem to solve. Depending on your product, you may find different ways to solve it than we did, but we solved it by longer production times, down payments, ordering from maybe 2 or 3 people at the same time for essentially the same product. You have to get really creative as far as product goes.

Got it. So these are all operational skills. Where do you go learn this stuff? Where's a recommendation for people to pick this stuff up?

Dang. Super question, bro. I primarily— I'll tell you, my experience has been jumping in, going on Google when I can, and for things I can't figure out through Googling a blog article or finding something somewhere, I just had to come up with a decision and run with it. But I definitely do not have the operational and logistical experience that would make me great at this business. So we made a lot of mistakes along the way and just kind of figured things out. I can't really say of any one place where we found answers to these problems besides working at it. And getting better every day and google.com whenever possible. Got it.

Yeah, I like, I like that how you're mentioning that, and that really hits a point home where, you know, people that are listening that haven't started their own business, and even people that have, that have, you know, it's, you know, the answers are all out there, right? This stuff isn't— at the end of the day, it's all hard work. It's not that difficult, right?

Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, that's really encouraging to hear. So It's only been 1 year for you, but was there any point in time where the company was close to the brink of failure, anything like that, or is it too early?

Luckily, it's probably too early. We've had some really random things happen along the way that made me think like, man, we're going to get crushed by our customers. One time, this is just one example of some random weirdness that can happen as you As well as you plan for things to go, you can't plan for every eventuality. So, one example, we were waiting for a shipment of razors and the train that the razors were on derailed.

Ah, wow.

True story, bro. Crazy. So, the whole time we're telling the customers, yeah, the stuff is going to be in the mail by Wednesday because we expect the shipment by Tuesday, and yeah, we had a train derailment that pushed everything back by— I can't remember how many days. And pissed-off customers, people threatened to cancel, the whole deal. So we've had a few instances like this where it looked like our company could be cut in half overnight. But luckily, you know, if you kind of communicate really, really well and, you know, be as proactive as possible with when things go wrong, you can kind of bounce back from a lot of things that may seem like, okay, this could be career-ending. So luckily we've been able to make it through and, you know, hopefully we're able to keep things going. But I just wanted to mention that, you know, As things are going to be crazy no matter what.

No, thanks for the candor, man. It's— I mean, shit's always going to hit the fan. It's really how you deal with it at that point that shows what kind of person you are, right?

Absolutely, bro. Absolutely.

Cool. All right, so a few more questions from my end. What's one piece of advice you'd give to your 25-year-old self?

True.

Good question, dude. The one piece I would give is not to overthink it. Not to overthink it. For myself back then, I would think like, okay, starting a business of any type is like a completely incredible undertaking that seems almost impossible. Yeah. Because what I would do is I would sit down and say, okay, I need to map out shipping, I need to solve logistics, I need to solve product, I need to solve marketing, I need to solve inventory storage, I need to solve customer service, all these things. And then it would seem so overwhelming that it would almost be crippling and it would delay my starting and it would just seem impossible. So I probably would end up not even starting. But now I would tell myself, hey, you just need to solve one thing at a time. So you solve your shipping, okay, great. You solve your product, awesome. You solve your branding, awesome. And you just do them step by step, day by day, solve one single problem and it all works out. But if you try to solve the whole thing before you even get started, you're never going to get started.

Right, it's paralysis by analysis, right?

Absolutely, yeah.

Got it, yeah. I mean, one book too I think the whole audience can check out, there's this book called The One Thing and I think it really touches upon what you just mentioned, so great book for people to check out. Now, what's one productivity hack you can share?

Sure, so one thing that— and I got this from maybe Lifehacker, I can't remember. But if you are kind of stuck or you feel like you're in a procrastination mode, which happens to all of us, set yourself a timer. There is, you know, you can set yourself a timer on your stopwatch or on your laptop and say, okay, I'm going to work for 15 minutes. That's it, 15 minutes. At the end of 15 minutes, I'm going to stop. And go do something else. And very often you'll find that at the end of that 15 minutes, whatever feelings of procrastination or laziness that you had before you started is pretty much gone, and you can kind of push through and get quite a bit done. So that's something that folks can do pretty easily. A 15-minute stopwatch, start working, and you know. And if you stop at 15 minutes, that's fine too. But that's kind of it.

I love it. Yeah, no, that totally works. It's something that, you know, I tend to get ADD sometimes too, so I use this little timer thing, but it totally works. It gets you, it focuses you, and you feel like you're doing something. So it's powerful. What's one must-read book you recommend to everyone?

Sure. So my book is actually a list of one. So, I always recommend the same one. It's called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. That may not be the exact subtitle, but it's very similar to that, but it's called Made to Stick. And this book is about communicating— well, I kind of say communicating online, but it's really about communication. Like, so they would say, if you're selling a hammer and a nail, you don't want to say, okay, I'm selling a hammer and a nail. You want to say that you're selling the ability for some person to hang a picture of their families and you can look at that picture and you feel great about it and you feel connected to your family. So, that's what you're really selling, as opposed to talk about selling a hammer and a nail, which is, you know, very mundane and non-inspirational.

Right.

So, that's a book that I really, really love and I go back to over and over again on how to communicate online and just how to communicate in general when it comes to branding and selling and making things as simple as possible.

Perfect. What's the best way for people to find you online?

The best way is twitter.com/RohanJilts, facebook.com/GrooveLearning. We have a GrooveLearning group and I hang out in there every single day talking about business and growth and startups, the whole deal. And facebook.com/RohanRJilts as well. And people can email me if they like at rohan@grooveliving.com or rohan@wetshaveclub.com.

Perfect. So Rohan, everyone, this is Rohan Jilks. Rohan, thanks so much for doing this.

Yep, thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate it very much.

All right, take care.

All right, you too.

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