Anthony Constantino - Culture + Simplicity = Sticker Mule

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey, yo, yo, yo.

Hi there.

How you doing today?

I'm good. It's the end of the day.

End of the day.

Long, long, long podcast day.

Yeah. We recorded one episode today.

Yeah, I kind of like this onesie kind of recording day.

Don't get used to it.

I know usually we're brain dead by this time of the day, but we're not. Today.

I feel great.

Nope, not today.

I did not have my bulletproof coffee.

You did. I've been sipping on yerba mate all day long.

Dang.

Because that's what I do now.

I know. I've not had that either, so. I don't know, man. I just got this natural energy.

Just got this natural energy.

All right, man.

Well, what are we doing today, huh?

Well, today we're talking stickers.

We are talking about stickers and we have a lot of stickers pretty much everywhere. On our hydro flasks, on our hydro.

Flasks, on your laptop, on.

Pretty much everywhere.

Your forehead.

Yes, my forehead. I always have a sticker on my forehead for covering up the third eye. Cause it's so powerful.

So when we do get stickers. So I've actually ordered stickers from multiple places and when we do get stickers, we actually get them from Sticker Mule. And it might sound like we're sponsored by Sticker Mule, but we're really not. We really just use their service because they have really good stickers.

They're pretty much the best stickers in the world that we've seen, at least.

Yeah. But today we've got one of the founders of Sticker Mule on the call.

His name is CEO.

The CEO and co founder. His name is Anthony Constantino. And we had a nice little discussion about the history of Sticker Meal, how he got started, where the name Sticker Mule came from, why he likes manufacturing, how he plans his manufacturing processes, how he does his marketing. He went. They did an asumo deal. So we talked to him about how the appsumo deal went with. We talked to him about hiring, how he. How he hires employees, what the hardest employees to hire for were some just interesting stories around, you know, his business and some of his friends businesses. We cover a lot of ground with him.

I think you just covered everything, the whole episode right there. Yeah. I don't even have to say anything. This is great.

You don't.

Okay, moving on.

Yeah, Anthony's a cool dude. He. He talked about a lot and he had some cool stories that I feel like we. We kind of pulled out to him, out of him. And he's got. There's a little interesting product that he's got in the mix too, that I don't think he's told anybody else. At least at the time of this recording. He did not.

Yeah.

So that's kind of cool.

It should be live now.

It should be live now if it is. Yeah. The URL is definitely mentioned on this episode and in the show.

Notes.

And it's not stickers.

No, that's right. So don't look for a sticker mule type thing.

Thing.

But still go to Sticker mill. Yeah.

Little Easter egg.

Easter egg.

If you can find the Easter egg in the episode and tell us about it, maybe we'll send you a free sticker.

Yeah, maybe so. Yeah, just email us or hit the contact button on our website. It's pretty easy to find us.

Yeah.

Reply to them emails.

As with all episodes. We took notes on this one.

Hey, you know, we did do. And I like how your voice went really high there.

Yeah.

Notes. We took notes.

I'm so happy about taking notes. Oh my God, my notes are so cool.

We took some amazing notes from Anthony.

But you can't, you can't look at my notes, Matt, because they're better than yours.

Okay.

No, actually we got the same ones. We have the same notes, just more scribbles.

Yeah.

If you go to hustleandflowchart.com our notes have all the systems and processes and the backstory and the resources and all the stuff that was mentioned on this episode, all in a simple Cliffs Note like form format. And you gotta be quick. They do go away after a little bit. So if you don't get them within a week or so of this episode coming out, you probably won't get them for free. But go to hustleandflowchart.com comp and grab the notes.

Yes. Get them notes. They are good and they are free and you'll learn a lot so you don't have to hurt your hand. Trying to write down all the cool takeaways during this interview.

Joe broke his hand.

I did.

Trying to take notes.

It's crazy. I can't be left handed anymore.

Yeah, he has. He has a crazy note taking injury.

Yeah. That's cool though. Now I dictate all my stuff to you. So you have to write everything.

Yeah.

Haha. Sucker. So that's not true, by the way. That's not True. Go to hustleandflowchart.com comp. You'll love them. And we got some other cool stuff for you too, if you do that.

Yeah.

So also, we have a badass sponsor and because they have a badass tool that we love because it gives us badass results.

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Spoiler.

But go check it out for seven days for seven bucks. One thing that we were actually literally before hitting record on this intro, we were in Ahrefs messing around. Did you know, Joe, did you know this? And. And, and I know you know this as of 10 minutes ago, but did you know this as of yesterday?

Enlighten me. What I should know, Matt, did you.

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Content ideas. To answer your question, no, I did not know that because you were asking me a question. So I knew that they had Bing, but I did not know they have YouTube, which is actually badass because second largest search engine in the world, YouTube. Yeah. No, we were looking at this like 10 minutes ago and we were just plugging in some random keywords of, you know, our products or, you know, the niches. I would say it's like a good idea to drum up content ideas, see the relevancy of, or, you know, get some maybe lateral keywords or some things that you might not have thought of. You could see the popularity of these things and actually dive deeper. Cool thing with Ahrefs is like not only are you going to see the content idea or the keyword, you can then click into that one and then go down the web even further.

Yeah.

And see like all the keyword difficulty, all the ideas from that keyword.

So peeling back the layers on the.

Onion, that's all you're doing. So Ahrefs makes it easier.

What I thought was cool too about like the whole Amazon, you can actually search Amazon. So if you, let's say you're in, in like the wedding Niche or something. You can type in like a wedding keyword search on. Search on Amazon and it will actually tell you what the most searched topics around weddings are on Amazon and that can help you title your book and kind of get some better rankings if you put a book out there.

True, dad.

So, yeah, if you go like niche level, you can definitely get some ideas on what are the popular terms that people are using.

Just the tool that keeps on giving it is.

So go to ahrefs.com, that's a H R E F S dot com and like Matt said, there is a $7, 7 day trial that is basically a dollar a day. I think I did the math right. And that's like 100 cents a day, something like that. You could find that on your street, I bet.

Just 700 pennies. Joe has more than that in his couch cushions.

Yeah. And I hope you do too. So go check it out. You're going to love it. And thank you, Ahrefs, for sponsoring our show and for your amazing tool. We will continue to use you.

Let's go talk to Anthony Consentino about what goes into running a mega company around selling stickers.

Stickers.

Hey, Anthony. Welcome to the show, man.

Awesome, thanks for having me.

Yeah, no, we've been longtime buyers of stickers from you. Matt was actually. And we're on video. I'm like, this thing's like covered with stickers over here and half of them are yours, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, I think we got connected through Jeremy Weiss. Do you know Jeremy? Yeah, yeah. It's so long ago. I think we were emailing back and forth originally. I think it's been a few months.

And one of my earlier podcasts with him and then maybe he thought I was amusing. So.

Figure out what you built a pretty cool company.

And anybody who's built a pretty cool company is amusing to our audience.

So for sure maybe you just wanted to do him. You guys have a bad interview.

I know. We haven't had one yet, man. That we published at least.

Just kidding.

Yeah, man. So let's kick it off because you have an interesting. You have sticker mules. Your company if all these sticker references we've been talking about and badass, high quality. We use it for a lot of our marketing for our podcast and just brand in general, which is rad. So appreciate all the stuff that you guys bring to the world.

So it's kind of funny because I'm actually looking at this water bottle while I have stickers and the ones I actually have Got a padre sticker here because we're in San Diego and like the color's already fading on it and then my sticker will. I'm sorry, I'm like pitching sticker meal on behalf of.

I'm like looking at that, I'm like, I'm looking at your water bottle. I'm like, I think a few of those aren't ours.

It's like, no, no, no.

Just, I'm just talking to our team about this that, you know, we go out into the world and sometimes we don't. We, you know, we run into people that like, are selling stickers or giving away stickers that aren't ours. And I'm like, we should do something to fix that.

Yeah, let's, let's, let's chat about the backstory, man. Like, how did you get into stickers in general manufacturing and kind of what brought you to this point here?

Uh, you know, I went into manufacturing like after college and like, I think I like loved it. I thought it was like an amazing environment for me. I told everyone, like when I first started working in a factory, I was like, I was like, this is like hanging out my high school friends. But 40, like everyone's kind of like just wants that. I don't, everyone's just got a pretty like fun loving attitude and it's, it's a fun environment to work in. So I loved it. Personally, like, I prefer being in that type of environment more than being in a white collar environment, whatever you want to call it. But like, the frustration I had like working in manufacturing was I had no control. And I love the people in the factory, but I had no control over their futures because traditionally manufacturing prior to Sigmo and prior really to the Internet was, you know, it wasn't like full stack manufacturing companies that sold and manufactured. It was like we manufactured and somebody else sold or distribution network sold. And that was frustrating because as just somebody running the factory, I was two steps removed from the customer. First there was the sales team that went and acquired distribution partners and then distribution partners acquired the customer. And so we could either have to scale up or scale down, you know, quickly based on things that had nothing to do with, with nothing that was within my control. And I just didn't really like that environment because I'm like, sometimes factory workers were like losing their jobs for something they had nothing to do with. And you could talk to people and say, listen, let's have great, let's work on quality, let's get quality better. And we could work really Hard to get quality better. We could work really hard to get turnaround better. But at the end of the day, you were so far removed from the end customer that sometimes it didn't even really matter. And I think it made the environment not ideal. So that was always in the back of my mind. And one of the main reasons why I was motivated to start Sticker Mule.

Yeah, no, I like that point about control, too, because we can relate to that with, like, affiliate marketing, for instance, is, you know, stuff's totally out of our control, and if you're just doing one segment and, you know, product goes away, or they just change the offer, you could be screwed, you know, or they don't pay you out.

Yeah, and I actually worked in manufacturing. I was a production manager in a. In a. Actually a shutter company factory here in San Diego. That was what I did 12 years ago before I got into digital marketing. And so I can definitely relate because we were. We were a wholesale company, so we actually didn't do the sales we manufactured. We sold them to retailers and then the retailer. So there was several steps. So I definitely relate to that. What. What kind of manufacturing were you in before you got into, like, the sticker stuff?

Packaging, actually. Oh, yeah.

So it's similar. Yeah. So you probably derived a lot more.

Yeah, yeah. So probably. Did you have fun? Did you like. Did you like.

It was. It was okay. In San Diego, I didn't speak the same language as a lot of the people in the fact. So, you know, I knew. I knew enough to get to get by in the factory, but it was. It was a struggle.

I tell everyone, you know, I mean, maybe we're a little different here. We're in upstate New York. But I thought everyone was like, the tech world is so obsessed with diversity. And I'm like, they're so far behind in diversity because in manufacturing, it's. It's the most diverse work environment you're ever going to be in. I mean, you have people from all different ethnic backgrounds, but just all different. Just. Yeah, just so many different backgrounds. And I. I've always found people to be incredibly, like, welcoming. We get from people from all different, you know, walks of life. But, yeah, I always like the.

The sort of expediting factor, like when jobs had deadlines and I had to kind of, like, arrange things. And it was always kind of like a puzzle for me in the factory to kind of figure out, like, okay, I got to get this one out in front of this one. But they're working on this one right now, so how do I kind of shift the assets around to make sure this one gets out, but this one doesn't fall? I actually really enjoyed that element of it. It was just. I had a communication barrier because in San Diego, a lot of our workers were Hispanic.

Yeah, I just started learning Spanish, so.

It'S good to know, man.

Everywhere.

Yeah. So, well, what's. So what. You were there. You said that was like, I was there.

And like, my. My. My. My boss.

At the time, like, he, you know, he ended up retiring. And as he, you know, as he retired, I just started. He had been in manufacturing his whole life, and I just kind of like right around his retirement date, just started BSing with him about the idea of starting an Internet manufacturing company. He had the same frustration as me. He lived it his whole life. And I said, we should start an Internet manufacturing company. And he was actually a guy that got through his whole career without even using a computer because he started a long time ago. And he's like, what do you even do on the Internet? And I showed him some options. I showed him this company, Zazzle, which is still doing really well. And he was like, wow, that's interesting. And then he kind of just went home and said, all right, well, I'm gonna go home. I was like, okay. I don't know. It was just a random conversation. I didn't really think much was going to come of it. And he came and saw me the next morning at 9am and he said, you know, Anthony. I went home and he's like, I grabbed a bottle of vodka and I sat down and thought about your conversation, decided we should start a company together.

And that was really the beginning of Stickerman. We had that conversation, and we launched four months. Four months later, I believe.

Whoa.

So what was it like actually launching it? Because I imagine, you know, you've got to go and get some equipment and you've got to, like, was it just you kind of running it yourself in the beginning? Did you have any team members from the beginning? How did you finance equipment in the beginning?

I mean, it was just like a handful of us. It was me, my co founder, I ended up grabbing. My brother was. My brother was studying to be a Chinese history professor, as was his career direction, but I ended up stealing him away from his career for a little while. And a friend of mine, and it was, I think, like five of us in the beginning. And, yeah, we had to go out, buy machines. We ended up buying the wrong machines.

And I think the hardest thing for us wasn't so Much the. I mean, we bought the wrong machines and that was an unfortunate mistake. But the hardest thing for us by far was, was figuring out marketing and figuring out software development. Because I remember I said to my co founder at the time, I was like, I actually debated whether or not I fought back and said, you know, I don't know if we could really do this. And he's like, why not? And I said, well, I have no idea how to do Internet marketing. Neither of us know anything about that. And he's like, well, you know, I figured out every other thing I had to do in life and you figured out most things you had to do in life and I think we figured this out too, so. Yeah, but that was a big challenge. More so than that, you know, we already, he actually said, he's like, we already have the manufacturing background, so we just need to figure out the Internet marketing background, the software background.

Yeah, is that still like. So for marketing, I know we've seen you, you know, you've done like some appsumo stuff. I believe you've been on there and all these other things. What's your marketing now to kind of stand out from the other online, you know, kind of manufacturing companies like yourself?

There's no one thing. I mean, we stand out through a collection of things. You know, I'll say like marketing became interesting to me. Like in the beginning I didn't know what marketing was and my co founder was, you know, 20, 30 years ago, was like VP of HR for a large multinational corporation. And he told me you had a hard marketing people and stuff like that. And he always talked about the fact that marketing people are generally the highest paid people in the company. And I didn't really understand why until I started, you know, started doing it. And marketing is like hard, but it's also, you know, it's also a lot, a lot of fun. But there's no, I don't know, there's no one thing. There's no one thing. There's such a collection of like, I like things that.

Once you implement it, you have it banked like forever. So a simple example is like, you know, which everyone probably familiar with is like adding PayPal to your checkout process. It's a simple example, but once you get that implemented, you got that forever. And it's like forever helping you acquire customers that you wouldn't otherwise be able to acquire because you don't have PayPal. So, um, I like putting things in place that are, that just run once you put them in place.

Yeah, sure. Do you remember, like back in the very beginning when you got like your equipment, you. You were kind of ready to start rolling. Do you remember how you got your first customers?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I was really, at the time there was. I don't know if they still exist, but at the time, you know, the Internet was just web2o thing was happening. Everyone was talking about like the cool new designs and they're. At the time there were these like web design galleries that would just talk about the cool. They would just showcase the cool new designs of the week and you could go submit yourself and if they liked you, they would feature you. So we went, you know, I think the first day we launched, I went and submitted us to like a bunch of web design galleries and we got picked up by some of the more popular ones. They sent us like massive traffic. And we got 10 orders the first day, which we were like, holy shit, one is pretty cool. And so we got that initial blitz of traffic from there and then like a lot of bloggers would follow these galleries and then we started getting blog articles with people saying like, you know, five sites you need to check out or five cool examples of whatever, you know. So we got a bunch of articles in that regard. And then, and then it was really just, you know, nights and weekends of me and my brother, like reaching out to people, reaching out to people that had blogs and could talk about us and saying like, hey, we got this new company, you know, would you like to try it out and if you like it, maybe you could say something about us on your, on your website.

Yeah, it's like guerrilla online marketing almost. You know, it's just kind of, I think so many people think like, I gotta do ads and then spend this budget. It's like, no, there's actually so many organic ways if you're just reaching out, like calling.

Yeah, we didn't do any ads for two years. We didn't run ads, we didn't really send emails. We just did that for the first two years. We just, I was like obsessed with reaching out every time I was on a website. If I could have felt like I could get in touch with the owner of the website, I just shoot them an email.

Yeah, yeah.

And my brother, you know, my brother was doing the same thing. So it was like just two of us were just non stop and non stop.

I think it's the best thing you can do in the beginning. Just like hit up all the influencers, people with an audience already and then just leverage their audience to pass it Your way. Just make it a win. Win for sure.

Yeah, exactly.

So do you, do you still have the same love for manufacturing or has it faded a little?

Oh no, I mean that's actually still my main focus. I still, I've actually, you know, I've handed off most aspects, other aspects of the company. I mean I probably still spend a decent amount of time thinking about marketing more, but.

I don't know. But no, I mean most of my, I'm still, I've handed off almost everything except manufacturing. We don't have a VP of manufacturing. I still run, I still run operations.

Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, so. So your day to day kind of lies more in the factory and doing all that stuff still.

And it, you know, it's like surprising. People bother me like when you hire a VP manufacturer. In fact, my co founder bothers me. He's, he's 78 now and he's not active in the company but he bothers me from time to time and I'm like, you know, we got two plant managers and they're, they're doing great and.

You know, we've known each other for quite a long time. We get along really well and they don't want a new boss. So I'm like, look, as long as like things run smoothly, like you know, you're not going to get a boss, you guys can keep reporting directly. But to be honest, like, you know, our team is amazing and even though I'm technically in charge of manufacturing, I, I'd really want to do that much. Like they come and they come and talk to me if they need something.

Everybody kind of knows their role and where they're supposed to be and what they're supposed to be doing.

So yeah, people here are amazing. They know what to do and like they, they know when to reach out. They don't know what to do. I mean it's a bit of an art figuring out how to do that, but yeah, that's the way we work. I'm like, call me if you have a problem or talk to me. I'm in the factory every day. But yeah, I'm just goofing off.

That's awesome, man. That's cool.

So where'd the name Sticker Mule come from?

You know, we saw my, my co founder pushed me to start the company and we went to. We know we, we got incorporated the next day actually. We went and he had a, he had a friend of his that was a lawyer and his, his lawyer friend was like 80 and we went and saw him and he said, look, me and Anthony want to start an Internet company together. And the guy goes, the Internet, that's wonderful. I think he says his grandkids say, that's wonderful. I mean, he didn't have a reader. He had a secretary that dictated everything, you know, he dictated to. And. And so we went and saw him, and then we came back, all right, we're incorporated now. Like, now we got to get programmers. So I found programmers and I called them and I said, look, we want to create an Internet manufacturing company, and we want your help to do it. And they said, all right, well, what are you guys going to sell? I said, well, we're not really sure yet. Some sort of manufactured product? And they said, all right, well, what's your budget? And I said, well, we don't really know that either because we've never done anything like this before. The guy goes, well, I don't mean to be rude, but you don't know what you want to sell. You don't know your budget. I don't think I can work with you. So I was on speakerphone. I sort of looked at my co founder and he's like, kind of like, nodded me like, go ahead, go ahead. And I said, all right, well, we can spend $100,000. The guy said, all right, I can see you next week.

So we flew out and we saw him, and we had a concept for how we wanted the ordering thing to work, ordering process to work. We had mock ups of how we wanted the ordering process to work, but we still didn't have a product picked out. And he met us and he's like, you know, I like your concept. I like you guys. You're, you know, I'm sure you also like the fact that we had a decent budget. And. And he said, you know, I want to start this next week, but you guys got to say what you want to do. So we came back and we batted a few things around. We were just like. It just came so quickly. We just were like, all right, well, a lot of domains are taken, so what can we do that would work? So first thing, we just jumped. We're like, well, animals are humorous. Let's do animal. And then we just started, like, doing weird combinations of, like, product plus animal. And then sticker mill came up, and we're like, all right, I love it. Let's do that. I think we're like, sticker monkey. Sticker mill sounds better. Let's do it.

Nice. I love how, like, not scientific it is. Like, some of the best names in Companies are just like that. Like, what's the domain available? Or like my pet's name or something combined with something else, you know, Exactly.

Like me and our, my, our lead designer, we talk about this and people, people see our logo. You have the best logo ever. You have such a cool brand name and we're like, you know, we. Honestly, if the company sucked, you probably would not say that, right? So I think if you do a good job and you execute well as a company, people say your brand's good and your name's good. Wow, you got a cool name. But if you want to Sticker Mill. And it was just this terrible website with, you know, nothing going on there. Like, I don't know if people would say Sticker Mill is a cool name still, I think, yeah, so. And even like the logo, like he's obviously, I mean, he designed the logo and he's obviously proud of the logo, but he's like, I don't know, he's like, you know, if the company wasn't good, so, you know, we don't get so stressed out about things like that.

I always wonder how many companies are started by just like finding out, finding domain names, just like searching out domain names and then like people just picking the company name. I bet a lot.

I would wager it's really high. Especially an online company. For sure.

Yeah.

What's, like, what do you think lets you stand out or, you know, like you said, delivers a really high quality product, which, I mean, says for itself, like our logos for company, like, they're freaking high quality. Like you were saying, like, a lot of them will just diminish in color, whatever, rub off. But like, what's the common thing that let you guys stand out from the pack in terms of just overall and maybe some granular things?

Well, like first, in regards to quality, I think that's a funny topic because, you know, if you look on our website, I think we almost never, I hope we never use the word quality. Like, I kind of banned us from using that word because I have high quality. And like, people don't believe you when you say that. Like, quality should just be a given. So our attitude towards quality is like, we have to have the best quality, but we're not going to talk about it. People in 20, I mean, we're in 2019 now. People just expect things to be good. Like, so. And if you're saying I got high quality, people are wondering like, do you really have high quality? Like, or just like saying you're like, so we don't talk about that, I think. But we do have, you know, great quality. I mean.

You know, we said from day one, we were, like, on the customer end, we want things to be fast, simple, and fun. So we are obsessed with, like, those three things. Like, people don't want to waste time. We. People want things quickly. Whether it's like, people don't want to wait for a response from customer service, people don't want to wait for their package to arrive. People don't want to be in checkout for 10 minutes. They want to be in checkout for 30 seconds or 10. So we focus on speed. We focus on simplicity. People don't want to be confused by anything. Like, confusion is terrible. And then people want to have fun. So we inject as much fun into the process as we can, and there's no one thing. But, you know, I think that everything we do in marketing kind of hits on one of those three things.

Nice. Yeah. Matt, I mean, you've always been the one to order the stickers through them, so you could speak to that kind of the process more than I can.

I've already done some selling at the beginning.

I know you're done with that, carrying.

My stickers on my water bottle. But no, I mean, we. Honestly, we've tried other. Other stickers before. Before we found Sticker Mule. And, like, I don't know. I don't know what you guys do different, but a lot of them just kind of turn to shit after a little while.

Yeah, that's true.

Well, we're obsessive about product quality, like I said, even though we don't talk about it, we're obsessive about that.

We'll blurb that word out. Don't worry.

Yeah, we can use it in this interview. But, yeah, we don't say it on the website.

That's cool, man.

Yeah, we try to make it as fun as possible. I think, like, one. Somebody asked me this before. Like, you know, what's on the example you did. That's fun. Like, I couldn't think. And then I remember, like, early or a few years ago, we don't have that many designers. At the time, we only had two. And our newest designer came and visited us because we're all remote. And he was actually hanging out in my apartment just playing around our proofing process. And he started, like, me and him just started talking about, like, how can we make the proofing process even, like, cooler? So I don't know if you recall, but, like, when you. Not when you go on sticker mill and you approve your proof. There's a series of like, really, I think really like cool animations that last about like three seconds. And we spent like a week polishing this and making it amazing. And we're just like, this is like a. It's just like makes the experience more fun and it's something that you only really get to see, only you can see when you buy. And it's like a nice prize and it makes it more pleasant. Whereas I think most people, like, when you click approve, it's like, okay, I clicked approve. Like, let's just, okay, just whatever, dismiss the model. Something really simple. But if you probably didn't even notice what we did, but we spent a week designing the series of animations that trigger post. Post approval.

Is that. Do you think that. That and a couple other things maybe can rattle out some ways to get customer retention coming back. Because obviously with stickers not high, you know, profit. Well, order value maybe in some cases.

Yeah, well, our idea there, like, specifically with that animation, like I said, whether you noticed it or not, was like, we wanted. It goes fast, like, maybe lasts like I think three or four seconds. And it's like. But it's at the same time pretty cool. And like, especially designers are always like obsessed with like cool design examples. We're like, well, if we make the animation sequence post approval really cool, people will like, almost want to buy again just to study. So many designers copy, but you can't really copy this because you only get to see it for four seconds and then it goes away.

Like, so they buy again to screenshot it or screen record and like, crap, I didn't get. I got to buy again.

Hopefully somebody's going to listen to this and they're going to go like, now record the process.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, you can copy our homepage easily, which a lot of people have done. But yeah, you can't copy that easily.

That's pretty sweet. I don't think I've ever heard of any, you know, someone saying that right after the order. Like, like, it's almost like they call it when they put it in like art or like an Easter egg. Yeah, like a little Easter egg kind of thing. It's like, oh, didn't expect that thing to happen. And then you notice it and you're like, I want to see it again and show everybody.

You guys are gonna both need to go by after this.

I gotta get my hit.

Yeah, dude, it's true.

We definitely will. I mean, we keep on re upping. We're actually going to A podcasting conference in, like, a couple weeks. So we're probably gonna get rid of all of our stickers there and need to reorder after that.

So actually, everybody listening should go buy and see if they know what I'm. See if they notice what I'm talking about.

Yeah, I mean, why not? You're gonna get cool stickers out of the thing anyway. What? Like what. In terms of marketing with stickers, have you seen some really cool uses of your guys's product in action by your clients?

I don't look at that. My, like, personally, like, I haven't studied that, so I know nothing. Nothing immediately comes to mind. I mean, we. We believe in putting stickers in every box only because if you're, you know, if you're an e commerce company or you're any one that ships stuff, it's like your cost of shipping is so high. Like, why not if you buy in bulk? I mean, our prices go down to like, just over 10 cents a sticker. So, you know, if you're going to bother packaging up an order that's worth $200, like, why not put 20 cents worth of stickers in the box? Because if that person takes a sticker and puts it on their laptop, they're, you know. You know how hard it is to get your logo in front of a person every single day of their life. It's like, really hard to do. So for 20 cents, you can do that?

I mean, yeah, that's literally what I did to mine. Like, that's an example of one of those stickers right there. So, yeah, yeah, that's cool. And we send stuff out all the time with just, you know, podcast swag. And like, Matt, you said at events, it's just like one of those. Instead of business cards, we actually use stickers now and just like, right on the back. Yeah, so it's actually better.

It's more fun. People throw business cars in the garbage. They stick stickers on things.

Yeah, sure.

So I'm curious about the dynamic with your partner. You said he's not really that involved anymore. How did it work when he was more involved?

You know, and honestly, it was aside, you know, he pushed me to start the company. I give him tremendous credit because I don't think I would have done it if he didn't push me do it. But he kind of didn't get actively involved after that. I mean, he's always been around for me to call if I need help, you know, and they help us off or I get stuck or have Questions. It was a little funny in the beginning. We had a phone and we used this, you know, Internet phone service called Grasshopper. And they would just ring our, if you called us, it would just ring our cell phones and whoever answered first got it. And you know, he would answer the phone and do phone support for us for a few months. And then, then we realized we don't want to do phone support anymore. But, you know, yeah, aside from that, you know, aside from that he, you know, he didn't get super, super involved.

Yeah. Well, how about like going back to team and all the focuses that you work in every single day? Because I know you're big on just, you know, your team in general and the whole environment you have in there. Like, how do you. I guess I don't know where to start. If it's like the hiring aspect of getting the right people on board or if it's the culture that attracts the right people, like, what would you suggest?

I was talking about this like recently with somebody and saying, you know, the interesting thing about stigma is if you look at like the early people that came, like maybe like the first five or six people, you know, we're a much bigger company now, but those people are, are in leader. They're, they are. Our executive team is ironically our first five people. And at the same time, like when we hire now, we generally look at two to 300 resumes to hire one person. So I'm like, how is it that, that your first five people. Our first five people are ironically in leadership positions.

Yeah.

But yet now when we want to hire, we have to like look at two to 300 resumes to get one. And I think it's just that like at the end of the day, I don't think any job's that difficult. It's hard to step into something brand new. But if you can start and grow gradually over time, nothing's that difficult. If you have time to learn and time to grow and you're in your introspective, you know, and self critical. Like I think anyone can learn to do almost anything. But yeah, it's definitely harder down, down the road when you got to jump in day one and be impactful when you don't have that like ramp up period. So yeah, it's a lot harder to find people.

So when you're looking through like resumes, do you guys have some kind of qualification like test or something that you're like filtering them through or things you're.

Looking for, you know, early on, like, you know, early on no, like, I mean, early on if I saw somebody talented, I grabbed them no matter, no matter what. Like, I was very aggressive about grabbing talent.

And I was also like very aggressive about terminating mistakes. Yeah, that's unfortunate. But like, you know, you make a lot of mistakes and I think people compound their mistakes for both the company and the other person by like trying to make something work that in the end isn't going to work. So I got that from my co founder. He was VPA HR for a chunk of his life. You know, we, we were quick to hire if we thought somebody was good, but if we made a mistake, we would just admit we made a mistake. And we, we generally gave them pretty generous, like severance packages to part ways and move on with life. Netflix had like a good attitude on that too about like they give very generous severance packages. They said like, they don't want their managers like scared, scared to terminate. They don't want to like knock you on the street. So yeah, in the beginning I had to like, you know, I was aggressive hiring. I also had to do a lot of firing. As we scaled and got bigger, we put a structured hiring process in place and I would say our success rate for hiring has gone up dramatically. Well, we put a structured hiring process in place and put a structured onboarding process in place. Like I said, it takes, it takes time to ramp a person up and maybe when I was less experienced, I was just throwing people into the company and like they sink or swim.

But now for the best.

Yeah, yeah, you can have structured onboarding process that like, and then you can tweak your onboarding process to see like, you know, maybe this idea makes it better. Like, so a lot of the stuff that we do in hiring we actually stole from Google because their VP of HR wrote a book called I don't know, his name's Laszlo. I don't remember the name of the book, but I think the Google VP of HR wrote a book on exactly how Google does hiring.

And we'll find that and shove it in the show notes.

We'll figure out whatever title that is. We basically just copied what they did and simplified it. But it works really well. Yeah.

Have there been any positions that have been like, really hard to hire for? Like as what's been the most difficult positions?

You know, we got, we got lucky in the beginning finding like an outstanding person to run software. Software development, like just happened to be one of the first developers we got introduced to. I think any position is hard to hire for. Like I said, like the Thing that I think made it work for us is like, when I saw talent, I always jumped on it and took a risk to get the person. I did whatever it took to get the person. So, like, the first software developer, we were working with an agency and the person was in a contract with the agency. And I could just tell, like we worked with three different people in the agency and I could just tell this one person in particular was, you know, outstanding. And they really liked us. You know, I really like them. And, and, but they were like, I'm in an employment contract, I can't come work for you. So I called his boss and just negotiated and did whatever I need to do to get him to break that contract. So we ended up paying a fair amount of money to break him from that contract, which was expensive for us. At the time we were still a new company, but in my mind I was like, well, we can't be a technology company without an amazing software developer, so I gotta do whatever I can take to get this guy. But I've had similar situations, you know, and in other, other parts of the company where I was like, I need an amazing person for this role. And I found somebody I thought was amazing and I went all out to get them and, you know, it didn't, it didn't work out. So. But, you know, I was honest to myself, hey, I made a mistake here. I would say the hardest thing to hire for, like, is, I don't know. If you don't have a software development background, getting someone there is really hard because that's really, you know, so you, you need not only to get somebody really good, but somebody that you form a strong relationship with and a strong bond with. That's hard.

Still to this day, hiring mark marketing people, it's hard to find. It's hard to find marketing talent. It's true. And our VP of marketing is actually the, our original designer. Like the guy that designed the website. He was with us from day one. He ended up becoming VP of marketing. We iterated through hiring a bunch of marketing people and finally I just, I went to him, you know, the last one here didn't work out. And I just said to him, look, I. Look, I want you to be VP of marketing. He was only a designer at the time. And he said like, what are you talking about? I'm like, I think you could be VP of Marketing. He's like, ah, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm just a designer. And he said, why? You know, I don't think I Could be VP of marketing. He said, why do you think that? I said, well, like, you got really, really high quality standards. Like, the highest quality standards anyone in the company, or maybe me and him are in competition, I don't know. But he's got incredibly high quality standards. And I'm like, I think that's the biggest thing in marketing, because in marketing, in software development or you can test things and make mistakes. But, like, when you run a marketing campaign, you only get to do it once. So, like, if you marketing campaign, you put all this effort in and, like, you do something stupid that screws it up, it's over with. Like, so you can't make mistakes in marketing. So you need someone that's, like, meticulous. And it's like, all right, this is what we're gonna do. And, like, everything's gotta be perfect. It's gotta go. And, you know, he's done. He's actually been amazing.

Nice.

Do you ever work with, like, marketing agencies and just like, let it. Let the marketing just be, like, out of house? Or you do you want pretty much all the things that happen, the business to be in house?

Only in the. The very beginning, I said, like, we didn't do any advertising in year two or three. I made one of our customers, reached out to me, and me and him became friendly. And he just kept saying, like, you guys gotta run ads. You guys gonna run ads? And I was like, I don't. We don't. No, we don't. And finally he's like, look, let me just, like, manage your ads for you for free. And so, like, he started running ad campaigns for us, and then we ended up hiring him to. He had a team and he brought his friends, and we ended up hiring them to.

Run our ads for us. And they pushed our ad budget really far. But then we ended up. They ended up starting their own e commerce company, and we ended up bringing advertising in house. So, you know, we do everything in house. But it's a funny story about our marketing is he took over marketing and, you know, almost like, reluctant to tell the story, but I remember he took over marketing, and a few weeks later, the. The revenue numbers jumped, like, dramatically. We had, like, an unbelievable month. And he was like, you know, he's like, thank God you made the change before these numbers hit the way they hit or how would you ever explain to the other guy, like, why he got let go? And I was like, dave, the only reason numbers hit this good is because I put you in charge.

No, he didn't even realize it like he thought like it was just luck. And I was like, no, I'm like, you're incredibly meticulous. Like everything executed perfectly this month. And because of that, like our numbers, you know, our numbers pop. And I think people. Yeah, people have seen, you know, we, you know. Yeah, we see that one.

That's awesome. That's a cool story, man. And yeah, and I think you're totally right. It's. If you have an attention to detail and a focus to learn, like you're going to make something good happen out of that whole comp.

Exactly.

And sounds like that's exactly what you do. And. And we have even a note down here is like you just, you kind of obsess over simplicity as well.

Yeah.

So like, let's talk into that a little bit because it seems like you're kind of taking that with your team structure, maybe even manufacture, marketing. It sounds like it's not like over complicated.

Yeah. You feel like, like when you think of manufacturing and you think of simplicity, they're like oxymorons, you know?

Right. So, yeah, yeah. What's your approach to that? Just like your general approach and then maybe there's some specifics we can shine.

On, you know, you like, I can like the best like lesson in simplicity I ever saw is when we started a company, you know, we had to make a handbook and like an employee handbook and we had the lawyers write something and it ended up being 30, 30 pages long. And I was showing it to my co founder and he ripped it down from 30 pages to 10 and he was like, at the end of the day, I don't know, at the end of the day, does it really, you could say, does it really matter if you have a 30 page handbook or a 10 page handbook? Does it really matter? But it just was like it meant something to him. He's like, no one's going to read 30 pages. People might read 10. So we spent like a whole day like ripping out as many words as we could rip out of this handbook and even fighting with the lawyers because lawyers like this doesn't really protect you. And like, he's like, we have to like, like get it as simple as possible. And if in a way that people can understand that if, if you're saying like you don't feel we're legally protected because of X, Y and Z, he always erred on the side. Like, let's just make it simple. Like we want people to be able to understand this. And like that was like a good lesson. I'm like, for me to be like, well, this. This guy's, like, obsessive to this extent over so many people will be like, who cares about the handbook? This is what the lawyers. We should use. Who cares? Like, we didn't have that many employees at the time. So what? Like, why are we spending all day on this? But just, like, he had that in his. You know, it just. Yeah, he just had to fix it. Like, so I think our attitude is, like, everything that you can fix, anytime you can make something easier, we do it. And even if you. Even if it seems, like, insignificant, you know, you just do it. And I had a situation where, you know, a friend of mine, you know, maybe a friend of mine at a restaurant, and, you know, the restaurant was struggling. And. And, like, one of the things that was. Was noticeably wrong with the restaurant to. To me, at least, was they. They had a light that was, like, flickering, and I was like, fix that light. And I went to the restaurant, like, a month later, and the light was still flickering. And I'm like, dude, I fixed the light yet. And he's like, well, how much more money am I going to have? I fix this light? Like, how many more customers I'm having to fix this light? I'm like, that's not the point. Like, you have a restaurant, you should fix the light. Like, but, you know, if you can fix something, always fix it. Doesn't. Even if, like, at the end of the day, it seems small. Like, always fix it. So, yeah, we rip out every bit of complexity. You can rip out every word we can rip out. We rip out every design element that's unnecessary. We really try to put it did not have anything unnecessary on the website. And when you get into marketing, especially start talking to SEO guys, that becomes a bit of a battle, because SEO people want more content, more stuff. You know, we had a lot of fights there. Maybe. I don't think we really caved. I think at the end of the day, like, everything on our websites, you know, valuable, you know, we added videos. Maybe that helps with SEO. But at the same time, our videos are amazing. And they're. I think they're, you know, they're insightful. They're not, like, just wasted space on the page to try to rank higher.

Yeah, yeah, With. With that, like, flickering light story in the restaurant. I think there's, like, it may be conscious, it may be subconscious, but I imagine, like, people come into that restaurant, they see something like a light flickering, and they're like, man, they haven't changed that light bulb the last Couple of times I've been here. What else are they letting slide?

There we go. There's actually a. It's kind of ironic, but one of the masterminds are in the last like two we've been in there and they're like it's a once every three months or something. And we sit underneath a flickering light and. And we were like, what the hell is going on? And that's actually crossed our minds. I love the example because like, yep, we've lived it.

I was thinking that exact same thing.

I'm sure you were.

And I wasn't sure about. My friend doesn't listen to this, but that's like, maybe he'll fix the light if he. Maybe if he listens, he'll fix the light.

Yeah, send him a light bulb. Make him happy. I don't know.

Well, you didn't drop his name or his restaurant name, so it's not, it's not hurting him.

Do you have like a process for when you're trying to simplify things or you come across something, is it you or is it your team? Like, do you have a procedure for that whole process there?

No, I mean we have no particular process. I think everyone has a mindset, has that mindset. Like if you can make something better, just, you know, just do it. You know. The only we have, we use a sauna. Like, I love asana. I don't know how we would operate without it. That's our favorite task management tool. So yeah, somebody has an idea. Like we put in asana, like maybe like for example, I mean I might put in there fixed light and XYZ room. I would put it in there and assign it to the relevant person and they would go fix the light. If somebody has a more complicated idea, like I'm trying to think of an example. We actually just built. You know, we ship a lot of.

We started selling custom samples for $9. So we ship a lot of 10 unit orders. And our software developers and we have some engineers, like mechanical engineers that work for us and they were like, we think we can automate this process to ship to 10 unit orders more effectively. So they just made a task like investigate automation for shipping 10 year orders. And they actually ended up building like an machine to. That simplifies our process for shipping 10 year orders better. So I don't know, there was no. I mean they were just. The process was putting aside. You want to do this, like notify the relevant people, somebody. I didn't even get really involved in that. Like we have another person responsible for technological change in the factory. And he was like, this sounds great, let's do it. And then they just started working on it and then, you know, makes sense.

I mean, if you instill that kind of thing in your culture and it's repetition and then, you know, maybe in your meetings or whatever you guys do, you're always kind of talking about that kind of high quality thinking, simplicity thinking.

It'S just getting, everyone's always thinking about it. And people, and people. Well, I think we trained the management to be receptive to ideas. Like good ideas come from anywhere. So I think everyone here just feels comfortable. Like you don't even have to talk to your boss. You just put it in asana. You put your ID in asana. Notify your direct supervisor or notify the relevant person. And like, if they like it, they'll say like, yeah, let's do this. And they'll like grab resources to get it done. Yeah, you know, if they, if they don't, they might criticize it a little bit and maybe have a different idea. But yeah, I think everyone here like realizes that if they have ideas, they should bring them forward and that, and yeah, to get that culture that way, like you do have to act on ideas. So like, for example, I'm really big on this. Like I talk to people in the factory a lot. Like I learn how to make factory improvement generally by asking people like, what frustrates them. Like when I'm in the factory, I'll, you know, just asking, like, we get a new machine, we got a new process, maybe we recently started making coasters. I'll talk to people and I'll say like, you know, how do you like run this machine? I was like, great. And I was like, well, what do you, is there anything you dislike? And they'll point out something and then, yeah, and then I'm big on like if somebody in the factory points out something to me or, and if they point out something to me, like I make an effort to get that improvement, get that fixed as quickly as possible. Even if it's not going to be a huge win for us, like, because it makes people realize that like, you know, like I'm being listened to.

Sure.

So sometimes if it's a management type person that maybe understands, like, maybe I'll argue with them and say like, hey, this isn't a huge win. So like, let's not do this right away. But if it's like, like a factory floor person or you know, or customer service person, like I, I, I like train People to listen to their ideas and try and act on them. Because if you don't listen to them, they're going to stop giving you ideas.

That's true.

More so, yeah, yeah.

And that's customer service. Even said it like you can get probably some of your best ideas through customer service if you're actually listening, but most are just like, nah, screw off, you're just complaining. It's like, no, no, all of our.

Best, you know, your best ideas come from like frontline people. Whether it's, you know, manufacturing, customer service, like, especially for backend automations, it's going to come from frontline, you know, frontline people. So.

Yeah, I think, you know, we kind of just teach people like if you give us ideas like we're going to listen to them and implement Nice.

Have you ever heard like listening to, just speaking into, listening to customer feedback? Have you ever gotten any like feedback from customers that have caused like major implementations, major changes in the business?

I don't, you know, like I said, like there was, I don't remember any like major change to how we, how we do things. Well, I could say the biggest one is sort of amusing. Like, you know, we have an operation in Italy now. And that came because there was actually a guy that had this company called UNIX Stickers. And you know, I started talking to him and he started complaining that he couldn't buy from us. And I was like, well, what do you mean you can't buy from us? And he's like, well, I'm located in Italy and I want, I can't buy from you. You guys don't ship to Europe. So I would say because of that conversation, we started shipping to, we started shipping to Europe. And he actually was, I actually said to him, I said, look, if you are so adamant about us coming to Europe, I said, you know, would you mind helping us figure out how to do that? So this was a customer of ours. He ended up figuring out how to help us come to Europe. He put together a marketing strategy to come to Europe. He identified everything that he felt we needed to fix in the website to be a viable vendor in Europe. So we implemented all his ideas.

He ended up becoming a consultant to us while he ran his own business. And that relationship just seems to continue to get better. I actually end up going to Italy and hanging out with them and having a lot of fun. And we ended up buying his company and he joined Sticker Wheel and we started Sticker Mill Europe or Signal Italy. But we service all of Europe because of that conversation. So, yes, I guess we. You know. Yeah, so that's. That was probably the most significant change that resulted from, you know, a customer.

Giving us feedback that's pretty damn big, I would say. That's cool, man. That's a good story.

So. So how many facilities do you have now? Like, how many locations are there where stuff happens?

We do all our manufacturing for United, For. For, well, United States and a lot. A lot of the world in upstate New York. That's our main facility. And then we manufacture for all Europe and in Italy.

Gotcha. And. And your employees, do they all come to, like, the office every day or a bunch of them?

Like, aside from. Aside from, you know, manufacturing personnel, almost.

Everyone'S remote, and most of that's just kind of managed through Asana. That everybody kind of.

Yeah, yeah. I prefer. Even if we do as much as possible through Asana, you know, we use slack. But, yeah, I like Asana because it's asynchronous, meaning, you know, somebody can write, and then I can write when I have time. Whereas, like, slacks. Like, if I. If I don't respond to you right away, I might forget the conversation.

Yeah, totally.

So, yeah, we really. Yeah, we handle pretty much everything through Asana. And we do. In Europe, for example, we do manufacturing and customer support and in marketing, some marketing, too. And those people all work remotely, but we do have an office for customer service. They come in as. As needed.

Lean and mean.

I love it. That's how it should be done. You know, where do you see yourself going in the future? Like, with a sticker? Mulding, Are you going to venture outside of stickers? And I know you said coasters and stuff like that.

Now, you know, right now I shouldn't. I'm gonna. Oh, it's okay. It's okay. No, you know, we're. We're having, like I said, like, we want to make things fast, simple, and fun. And, like, we've been focusing more on fun lately. So we got some pretty amusing product projects coming out that.

You know, I think. I think people are gonna, like. I don't know if they're directly applicable to printing. I think they're gonna surprise people. But, yeah, we got some cool stuff coming out in the next few weeks.

Sweet. Sweet. Like 3D stickers and holograms and stuff.

Nothing to do with printing. We're gonna go, like, consumer. I'm the consumer. What do you call it? Cpg. Like. Like, you know, we're gonna sell stuff that is nothing like anything we're selling right now. Just for you Know.

All right, we'll wait and. We'll wait and see. I just want to.

We come up with our own hot sauce.

Oh, all right. Sign me up, man.

Consumer hot sauce actually really kick ass. It's. It's really good. So.

It'S going to be. I think it's going to be a lot of. A lot of fun to sell hot sauce, but we'll see.

Hell, yeah. I love hot sauce. I'll sign up and be one of your.

Exactly. Who doesn't love hot sauce? And there's no direct to consumer hot sauce company. We like to do things that, like, I know a lot of things we've done are just like, they just happen randomly. And like, I was like, we. One of my friends was joking. We actually did. We did free burger day for my hometown because we wanted to, like, kind of do a really cool job fair. So we're like, all right, we're gonna make free hamburgers for the hometown. It's 10,000. We're gonna do 10,000 hamburgers. And we ended up doing like three, 4,000. And we're like, to make the hamburgers really cool, we need, like, a cool sauce that goes on. So we started, like, experimenting with, like, hot sauces. And it was like, I guess, like one of those things too, where we were like, does it really matter if we have a unique hot sauce? I mean, people are going to come for the free hamburger, like, whether or not it has unique hot sauce on it. But we just, we spent all this time, like, trying to figure it out. And then like, our. One of our employees, actually our VP of sales was like, we should sell this. Like, it'd be hysterical if we just started selling hot sauce. Yeah, let's sell hot sauce. And they're like, are you serious? I'm like, yeah, why not? Like, let's figure out how to do it. So, you know, we spent a while, like, finding a partner, like, help us make it, and we're going to. I don't know, maybe by the time that you guys push out this podcast, will you guys will already be able to buy our hot sauce.

Well, if it's live, we'll link it up for sure.

Yeah, we got some other. We did that. We'll see how this goes. We got some other, yeah, I guess fun things. And we have some. Some cool products coming out too that make more sense than hot sauce.

Like, it's all good.

Yeah, I mean, we're running about six or eight weeks. So this. I mean, if it comes out within the next two months or so it's likely that this episode will be live by the time that stuff's live.

Exactly. So everyone can go check out mulesauce.com There you go.

This is just kind of my own curiosity here. I know you guys have. I don't know if you've done it more than once, but you've done some, like, appsumo campaigns. How have those gone for you?

Those are fun. I mean, we had a great time doing those. I actually met Noah Kagan, was the founder of AppSumo, and I was in love. I was on AppSumo years, I think, our first year, second year in business, and the live chat thing popped up, and I said hi, and it was Noah. And, you know, he got us on there, and that went really well for us.

It's not a big part of our marketing today, but we still occasionally do these, like, deal actually now, like, what happens is we'll run our own promotions, and the sites will grab them and just start running them. Yeah, like, reselling our. Our promotions and, like, so, yeah, we don't. We own. I don't believe we specifically work with any deal sites intentional anymore, but some of them still grab our stuff.

Yeah. Have you. Have you had any, like, promotions that have just been, like, really big wins where you're like, wow, that. That worked really well.

You know, goofy. You know, most of them goes over surprisingly well.

That's good.

You know, mostly, yeah. People, I think, like, sticker mill at this point, and, you know, we. You know, whatever we do, seems people seem to enjoy it and want to talk about it. Sweet.

Yeah. I mean, you got some pretty good brand equity now that it makes it more and more effortless as the brand.

A lot of time getting to that point.

Well, it's paying off, dude. So good job on that, for sure, man.

Yeah.

So let's wrap it up. And so I was asked, like, what's a good. Maybe there's a book or maybe it's a podcast or something else that you just find yourself recommending maybe your team or other people that you feel like just got to hear about it.

Oh, boy.

You know, for. I don't do a lot of book recommendations, but I would say, like, one of the more impactful books I read, like, years ago when I was in college. It's hard to find. It's like. It's called the Nature of Managerial Work by Henry Mintzberg, and he actually, you know, most. I didn't like most business literature because it's so prescriptive. It's all these people Giving you opinions about, like, what you should do. And this guy actually just did a, like a sociological study of, like, what do managers, like, actually do? So his book isn't telling you what to do. It's just he wrote a book saying, like, look, I followed around, or I had a team of people follow around, I think a thousand managers, and this is like, what they actually do. And the one thing that stuck with me from it was like, the average manager's day is like, incredibly frenetic. So people think like, you should be, I don't know, maybe like, in control. But the average manager is changing what they do like every two or three minutes. And if you look at my day like, it is like that. It's like. And I think reading that and like, understanding that from day one was like, very helpful. Me, I don't have a structured day. I just like, it's Stuff hits me from all different angles and I don't know, I manage. I like. I also like working that way. But I'll be talking to one person one minute and I'll be talking to another person next five minutes. And.

As we've had some of our own people transition into management, they. They actually at times felt like they were. You know, I've had people say they felt like maybe they were struggling as managers because their day was like this. They felt like they were not in control. And it was helpful for me to explain to them, like, no, this is like, what your day's gonna probably be like, especially.

I like that, man. Yeah. Because I feel like our days are very similar to that.

I know.

Mine especially. So it's normal, it's cool.

Exactly. I mean, if you're getting good results, it's fine, you know.

Sure.

Yeah. We used to ask the question on the podcast every once in a while, like, what does the day in the life look like for, you know, for you as an entrepreneur? And it's like nobody has like a day in the life of an entrepreneur. Every day looks different than yesterday pretty much. You know, you know, there's probably a handful of things.

Yeah, my days change very.

I think it's kind of why you become an entrepreneur too. So you're not bored with just doing the same shit every day. I think it's like, I mean, yes and no, I guess in certain cases. But I know for me, I'm like, eh, I like to test new things.

Yeah. If you have ADD help. I tell you, I don't know if I have add. I joke. But I mean, if I do have add, it could be helpful.

Well, you're putting it together.

Could be a superpower.

All right, man. Well, I know we mentioned Sticker Mule a million times. Sticker mule.com, i'm sure is, like, the best place they can check out anywhere else that you want to send people.

Yeah. Now you can check out mulesauce.com, too, and get what's soon to be the Internet's best hot sauce.

Love it, man. All right, Anthony. Well, appreciate your time, dude.

All right. Thank you. Thanks. That was awesome.

All right, man.

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