Steven Sashen — Xero Shoes & Behind The Scenes Of Shark Tank

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf. Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

You got a little zipper sound in there.

Well, that's fine. Joe's just pulling down his pants.

What's new? All right. Hey, so welcome. Thanks for joining us for another episode. And today this is a. This is going to be a fun one. This is with Steven Sashan from Zero Shoes, but also from a Shark Tank. He's a Shark Tank vet veteran. So we actually dig into all sorts of different things. We actually had a chat with him. We met him in Austin at the New Media Summit, what, a month ago or so. And just we had a dinner with him and just talked about, like, everything possible. I don't even know where it went at this point, but this podcast definitely a little bit more focused. But Stephen's just a riot excommedian pro comedian. So he's just like. He just throws these little one liners in there. They're just like, what? How did you come up with that?

Yeah, no, it's a great episode. And, and one thing that we kind of drilled in that we didn't plan on going here, but we kind of drilled in on it and we went really in depth on, like, what it's like to be on Shark Tank. You know what the process leading up to Shark Tank was, what it was like being in the Shark Tank. What happens after you're on Shark Tank? A lot of the discussion was around that. Now saying that he did give us some cool marketing tactics. He did talk a lot about the benefits of, you know, a specialized type of footwear, which we're going to really get into. That's his company. He's got a shoe company, Zero Shoes. So we're going to get into all of that. A great conversation. Honestly, one of my favorite episodes we've done so far.

Well, we'll be having him back again too, because I think we can just like, collaborate on different things we're doing. He does some cool, cool, cool traffic stuff, SEO stuff. He's a software developer, too. Owns a pretty big company there. I mean, guy does a lot and he's the real deal. Amazing guy. And so, yeah, listen to that. Check that. Or check this out. But there's something pretty cool that we've been sitting on. We've been keeping it a secret for quite some time now.

This show actually has its first sponsor. Hey, now this show has its first sponsor. So this episode is actually sponsored by GenM. So official sounding and GenM, that's G E N GenM co. But actually if you go to our special link, evergreenprofits.com genm we're working on some special goodies and deals with them. But do you want to kind of give a quick rundown of GenM because we use the hell out of it right now.

Yes. So you probably have not heard of it because no one's talking about it, but they wish they were. So GenM is essentially this marketplace where they have folks who want to be interns. These are a lot of students. They're very. A lot of them are educated in the marketing digital online space and want to learn more. So for instance, we've actually hired a writer, we've hired an SEO person to kind of go back and check out all of our posts on a variety of sites and essentially do all of our tasks for making those things SEO friendly. Yeah, Google friendly.

It's essentially 50 bucks a month. So for 50 bucks a month, you get somebody for 10 hours a week, 40 hours a month to work on something in your business. And they're interns. So they're unpaid interns. You just paid genm 50 bucks a month to, you know, as kind of the head hunting service to find you the right interns. And we've just been using the heck out of it and it's really, really improved our productivity in our business. I can't recommend it enough.

Well, actually. And we actually hired another intern to do a lot of the different podcast type related things. Show notes might be part of it. Some tech behind the scenes. I mean, the whole point is if you have something repetitive in your business.

This is actually the perfect solution for you. And I don't think you're ever gonna find anyone cheaper unless you're hiring like your retired mom or dad or sister, brother who's trying to. Probably not for free. So I would bet, I would wager that this is gonna be cheaper than even hiring someone in the family. For sure.

So go to evergreenprofits.com genm that's G E N M. All right. And we're gonna make sure you get hooked up over on that link.

Heck yeah. So see all the deets over there. But let's go over to Steven from Mr. Zero Shoes. Mr. Zero Shoes. Just Zero Shoes. That's all. Steven. Steven, we're here man. We're recording now.

We're having a good little the normal chat. I feel like leaving off from Austin when we met up. Thank God that was A. That was the best night of the. The entire time. Well, you know, I can't take it away from Kurt, because I know he introduced you to us.

Every night was the best time of Austin.

It was just a good time out there.

While I agree, saying that the time we spent together was the best night you had in Austin is just a little creepy.

Yeah, I know. But, hey, we're eating Ethiopian food.

We were Ethiopian.

Because Kurt. The night that we spent with Kurt was just as good.

It was amazing, too. And we had Kurt on recently, so I can't take his thunder away, too.

No, I was just trying to make it sound creepy is all I was doing.

I appreciate it. We had drinks, we went dancing.

One thing led to another, and we'll just end the story there.

And somehow somebody got a Tesla out of the deal. That's all I know.

And we didn't speak after that. Yeah, man. So you're out in Boulder. We were just chatting about kind of Boulder life and how beautiful it is.

I think it's weird that you tell people on a podcast that there was something going on before the podcast started. It's like, wait, what did they miss out on? What was going on? Was it just information, or was that the really good stuff?

That was the good stuff.

It's always the good stuff. We'll get it out of you. But, yeah, I don't even know where to start with yet, to be very honest. You have an interesting background in what you have comedy. You have. Well, you've never had a job. I'm kind of curious. Were you living on the streets?

One would think. No, it never occurred to me to get. I never had a resume for anything other than an acting gig. And that doesn't count, because on an acting resume, you put things like, I know how to do magic tricks. So that's really the same.

Starbucks doesn't care.

No, they don't. One day I was trying to hit up my dad for some money for a venture that I was starting, and he just looked at me kind of. Kind of. I don't know what the look was. Just sort of, you know, out of the side of something or other, and he says, why don't you just get a job? And I said, because it wouldn't end well for anybody. So it just never occurred to me to get a job. And luckily. And I mean that seriously, luckily, anytime I was, you know, in between gigs that I had created, at the last minute, something just shows up and away it goes. And I've been really, really, really fortunate But I mean, since from the time that I was gads. Well, here's a fun one. My sister calls me when she's a freshman in college. She's three years younger than me. She says, how much allowance did dad give you when you were a freshman? I said, allowance. He hasn't given me an allowance since I was 13.

I even asked him for money.

Yeah, exactly. And there's a pause. She goes, don't tell him I called.

So now I've been. I've just. You know, it always occurred to me to go out and find a way to do something. It literally never occurred to me to get a job. Oh, wait, I take it back. When I was 10, my dad gave me a job. He was a dentist. And he said, you can come work for me and you can do things in the lab. And I'll give you a choice. I give you $5 an hour and you buy your own lunch, or I pay you 250an hour and I buy your lunch. And it took me one lunch to realize that I needed that 250 an hour gig because I ate like a pig.

That makes sense then.

Yeah.

What was the. How do you get started? Like, what was your first venture? Getting out to the entrepreneurial world here.

You know, if you. Boy, if you really want to think of it. So I was a professional standup comic and actor, and in a way that's very entrepreneurial. It's the same skill set. It's selling things. It's basically you and what you can do, but it's lead gen. And my favorite thing that I did when I moved to New York was there's a little thing, I think it's called the Ross Reports. It's a little booklet that they. That you could buy that listed every manager and every agent, every casting agent, and every actual agent agent. And a lot of them would say things like, do not call. Do not stop by. And so I would call them and stop by because I knew no one else was.

So. So acting and comedy was really my first kind of entrepreneurial gig, if you want to think of it that way. Actually, before that, when I was a kid, from the time I was about 13 through 20, I did magic for a L. I did kids birthday parties. I worked. I did a street act. I moved to New York. I did an act where I was walking on broken glass and my bare feet, which is sort of interestingly ironic considering I now make money selling shoes that replicate being in bare feet. But karmic payback notwithstanding, my first venture, though, that Most people think of as entrepreneurial was while I was doing comedy, I was. I basically had nothing to do all day. And I, to make a very long story very short, went to Columbia Film School, graduate film school. And while I was there, I was writing screenplays mostly. And the software that you needed for writing screenplays and getting screenplays into the proper format was horrible. Just really unwieldy and just horrible. And I came up with a better way. And I uttered the five dangerous entrepreneurial words, how hard could this be? And decided to start a software company. And three years of development later, I found out how hard it could be. But I invented what became the industry standard word processing software for film and television writers and totally changed the industry. In the last 20 something years, every piece of software that's come out has unsuccessfully tried to copy the functionality that I created way back when. So that was the first really kind of big one.

Wow. Is that still your company or is that something you sold out?

It is. It amazingly is. And boy, here's a horrible lesson for you. I tried to sell it to someone who was a consultant that I had met early on. He worked with me and to him and his partners, and they decided they were going to run it while we were kind of negotiating the deal and putting the deal through. We were very confident it was all going to happen. We'd all known each other for years, seemed like it was going to be a slam dunk. I sent all the computers out to California so they could run the thing. And one of the three partners, he just wanted to test the marketing potential of the business. So we get on a call and he says, you know, I made a bunch of phone calls to see how good the leads are, how good your customer list is, and it was horrible. I said, well, how many calls did you make? And I don't remember what the number was, but whatever he said. I said, well, when did you do this? And he tells me, and I said, so I don't want to do this the wrong way or say this in a way that seems wrong, but for you to make as many calls as you just said in the time that you just said, you would have been having to make a brand new call every seven seconds. Oh, my God. And you said you did it on the office phone. And the office phone is a VOIP phone and I've got access to the records and I don't see one outbound call from that phone.

Wow.

And the guy starts screaming, you're accusing me of being a liar. Who do you think you are. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Righteous indignation is usually a sign of guilt. That's right, scream some more. And then he hangs up. And the other two partners say, we're gonna get back to you. And a couple days later they got back to me and said, yeah, we just found out he was embezzling. And so this whole deal is off. So that's my long version of I still have the company and we're actually gonna relaunch the product because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the guys who give out the Oscars, they called me a couple years ago and said, if you get a little market share again, we'd like to give you a technical achievement award. And there's no, nothing that I would like more than to have an Oscar statue in my bathroom.

Just look at that bald dude in standing on the top of your toilet.

Well, to be clear, guest bathroom. Because now you're just showing off.

Now you're just showing off.

No, no, no, it's the opposite because nobody would believe it. They would all think that it was a prop, you know.

That'S a good point. Yeah, sorry.

When that happens, when that happens, I want to see that thing. I'll visit that guest.

So then how did you evolve into selling shoes?

Oh, it's, I mean, come on, who doesn't go from software to shoes? I can only do this.

I mean, I guess it is a logical next step.

But yeah, it's so obvious. There was a window in between when I wasn't paying attention to the software world and my wife and I had kind of retired because we had done some clever real estate investing. And in 2006 we, we, our last friend became a real estate investor. So we called our partner and said, it's like 99 all over again. Start selling everything. And he said, yeah, we can't find good deals. So we, we kind of predicted the crash about two years before it happened. But we didn't think of any way of capitalizing on it other than selling all the properties that we were met that we owned. So we did okay. We came out pretty fine actually. But by 2009, what we thought was going to be a cash flow deal for the rest of our life, you know, the cash was drying up and we, I started an SEO SEM business because I'd been doing that since 1990 and I got this idea to, well, I got back into sprinting also when I was 45 after a 30 year break. I was getting injured pretty much constantly. After a few years of that, a Friend of mine who's a world champion cross country runner said, take off your shoes and see if you learn anything from running barefoot. And what I learned was A, why I was getting injured and B, how to stop getting injured because doing it wrong hurt. Doing it right felt good. So my form naturally changed. My injuries went away. I became faster. I became a Masters All American sprinter, one of the fastest guys at that time, over 48 or 45 at the time. Now I'm 56 and I may be. We haven't proven this, but when I look at the records, it seems highly probable that you're talking to the fastest Jew in the world over 55.

It's funny you say that because we have a whiteboard right next to us. And whenever we get on these podcast episodes with people before, we write a whole bunch of stuff on the whiteboard of like, here's some places we can go with this conversation. And Joe actually wrote on the whiteboard, fastest Jew alive. And then he went and erased it and said, no, he might see that as offensive.

I don't know.

Maybe a fighter pilot Jew, you know, like.

Well, I thought of something the other day. It's like, you know, when I. What the way that happens. I used to say that when I show up at the starting line of a race, you know, I'm usually. It's usually me and a bunch of guys who are way taller and way less white than I am. And then I looked at the list of people who were faster than me and went, I think I'm the only one on that list.

But I don't really have a Jewish idea. I don't think of myself that way. And I was thinking one day that the best way to say that I don't really think of myself as having a Jewish identity is like Jewish Mooish. Just the antithesis of that. But regardless. So what happened was I just loved this idea of natural movement and just being as close to barefoot as I could at times where I couldn't be barefoot. Like certain restaurants, although that's not legally true. You can go into any restaurant barefoot, totally legit, any store, totally legal. They. But that's a whole other story. And so I started making sandals just based on this 10,000 year old idea. Just a bit of rubber, some rope from Home Depot, lay some onto my foot, and it's all you need to do pretty much everything. I lived in those, even over the winter in Colorado. And after a while, this guy who said he was writing a book on barefoot running told me that if I had a website. He would put me in the book, and I had built like 500 websites by that point. So I rush home and I pitch this idea to my wife, who tells me it is a horrible idea and won't make any money. I shouldn't do it. Distracting from our SEO biz. I'm a good husband. So I agreed. And after she went to bed, I built a website. And the next morning when she kind of growled at me, I said, look, the people that are ranking for the keywords I care about are clearly there by accident. So I can own this in about three months and we'll see where it goes. Maybe it'll be a car payment. We'll see. I was wrong. It only took me two months, and it was a car payment from day one.

It was totally accidental, totally fluky. And that was just the first crazy, completely serendipitous thing. The business is one of those after another after another.

I kind of want to dive into that. Just the fact that you.

Okay, yeah.

Just on just the keywords alone, because we've done that just on promotions, not starting a whole brand new business.

But are you still doing that stuff? Are you still working SEO SEM, like traffic stuff?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I have gotten to the point where I'm playing CEO more than SEO. So I've got guys who I'm working with a bunch of marketing things. I just flew them all into Colorado over the weekend, actually, including Kurt. Molly, our dear friend.

We heard Kurt was going out there.

Yeah, yeah, we had a blast. It was a really good time. And it was fun because there was like four or five different groups. And at one point, each one of the groups came up to me and said of the other members, wow, these people are really smart. So that was very satisfying. And so I'm doing less of it, but it's something I still stay on top of. In fact, I've been reading a big 10,000 word article about what's going on with SEO lately, even right before we got on this call.

One of the things, for me, I think I'm an unusual CEO, that I really understand Internet marketing very well. But it's important for me because that's how we grow in Our business is online, that 70% of our sales are online. And the fact that I know this stuff really well means that I'm able to do things like hire really smart people. I have met, but I've met guys who have the title Director of digital for billion dollar companies. And I've said to them, so what's your fundamental SEO strategy? They go, well, we do a lot of Facebook advertising. Sorry, what? I said SEO. They go, yeah, we do a lot of Facebook advertising.

Yeah. And what it says to me is that not only is the guy that I'm talking with not as smart as he thinks he is, but the guy who hired him is even dumber. And this is a guy who's running a billion dollar company. And. And so I.

Lot of dumb money out there.

There's a lot of dumb money out there.

I need to figure out how to get in front of more of that dumb money.

Tell me about it.

Boy, that I see. I have a friend who has a. He's got a company, they just raised $5 million on a $65 million valuation. They've never made money in like 10 years. They're over capitalized. There's no way their investors are ever going to pull out of it and make money. And he. It's like, how did you do that? Or some of these unicorn companies that have billion dollar valuations and they've been running with a burn rate since day one. It's like, how does that make any sense?

There's a lot of funky valuations happening right now and just money getting tossed around based off of free users. And I mean, that's been happening for a little while now.

Yeah. I mean, just on that same vein, we were talking to a person in the sort of mobile app world, they help people create mobile apps for their companies. And they were saying that right now they're getting an app that has 1,000 active monthly users. You get like a $5 million valuation based on active users alone, pre revenue.

On the technology.

On just the technology and the users alone. Now, I don't know how realistic those numbers are. This was obviously somebody who was trying to sell us on using their platform.

Right.

But that's what they were saying is that these app companies are getting these crazy valuations based on users alone, pre revenue.

Well, it's kind of like we know someone who's one of the top gamers in the world and this guy makes tens of millions of dollars playing games on Twitch. And I said, do your sponsors pay any attention to roi? And he goes, oh, no. They just know that I have 4 million people who follow me and they give me money.

Welcome to the reason we're trying to get into the world of sponsorships with podcasts.

That's very true, I agree. Well, I'm just trying to find a way to somehow get the word SaaS and blockchain choose in the same sentence.

Well, you just did. Yeah.

Better sentence. I need a better sentence.

We'll improve that one soon.

Yeah. I actually do want to circle back around to the SEO stuff in a little bit, but I do want to stick on, like, the story a little bit more. When we met in Austin and we went and had dinner, we went and had Ethiopian food. When we were talking, for some reason in my brain, I was going, I've seen this guy before. I don't know how I know him. I don't know where I've seen him. I don't know why Turkish prison didn't even dawn on me. I got home and Joe mentioned, yeah, he was on Shark Tank. And I was like, oh, shit. Probably where I saw him. So I looked it up on YouTube and sure enough, I saw the Shark Tank video. So can we talk about that story for a minute?

You sure it wasn't a Turkish prison?

I think it might be, but Turkish prison?

Well, yeah, I met. I met a lot of guys like this.

Right.

Yes, we can talk about Shark Tank. I'm more than happy to do that. What would you like to know?

I'm curious just how that came about. Did they approach you? Did you approach them? What sort of information do you have to provide in advance? I'm just kind of curious about how that process worked and what it looked like.

Let's start at the beginning. The universe was a singularity. And then.

When a man loves a woman very much, then they have a good one.

Too far back, Too far back. Let's fast forward a little.

Fast forward.

Okay.

So.

My wife and I would be at parties where people would say to us, hey, you guys should be on Shark Tank. And we're going, what the hell is Shark Tank? And so we went home and got on YouTube. YouTube and looked up Shark Tank. I guess this is like after season two, maybe, Maybe season. Yeah, it must have been, I don't know, season two, season three, somewhere in there. And so. Oh, season three. Not that that matters. And so. And then we even watched, like, the Dragon's Den from Canada and the Dragons Den from. From the uk. We just watched them all. We loved them. And we're thinking, yeah, we totally should be on the show. And so I sent some emails. I didn't know how it worked. I figured it out and. And the way it worked is they would open casting in, like, March or April by announcing it on abc.com and then they were taking casting by email. Just send an email, give a little pitch. And then I think for season four, maybe it was the first time. I'm not sure. They also did live casting events as well. So I sent them an email and then a week later I made a video and I sent them the video. And then a little while later, I was ready to fly to Chicago to do one of the live events, thinking that maybe we'd pitch it better real time than via email. And we got a phone call. They said they were interested and just had an interview with us for about an hour on the phone. It was on a Thursday afternoon. And said, we'd like you to just do a five minute video that answers about a million questions that you can't possibly answer in five minutes and get that to us by Monday. And I said, no problem, I've got a master's in film. I think I can knock that out. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, my wife was planning a surprise 50th birthday party for me on Saturday. So she is freaking out and somehow we pulled all of it off. She threw off the party. I was completely surprised in part because she was very sneaky. She had it three weeks before my birthday and it was my 50th. So very clever. She's a smart chick. So had the party, my mom had flown in, her mom had come in, they were staying at our house. And on Sunday we shot the video and got to them on Monday. And then also had to send in a contract. No application that had to be handwritten. One copy from me, one copy from Lena, even if it was the same answers for some of the questions. And you can't read either of our handwriting. So I hired someone on Craigslist to take our typewritten answers and handwrite them. I have very girly handwriting, apparently, when I do that. And so we sent the application in, we sent the video in, then they called us and said, we want to send you a contract. It doesn't mean anything, it's just the next step. But we just have to go through the legal things in case we like you, you know, we gotta make sure the I's are dotted and T's are crossed. So they send us a contract, very onerous, very one sided, with things in there like, we're not gonna sue them if we die on set. And lame is like, how are we gonna die on set? And they said, no, no, this contract was cobbled together from all these other Mark Burnett shows, including Survivor. So that's where that piece came from. So we send the contract in. The next day they call us and say, we want you on the show. And we were really excited and they say it's gonna be in about eight weeks. And we were really disappointed because we were all geared up by that point. So over the next whatever period of time we had, and maybe during this, I can't even remember, we read all the Sharks autobiographies. We rehearsed with friends of ours who had almost been on the show. Then some serial CEOs that we knew who were very smart, who would ask us probing, tough questions, people who were fans of the show, who knew, like the top 10 questions that always get asked. We talked to bankers and investment people who had bought shoe companies, who had sold shoe companies. We talked to people who were private equity guys and venture capital guys just to get a sense of the valuation. Because it is a weird thing on the show that you walk in with an ask at an offer. You're saying, I'm willing to give you X for Y. That's not typically how those negotiations go. And so we figured out all our numbers and while we thought we were going to have some like six more weeks to go, they we got a phone call, hey, we need you out here on Wednesday. It's like, yeah. So they fly us out and we spend one day kind of doing our pitch in front of the producers and then the next day just chilling out and not allowed to tell anyone where we were. And then the next day we taped the show and then we walked out of the tank on what just happened. Because it's very surreal. It's not what you see on the show looks like a conversation. That is not what happens in the tank. It's just people vying for TV time. Not us, them, the Sharks trying to out shark each other and trying to come up with the best time where they can look at us and go, oh, what's the story behind that? And they love that one.

At one point, I think Cuban says, wait, you guys said you're married? It's like, yeah, but you said she owns the company. Yeah. What's up with that? It was an asset protection strategy.

So how long are you in the shark tank? Because obviously on TV you see maybe like a 10 minute clip. How long are you actually in there for talking to them?

It varies. Basically, people have said it's between 20 minutes and two hours, depending on what goes on. For us, it was, I think it was about 45 minutes.

Oh, wow. That's quite a bit of time. They're cutting down, so.

Yeah, yeah, quite a bit. And then, and then we got a call A little while later, they were going to come out and film us here in Colorado, which on the one hand we knew increased our odds of actually being on the show and at least looking somewhat sympathetic at first. But you never know. We walked off the set, we thought we did okay. Our producers told us we did okay. But there was enough moments that were crazy that I went, oh, man, if they just edit the crazy bits together, we're gonna look like morons. Oh, yeah. And so we said that to our producers and they said, look, look, we don't try to make anyone look bad. We try to make everyone look as good as they can. We're a Disney owned network. We want people to want to be on the show. If we made people look bad and crush them, then nobody would want to be on the show and it wouldn't be fun. You know, they said if you see someone who really bites it, they probably were worse in real life. So we had a friend who taped the show and according to her, it went really, really badly. And so much so that she was thinking of divorcing her husband because he didn't want to be on air. And she felt really betrayed by that. When you see her episode looks great because she's smart and funny and attractive and had one bit that was good television because she said something the sharks didn't like, but she handled it fine. But I've also met people who has said, you know, they gave me a really bad edit because they made me look like a complete asshole. And I've said to them, you know, I've gotten to know you and you got a pretty good edit. So wow, it's. Anyway, then, you know, then you sit around and wait and find out if you're gonna air because they tape more segments than they actually show.

Oh, I didn't even know that.

Okay, that makes sense. Now when you said after the fact, they came to your what out to Boulder, go film guys. Okay, right, that makes sense.

But, but even that doesn't guarantee it. I have a friend who taped the show. They came and did that thing where they come out to your place. They call it a home package. They had him in the, in the trailer for the teaser for the next week. You know, see this guy do this thing. And then he didn't air and he has no idea why.

Wow.

So, yeah, he was in TV Guide and didn't air. So.

So by the time they came out to Colorado to shoot sort of the, the kind of B roll footage of you and your wife just kind of doing your Thing, thing. You already knew the outcome of the episode.

Yeah. And part of the contract is an NDA where if you tell anybody what happened, you agree to just give them $5 million. It's not even they can sue you and get it. It's like you just agree to pay up. We'd be at parties and people are going, wow, you guys would be great on Shark Tank. It's like, really? We should try and find out how to do that.

Hopefully that NDA doesn't go this far and onto podcast episodes.

No, we're out of the NDA. Although there's some cool things that happened because of the NDA. One woman who made a deal on the show that did not go well for her. She started a private Facebook group for people who've been on the show because she knew that she could only talk to people who had signed the NDA. And now it's this awesome group of people who a have this shared experience. I'm not going to say it's like being in nom, but you know, it's one of those crazy war types things where you walk out shell shock.

And there's a bunch of really smart people on it too. It's really fun.

Oh, I bet. I don't want to be the spoiler alert, but how did it turn out on the Shark Tank?

I know you got an offer.

I kind of know already, but I want to hear from you.

Well, we turned down a $400,000 offer from Kevin, aka Mr. Wonderful O'. Leary. And it was really interesting. It was a no brainer for us because basically he wanted half the company for 400 grand. And so we're going to do over 800 this year. Why am I going value the company at less than 1x when we're growing at the rate we're growing? And so it was just a non starter. In fact, we forgot he even made the offer at one point Kevin had to remind us and it's like, oh yeah, yeah, right, right. So in fact, here's my favorite part that you don't see on the show. Kevin. Each one of the Sharks will have like a line that they keep saying over and over and over because they think it's the tagline that's going to get them TV exposure. So Kevin's line was, I get it, I get it. It's a bunch of desert. Sorry, it's a bunch of Indians running around the desert naked on pey.

I think that's awesome.

Well, they cut out the on peyote part. So they left the running around the desert naked. But when we got out of the Tank, they said, so what'd you think of Kevin's offer? And Lena says if he thought we were going to give up half the company, he was the one on peyote.

It's true.

Yeah, I loved it. So it was just a non, starter, but there were people on social media who were freaking out, like, how could you turn down almost half a million dollars, you morons? Because it's a lot of money, but it just wasn't the right amount.

Well, you know the value of your company, you know a lot more of the trajectory, the SEO. I mean, you knew where you're headed.

Yeah, but you know, 400 grand is a lot of money.

Heck yeah. No, that's for a lot of people. It's hard to turn down. But yeah, I know. You're a totally different company, or at least it appears that way. Product wise, from Those days, what, five.

Years ago you said.

Six. What year is this? 18. Six.

Got it. Yeah. So you've evolved a lot since then. Have you taken away anything from Shark Tank to help you out?

Oh, my God. Well, I mean, it's. I'll tell you what, it did. Just the, just the preparation for being on the show really, really made us focus on what we wanted and get clear about what we were trying to do and realize the value that we were offering and how important that was. And it really solidified our commitment up until they said they were interested in us. You know, it was a fun little lifestyle business. I said to Lena at one point, wouldn't it be cool to have a little Internet business? Took a couple hours a day, made a few hundred grand a year. That's what we have. I said, yep, too bad I can't stay that way. So it really just, just energized us and that was a really big thing. Also, the complaints that they had were valid, so. Well, not Barbara. Barbara's. Her two complaints were not very valid. Her biggest complaint was that she hated me because I looked like her ex husband.

I actually do remember saying that we watched the YouTube clip fairly recently, maybe like a month ago.

But.

Well, I tweeted her on the night the show aired. I said, it's too bad you didn't invest because I would have used some of that money for plastic surgery.

She didn't go for it. And she also complained she's, I don't like the souls, they're black. And you see me pointing to something, but you can't see what when you watch the Segment, I'm pointing to the fact that the souls came in five different colors. They're not just black, but. All right, whatever. But. But their complaints were all totally valid. What we were selling then was a do it yourself sandal making kit. It's a little funky, it's a little finicky, it's a little weird. It's a lot of fun. You develop the superpower of knowing how to make your own footwear. It's really cool, but certainly not kind of ripe for primetime the way we thought it was. We also got thousands of emails and phone calls from people saying, oh, my God, I'm so glad you're doing this. I hate shoes. Or I've always wanted something, or I like being barefooter. I. I mean, and they really. People who didn't know anything about barefoot running or minimalist footwear or any of that, just told us what they wanted, and it's what we wanted to do. So it really confirmed that we had something worth pursuing. And the fundamental idea that we had then, which is your feet are meant to bend and move and flex and feel, and we want to make footwear that lets them do that. That's still what guides us. So we've just. We've evolved way beyond a do it yourself kit to ready to wear casual and performance shoes and sandals. But it's the same fundamental idea of get out of the way as much as possible and let your body do what's natural.

I love it. And so you're saying, yeah, basically, that time on air, that was like the. That was the whole business. You know, research, you know, your numbers back and forward, probably better than any other business prior to. Yeah, practice your pitch. I mean, you're getting all this feedback and you got exposure because I know a lot of the public, I'm sure more so now they're aware. But back in the day, even, you know, five, six years ago, people, I mean, well, and Chuck. Chuck's, you know, Converse or flat shoes, that's probably all they knew of.

And you essentially crowdsourced, like, ideas and feedback on the product because, like you said, people were messaging you in the. Probably in the hundreds after the episode. And all of that feedback was new feedback you were able to take back to your business.

Absolutely. And to your point about Chuck Taylor's, there's a researcher at Harvard named Irene Davis, who I'm having dinner with on Friday, who, at an event we were both at, where I was on a panel discussion with guys from Brooks and Adidas, and she says, look in the 60s and up until the early 70s, all shoes were made like zero shoes. They were really thin soles, usually leather, sometimes rubber for runners. And then basketball players were wearing Chuck Taylor's. And we weren't seeing the injuries then that we're seeing now. What problem were you guys trying to solve and why haven't you. And the guys from Brooks and Adidas were like. They just had no response. They actually. Guy from Adidas, his only response was something like, well, not everyone's going to switch to zero shoes. It's like, good. That's a good answer.

We don't want you all anyway.

Yeah, keep that mentality while I crush you behind the scenes.

It means that, you know, the extent to which they don't think I'm doing the right thing or a threat or any of those things is directly correlated to the gaping hole, the size of the gaping hole in the market that we can fill before anyone really pays attention.

Well, you just need someone to, like Kanye west to sign on as, like, a signature shoe, and then you'll be golden.

Except for Kanye. Anyone like Kanye? That's not.

I wouldn't sign him up right now. You never know.

Doesn't Kanye have, like, a shoe deal somewhere?

I think he's with Adidas. We actually have a bunch of celebrities who are wearing our shoes, and we're chatting with them to discuss how they want to publicize that or how we can publicize that. We're also having interesting conversations with some pro athletes who have said, yeah, if we really like these, it's not that we don't want endorsement money. We want to own part of your company. It's like, okay, so there's some really cool conversations we're having, and I have my fingers crossed because all those things are just up in the air until they're not.

Yeah. So what do you see? How does it look like to get your type of shoes? The zeros of the world. I know there's some other companies as well, but just that minimalist style into more of the mainstream. Do you see it headed that way fairly soon?

I gotta tell you, it's the experience. Do you remember Joe Sugarman with the blue blocker sunglasses and the commercials they did? Yeah. It's like just putting them on, taking them off. It's like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. It's the same thing with our shoes. People put them on and it's like, oh, my God, they're so light, they're so comfortable. The number of times someone has said verbatim, it feels like I'm not even wearing anything. And then we have them go step on the rocks outside of our office. And they go, wow, it's like a foot massage. Like, yeah. We have a new employee who has had leg and knee and back pain, like, serious pain, where he could barely do stairs for years. And he'd been working for us for a little while before he actually put on some of our shoes. And he said, we were talking about it today. He says, after three days wearing these shoes, I have no pain. For the first time in years, I'm walking up and down stairs without having to hold onto the handrail to push myself up or hold myself from falling down. I mean, it's just miraculous. And I go, it's not miraculous. That's what happens when you use your body naturally. What happened to you is that you were in what we affectionately call foot coffins that don't let your feet do what they're supposed to do. And that just, you know, if you screw with the foundation of a house, it doesn't matter how good the house is.

Yeah, I remember, actually, I think I picked up your sandal or one of the shoes you're wearing at the time with my pinky. You're like, just feel this thing. It literally was like, air. I was like, holy crap.

Yeah, like one of our sports sandal. 3 pairs of. 1 of our sports sandals weigh less than a pair of similar chacos and they have a 5,000 mile warranty on the sole. And yeah. It is so interesting though, because what we're doing is, is what people were doing 50 years ago. It's just everyone forgot. And now that it's been two generations, people have no memory. And it's like, well, but of course I need arch support. Of course I need all this padding. Of course I need to have my toes squeezed together and my foot not moving. It's like, no, no, no, no, you don't.

Yeah.

It's funny because living in San Diego, Joe and I, like, never wear shoes. It's an anomaly because today we both are, which is very rare.

And I've been told by my. Because I go to a gym here locally, they're big. Dig into exactly what you're talking about.

Oh, good.

And I, I, I'm guilty. You can, you can shame me for this, but just flip flops. I wear my rainbow flip flops. They're just. I know, I know. I'm already, I've actually about to place an order today on your website because I saw a size that, that fits. I'm like, yes, that one. But. But yeah, no, they're. They're always harping on like, athletes don't wear those flip flops or you know.

And I'm looking to forward to get a pair of boat shoes off the website.

The boat shoes are awesome. Well, you know the thing that's also really funny, and by funny I mean not at all funny, is that when this whole idea of barefoot first started coming out, the shoe companies and the shoe sellers were writing articles about how, you know, you don't want to do that. You're going to get Ebola and step on hypodermic needles and your kids won't get into a good college and your mortgage rate is going to go up and your cable bill is going to double insane. And then a year later it's like, hey, we have new minimalist shoes that are just like being barefoot. And they were nothing like being barefoot. So back to Irene Davis. She has been analyzing footwear and she breaks things down into minimalists, like what we do and what she calls partial minimalist because she's being politically correct. I call them fake minimalist that use all the same language but are actually worse for you. So the big shoe companies just tried to capitalize on the interest. They were terrified that people were going to stop wearing shoes, so they came out with something just to staunch the bleeding and they wanted to just capitalize on it. But they never, not only did they never really believe in it, but they knew that if they were saying, well, this is the right way to do it, people were going to go, but what does that mean about the crap you've been doing for the last 45 years that you told us was good?

So that's all the, like, Vibram stuff?

Vibrams are actually pretty good. Some of the models are better than others. They fit in them. Most of them fit in the minimalist category, but not all of them. One of my friendly competitors, vivobarefoot out of the uk, also, most of them very minimalist. There's a company called Innovate. I n o v8 most of their stuff is no longer minimalist. They Oops, let me turn that off. My apologies. They actually went from being closer to true minimalist and then went away from it.

Sorry, what'd you say?

No, I was just saying I do have a pair of Innovates. That's what I used prior to even meeting you. So I'll be replacing the.

Well, like, you know, the shoe that most people thought of as a barefoot shoe is the Nike Free which has like a 3 quarter inch heel and a big flared sole. And it's more flexible, but it's nothing even close. And so there it just sows confusion. And that's the challenge.

My go to shoe is the New Balance minimus. It's the ones that I've worn for years and years and years, but I'll be replacing those soon.

Well, explain really quick.

And the minimus, the early minimus was a really good shoe and the latter one ones became less good.

So how zero drop. I know that's what, is that true? Minimalist, right?

Well, it's one component. So zero drop simply means that if you imagine standing barefoot on the floor, your heel and the ball of your foot are at the same level, assuming the floor is level. And you want to do the same thing when you're in shoes, because that's the natural way your body works. If you elevate your heel, it just throws off your posture and puts more strain on your joints and on your back in particular.

So one idea is that you don't want to elevate your heel, but you can have a zero drop shoe that still has an inch of foam underneath it. And one of the other important functions of your foot is to feel things. You have more nerve endings in the sole of your foot than anywhere but your fingertips and your lips. And this is not an accident. It's telling you, it's giving your brain the information that it needs to know how to use your entire body. And if you don't give it that information, it makes your, it makes your feet dumb essentially, or numb. It's one way of putting it literally, if you don't give your brain feedback from your souls, your brain basically stops paying attention because there's no information. And that leads to things like what happened to my dad a few years ago where he tripped, fell down, broke his hip and was dead two weeks later. And so when you see older people getting put in progressively thicker or orthopedic shoes, it's like, no, that's the exact opposite of what you want. We had, we had a guy. Early on, I wrote a blog post. There was these magic vibrating insoles that some, some researcher made and showed that by putting those in, in the shoes of elderly people, they, their balance improved. And I wrote a blog post, was like, well, of course they did, but you don't need magic vibrating insoles. Just take off your damn shoes and go for a walk outside. And So a guy, 82 year old guy called me and said I was looking for the Magic vibrating insoles. But I found your blog post and I couldn't find the insoles. So I put it to the test what you said. And that was two weeks ago, and I just threw away my walker.

Wow. Holy.

But again, it's just use it or lose it. This is not rocket science. Or as they said 15,000 years ago, it's not rock science. Just this is the way these things are built. They're made to be used. If you went to a doctor and he said about any other part of your body, you know, you know, it's just flawed. You can't use that for the rest of your life, you'd think he was insane. But why do we think that's normal? When someone says that about your feet and puts them in motion. Control, stability, control, things that don't let them move, it can feel better temporarily. But, you know, like, you put your arm in a cast, it doesn't come out stronger. Same thing with your feet. Don't let them move. They get progressively weaker. That ain't good.

It's interesting. It's like a balance of, okay, increased technology. People love the latest things, the latest technology, like you just. Or, you know, back in the 80s when it was like, I'm going to pump up the front of my shoe. You see, that was. But. So we had a barefoot guy at the gym that I go to locally here, and he was completely barefoot everywhere he went. And, you know, most people think he's crazy. Just the general public.

Wait, is his name Ken?

No, Mike. Michael.

Different guy.

His last name, Curly hair guy, but kind of like you. And. But basically I asked him, I was like, okay, so explain this. Tell me a little bit. And he said a lot of what you just said. And I don't know if this is true, but he claimed because it's feet, everybody's feet, you can feel a lot more. He claimed if you step on something like a very sharp thing, your brain's gonna respond to that before you. Or, sorry, your foot's gonna respond to it before your brain actually sees that's pain or feels it, so you can react quicker.

There is a reflex arc that goes from the bottom of your foot to the base of your spine and then back down into your leg. Leg. Without having to go up to your brain. Now, he's not totally right. It's not like you're going to step on a nail and never have a problem because you're going to instantly retract off of it. But you are wired to be aware of what you're stepping on and to respond to it more quickly than you can think about it. There's no doubt about it. And what I noticed when I started going barefoot is it seemed like my reflex arc improved. My feet became more flexible. Flexible. So things that were painful to step on at first, I found myself a couple years later, like, stepping on those things with no problem because my foot would bend around it, or if it was too painful, I would just step off of it. I wouldn't put all that pressure on my foot. That was the second thing that happened. And then there was. Oh, and then this crazy thing. I've had, like, lifelong family joke level flat feet. And I developed arches in my feet.

Wow.

As I was using them. And so that muscle that had been weak and therefore stretched out and led to being flat foot got stressed. Strong and tensed things up. And my shoe size went down by half a size and it went wider by, like, a whole size. But that was just from using them naturally. I don't have crazy high arches. That's genetic. But the important part is strength, not shape.

Now, doesn't the skin actually get, like, a little bit thicker, too? Because I know Joe and I are both guitar players, and you play guitar long enough, you develop the calluses, and the skin on your fingers is thicker, and it doesn't hurt hurt as much anymore the longer you do it. I would imagine the same kind of thing happens with your feet, right?

Yeah. There's a little misconception about that. People think that your feet get calloused and they don't do that. If they do that, then you're doing something wrong. You're applying too much force. But over time, the skin has thickened somewhat. But I don't feel like that's made them less sensitive. It's just that it's a little more protection. It helps me deal with cold or heat a little better. A little better. I can't walk on melting tar. I'm not going to go for. For a walk on the volcanoes in Hawaii without some protection. Although I know some people who do, but I'm not there. Some people that walk on volcanoes.

Hold on. I'm curious about that. How the hell are they walking on lava?

I don't know. I literally don't know.

They don't have feet anymore.

Yeah, they're gone.

Prosthetics. But it's interesting because the skin on my feet has gotten thicker but not callous. But I was a former gymnast way back when, and I haven't done gymnastics in 4, 35 years or something. But I still have calluses. Where from doing rings and parallel bars and high bar.

Wow.

Okay. That's impressive.

It's a weird thing. Like, why does it keep regrowing with calluses when I'm not doing anything to make that happen? I can't figure that out.

Interesting.

I'm curious. So what are your plans to make this more. More mainstream? Maybe not mainstream, but to bring more adoption to it.

What's the marketing play essentially, over the next year or two?

Well, essentially, I mean, Matt and I talk about this pretty often as changing user behavior. The old norms is very difficult and very expensive and lengthy in time.

Getting them to change their existing habits and norms and routines is a very difficult thing to do.

Well, the good news is I'm not trying to get the entire universe.

That's beyond my scope. And the other good news is there's a lot of people who feel better when they take off their shoes at the end of the day. That's one of the things that I like to say, is if you come home and you take off your shoes and you feel better, you're wearing the wrong shoes, and it's not your fault because you haven't had a choice. Mostly because almost all shoes are made with the same design.

Or the other line I like to say is if your shoes feel better when they're off your feet, then not the right shoes. Or if you've never gone to bed still wearing your shoes because you forgot you were wearing them, not because you're passed out drunk, you're wearing the wrong shoes. And so just getting people the experience is one thing, and there are a lot of people who are really primed for it. But what you're talking about is how do you think of it in a different perspective? How did gluten free become a thing?

Yeah, it took some time. It was kind of the weird stuff, but it was a lot of diseases or weird feelings.

It was a small. It's the number of people who are really affected by gluten is estimated to be less than 2%. So how did it become a thing where everyone thinks they have a gluten intolerance?

It's like a health craze. Like, I'm going to lose weight.

Yeah, well, there's that, too. And it's just some calories, but.

Right.

And someday I'll tell you the story of all of my friends in Boulder who are convinced their kids have sensitivities to gluten. Well, here's the story. In one day, I just brought a whole Bunch of cookies to a potluck that were all 100% white sugar, white flour. And the parents are going, yeah, this is agave. And oh, yeah, this is totally gluten free. And they just gave them to the kids without any thinking. And the kids ate tons of these things. They were totally fine. They had no problems whatsoever.

They all died. End of story.

They were completely fine. But I couldn't tell the parents for a year because I knew we would never be invited back to the party.

But the reason I bring it up is what we're trying to do is get people to understand natural movement as the obvious, better healthy choice, the way that they currently think of natural food. And the easiest way to do that. There's a number of things. The biggest is just giving people the experience. And so we're looking for ways to do that as easily as we can while still running a profitable bootstrap company. We don't have $10 million behind us to. To send people free shoes and do something. No one's ever done this yet in the shoe world. The thing that people have done in the info product world of just take the puppy home and try it for the weekend, it's like, we'll send you the shoes. We'll even pick up the shipping in 30 days. If you don't send them back, we'll charge your card. But until then, just try them for free. I would love to have the resources to do that. It would be a blast. But we don't have that kind of cash.

Is there a way to do that with the kits that you sell?

You know, it's the kids are again, the kids are a funky thing because it's a craft project and some people are less crafty than others. Again, great fun. Once you do it once, it's a piece of cake and you go, why did I think this is hard? But some people, they have trouble tying knots or something. But the answer to your question, more specifically than our goal is to make natural movement an obvious thing, is finding ways to get things on people's feet and making people aware of what we're doing. So they want to get them on their feet and trying to reduce the friction for doing that. If we think about the idea of influencer marketing, which is a phrase that I hate with a passion for a list of reasons, not the least of which being that it makes the people who think they're influencers think they're more important than most of them are. And it makes companies who don't understand how it really works Overpay and just ruin the market. That's for another conversation. But there's a couple levels of influencers. So there's our customers who become evangelists who are awesome. And that's how our business has grown primarily is just word of mouth. So that's a big thing that we're encouraging. There's a top level of influencer, if you will, that you mentioned before, someone who's a celebrity, whether it's in entertainment or sports. So we're doing things with them as well. Then there's like this mid tier of influencers that are actually the ones that are most interesting to me. Think of things like people who are CrossFit coaches or yoga teachers or Pilates teachers or podiatrists or physical therapists or chiropractors. People who are, as part of their daily life, they are dealing with the public and respected by the public by the people they come to. People are coming to them for advice and for help in the things that we can help with, which is things like, like moving better and feeling better and ideally having fewer problems with every part of your body. So that's another level. And we're creating campaigns to work with all three of those. That's sort of the big initiative for next year.

Got it. That makes sense then. So how far. Go ahead. Sorry.

Well, there's actually one other. Go for it. And I think you might get a kick out of this. I have been stupid in a very particular way. I didn't want to market our products the way that everyone markets their products. What I mean by that is this.

If you've never searched for a mattress, start searching for mattresses and look at the ads that you start getting served. Every mattress company is going to serve the exact same ad. It's the most comfortable sleep you've ever had. Try it risk free for X number of days. It's the best mattress ever. And you can, you could swap out the products. You wouldn't know if it was purple or Casper or thread and needle or whatever the hell they all are. It's like all the same ads and footwear is the same way. It's super comfortable. My favorite, there's a company called Vionic and they go, it's super comfortable or whatever. They don't use super. The most comfortable shoe because it uses real Vionic technology. It's like, I'm sorry, what?

Yeah, we coined a word and now we're making it a thing. Okay, but so the whole idea of comfort is really, really important. People want to have happy, healthy Comfortable feet. And they think that having the right shoe is the way to get there, which is only partly true. But I didn't want to just tell the same story that everyone was telling, which is kind of the right move, because you want to differentiate yourself. But I wasn't going to. That top level of what do people want? Just point blank, end of story. Simplest thing you can tell, comfortable shoes, happy feet.

And I'm still not doing it the way I want to, because I still want to find a way to do it. Where we're throwing in the little twist of. And here's why. And this is what differentiates us. So we're creating a bunch of content that really is, let's call it, say, moving up the funnel. Funnel to a higher conversation, a higher level conversation that affects more people. And that's a big piece of what we're doing. And then there's a whole bunch of people who aren't even looking to buy shoes. They don't care about comfortable shoes because it's not even on their mind right now. They think that whatever they have is good enough. They're not paying attention, not on their radar. Their shoes are not worn out. Well, I want to get them, too, because everyone wears shoes. So how can I interrupt their. Whatever they're doing with something provocative enough to give them a state change and think about their shoes when they weren't a second ago and then realize that, you know, yeah, they have shoes. Yes, they want something comfortable. They've been having problems getting that. The reason they're having problems is because all the shoes they have are made in a way that can't be comfortable. Bad foundation for a house. The solution for that is natural movement. And then there's a product that does the natural movement thing, happens to be us. And then here's the specific products based on what you want to do. And now you're, you know, you're in our. In our world. And so that's really the big plan for 2019.

It sounds a lot of. Because I heard you say top of funnel. It sounds like some Kurt Molly type verbiage right there with ads. Because we had them on the show recently and, you know, kind of widening the net, like you were saying.

Yeah, the funnel is widest at the top of the most people and narrowest to the bottom. And it's easy. Easy to do the really narrow ones. If I sold shoes that only fit women named Rachel who went to yoga on Thursday afternoons, boy, that's easy. But to go for. You know, they say in Marketing. You don't want to advertise. You don't want to say things like, well, everybody needs my product. Because that's not true when it comes to footwear. Everybody wears shoes. Everybody wears sandals. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody is our market because we're not selling $500 blinged out whatever. Nor are $5 completely crappy. Whatever.

You don't have Yeezys. Yeah, I said you don't have any Yeezys.

We don't have any Yeezys. There are companies who. Their entire model is just jacking up the price of something that you could not buy in anywhere else for, you know, a tenth of the cost because there are people who will only buy it if it is expensive. That's not our. Our thing. We're not going there. But. So we're not selling to everyone. We're not that dumb. But we can broaden the scope of who we want to talk to much, much wider than we can if we're just advertising for barefoot or minimalist or natural movement. And that makes sense. That's the plan.

Cool. No, it's a good plan. And it's a perfect combo. It sounds like a lot of content. I know. I see your ads everywhere. You're doing the retargeting game. It's on point there. I've seen it all over Google, different websites and Facebook.

So can we expect any zero stilettos anytime soon?

Oh, no, no, no.

Damn it. I was hoping to buy a pair.

You do look great. That's when you wear them on Wednesdays.

For some reason, we actually get requests like that on a probably daily basis.

No, you don't.

Really?

Swear to God. I swear to you. I swear to you, I love these shoes. Are you gonna make. Are you gonna make he like.

Oh, my God, no.

Like, I wish I had a hand that came through the monitor and just slapped your hand off.

Yeah. You know, I love these shoes, but, I mean, I really need them with a whole lot of padding and arch support. No, no, no, no. That's not what we do.

Go buy some, whatever.

Well, we're kind of run out of time, and there's so much I want to talk about still. We're definitely going to have to do a round two if you're open to it.

All right.

He's a busy man.

No, seriously. Look, I mean, a. It was a lot of fun in the. Thanks. But you know, frankly, from my perspective, you and I. Well, you and I, it's a. It's a threesome.

Collective.

We've had some very interesting conversations that have nothing to do with certainly my business, but just like all of our business experience and. And also things that have nothing to do with business. And those conversations are a whole bunch of fun. So this is a little, you know, me, me, me, me, me. Hope it was useful, but we can definitely have some more fun.

Well, yeah, we can riff on kind of a collective because I. The thing I didn't know about you was the SEO SEM stuff.

I was actually going to ask one last question around that, and I was going to ask sort of what your game plan with your SEO SEM stuff was for this, because I know you talked about influencer marketing and we know what you're doing on Facebook. I'm curious, is there an SEO search engine play here?

Yeah, here's the part that I can tell you. So Google is paying attention to voice search. And if you think about how people interact with their voice devices, whether it's an Echo or Alexa or your phone is they typically, they're asking questions. And so one of the ways that we create content is we find a bunch of questions under a theme. Let's say hiking sandals. And then I sit in front of a camera and I answer the questions one at a time. And then I upload those videos to YouTube. I have them transcribed and edited. I put all the videos and all the transcriptions on a page, along with.

Some additional pictures and whatever else I need to flesh out the story. These turn into like 5 and 10,000 word pages. And they rank really, really, really well because they're answering questions that people are asking. And it's all natural language. And it's got all that latent semantic indexing, which is basically, if you're talking about shoes, you're going to use the word feet, and you might use word footwear, and you might use the word, you know, whatever else is related to it. So it's all very normal. And that's what Google's one of the things Google is doing. So that's one of our significant strategies that I'm happy to. I'm always happy to teach people because it's a really easy, fast way to make very good, useful content.

I love that.

I think that will be a big topic around, too. Yeah.

Well, I'm going to ask you a last question. Maybe this will lead us somewhere, you know, maybe a beginning of something else. What's the one thing or name a thing that has just been on your mind lately that you just. That either you're investigating or that bothers the crap out of you because you just can't believe it's real.

I would say a big thing for me, and probably us collectively, is podcasts and how there is such a potential there. But it's extremely fragmented, and there's not really great marketing solutions around podcasting as a whole.

Yeah. I mean, right now, Joe and I have had a lot of conversations about how can we disrupt the podcasting world a little bit. Because everything in the podcasting world is so antiquated, from tracking to the tools that are available to just marketing in general around it, the way people market it. There's a lot there. And podcasting is our favorite thing to do. I mean, our business is led by podcasting. The way most people discover us is through our podcasts. So we're constantly in that mindset of where can we make changes to improve this community?

Well, I don't have an answer for you, but I can tell you what it's like on this side as someone who doesn't have a podcast, and I think I'm the only one that doesn't. But when people are trying to sell me advertising on podcasts, it's like going back to the 50s because. And they're literally telling the same stories. Well, it's all about engagement and frequency. You know, people have to hear your message seven times until they. It's like that seven times before they know who you are. That was made up by some guy in Madison Avenue to sell more ad space. There's no evidence for it at all, but. And I do a thing that I refer to as doing math at people. So these podcast advertising people approach me and they go, you know, here's how much it costs, and it's only going to be, you know, X number of dollars per per download. And I go, well, based on the math you're giving me and the math of my business, I'm going to need 10% of the people who listen to this podcast, hypothetically listen to this podcast, to come to my website because some number of them are going to buy. And at 10% of the entire audience, that gives me a higher probability of breaking even. The odds of that happening are about zero. And since we can't track it to know or. Or there's not good ways of tracking it to know what the real effect is. How am I supposed to decide if it's working or not? And they go, it's all about branding. I go, branding is for people who don't have the balls for tracking.

It really is the wild west out there right now.

Yeah. And I mean, just to speak into that point a little bit, one of the ways we do it, we actually haven't purchased sponsorships on other people's podcasts, but we've been on a lot of other people's podcasts, and we actually know exactly how effective every podcast we've been has been. Every podcast we've been on has been because we actually create custom landing pages for every single show we go on. It's literally just a process of, like, clicking two buttons to clone the previous page. But I can go into the data and see, okay, that being on that show generated 400 new people to us. Being on that show generated four new people to us. And we can sort of back it out, but it is kind of a pain in the back, but because I have to make a new landing page for every show we go on.

Are you doing a special offer?

Yes, we are.

Yeah.

See, that's another thing, like in the footwear, in the physical product world, there's limitations that don't exist in digital products or info products. And so we've got to make a certain amount of money to keep the lights on and hire the people that we need to hire. And so I think the whole phenomenon that everyone's looking for a discount is going to be the cause of the end of civilization as we know it. It's really. It's just devaluing everything. And everyone's like, well, I think it's going to sell better if you give me a 10% discount. It's like, not better enough to make up how much money I lost by giving you the 10% discount.

Sometimes it might be, but sometimes not. But this whole idea that everyone needs, that you always need a discount, I have myriad examples of where that's not true. And we're one of them. We don't. I have a friend who's another online seller of physical products who said to me, the biggest mistake she ever made was doing repeated discounts and sales. It trained her entire universe to only buy things on sale.

Yeah. No, 100%. And we've said the same stuff in info products is that we don't like discounting in that way, because then people don't buy. They wait till they see another discount from you.

Well, the way we lead with it. So just to clarify that we're not actually giving a discount on the show, or it's a special offer, but it's a free download of basically our traffic resources and guides. So saying that you could do the same Exact thing. But just, you know, that's actually a.

Really interesting point, and it's something that I haven't done yet is put down a certain kind of content that I could give away free. That would be that kind of valuable. It's a little tricky with something like sheets, but given what we're doing, there may be a there. There for that. So I'll have to look into that. That might. That. That might be a good solution. We have a couple of products that we can throw in as a freebie if someone orders, but that's not the same either. So we're still trying to.

Yeah, I mean, we use them as a lead gen tool when we go on podcasts. So we have an opt in page that we're sending people to, and then they could give us their email to get the freebie. And we duplicate that for every show we're on so we can tell exactly how effective each show was. But we're basically generating the leads onto a mailing list so that we can then. Then sell them stuff in the future.

One thing you might want to look into is whether you can generate those in a somewhat dynamic way so that you don't end up from an SEO perspective with a whole bunch of essentially identical pages. Because that could get messy.

That's true, but the way we're doing these. These pages are only getting traffic from the. From being on these shows. So we actually de. Index these pages and everything.

There you go. Perfect. Okay. Just making sure you're okay. You got it?

Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So everybody listening? Make sure to DN index all those.

Yeah, no, we actually had a previous episode with a guy named Steve Olsher where we actually really dived deep into this strategy. So, you know Steve. Oh, yeah, of course. You know Steve. I'm saying for the audience. For the audience.

Yeah.

And if by chance you're a competitor of mine, feel free to index your entire site.

There you go.

Just domain wide.

That's okay. I'm okay with that.

Well, cool.

We got. We got two last questions. We just. We do have to wrap up because we've got our next interview in four minutes here.

So our last two questions. Do you have any books that you find yourself recommending often or rereading once per year because they were that impactful for you?

I don't reread them once per year because they were impactful enough. That man, I got it. And the message is pretty simple. And it's two. The first is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, another Harvard not That I'm a Harvard boy, but I mentioned Irene Davis, who's a Harvard woman, so stumbling on happiness. And I'll give you the synopsis in a nutshell, human beings are. Our fundamental thinking is designed to answer the question, what will make me happy in the future? And the future can be a moment from now or a year from now or the end of our life. But we're always trying to figure out what will make me happy in the future. We're incredibly bad at it, and we're even worse at remembering how bad we are at it. And we also think we're special because if we asked a million people who got the thing that we think would make us happy and we found out that they're no happier than we are, we'd still think, yeah, but if I got it.

And the reason this is so powerful is that it gets. It can really, if you really dive into that, it gets you over believing the thought, I'll be happy in this imagined future. And that's an incredible amount of freedom. Especially when you're in a business where, look, this could go bad any day now. There's a possibility that some tariffs are going to get raised that could put us out of business.

Sure.

But, you know, we're going to. We're going to move forward and do whatever we need to do. And I'm not married to the idea that there's some magic island at the end of the rainbow that we're going to land on. May happen, may not, who knows?

Yeah, but you're going to be happy either way.

Yeah. And the second one is Fooled by Randomness, the first book from Nassim Taleb. Most people know the Black Swan, but they've never read it. But the first one, Fooled by Randomness, the subtitle is something like the Hidden Role of Chance in Markets and Life. And I love that one because it gets you over. It makes you really appreciate the hidden role of chance. When I was in film school, one of my teachers was the director, the now late director, Milos Forman. And someone said to Milos, how do you make a good movie? Because, oh, it's very simple. 90% of making movie is casting, and the other 10% is casting.

And I think of business the same way. 90% of it is love and the other 10% is luck. And then there's a whole separate 100% that's working your ass off.

Amen to that.

So, you know, Fooled by Randomness really drills that into your skull because it shows, for example, the number one cause or the number one correlation between.

Having a failed business is that you had a successful one before that one.

Right.

Because you think, well, you know, I was smart before, I must be smart again. But the whole universe has changed in the meantime and you know, there's a of lot of things out of your control. So those are my two big faves.

Love it. Yeah, we'll list those in the show notes here. And obviously to wrap it up, Xero Shoes is your main baby there. Is that where you want people to head and check out?

Yes, please. And that's xeroshoes.com and of course, on social media, we're @zero shoes everywhere.

Awesome.

Zero shoes.

Well, cool. We're definitely going to have to do a round two because I want to talk more about stand up comedy. I want to about talk. Talk more about what goes into the actual business of making and fulfilling these shoes. I want to talk a little more about SEO and SEM. I think we got a whole nother hour episode in us, maybe more.

Well, it would be my pleasure. I mean, it's just a blast talking to you guys.

I appreciate you, man. Yeah, it's been a great time getting to know you. So we'll reach out and make that happen and have a great one, man.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Looking forward to what's next.

All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's gonna help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's gonna spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode. And maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second, second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training and a whole bunch of other cool, free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com. so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening, and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.