Reimagining The Customer Experience & Other Product Development Tips With Cyd Tetro, CEO Of Brandless

If you're the CEO, if you're the entrepreneur, if you're the founder, you have to be in the seat of knowing your customer. I think people have to remember that they should be in front of customers all the time, even if it's uncomfortable for them, even if it's not their natural place to go out and talk to people. It's your company, it's your product, talk to customers.

Welcome back to the show, everyone. So excited that you're here. For real, everybody time. I say that I truly mean it because, like, this would be no fun if I knew no one was listening. So it's so cool to see all of you uploading stories and sharing the podcast and reading your reviews. I am so grateful for you. So I just want to tell you that today. I know I say I love my podcast all the time, but I'm not sure if this was one of my favorite conversations because I just totally vibed with this woman or because this is exactly where I'm at on my journey and she had all of my aunts, or if it's because this is a woman that I strive to be like, or just because, like I said, the energy was so good. But Sydney Tetro is a woman that you need to know. If you do not know who this is yet, you guys go on Instagram and search for the company name Brandalous and you're going to be blown away by what this woman is doing. So Sid Tetro is the CEO of Brandless. She's an innovator of experience, a growth leader, technologist, stem advocate, author and speaker. She recently raised, wait for it, $118 million, which is the largest fundraise led by a woman in the silicone slopes. Brandless is a mission driven omnichannel commerce platform that is growing through technology and the acquisition of mission driven brands. So prior to that, she was CEO of Forge dx, which is a customer acceleration platform used by like Verizon, Adobe, Microsoft, Dell, you guys. This woman, just to tell you, has a very long bio and she's really, really freaking smart. And not only is she smart, she is so fun, so approachable, so down to earth and has such a heart of service that I was blown away. So if you listen to the podcast, I'm going to need you to go follow Sid and go follow Brandless and check it out because they have incredible products that you're going to want in your life. But before we get started, just listen in for wherever you are on your journey, whether you haven't started your business yet, or whether you want to move up the corporate ladder or whether you're scaling your business and you want to make it huge. And she totally expands your vision. Whatever it is. I want to remind you that there are people out there who are doing it, and there are people who also want to help you. So let's dive in. Sid, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.

I'm super excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Oh, my goodness. You're one of those people that I'm like, oh, my gosh, I get an hour with this person. Like, I better make this count, because the amount of wisdom and experience you have, I just want to absorb the Cliff Notes and get those Cliff Notes for everybody listening. So you guys just heard the bio that I read that literally, I don't. I don't even know how it's possible because you look way too young to have, like, lived this many lifetimes in everything that you've done. So, Sid, I think what I would love to start with is just what exactly? If you could just put it in layman's terms. What do you do and how did that get started? You don't have to go too much into the backstory, but, like, what brought you into that arena?

Yeah. You know, even as you read all of the things right in my bio, there's this one common thread, which is this. How does innovation really help you build companies and reach customers? And that's kind of the core of how I really think about my career. It's like, at the end of the day, just like what you do. You're building relationships with people. You're trying to build brands that last and matter, and you're trying to solve interesting problems that help people live better lives. And I've just had this unique opportunity to do that in many different stages. For me, the start of that actually came through. I really am passionately a technologist, and I have that whole nerd side of me. Right. And I'll be the first to troubleshoot any problem when you walk into any setting with tech or just think about innovation. And that technology and that innovation mindset really became the platform for how I've done everything in my career.

Oh, my gosh. Is it even possible for you to walk through stores and not see what everyone's doing right and wrong?

Oh, no, it's actually not. It's so funny. I was at the Consumer Electronics Show a few weeks ago, and we're walking through, and the gentleman One of my colleagues that I was with, he's like, sid, it's so funny. You walk through and then every comment you make is about the experience that's been created, the innovation, it's just becomes in your DNA. It's just how you see the world. It's how I see the world, I should say.

This is literally why I'm so excited to talk with you. Not only because right now I'm coming out with a new product, but also I think everybody listening right now has something where they're wondering what they should be thinking about, like, where are their blind spots? And I think that'd be a great place to start. Is on this podcast, we have entrepreneurs want to be entrepreneurs, people who want to go and start that thing, people who want to start a product company, people who want to launch their own digital courses. But all of it comes down to that customer experience. How are we connected? What are we missing? So if you were just to say, let's just start basic, somebody launching something out into the world, whether it's a digital product or whether it is a physical product, what would you say are some of the things that we should be thinking about right now when it comes to our customers?

I'm going to give you a little bit of story and then a little bit of a highlight on how I think about that. You know, at the end, at the core of anything we do, it's how you reach and speak to the other person on the other side that you're developing a relationship. Ultimately, customers are people you build relationships with. When I. So I got this really amazing opportunity to spend about six years at Disney, and I always knew customers, and I always knew marketing, right? And I always thought about, okay, I know how to build my marketing message. I know how to reach someone with a core thing. But the thing that Disney does better than anyone else is they understand that everything is about that guest, and everything is about this magical experience that you create from every touch point and in every interaction. And if you are willing to go all the way into what the customer needs and what they expect from you, then they come back and they become very loyal. And so it weaves its threads through. So you think about starting new businesses. When you're starting a new business, the only thing that matters are, are you building a product that customers want to purchase? Right. And there are enough out there of the types of customers you're going to reach that makes it a big enough pool of people that will sustain whatever your vision is for the product. And the very Best. So my philosophy in building new products is this whole customer product validation. If I'm going to take something new to market, I'm going to go find 13 is my magic number. 13 people who look exactly the same. You know you're thinking about your new product. And I think about it as, okay, well, who are people that should best need this product? Or 13 of them. They can't be family and friends because they lie to you and they love you and they think you're amazing. But when you find 13 people who sit in this demographic and you go to them and you're like, this is what my product is, this is what it won't do. How do you think about pricing this and would you buy it? And people start to tell you if they would purchase it as you described it, if you need to make changes in order for them to purchase it and how much they would pay. Those three variables tell you both how to speak to customer, your business model, and what you will be able to do to go to market. And I'm a big believer that anytime you talk to someone about a new product you're building, your job isn't to get feedback. Your job is to make them a customer. Because that's how you know you have something real that people love, is that they're willing to give you money for it. They're willing to engage in a partnership for that. And if they won't do that and they're willing to give you feedback, they're actually not a customer.

That's what I was just going to ask. So let's say, let's say you get some negative things back around what you were doing. What are some of the questions we can ask ourselves to tweak that product? It doesn't necessarily mean it wouldn't sell. Right. It means like, okay, there's some tweaking to be done.

Exactly. So when you think about taking products to market and when you think about talking to customers, you have to really make sure that you're like, hey, these are the problems I think I'm solving. Do you have any of these? It's way less about you talking and way more about them. You gotta tell them what you're about to do. And what we found is the number one key to actually building successful products is making sure people know what it won't do. So they actually make their decision based on limitations. We spend all of our sales time telling you benefits, but people make decisions in the gaps, so you want them to know what it doesn't do. And Then you ask these, hey, how much would you pay? How many people would use it? How often would you use it? What are other products that you use that look like this? And you build this profile? So let's say you get back the negative data, says, you know what, people think this is a bad product. And you usually don't actually say that. What you actually find is that some number of your limitations are holding the product back. And especially if you're solving a big enough problem. And so I call it the buy could be. If so, what would I change in my product in order to get those people to purchase it? And can I change enough in the right type of structure that they would love it? And they become an A customer, not a C customer. And so you can rank them like that.

Interesting. Tell me a little bit about an A customer versus the C customer.

When I am taking products to market and I'm trying to figure out if they're good fits, there's four variables that I track on their relevance. Meaning if this customer doesn't say they love my product, does that mean I'm. I have a risk? Because I expected them to just love everything that I just told them about. So that's their relevance. Sophistication is how smart is that customer in this segment? Have they tried alternatives? Are they really familiar with these products? How sophisticated are they in the language of what this looks like? And then I track their buy as is the product. I told them, what's their propensity to purchase? And then we rank them A. And then buy could be if. And it's basically a grading scale, A through F. Not an exact science, but if someone's going to totally buy it, you're like, oh, my gosh, A. I don't even have to do anything. They just love me. Someone's like, well, you know, super interesting. And maybe I'd use it one time. If it did these six things, then I put in them in the C category. They're like, yeah, never purchasing. Right? They're clear. They're clear down to the bottom. And what you see after the course of 13 is where it starts to stack. Because if the customer is exactly the same, then they start to give you clustering feedback. And then you can make your pivots. You say, oh, do you know what? Everyone, all the majority fell in this kind of B minus category. But they all told me the same thing. If I did these three things, they would totally love. So then I go back to them and I'm like, okay, awesome feedback making these changes and now Will you purchase?

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And now you've got a customer pipeline. So by the time you deliver the product, people actually are buying it and their fingerprints are on it.

I think this is really important for people to hear because when you're thinking of launching a product, you need feedback, I think in the beginning and if it's too late and you've already launched, you can still do it in the middle. And you know, one of the biggest things for me even when launching this product is thinking about, I don't have to be like, of course I want a great product to roll out and I want everyone to love it. And even if you do, you know, rounds of data and feedback, it's like there's still going to be way more feedback once you launch it. So can we talk about what that journey can look like when you're innovating even after you're launched, like, you know, detaching from needing to be perfect on that first round, how much can we innovate? What can we expect? What does that look like?

This is a great question. So two terms keep coming to mind as you're talking. You've got this ongoing voice of customer, what the customer comes in and the feedback that they give you. And one of the things you're always doing with product is driving innovation. So your number one goal is to launch, we call minimum viable products comes kind of out of the tech world. But when you launch your first product, what you want is a product that's good enough that enough people that you want purchase it. So that's like first goal, right when you, and let's say you launched it and it's, it's usually a smaller group because of what you said, you couldn't do everything you wanted, you couldn't think of your product, you couldn't launch all the variations. You have all these brilliant ideas for product expansion. You just don't launch them all at once. You're going to Keep adding to them. So then what you're really doing is that constant evaluation of, okay, what did you love about this? Where are the places that we can improve? What's the expansion? And then you're taking those down really, based on market size. And actually, can I share with you one thought on market size? Because it makes it super simple.

Yes.

So one of the guys that I learned that I was really trained on product validation for, his explanation of market size is my very favorite. Because everyone's like, go to the websites and search all the databases and get all the numbers. And he said, sid, what you should really think about is market size is based on this simple factor. Walk out your door. How many people on your street would buy your product? And then if you look at your city, how many people in your city would buy? And then you look at your state, how many people in your state? So take for example, if no one in your state would buy your product and you have to go to another state to get people to buy your product, that tells you a lot about your market size. So you don't have to go to all of those. You can start getting this gut feel of, you're right. When I walk down the street, all of these houses, like 10 of these people could totally use my product, my perfect target segment. They would absolutely buy it. They have the income, that makes sense. They have my problem. This would change their life. And so you can start to build your model that easily. And as you're developing products and you're thinking of the next steps that make it bigger, it's the same exercise. Which problem do you solve next? Should always be based on what you think its opportunity can be.

Oh, wow. I mean, that's a much easier, that's a much easier way to look at it. And it's also probably pretty eye opening for some people. So when you found yourself in situations where you're like, oh my gosh, I just ran this idea that I was really passionate about through kind of my tests and it's failing. Do you typically find that you go back to the drawing board or do you try to hold onto that and innovate? Like, what's been your past experience?

Yeah, on both sides. So I'll give you my kind of failure experience along the way. So I was developing a product that was in this, you know, really sexy compliance document management space. And we've flown all over the country to validate this product. And we, and in the room, we always had the users and the buyers and everyone and we had a Lot of data coming in. And I remember being in this one meeting in California, I'm in this room, there's like 30 people in the room, and I'm giving the pitch and. And everyone for every part of it, they're like, we have these problems. Oh, my gosh, we love this product. Show them what it is, we tell them what it's not. And then I get to the questions around kind of paying for it and justification. I'm like, okay, this is so great. You guys love this product. Like, okay, how many people in the company would use it? And like, what does that look like? And I remember the two lead people, they looked at each other and one of them said, you know, I don't think anyone in my group would use it. And the other person said, I think one person. And in our business model, we needed all 2,000 employees to use the product or we weren't going to make money in our cost structure. That became the final meeting where we had to make really significant pivots because we realized after a series of meetings that it was going to be almost near impossible to make changes to the product to meet the economics that we needed out of it. And we probably spent nine months a year on this. Like, I was fully invested in where we were going. And it's really hard to separate yourself because you put so much of yourself into it. But really, we want to spend time building things we know are going to be successful. I've had many other opportunities where the data was also wrong, but we could pivot enough in the product to get it to market so that it could launch. But the data helped us make the changes.

Oh, it's so good. Sometimes it's so painful. But my God, you're just. You're saving yourself so much pain down.

The road and potentially millions of dollars, because if you take the wrong product to market without that information, then you've spent all this time, cost and resource for probably the same data you could have received up at the beginning. And because the world is so fluid, feedback is so ever changing. Consumers are ever changing. The more you bring them into your innovation process and align with them, the more likely you have a success.

So for people, when they're thinking of this right now, if they have something that they're on the verge of doing and they're kind of skipping over this step, would you say just Even getting those 13 people together is going to give you really good data? Okay, what about a product that's bigger? And, you know, you're thinking, I don't even kind of know where to collect this. And even if I collect it, they know that I'm attached to it. Are there services or places that offer this to be able to kind of get.

There's so many places you can go to get information. Here's the thing that I believe is the most important when building products, whoever in your company, and it could be you, has the ability to say yes or no to go forward, has to hear it straight from the customer. So you just think about this. You're developing a product. You love your product, you think it's changing the world, right? And you have this whole vision. And typically as entrepreneurs, when you build products, you've heard all this feedback and you've assimilated and you know, okay, what they meant is this. And this is why I'm developing this. And they're really going to love this. This is the problem they have. Right? Your brain goes a million miles an hour. So you develop things like that. But then what happens is if you send someone else to do this research for you, when the research comes back and you have the ability to say, I don't like, I'm still moving forward, you actually discount the research. So you look at it and you're like, you know what? I bet they asked the wrong question. Do you know what? They didn't really know what they were talking about. Did you know if I was in that room, my listening would have been different because I bet the customer meant this. And so anyone who has the power to veto or to say, we're not listening to that, we're going forward, actually must hear exactly from the customer. Because you just don't believe other people. Because if you're the person who did the innovation, your perspective on it is so different. So you should be in the room and 13 people, it's nothing. People like to say that you should go get more. You can totally get more. But I've consistently Learned that after 13, the data normalizes.

Interesting. Okay, so 13 is our lucky number that we can do it is.

That's the lucky number?

Yeah. I mean, it's so good to know something like that. Like, all of US could get 13 people in a room. Like, we could work on doing that. So that really makes it just feel more doable for anyone. What would you say businesses should focus on right now for growth? And I know that that is so broad, but is there anything that you. Three things that, if you could say, this is really where your head should be at for 20, 23, and where we're going what would 2023 is?

I mean, it kind of goes back to where we started, which is it's all about your customer. How is your customer going to change their decision making patterns this year? And do you have any leading or lagging information that tells you that their behavior will change? So I think that's the most important because when you're building a business, your number one goal is to make sure that you can still grow it, you can still invest in it. And with the changing consumer dynamic, you have to know your customers, I think you have to know your numbers, you have to understand what it takes to make your product, what it takes to market your product, and what that ultimately means for you coming back in your business, because that economic component is there. And then I'm a big believer that in this market you have to invest in how you diversify access to your product. So five years ago everyone was thinking about, I have a direct to consumer product, or I have an Amazon product, or I have a retail product. But in today's world where consumers behave differently and you're trying to make sure that you can have a going concern, the more you invest in making sure you have many channels of revenue, the more stable your business will be.

And is it good for people? Like when we're thinking of a plan going multi channel, if people are thinking about this, what does that look like? Is it one at a time? Do you want to kind of like focus on, you know, one and master it? What does that look like for some people?

You know, it's a good question because you have finite resources. So I think you really have to weigh the opportunity cost. And the other interesting thing is each channel has a different set of metrics under which it's successful. As an example, when you think about an Amazon channel, Amazon's very much a search driven world. So you need a product that has, can relate to high volumes of search. But you also have to be able to manage inventory. If I'm a physical product, because if I run out of inventory, I can potentially impact my rankings. So there's just different variables in each one of those. I'm not a big proponent of do everything at once. I think you have to be focused, you have to go one place, you have to be doing well, but then you have to add sequentially what those are in order to make sure that you understand what that is. And then just also you're trying to think about, well, if I do this on this place, how much does it impact my other channels and where do I Go. But there's just so many strategies that you can implement as you try to expand. It's just a great way to provide protection for your business if you can do it successfully. Then if, let's say, you know, in your direct to consumer, maybe email underperforms for you or your paid ad strategy or an influencer relationship changes if you have Amazon or retail or both those channels provide you some cushion so that you're not all in one place. That's really valuable in an uncertain economy.

Oh my gosh. I think of this even just from when we think of, you know, our income streams in general. We always talk about that, like, don't have your eggs in one basket, because we've definitely had some baskets explode on us through the years when they were in one place. And I'm thinking of anyone listening who, you know, isn't thinking of a physical product, but also just a digital product or a book or even when I think about maybe the plat they're launching on what, just thinking of social platforms. It's. It's really hard to be everywhere all at once if you haven't mastered one or know where that person is. And I've tried that.

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Like, I want to be on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and be selling in all those places. And it's just you kind of need to go deep on one to understand it because your, your product and the way that you speak to your customer is different because each customer is different in each place too. So is that.

That you.

I mean, obviously, I'm sure you do, but what's your strategy around the customer that's buying on Amazon is spoken to different versus the customer that's buying through an affiliate or a retail store?

Yeah, you know, that's. I think that's a really important point because think you can also think about diversification even in the ecosystem you're in, it doesn't have to be massively new channels that have completely different ecosystems. I actually think you just made a really great point. When you think about, say, your digital product or your coachings or a service that you're offering, there are also many ways that the same thing that you do can reach customers. And so maybe your Instagram channel is super amazing. And then you start to think about, oh, well, that same thing actually works really well in Facebook groups. Or you go find another platform that has a different customer base, but they can still use your exact content and that platform becomes your distribution channel for what that looks like. I mean, in the podcast world, right, we have all these distribution. We're like, put them on Apple Music, put it on Spotify, put it everywhere that we can put possibly manage. Imagine it's the same strategy. They all have different audiences, but it's using the same content. And so oftentimes when you're producing a service, there are. There's many places that that exact person, you don't have to completely change your product. And some channels require that, as you just pointed out. But there are ways that if you step back for a minute, I bet you can innovate and say, customers can reach us in this exact same product, but they can find them in different place. And maybe the way I make money or the pricing model is different, but it's a new access to a new type of customer that I don't have in my core.

Oh, I love that. Are you seeing anything that you're like, oh, this company or this brand is nailing it with their customer, like, journey with their customer experience. And what does that look like? So what are some, you know, that. That we could take and kind of integrate those ideas or questions that we.

Could ask ourselves that, okay, and I'll kind of think of, you know, products in different categories of things. I have two examples that I think are interesting. They're totally opposite and I've had an opportunity to work, I should say, in some level. So I appreciate them deeply. But I think in the airline Industry. If you take what an organization like Delta Airlines has done from a customer experience perspective, they have done this phenomenal job of anticipating what you might need to know and then making an experience better. Which sounds completely ridiculous because the airline industry is like, all sorts of crazy right now. But if you're a user in their app and you follow them on Experience, they're proactively thinking about, hey, we know something that you don't know. Your flight's getting canceled. How do we notify you? How do we tell you that Your gate is 10 minutes walk from here? How do we notify you ahead of time? How do we let you order food in the app and have it delivered to your gate? Just all of these things where, as a customer, if you have those experiences, and to do that, they had to activate not just your app, but the entire experience in an airport and their entire experience for their. Their people who do the below the wing type of work, the maintenance on the planes, the pilots on the planes, an entire system. The other one I'm just going to throw out is I don't. I'm sure you've been to Lululemon recently.

Yeah.

So Lululemon does a fabulous job at Experience. And I'll give you one specific instance where they go further than just when you walk in the store or how you think about how their associates or team members integrate with you. If you've ever gone in there and they've actually used innovation to do this, and you're like, you don't have my size. I need my size in these. And they'll pull it up on their app and they'll say, hey, it's in the store. It's somewhere in the store. And for a moment, you step back and you're like, oh, no. Like, where is it in the store? I'm never going to find it. Well, do you know what? They solved the customer experience problem where they can actually look at the exact RFID tag that is sitting in that exact pair of pants that's your size, and that it will tell them its exact location in the store. And then if they walk up to a rack, they can scan their device and it will beep when it finds your exact size, even if it's sitting in their returns bucket.

Wow, I had no idea about that.

From, like, a customer service perspective, right? You walk in and how many times have you gone before to somewhere else where, like, oh, yeah, your size is somewhere in this store. And you're like, what am I going to do? I'm never going to find it. And you walk into an experience like that and then they capture yourself, they capture your loyalty. You come back time and time again and then you share that story. That's what great customer experience is about.

Yeah, we have all these moments, right? Like you were just telling me about Delta, it's my favorite airline, but I hadn't with them been like, why is this superior? Like all the little things. There are things I realize, and I know that why I think it's superior. But if we even start looking at that with every single experience that we're having and why we love certain companies. And I think that the innovation part of what you're talking about is where can we do something maybe that other companies that are totally opposite of us. This is where my head is at right now, Sid. Like, what would be something unexpected in my category that I'm launching that's like, oh, I wouldn't even think they would even bother doing that because that's something that's maybe a higher up experience or customer service experience. So it's kind of like, how do we test? Do we just how much time and effort would you put into a customer service experience? When you're first testing, do you roll those out small? Do you roll those out bigger? What does that look like for you?

My customer journey, I have this infinity loop that I use, right. Which always starts with awareness and ends with advocacy. Because the thing about customers are it's always cheaper to keep a customer than get a new one. And so when you're building customers, your number one job is to make them love you at every step of their journey along the way. Because the advocates think about the influencer market. You know this extremely well, right? People listen to people they trust, they advocate for the things that they love. It's the cycle you're building as a company. So when I think about the customer journey, and there's a whole bunch of points in that, from awareness to information to evaluation to purchase, post purchase, all, all of those steps as a company, you cannot possibly take them all down at once. So what you really have to think about is in your specific journey at this moment, when you're launching a new product, what are the ones that are going to make people continue forward? Because let's say, let's say in the journey of things, awareness or evaluation, let's say the thing is, whatever it is you're developing, people have to have some experience with it in order to decide if they're going to purchase. Maybe they need. If I were developing a masterclass or maybe they need some insight into how my workshop runs or what the materials are. And so I've got one sheet that I've pulled out or one section that they can listen to that evaluation. If that is the most critical component in your cycle of converting to customers, all the touch points around that are where I focus. If I'm losing all my customers in evaluation, I focus my resources there. If I'm losing all my customers, like, they keep buying and then their experience using the product isn't great. It was really hard. They were all complaining, I have customer support coming back in, got a low repeat customer rate, then actually go there because that's my next one. And so I try to take them down very sequentially based on their greatest impact to my business. Business. It's the same thing. I talk to people, like, when they develop websites, like, my website's not converting, nothing's converting. I'm getting no customers. And I always say, okay, well, let's first think about how many people are hitting the website. Is your real problem clear up here in awareness? No one actually knows what you're doing, because if you fix conversion before you fix awareness, it doesn't actually matter. There weren't enough people coming to focus on. So where's the problem in your path? Focus on that customer journey there. And once you solve that, the next problem will open up. And ultimately your success with customers is about your philosophy from customers that you ingrain in what you deliver. Because even if it's an imperfect experience, if people believe that you authentically care about them, they'll forgive you when you make mistakes. As you're growing for the first time.

This is so good. I literally am like, this is such an amazing podcast already. So much really good pertinent information that applies that you can apply to anything that you're doing. Where do you sid when people kind of come to you or ask you questions, Are there places where you see the same problem over and over again?

I think there's probably a couple of places. I think. One, if people don't know their customers well enough or as an entrepreneur, they're not the one talking to customers. You have to be first person when you're developing product and when you're brand new, if you're the CEO, if you're the entrepreneur, if you're the founder, you have to be in the seat of knowing your customer. I think people have to remember that they should be in front of customers all the time, even if it's uncomfortable for them, even if it's not their natural place to go out and talk to people. It's your company, it's your product. Talk to customers.

Oh, I. Okay, so that's amazing information because I was just thinking about the times where I felt closest to my customers and our people was when we were in our groups doing like four hour Q&As with people. And all of a sudden I'm like, gosh, I thought these people were having these problems and we'd create content off of that when actually they're having totally different problems. Like they were actually having more basic problems than I thought they were having. That if we could solve those, you know, it would open up a whole lot more. But creating spaces, so now we try to create those within our businesses no matter what. Like, how can we get in that data? Because I like to think my customers a certain way. Like we kind of like make this dreamy avatar and you're like, they're actually not that at all. Or they have something totally different than what you're thinking. So just creating those places, I think that's absolutely genius. Sid, I would love to know about Brandless, how it got started, what you're super passionate about it.

All of the things is that when I'm taking products to market, people often design for what I consider steady state. When my company's really big, everyone needs this. When my company's really big, then of course the experience should be this way and they forget. Today when you start, you have zero customers. And so your number one focus is how do you make it so easy for those customers to get your product and to engage with you? Because that's what really builds great brands, is in the early days, it's so easy, whatever it is, because then once a million people use your product, you need different features. But today no one does. And entrepreneurs are often, because they're so visionary, think about when the entire world uses their product, how amazing it will be. But they forget the journey starts with one. And so you have to anchor yourself in those first five, 10, 50, 100 customers. And when you do that, you actually develop different things for them. You think about your content differently and you think about yourselves. And if I pat that way that into, you know what brought me, brought me to Brandless a little bit. So my career has really been this intersection of innovation and customer experience. And I think as individuals, you were talking about all your eggs in one basket. You know, one of the things that I always think about is we're the architects of our own careers and whether you work for a company or not, or you're doing your own thing, at the end of the day, it's all in our control. We decide where we spend time. We decide the opportunity cost of our time. And for many of us, we've had, we do side hustles, and we also do our core businesses. We're always exploring those things. But at the center of that is an opportunity cost of time. Where do you spend your time and talents that you think build great things? Things that's become kind of this driving force for me as I try to figure out. I oftentimes say, like, I have no idea what I'm doing next or what my next step will be, but I know I'm on this journey.

I love hearing this from you as well. It just makes me feel so much better.

I'm seriously. Everyone's the same, though. We're all in these places of like, oh, I wish I had all the answers, but I don't. But I know that the most important thing to me is how do you create this pathway of learning and becoming better and contributing the talents you have to make things better? One of the coolest things about building companies, including building Brandless, is that as we have success, I also get to help all of these other hundreds of people around me have jobs and contribute to their own families and find places and spaces for their talents and their careers to expand. Those are types of things that are really important to me. So I didn't found Brandless. I founded companies before this, but I was involved with a private equity firm who had acquired Brandless, and they'd restructured it, and they needed someone who sat at the intersection of technology and customers to basically take this and turn it around and create a massive growth engine. And so two years ago, I came in to do that, and over the course of that time, we've had this really fantastic journey. About six months in, we raised $118 million, which is a really large fundraise for a female entrepreneur. And we pathwayed that into an ability to acquire companies to accelerate our growth. We leaned into creating all of these marketing engines that as companies come in, we can add a ton of value. From the beginning, we've added hundreds of jobs into the ecosystem. We find ways that we get to give back, and we call it better together in our ecosystem, but spend time using our products and our resources and communities that we're in and in the broader country and even the world. And so for me, what we're building, which is really, it's a products company, so we have a. I call it CPG3 because I think about what's happening in Web3 compared to the consumer market. And because the thing I believe has happened with consumers is people are becoming the platform. They want to be a force for good. They want to advocate for the things that they love, and they need platforms to do that. And so what we're building is a platform that not only lets them do that, but that has products that help them take better care of themselves, their families and the planet. And that by bringing together brands that are tied into that, we build a platform that allows us to deliver that value to. To people and individuals and families.

Okay, this lights me up so much, which is why I was so excited to talk to you too, because I kind of found my purpose through a product, meaning my purpose in life, which was, is to help women make money, help people get great products into their life. Because products really can change our lives, especially if there's vehicles for us to maybe make money with that product or whether it's. Maybe it's an opportunity for us to play the hero and transform someone else's life by even sharing this product. Maybe there was nothing that even was attached to it outside of just sharing it, and you get to be the hero with it. So I love that you're finding these incredible products and putting them all in one place, which is so exciting. And also just working with all of these companies and aligning and giving them a home, which is so cool. What do you look for in products? What is it that you're looking for when you're going out and acquiring? Like, what does a company have to have for you to be interested in it?

Yeah. And you know, there's a couple of things. You just mentioned one of them, because I, as I, as we were talking previously and you were telling me about this path you've gone on in the product, I think anytime you can find what you're passionate about and how it aligns with what you take to market, it's magic. Because the way you problem solve and like what you're doing with helping other females be able to invest in products and bring them to market, I just love it because it matches those two things. And when I think about companies that we look at, we're also looking for amazing entrepreneurs who have taken a product to market that have established some amount of growth and profitability so that there's proof in what that is. And then there's this amazing expansion opportunity that can come so much faster when you put it into growth and because you want things that, you know, generally if you're, you're pulling things together, things that have been validated, that, you know, have customers that are, you know, are growing. That's kind of our formula. But we do that because when we look at it, we can partner with the entrepreneurs and say we have these growth engines. Your company can be, that you can get to the $100 million opportunity, can get to the billion dollar opportunity faster with more sophisticated resources. And we only partner with entrepreneurs who also want to be part of, of the strategy. So we look at it like people do amazing things to get products launched. Don't break those things. Let those things flourish and then find ways to accelerate the opportunity through the partnership. And that's really been a unique strategy. There's many strategies where people buy and then they rip all the people out and then it just becomes a financial game. We do not believe in that at all. We want great people who are passionate and then help us build and that we can do it better together.

I love that you're pointing out also for the entrepreneur who has the product or is thinking about it, that it's really important to also partner with those people who are interested in their strategies, especially if they think that they want long term success or they want this product to live on. I actually have an experience right now with one of my friends who they stopped selling or sharing this product in the way that it had always been run and it just, just immediately has not done well. Why do companies do that? Why do they pluck out what originally is working?

Okay, so I'll give you my like, nice answer. So oftentimes people who make those decisions are like your finance guys who have a bunch of spreadsheets in front of them, right? And they look at it and they're like, oh, okay, well, I see we're spending so much here on this marketing ratio. This engine does it better than this and then you just drop it into this and then it just works. Like that's just how things work. They're engineers, the same assembly line keep doing them because they all look the same. That's just not how products in general go to market, especially from an entrepreneurial perspective, especially products that are coming new to market to get something to grow. I firmly believe an entrepreneur has done something that created magic for the brand. And there's some formula, just like when you're launching your product, some formula that you have that because of who you are and how you believe and the people you line behind it, it drives its success. And Then it keeps the revenue coming because of how you invest in that, that some elements of those are so unique to the product that if you underappreciate them and you do what your friend, what happened to your friend's business? Someone swaps them out and they're like, oh, just kidding. All influencers the same. It all looks like this. And they swap those channels. They basically assumed that every element was the same and they didn't take the time to appreciate what actually made the business successful. Because there are some places where you can get synergies. We can drop you into a finance team, we can drop you into regulatory compliance. There's logistics, those teams are process driven. But customer relations, the way you speak to customers, the way you engage them, that tends to be a formula for success for every company. And if you basically disrupt that, you do exactly what happens. You tend to lose revenue and the recovery is hard because then the customers become frustrated with the changes you made.

Is there a scenario where if somebody's listening and they're like, oh, I would love to find a partnership like that, but maybe eventually not have to be in it and totally sell the company, is there steps to being able to keep that magic like integrated into the new team or what does that look like?

Yeah, that's a great question. Absolutely. Everyone has some horizon for especially if you're going to do a transaction where you move from being like the complete owner of that business into a partnership with someone. Most of those deals are actually structured that over some course of time, usually like a three to five year horizon, that you're working together, the incentives in the deal are aligned so that you have the time to say how do you transition this? How do you make sure your customers are protected? How do you make sure that you're setting this business up for long term success? The entrepreneur is just so key. If you do your disruption too quickly, it will fall apart. But you can find ways to replicate that and reproduce it. You just need time and a strategy and smart other people around them.

Let's go back to the kind of that formula that you look for within where it's like solving a problem and something people are passionate about. Because sometimes I think we can get really lost in even right now I'll use myself as an example. It's really easy for me to get on calls with people in retail or data and forget that. I have found kind of a magic in my personal opinion, have kind of found this magic that I know works within my audience for somebody listening who might be getting Discouraged, like, well, gosh, I don't know how that's going to work in that next phase or in the retail phase or how I'm going to grow. But, you know, you have something magical right now within a problem you're solving. I guess my question is, how do you kind of stay focused on that and grow? And what is that formula that you have found that that works in the beginning?

I think you're right. When you're building in the beginning, you're basically balancing priorities every day. And so when we step back, there's. We really do look at it a little bit formulaic. And so we look at things like what's the size of the price? So let's say you have 10 options of how you can grow your business in front of you. You, we tend to weigh them against what's the strategic fit with how you're growing your business and what's the size of the prize and then what's the cost to do that? Because what you won't, you have finite amount of time. So people bring you. I was actually talking to a female CEO friend of mine yesterday, having this exact same conversation. And she has these seven great, super great ideas sitting in front of her. And all of them could be really awesome. And some are super fun and like, some of them are different. I asked her the same question then. Ultimately, when you look at this list, you have finite amount of resources. We all do. We only have so much time. So the way you have to think about where you spend your time is what is the opportunity cost, the size of the price, and what's the strategic fit. And then you prioritize those first. Some of them you can do in parallel. Because let's take your retail example. Retail takes a long time, right? It's not like we decide tomorrow we're in some retail up. It takes a whole series of planning. So sometimes you lay those foundations, but you really do have to sit back and say, for the amount of resource I'm going to go spend and I have a finite amount of resource, where will be the place that I get the biggest bang for the buck? And sometimes you don't know. So you might start both of them, but you have to be tracking what those are so that you know when your decision point can come that will take the next level of investment or time. Because when we're built, like at least every time I build businesses this, I'm always spinning up everything like, oh yeah, let's say yes to that. Oh yeah, let's go do that. And there have been instances where my yes led to a ton of work. But if I hadn't have said yes, I wouldn't have gotten the next opportunity. So I was launching. I had built a company called 3D Plus Me, and we could make you Iron Man. So we built a 3D scanning system. We'd scan your face. You could buy yourself as a 3D printed collectible. And eventually Hasbro built opposable toy line. And I launched it originally at comic Con in San Diego. Year and after Comic Con, I got a call from one of the. One of the big retailers, and they were like, he said, how many stores can you launch in in 60 days? And I just launched like, comic Con end of June. And they're like, how many stores can you launch in? And my first response was, well, how many are going to pay for that? Was like my first response. Then my second response was, you know, I came back to the team and I'm like, we have to launch for superhero September. That's in 60 days. How many stores can we launch across the country? Like, I have no idea. And so then we started down this. And then I went through this decision making thing of like, I can't sell full 3D printed characters. They're too expensive. I need toys. Oh, no. I've never built a toy line before. Oh, no. Who do I need to call? I better call the Hasbro guys. Oh, we need a toy line. Okay, we have to go through all the product testing, do everything. We did this over the course of 60 days. In 60 days, I knew no one of those answers. Actually didn't even know one person at Hasbro that on that 60 day prior to superhero September. But because I thought the opportunity was so great, I jumped all the way in. Now the final product ended up with us, like, taking heads off of superheroes, replacing them with the 3D printed ones, repackaging them and shipping them to customers. Because it was the only way in the timeline. I still have all the heads at my house, like, never getting rid of them. Oh, God. But yeah, I got Captain America and Iron man. You need.

I love them all. I just don't know what I do with their heads.

You know, I'm gonna make a statue someday. It's gonna be really great.

That would be amazing.

But we did all of this work as an entrepreneurial team because we knew if we didn't do it, the next opportunity wouldn't come. And by us jumping all in and knowing that that was going to open the next door, it did. A year later. It expanded into the next largest retail and kept going and kept going, but all because we had this mindset of, what's the opportunity cost? Where are we going to jump in? And then we moved those forwards and sometimes we hit barriers and we pivoted. But your energy and your ability to be successful is really about your ability to say, this is a great opportunity. We're going to pivot. It's not perfect at the end, like, I'm taking off heads, but I launched a product and that gave me next opportunity. So you can't forget that scrappiness that I think really is what. Is what makes entrepreneurs so special. It's why they're so great. It's what big companies can't replicate.

I love that. Okay, this leads into my next question. How much of it for you has been just like an intuitive passion? Like the energy is coming from your pure excitement over the idea? Because I know that you are such a business person and it's really easy to go to see an opportunity that's brilliant and genius and will totally work, but your energy maybe has not been there.

So I have a hard time, like, embracing things that I don't like, love. Good example. I don't love everything in, like, all the financial tech space, even though I know it really well. So, like, getting super excited about how I go launch this. It doesn't really, like, light me up and make me super excited to go. I have definitely drifted my career towards consumer things. I think if you have to find a place where you're going to spend a lot of time, you got to figure out the reason that you're going to be in that moment if you're going to develop a product. And it's hard being an entrepreneur. Launching new products is so incredibly difficult. It takes all of your time, it takes your resources, it takes your energy. So you have to be doing that for something that you care about. And sometimes it doesn't have to be the product. It has to be the process you're in or the channels that you're going into. It doesn't all come down to the same thing, but at the end of the day, if you don't do things that you love and there's some element that gets you up every day and that takes all your creative juices to make it successful, it's really, really hard to make it work.

I was just. I was looking at my product from a totally different standpoint, trying to, like, separate my emotion for a moment and really look at some just different, different things that people were bringing me that could be potentially amazing. And I wasn't excited about potentially the, the, like the different customer that I would be talking to. And I wasn't excited about the product. I'm like, so what am I excited about? The potential of the money, which actually never ends up super. I love money, don't get me wrong. But that's not like a core driver for me that gets me excited to like go and talk about things. So yeah, there's, there's always like you said, what, what do you call that? Is that the. When you're trying to weigh, weigh different, different things like that.

I always, I think about them as your trade offs.

Okay. So like, yeah, like what, what are the things that are driving you the most? And I think awareness as an entrepreneur of what is going to make you get up is probably one of the biggest things that I have discovered. So for you, what is exciting you right now? Like what is making you voice note your friends because you just can't keep it inside anymore?

Yeah. You know, the. So there's probably two things I actually love that this platform lets me work with so many amazing entrepreneurs. Like the fact that I get to spend time talking to other people and then bringing them in and then finding ways to help their companies grow. I love that. I really do love that. And then I love this, this the opportunity that we have that we're creating so much innovation that as we partner with these companies, it builds this collective success. I think I'm really passionate at the end of the day around how do you get people together to do great things and how do you innovate and how do you build and how do you focus time, energy, resources and people's talents so that you're building great things. And I also really love building great things with great people. I've spent time in places where the people around me were never going to be my best cheerleaders. Those are the worst places ever to be. So I want to build a place where that's not true for other people and that those are also the environments that I want to be in because that's where I really thrive.

I love that, I love that you're doing this. It's so much fun when you unlock the power of just even three or more brains when you're sitting together trying to get together on like a common goal. It's like there are things that even we have inside of us that we didn't even know we had that is waiting to be unlocked by another person. So I think just you, you pointed out the power of even just getting in rooms with other people and discussing these like big ideas that you have. I always think there's just so. There's so much magic there. That is like my absolute. I love that too. It's so much fun because it's access.

Spend all my time in the possible space. Well, what could be possible if we did this?

Yeah. And it's crazy. It's literally like the, the things that come out of these conversations are just. It's. It's my favorite thing about life. It really is like the access that we have to things that we can't actually imagine or see right now. Okay, so you also have something called, called Women Tech Council. Tell us what that is.

So it's a non profit about 14 years ago. Okay. So I'm one of three graduating women in my computer science class. So I come through computer science and you know, you're. We're still in the minority in the world of tech. Only 25 of the jobs are held by women. And what do you do?

What do you do in computer science? Real quick? Because I'm just picturing a lot of programming.

So it's a beaker section. Exactly, A programming and architecture. So the coolest part about it is that you really understand the models for how things are built to work. Which is the part that I use most often still today. Like I can architect how you bring a technical product to market. Wow. So that's what I did. And then as I was in my career, you know, there's such a minority, and I saw this opportunity to create community and say, if you bring people together, that's how you create change. That's how we increase the number of women in tech. We focus on their economic impact. And what's been really cool is over the course of the last 14 years, that platform now has programs that go from high school to the boardroom. So we have a high school program to enter. All the girls tell us they don't choose STEM because they have no role models and they know no women in tech. And so we've had about 30,000 high school girls go through this program. And we're all about how they pathway into meeting these amazing role models, these women who then become their mentors or their guides or even just. Just the people that they say, oh my gosh, you did it. I can't do it too. And then they are choosing STEM careers because of that. And then we have programs go all the way to the boardroom. How do you increase the 5% of female executives to be women. Because ultimately when you. Because tech also pays more, it's way more flexible. It allows that innovation and the way that we design things in the world to really have the diverse voices around the table that I think are so key to where the world has to go. So for me, it's just a total side passion project. And the benefit for me personally has become that I have met thousands and thousands of women that I would never have otherwise met if I hadn't spent my effort going and trying to give back and build something that made a difference for other people.

So amazing. What is anything that you want to leave us with that you haven't maybe mentioned yet? Even though there's probably a million things you could leave us with? Is there anything that's just on your heart right now?

You know, the thing that I have been thinking a lot about is that even in those most like frustrating days and in the days that feel impossible because the to do list is so big that you can really do anything that you're willing to put your effort in for the life and the opportunity you want to create, it is in your hands and how you embrace that and your focus and your attitude and your approach to life. It's everything people want to help people. And if you'll ask them for the help, even when you feel like you don't deserve it, you'll actually end up opening the doors for the next opportunities.

So good. You have offered so much value on this. This is truly one of my favorite podcasts I've ever done. I would love to know how can we help you? Because someone is moved right now listening as like, what is something?

How can we get in your atmosphere?

Meaning how can we find you, follow you all the things and then how can we help you?

Those are fabulous questions. I mean, always help me by supporting my businesses, right?

What does that look like? Like real quick, what does that look like to support your business?

Well, so like@brandless and brandless.com we have all sorts of amazing products. Like one of the products we have purchased is the best plant plant based protein in the whole world. Banana maple syrup is the top selling flavor. And so it's amazing. I want to tell you, we just tested this like Lean Sip greens product today that actually didn't taste like greens. It was amazing. But it's all about like, how do you support entrepreneurs in the products, right, that they're bringing to market along the way? And I tend to talk a lot about the things that I'm doing whether it's in my LinkedIn or on my Instagram or on Twitter, which are all Sid Tetro. C Y D T E T R O.

Okay, you're amazing. We're gonna go to Brandless and we're gonna get some bananas and maple syrup, and our life is gonna be so much better.

I'll get you.

Dog's name is Bananas. I'm very excited about this, so that's great. We're so grateful for you, you guys. Absolutely. Go and check it out. I know that she just brought a whole new world into your world, which means more opportunity for us. So thank you for being such an expander for myself and everybody listening. And, you guys, one of the biggest things we can do is give her a shout out, let her know what the biggest takeaway was, and of course, go check out her company in the show notes. So brandless.com, you guys. And Sid, thank you so much. So grateful for you. Thanks for all the work you do and the platforms you're creating for all of us. And until next time, earn your happy.

Bye, everyone. Sa.