£250k in First 3 Months & Everything Is Going Wrong Again - Documenting the journey - Episode 10

Right then, fellas, back with another episode of Documenting the Journey. And I'm sat on my balcony because it's fucking glorious right now. It is a pristine summer evening. I've just finished an hour run in the treadmill, so I look like shit on the treadmill in the gym and the sauna. I figured these mics are pretty useful so I can just. I wrote down notes of what I'm going to talk about because they're never that planned. This one is no less planned or more planned than usual, I guess. First thing, quick little call out, you probably know. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram. I've signed up to the London Marathon. Got a place supporting Mind Charity in October. London Marathon, first marathon I've ever done, ever. But it's a big fucking official marathon as well. And I'm going for my sub 3 attempt which to anyone that knows running I basically googled a few months ago when I got into running that sub 3 was, was like kind of elite for like non professional runners. I'm not a runner at all. I'm like 89 kilos, 6 foot 3. I never thought I was naturally a runner. I've got like addicted to it over the past few months and pumping some pretty vicious times. I reckon I'm fit enough to do it now, but I got really bad leg injury. But the point is, there's a link in my bio. I'm trying to raise ten grand for charity. I don't know if that's a lot or not a lot. I've never actually raised money for charity before, like in this capacity. So yeah, first thing, if you, if you like the pod, if you like the document in the journey, obviously this shit's free. Go and support a good cause. And yeah, if I don't do Sub three, I publicly said I'll give a thousand pounds of charity for every minute I go over, which I may live to regret. But the plan is that I'll go sub 3 and I'll probably donate on top of that as well anyway. But go support that link in the bio. Second thing is pull Pie Social Club. I want to mention quickly, ppsc, which people may have seen on my Instagram, on Twitter and I was kind of playing around with it and there's a few ideas floating around. Go put your email in there. Essentially what it is. I'm going to reveal more like a proper video very soon. But in summary, I mean that's like the basic website. I don't know if it's going to focus. Ah yeah, it is. An online and real life community members and fun club for ambitious creative people. Basically something I've wanted to do for a while. I will make a full video on it, like I say. But yeah, it's just one of those things where I want to do it. I know I get bare messages about doing this sort of thing which. Which it kind of is along with other things and I just like, fuck it, like life is short. Been doing the pod for like nine months now, I think. And I think it's time to like leverage that audience and do some cool shit together. So that's what that is in summary. But like I said, I'll make another video. Go and put your link, go and put your email in on the website. There's like a waiting list. Register your interest. It looks like that. Don't know if it's going to focus. Come on. There we go. Yeah, go put your email in there and yeah, I'll make a video on it like next week. But what's been going on in the business? They're the first few things I want to talk about. I'm going to try and keep this episode less than like 10 minutes because I'm fucking hungry and I need to eat steak. We have passed. Wait, today actually today to the date it's the 13th of July. We launched on the 13th of April. We've now passed a quarter of a million in revenue, which is pretty cool. I've gone quicker than that in the past with. Not with Midnight City, with Neon Beach, I did, but obviously everyone has a story with that. It's kind of hybrid drop shipping. Don't really count it the same Quarter of a million in revenue. Not particularly profitable yet, but maybe we'll come on to that. Quarter million revenue. Three months, which I think is a solid marker in a brand, you know, the brand new industry for me. A bespoke product, Something that could have really flopped. It hasn't flopped at all. Didn't think it would flop. Did a lot of research and executed it well, I think. But yeah, that's like a solid first marker. Quarter of a million revenue. Pretty much like to the dot, by the way, three months in, decent start. Could definitely have gone harder, but didn't have the stock at the time to go harder. Plenty of fucking growing pains. Instagram has gone again. I said before, I think three or four episodes ago, Instagram. Instagram got disabled when I was in Marbella on the 11th of June. Super weirdly, two days ago, on the 11th of July, I woke up, logged in to post something I didn't log in. I just went to post something and it logged me out and it said, instagram disabled again. And my fucking heart sank. And at this point I'm pretty unsure what's going on. I feel like it's probably getting targeted by someone or a brand or I don't know, maybe it's just automatic shit, but it's not ideal at all. And yeah, it's currently getting fixed, which cost me a lot in lost revenue and will probably cost me a lot to get a certain person to fix it again. We'll see. But I have a theory. It might have been to do with adding Instagram shopping, I guess just to touch on that point generally. So when I launched, I was very much, you know, going down the microdose imitation angle. I wanted to pitch it as like a long term psychedelic brand. I've already had to like tone that down and make it more vanilla because TikTok wouldn't have it. The Instagram account got disabled originally because of a reel that mentioned psychedelics. I sacked all that, thought I'd done enough. Turns out hadn't done enough because TikTok have been banning shit again, even though they said they'd approve the account. My dog just arrived and yeah, I basically had to remove any mention of psychedelics microdose, like long term mission at all from the website, which is kind of a shame. But I understand, you know, it's better to play it safe. It's better, better to have that narrative in the background, maybe from an investment perspective, whatever, long term. But you know, at the end of the day, I need to be able to sell products and to be able to sell products at scale consistently and actually have a business rather than just a concept, then I need fucking ad accounts. So, yeah, I think that might be why Instagram went, because I updated shit on the website and then Instagram shopping, TikTok approved everything like four weeks ago. They'd then disabled everything again. So stop and start. Madness, really. But yeah, I think having cleaned up everything now, we'll get there. Fucking hell. Something going on down there. Yeah, so that's super frustrating. Less stressful than the first time because it's already happened before, but still fucking stressful. Yeah, a lot of issues, but we still hit that remedy mark, which I'm pretty pleased with, all things considered. It just probably could have been like 50% more if there hadn't been so much stop and start. You want to be in my video, lad? Are you making a feature? Kazoori CEO making a feature. Yeah. I can pause it though. I just thought it's quite a lit angle. I just pulled that cuz you can see your bedroom. He's gone. So yeah, it's been stop and start but I think, you know, consumables, mushrooms, the nature of it was always going to be challenging. Probably more in reality than I maybe thought it would be. The stop and start super frustrating. But ultimately like with everything, I'm absolutely confident we get sorted. Most issues I've dealt with before, like Instagram ad accounts obviously and I just have to be, have to remain somewhat stoic about it in a way it's like, you know, done what I can. I can't control how quick it comes back. You know, it's not. The entire business is gone because Instagram's gone. Ads are still running on Instagram just without an account. You know, obviously we're running Google as well. We've got repeat customers already. We've got like a thousand subscribers nearly now. So yeah, I'm not overly concerned. It's just more frustrating than worrying to be honest at this point. Another thing, diversifying channels, which I like ad wise was already thinking about but like sales channels wise had never done in the past. So we're actually launching on Amazon via an Amazon agency. Like I sent 500 units to Amazon like the other day, so very small scale to begin with. I've never sold on Amazon ever in my life in any capacity. That's partly why I'm using an agency. They seem to think there's massive potential there, but it probably take like six months to get to any like solid level. It's not like ads where you can obviously run ads, spend a grand a day, blow up quick, slightly different. But it'll be good to have that alongside because especially when like Instagram gets, you know, having another channel, sales wise will be solid. So that's happening. I also would like to get into like retail at some point because again like diversifying but also just be cool. I think it makes that makes the brand seem more like real in many ways and yeah, just something I've not done before. So both those things would be cool. What else on my list, likely to close another round of funding within the next month. Again I touched on that in the past. It's not that I need more cash, it's that more cash would help me reach my targets that have now I guess because we've now got solid proof of concept, I've now got data and I know what I could do with more cash. And realistically how Quick, we could get to 500k a month, a million a month, potentially in 12 months time, whatever. And also to get certain people on board that want to get on board, which again I've touched on in the past, I'd like to close another round of funding a bit more than I initially did back in January within the next month. And that'll just ramp things up, basically allow us to go quicker on primarily new products development and stock ordering. So. So basically product shit, to be honest, that's happening product wise. I know I'd mentioned I'd sacked off like the gummies and a bunch of a few other SKUs that I pretty much. I had like ready to go and I still have ready to go. I just hadn't ordered them. I've had like a change of heart on that. I think I'm gonna do a nighttime product. My provisional name obviously is Dream Dust because I feel like that makes more sense to me and hopefully to consumers to have, you know, a morning and nighttime powder. Because powder is a much better product. I found you can get more actives in it. The margins are way better, it's way more versatile. It's just better in every fucking way, basically. So instead of doing a gummy or a confusingly similar version of Rainbow Dust, like a fruit version, which I was thinking about doing, I think given how complicated it is to develop new products in this space anyway, I'd be better off putting my time and resource and cash ultimately into an evening product, which I just think whether it's called Dream Dust or something else, I mean, this will probably be like at least four or five months away from launch. I've literally only started ideation like in the past week. But yeah, I just think that will make. That makes a lot of sense to me as like a suite of products, like in terms of like main nutritional products. So that's what I'm planning on doing. People maybe think that's stupid, maybe think it's great. I tweeted about it earlier, like a picture of the basic packaging design I did earlier, which is like a blue to purple gradient, obviously gradient. And people were like, yeah, fucking, I'll buy all this shit. So I think in my mind it would make sense. And then I can also do like another 80s movie which like follows on from the first one and maybe I'll make a cameo appearance in it. So yeah, I just think it makes sense in my head and I have this vision for it and maybe I've just been having too much rainbow dust, but it seems to make sense for me. So we'll see. That's the plan there. Other than that, what's going on? That was all I wrote down, really. Three months in, which is a quarter and a quarter of the year. That's flown by really fucking quick. Yeah, Just trying to be really. What's the way to put it? Trying to be something Gary Vee says, like, be impatient in the micro, patient in the micro. It's kind of what I'm trying to do. I don't know if that's the term, but get as much done as I possibly can per day and win every day. But realize that, you know, a million a month in a subscription product probably isn't gonna happen in month four, because in Neon beach it happened in month six, which is ridiculous, but I think it probably could happen by month 12. So, yeah, it's exciting, but there's a fuckload going on and it's that like, trenches stage where I just. I feel like I fucking have to get everything right, otherwise. Otherwise I could miss out on the opportunity to do what I want to do with this brand. So, yeah, I'm all fucking in, really. But I am making sure I enjoy the process and trying to keep it like creative and shit, because obviously that was largely why I went into this brand over something else, is that I wanted to enjoy the process of it, which I definitely still am. But I get most excited speaking to like, Brad. He does all my creative shit. I've had a call earlier and I spent like 45 minutes just fucking blurting out ideas and probably didn't let him speak enough because I got over excited. But like, ideas about different movies on movies we want to make for the nighttime products and shit, like visuals. I want to do the pool party, social club stuff, which I feel like could end up kind of tying into space goods. I'm not entirely sure how yet, but it feels like it all makes sense. And then also more podcast shit I want to do. I'm not sacking off the pod. I actually want to make the pod just way better, but do it way less. Not way less quality over quantity, basically, because I think it's a solid platform I've built here over the past nine months. Some people prefer this series, some people prefer the pod, some people like both. But yeah, I'm going to Mykonos in two days with a bunch of the previous Marbella group, so I'll probably do a video out there. Hopefully the whole trip's not stale by the fact the Instagram's still down, which would be stressful. But yeah, I'm sure we'll get soyed. That's pretty much everything on my list. Like I said at the start, go support the marathon effort, the sub three attempts. That'd be very, very, very much appreciated. Obviously every penny of that goes to charity, does not go to me. And also pool party, Social club. More coming on that later. Probably within the next few weeks. I'll do a proper video on that and what that is and what I have planned in the pipeline for that. Because it is going to be a real fucking thing, not just an idea. But yeah. In the meantime, go put your email in to the website and I'll see you in the next episode. Cheers for watching. Peace.